I recent read The Last Lecture Randy Pausch. If you haven’t read it yet, grab it. Pausch wrote it with the help of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow shortly before he died of pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008. It was his way of summing up his life and leaving something to his children.

Rather than talking about his cancer, the book is a meditation on life and has a lot of lessons for us about the art of living. Pausch is particularly astute on how to live out your dreams, seize the moment and be a leader.

I was thinking about all of this in light of the BP disaster where to date there has been a crying lack of leadership and plain communication.

Pausch aptly titles one chapter: “Tell the Truth.” He says, “If I could only give three words of advice, these would be “Tell the truth. If I got three more words, I’d add  ‘All the time.’”

That is not only a good principle for living but for companies. As author and PR consultant Alan Caruba recently wrote, “The worst kind of PR person is the one who is so eager to “spin” the story they forget that telling lies always, always, always comes back to bite them and their client.”

The fact is you don’t get away with lying over the long-haul. Not to mention the ethical and moral dilemmas.

Pasuch also reminds us of the importance of apologizing. I love the way he puts it. “Apologies are not pass/fail…When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn’t cut it.”

I’m sure like me you’ve gotten half-baked apologies that somehow ended up making you feel worse  than before the apology. BP and company, as well as the rest of us could learn a lot by adopting Pasuch’s three-part apology strategy.

• Acknowledge that what you did was wrong.
• Acknowledge that you feel bad about the hurt/problem you caused. At minimum in lying you injured someone by not respecting them enough to tell the truth.
• Ask how to make it better. What can you do to correct the problem?

(Full Disclosure:  I recently tried this with my husband and it worked like a charm.)

Some other Paushisms:

• “There is more than one way to measure profits and losses. On every level, institutions can and should have a heart.”
• “Rights come with responsibilities….When we’re connected to others, we become better people.”
• “Ask those questions. Just ask them. More often than you’d suspect, the answer you’ll get is, ‘Sure.’”

What are some lessons in life you’ve learned that apply to business? I’d love to hear from you.