

Calling for an Apology Cease-Fire
Apologies can and should be hugely important actions and mechanisms, blessed with enormous power and lasting impact. But they must be two-way exchanges of trust and healing that are open and transparent.
There are hundreds of Insights to explore that we hope raise people’s consciousness and elevate the conversation by exploring today’s world through the lens of The HOW philosophy.
Apologies can and should be hugely important actions and mechanisms, blessed with enormous power and lasting impact. But they must be two-way exchanges of trust and healing that are open and transparent.
A month before Lion Air Flight 610 took off from Jakarta and promptly plunged into the Java Sea, killing everyone aboard, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg traveled to a Baptist church in southern Illinois to talk about faith and leadership.
This is the fourth apology in our Apology Metrics series in which we present apologies for readers to assess. Our goal is not to evaluate apologies as theatrical performances but to evaluate the apologizer’s behavior over time to see whether there has been genuine change. The survey for this apology will be predictive rather than retrospective. We will follow up with a retrospective evaluation after at least a year.
This is the third apology in our Apology Metrics series in which we present apologies for readers to assess. Our goal is not to evaluate apologies as theatrical performances but to evaluate the apologizer’s behavior over time to see whether there has been genuine change. This time, we will look at the apology of Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, to Australia’s indigenous community in 2008. With the benefit of six years of hindsight, we are in a much better position to judge the apology’s authenticity.
This is the second apology in our Apology Metrics series in which we present apologies for readers to assess. Our goal is not to evaluate apologies as theatrical performances but to evaluate the apologizer’s behavior over time to see whether there has been genuine change.
Doctors don’t traditionally apologize for medical errors; in fact, they usually don’t even disclose them. That is why I have long been interested in how the University of Michigan Health Systems has bucked tradition with its Michigan Model, a collaborative and transparent approach to patient safety and medical mistakes.
When Andrew Ross Sorkin and I came together to start “Apology Watch,” our goal was to elevate the conversation about authentic apologies. In that vein, we are introducing an “Apology Metric” survey to give readers an opportunity to share their insight.
With high-profile apologies from the likes of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, we're in apology overload. Dov Seidman is calling for an apology cease-fire. Seidman is CEO of a company that helps corporations develop values-based cultures and strengthen their ethics and compliance effort. He tells Audie Cornish why he takes issue with recent apologies and what he believes makes a good one.
Beginning on Tuesday, Mr. Seidman and I are starting “Apology Watch” on the DealBook website (nytimes.com/dealbook) and on Twitter using the hashtag #ApologyWatch. We hope readers will participate by helping us track new apologies and, more important, follow up on what companies, institutions and individuals have done post-apology.