CHAPTER 4

HOW TO COPE IN A ­CORPORATE CRISIS

Two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crash within five months of each other, killing a total of 346 people. Two children die of carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective boiler while on a Thomas Cook holiday in Corfu. An explosion on a BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico kills 11 and generates a gushing undersea well that pollutes the surrounding coast.

These tragedies – the Boeing crashes happened in 2018 and 2019, the Thomas Cook tragedy in 2006 and the BP explosion in 2010 – caused huge damage to the three companies. It is easy to look at these incidents with distress and move on, as you do when you see police and ambulance lights flashing around mangled metal on the motorway. A horror, but someone else’s. But every company is an hour away from a reputation-wrecking disaster. You don’t have to be an aircraft manufacturer, a tour operator or an oil giant. You could be a film distributor, a software developer or a care home owner – and a sexual harassment incident or an automated vehicle crash or a bullying worker could upend your organisation.

News about a crisis can spread fast. Social media can outpace the ability of your organisation to keep up. Some of the stories about your company could be false. They could be alleging that the crisis is worse than it is, or citing information that turns out to be wrong. Your people will be reading these messages. They may even be responding.

How do you deal with a crisis when it happens?

Few know as much about corporate disaster and its aftermath as Sue Williams and Simon Walker. For seven years, Sue was Scotland Yard’s chief kidnap and hostage negotiator. She also worked at ­Buckingham ­Palace, advising the royal family on its major events and how to deal with any emergencies arising out of them. She is now a counsellor to companies and governments on crises and on kidnap and hostage situations.

Simon was head of communications at British Airways before he too moved to Buckingham Palace, where he was communications chief for the Queen. He played the same role at Reuters before becoming director general at the Institute of Directors. He has worked through a host of corporate and media crises. I talked to Sue and Simon at an FT Forums meeting about what they had learned about corporate crises and how to deal with them. They suggested a range of preparations for the worst, and ways to deal with the worst if it happens.

CAN YOU REHEARSE FOR DISASTER?

Not only do Sue and Simon suggest you rehearse for a corporate crisis, they say it is essential that you do. This may not seem a corporate priority; there is so much else for leaders to do. But ask yourself: do you want to be the next Boeing, Thomas Cook or BP? Probably not. You do need to think about what sorts of disasters might strike your organisation and start practising for when they happen.

Begin by considering what the biggest risks might be to your organisation, your customers and employees. It could be a data breach, or a staff member secretly running up huge losses, or a customer falling ill after consuming one of your products.

When he was at BA, Simon recalled that they rehearsed for a disaster every six months. They would imagine a hijacking or a plane crash – and then go through how they would respond. This meant that when there was a real incident, they had already thought about what they would do.

Take the Concorde accident in the summer of 2000. Everyone involved in aviation remembers where they were when they heard about the crash of this magnificent plane. I was walking along Upper Thames Street, near the FT’s London office, when I looked at my early generation Nokia phone, which I had used up to that point simply to make calls. There was, strangely, writing on the screen. It said: Concorde has crashed. Get back to the office. I realised I had received my first-ever text message.

As Samme Chittum recalls in her book Last Days of the Concorde, an air traffic controller at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, who was that day guiding an Air France Concorde through its take-off, noticed flames streaming under one of the aircraft’s wings. He alerted the airport’s fire service to prepare for the plane’s return to Charles de Gaulle and emergency landing. But the pilots decided not to go back to Charles de Gaulle. Instead, they headed for the nearby Le Bourget airport. They didn’t make it. The plane crashed into a hotel, killing all 100 passengers, the nine crew and four hotel staff.1

As Simon recalled, although this was an Air France crash, it had important implications for his company as BA was the only other airline flying Concordes. The Air France Concorde had gone down at around 4 pm ­London time. BA had a Concorde flight leaving for New York at 7 pm. Should it take off or should they cancel? The BA engineers said they had checked all their Concordes and there was nothing wrong with them.

But Simon said: ‘My argument was it was simply disrespectful to the dead people, there were bodies burning on the ground, and if you flew a Concorde out at seven o’clock it just showed no respect.’ So, BA cancelled the 7 pm flight. ‘We spent the entire night checking all our Concordes,’ Simon remembered. ‘Engineers worked non-stop to make sure we could say everything was in order. And we resumed flying the next day.’

