Editor's Note: I have long been
citing the e
pic Ford-Firestone tire crisis as a milestone event in terms of
global awareness regarding crisis management, so I'm particularly excited to
bring you an exclusive excerpt from Feeding Frenzy, Ford insider Jon Harmon's perspective on one of the biggest
business stories of the past decade. Mysterious tire tread separations-mostly
on the Ford Explorer-caused an outbreak of horrific roll-over crashes, claiming
at least 270 lives in the U.S. and more than 100 in other countries. The book
details the efforts made by Ford's PR team responding to a nearly unprecedented
flood of inquiries from internatonal media, stoked by daily attacks from
plaintiff attorneys and safety advocates, along with two Congressional
investigations. The compelling narrative includes invaluable crisis management
"lessons learned." As the PR executive responsible for Truck Operations, Harmon
led Ford's crisis media relations.
Ford
introduced the Explorer in 1990, replacing the Bronco II. The larger and more stylish
Explorer was an immediate hit and quickly became the
most popular SUV sold by any automaker. As [plaintiff attorney
Tab] Turner had begun to specialize in lucrative SUV rollover cases, he began looking for victims in
Explorer accidents. He would argue in legal briefs that
the Explorer was simply a modified Bronco II allowing him to recycle theories that had
worked so well in his Bronco II cases.
Turner, along with other plaintiff
lawyers and their legal
assistants, also began combing over hundreds of thousands of notes and records
created during the development of the Explorer. They studiously mined this new document
trail in search of a "smoking gun." They hoped to demonstrate to a jury the
callous way, the lawyers surmised, that Ford engineers had hastily developed
the Explorer, rushing it to market, knowing full
well that safety compromises had been made in the name of quick profit. This
conspiracy theory was not plausible to those inside the
auto industry for three reasons. One, it just was not possible to "rush a
vehicle to market" and have that vehicle become a runaway hit, the No. 1 seller
among SUVs of any size and from any automaker every year for the next 15 years.
Two, in an era when information moves so quickly and completely, it was
patently stupid to knowingly sacrifice real-world safety for some small cost
reduction. And three, it ignored the fact that the Explorer's overall real-world safety record
(in terms of fatalities per 100 million miles driven) was better than most of
the other SUVs in its class and significantly better than the "average"
passenger vehicle of any kind.
But
courtroom justice bears little resemblance to the empirical exercises familiar
to engineers where the correct answer demonstrably prevails. The members of a
jury make decisions based on their eval-uation of the facts presented by both
sides, for sure, but they also are swayed by emotion and intangibles, by what
they feel in their hearts. At the center of every serious-injury or fatal auto
accident is human tragedy, and often the victims are sympathetic characters.
The jury feels sorry for the awful event that has come into the plaintiffs'
lives. Then the jury hears the victim's lawyers make accusations about the
large auto company with annual profits in the billions of dollars (not recently,
mind you, but throughout most of the '90s Ford was immensely profitable). How
else is the destitute family coping with tragic loss going to pay the medical
bills? Shouldn't someone - or some company - have to pay for what's happened to
them? The plaintiff attorney's objective becomes to present just enough of a
plausible case to convince a sympathetic jury to award damages against a giant, impersonal company that might
amount to a tiny fraction of its profits that year.
Yet,
the real secret behind successful plaintiff attorneys was that they only rarely had to win in the
courtroom. A successful verdict came only after a lengthy and difficult battle
of wits against sharp corporate defense lawyers with vast resources. No, the
secret was to create in the defense team just enough fear and doubt, and just
enough uncertainty about the jury's sympathies that the company would decide to
cut its losses with a settlement offer. Accepting a settlement also took away
the uncertainty from the plaintiff attorneys, who took cases on a speculative
basis, collecting one-third of any verdict or any settlement. The object was to
win just enough high-profile verdicts to show the deep-pocketed corporations
that they could lose if they went to trial, leading to a steady flow of
subsequent settlement checks. (Indeed, in 2007 Turner & Associates claimed on its website to
have reached out-of-court settlements in more than 150 rollover cases involving 16 different types of SUVs
manufactured by eight different auto companies. As of February 2009, the
website no longer featured a running total of tragic SUV cases on its website; perhaps the firm had
decided it was better to emphasize personal service, just as McDon-ald's had
several years earlier when it stopped updating the neon signs outside each restaurant proclaiming the number of
billion of hamburgers served.)
And
as Turner came to understand better than perhaps any
other plaintiff attorney, there were ways to
help turn on the spigot of corporate capitulation resulting in large and
frequent settlements. Ways that involved turning the tide of public opinion
against the company. Tab Turner knew the best way to influence public opinion was through the mass media. And all
it took to generate a juicy, inflammatory story was to leak to an ambitious
journalist some of the same documents he'd been gathering for years as he spun
his conspiracy stories to juries, on those rare occasions
when he actually had to take a case to trial.
Turner became so successful that he had bought his
own personal jet to more easily move around the country paying
visits to grieving families, all the while maintaining a level of comfortable
luxury befitting such a successful lawyer. Of course, the image-conscious
Turner went to great lengths to down-play the money he
was making and the size of his own personal fortune. He did not want anyone to
wonder how an extravagant lifestyle squared with a well-developed reputation as the champion of poor, downtrodden victims
of greedy, rich corporations. When Turner collaborated with writer Adam Penenberg for the rather sappy biography Tragic Indifference:
One Man's Battle with the Auto Industry over the Dangers of SUVs, they addressed the issue of Turner's private jet by declaring that it wasn't a "flashy jet," but more like a humble "Plymouth with wings." A
few pages later, Penenberg reveals that the jet was actually a Cessna Citation, a sleek and modern aircraft that
few of Turner's clients would be likely to
confuse with a Plymouth.
