Nascar = blah, blah
So I’m driving to town this morning listening to the early guys on Sirius Nascar radio. The race at Indianapolis last weekend was a joke and the callers were letting the hosts know exactly how disappointed they were with the race, with Nascar, and with the Goodyear tires that couldn’t last over 10 laps. The hosts had the nerve to call their audience, at least the part that believes that Goodyear should apologize for the mess they caused, “juvenile”.
Let’s get it straight. The Goodyear people are at fault. It is their job to deliver usable tires to a racetrack. I heard every blah-blah excuse made, “should have done this”, testing not enough, etc.. There is no excuse. It is their job to have the right alternatives available for selection. It is their job to know what is needed. No amount of testing will make a bad tire better.
OK, they screwed up. And they admitted it. So what? They have screwed up over and over this racing season. It doesn’t seem to have taught them that saying they screwed up does not fix the screw up and make it OK.
They also don’t seem to get the difference between admitting they are screw ups and saying that they’re sorry. Saying that you are sorry means that you accept responsibility for how your failure affected others. While it cannot change the failure, it provides a signal that you actually care about the people affected by your failure. Saying that you are sorry is an admission that you have failed to live up to an expectation (for decent tires in this case) that you had engaged in and tried to live up to. Trying is not good enough. When you try and fail, aside from accepting responsibility, you say you are sorry. Only then can trust begin to be re-established.
Not only, as a former marketing consultant, am I shocked that the Goodyear people didn’t start by saying they were sorry, whether the problem was their responsibility or not (which is an absolute requisite for any good PR), I am shocked that so-called radio professionals do not get it. Saying that you’re sorry is completely separate from saying you are responsible.
I wonder if any of these guys (and they are all guys, by the way. Hmmmm) are married. Some marraige if they havn’t learned to say they are sorry even if they don’t know what they are sorry for. What you are sorry for, fellows, is how the other person ( or in the race’s case, the millions who watched a frustratingly lousy race) feel. And if you’re only sorry because somehow you are in a corner being forced to say you’re sorry, say it anyway. Then figure out what the problem is and how to solve it. Then you don’t have to be sorry the next time.
The boys on Sirius don’t get it. When they start calling their own listeners ‘childish’ the reflection is on them. When you point a finger at someone, there are four fingers pointing back at you. Namecalling of any kind is inappropriate, and only means that you have nothing substantive to say to defend your position. Just verbal bullying.
They need to say they are sorry to their listeners for their comments this morning. Of course, I won’t hear it as I won’t be tuning them in anymore.
Tags: brickyard, Goodyear, Indianapolis, nascar, sirius, tires