Crisis Management: Slow Response Characterizes a Teacher/Sex Case: Crisis Response A 2006 teacher sexual misconduct controversy in North Carolina was full of enough bad moves (and a few good ones) that it was hard to know where to begin. The middle school teacher molested students and in 2007 was sentenced to prison. The problem was that parents […]
Crisis Management: Sidestepping crisis: action at lightning speed: The need for speed If you doubt that your hard-earned business reputation can be swiftly sullied with the slash of a news story – read on. I hope that this tale will help you avoid the trap that snared a local company. One Friday evening I watched a local […]
Crisis Management: Should Your Board Be the Crisis Team : Crisis Leadership The 2009 leadership decapitation of NC State University was unsettling for at least two reasons. First, the tree was diseased at the top. Second, it begged the question of how stakeholders can protect institutions when the chiefs are involved. First, an NCSU recap. Influence peddling gave then-first lady Mary Easley a high […]
Crisis Management: Should you fight reporters – Obama vs Fox : Crisis communications So, the White House attacks Fox News for being a wing of the Republican Party and “the opposition” rather than a legitimate news operation. Is fighting the news media a bad move? 99% of the time: yes. It’s often perceived as desperation, diversion, shoot the messenger, and […]
Crisis Management: Set Your Media Expectations Low In A Crisis: Understanding the media If you want a glimpse of how a crisis at your company might be covered by the news media, go to the local video store and check out Akira Kurosawa’s film classic Rashomon. Rashomon shows a savage assault from the totally different points of view of […]
Crisis Management: Save Employee Lives – Drill: Crisis planning When US Airways Flight 1549 slid to a stop in the Hudson River in 2009 and Captain Chesley Sullenberger avoided a land crash, flight attendants rapidly evacuated passengers from the flooding cabin. US Airways later told the Wall Street Journal that its flight crews spend 80% of their FAA-mandated evacuation […]
Crisis Management: Rush Limbaugh/Sponsors – get it over with: Crisis response What did conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh and some of his sponsors have in common when the uproar over his sliming of an activist law student first flared? They violated the crisis management principle “get it over with!” If a reputation-damaging train’s barreling down the tracks […]
Crisis Management: Rumsfeld Shows How to Communicate: Crisis communications (I wrote this in the early days of the attack on Iraq and before the hard slogging of dealing with the insurgency and before it became clear that Rumsfeld was wrong-headed about war strategy as obviously I was when I first wrote this.) Watching Secretary of Defense Donald […]
Crisis Management: Rumsfeld – Why he is down now – and what you can learn from it: crisis communications I have been puzzling over the arc of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: from yesterday’s media darling to today’s target. In a January 2002 column, just months after 9/11, I complimented the Defense Secretary’s communications skills, described how […]
Crisis Management: Rudy Giuliani – Crisis Leadership At Work: 9/11 For all his faults, I think most reasonable people would agree that during 9/11 and the aftermath then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave a personal lesson in crisis leadership. Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol poisoning case may be the gold standard for corporate responsibility in […]