Reporters' Roundtable: Failure is always an option
With guests Owen Thomas and Brooke Hammerling, I look at how tech companies deal with failures and errors: Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and most recently, Path. How can you recover? How do you prepare?
Podcast
This week's failure to communicate, from Path, was hardly a unique event. Companies--especially fast-moving startups--screw up all the time. The issue is how they react to their errors. Can Path recover, as Facebook and Google have from their privacy flaps, or will this flub hurt the company over the long term?
And how can you prepare for your own inevitable, and public, failures, if you're running your own company?
I have two guests today well-versed in the art of failure and graceful recovery:
- Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, and
- Owen Thomas, the founding editor of The Daily Dot
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Discussion points:
Path: Why was this such a big deal? Or was it?
Owen: Discuss the "non-apology apology."
Other flubs, and their costs: Airbnb, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Google, etc...
What about Pinterest?
What's a CEO to do?
"Never waste a crisis." Discuss.
How to plan for the inevitable screw-up.
Components of a proper apology.
How to evaluate risk profile.