Nobody has ever won an argument at 3:38 am, but that's what Good Good Golf CEO Matt Kendrick set out to do on Friday when he posted on X in part, "Interesting that Callaway Golf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it..." In a reply he has since deleted, he said he was "not opposed" to suing Callaway. If all PR was good PR, he scored nearly four and a half million views in under seven hours with that tweet. But as we all hopefully know, all PR is NOT good PR.

Later that morning he sat for an interview with Front Office Sports and explained himself. "It's definitely reactionary," he said, "but it comes from a place of just not liking what's coming from this to us personally. It's been tough. The company is one thing, but family is a whole nother [sic] thing."

I'm sure there is no shortage of people lining up to explain that he shouldn't have posted and I suspect he knows that. I think what's more helpful is to recognize how familiar this is. If you've done this job long enough, you've sat with a founder who wants to fire back at the reporter or with an exec listening to his draft reply to a troll. The instinct to defend yourself when you feel wronged is wired into all of us.

Kendrick's own explanation here tells us that the danger peaks when the conversation stops being primarily about the company and starts bringing your personal life into the fold and when a crisis crosses that line, your principal becomes least able to judge their own words and least willing to have them edited. I don't know whether Good Good has crisis counsel and nothing about last week suggests anyone was in a position to guide Kendrick away from tweeting at 3 am but the crux of this job is being someone who can say the hard thing and be heard: yes, this sucks. Yes, it's unfair. You're allowed to be angry and also doing this will not help you.

This is very, very, very hard. In my experience, the people who give hard feedback well don't immediately open with their own point of view. They move the argument away from right vs wrong and onto what being right costs. A former boss used to ask me: "Do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?" That's the question to put on the table, and then you help them play it forward. Say the post works and everyone believes you, what happens next? Does the partner renewal still get approved? Does the next brand doing diligence on you still sign? And if none of that lands, ask for time. If it's true at 3:38 am, it will still be true at noon. Save it to the draft folder and look at it in daylight.

I often half-joke that the role of crisis counselor is part strategist, part therapist, and this example brings that to life.

Gap Inc. reported earnings Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, Fortune published a profile of CEO Richard Dickson headlined "The CEO who revived Barbie thinks he can do the same for Gap." We all know it's not a coincidence but it's also not a one-off. When Q1 numbers came out in late May, Dickson was featured in The New York Times Corner Office column that morning. And he tells the same story every time which is also the one he's been telling since 2023: Gap's historical legacy (the 1969 store, the archives I wrote about back in May), a revival is underway, and a quick word about the other brands.

What the Gap comms team is doing here is shaping which story people read first. If the first thing you read about Gap's quarter is a profile of the guy who saved Barbie now saving an American classic, then by the time you get to the sales numbers, you read them as part of that story. So a mixed quarter becomes a chapter in a bigger story, not the entire book.

This quarter was an interesting one to look at through the lens of both story vs numbers.

The number to watch here is comparable sales i.e. comps which only counts stores open at least a year, so it tells you whether a brand is winning customers not just opening new locations. Gap brand was up 10 percent, its eleventh straight positive quarter. Banana Republic was up 3 percent, its fifth. Old Navy, more than half of everything the company sells, was down 4 percent, its first drop since 2023. Athleta fell 12 percent.

Now look at the story.

Gap's win was credited to "big ideas and culturally relevant storytelling." Banana's to "more distinctive marketing and brand storytelling." Old Navy's drop was blamed on the women's summer assortment and slower store traffic. Athleta got "disciplined execution to rebuild the brand profitably." So the winners get a story, losers get an explanation which, fine, that happens at every company. But at Gap there's a reason the story stops where it stops. The whole thing runs on Gap's heritage, and Old Navy doesn't have any. It was founded in 1994, s no 1969 store, no archives.

Look at how Dickson talked about the solution here: "We see value as a perception based on product and pricing." In plain English, shoppers aren't seeing Old Navy as a good deal. But when analysts asked what he's doing about it, his answer was about ads: a Cardi B campaign he called the most-viewed in Old Navy's history, a back-to-school push with MrBeast, "the #1 YouTuber in the world, over 500 million subscribers." The problem is prices but the answer he gave was how many people watched the commercials.

Now, the stock jumped 11 percent because profits beat expectations but the story is about to get graded itself. A new Old Navy leader, Michael Francis, starts November 2 and Q3 results land in late November and since Dickson has already told analysts that August is "demonstrating really significant improvement," he'll be held to that. Then holiday comes quickly thereafter. If Old Navy is still shrinking after all three, "the revitalization" story will need to turn the page fast.