CEOs: Apologize, but Keep It Manly

Publicists are quick to tell clients what to do when the corporate nightmare of a misbehaving executive or a faulty product erupts: apologize, with feeling. The consultant who coached ice cream maker Blue Bell Creameries on a mea culpa after a deadly listeria outbreak in April has chief executive officers read their talking points three times—once aloud, once to himself, and again aloud—to make sure they sound authentic. “The key is to feel the message points, not just recite them,” says Blue Bell adviser Gene Grabowski, a former PR News Crisis Manager of the Year.

Stock market investors have their own feeling about contrition, according to new research: lose it. Two business professors who analyzed more than 100 corporate apologies over three decades through 2012 found that those demonstrating the most emotion also experienced the steepest declines in share price over the following week. “The more empathy the company shows, the more they promise follow-through, the more they get slammed by the market,” says DePaul University ethicist Daryl Koehn of her research with Maria Goranova, who teaches management at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.