The Economist magazine has a periodic feature in which it offers a summary of an article from one of its own books, “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus.” This week’s was about crisis management.
What comes to your mind when you, a manager, think of crisis management? Is it something like this?
. . . a significant business disruption which stimulates extensive news media coverage. The resulting public scrutiny will affect the organisation’s normal operations and also could have a political, legal, financial and governmental impact on its business”
That’s the definition offered by an American consultancy, featured in The Economist piece, specializing in crisis communications planning. Doesn’t this open up a question for you – as a manager, certainly, but also perhaps as a person and a citizen?
What, at bottom, is the actual crisis? Is it the event that went astray and caused damage to your company, your customers, and your community? Or is it the damage consequent on that to your reputation and future business prospects?
What ought to be the central focus of your response? Should it be to understand and undertake measures to prevent or mitigate such core causes from occurring again? Or ought such efforts be subordinated to ensuring your sales don’t unduly suffer and to helping cause the incident to slip from the public mind so that you can return to business as usual?
Asked another way, toward what should you direct your main attention when a crisis strikes? Inwardly, to the cause (the piece identifies nearly 2/3 of them originating in management errors; the other three categories are human error, mechanical failure, and acts of God), or to the consequences of it to your public relations?
Please do read the article – especially the recommendations for good crisis management. Surely, your duties as a manager include effective public relations, so that you can continue to operate and thrive. But to what extent is this a chicken or egg question?
And, might not an overemphasis on readying yourself for handling the PR side of a crisis – indeed, to view that as the essence of crisis management – subject you to the likelihood of incurring unnecessary crises in the future? Wouldn’t that, however smooth your PR engine, leave your company with egg on its face?
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Today’s tips: Speaking of crisis management and straying points of view, please see Michael Wade‘s piece at Execupundit on the distinct ways preparation is viewed by optimists, pessimists, and particularists.
Please also visit this WSJ article about the way market forces are changing the shape of MBAs to better suit the life-cycles of many female students.
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Nice post, Jim. As you point out, the framing of the definition as having negative press coverage at its core begs the question of the what the crisis is. It implies that you have solved the crisis if you have dealt with the media side of the issue. That’s dangerous thinking.
That kind of thinking leads you to denying legitimate issues when dealing with the media. In today’s “everything will be found out” world, that is dangerous in the extreme. That kind of thinking also slides by the issues associated with fixing the underlying problem and re-arranging things so it’s unlikely to recur.
The best advice that I’ve seen in how to deal with a business crisis is in Jack & Suzy Welch’s book, Winning (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060753943/wallybock/). Here are his planning assumptions from chapter 10, “Crisis Management: from ‘Oh, God, No’ to ‘Yes, we’re fine.’”
The problem is worse than it appears
There are no secrets in the world and everyone will eventually find out everything.
You and your organization’s handling of the crisis will be portrayed in the worst possible light.
There will be changes in process and people.
The organization will survive, ultimately stronger for what happened.
Hello Wally,
I appreciate your reference to the Welch book. I haven’t read it – yet another (undoubtedly valuable) reading assignment from you.
The assumptions you quote are the voice of well-considered experience and focused judgement. They are also presented for deliberation in exactly the right order.
Thanks for stopping in with this!