Work Matters

Author: supermoxie

  • Dr. Giuliano’s Ten Commandments for Minimizing Medical Errors

    About two weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking at a conference in San Francisco that was attended by doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and parents for at least 30 hospitals who were working together to improve the quality of care in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU's).  It was organized by the Vermont Oxford Network, a " Non-profit voluntary collaboration concerned with medical care for newborn infants and their families."  Dr. Jeff Horbar, the CEO of the network, invited me to speak about evidence-based management to the group, and then to lead an interactive "d.school style" session. 

    This second part knocked my socks off.  The 250 or so participants sat at round tables, organized by hospital, and most had a doctor or two, some nurses, an administrator or two (including a few CEOs), and parent who an infant that had been in the NICU.  The groups focused on the parent's experience in the NICU, first identifying a list of difficulties with the experience and then brainstorming was to solve one or of these problems, and finally, discussing ways to implement their solutions.  The degree to which everyone in the room was open, and non-defensive about their challenges, and their willingness to take action, and their pure enthusiasm was something to behold.  It was lesson in the power of trust, energy, and the willingness to act. 

    More generally, although I realize that the U.S. health care systems is a mess in many ways, after seeing these wonderful people in action, and writing the article about the IHI campaign that saved 100,000 lives in U.S. hospitals, I am getting quite optimistic that there is hope for improving the system, and more generally, hope that some of the most difficult problems that we face in this country — and throughout the world — can be solved by determined, open, and action-oriented people.

    I stuck around after my session and listened to Dr. Michael Guiliano of the Touro University School Medicine (and Director Neonatalology at the Hackensack University Medical Center) give an astounding talk about diagnostic errors that are made in the NICU and how to avoid them — and as I did, he also had people at the tables (so that means not just doctors) talking about how they could work together to reduce diagnostic errors.  He brought home the point by presenting several case studies of premature babies that had died as a result of missed diagnosis, digging through their case histories and calling on the audience to provide advice about what should have done along the way.

    He also cited some more general research showing that diagnostic error occurs in 10 to 25 percent cases in medicine in general, and estimated that occurs about 20% of the time in the NICU.  He went through many causes of these errors, but one I found especially interesting (in light of our emphasis on parents earlier in the morning) was research cited in Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think, which discussed how badly doctors interact with and listen to patients — including one study that found that the average doctor only waits 18 SECONDS before interrupting a patient who has begin to describe his or her symptoms. 

    Dr. Guiliano ended with a list of his 10 Commandments for Minimizing Error.  As you can see, one of his main themes is not just put all the trust and power in the doctor's hands, especially a single doctor, and to involve give everyone who comes in the NICU both a voice in the process and the responsibility to contribute tot he diagnosis (and its correction).

    1.  I shall not believe everything I hear from the
    doctor

    2. I shall first listen
    to the patient

    3. I shall not
    fall in love     with my first diagnosis

    4. I shall not
    believe everything I hear     about test results

    5. I shall explain
    everything to everyone

    6.  I shall involve the patient in everything.

    7.  I shall communicate
    with peers precisely

    8.  I shall take
    personal responsibility     for the patient’s clinical problem

    9.  I shall not
    believe everything     the consults say. 

    10.  I shall say “I DON’T KNOW” regularly and go get the answer

    Brilliant stuff, isn't it? And it is backed by a growing body of research in both evidence-based medicine and evidence-based management.  As I suspect you have already been thinking, these ideas apply beyond far beyond medicine –  I believe that (with only slight modification for the context) that they apply to any complex decision where there is uncertainty, people
    with different levels of power, different information, clashing self-interest, and severe
    pressure to get things right.

  • Sesame Street Simple: A.G. Lafley’s Leadership Philosophy

    I was lucky enough to be in the audience recently when A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's CEO, gave a lovely talk to a small group of executives. We've talked here about Level 5 leaders — he qualifies, If anyone does. He is perhaps the most modest and selfless CEO of a Fortune 500 firm I have encountered.  I know A.G. slightly, as in 2000, when he first stepped in as CEO, I spent a few hours with his top team talking about The Knowing-Doing Gap. 

