Steven Fink - Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message

Also by Steven Fink

Nonfiction

Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable

Sticky Fingers: Managing the Global Risk of Economic Espionage

Fiction

The Hailing Sign

Copyright 2013 by Steven Fink. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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In Memoriam

Harriet Braiker, Ph.D.

She touched the world
and left her handprint on our hearts
mine, most especially.

And for:

Judy Ellis
Kay Jamison
Matt Rainwater
Sheryl Sandberg

Friends in deed,
Friends indeed.

And Amanda,
Torchbearer extraordinaire.

What weve got here is failure to communicate.

from Cool Hand Luke

Some years ago, I wrote Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable, the first book ever written on the subject. It took the position, as the subtitle boldly asserts, that today, a crisis in business is as inevitable as death and taxes; it is not a question of if, but rather when. The passing years have only reinforced that ironclad belief, and I daresay the universebolstered by sad history lessons and a veritable graveyard littered with companies and managers that have fallen victim to all manner of crisesagrees with me.

In that book, and at that time, I believed that I had included everything that needed to be said about crisis communications. In fact, I devoted two full chapters to the subject, one subtitled Controlling the Message and the other Handling a Hostile Press. At the time, that was sufficient.

But that was before the Internet explosion and the advent of never-ending 24/7 news cycles, cell phone videos, the runaway profusion of still emerging social media, ever-lurking-in-the-bushes paparazzi, blogs and websites devoted to gotcha journalism, and electronic mob-mentality consumerism/activism. There was a time when a client of mine could make a verbal gaffe to a reporter in the morning and I had time to correct the statement and rehabilitate the client before the afternoon news cycle began and the clients ill-chosen words got out in print or made the evening news. Those halcyon days are long gone, never to return.

The truth is, even the phrase 24/7 sounds antiquated today. Were really talking about an instantaneous, live news stream; you cant use the word cycle, since that implies a beginning, an end, and a restart. And woe to any company whose crisis communications strategy is not prepared for that phenomenon, especially since in this current paradigm, where risks have magnified exponentially and where news and pseudonews break in the blinking of an eye, the risk of inaccuracies and resulting damage to businesses and reputationsreal or imaginedis huge.

Also, there seems to be a new generation of business leaders (and politicians and celebrities, too) who think that theyre above the strict laws of crisis communications or think that theyre smarter than a horde of ravenous, take-no-prisoners reporters and cell phone videographers. They think their verbal gymnastics skills can extricate them from any trouble they find themselves in, especially trouble of their own making. Or worse, they clam up, adopt a bunker mentality, and refuse to talk to the media or to their constituencies when that is exactly what they should be doing. What these so-called leaders and newsmakers fail to realize is that reporters are smarter than they areand they always have the last word. Even if you believe thats not true, its more prudent to act as though it were. As some wise wag once quipped, Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

Benchmarks in crisis management and its important counterpart, crisis communications, have been well established and long recognized as essential corporate business disciplines since 1979, the year of the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear accident. According to the New York Times, it was during that then-unprecedented disaster and near catastrophe that modern-day corporate crisis management was born. It was then that the world first saw a side-by-side comparison of both good and bad crisis management and crisis communications in the form of the management and communication skills of the Office of the Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (the former) and the Metropolitan Edison utility company, the nuclear plant operator (the latter). In fact, the utility companys crisis communications pronouncements were so problematic, so misleading, and so frightening to the public at large that the White House took the unprecedented step of gagging the company by ordering it to stop issuing