Book Review
Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management
Harvard Business School Press 2000
A crisis is an issue that all businesses will encounter at one point or another in time and every business should have a crisis management team in place, designed plans for identified potential crisis's on file and that are exercised and updated on a regular basis. More time than not individuals train in crisis management by individual discipline, IT train for IT issues, Security for Security issues, Media for media issues and the like. What's needed is a book that brings all the basic thought processes together and The Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management does exactly that. It's multi discipline in nature, which is important in preparing Crisis Response Team members for an actual crisis by giving them a broader perspective than their individual area of expertise.
One of the most insightful statements in The HBR on Crisis Management was by Norman Augustine page 3, who was the author of chapter one in this HBR classic and stated that "Almost every crisis contains with in itself seeds of greatness as well as the roots of failure." I find this to be a profound and true statement by Augustine. Every business will face a crisis at some point or another on some scale. I would rate the odds of not encountering a crisis as slim to none. This crisis could be compliance violations such as OSHA, SEC, EEOC or it can be Occupational crime such as trade secrets theft, bid rigging, kickbacks. A crisis could come inform massive internal theft by employees which could leave the company short of operating cash, product recall or a massive food poisoning if your company is in the food services industry. It's how you anticipate and prepare for known hazards can spell life or death for the enterprise.
Augustine went on to sate on page 19 "Asking the people responsible for preventing a problem, if there is a problem is like delivering lettuce by rabbit." Odds are it was insiders that got the organization in the bind in the first place and odds of those who got you into a bind are not the ones to get you out. A dysfunctional culture of backbiting internal politics, failed policies, group think are all part of the reason that organizations manufacture their own problems.
Over all I must call this book a must read for anyone involved or potentially involved in an organizational crisis as a must read and for those that may be Crisis Management Team leaders, The Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management offers the perfect foundation for the design of table top exercises for the CMT.