Air investigators eventually discovered that the Air France Concorde crash had been caused by a 17-inch piece of metal that an earlier Continental Airlines DC-10 had left on the runway. It had punctured one of the Air France Concorde’s tyres, which had ruptured a fuel tank. So, the BA engineers had been right: there was nothing wrong with their planes. But it was over for Concorde. It flew again, but the crash, followed by the downturn in air travel after the 9/11 terror attacks, grounded the plane for good in 2003.

Simon’s point was that when the crash happened, British Airways knew what to do because it had practised just this scenario, a plane crash. But an aircraft accident, tragic as it is, is something that an airline might expect. Some disasters come out of the blue; you can be blindsided by an event you hadn’t contemplated.

But rehearsing for the crises you could face is a start and it helps develop something we will be discussing throughout this chapter: your preparedness mindset, your recall of how you have practised responding to other crises. We can call this your disaster muscle memory. Even if the crisis you eventually face is different, or entirely unexpected, you will already have developed some of the reflexes and systems necessary for an appropriate response.

If the crisis is the one you prepared for, you are primed to spring into action. If you hadn’t thought of precisely this scenario, you have at least planned for something adjacent to it or, if the crisis is wholly unexpected, you have at least primed your organisation for whatever happens next.

KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR LOOMING DISASTERS

As well as rehearsing, organisations need to keep a watchful eye on potential crises lurking below the surface. Some, as we’ve said, are possible because of the sector. In industries where physical safety is crucial, such as airlines, trains and nuclear energy, accidents haunt leaders’ imaginations. Any organisation that holds customers’ financial data (and that is almost every organisation these days) is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. There were big data breaches at TalkTalk, the UK landline, mobile and broadband company, in 2015 and at BA in 2018. The consequences of data hacking are often not as bad for customers as many fear. Misha Glenny, the journalist and broadcaster, wrote in 2015, that, ‘Customers whose bank details have been filched are unlikely to suffer any permanent financial loss.’ Even if hackers get hold of account numbers and sort codes, they will find it hard to withdraw money and, even if they do, the customers should be able to claim it back from their bank, Glenny said.2

But the financial damage to both TalkTalk and BA was large. TalkTalk lost over 100,000 customers and £15 million pounds in trading revenue. It had to book exceptional costs of between £40 and £45 million.3 BA was fined £183 million, a record for breaching data rules, by the UK information commissioner.4

Then there are less financially damaging crises that still cause companies inconvenience and hurt their reputations. In 2010, a YouTube video apparently showed an office worker, in the words of the advertisement, having a break, having a Kit Kat. He tore the silver wrapping around the chocolate bar along the groove, as Kit Kat eaters have done for years, and snapped off a finger. Except that, instead of being a chocolate finger, it was a real finger, with a nail, and the office worker breaking it splashed blood over his keyboard and chin. The finger was an orangutan’s. This was, you will have realised by now, not a genuine Kit Kat promotion. The film was produced by Greenpeace, the environmental campaigning group, as a protest against what it alleged was Kit Kat manufacturer Nestlé’s role in destroying rain forests – habitats for orangutans – in the search for palm oil. Greenpeace had already persuaded Kraft and Unilever to end their purchasing of what the organisation said was unsustainable palm oil from Indonesia. Rather than falling in with the other companies, Nestlé complained to YouTube that Greenpeace had infringed its intellectual property rights. All this did, predictably, was give the film a huge boost on social media. Eventually, Nestlé caved in and committed itself to ensuring that its palm oil purchases were sustainable.5

The lesson here is that, while many corporate crises are unforeseeable, others bubble up on social media. Companies were once the masters of the filmed commercial. As I wrote at the time of the Kit Kat debacle, companies needed to realise that many others, Greenpeace foremost among them, had now mastered the art too. It is important to monitor online mentions of your company, whether on YouTube, Twitter or other channels. It is also important not to over-react. As Caroline Daniel, a partner at Brunswick, the communications consultancy, told another FT Forums gathering, you need to ‘distinguish between what’s a crisis and what’s just an incident’. A bad news story can happen to any organisation. Caroline Daniel said it was particularly hard on new companies and startups when they saw themselves criticised on social media. ‘They think it’s absolutely existential, or the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.’ It may be, but it may not. Organisations should respond and point out the truth if what’s being said about them is wrong. (It goes without saying that if what’s said about your organisation is true, you should work out how to correct what’s gone wrong rather than deny it.) Caroline mentioned the importance of monitoring sites such as Glassdoor, where unhappy staff may post comments you should be aware of.