    One of the premises of that book is that a key to turning knowledge into action is that — although executives who talk about many ideas and complex ideas will be viewed as smarter — wiser and more effective executives pick just a few simple messages and repeat them over and over again until people throughout the organization internals them and use them to guide action.  Constantly changing messages lead to the "flavor of the month problem" where people don't act on the current message because they have learned that, if they wait a few months (or days) the message will change (managers in such organizations become very skilled at talking as if they acting on the flavor of the month, but not actually doing the thing that senior executives are pushing at the moment.) And making things overly complicated may make the senior executives seem smart and feel smart , but if a message is too complicated understand, it is also means that the implications for action are impossible to understand as well.

    Expressing a simple message and repeating it over and over again is especially important when an organization is large, as it isn't possible for A.G. to have a meeting with all 130,000 or so people in one room. A.G.'s motto is that the principles used to run the firm need to be "Sesame Street Simple."  I love that because it is so different than the kind of message you hear from management theorists or from CEOs who are obsessed with how smart they are — and how dumb everyone else is in compassion.

    Here is a U.S. News and World Report article that describes A.G.'s style in more detail.  For this post, here is the key paragraph:

    Repeat after me. If that sounds simplistic, Lafley is the first
    to admit that it is. Yet in a company where more than half the
    employees don't speak English as their first language, he says his     Sesame Street-
    simple slogans, repeated over and over, keep everyone trained on what's
    important. Human beings "don't want to stay focused," he says. "So my
    job is to get them to focus their creativity around the focus; focus
    their productivity around the focus; focus their efficiency or
    effectiveness around the focus."

    As I compare A.G.'s approach to what is happening in financial meltdown, it strikes me that the crisis (and the apparent cure too) is brought to us by people who — at times — did such complicated things that no one, including themselves, understood what they were doing and what the implications might be.  I am sure that some very smart economists or finance people believe that they understand all this, and I guess we have to trust some of them now to get us out of this despite their history of greed and arrogance.   But this crisis has further convinced me that I prefer Sesame Street Simple to Wall Street Convoluted every time.

  • Some Timely Wisdom From Hal Varian

    Hal Varian is, among other things, Google's Chief Economist, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, a New York Times columnist, and author of many books including Information Rules.  He is also been around a long time and seen many ups and downs in the economy.  I found it comforting when he reminded a group of us (I am paraphrasing): "When things seem really good, it is never as good as it seems.  And when things seem really bad, it is never as bad it seems."

    Given the recent madness, I hope he is right

  • Up The Organization: A Timeless Classic

    Up
    I spent a couple hours catching up with Diego of Metacool fame the other week. We talked about a lot of different things. One of them was Up the Organization, a classic business book by Robert Townsend who, among other things, was the CEO of Avis.   Diego commented that it was a great book, a series of brilliant blog posts written decades before anyone had ever heard of a blog.  I also noticed that Mozilla CEO John Lilly put in a plug for the book on his blog too.

     I bought the book (I actually never had read it), and I am just stunned with his boldness and wisdom.   There is new commemorative edition out, with some great little essays in the forward, including one by the Warren Bennis (who I have been blogging about a bit). But the text of Up the Organization is what is really something.  Tom Peters' blurb says that the book shouldn't just be read, it should be memorized, and he has a point.  A sample of tidbits to whet your appetite:

    "If you have to have a policy manual, publish the Ten Commandments"

    He advises CEOs to get rid of their PR departments and all their PR consultants too.

    "Fire the whole personnel department."

    On conviction vs. ego: 'Before you commit yourself to a new effort, it's worth asking yourself a couple questions: "Are we really trying to do something worthwhile here?"  "Or are we just building another monument to our diseased ego?"

    You won't agree with everything; I didn't. But I once you start reading it, I bet you can't stop. It is as irreverent, creative, and fun as any business book I have ever read. 

  • The Ergonomics of Innovation: Our McKinsey Quarterly Article on the 100,000 Lives Campaign

    My colleague Huggy Rao and I just published an article in the McKinsey Quarterly called "The Ergonomics of Innovation."  We analyze an astounding effort by a small non-profit in Boston called The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to lead a campaign to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals.  Their goal was to stop over 100,000 preventable deaths in hospitals over a one year period. And, although there is some controversy about the campaign's effects, it appears that they ultimately involved hospitals that included over 75% of the beds in the U.S. and exceed their goal by about 20,000 lives.

     You can get the article here at the McKinsey website (it is free, you just have to register) or here is the pdf:

    Download the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

    Even if you get the pdf here, I suggest poking around the McKinsey site as they have lots of great free stuff.

