Effective Apology Skills

One of the essential skills in life is learning how to apologize with grace and honesty. For real. A genuine apology can move mountains.

We expect character from corporations even though they are not people, but when business do behave like upstanding people, we notice. Amazon did a silly thing recently by disabling books that they mistakenly sold on the Kindle. Founder Jeff Bezos just posted an apology that raised him two notches on my Buddha scale. It takes courage and wisdom to apologize as genuine and effectively as his did. Man, he is good.

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos