Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management ("Harvard Business Review" Paperback) [Paperback]

Acquiring required skills and tools to effectively manage or mitigate crises is essential to the success of modern organizations. 'Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management' is a collection eight essays presenting new ideas and concepts on how to manage, mitigate crises and other related key issues in a rapidly changing business environment.

Some of the essays in this collection are written by leading management consultants and CEOs. Topics covered include; 'strategic approaches to product recalls', 'leadership', 'what happens when an executive defects' and how companies can develop better media policies and plans as part of crisis management and preparedness.

My favorite is Norman R Augustine's essay titled 'Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent'. In this well researched essay, Augustine describes six stages of a crisis drawing lessons from several well-known crises. The important issue emerging is that "almost every crisis contains within itself' the seeds of failures as well as the "roots of failure." Drawing quotations from Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, the author provides very useful insights into understanding, managing and preventing a crisis.

This book is a useful tool for executives and managers who need to upgrade their knowledge or gain access to leading experts on topics related to crisis management.

This is one in a series of several dozen volumes that comprise the "Harvard Business Review Paperback Series." Each offers direct, convenient, and inexpensive access to the best thinking on the given subject in articles originally published by the Harvard Business School Review. I strongly recommend all of the volumes in the series. The individual titles are listed at this Web site: www.hbsp.harvard.edu. The authors of various articles are among the world's most highly regarded experts on the given subject. Each volume has been carefully edited. Supplementary commentaries are also provided in most of the volumes, as is an "About the Contributors" section that usually includes suggestions of other sources that some readers may wish to explore.

In this volume, the reader is provided with eight articles. Given when they first appeared in the HBR (1994-1999), some of the material is dated but the core concepts remain relevant. Here are some questions and comments that indicate issues the various contributors examine:

How to manage the crisis you tried to prevent? (Norman R. Augustine)

What can be an effective strategic approach to managing product recalls? (N. Craig Smith, Robert J. Thomas, and John A. Quelch)

How was Continental Airlines "saved"? (Greg Brennehan)

What to do when a key executive defects? (Anurag Sharma and Idalene F. Kesner)

How to formulate and then implement an effective media policy? (Sandi Sonnenfeld)

Note: Five experts respond to a fictitious scenario and offer their advice.

After layoffs, what to do next? (Suzy Wetlaufer)

Note: Five experts offer their advice on how to revive morale at a company in another fictional case study.

In "Leadership When There Is No One to Ask," Linda Hill and Suzy Wetlaufer interview Franco Bernabe, CEO of Eni (a large, energy-focused industrial group in Italy), who explains why he made turnaround decisions in "solitude."

In "Lincoln Electric's Harsh Lessons from International Expansion," chairman emeritus Donald F. Hastings explains how Lincoln suffered throughout the 1990s and then returned to prosperity.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out the recently published Harvard Business Review on Making Smarter Decisions as well as other series title in the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series such as those on Advances in Strategy, Becoming a High-Performance Manager, the Innovative Enterprise, Leadership at the Top, and Measuring Corporate Performance. Also these excellent sources which provide other perspectives on crisis management: Eric Dezenhall and John Weber's Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong, Dominic Elliot's Key Readings in Crisis Management: System and Structures for Prevention and Recovery, Ian I. Mitroff and Gus Anagnos'Managing Crises Before They Happen: What Every Executive and Manager Needs to Know About Crisis Management, Edward Borodzicz's Risk, Crisis and Security Management, Gerald Lewis' Organizational Crisis Management: The Human Factor, and Edward S. Devlin's Crisis Management Planning and Execution.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Here's another excellent source published by Harvard Business School Press: Crisis Management: Mastering the Skills to Prevent Disasters (Harvard Business Essentials).