Harvard Business Review Rediscovered the Vidui

Sometime this week you will likely receive a text message that sounds something like this: “If I hurt or offended you in any way this past year, please forgive me. Gmar chatima tova.” The sender sent it to two hundred people at once. You may send one too. Nobody names anything. Everyone answers “of course.” Everyone feels slightly better, and no one has been forgiven for anything in particular.

Facebook did much the same thing, at scale, in 2014. In June of that year the company admitted it had let researchers alter the news feeds of 689,000 users for a week to test whether their moods could be shifted (politically correct for "manipulated"). The outrage was immediate. The company defended itself for days. Then its chief operating officer apologized for poor communication about the study. 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.

Three business school professors used that episode to open a 2015 article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Organizational Apology.” They had spent years studying apologies that worked and apologies that made things worse, and they reduced what they found to a formula. Read it once and it is sound management advice. Read it again with a Rambam open beside it and something strange happens. The formula is the Rambam’s vidui.

Here is the vidui as the Rambam gives it, in the first halacha of Hilchot Teshuvah: “How does one confess? He says: Please, G-d, 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” (Hilchot Teshuvah 1:1).

Harvard's research, gathered from corporate disasters and the occasional corporate success, helped me understand the Rambam.

Part 1: What to say - The three clauses

The heart of the Harvard formula is what the authors call the "what," the substance of the apology. Effective apologies, they found, contain three things: candor, remorse, and a commitment to change. The Rambam’s vidui also has these three clauses.

Candor:

Harvard:The apology must name the harm and own it, leaving the listener no room to wonder what is being conceded. The authors contrast two attempts by Goldman Sachs in 2009. In the first, chief executive Lloyd Blankfein apologized for unspecified acts by the financial industry that had led to the Great Recession. The New York Times editorialized that it did not come close to an apology, because he never said what he was sorry for or to whom. Blankfein tried again. He admitted the firm had done things that were clearly wrong. The second landed. The difference was specificity.

Rambam: “I did such and such.” Not "mistakes were made." Not “if I hurt you in any way.” In the same halacha he adds that whoever elaborates in confession is praiseworthy, and in 2:3 he goes further: one must spell out the sin, as Moshe did after the golden calf, “This people has sinned a great sin, and they have made themselves a god of gold” (Shemot 32:31). The Sages, upon whom Rambam based his system, understood what the Harvard authors state: vagueness in an apology is not modesty. It is a way of not apologizing.

Remorse:

Harvard: The authors hold up an earlier Facebook apology, this one from Mark Zuckerberg himself in 2006, after the original News Feed launch enraged users. The Zuckerberg’s first response was a post titled “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” It made things worse. Three days later Zuckerberg wrote again. He opened with “We really messed up” and called the decision a big mistake. The authors describe the language as self-abasing, and they mean it as praise. A leader accustomed to projecting strength must, for a moment, do the opposite.

Rambam: “I regret it and I am ashamed of my deeds.” Two verbs, not one. Regret is a judgment about the act. Shame is a feeling about the self. The Rambam asks for both, and Harvard's examples show why. The Facebook executives of 2014 expressed regret about the reaction. None expressed shame about the deed. Their audience could tell.

Commitment to change:

Harvard:The authors describe a good apology as creating distance between an old self that committed the violation and a new self that will not. New procedures, an independent review, a fired executive: these are the corporate ways of saying that the person who did this no longer exists.

Rambam: “I will never return to this thing.” And in 2:4, among the ways of teshuvah, he lists changing one’s name, as if to say, “I am someone else, not the person who did those deeds.” Harvard's old self and new self is a paraphrase of twelfth-century halacha.

Part 2: Who, when, where, how

The rest of the formula focuses on who in the organization should apologize, how soon after the incident (“when”), and where and how the apologies should be made.

Who?

Harvard: The more serious the harm, the more senior the voice must be. Delegating the apology downward signals that no one is taking it seriously. And it must reach the people actually harmed.