If your company is trending on social media, with hundreds of thousands of complaints about your organisation, it may indicate that what you face is more than an incident. It may be the crisis that you have been rehearsing for. So, what else do you need to include in your practising?

EVERYONE HAS A PART TO PLAY

It’s one thing to say ‘rehearse’; but how do we know who should do what in a crisis? To Sue and Simon, every department in the organisation has its own role in a crisis.

To decide what those roles should be, you first need to think about who your stakeholders are. There are your customers, your shareholders, your staff and, most important, the victims of the crisis and their families. We will return to the families later, not because they don’t matter but because they are so important that they merit their own discussion.

Each department in the organisation has to think about how it is going to deal with its relevant stakeholder. In many cases, departments will overlap in their roles and responsibilities. For example, if the company’s data has been hacked, IT will have to look into what happened and what data has been compromised. The IT department will have to work with the customer services department and with communications in telling customers what has happened.

Customer reassurance and information is particularly important when, as we have discussed, their information is stolen. There could be millions of customers involved, who will need to be told whether their bank details have been hacked and what they need to do about it.

Investor relations will have to prepare explanations for the shareholders. And human resources will have to work with the internal communications team and with departmental heads to make sure that staff know what is happening. HR is sometimes forgotten, Sue said. During a crisis, when she sees ‘the person who’s looking like the rabbit caught in the headlights, I go up to them and say, you must be HR. Because I think HR gets overlooked in many crises.’ HR needs to be part of the preparation and rehearsal process.

The communications staff, both in-house and external PR consultants, are key to dealing with a crisis. They will be putting out messages to the world. They will also be monitoring social media and deciding how to respond. Their role is not only to keep the world outside informed. They need to help you tell your own people what is happening. Your own staff can be your best ambassadors during a crisis. They can also, if you play it wrong, become demoralised and disillusioned with your leadership and the organisation. We will talk later about how vital it is to keep them informed and onside.

There is another department you always need to consider: legal. They will often worry about the legal liability coming out of a crisis and the damages you might have to pay. Often, the communications team wants to be more transparent with the media, but the general counsel typically does not, Caroline Daniel of Brunswick said.

To Simon Walker, Thomas Cook’s reluctance to apologise had one group’s fingerprints all over it: the lawyers. Lawyers, Simon said, have ‘a kind of instinctive view that you ought to shut up and say nothing. Or just be very guarded.’ Lawyers’ first instinct is often to ensure that the company doesn’t admit liability, because admitting liability means it could be sued.

‘Well, actually, there are worse things than being sued. And if your corporate reputation completely disappears because of how callously you handle a situation, that’s a very damaging outcome to any crisis,’ Simon said. It was only in 2015, nine years after the tragedy, that Thomas Cook finally said sorry. The world’s oldest travel company later succumbed to debts and online competition and collapsed in 2019.6

So, the roles that each department plays are not always simple. They overlap and they may shift. What is important is that everyone realises they have something to do, and that every practice exercise makes sure that each department is thinking about where it fits in.

WHO SPEAKS FOR YOU?

It’s hard to stay calm when the organisation’s world seems to be collapsing, which means that someone has to be in charge. This is the job of the CEO, of course, and of the top team. If ever there is a test of a leader, it is when a disaster occurs. A few CEOs enhance their reputation during a crisis. One of the best-known examples was Michael Bishop. When a plane belonging to British Midland, the company he headed, crashed into a motorway embankment just short of the runway of East Midlands Airport in 1989, he took charge within minutes. (How Sir Michael reacted, the compassion he showed to the victims and their families, and his communication with the media is in our case study at the end of this chapter.)

That the CEO should be leading the crisis response does not automatically mean they should be the public face of the company, ­speaking to the journalists and the television cameras. It may be that the CEO is the best person for the job, but not always. Let’s consider the case of Tony Hayward, head of BP at the time of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. ­Hayward worked ­tirelessly after the blowout, but he was always up against the ­enormity of what had happened.