* * *
Like
any good student of public relations, Turner refined his method of placing stories in the
media as he grew more experienced. He and many of the other trial lawyers hired
PR firms to help them place stories in the media, but they did it quietly
because they certainly did not want to be seen as corporate. By the time of the
Firestone tire recall, Turner had developed excellent relationships with
many journalists. A number of reporters from prominent and influential
publications, notably Myron Levin of the Los
Angeles Times and Mylo Geylin of the Wall
Street Journal, were infamously reliant on plaintiff attorneys to bring them salacious stories of corporate
wrong-doing. (Inexperienced corporate PR people from every industry had made
the mistake of assuming that the Wall
Street Journal's reporters would operate from a starting point sympathetic
to Big Business. The opposite was often true. Many of the Journal's reporters had a quite liberal disposition and took it
upon themselves to provide balance against the paper's overtly conservative
editorial page.) Turner had an almost unlimited supply of Ford and Firestone
documents from years of depositions. It didn't matter that neither he nor any
plaintiff attorney had ever prevailed against Ford in an Explorer rollover trial. He was making a fine living on settlement
money. And it didn't matter if these documents had invariably been presented as
evidence in court only to be disputed and often thoroughly discredited by
Ford's lawyers. If no one had written a story yet about the document it
qualified as news, along with the conspiracy theory it "proved." All he had to do was slip
the document to the media hounds and watch them ratchet up the public pressure
against the automaker.
* * *
Lesson Learned: Know your
adversaries' tactics.
Arguing cases in a courtroom is a ruthless game. When trial attorneys bring a
mentality of "win at any cost" to public relations, they aren't going to play
by the rules we're used to. Know the technical side of your story inside and
out. Call out misleading tactics of your adversaries while countering their
accusations with facts.
* * *
[Louisiana Congresman
Billy] Tauzin sent his closest aide and spokesperson, Ken
Johnson, and two other staffers, first to Dearborn and then to Nashville, to probe into some of the most
contentious issues before the hearings. On August 25, Ford's Helen Petrauskas and Tom Baughman welcomed the House Committee team and led them
to a conference room on the second floor of WHQ. Ford lawyers and Government
Affairs people sat in on the all-day meeting,
and I represented Public Affairs. Petrauskas and Baughman answered most of the Congressional staffers'
questions in direct, conversational language. When the Washington guests asked for
documents that had been referenced, the Ford hosts readily produced them. The meeting
appeared to be going well. Conversation was
often light. When it was time for lunch, sandwiches were brought in so work could continue. By mid-afternoon,
the staff investigators seemed pleased with the answers they had received along
with the promises the Ford team had made to forward a number of additional
documents that could not be located readily.
Tauzin's investigators
would return to Washington for the
weekend, then visit Firestone's Nashville headquarters the following Monday. Johnson remarked that Ford was cooperating much more
readily than Firestone. He left us with the clear impression that Ford's
helpfulness and Firestone's intransigence would be reflected in the tone of
questions the two companies' executives would face in the hearings the
following week. However, Johnson's demeanor would change when he
stepped in front of media hungry for their next story. There was more political
gain to be had for himself and for his boss by attacking both companies.
Johnson and Tauzin would not hesitate to criticize Ford on any
issues where they perceived vulnerability. The fact-finding visits by the investigators were all about finding
weaknesses and contradictions in the two companies' stories. Congress would have plenty of hard questions for both
companies. All we could do was to try to tip the balance of doubt away from
Ford.
A pack of media had gathered outside the Glass House, undoubtedly alerted by Johnson that Congressional investigators were in the
building. As the three staffers walked out of the building to the Lincoln Town
Car limousine we had arranged to take them to the airport, Johnson talked to the journalists, paying particular
attention to the two television cameras. Congress was determined to find out for the sake of the
American public, he told them, why Ford and Firestone had waited so long to do
anything about the deadly accidents.
* * *
Ford's
Public Affairs team had triple duty in the two weeks leading up to the
hearings. In addition to handling the deluge of media calls as well as the various pieces of employee and dealer
communications, we now had to help Governmental Affairs and our lawyers prepare
the written testimony and the vast amount of backup [Ford CEO Jac] Nasser, Petrauskas and Baughman would need as they were grilled by Congress. The extensive media Q&A that I had continued to add to each day was
used as the starting point for the Q&A in the executive backup books being
prepared for the Congressional hearings. Not every question was used and many
new ones were added. Some answers were too long and some needed further
explanation or added detail. We deferred to
Governmental Affairs in matters directly pertaining to the hearings, of
course. They conducted several extensive training sessions to prepare the
executives for the questioning, similar to the media training that Public
Affairs routinely conducted for company
executives preparing for interviews. But there were fundamental
differences, primarily in tone. In addressing Congress, deference was
essential. An executive was not used to maintaining humility and respect for a
person asking tough, even rude, questions. But a witness at a Congressional
hearing must never forget to maintain composure and mannerly behavior at all
times. The last thing you wanted to do was to get into an argument with a
Congressman in a hearing, an argument you would not win.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jon Harmon served in a number of senior
PR roles for Ford before joining global truckmaker Navistar as VP-Communication
and Reputation. He is currently based in Chicago as a communications
consultant. Feeding Frenzy-Trial
lawyers, the media, politicians and corporate adversaries: Inside the
Ford-Firestone crisis by Jon Harmon; © 2009; all rights reserved by the
author. 298 pages. Available at Barnes
and Noble for $24.92.
han Bernstein is president of