When Apollo 13 called a disaster their finest hour, they meant how they responded. A software bug or false alert can destroy a company, but if you acknowledge it openly, fix it concretely, and bring stakeholders along, you rebuild trust and come out stronger.
Turn disasters into your finest hour. There's a line from Apollo 13 where someone talks about the incident and it being the worst disaster in NASA's history, and the director, the flight director says, "I think this could be our finest hour." And I think this is true for a lot of businesses. We have something go wrong, like maybe we introduce a major bug into our software, maybe our QA caused us to go send an alert to a bunch of people that really shouldn't have gotten an alert. Any number of things can go wrong, and I've seen a lot of things go wrong with my businesses and clients. Clients, and just with my friends. And I gotta tell you that the difference between the ones that can crack a company and the ones that don't aren't the severity of the incident, it's what you do after. Because the opportunity is to say, "Alright, something went wrong. Here's how we're going to rebuild trust, and here's how we're going to make this better than ever, and here's why we're going to include you in our process." If you can take the opportunity for a disaster and say, "This is a way for us to come together and build trust together," you can have your finest hour.
