O’Leary a lesson in how to do it, Branson not …

THIS week’s observations come to you from the UK where I was recently on assignment. In the space of one day, I saw two prominent CEOs produce textbook case studies in how not to do crisis management and how to do it brilliantly.

Firstly, marketing megastar (at least that’s what we in the media have made him) Richard Branson totally mishandled the story of the crash of his Virgin Galactic spacecraft. The crash, in the Mojave Desert in the US, killed one test pilot and gravely injured the other.

Branson at first claimed he didn’t know the man who died and hadn’t met him… and later changed his tune when alert hacks produced photos of them together. Then he tried to deflect blame for the incident on to his partners in the project, even as reports flowed about Virgin being warned that the rocket fuel it was using was highly dangerous.

Branson came across as callous and only concerned with his own fame and fortune (reports said the crash may have been due to deadline pressure applied by Branson to get the scheme up and running commercially as soon as possible).

For the damage he has done to his own and his companies’ reputations, he gets an Onion for bad marketing.

Interestingly, five years ago I was involved (on a freelance basis) in the Webtel.mobi Intercontinental Challenge, where Swiss pilot Yves Rossy attempted to cross from Africa to Europe with a jet wing. Halfway across, he disappeared into fierce cumulo-nimbus clouds and later had to jettison the wing and parachute into the cold Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain.

This all happened in real time on TV networks across the globe (who were provided with a free, HD live feed by Webtel.mobi). For about 10 minutes, nobody (including me running the media team on the beach in Spain waiting for him) knew what had happened.

In the end, Yves was plucked out of the water (because the company had contingency plans and had practised) by a South African rescue diver and winched into a helicopter.

Although the event did not end in tragedy like Branson’s did, the significant difference was that the Webtel.mobi CEO had prepared for all eventualities, including the possibility that Yves might not make it, or even that he might be killed.

And, when he spoke to the media, he was able to round off a good news story with a message of congratulations and hope. That message went out globally and generated immense positive publicity for Webtel.mobi.

While Branson was putting his foot in it this week, the CEO of lowcost airline Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, was taking on the BBC in a live interview. The TV interviewer was clearly trying to attack O’Leary (cheek uppity bogtrotter) after a Daily Mail “survey” claimed there was huge unhappiness with Ryanair among its customers.

Not only did O’Leary scathingly dismiss the Daily Mail survey, but he repeatedly stressed that the airline’s numbers and profits were both up significantly. When the interviewer kept trying to back him into a corner, O’Leary used the opportunity to shamelessly plug Ryanair, “the lowest cost airline in the world”. That airtime alone would have been worth tens of thousands of pounds in revenue to the BBC had Ryanair bought it.

But O’Leary’s kicker was to describe himself, in answer to a question, as “a simple Irish far mer…” Even the interviewer couldn’t help laughing at that, acknowledging she had been bested by a master of the media.

I would give O’Leary an Orchid for the performance and suggest to some of our local CEOs (Nazir Alli perhaps?) that they try to emulate him. Mind you, at least Ryanair does have a good story to tell…