Chapter 10
Managing a Crisis
In This Chapter
Defining crises
Preventing what you can and preparing for the rest
Responding during a crisis
Recovering from a crisis
Are you good at managing your business? Although we can’t test our assumption, we’re prepared to bet that most of you would answer ‘yes’, ‘probably’, ‘definitely’, ‘sure’ or something positive to this question. And it follows that if you’re good at managing your business, you may also believe that you’re going to be good at managing a crisis . . . yes? Of course For Dummies readers are a superior bunch and perhaps not representative of society as a whole, but logic dictates that not everyone can be better than average (which is our working definition of ‘good’).
In a classic survey on this human tendency to be overconfident (it’s fine, everyone does it), 50 per cent of responding Fortune 500 CEOs during the 1980s had no crisis plan in place, and yet 97 per cent were confident that they’d respond well if a crisis occurred. These numbers just don’t stack up. The fact is that being good at leading and managing a business under day-to-day operating conditions is no guarantee of being able to lead or manage a business to survival through a crisis. The good news, however, is that a bit of preparation shortens the odds dramatically.
In this chapter, we explore what makes a crisis (as distinct from an incident or disrupting event), what you can do to head off crises at the pass and what steps you need to take to prepare for the unforeseeable ones that are likely to affect your business. In addition, we cover responding to a crisis and recovering afterwards. Many thousands of pages across dozens of books are devoted to this topic, but the little secret that some crisis management professionals may try to keep from you is that this subject isn’t complicated and not even particularly difficult. But it does require you to face up to two facts:
A crisis is more than likely to cause your business to fail.
During a crisis is too late to prepare for it.
So, you have at least two compelling reasons to read on and act on the contents of this chapter.
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