Last time I took a swipe at the filler phrase “y’know,” which has invaded so many interviews that for some it’s become a reflex, like breathing when answering a question. A colleague of mine reminded me that a couple of years ago we began encountering another useless time-buying verbal gimmick — the word “so.” It began popping up in media training sessions with scientists and engineers.  Some of them began their answers to our practice interview questions with, “So…” as in this exchange:

Question: “How will this experiment expand our knowledge of the universe?”

Answer: “So, what we are going to study is…..”

It was so pervasive that a few science and engineering media training participants began every single answer with the word “so.”  They were unaware they were doing it until we played back the interviews for our critiques. One confounded scientist, for whom the critique was a revelation, asked, “Why am I doing that all the time?” At the time I couldn’t answer his question, but now I think I know the answer.  Scientists, by inclination and training prefer to build to a conclusion.  But they know that laymen want a conclusion first, followed by the supporting data.

In fact, during media training sessions I drive home that message using the slogan, “Key Point Up Front.”  In other words, we are asking people to do something counterintuitive: to start with what would normally be the end of an answer.  Normally, when our scientist is building his argument with peers, he lays out his evidence and when he is going to to deliver his conclusion uses flags the fact with the word “so.” Actually, “so,” used this way is layman speak for “ergo,” which in its original Latin meant “because of,” but was adopted as a synonym for “therefore” in 14th century English.  Now when urged to begin with the conclusion, many scientists and engineers instinctively start with “so,” even though they haven’t presented the facts leading up to the conclusion. At a recent gathering I attended, there were a lot of scientists on panels and laymen in the audience and almost every scientist present began many answers with the word, “So….”

Why is this relevant to the business community?  Well, lately I’ve noticed the answer-starting “so” creeping into media interviews with businessmen.  Perhaps they picked up the habit listening to Nobel prize-winning scientists using the word.  Perhaps there is a “so” virus out there.  Whatever the reason, I am hearing more and more “so” answers from more sectors of the economy.

Whether you have talking about dark energy or monetary policy or business opportunities in third world countries, starting answer with “so,” is distracting and annoying.  First of all, the “so” is totally misplaced and somewhat baffling to the listener, since the basis of the conclusion hasn’t been given.  Second, it becomes a cliche like “y’know” and can lead to such overuse that it becomes a distraction — just like “y’know.”

As I pointed out earlier, a lot of perpetrators of “so” responses were totally unaware they were committing the offense.  So (sorry, couldn’t resist) how do you know you’ve fallen into the trap and what do you do to get out of it?

I know of only two ways of catching yourself deploying the inappropriate “so.” Ask colleagues to listen for it — a less than reliable solution — or record yourself in conversations and practice interviews and play back the tapes listening for “sos.” If you are a so-er what is the remedy? Incorporate the sense of the question in your answer.  If you are rephrasing the elements of the question, it’s virtually impossible to begin an answer with “so.” Back to the example I used earlier:

Question: “How will this experiment expand our knowledge of the universe?”

Answer: “This experiment will expand our knowledge of the universe by studying…..”

What about my mandate for getting your key point up front?  Restating the sense of the question doesn’t push the key point all that far back in your answer, AND, importantly, it makes your answer totally self-contained — something the media love.  If they can use your answer without their question, they are a giant leap toward a good soundbite or pull quote.

If corporate crises were a game, the Toyota safety recall would be a Superbowl contender.

Toyota Motors is a company that heavily promotes its engineering innovation, production quality and service reliability.  In a haymaker blow to Toyota’s reputation, the company suspended production and sales of eight of its most popular models — including America’s (previously) best-selling car, the Camry.  And now Toyota is recalling millions of already-sold cars worldwide to fix a potentially life-threatening problem: unintended acceleration.

(Disclosure: I have a personal stake in this story: I own a second-generation Toyota Prius.)