    We call this article "the ergonomics of innovation" because the IHI staff did such a brilliant job of designing the campaign so that it reduced the cognitive and emotional load on their tiny staff (about 100 people) and, especially, on the thousands of hospital staff members who participated in the campaign.  For example, IHI focused everyone's efforts on six relatively simple behaviors that had been shown to be big causes of preventable deaths in prior research.  They developed very concrete guidelines that hospitals could use to stop these causes — which reduced load on everyone because, although the list could have contained hundreds of evidence-based practices, instead, it helped people focus their efforts and also made it more efficient for hospitals to share what they had learned because they were working on a limited numbers of problems.  IHI also created all sorts of efficient ways for people to learn and share, including a weekly "call-in" radio show that as many 4000 people a week participated in and they made it very easy for hospitals to sign-up for the campaign: all it required was a one page fax signed by hospital administrators in which they agreed to try at least one of the six practices and to provide mortality data from their hospital after the campaign was over.

    This is an inspiring case because so many lives were apparently saved in a system that is often seen as both broken and impossible to change.  It gave me great hope that change is possible even when seems things seem bleak, which is something that all of us need right now given the state of the economy.  The specific long-term interest for Huggy and me is that the case taught us that — although efficiency and innovation are two words that often seem at odds — there do seem to be ways and times when ideas can be developed, spread, and implemented in efficient ways.  We use the term "ergonomics" because we spotted so many ways — like ergonomically sound tools — that were found to reduce the cognitive and emotional burden on everyone involved.  

    I would love to hear any comments you have on the article, and even better, other examples and practices that combine "innovation" and "efficiency" in ways that lead to and spread better ideas, and at the same time, bolster rather than damage the human spirit.

  • Reality Check: Guy Kawasaki’s Magical New Book

    Reality Check Guy
    If you love Guy's smarts and irreverent charm, you've got to read this book.  If you have never read his blog or books — or seen him speak — this is the place to start if you want to understand why Guy has such a huge and loyal army of fans.   Guy has had a lot of different careers, including at Apple as an evangelist, a venture capitalist, the master of ceremonies at wildly popular entrepreneurship Boot Camps during the boom, and now on his blog "How to Change the World."  And now you can get the best of his experience and gentle wackiness all in one place.

    Last week, I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of his new book,  Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition. I started glancing through it, and instantly, I was hooked and — even though I was supposed to be doing other things — I read it from start to finish. This isn't a clean linear business book, although the chapters are organized around themes like starting, raising money, innovating, communicating, hiring and firing, working and so on.  It is a collection of the best stuff from Guy's blog and other places, with editing and tweaking.  And even if you are rabid reader of the blog, you will want to own a copy of this book. I could go on and on about why I enjoyed this book so much, but so I don't lose your attention, consider three things about it struck me:

    1. If you read Guy's blog, you probably know that he provides the best blend of being entertaining, presenting lots of useful information, and not taking himself too seriously of any blogger around. Among those of use who blog regularly roughly in the business space, there is pretty widespread agreement that he is the best — his
    popularity is earned. So Reality Check contains the best stuff from the best business blogger around (at least in my opinion).  Just read "The Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists" or "The Purest Form of Engineering," and you will be hooked.

    2. Guy not only brings you his own wonderful and weird perspective, he pulls you into his social network.  You might wonder, why are the interviews on Guy's blog so much better than in most places?  It is because he takes the time to think of great questions.  He asks obnoxious, fun, and revealing questions that bringing out the best in people without coming across as mean-spirited or naive.  For example, I learned more from the chapter on "Speaking as Performing Art" that Guy gleaned from talking to Doug Lawrence (a professional singer and speaking coach) than from anything I have ever read before on the subject.

     You learn so much because Guy has an ability to get to the heart of the matter, whether he is giving us his ideas or helping us understand others. I think this is partly because Guy doesn't do a "gang" blog and doesn't have other people write his posts.  He is charming but also very picky about details, always thinking of what will be most fun and most interesting.  I was struck by how much time that he spent working on the acronym for the ARSE test that we published on his blog last year and also how skilled he was when he went through and changed the language on the questions that Guy claims that I prepared to determine if your boss is, in fact, an asshole.  I came up with the basic ideas, but in dull language. Guy went back through and changed the language so it was concise and fun — "Kisses up and kicks down," "short fuse," "army of one," and so on.  Everyone I know who has ever done an interview with Guy or any other kind of project will tell you that he edits things, pushes people to be the best, and as he has the magical marketing touch, it is a good idea to listen and learn.  So, in Reality Check, whether Guy is talking about his ideas or others, you get Guy's charm and that unmistakable voice.

