Send us Fan Mail

How does a bad decision survive the idea, production, internal review and final approval before somebody finally says, “We shouldn’t do this”?

That’s the leadership question behind the Good Good Golf and Callaway controversy.

A co-branded ad drew widespread backlash after depicting Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoving fellow creator Alexis Miestowski to the ground. Callaway later acknowledged that it had reviewed and approved the ad before it was posted.

The consequences went well beyond social media criticism. Callaway ended its relationship with Good Good, retailers pulled merchandise, Golf Channel canceled the current season of Big Break x Good Good, and Good Good stepped away as title sponsor of the PGA Tour event in Austin. Those details reflect the updated reporting reviewed for this package.

The more useful question for a leader is what happened before the public ever saw the mistake.

In this episode of The Presence Lab, I use the Good Good and Callaway case, along with Meta’s proposed settlement of up to $18 billion over state claims concerning child safety on Facebook and Instagram, to examine what happens when organizational judgment fails.

I’ll walk through the crisis framework I’ve taught for years:

Own it. Get clear about what happened and take responsibility for what actually belongs to you.

Fix it. Go beyond the apology and find the conditions that allowed the problem to happen.

Prevent it. Build the judgment, systems and lived values that help people make better decisions before the next crisis arrives.

The prevention piece is where this gets personal. I’ll share a values exercise my family worked through over several dinners and how five very simple values became something we could actually use when making decisions.

That experience changed the way I think about corporate values.

Values on a wall don't do much. Values that are identified, discussed, modeled and deliberately used in real decisions can become part of an organization's protection system.

There’s a practical test you can run with your own leadership team: Take one difficult decision from the past 30 days and put your company values beside it. Which value actually influenced the decision? What did honoring it cost?

Your answers may tell you whether you have values your organization lives by or simply values your organization publishes.

In this episode:

• Why Callaway’s approval of the Good Good ad is the most interesting part of the story
• What effective ownership sounds like after an organization makes a mistake
• Why explaining intent too quickly can weaken a crisis response
• How to investigate the conditions that allowed a bad decision instead of simply adding more bureaucracy
• What the Meta settlement adds to the conversation about values, incentives and tradeoffs
• How lived values can improve judgment before a crisis
• A simple exercise for testing whether your corporate values actually influence decisions

Learn more about executive communication coaching and The Presence Lab at Dale Dixon Media. https://www.daledixonmedia.com/

Join the free Presence Lab community https://www.daledixonmedia.com/community

Support the show