From the January 2010 Wired comes My Greatest Mistake: Learn From Six Luminaries. I like this one short piece, in particular, because it is very close to the values I hold as important. I have given the "perception/reality" speech to many of my direct and indirect reports and to my kids, but this little example is a good one.

Jason Kilar, CEO of HULU: I used to run the DVD business at Amazon.com. In the fall of 2000, we wanted to find out whether we could lower our prices and still make money. The team was very rigorous about data. So we decided to do a test: 50 percent of the people who wanted a DVD on Amazon were given the everyday price; the other half were given a lower, test price. Our intentions were good, but in hindsight it was very foolish. Some shoppers noticed the different prices and thought they were being discriminated against. The whole thing blew up on the Internet. We had television crews outside our headquarters in Seattle.

I emailed Jeff Bezos as soon as I found out. He summoned me to a conference room. It was definitely not an enjoyable walk down there. I’d been at Amazon for only three years, and I didn’t have the luxury of a ton of experience to fall back on. But once I got into that room, the tone was exactly the opposite of what I expected. All Jeff wanted to know was what had happened and what was the best thing we could do at that point. The next morning he appeared on the CBS Early Show and explained everything.

It was a defining moment for me. I learned that perception can quickly become reality: It was very important not to look like we were hiding anything and to talk to our customers about what had occurred. [emphasis mine]

Read the full article here.