The Cost of Forgetting to be Human (A Different Take on Good Good)

There’s been a lot of discussion the last week or two about the poor decisions by Callaway and Good Good to create and publish a video advertisement that was less than kind to women. The two organizations obviously messed up bigtime, and they’re paying an appropriately steep price for it.

For this post, though, let’s focus on now-former Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick. He resigned on September 3 in the fallout from the fiasco. As much as his departure is due to the ad, I’d say it’s just as much (if not more) about a late-night social media rampage he went on just after the worst of the crisis hit his company.

In a post sent at 3:38 a.m., Kendrick went on a rant about the situation. He deflected blame. He wrote in a tone/manner that insinuated he was oozing with anger. He even engaged a commenter by threatening to sue Callaway, one of the golf partners that’s elevated Good Good’s business to be what it is. While I haven’t seen any proof of anything, my perception was that he looked exhausted, under the influence or both.

Who does that? Didn’t he know that nothing good happens after midnight?

Seems to me that Kendrick’s firing (let’s face it, that’s what happened) was necessary more because he acted out of step with the way normal/decent humans act. I’m sure he was under a lot of stress. But no sane person is up that late on a weeknight, much less firing off attacks at those they feel slighted by. It’s galling how he tried to pass the buck and shirk responsibility for what happened. And this is just what we’re seeing in the public domain; we don’t know what happened behind closed doors, but the record doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Do you think Good Good’s business could rebound with a guy who exposed himself that way at the helm? Could you trust him if you were one of Good Good’s business partners, employees, investors, etc.? I’d say no. Kendrick used up whatever human capital he had in the way he handled the situation. Almost surely, Good Good forced him out because it was the only reasonable thing they could do to salvage anything from the wreckage of the crisis and begin to move forward.

The moral of the story: don’t forget to be human. Stress and adversity hit us all, but we need to respond in constructive (and not self-destructive) ways. Navigating a crisis is as much about taking care of yourself and other humans as it is mitigating damage. We simply can’t do the latter if we don’t do the former.