Crisis Leadership Blog
Insights and perspectives on being the lighthouse during a crisis.
Leading While Always Communicating
Critical takeaways: Strategic communicators will need to find ways to keep their CEOs leading while always communication and visible to people who matter Humility, generosity and engagement are crucial leadership characteristics in this time of COVID-19 Great...
Saying Hard Things – Focus on a Bigger Picture
Critical takeaways: In a crisis, organizations should aim to be understood, not loved. Focus on a bigger picture to meet reasonable people’s expectations for a responsible organization. Spend your efforts communicating to the reasonable 80% and not over-indexing for...
The Eggs Podcast: Bill Coletti
Kith CEO Bill Coletti joined Michael Smith and Ryan Roghaar from The Eggs Podcast to discuss current crises happening in the United States and how to manage your way through it as a company. He also talks about where to start if you want to change your company's...
Saying Hard Things – Own the Disappointment
Critical takeaways: Saying hard things will inevitably disappoint people who matter. We cannot write magic words that will somehow keep people from being upset. We must own the disappointment. Our five-point Framework for Saying Hard Things can help soften the blow of...
Crises Are Inevitable but Learning Isn’t
Critical takeaways: Crises are inevitable, but it takes effort to learn from them and apply them to the next crisis. Create an inventory of all the decisions, policy changes and communications from the past three months, and evaluate the successes and misses. Schedule...
By definition, Kith means a cadre of peers who shape opinions and attitudes while instilling sophisticated habits for action. As a way to live this value, we like to share resources that are building blocks to good crisis management and can help you start the path of protecting your reputation.
More Recent Insights
A Tale of Two Executives
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness" is the well-known opening to Charles Dickens' novel "A Tale of Two Cities." However, the second part, regarding wisdom and foolishness, isn't quoted as often as the first. When we walk into crisis situations in need of a rapid response, it is...
Critical Moments: The New Mindset Of Reputation Management
What is a crisis? It’s a big question, but in its most basic terms, it’s something that interrupts you from a pre-planned activity -- it moves you off-course, in other words -- and it triggers a negative reaction from some important subset, be that employees, stakeholders, investors, the media etc. The perception of your actions has now been misaligned...
Corporate Reputation Can Be Managed
“It’s all about reputation now” Pretty heady first paragraph of a recent Fast Company article about the importance of reputation (which you can easily argue has always been important): There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that...
The Ecosystem of Advice: Who do you turn to during a crisis?
I started putting together a post a few weeks ago called “The Ecosystem Of Advice.” It was going to be a deep dive on who exactly we turn to when our business is in crisis and collapsing around us. I had a few thoughts, of course -- consultants, attorneys, recommendations from past colleagues, trade associations, Google searches, Amazon, etc. I realized...
Facebook and the Limits of Reputation
No one seems to know what many brands really even do. Is that an issue? I don’t want to write much about the Mark Zuckerberg hearings -- although “Mr. Zuckerman” was pretty funny, as well as the fact that a tech hearing used printed-out logo boards -- because the story’s been everywhere, and everyone is essentially saying the exact same stuff about it....
Pattern Recognition and Crisis Management
What is pattern recognition? Pattern recognition has been around since humans have been around, as it’s one of the more logical ways we make sense of our world. In recent years, it’s gained a bunch more contextual notoriety because it’s deeply tied to image processing, neural networks, machine learning, textual analysis, and other tech stack fields that...
The Equation For Crisis Success
We’re not big fans of jumping into the fray with whatever everyone else is writing about at a given time. There’s a lot of digital noise already out in the ether, so why make that worse? We have opinions on the United flight dog, the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica situation, Uber’s self-driving car death, and more. Of course we do -- the name of our...
How can universities handle reputational risk better?
Higher education is seemingly in an increasingly perilous spot. As the job market shifts -- 47 to 54% of jobs will likely be lost to automation by 2030, or roughly 800 million jobs globally -- higher ed also needs to reinvent itself to be more of a value-add in the modern age. Just a few years ago, The New Yorker referred to higher education as...
Year-End Review: Critical Takeaways from Key Case Studies
As we look back on 2017, we at Kith find ourselves not only planning for the new year ahead, but reflecting on the past 12 months. We had a busy year helping clients in their journey toward reputation excellence by implementing the Kith Model for Reputation Excellence. Kith’s Model for Reputation Excellence was created after CEOs and CMOs expressed desire...
Active Shooter Situations: How CEOs Can Plan And Prepare for the Worst
By Bill Coletti, CEO, Kith Active Shooter Situations Are a Realistic Risk For Which CEOs Should Prepare Critical Takeaways Crisis simulations help your organization prepare for every scenario, even the ones that are painful to think about In an active shooter situation, law enforcement runs the show. Training now helps you maximize what little control you...
The Kith Method
Good crisis management comes from a plan. Great crisis management comes from capability – and starts before you even smell smoke. That’s why we developed the Kith Method. We can help build and maintain a flexible capability that works for you.
Your reputation is an investment; time-consuming and costly to build and expensive to repair. Protect it.