Rehabilitating Tiger Inc.

Several billion dollars of lost valuation and countless web tabloid articles later, Tiger is coming out from the fetal position under his couch to finally face his fans and the thousands of people who depended upon him for their livelihood.
The hot buzz is over whether he cops a plea of sexual addition (Note to file: Why does nobody ever claim to suffer from an addiction to taking out the garbage or cleaning the gutters?) or just fess up that he has been caught more than a few times in an unplayable lie. However, the business issue is whether he can restore the marketability of the the Tiger brand. Whether and how to do that actually holds some lessons for any business that finds itself in deep violation of its brand premise and promise.

1. Apologize for the damage he has done to the sport and his sponsors. I question his motives in insisting on holding this news conference right when all the other golfers who know how to keep their knickers zipped are playing in the Accenture Match Play Tournament (Accenture was the first sponsor to drop him, so it could easily be seen as retaliation). Just like would be expected of any CEO, Tiger has to answer for wiping out billions of dollars of equity value among the sports enterprises and corporate sponsors.
2. Be human. Ah, certainly there is a debate whether the human condition need embrace serial adultery, but the public is amazingly forgiving (or accommodating) to all manner of bad, even prurient, behavior if the accused will simply admit that they are failed creatures. It makes the rest of us feel a little better about our failings when those who pretend they have none finally come to that blinding point of self-awareness. Tiger needs to simply say there was no excuse for his behavior. The "sexual addition" thing is cute, but does not cut it.
3. Get off the privacy kick. When you have packaged and marketed yourself as a loving father, protective husband, good son and model of self-control, you give up your privacy. You cannot choose to capitalize on your personality when it suits you, then true to hide your character when it fails. If he uses that word in his news conference on Friday, it will draw all the fire.

4. Ask for patience and support. Tiger created this monstrous image as a guy who could draw from within and be something larger than all of us, and it landed him sprawled on his lawn at 2:00 AM with a busted nose. Stepping into the crowd and asking for the metaphorical hug starts to give his fans a stake in his success.

Planes, trains and exploding underpants

No wonder we don't feel safe. The DHS Secretary says, "the system works"—a notion you can only embrace if you accept that the first (and seemingly only) line of defense in the system is the inclination of every citizen to spot and pounce on the next passenger seeking to ignite their underwear. Then the incident is dismissed as "isolated" by Obama while Secretary Clinton warns omminously of the instability of Yemen. The "terrorism czar" (I am still thumbing through the Constitution seeking to find that office) declares that there is no smoking gun, just a day before Obama declares a clear link between our U.S. visa-approved visitor from Yemen and Al-Qaeda. Meantime, I trudge through the airport on Monday to the sonorous tone of the TSA announcement that the threat level has been determined to be "orange" — a color key on which it has been stuck for years since anyone lost any sense of its meaning anyway. While all this is going on, they confiscate some kid's Christmas gift of Play-Doh at security. Underneath all of this, we insist on zero-tolerance for error, amassing a list of 500,000 "watch list" names, which cripples our ability to focus at all on the real patterns of behavior that lead to terrorism attacks.

Flaming underpants, shoes, box cutters and Play-Doh don't kill people. Terrorists do. The reason we don't "connect the dots" of someone with terrorist ties, who has been reported as unstable by his own father to two embassies, who buys a one-way ticket with cash and has no luggage, is because we have created two many dots.

As well, we badly under-serve the criticality of public safety when we send such muddy signals about our intent, our policy, and the real threats we face. Communications is more than a public statement or a speech -- for it to any any effect, it needs to be a closely-knit, consistent and authentic process that matches words to actions, and experience to expectations.