In November 2013 the founder of Lululemon went on Bloomberg TV to answer complaints that his hundred-dollar yoga pants pilled and turned sheer. He said, "Quite frankly, some women's bodies just don't work for it." The problem was not the pants. It was the customer. The backlash was immediate. A week later he posted a fifty-second apology video to his staff. He said he was sad, that he took responsibility, and that he was sorry to have put them through all this. "Them" was his employees. He had apologized to the people who had to answer the phones, not to the women he had insulted, and he never retracted the remark. Within a month the company announced he would step down as chairman.

Rambam: The one who sinned confesses; there is no proxy. And for a wrong against another person, confession before G-d accomplishes nothing until the offender goes to the person he wronged and appeases him (2:9). If he is refused, he returns with three friends. If refused again, a second group, then a third. If the person he wronged has died, he brings ten men to the grave and confesses there, naming what he did (2:11).

When?

Harvard:Speed signals sincerity. Delay signals a leader still deciding whether he is responsible. But the window never fully closes. General Motors apologized in 2014 for an ignition defect it had known about for a decade, and the apology was received well.

Rambam: Time is of essence because complete teshuvah is repenting while you still have the strength and the opportunity to repeat the deed. Repenting in old age, when the sin is no longer available to you, is lesser. But it still counts, he says, even on the day of death.

Where?

Harvard distinguishes apologies that must be public from those that can stay private, and warns that a public apology for a private harm looks like theater.

Rambam, in 2:5, makes the same distinction with a sharper rule. Wrongs between a person and his fellow should be confessed publicly. Wrongs between a person and G-d should not be broadcast; to do so, he says, is brazen.

How?

Harvard: The authors devote a section to tone and cite the chief executive of BP, who apologized for the Gulf oil spill and then added that he would like his life back. The words of apology were all present. The posture was wrong.

Rambam, in 2:4, lists among the ways of teshuvah crying out to G-d with tears, giving charity according to one’s means, and putting distance between oneself and the thing that caused the sin. Confession is spoken, but it is not only spoken. The actions have to prove it.

Where They Differ: What is being measured?

So far the two documents agree. But in the following they part, and the parting is the whole point.

For Harvard, the measure of an apology is how it is received. Every element of the formula points outward: who will hear it, when, in what setting, in what tone, and whether trust and reputation come back. That is the correct measure for a corporate communications strategy.

For the Rambam, the measure is how changed you actually are. In 2:2 he defines teshuvah as abandoning the sin, removing it from one’s thoughts, and resolving in one’s heart never to return to it, until “He who knows all secrets” can testify that this person will never return to that sin. Public reception is not the test. There is no audience to satisfy. The only question is whether the one confessing has become someone else.

Then, in 2:3, he gives the image that belongs on the wall of every corporate communications department. One who confesses in words but has not resolved in his heart to abandon the sin is tovel v’sheretz b’yado: he is immersing in a mikveh while holding dead vermin thing in his hand. He can say every word. He can say them in the right order, at the right speed, to the right people. The water will not help him until he lets go of what he is holding.

This is why the vidui is addressed to G-d. It is spoken before the one listener who cannot be managed, who does not read tone, and who already knows what happened. Before that audience there is nothing to engineer. And it is why a fixed text does not defeat sincerity. What makes them sincere are the thoughts and feelings of the person saying them.

Read this way, the vidui is not an apology at all. It is the spoken form of an inner change. The Rambam requires that it be spoken (2:2). Until you have said it, you have not finished deciding it. Harvard's formula, for all its merit, is not about teshuvah. It is about apologizing. Its three elements are the right ones, and the Rambam has each of them. 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 message that will arrive before Yom Kippur. Send it if you like. But do not mistake it for the vidui, or for what the Rambam means by asking mechilah. Somewhere on that list of two hundred people there are two or three people, perhaps only one, who are owed a different message. It names what you did. It does not begin with “if.” It goes to that person alone, and if it goes unanswered, it goes again.

Every corporate leader should learn the Harvard formula. The Facebook executives who never said sorry would have done well to read it. But an apology measured by its reception will always deliberately say what the audience wants to hear. The vidui is measured by Someone else, and that is the difference between an apology and repentance.