As I wrote in the FT: ‘The BP crisis had enough drama to fill a summer movie blockbuster: the encroaching slick; the desperate laying of 3,000 miles of barriers; the locals staring bleakly out to sea.’ At the same time, the then-US President Barack Obama was severely criticising the company. While BP attempted repeatedly to shut off the flow, television reports showed the oil spewing out.7

And then Hayward made a bad mistake. He told the press that he hoped as much as anyone to resolve the crisis. He said: ‘I’d like my life back.’ Remember: 11 people had died. It was a crass remark, and it effectively ended his BP career.

Anyone can make a slip like that under such pressure. But Hayward was at a disadvantage. He was a Brit representing a UK company in what was increasingly being portrayed as an attack on America’s beaches, fishermen and coastal communities. As Sue said: ‘I think the BP example is particularly instructive as an example of how not to do it. It was crazy to use a soft-spoken upper class English CEO in America.’

BP did have the right person in its executive team: Bob Dudley, New York-born, Mississippi-raised, who became the public face of the company in the Gulf of Mexico crisis and succeeded Hayward as BP’s CEO.

Who will represent the company during the crisis should form part of your planning. It may be the chairman or the CEO, or someone else. It could be that the circumstances demand a change in front person – for example, as in the BP case, where the disaster takes place in another country, where someone who is better known locally may be preferable.

Once again, it is about developing the organisation’s disaster muscle memory. Thinking about how to handle the crisis in advance means you are more likely to be prepared, agile and ready to adjust plans, if necessary.

TAKE OWNERSHIP OF THE CRISIS

There was another problem with BP’s response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster. It initially tried to cast blame on the subcontractor who was running the rig. This is a vital lesson of crisis management. Take responsibility. Own the problem. If you are the company that delivers the goods and services, then people expect you to step forward. Don’t blame the companies who work for you.

This is what went wrong for Thomas Cook over the tragic death of two children in Corfu. Thomas Cook is one of the most famous names in travel history. Indeed, the original Thomas Cook is regarded as the inventor of modern tourism. A printer and campaigner against alcohol, Thomas Cook, on 5 July 1841, launched the idea of mass travel when he took 500 people on a train from Leicester to Loughborough. A large crowd of temperance campaigners were waiting for them and Thomas Cook made a speech extolling ‘teetotalism and railwayism’.8

Abstemiousness did not remain central to Thomas Cook’s corporate history. The company owned Club 18–30, which became notorious for its suggestive advertising and the riotous antics of its customers. But Thomas Cook remained a venerable name and it was shamed by the Corfu incident.

The death in 2006 of the two children, Bobby and Christi Shepherd, of carbon monoxide poisoning was actually the fault of the hotel where they were staying. At the UK inquest into their deaths, Thomas Cook’s chief ­executive said the company had nothing to apologise for because a Greek court had absolved it of criminal responsibility.9 The UK inquest found against Thomas Cook, saying it had failed in its duty to the children’s parents – but it was the court of public opinion that delivered the harshest verdict.

Yes, the hotel had been at fault. But, in the eyes of many, it was Thomas Cook that had taken the Shepherd family on holiday and put them in the hotel. A family holiday is an adventure. It also represents a chunk of people’s money and their leave from work. People trust not just that the company will give them a good, relaxing time but that it will look after them and especially their children. The hotel may have been responsible for the tragedy, but Thomas Cook had sold them the holiday and it was Thomas Cook that was seen to have failed in its duty of care.

The company suffered significant reputational damage over the affair. In 2015, Justin King, a former chief executive of Sainsbury’s who led an independent inquiry into the Corfu tragedy, said parts of Thomas Cook had ‘a tendency to protect cost rather than maximise the customer experience’.10

Boeing was also slow to accept responsibility for the two 737 Max crashes. After the accidents, it said it had updated the 737’s software to ‘make an already safe aircraft even safer’. That sounded callously complacent, given how many had died. The world’s airline regulators didn’t think the Boeing 737 Max was a safe aircraft. They grounded the plane, forcing the US authorities, belatedly, to do the same. Even before they did, passengers were refusing to fly on the aircraft. Large US companies began to ask their travel agents not to book their customers on Boeing 737 Max flights.11 In late 2020 and early 2021 respectively, nearly two years after the second of the crashes, US and European regulators allowed the Boeing 737 Max to re-enter service again after safety modifications.12

