How NOT to respond to an attack on your company
The post in question:
I’d been staying studiously silent on the Amazon NYT article. I found it over-the-top…so much so that the grains of truth (and there were some) got drowned out by the sensationalism. Keeping silent felt like the best way to not give it more attention but then this particular medium post popped up out of nowhere and made me angry.
I know I hate the response. What I’m trying to figure out is how badly I hate it.
The tone, style, and type of response given by a entity to an attack is itself a reflection of the entity.
Going after individuals is poor form; even if the content is true, doing it like this still feels “whistleblower retaliation” in nature. Worse, disclosing information about the individuals which, by social contract, is meant to be kept within the company is extremely uncool; it breaches trust by directly showing a willingness to use written records from one’s tenure (even positive records) to publicly call you out if you are associated with a negative piece.
You don’t engage in that kind of persecution no matter how angry you might be at an attack. It disrespects your current and former staff and damages trust.
That this is a public response posted by an SVP makes it worse. It reflects very poorly on Amazon because it shows executive endorsement of this sort of response.
None of this of course mentions that the article doesn’t give any constructive arguments in favor of Amazon. It’s an eye-for-an-eye piece that purely focuses on attacking NYT and the characters and competence of the people who associated themselves with the article.
There were other ways to respond. This was not a good one.
