"United Breaks Guitars..."

I was going to write about "not making excuses" today - I have been trying to post something new on my blog at least twice a week and usually on Sunday and Wednesday evenings.  I had all kinds of excuses for why today I am 24 hours overdue - there was the fact that I am in the middle of training for an upcoming half-marathon and ran 10.5 miles yesterday.  Perhaps more worthy of an excuse, my wife and I did our taxes last night, which took longer than I wanted (and by the time we were finished, we were both ready to just go to bed).  I was going to throw in some quotes about how great leaders don't make excuses and then discuss how leaders can support their teams in such a way that they don't feel the need to justify their failures by making excuses. 

I was all set and ready to write this evening - but then I checked my Twitter feed.  Wow!  There were several tweets about an incident that occurred today on a United airlines flight from Chicago to Louisville.  I don't know the full details (other than what has been reported all over social media and in several national news media outlets), but apparently United overbooked the flight (as many airlines do) and had been offering vouchers for passengers to volunteer to take a later flight instead.  None of the passengers volunteered, and they were then told that the airline would be randomly selecting passengers to step off the plane and take a later flight (by some reports, there was another flight crew that needed to get to Louisville to fly another plane).  One of the passengers refused to comply, security was called, and several videos (taken by other passengers on their cell phones) showed airport security and one man in plain clothes (reportedly an airport police officer) forcibly removing the man from his seat and dragging him (semi-conscious) off the airplane. 

I am confident that more details will emerge - I am less confident that we will hear them, as I suspect that the case will be adjudicated in our legal system.  However, the video is clearly damaging to United's reputation.  How the leaders at United handle this particular crisis will determine how significant an impact this incident will have on their business (it will have some!).  At the very least, United needs to get in front of the story (it is probably too late for that at this point) and get their side of the story out there and control the rumors.  As in many cases like this, when the details are not readily available, people tend to "fill in the blanks" with whatever story that they can come up with that seems reasonably logical.  It would be appropriate for United to issue an apology, but I suspect that they won't (most lawyers would suggest that an apology is an admission of guilt - we know that this is not necessarily the case in the health care industry, which doesn't necessarily change the advice that many hospital attorneys give). 

Regardless of what happens next, United will take a hit - indeed, the airline has already suffered a significant amount of negative press (perhaps deservedly so - time may tell).  As anyone who has attended business school knows, this is actually the second time that United has been on the wrong end of a viral video.  There is a very famous Harvard Business School case study, called "United Breaks Guitars" (the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto wrote a similar case study).  Basically, a guitar player named Dave Carroll was traveling with his band, on a United flight and overheard another passenger on his plane claim that the baggage handlers outside the plane were tossing around a bunch of guitars.  Carroll's guitar was damaged, and he later filed a claim against United to pay for the repairs.  United refused (several times), so Carroll wrote a song about his experience that went viral on YouTube.  Within four weeks of the video going viral, the United stock price dropped over 10% at a loss in shareholder value of nearly $180 million.  The whole point of the case study is to address issues such as (1) communication with customers, (2) handling negative complaints and facilitating service recovery, (3) dealing with and minimizing the impact of negative press.

It seems that United has another ""United Breaks Guitars" crisis on their hands - this time, it's much, much worse.  While the "United Breaks Guitars" case did not result in legal action, I suspect that the current crisis will involve the courts.  There are several lessons in leadership here - mostly what not to do and how not to handle a crisis involving negative press.  I will let you, the reader, be the judge of how United deals with the current issue.