Poor Jobs is Dead … Not!

I hope Apple has a crisis management firm on retainer. It seems that an electronic misstep last week at the Bloomberg news outlet accidentally released a partial obituary for Steve Jobs. And the Apple CEO was still very much alive. Oops.

I would characterize this gaffe as rising to the level which requires intervention by a crisis management firm because, not so long ago, when Jobs was battling pancreatic cancer, he had kept it secret for months while he researched alternative treatments — a material issue for a publicly traded company, according to some. Then, according to CNET, “When Jobs appeared onstage at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, his thin appearance led some bloggers and company critics to speculate that he was ill again. … So given a CEO whose health has been discussed so speculatively in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, and whose company's stock has been shown to be far from immune to the influence of the rumor mill, the appearance — however brief — of a Jobs obituary online must certainly have been disquieting for those who stumbled upon it.”

There was no animus in this crisis … no partisan battling … just an electronic glitch. But a crisis management firm can help anticipate and ameliorate the negative effects of even the most innocent of accidents.