This week Toyota began shipping parts to dealers across the country to correct an accelerator problem that could lead to cases of disastrous unintended acceleration.  The Toyota problem is so serious the automaker stopped production and sales on eight of its top-selling models — including the Camry, the best-selling car in the U.S.  The scope of the problem is staggering: I’ve seen stories on the web sites of European, Japanese, South African, Canadian and Israeli newspapers.  Toyotas sold in China have also been implicated.

I always judge a company’s handling of a crisis by what I call the Tylenol Standard.  Back in 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were the best-selling over-the-counter pain reliever in the United States.  Then, seven people in the Chicago area died; they had all been taking the drug.  J & J jumped into action with an approach that is taught in business schools to this day.  The company suspended all production of Tylenol immediately.  It recalled the 31 million bottles of Tylenol then on store shelves, destroying all the medication that was returned.  It launched a rigorous inspection of all its manufacturing facilities. And, Johnson & Johnson made top officials readily available to the media where their story was: “We don’t know how this happened.  We will find out and correct it.  Meanwhile, do not use any of our products that you have at home; return them immediately, and report any adverse effects from our medication that you have already taken.”

The company’s response was fast, comforting and took a page from the Harry Truman adage: “The buck stops here.”

As it turned out, the buck did not stop at Johnson & Johnson.  The Tylenol deaths were murders, not the result of accidental contamination.  Someone had tampered with some Extra-Strength Tylenol boxes in drug stores around Chicago. The killer opened the packaging and the bottles, inserted potassium cyanide into the capsules and then resealed everything and put the product back on the shelves.  Police and FBI theorized the killer had a specific target in mind but killed others in order to make his intended victim look like a random casualty in a series of accidental poisonings-by-contamination.  (The case remains unsolved to this day, possibly because the intended victim never took the contaminated drug.)

Within a year, Extra-Strength Tylenol had regained its position as the country’s top-selling pain killer.   Unfortunately, the Toyota brass must have cut class in business school the day they taught the 1982 Tylenol lesson.

Toyota was late to the table with an admission that there was, indeed, a problem and slow with information to the media (and through the media to the millions of Toyota owners worldwide).  This sowed the seeds of confusion and resulted in a serious erosion of trust in the company.

Toyota’s worldwide president, Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder,  made no statements to the media and no apologies to customers until a crew from NHK, the Japanese TV network cornered him at the World Economic Summit in Davos the last week of January.  This reclusive behavior despite the fact that the issue has gained massive media attention since last August when an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer and three family members burned to death after crashing a runaway Lexus they had borrowed from a dealer in San Diego.  The company’s U.S. president, Jim Lentz, was also noticeably absent from the media until February 1, when it was time to announce the fix.  Then he began a media blitz explaining the problem and the repair, a belated attempt to restore Toyota’s battered image.

But wait, there’s more, as the infomercials say.  If you look at the list of cars being recalled for the accelerator fix (below) you’ll notice that the Lexus in which Highway Patrol officer  Mark Saylor died — a 2009 ES — is not on it.  That’s because those cars — and many other Toyota-made cars, including my Prius — were subject to an earlier recall, back in November, 2009.  In that recall, the Lexus accelerator pedals were shortened so they could not be trapped under the floor mat — the ostensible cause of Officer Saylor’s accident. (For the Prius, I was just told to remove the mat — which I had already done.  It still sits in my trunk awaiting the promised “permanent fix.”

But at the same time as the mat matter was being handled, Toyota was aware that for six years both the company and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been looking into multiple cases of unintended acceleration and that the mats were unlikely culprits in all of them.  In its autumn response, Toyota tried to sweep the more basic accelerator problem under the floor mat problem.  In fact, in November, Toyota put out a press release misrepresenting the NHTSA’s conclusions about the floor mats and had to issue another press release correcting the first one.  But neither press release acknowledged that unintended acceleration might have been caused by anything other than misplaced or mismatched floor mats.

So there were two problems and initially Toyota tried to conflate the simpler problem (the mats) with the more serious problem (the accelerator mechanism).  The mat recall affected 3.8 million vehicles and despite the fact that NHTSA told Toyota that mat removal was at best an interim solution, no long-term solutions has been reached for many of those recalled cars.  The faulty accelerator affects 4.6 million vehicles, some of which were previously involved in the mat recall (with the attendant danger that owners who addressed the mat problem will now think the entire problem solved.)

