William J. Holstein

Crisis Strategies: Toyota and the Roman Catholic Church
APRIL 8--Toyota and the Roman Catholic church are dramatically different institutions, yet they are making the same mistake in handling their communications crises: they are not accepting the criticism of their practices and changing the way they do business. Instead, they are seeking to discredit the media by arguing that it is anti-Japanese, in one case, and anti-Catholic in the other. You can never win those arguments.

They both also are allowing a highly corrosive pattern to develop: by appearing to not "come clean," in the language of one Toyota official, they encourage the media to maintain a steady drumbeat of stories and accusations.

This may seem like lunacy, but here is my prescription for both of them in a nutshell: accept the criticism and make deep structural changes that are convincing to a wider audience. In Toyota's case, that means acknowledging that it consciously hid safety problems in pursuit of the almighty yen. People would have to get fired. It would have to take a big financial writeoff and pay big fines. It would have to make even more dramatic offerings to its customers by, say, replacing some vehicles for free. Painful, obviously, but they might be able to turn the corner on the story.

For the Catholics, they have to acknowledge that there has been a systematic, decades-old pattern of priests sexually abusing children. This admission would have to come from the pope himself. Restitutions would have to be paid. But more fundamentally, the church would have to abandon its policy that priests cannot marry. It would have to take the Episcopalian route of allowing bishops to marry. Lifelong celibacy is just not credible or desirable on any human level. Would that represent a huge shakeup in the church? Sure. But it might be able to re-establish moral legitimacy and stop the erosion of its authority.