The likely epilogue of Martha Stewart's career was announced last week with her company's sale for $353 million to Sequential Brands. Stewart will stay on as chief creative officer.
It's been a bumpy quarter-century ride for Stewart who has been branded both a billionaire and a criminal within a few short years.
It's tempting for business pundits to characterize the sale of her company at a comparatively discounted price as a failure, but when you're in the crisis management business, you tend to have more earthly standards of success.
I tend to measure crisis management success in terms of what is salvaged versus what was lost, and Martha Stewart salvaged her career and her company after being convicted of crimes related to her ill-advised 2001 trade of ImClone stock. She also managed to weather a wildly changing media landscape: The cornerstone of her empire was Martha Stewart Living magazine, which debuted in 1990 and peaked with a circulation of 2 million in 2002. Her company went public at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.
But unforced and forced errors changed Stewart's life in the form of her crime -- lying to authorities about the ImClone trade, her prison sentence and the collapse of print media under the weight of the internet explosion.
Yet Stewart survived. What did she do right? She eschewed a lengthy appeals process and served her five-month prison sentence without a peep, likely understanding that once she reported to jail, both the media and her fans would likely root for her recovery. And this is exactly what happened.
Stewart also realized that her core audience, women consumers, would be especially invested in her comeback, many feeling that she was savagely punished in the press for what was essentially a $45,000 trade at the same time when male CEOs of companies like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco had made tens of billions of dollars vanish overnight.
Stewart stuck to her strength: Her ability to communicate her strengths via TV appearances and personally-branded products to her consumer base. She also threw a lot of tactics at her rehabilitation. Some devices such as a Martha-centric version of The Apprentice flopped, but her daily show on NBC did well and was nominated for a number of Emmy awards.
No, Stewart never returned to the heights of her pre-scandal and pre-internet potential, but if she didn't eliminate the damage to her brand, she certainly brought it under control, which is why the discipline is called "damage control."
One of the great challenges of crisis management is learning to re-calibrate the value of your life in accordance with your new circumstances. Stewart will likely have a thriving, if diminished, career for as long as she wants it and, by comparable standards, will be wildly successful for the rest of her career doing what she loves to do. How can this not be a success story?