    3.  Reading this stuff in a book is more efficient and fun than reading it on a blog.  One of the weird side-effects of reading Reality Check was that it made me realize that books aren't obsolete yet — even through this is a book that draws heavily on a blog.  Things are organized by themes so it is easier to know the big picture, there is editing (always a good thing), and — as I have been told by a number of my Stanford colleagues who study his stuff — it turns out that people can read text on paper about 25% faster than online.  At the same time,  Guy's knowledge of the web also helps make the book a better experience, as he sometimes sends you to film or website and comments on it in his usual insightful way.  I especially loved the chapter "As Good as Steve Jobs," where he sends you to Majora Carter's 2005 TED talk and shows why it was such a great speaking performance and what you can learn from it  — breaking down what she did in the speech in one to two minute increments (especially the first 10 minutes).  In short, although Guy's book is a product of the web and it is sometimes designed so that you read it and use the web at the same time, it gives me good reason to believe that the experience of reading a book is something that still is a distinct and often superior experience.

    Guy's book doesn't come out until October 30th, if you believe Amazon (usually they ship earlier than the announced date),  But I am going to order an extra copy right now, as this is a book that I will be loaning to a lot of people.

  • Winning Leaders: New Evidence that Experience and Success at Doing the Work Matters

    One of the arguments that is sometimes made in the literature on leadership is about whether it is a generic skill that can be applied in any setting, or if having deep past experience — and success –at doing the work of organization is required to be a successful leader.  We talk about this quite a bit in The Knowing-Doing Gap. We argue that leaders aren't as easily fooled by hollow smart talk, and are more likely to talk in ways that help their followers succeed (rather than simply sound impressive), when they have past deep experience in the industry along with years of experience doing, managing, and succeeding at the kind of work their people do. 

    I talked about this in my recent post on managers vs. leaders too, and argued that the most successful leaders either understand the work they work that they are leading (think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Lasseter of Pixar, or George Zimmer of the Men's Warehouse) or they take the time to understand the work they lead (I used the example of Bill George at Medtronic).  My arguments on this point were questioned, and rightly so, by a commenter who pointed out that I needed to be careful about just using success stories to "prove" my point  — as it is possible that just as many or more people who have little or no experience succeed at the same or higher rate.  Or it is even possible that, if I looked at the population of leaders who have experience doing the work and doing it well, that they would actually perform worse than people who simply had generic leadership skills but did not understand the work that their people do.

    This "success bias" is, in fact. a big methodological problem with Good to Great.  Collins talks about 11 Level 5 leaders out of a sample of 1435 companies.  He argues that this difference in leadership is one of the main reasons that these 11 companies made the leap from good to great.  But he considers no data on Level 5 leaders who led merely good — or downright lousy — companies.  It is entirely possible that, if someone carefully examined the full population  that Level 5 leaders actually do worse on average.  I don't believe that this would happen, but I don't have the evidence to support this hunch (nor does Collins). Rather, I  see this critique (and others, see The Halo Effect) as a reason to see Good to Great as a book with some interesting but untested hypothesis rather than rigorous research. And, as this commenter pointed out after my post, I made pretty much the same error that Collins does in my earlier post — so to come clean, I think that my assertions about experience are best viewed as hunches or hypothesis that require additional research. 

    I can report, however, that I ran into a story in the Atlantic last night about research on basketball teams that is consistent with this hypothesis.  You can find the story here (scroll down a bit).  In short, three researchers — Amanda Goodall, Lawrence Kahn, and Andrew Oswald — from Cornell did a study of 15,000 National Basketball Association games between 1996 and 2004. They found that coaches who had played in the NBA won a lot more games than those who hadn't played, and that teams who had former coaches who not only played, but who had also been NBA all-stars too, did even better.  As The Atlantic summarized:

     "On average, teams with former all-stars as coaches placed six spots
    higher in league rankings than teams with coaches who had never played
    in the NBA, a huge bump-up in a league with only 29 total teams during
    the years studied."

    This research is interesting for two reasons. The first is that is does bolster the hypothesis that, when people have deep understanding of the work they are managing, and have a history of success, they are more likely to be successful leaders (assuming all other things being equal.. I am not sure that Dennis Rodman has the other qualities to be a good coach). The second is that it shows the dangers of placing too much weight on a single vivid case.  Phil Jackson has the highest percentage of any NBA coach, winning multiple championships at Chicago and Los Angeles. Jackson played in the NBA, but was a bench-warmer rather than a superstar. 

    If you are curious about this paper and want to dig into deeper, you can download a pdf of "Why Do Leaders Matter? The Role of Expert Knowledge."

    P.S. Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame did an analysis of Collins' "Great companies" over the summer, and found that most now have ordinary or poor performance — and if you had bought a portfolio of these companies at the time the book had come out, and held it, Levitt concludes it would have performed worse than the S&P 500.  Of the "Greats," two that have fallen most include Circuit City and — I had forgot this — Fannie Mae. Check out the article. As Levitt points out, predicting the future is a tough thing to do. 

  • Michael Maccoby on Managing vs. Leading

    My post on Michael Maccoby's definition of leaders as "someone that people follow" generated a lot of discussion, including a comment for Maccoby himself that, in The Leaders We Need, "I go one to raise the difficult
    questions: Why is this person being followed? How is this person being
    followed? Where is the leader taking followers? The best leaders are
    working for the common good and not personal power. However, as I point
    out, the ability to engage followers depends on understanding those
    followers, something theories of leadership often ignore."  To reinforce the point, he does a splendid of addressing this tough question in the book.

    I was especially taken with the wisdom of his next comment, on the "managing vs. leading" post that followed a few days later. Professor Maccoby pointed out that:

    "Bob- Your point about successful business visionaries having deep knowledge about their products fits my experience. However, I think we should differentiate leadership which always involves a relationship as contrasted with management which has to do with processes and systems. Yes, leaders should understand management. However, management doesn't always need a manager. I have worked with factories where management is done by teams. Furthermore, you find different kinds of leaders in knowledge organizations today– strategic, operational, networking–and they have different styles and qualities. We should no longer be thinking about the leader, but rather an effective interactive leadership system that includes strategy, implementation and facilitation. This can't be achieved by management alone at a time of constant change when people need inspiration, a sense of purpose and enthusiasm to achieve their goals."

    I love this comment because of that key phrase "management doesn't always need a manager," indeed, as Maccoby suggests, the management function can be replaced by everything from self-managing teams to rules that are embedded in an enterprise software system.  But leadership implies a level of interaction and wisdom that is not so easily replaced. Nice point, and I thank Michael for join the conversation, as he has studied and worked with leaders for decades.  In addition to "The Leaders We Need,"  I would also recommend his wonderful Harvard Business Review article on Narcissistic Leaders (which you can read here at his website) and his 2007 book in such leaders.  Finally, I first read heard of Maccoby's work on leadership when I was a graduate student, one of my classmates gave me a copy of his classic bestseller The Gamesman. It appears to be out of print, but is definitely worth tracking down. If you are interested here is a 1977 Time Magazine story about it.

    Michael, thanks for taking time to comment and for all your great stuff on leadership.

  • Leadership vs. Management: An Accurate But Dangerous Distinction?

    As my recent blog posts suggests, I've been reading a lot about leadership lately.  The last time I reviewed that literature was about four years ago when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense.  It is impossible to read it all.  Tens of thousands of books have been written on the subject and there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, including The Leadership Quarterly and The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies.  Perhaps the most definitive review and integration of the leadership literature was Bass and Stogdill's 1200 page Handbook of Leadership, which was published in 1990 (and still does the best job of making sense of the literature, for my money). But if you really want a long book on leadership, you can get the four volume Encyclopedia of Leadership, which is 2120 pages long, weighs about 15 pounds, and costs a whopping $640 on Amazon!  So the task of reviewing the leadership literature — and acting on it as leader — isn't to understand it all (that is impossible), but to develop a point of view on a few themes that matter most.

    As I have been reading these writings and research again, I have been bumping into an old and popular distinction that has always bugged me: leading versus managing. The brilliant and charming Warren Bennis has likely done more to popularize this distinction. He wrote in Learning to
    Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader     that  "There is a
    profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important. To manage
    means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct.
    Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction
    is crucial". And in one his most famous lines, he added,  "Managers are people
    who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing."