TAKE ACTION

Not only is it vital to accept responsibility verbally; it’s important to take action, too. If your products have been contaminated, take them off the shelves. There may be a financial hit now, but you will reap the benefits in reputation enhancement and consumer trust later. One of the most famous examples of this was the Tylenol crisis in 1982, when seven people died in the Chicago area after taking Johnson & Johnson Tylenol painkiller capsules that had been laced with cyanide. The company removed the products from stores throughout the USA. Ever since, this has been seen as the right response. (Johnson & Johnson’s reputation has since been damaged by its involvement in the US opioid crisis and in its attempts to shield itself from claims over allegations of damage caused to users of its talcum powder, which it strongly denies.)13

Boeing’s behaviour was a sharp contrast to the model that Johnson & Johnson had established in the 1980s. The aircraft manufacturer initially tried to play down the safety problems with the 737 Max, but it later came in for severe criticism in the investigations into the crashes. The US National Air Transport Safety Board found that the 737 Max’s software created a gap ‘between the assumptions used to certify the Max and the real-world experiences of [the pilots]’.14 What this meant was that the pilots in the two crashes found the plane’s software made it impossible to control the aircraft. A US House of Representatives report said that Boeing had, unforgivably, hidden shortcomings in the plane’s design in an effort to get it on sale so that it could catch up with Airbus, its European rival.15

The investigations revealed a malaise at Boeing that went far beyond crisis management. But the company could have started the long trek back to restoring its good name if it had reacted to the loss of lives by grounding the aircraft immediately.

MAKE SURE YOUR STAFF ARE ON YOUR SIDE

It’s not just consumers who want to see the organisation take responsibility at a time of crisis. So do its own staff. It is tough working for a company that’s in the news for the wrong reasons. Family and friends ask what’s going on. Employees are ashamed, embarrassed, evasive or all three. In 2002, when Nike was struggling to emerge from a scandal over the use of children in its suppliers’ factories, Maria Eitel, Nike’s vice president for corporate social responsibility, told me that the effect on employee morale was awful. ‘They were going to barbecues and people would say: “How can you work for Nike?”’16

So, what should your approach be towards your staff, particularly in an age of social media, where anything you tell them might find its way on to Facebook or Twitter? It’s always worth reminding staff that any media inquiries should be referred to the press office and to warn them of their obligations not to misrepresent the company on social media. But it’s a bad idea to hide the truth from them. Don’t let them discover what’s happening in their own company from the news, Sue said.

‘I think you need to be as open as possible, as quickly as possible. But above all, to tell the truth,’ Simon said. That way you ensure your staff continue to trust you. And when they know the truth, they can explain the situation to anyone outside who asks them. They can hold their heads higher if they believe the company has made a clean breast of it.

Don’t forget, either, that employees can be badly affected by a tragedy involving their own company, particularly if it involves loss of life. They may know some of the people who have been injured or killed or may know the colleagues who have had to deal most closely with the victims. If the crisis is particularly serious, Sue said, it is a good idea to set up a 24/7 counselling hotline for employees to call, anonymously if they want to.

STAY AHEAD OF THE STORY

When a crisis occurs, reporters scramble to learn more about what happened. Social media accounts start speculating, often inaccurately. It’s important that you get ahead of them. Say what you know and what you don’t. Make sure your social media team is providing up-to-date and accurate information as soon as they know what’s happened.

It’s important not to get facts wrong or to prejudge what happened. As Caroline Daniel said, don’t go further than you know. But it is also vital not to withhold information that is correct and that diligent journalists can find out. Announce what has happened rather than having it squeezed out of you.

Simon told a story of a crisis that occurred when he was at Reuters. ‘One of our journalists, who had a flatmate who was working in a cabinet minister’s office, went through his briefcase one night when he was out and came in with a huge scoop story the next day. Said, “Whoopee! Look what I’ve got!” We ran it innocently, not imagining that it had been pinched from a flatmate’s briefcase. Reputation to Reuters is everything. When this was discovered and the ministry came to us and said, “How is it possible that this extremely confidential information leaked?” all I could do was say: this is what happened, this is why it happened, this is the action we’ve taken. The guy was fired. And we’re really sorry. Crisis completed. And, actually, kind of averted. Because we’d acted decisively. We’d been completely honest. And once it was there and we said we got it wrong, it was all over.’

