Taylor Swift Power Letter Highlights A Must-Do Practice For Every Business

By now, most everyone’s heard about the Apple goof and re-boot — where they were ready to fire up their new Apple Music service without paying artists during the free-trial period.  Taylor Swift wrote an open letter to Apple, and they quickly reversed their position.  It’s noteworthy that words like “Apple caves” have been used in headlines.

Despite the smiley “my-bad-but-it’s-all-good-now” rhetoric coming from Apple, there’s been some damage done.  Sure, it’s good that they ultimately “did the right thing,” but no company can afford this kind of public spanking.  Any time a key constituent resorts to an open letter to castigate company execs for a key decision, there’s a loss of credibility.  It can make others who work with and depend on the company wary and wondering what other decisions might be in the works that could negatively affect them.  And what if they don’t have the huge clout of Taylor Swift?  Would Apple be as quick to reverse a decision after a letter — private or public — from one of these smaller-fry folks?

In every business, a key component of our decision-making process has to be to look down the road for consequences, intended and unintended, to all our stakeholders — investors, customers, vendors, partners — that might result.  Who will be affected and how?  What would they say if they were sitting here now, listening to us discussing this decision we have to make?  Does it make sense to bring them into the discussions, not to have them run our company, but to get their reactions to some alternatives.  Maybe they have an alternative we haven’t considered, or can at least provide a perspective we haven’t considered.

Even if those discussions don’t yield an idea of earth-shattering and momentous significance, our partners will be grateful for the opportunity to give input before the decision is made, and they’ll know we really mean it when we say we really care about how our actions will affect them.