This past weekend saw the U.S. National Football League engaged in broken-field running as it struggled to address the growing rancor over protests in relation to the national anthem. Individual teams and individual players reacted variously, often without fully considering all the consequences of their actions or inactions. The news media is having a feeding frenzy […]

A smoldering crisis can be hard to detect. When the situation bursts suddenly into flame and into public view, the organization is genuinely surprised. The root cause of the surprise is that the problem has come to be accepted as the way things are. I once led a crisis tabletop exercise for a business that […]

Crisis managers must have thick skins. They make decisions that WILL be second-guessed by many. Because most people—even their colleagues—will not be privy to what the rejected options were, the option they chose will look like a bad choice. Chances are that it was. The problem was that the others were worse. That is often […]

Bill Gates used his time at the podium during the recent Munich Security Conference to issue a stark warning. He sounded an alarm to tell people that a terrible pandemic is coming and the world is not ready. I have worked on pandemic planning for more than a decade and was a leader in the […]

Hidden Figures is a must-see movie for everyone. The film documents the true story of three brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that turned around the Space Race. The visionary trio […]

BMW is the latest automaker to have its world upended by a recall due to defective airbags. Faulty airbag inflators manufactured by Takata can explode in a crash and spew metal shards onto vehicle occupants. The defect has been linked to at least 17 deaths worldwide and prompted one of the largest recalls in automotive history. More […]

Arsonists use accelerants to assure damage from their crimes. Sometimes nature provides accelerants for wildfires such as dry brush from a drought. Accelerants make fires worse than they might have been. Your crisis may fall victim to accelerants – human-induced or naturally occurring. An example of a human induced would be activists taking an interest […]

Special alert to organizations that use animals for entertainment. PETA is feeling its oats after taking credit for the closure of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. PETA’s website now issues a very clear warning: “All other animal circuses, roadside zoos, and wild animal exhibitors, including marine amusement parks like SeaWorld and the Miami Seaquarium, must take […]