Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message: The Definitive Guide to Manageing the Message - Hardcover

Fink, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071799214 ISBN 13: 9780071799218

Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education - Europe, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Definitive Guide to Communicating in Any Crisis

“When facing an already difficult crisis, the last thing a company needs is to make it worse through its own communications – or lack thereof. As one who has lived through a number of [business] crises and served as an independent investigator of the crises of others, I consider Steven Fink’s book to be an excellent guide to avoiding collecting scar tissue of your own by learning from the scar tissue painfully collected by others.”—Norman R. Augustine, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lockheed Martin

There are few guarantees in business today. Unfortunately, one of them is the inevitability of a crisis having a potentially major effect on your business and your reputation. When your company finds itself in the midst of a crisis, the ripple effects can disrupt lives and business for the foreseeable future if public opinion is not properly shaped and managed.

Skillfully managing the perception of the crisis determines the difference between a company’s life or death. Because in the pitched battle between perception and reality, perception always wins.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Crisis communications and crisis management legend Steven Fink gives you everything you need to prepare for the inevitable—whether it’s in the form of human error, industrial accidents, criminal behavior, or natural disasters.

In this groundbreaking guide, Fink provides a complete toolkit for ensuring smooth communications and lasting business success through any crisis. Crisis Communications offers proactive and preventive methods for preempting potential crises. The book reveals proven strategies for recognizing and averting damaging crisis communications issues before it’s too late. The book also offers ways to deal with mainstream and social media, use them to your advantage, and neutralize and turn around a hostile media environment Steven Fink uses his decades of expertise and experience in crisis communications to help you:

• UNDERSTAND AND MANAGE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PUBLIC
• PERCEPTION AND REALITY
• CHOOSE THE BEST SPOKESPERSON FOR THE CRISIS
• PROTECT YOUR BRAND AND REPUTATION THROUGH CRISES LARGE AND SMALL
• MAKE WISE, VIGILANT, AND DEFENSIBLE DECISIONS UNDER EXTREME CRISIS-INDUCED STRESS
• TELL THE TRUTH NO MATTER HOW TEMPTING IT MAY BE TO MISLEAD
• USE SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLETS TO COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY TO THE PUBLIC ABOUT A CRISIS

The explosion of the Internet and, especially, social media, has added a new layer to the business leader’s skill set: the ability to handle a crisis quickly and professionally within moments of its occurrence. Livelihoods depend upon it.

With in-depth case studies of Toyota, BP, and Penn State, Crisis Communications provides everything you need to successfully lead your company through today’s rocky landscape of business—where crises large and small loom around every corner, and the lives of businesses and management teams hang in the balance.

PRAISE FOR STEVEN FINK’S CRISIS MANAGEMENT
“Every major executive in America ought to read at least one book on crisis management. In this way, he or she might be better prepared to deal with the disasters striking organizations at an ever-increasing rate ... The question is: ‘Is Steven Fink’s book one that busy executives ought to read?’ The answer is a resounding yes.”—LOS ANGELES TIMES, FRONT PAGE SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Fink is the President and founder of Lexicon Communications Corp. (CrisisManagement.com), the nation’s oldest and most experienced crisis management and crisis communications firm. In addition, he authored the bestselling Crisis Management, the first book ever written on the subject.

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Crisis Communications

The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message

By Steven Fink

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright ©2013 Steven Fink
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-179921-8

Contents

Preface
1. You Can't Make This Stuff Up
2. Defining Our Terms
3. What BP Should Have Said
4. Attitude Adjustments
5. Toyota: On a Slippery Crisis Communications Slope with No Brakes
6. Understanding Your Crisis
7. Shaping Your Crisis Communications Message
8. Spokespersons
9. Social Media and Digital Communications—or, Truth/Lies at the Speed of 
Light
10. Shakespeare Was Right: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the 
lawyers."
11. Protecting Your Brand
12. Telling the Truth
13. Say It Ain't So, Joe!—The Penn State Crisis
14. Dealing with Death: Fatality Communications
15. Crisis Communications Strategies
16. The Good, the Bad, the News Media—or, Juggling Chain Saws
17. Senior Management: Your Own Worst Enemy?
18. Take Your Own Pulse—or, What Were They Thinking?
19. Internal Crisis Communications
20. External Crisis Communications
21. Reputation Management and Reservoirs of Goodwill
22. Issues Management
23. Crisis Communications for Publicly Traded Companies
24. Crisis Litigation
25. How to Break Bad News
26. The Blame Game
27. Crisis-Induced Stress
28. Making Defensible Decisions: Decision Making Under Crisis-Induced 
Stress
29. Apologies: Shakespeare—Still Right After All These Years
30. Crisis Advertising: Does It Work?
31. Crisis Communications Plans
32. The Failure of Business Schools
33. Speed Is of the Essence
34. Rising to the Occasion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

You Can't MakeThis Stuff Up

"I'd like my life back."