    As I have been reading the leadership literature again, it is becoming more clear to me that — although I think this distinction is more or less correct, and is useful to a degree (one emphasizes the focusing on the bigger picture and the other on the details of implementation), I also think that it has unintended negative effects on how some leaders view and do their work.  Some leaders see their job as just coming up with big and vague ideas, and treat engaging in conversation about the details of those ideas or the details of implementation as mere management work that is "beneath" them, as things for "the little people to do."  Moreover, this distinction also seems to be used a reason for leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the technologies their companies use and the people that they lead and to make decisions without considering the roadblocks and constraints that affect the cost and time line, and even if it is possible to implement their grand decisions and big ideas. 

     I am all for dreaming, and some of the most unlikely and impressive things have been done by dreamers.  But one characteristic of the successful dreamers I think of — Francis Ford Coppola, Steve Jobs, folks at Pixar like Ed Catmull and Brad Bird — is that they also have remarkably deep understanding of the industry they work in and the people they lead, and they often are willing to get very deep into the weeds. This ability to go back and forth between the little details and the big picture is also evident in the behavior of some of the leaders I admire most who aren't usually thought of as dreamers. Anne Mulcahy's efforts to turnaround Xerox were successful in part because she already had such detailed knowledge of the company, and she was very detailed oriented during the crucial early years of her leadership.  I also think of Bill George, one of Jim Collins' level 5 leaders, who told me that, when he was brought in as CEO of Medtronic (a medical device company), he spent about 75% of his time during his first 9 months on the job watching surgeons put Medtronic devices in patients and talking with doctors and nurses, patients, families, and hospital executives to learn about customers and users of his products. 

    I am all for grand visions and strategies.  But the people who seem to make them come true usually seem to have deep understanding of the little details required to make them work — or if they don't, they have the wisdom to surround themselves with people who can offset their weaknesses and who have the courage to argue with them when there is no clear path between their dreams and reality.  I guess this is one of the themes that I have written about before, especially in The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeff Pfeffer).  But it is bothering me more lately, as I've had some conversations with project managers who have been assigned tasks by naive and overconfident leaders — things like implementing IT systems and building software. And when they couldn't succeed because of absurd deadlines, tiny staffs, small budgets, and in some cases, because it simply wasn't technically possible to do what the leaders wanted, they were blamed.  Such sad tales further reinforce my view that talking about what people ought to do and telling them to do it is a lot easier than actually getting it done.

    I am not much rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, but I am saying that the best leaders do something that might be most properly called a mix of leadership and management (a great example is HP CEO Mark Hurd) , or at least, lead in a way that constantly takes into account the importance of management.   And some of the worst senior executives use the distinction between
    leadership and management as an excuse to avoid learning the details
    they ne    ed to understand the big picture and to select the right strategies. 

    In Bennis speak, I guess I am saying: To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right."

  • Leadership During the Worst of Times: Michael McCain at Maple Leaf

    CEO Maple Leaf
    There is an amazing story unfolding in Canada, which has received
    remarkably little play in the United States (I suspect because of the
    election madness). An outbreak of listeria linked to a Maple Leaf
    meatpacking plant in Canada killed at least 11 people in August and made many others extremely ill. You might think that such a
    horrible thing would lead to widespread anger against the company and
    to the certain demise of Maple Leaf.  But — at least so far — both
    the reputation of the company and its CEO, Michael McCain have remained
    intact because McCain has so openly accepted blame for the deaths (see
    this article and this one
    ), spoken so clearly about why they happened, and the difficulties of
    repairing the problem. And he has done so in way the conveys genuine
    compassion — and personal pain and guilt as well. 

    Anyone interesting in how to lead during a crisis can learn something
    from this horrible tragedy.  The CEO's grace and unminced words have
    impressed many in Canada, and I expect this case will take a place
    next to Johnson & Johnson's famous response to the Tylenol
    poisonings in the 1980s.  In fact, the Canadian press is already making
    the comparison here.

    Of course, this story isn't over yet, and it is impossible to predict what new facts may emerge. But so far CEO McCain is doing one of the hardest things that any CEO can do, and doing so with grace, and without pointing fingers at others. 

    P.S. Here are a few snippets from YouTube of his speech, including this one;
    I am looking for a longer version, as when I heard his speech and Q
    & A on the CBC, I was touched and impressed with demeanor and grasp
    of the facts.  Also, the Maple Leaf website provides impressive no-nonsense information as well.