Many firms have strong leaders.

Successful leaders are used to voicing their opinions, and sometimes the qualities that made them succeed–opinionated, fanciful, creative and animated–are also the ones that come back to bite them.

That kind of a leader, while good for company profits, can be bad for a company’s image.

Potential public relations disasters range from the political–such as a CEO publicly voicing their support for a particular policy that happens to be controversial–to the slanderous, where firm’s top management voices a heinous social prejudice that was previously unknown to the public.

Then there’s the interview in which your chief executive makes statements that are simply not publicly palatable, and once they are released into the airwaves, make for too-juicy content.

All of these scenarios we have seen before, and it’s one of the main reasons that firms hire PR companies to shepherd their executives through testy media waters.

Take for example the designer John Galliano who while chief designer for Christian Dior shouted anti-Semitic comments after he got drunk at his favorite Paris hangout, La Perle. Even video proof of his disgrace made the rounds in the media, before the designer was promptly fired from Dior.

He was quoted as saying, “I love Hitler,” and, “People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f**king gassed.” (See the video at the UK Sun -it’s in English.)

Then, after Galliano reversed his downward fate by obtaining a co-design position at Oscar de la Renta, he threw it all away when he was photographed leaving his home in a Hasidic-themed outfit on February 13, an act captured by the NY Post.

The New York Post said the designer’s fashion statement made a mockery of the Jewish faith, splashing the photo across the front page with the headline “SHMUCK! Jew-bash Designer’s Costume Mocks Faithful.”

“He’s trying to embarrass people in the Jewish community and make money on clothes [while] dressed like people he has insulted,” Williamsburg community leader Isaac Abraham told the Post.

What do you do with a person like this when you can’t stop them from from making their own stumbling steps, over and over again?

While Galliano might be one of the more radical examples of a high-profile employee going off the charts,

there are the more subtle examples, such as Whole Foods CEO John Mackey stating that global warming was “not necessarily bad.”

The statement is one of many that the opinionated executive has been called on the media carpet for, and it sheds him in a bad light: a healthy food company leader saying that pollution is not bad for us? How’s that for real irony.

The contrast between the CEO’s statement and the company’s mission could call into question whether the mission itself is a sham, and whether ultimately we should be buying food from him.

Fans of the large food chain that sells high-end, healthy fare could question what goes on behind Mackey’s granola and nut exterior, and suspect instead a serial garbage-throwing polluter.