To Slip or Not to Slip

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, shared his feelings about his Commander-in-Chief with an advisor, who was later quoted in a Rolling Stone article:

Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his f***ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.

The very same week the article was published, his Commander-in-Chief relieved General McChrystal of his command.

During the same month, Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, in a statement to the media about his company's disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, said, "I'd like my life back."

One month later, Mr. Hayward was replaced as the company's spokesman.

In the summer of 2006, at a rally during his campaign for the Virginia senate seat, Senator George Allen, the favored incumbent, mocked a student of Indian descent as "Macaca."

On Election Day Senator Allen went down to defeat.

In 2002, during a 100 birthday party for segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator Trent Lott, the Republican senator from Mississippi and Senate Majority Leader, said:

When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Three weeks of public furor later, Senator Lott resigned from his majority post.

Clearly, the World War II slogan, "Loose lips sink ships," also applies to politics and business. Where politicians lose elections, business people lose jobs and sink deals as a result of verbal gaffes.

An article by Jeffrey Zaslow in last week's Wall Street Journal called, "Keeping Your Foot Away From Your Mouth," looked at some famous gaffes by famous people and analyzed the reasons why such slips happen:

There are gaffes that result from clueless thinking or unfortunate phrasing, and then there are gaffes-- such as those with racial or sexual overtones--that can be rooted in our personal belief systems.

The article went on to note that that the viral influence of the Internet and YouTube have worsened the negative impact of gaffes. "Even if we don't mean it, it can be hard to recover. We've become a culture that is unforgiving when it comes to poor word choice."