In 2007, JetBlue had a very bad press day after several of their flights were grounded in a snowstorm, one of which sat on the tarmac for over nine hours without letting passengers leave the plane. The media had a heyday with the news, shredding JetBlue (and I imagine, their stock with it), inciting a whirlwind of angry rants on the Net and leaving JetBlue wondering how to turn it all around. To their credit, CEO David Neeleman issued a public apology shortly thereafter, taking the blame and announcing they were issuing a “customer bill of rights,” a move which prompted other airlines to consider similar actions. Instead of laying low and letting the media pile on the dirt, they stepped up and faced the bad press head on.
That bad PR will always be part of the JetBlue legacy. That incident is referenced in nearly every news report about (and truthfully was the impetus for) the new Federal regulations about the amount of time passengers can sit on a runway. Yet it no longer hurts JetBlue because they have taken very significant steps to ensure that such treatment doesn’t happen again to their customers.
However, there is BAD press that doesn’t quite go away…that can linger and resurface after many years of hibernation.
Recently, on Reddit, an email memo from Neal Patterson, CEO, Chairman of the Board and Co-Founder of Cerner, a medical software company, has resurfaced. The letter is scathing, ripping into the company’s managers, talking about the incompetence of employees and demanding unrealistic working hours and conditions for the staff. It’s actually a shocking note–the tone is mean, impetuous and essentially, soul-crushing. Why on earth would anyone want to work for someone like that? It’s resonated with many (it did with me–I’ve worked for bosses who were assholes like that) as is evidenced in the comments on the article.
This is where it gets interesting and the fearsome power of the Internet’s dark side comes into play. It’s hard to determine the date of the memo from the majority of the postings about the letter. You have to dig deep into the Reddit comments to realize the note might not be current and likewise, this referenced Star-Ledger article doesn’t deliver the timeline either. Essentially, 9 years have gone by since Patterson sent his horrible missive to his managers.
When the email reached the Web, notably Yahoo, (note that in 2001 there was no social media as we know it–primarily email, Web sites and forums, and Google was nowhere near the giant it is now) Cerner’s stock plummeted 22% down from $1.5 billion (around $17). Pretty significant for an email screw-up.
The company has recovered over the last nine years, with its stock at 76.23 at this writing. Wikipedia even tells us, “In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of “America’s Best-Performing Bosses” based on a formula for calculating which executives delivered the best shareholder value relative to their total compensation. Factors included stock performance relative to industry peers over the past six years, annualized stock performance during the leader’s total tenure and performance relative to the S&P 500 over that time, and total compensation over the past six years.”
Of course, best-performing doesn’t necessarily mean best boss overall.
Patterson apologized later in an email to employees (you would think he would just steer clear of email after that massive faux pax) and at an event had a comedian joke about the situation as a way to bring levity to the situation. But this is a scenario very unlike JetBlue. An apology isn’t really enough in this case. And I doubt that Cerner decided to compensate employees at all. My hope is that the Board cracked down and demanded better employee programs to build positive morale (and since the company is doing well they must have figured something out), but it is pretty impossible to retract the sentiments expressed in that email. It was character-revealing and it left bare to the world how the company is run from the top-down. I bet they had a hard time bringing in new talent for awhile after that email came out.
Will this 9-year old story matter much to Cerner now? Maybe not. But it could if the fire under this email decides to take off and ends up being passed around via email, Facebook or on other social bookmarking sites beyond Reddit. Web guru and Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis just bookmarked it, so clearly there is buzz. There are two lessons here:
1. If you don’t want it on the Internet, don’t write it down and don’t set yourself up to be recorded via audio or video. Assume that even the most innocuous information could end up being shared. Very little is sacred and private in today’s world of the Internet.
2. And, as a result, if you have the slightest inkling that you may come across as a class-A jerk, maybe you shouldn’t push that button. Because, trust me, the last thing you want is a PR nightmare years and years after you thought you put it behind you.
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