Don’t admit the minimum and then wait for the drip-drip of damaging news. ‘Admit as much as is going to come out. And admit it very quickly. Because that . . . stems the flow,’ Simon said.

LOOK AFTER THE VICTIMS AND THEIR FAMILIES

This is an important lesson of crisis management. If there’s been an accident or a case of food contamination, make sure the families know who to contact and that you have liaison people to keep in touch with them. While this takes sensitivity, it is not a soft job. It requires training.

Sue Williams said it is vital that victims and their families feel supported, that they know what is going on and that they think the company cares about them. It is not just that it’s the right thing to do – it is also that families that feel neglected can do your organisation damage. They are more likely to sue you. They can go to the media. ‘People believe families,’ Sue said. They believe them because they seem like you and me – their plight could be ours.

This is why crises are so damaging to organisations. Companies provide us with the stuff of everyday life: food, medicines, transport, holidays, news and housing. When something goes wrong, it feels like a betrayal. For all the talk of falling trust in organisations, we base our lives on trust. We don’t check every jar we open for broken glass. We assume that the baby food we spoon out for our infants is safe for them to eat. We assume when we have an operation that the doctors and nurses have been trained. And when we fly, we trust that the pilots know what they are doing and that the aircraft manufacturers have built a reliable plane.

When things go wrong, when this trust proves to have been misplaced, we feel horribly betrayed. Yet it happens. And when it does, we must do everything we can to ensure the victims are looked after.

And once the crisis is over? Remember what Sue and Simon said at the beginning about the importance of practice. Once you’ve been through the real thing, you need a detailed review of what happened, what worked and what didn’t – and what you plan to do the next time a crisis hits. Because chances are that, at some time, it will.

CASE STUDY: MICHAEL BISHOP AND THE KEGWORTH CRASH

Michael Bishop’s secretary lived in the village of Kegworth in the English East Midlands, just near the local airport. On the night of 8 January 1989, she was at home when she heard a noise. She phoned her boss. Bishop went straight to the scene. A brutal sight awaited him. An aircraft belonging to British Midland, the company he led, had crashed into an embankment of the M1 motorway, just short of the runway it had been trying to reach at the airport. Forty-seven passengers were dead but, remarkably, 79 had survived, many of them injured. Bishop took immediate command, giving interviews but making sure that the injured were ferried to hospital and that support was given to their families.17

How did he know how to react? Tragically, he had been through a situation like this before. In 1967, as a relatively new recruit to British Midland, he had been the station manager at Manchester airport when a British Midland flight crashed near Stockport, killing 72 people. He had the job of telling the bereaved the news. ‘I did 40 next-of-kins,’ he told The Sunday Times. ‘I know what it is like to tell people that their nearest and dearest are dead.’18

An awful experience, but one that prepared him for the next tragedy. The sure-footed and compassionate way that Sir Michael handled the Kegworth disaster and dealt with the press, the victims and their families has since come to be seen as the model of crisis management.

FURTHER READING

I have long felt that official investigations into accidents and crises make for instructive reading. They don’t need to be from your own industry. In fact, being at a distance from the events they describe may be helpful. You can think: how would we manage if something similar happened to us? There are other advantages to official reports; they are objective, forensic by nature and often very well-written. Here is one to get started.

The Australian investigation into a fire on a Rolls-Royce engine on a Qantas Airbus A380 aircraft in 2010 is fascinating on the corporate culture at Rolls-Royce. It is a useful insight into how not to let a crisis develop and is available at: http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2010/aair/ao-2010-089.aspx.

Another riveting read is an account from the Harvard Business Review about the Japanese Fukushima disaster of 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This article is about the successful disaster management of its sister Fukushima Daini plant, which was saved from meltdown. This report of what was done emphasises the role of the crisis leader, Naohiro Masuda, in ‘sense making’, working out what was happening, what needed to be done and transmitting that to his team. ‘How the other Fukushima plant survived’ is available at: https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived.