Lumber Liquidators is getting nailed. An investigative report on 60 Minutes accused the company of selling unsafe laminated flooring. A predictable fall in the company’s share price ensued. But rather than mount a defense, Lumber Liquidators has been mostly silent. That’s making a bad situation worse.
Dealing with an M&A rumor is tricky terrain for a CEO. When you’ve got to do it in the middle of a big industry event, well, that’s a high-wire act for sure. Just ask Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, who arrived at a Citibank investment conference a day after a Bloomberg news report said he was […]
Why is speaking to employees during a crisis so difficult? When a company is mired in controversy, it needs every friend it can get. Employees are likely to be supportive in these situations, but companies seldom do much to engage them. Chief executives offer up a variety of objections. Here are the five most common […]
Usually when a company sees its stock price sliced in half the CEO takes to the airwaves to reassure anxious investors and heavily stock-optioned employees. But flouting convention is a hallmark of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s the right strategy.
Lucas van Praag, the longtime communications chief at Goldman Sachs, is stepping down. To those of us in the PR trade, this news yesterday was much more significant than Facebook’s IPO filing and the legion of twentysomething millionaires it will spawn. Van Praag has done a brilliant job of defending Goldman and handling the outsized […]
Sure, the positive comments today from Meredith Whitney helped, but give Jefferies (NYSE: JEF) credit for handling its communications well in a very challenging environment. At one point the stock was down 20 percent as rumors swirled about the firm’s exposure to European sovereign debt and a downgrade by Egan-Jones. By day’s end, however, the […]
It’s hard to square the statement by Olympus that its M&A transactions, which are now the subject of an independent investigation, “were in no way improper.” Presumably, the propriety of the deals is up to the investigation to determine. It’s precisely that sort of statement that makes investors skeptical about the company’s commitment to shedding […]
At this hour, executives and MF Global are huddling with bankers and lawyers, trying to come up with a deal to sell the firm. It must seem like a surreal exercise, since just days earlier the firm held a solid investment-grade credit rating and a market cap of $620 million. Now, as its clients turn […]
The hole is getting deeper for Olympus and its chairman, Tsuyoshi Kikukawa. And his outside auditor, Ernst & Young, might find itself alongside him. A day after denying allegations by its former CEO, Michael Woodford, that it paid advisory fees of $687 million on a $2 billion acquisition, the company reversed itself and acknowledged that […]
The messy firing of Olympus CEO Michael Woodford provides another example of the challenges in communicating an executive exit. The Japanese camera and medical-imaging company last week fired Woodford, its first non-Japanese CEO, after less than a year. In announcing his dismissal, Olympus cited Woodford’s inability to work effectively with Japanese managers and chairman Tsuyoshi […]