Tiger Woods has been criticized time and time again throughout his career. He has served as the punching bag for social activists who believe Tiger hasn’t done enough for minorities. Fellow professional golfers publicly challenged Tiger’s decision to change his swing when he was already number one in the world. And then before the British Open, naysayers said that Tiger couldn’t win this tournament because he only excels on courses that allow for him to blast the ball off the tee.

And yet, Tiger has remained focused on the end goal every step of the way. He deliberates, then chooses his strategy and acts with confidence in his relentless pursuit of improvement and perfection. His critics have never derailed his plans.

Tiger is ultra-disciplined, innovative, flexible, passionate, committed to measurement and analysis and driven by purpose and targeted results. He also is a great storyteller and shares his goals and objectives with everyone. And his Tiger Woods Foundation is introducing opportunities to junior golfers and minority kids across the country.

Although golf seems to be a solitary sport, Tiger is a role model not only for other golfers, young minorities and the entire sports community, but also for business managers and executives looking for a figure to emulate.

Photo: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7256/451/1600/tiger.3.jpg

A couple years out of college, while working as an account executive at an Arizona public relations/public affairs firm, I helped spearhead a public relations campaign related to the first proposed and privately built toll road in Arizona (the project shut down after a comprehensive economic evaluation concluded that the financials wouldn’t work).

We were coordinating open houses in the related community and placed ads in the local newspaper that said that “the toll road will be completed by (whatever the estimated date was)” and the reporter for the associated community paper covering the issue called and accused me and my firm of trying to steamroll the project through by making people think it was a done deal, as evidenced by the phrase “will be” rather than “could be” or “would be.” He threatened to write nasty articles “exposing” our efforts, although that certainly wasn’t our intent.

The reporter wielded a lot of influence in that market and would not be swayed by anything we said. Over the next day or two, we and the client organization debated whether or not to reproduce all of our informational materials.

Eventually, we decided that the cost associated with changing all of the ads and all of our collateral material, including fact sheets, Q&A sheets, brochures, the Web site, and all of our open house boards and displays to change the one word far outweighed the cost of losing the project altogether.

That was one expensive word, but definitely worth it in terms of the long-term relationship we salvaged with the reporter, who appreciated our decision and started giving us the benefit of the doubt. Did he change his reporting? Not really. But that was the point. We weren’t trying to get him to be a passionate advocate for us – that wasn’t going to happen. We were just trying to get him to keep reporting fairly. In essence, we were trying to get him to do nothing.

Many times, the goal of issues management or crisis management is not to get everyone on your side, but to solidify your small supporting base and get the majority to do nothing different at all.

An article in a 2008 New York Times titled “Where the Fingers Are Pointing” opens with this line:

“When money managers make good investments, they are happy to take credit for brilliance. When they make bad investments, they would rather the blame go elsewhere.”

You could pretty much substitute “money managers” with any other title and it would still be an accurate statement, especially when it comes to crisis management.

In crisis situations, lashing out and casting blame in other directions is a common, but ineffective strategy for protecting and salvaging corporate reputation. When the fires are burning, people expect someone to take responsibility for solutions. The truth almost always comes to light, so blame eventually is laid at the feet of the true offenders. Companies that are in the wrong that choose to deflect and strike often find themselves in much hotter water than they would have if they had owned up to the issue and made amends.