Here is a list of the cars in the current Toyota recall.

• 2009-2010 RAV4

• 2009-2010 Corolla

• 2009-2010 Matrix

• 2005-2010 Avalon

• 2007-2010 Camry

• 2010 Highlander

• 2007-2010 Tundra

• 2008-2010 Sequoia

Last time we asked whether or not your business needs a crisis communications plan. On the assumption you are reading this post because you answered “yes,” to the question, here are some tips for you and your spokespersons.

Assign your spokesperson or spokespersons in advance: Often, when a crisis breaks, you see multiple personalities jostling for the media spotlight, trying to manage the crisis communications. This is counterproductive; it sends a message that nobody is in charge. Also, it’s imperative that everyone in the organization knows who the proper spokespersons are and refers reporters to those spokespersons. If your people don’t know who to refer the media to, you’ll face a flood tide of speculative answers from your own employees, most of whom will have only a partial picture of the crisis. Also, the fewer the spokespersons and the higher their rank, the better the plan.

Keep your spokespersons in the loop: Your crisis communications plan must include mechanisms for keeping spokespersons in the information flow. They cannot address public concerns if they don’t know what’s going on themselves. Never withhold information from your spokespersons because you want it withheld from the public. If that information gets out and the spokesperson did not know about it, he loses all credibility with the media.

Once you have your spokesperson or spokespersons, here are some tips for how they should communicate in a crisis.

Stay out in front: Late messages are as bad as mixed messages. If your spokespersons don’t get out and address the crisis quickly, other “experts,” many of them self-appointed and ill-informed, will assume the mantle of authority. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans wondered if they should buy gas masks. It took the federal government three weeks to come up with the recommendation not to buy them. During these weeks, self-appointed terrorism experts filled the 24-hour news channels, warning of chemical weapons and frightening the public into depleting Army/Navy stores and online military surplus companies of every gas mask in stock. If you don’t respond in a timely manner, someone else will, and it may prove hard to wrest back control of crisis communications once that horse is out of the barn.

Tone: Your spokespersons needs to exhibit empathy, not paternalism. People resent being talked down to, even in extremely dire crises. Another form of paternalism is withholding bad news from the public for fear it will panic or react badly. Eventually the information is going to come out and once it does, your credibility will be in shambles.  The public can handle bad news if you present it in a mature, factual, respectful way. A series of 55 focus groups conducted across the country by the Centers for Disease Control and five universities found that uncertainty is more difficult to deal with than bad news and that any information is empowering in a crisis.

Speculation: The media will invite you and your spokespersons to speculate on the progress and outcome of the crisis. Decline the invitation.  Speculation is dangerous. If you are wrong, you damage your credibility.

Swat rumors promptly: A rumor left standing becomes a fact in short order. While this is an extreme example and unlikely to be duplicated in the world of business, it is instructive: There were rumors of mass assaults in the Superdome in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t happen, but authorities failed to refute the rumors in a timely manner and to this day many people still believe and repeat the stories.

Don’t answer what you can’t answer. Do answer what you can answer: “I don’t know. We’re working on it,” is a perfectly valid answer, especially if followed by a description of what steps are being taken. On the other hand, you can’t manage a crisis by withholding information. As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, “Truth will out.”  When it does, your credibility plummets and you find yourself managing both a crisis and a credibility gap.  But what about information you really can’t share? Respectfully, tell the media that you are withholding some information and why you are withholding it. If you have no results to report, talk about the process that will lead to results. The public wants to know something is being done, even if it hasn’t yet borne fruit.

The bottom line: candor: Candor is the most important tool for the crisis communicator. It served Johnson & Johnson well in the 1982 Tylenol poisoning crisis. J&J’s handling of the crisis is cited in every crisis management text written in the last three decades. And from a business point of view, candor worked extremely well because within months of the emergency, Tylenol regained its position as the country’s top-selling over-the-counter pain relief medication.