Harvard Business Review Rediscovered the Viduy Confession

Sometime this week you'll likely get a text that reads: "If I hurt or offended you in any way this past year, please forgive me.." It goes to two hundred people at once. Everyone answers "of course" and no one has actually been forgiven for anything specific.

Facebook did the same thing, at scale, in 2014, when it admitted letting researchers alter 689,000 users' news feeds for a week to test whether their moods could be manipulated. The outrage was immediate. The company defended itself for days, then had its chief operating officer apologize for "poor communication." Three months later its chief technology officer conceded the company should have acted differently and announced new research guidelines. Three statements, three months, and no one said the word sorry.

A 2015 Harvard Business Review article, "The Organizational Apology", written by three business school professors, opened with that Facebook episode. After years studying apologies that worked and apologies that backfired, they reduced their findings to a formula. There results are remarkably similar to Judaism’s viduy confession formula, as stated by the Rambam [Maimonides].

The Rambam writes: "How does one confess? He says: Please, God, I have sinned, I have done wrong, I have transgressed before You, and I did such and such. I regret it and I am ashamed of my deeds, and I will never return to this thing" [(Laws of Repentance, 1:1)

Harvard's research, drawn from corporate disasters and the rare corporate success, ended up explaining the Rambam.

What to Say

The core of the Harvard formula is the substance of the apology itself: candor, remorse, and a commitment to change. The viduy confession has the same three clauses.

Candor. The apology must name the harm, leaving no room to wonder what's being conceded.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein apologized in 2009 for unspecified acts by the financial industry that had contributed to the Great Recession; the New York Times called it not close to an apology, since he never said what he was sorry for or to whom. He tried again, admitting the firm had done things that were clearly wrong. That one landed. The difference was specificity.

The Rambam: "I did such and such." Not "mistakes were made." He goes further elsewhere, saying one must spell out the sin, as Moses did after the golden calf: "this people has sinned a great sin, and they have made themselves a god of gold." There’s no room for vagueness in an apology.

Remorse. Mark Zuckerberg's first response to user outrage over the 2006 News Feed launch, a post titled "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you," made things worse. Three days later he tried again: "We really messed up." The authors call the language self-abasing, and mean it as praise -- a leader used to projecting strength has to, for a moment, do the opposite.

The Rambam: "I regret it and I am ashamed of my deeds." Regret is a judgment about the act; shame is a feeling about the self. He asks for both. The Facebook executives of 2014 expressed regret about the reaction, never shame about the deed. Their audience could tell.

Commitment to change. A good apology creates distance between the old self who erred and a new self who won't repeat it -- which is what new procedures, an independent review, or a fired executive are meant to signal.

The Rambam: "I will never return to this thing." Among the ways of doing teshuva, he lists changing one's name: I am someone else now.

Who, When, Where, How

Who? The more serious the harm, the more senior the voice needs to be, and it has to reach the people actually harmed.

When Lululemon's founder went on Bloomberg TV in 2013 to answer complaints that the company's yoga pants turned sheer, he said "quite frankly, some women's bodies just don't work for it." The backlash was immediate. His apology video a week later went to his staff, not the women he'd insulted, and never retracted the remark. Within a month he'd stepped down as chairman.

The Rambam: the one who sinned confesses -- there's no proxy. For a wrong against another person, confessing to God accomplishes nothing until the offender appeases the person he wronged directly. If refused, he returns with three friends, then a larger group. If the wronged person has died, he brings ten men to the grave and confesses there.

When? Speed signals sincerity; delay signals a leader still deciding whether he's responsible. But the window never fully closes -- General Motors' 2014 apology for an ignition defect it had known about for a decade was still well received.

The Rambam: timing matters because complete teshuva means repenting while you still have the strength and opportunity to repeat the deed. Repenting in old age counts for less, but it still counts, even on the day of death.

Where? A public apology for a private harm looks like theater. The Rambam draws the same line more sharply: wrongs between people should be confessed publicly; wrongs between a person and God should not be broadcast -- doing so is brazen.

How? BP's CEO apologized for the Gulf oil spill, then added that he'd like his life back. The words were right. The posture wasn't. The Rambam lists crying out to God with tears, giving charity, and distancing oneself from whatever caused the sin. Confession is spoken, but not only spoken -- actions have to back it up.

Where They Differ

Here's where the Rambam and Harvard part.

Harvard measures an apology by how it's received: who hears it, in what tone, whether trust returns. That's the right measure for a corporate strategy.

The Rambam measures how changed you actually are. He defines teshuva as abandoning the sin, removing it from your thoughts, and resolving in your heart never to return to it -- until "He who knows all secrets" could testify you won't repeat it. There's no audience to satisfy.

Then comes the image that belongs on the wall of every corporate communications department: someone who confesses in words but hasn't resolved in his heart to abandon the sin is like one who “immerses in a mikveh [ritual bath] while still holding a dead mouse in his hand.” He can say every word, in the right order, to the right people. The water won't purify him until he lets go of what he's holding.

The viduy is addressed to God -- the one listener who can't be manipulated and already knows what happened. There's nothing to engineer. And that's why a fixed text doesn't defeat sincerity: what makes the words sincere is the person saying them, not the words themselves.

The viduy isn't really an apology. It's the spoken form of an inner change; until you've said it, you haven't finished deciding it. Harvard's formula is about apologizing. The Rambam's is about teshuva. Both use the same three elements -- but Harvard uses them to repair what the audience thinks of you. The Rambam uses them to repair you.

Which brings us back to the text arriving before Yom Kippur. Send it if you like. But don't mistake it for the viduy confession, or for what the Rambam means by forgiveness. Somewhere on that list of two hundred people, one or two are owed a different message -- one that names what you did, doesn't begin with "if," and goes to that person alone, preferably face to face.

Every corporate leader should learn the Harvard formula. But an apology measured by its reception will always tell the audience what it wants to hear. The viduy is measured by Someone else. That's the difference between an apology and an act of genuine teshuva.