With those five whiny words at the height of one of the planet's worstenvironmental crises, one of the world's most successful CEOs cracked publiclyunder the strain of crisis-induced stress. That pathetic plaint forever sealedhis reputation as a seemingly unfeeling, gaffe-prone dunderhead whose glamorous,jet-setting lifestyle was inconvenienced by the tragic loss of 11 lives during amassive oil rig explosion, the resulting runaway oil spill in the Gulf ofMexico, and the heartbreaking loss of livelihoods for countless thousands ofarea families—all caused by his company, his minions, and their combinedsins. That one ill-chosen utterance, in full view of the world's media, at oncethrust former BP head Tony Hayward into the pantheon of such other insensitive,kindred luminaries as Marie ("Let them eat cake") Antoinette and Emperor ("Handme my fiddle") Nero. Did Hayward fiddle as the Gulf of Mexico was engulfed inoil and flames? In a manner of speaking: he went sailing on his luxury yachthalf a world away, while the ashes of his self-immolated image were blown out tosea.

What kind of crisis communications message was Hayward intending to convey tothe world? How does such a successful and accomplished executive crumble socompletely on the world stage of a megacrisis? Was it ineptitude, fear, or lackof crisis communications training that allowed him to turn a worldwide crisisinto a "What about me?" moment?

But Hayward—a complete novice in the art of crisiscommunications—was on a roll and was only just getting started. In fact,it was nearly impossible to stop him. He later "guesstimated" publicly that thespill was averaging a mere 5,000 barrels a day ("A guesstimate is aguesstimate," he truculently sniveled in the face of demands for more accuratenumbers) when the actual number was closer to 60,000 barrels a day, and hefurther pooh-poohed the environmental impact of the soon to be millions ofbarrels of oil awash in the Gulf as "very, very modest." He also predicted thatthe spill would be "tiny" compared to the size of the ocean, convenientlyoverlooking the fact that prevailing winds and unrelenting tides were drivingthe oil toward previously pristine shores, once-rich fishing areas, family-orientedrecreational beaches, fragile marine and bird sanctuaries, anddelicately balanced ecosystems. When the well was capped for good in August 2010and the flow was permanently stemmed—more than three full and agonizingmonths after the drilling rig explosion—official government figures putthe total spill at nearly five million barrels, or some 200 million gallons,making it the worst offshore oil disaster in U.S. history and completelydwarfing the previous record holder, the Exxon Valdez, which struck a reef inPrince William Sound, Alaska.

"Very, very modest," indeed.

Meanwhile, testifying on live television before a congressional investigativecommittee, Hayward responded petulantly to a U.S. representative who wanted toknow what happened at the explosion of the deepwater oil-drilling platform,saying, "I don't know; I wasn't there."

In response to direct congressional questions seeking more information and lessobfuscation, his testimony included such cover-your-ass gems as, "I'm not adrilling engineer" or "actually qualified" in these matters, "I'm not a cementengineer," and "I'm not an oceanographic scientist." It was becoming all tooclear that Hayward was not a lot of things, including a competent crisiscommunicator. For someone who had served for years as head of oil explorationand production at BP before ultimately becoming CEO, Hayward went out of his wayto portray himself as ignorant of any aspect of drilling operations. He eventestified before a disbelieving Congress that he had "no prior knowledge of thedrilling of this well, none whatsoever."

But an angry Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy andCommerce Committee, accused Hayward of blatant "stonewalling" and charged, "Youhave consistently ducked and evaded our questions."

But even feigned ignorance is no excuse. If you're the CEO, you're paid to know.And in Hayward's case, he was paid plenty.

As a contributory consequence of all of the foregoing missteps, the stock valueof BP, then the world's fourth-largest company, soon plummeted into an abyssdeeper than its Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig. The beleaguered company lost$17 billion just in the second quarter of 2010, on top of the more than $32billion it was forced to set aside for spill-related costs. At one point, BP'smarket value declined 40 percent and the company was forced to sell off valuableassets to help pay its mounting costs.

The passage of time hasn't helped the oil giant recover: in the second quarterof 2012, BP reported an additional loss of $1.4 billion. A drop in the oil-slick ocean to a deep-pocket company like BP, maybe, but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education - Europe
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071799214
• ISBN 13: 9780071799218
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar