When White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took to his podium Wednesday, he had a different message than you normally hear from the second-most visible person in our government.

He wasn’t offering a report on the progress with the Gulf oil spill cleanup.

He wasn’t trumpeting President Obama’s efforts to reform the banking and financial industry.

He wasn’t even picking an election-year fight with Senate or House Republicans.

He had one simple message, “We were wrong.”

A United States Department of Agriculture staffer was fired for what some considered racially insensitive comments regarding an event that happened 24 years ago. The problem was that the statement that got the staffer, Shirley Sherrod, in trouble appears to have been taken completely out of context.

When the video of her comments is viewed in its entirety, Sherrod appears to be using a racially charged experience to make the point that poverty and economic hardship are not about race, but about the disparity between the “haves” and “have nots.”

While the serial critics among us will be quick to pile on the Obama Administration’s firing in the first place, those of us who work in reputation management know that it is never too late to do the right thing.

That’s why Gibbs’ public apology on behalf of the “entire administration” should be heralded as a wrong corrected.

Fallibility is an ever-present part of the human condition. And, since all organizations are run by humans, it’s a part of all organizational and corporate reputation management.

Wednesday Gibbs reminded all of us that acknowledging fallibility is not a weakness. Failing to do so, however, is.