At a sustainability conference, Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh caused a viral sensation by revealing he had never laundered his two-year-old Levi’s in a washing machine. Instead, he hand-washed and line-dried his jeans every few months. His point was that jeans shouldn’t be washed all the time, but people thought it meant Bergh never washed them. The fallout from this one quip continues even years later: “Today, if you type ‘CEO Levi’s’ into Google, ‘don’t wash jeans’ comes up,” Bergh says. “I expect that my supposed anti-laundry stance will be mentioned in my obituary.” Can you think of other, more negative examples of executives’ offhand public comments causing consternation and worse?