Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from a Crisis: 7 Essential Lessons for Surviving Disaster.Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from a Crisis: 7 Essential Lessons for Surviving Disaster. By Ian I. Mitroff. Amacom, 238 pages. $27.95. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Does your company have a chief crisis officer? No? How about centers or departments for crisis learning and early warning-signal detection? If not, you can probably join virtually every other company in North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. . But such positions and offices may be vital in the years ahead as corporations face crises that will strike with unprecedented frequency, complexity and power, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Ian I. Mitroff, a professor at the University of Southern California The U.S. News & World Report ranked USC 27th among all universities in the United States in its 2008 ranking of "America's Best Colleges", also designating it as one of the "most selective universities" for admitting 8,634 of the almost 34,000 who applied for freshman admission and a recognized expert on crisis management. As Mitroff defines it, crisis management is more than the sum of its parts, which include risk management, business continuity planning Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is an interdisciplinary peer mentoring methodology used to create and validate a practiced logistical plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined and crisis communications Crisis communications are generally considered a sub-specialty of the public relations profession that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization facing a public challenge to its reputation. . He offers a framework of seven lessons for surviving a crisis, each of which appears in the form of an "IQ"--emotional, creative, social and political, integrative, technical, aesthetic and spiritual. Well-written, if occasionally somewhat pedantic pe·dan·tic adj. Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules: a pedantic attention to details. , the book offers a highly instructive epilogue comparing the experiences of two very similar, though unnamed, pharmaceutical companies--one proactive and the other reactive. It also has a very good appendix on crisis management, with tables, charts and checklists. This is a provocative book that refuses to coddle any readers about the challenges that may be coming. |
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