Crisis Management: Can leaders cry in a crisis?: Crisis Response from archives How tough should a leader be during a crisis? When you’re in charge and all around you is crashing must you always keep a stiff upper lip, maintain control, exude confidence, stifle anger, restrain emotions, and reassure others that you intend to prevail? That question […]

Crisis Management: BP debacle – Fix it rather than talk about it: Crisis response We watch oil ooze into bayous, onto beaches, smother brown pelicans, and ruin human lives after gushing from mile-down broken pipes following a deepwater drilling rig explosion.  Sometimes we can’t watch, look away, or turn it off. So when a national radio news service […]

Crisis Management: Be Prepared: Crisis planning The terrorist explosion that ripped into the USS Cole in Aden and killed almost a score of sailors especially shook those of us with ties to the military, present and past. I, for one, refueled at that very port while serving aboard a destroyer from Norfolk. Our stop came 6 months […]

Crisis Management: Be Careful When You Call Out the Media: Crisis avoidance I call it The Stockton Warning: be wary of playing the media card to gain an advantage because it’s a double-edged sword that can cut both ways. That was a caution the late esteemed lawyer Ralph Stockton gave clients. And the recent test drive debacle […]

Crisis Management: Avoiding the 5 Stages of Scandal: Crisis response The scandal at Duke University over its lacrosse team and whether members attacked a stripper at a party reminded me of a column I wrote awhile back. It concerned the seemingly endless corporate scandals at the time, plus a controversy at the University of Colorado. Here is […]

Crisis Management: Avoiding A PR Hole – Southwest Airlines: From archives When the Federal Aviation Administration first threatened fining Southwest Airlines $10.2 million for skipping structural inspections on 46 still-flying older planes, the airline almost jumped into a public relations hole – the same hole that swallowed Food Lion in the 1990’s.  Given that FAA inspectors may […]

Crisis Management: Avoid Adlibbing to a Reporter: Crisis communications When you pay a sales call on an executive, you prepare. When you speak to 50 people at a civic club, you prepare. Therefore, if you are about to give an interview to a reporter who will convey your words to thousands and perhaps tens of thousands, you […]

Crisis Management: Attacked On the Web!: Crisis response Are you prepared to deal with this? Several years ago I alerted companies that Environmental Defense Fund website www.scorecard.org may accuse them of being polluters. One client had already complained that the site unfairly portrayed it as a polluter using out-of-date data filed with the EPA. Sure enough, a few weeks […]

Crisis Management: Apology – Oprah Style: Crisis Communications Like most of you, I have a relative trying to kick a life-long substance abuse problem. Another family member, a therapist, recommended I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces for insights. Well, I got insights alright, not from his book but from his public spanking by Oprah Winfrey for lying […]

Crisis Management: Answer Tough Questions to Maintain Your Credibility: Crisis communications When former Enron chief, the late Kenneth Lay, refused to answer questions before Congress and invoked the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination – as his attorney urged –what little credibility he had in the monumental corporate collapse evaporated. I believed his wife’s weepy, credulity-stretching defense of her […]