Crisis Leadership Blog

  It should not be so hard for companies to “Sorry.” Recently, I was mulling over the different responses I normally see during a crisis meeting if the CEO asks, "What happens if we just apologize?" General Counsel: panic.   "No. We can't do that. We can't accept blame because of the implications it'll have on us in litigation." VP of Communications:...

  The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) gave his update to the group. ‘Someone accessed our user database with a set of compromised access credentials they obtained through phishing attacks. We think we've lost some PII and unhashed user login info. Unfortunately, it looks as though they also corrupted some of the logs in the SIEM and UEBA...

I was recently put in an awkward situation where the question of the crisis communications team’s independence at a major organization became an issue. As background, the communications team had asked me to work with them to prepare some materials related to a specific product launch.  There was the potential that the launch could cause some communities to...

Having the ability to find a link between your passion and your profession will make you better at both. That said, I often try to uncover the similarities between what we do in crisis communications and crisis planning with my passion for sailboat racing and long distance sailing. I was recently watching a video about heavy weather sailing skills. The...

"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...

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...

“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...

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...

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....

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...