QUOTE OF THE MONTH: “Talking louder and faster   doesn’t make your idea any better.”
– Randy Pausch,  Author of “The Last Lecture”

Maybe your television, like ours, has been tuned to an unbelievable number of basketball games for the past few weeks.  March Madness is approaching its end as this e-zine is posted.  It was a sad night here on March 25th when the Orangemen of Syracuse University went down to defeat.  Both of our daughters graduated from SU (the older having played basketball for four years for their Utica College campus and the younger being one of the most avid fans in the Carrier Dome).

When Butler University got off to a 10-1 lead early in the game, my husband said, “This is not going to be a good night.”  When the game was over, although SU had scratched their way back and even had the lead with some minutes to go, they ended up losing by four points.  Had they not stumbled so badly at the outset, it might well have been a different story.  As often happens with me, I saw a parallel to crisis management.

WHAT YOU DO IN THE OPENING MOMENTS IS VERY IMPORTANT

When I’m trying to convince an organization of the value of crisis management and media training, I say, “What you do early on sets the tone for the whole response. If you don’t know the right things to do and say when the crisis first breaks, you will spend the whole rest of the time playing catch-up and on the defensive instead of playing your game.”

This is why I highly recommend that organizations prepare crisis communications templates to have on hand.  First, brainstorm about the most likely and/or the most potentially damaging crises that could afflict your company.  Next, develop some fill-in-the-blanks statements to address them.  Leave spaces for the specifics of what happened, but craft the rest of it to hit the high points of an excellent initial or “holding” statement.  If it were a fire, talk about how your fire protection system operated properly, how the local fire company cooperated with you as you have trained with them to do, how your injured employees are being taken care of, and what is being done to make sure the local citizenry will not be adversely impacted.  Pass it all by Legal so they are on board beforehand to avoid delays. Then, when a fire breaks out, you’ll look (and be) prepared to handle things quickly and confidently.  Once you have one for a fire, move on to the others — a disgruntled employee that injures or kills workers, damage done to the environment, a bank robbery, a wandering patient from a nursing home facility, etc.

THEN AVOID “TURNOVERS”

Every commentator on the SU game attributed their loss to the excessive number of turnovers — sloppy plays that ultimately spelled their doom.  If you want to read a truly fascinating story about a crisis that played out in the national news that many of us remember, read Jon F. Harmon’s “Feeding Frenzy: Trial Lawyers, the Media, Politicians and Corporate Adversaries Inside the Ford-Firestone Crisis.”  Mr. Harmon was the head of Public Relations for Ford Truck in 1999 when this high profile case broke when Firestone tires experienced dramatic “tread separation” blowouts that led to rollover accidents that caused the death of 300 people and hundreds of severe injuries.

As Mr. Harmon points out, some of the most serious “turnovers” made by Firestone included:

–  lack of a serious investigation into numerous reported incidences of tire failures in mid-1999 in some Middle East countries and Venezuela;
–  attributing U.S. accidents to driver error (underpressurization of the tires and then poor driver reaction to a blowout) even as the TV visual was of a devastated family with a young mother turned into a paraplegic;
– refusal of the company to release to the public — or to Ford Motor Company — the safety study data they had compiled that led them to eventually recall 6.5 million tires, leaving open a legitimate question as to whether the recall had gone far enough;
–  not including their head of Public Affairs in crisis management meetings with the result that she was blindsided and ended up telling people there was no need for a recall just days before it was issued;
–  trying to get away with just issuing a press release and a one-way satellite-feed announcement of the recall because none of their senior executives would agree to stand up in front of the cameras and reporters in what they knew was going to be a very difficult press conference;
–  serious difficulties in communications with a parent company located half a world away — not only language problems but differences in cultural values;
–  not having the CEO of the company willing and able to be the spokesperson in Congressional hearings, losing credibility when the most senior officer appeared scared or uncaring.

FRIGHTENING THINGS YOU CAN LEARN FROM READING THIS BOOK

I had plenty of difficult experiences in my 16 years as head of Public Affairs for my small chemical manufacturing company in New York.  But our stories were mostly local, often with front-page articles and editorials in our county-wide newspaper. These local issues were challenging enough as we sought to douse the fires of distrust and fear about our products and our processes and perceived health threats.

But if your organization has even the possibility that you could have a high visibility (even a nationwide) crisis — if your products could be deemed a safety threat to a large population –
you owe it to yourself to get a copy of “Feeding Frenzy.”

In it, for example, you will learn:

–  how major press conferences are prepared for, set up and handled;
– what happens when hungry plaintiff attorneys use the media to turn up the heat and try to make the company pay huge settlements to avoid nasty trials that will drag the company through the mud;
– how dangerous it can be for your corporate reputation if politicians see they can gain their moment in the sun as the protector of the people by humiliating you in Congressional hearings;
–  how a supremely lucrative and solid business relationship (like customer and supplier) can be torn asunder irreparably when the companies cannot work together.

Mr. Harmon writes so that you feel like you, yourself, are in the middle of the crisis, trying to figure out what to do.  He doesn’t pull any punches. He admits when Ford made mistakes and he tells you what he and his colleagues think Firestone did wrong.  And he clearly points out the lessons learned from the whole situation.

Even if you don’t think you have the possibility of experiencing a crisis that makes national news for months on end, there are many valuable lessons to be learned here on how to handle more routine crises.

You can obtain his book from either Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com.

Now that March Madness is almost over, perhaps you’ll have time to read!
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Special Note:  Since we moved to North Carolina over three years ago, now I’m rooting for Duke! And I still recommend Jon Harmon’s book, even though he recently told me he’ll be pulling for Michigan State…

Until next month…KEEP COOL!

Judy Hoffman
www.judyhoffman.com
jchent@earthlink.net
1-800-848-3907 PIN 2145