Who's Sari now?

More pictures from the Crisis Solutions Indian Adventure

























Do I eat it or smoke it?

Here's Crisis Solutions' CFO, Richard Whitby, on a recent business trip to India.
He is seen taking possession of the first of our new fleet of company cars.

Can you profile the perfect crisis manager?

What qualities are required in a disaster and is it possible to profile individuals who might be effective crisis managers? Jim Preen writes in Continuity Central.

The recent anniversary of 9/11 reminded us what good looked like in a crisis – it looked like New York City firefighters and of course Rudolf Giuliani, the mayor of New York in 2001.

Prior to the catastrophe Giuliani had been a divisive figure and by no means universally popular, but cometh the hour cometh the man. He seemed up to the job in both word and deed. When asked how many people he thought had died in the tragedy his immediate response was “more than any of us can bear.” Perfectly capturing the public mood at the time of overwhelming crisis.

So what qualities are required in a disaster and is it possible to profile individuals who might be effective crisis managers?

Read more

Perfect profile

The police use profiling to target potential criminal offenders.

The Lizard asks: Can you profile the perfect crisis manager?

There might be an article coming on…

A pilot’s guide to crisis management

Richard Whitby, CFO at Crisis Solutions, has a highly entertaining article in the new edition of Risk UK. Click here to see the article and the rest of the magazine.

Here’s a taste:

A pilot's guide to crisis management

“Final check, then apply full power,” says the instructor. I’m hunched over the controls of the Cessna light aircraft, my palms sweating and my head full of figures. The pilot of a 747 couldn’t be concentrating any harder.

Final Check means a quick glance over the myriad dials in front of me to ensure that ‘temperatures and pressures’ are normal. Then it’s the Big White Numbers check which means making sure the runway number given by air traffic control matches the huge numbers painted on the runway in front of me - thereby ensuring I’m on the correct runway and not about to meander in front of a 737 on its way to Majorca.

Flying is all about logical planning, together with the training and flexibility to deal with any eventuality, which strikes me as the same set of skills you need for crisis management.

Social media policy

A couple of posts back I highlighted an article about social media. I’ve had a couple of comments along the lines of: ‘Well that’s very interesting, but what are we meant to do about it?’

The answer is your company should have a social media policy – so as a public service and to get you started here’s a checklist to get you underway:

• Employee Facebook policy
• Employee personal blog policy
• Employee Twitter policy
• Employee Linkedin policy
• Corporate blogging policy and approval process
• Corporate blog commenting policy
• Corporate YouTube policy

Developing scenarios

Jim Preen provides some advice on how to set up convincing business continuity exercise scenarios.

Terror blasts, white powder attacks, pandemic flu, cyber crime, the list goes on. At the sharp end of business continuity it really is one damn thing after another.

We seem to spend our lives frightening the life out of crisis management teams by dreaming up the best possible scenarios to test their response and the company’s business continuity plan. So what makes for the top scenario - one that really tests the plan and the players?

Read the full story here.