Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable

This is a book that every professional working in crisis management or emergency planning should read and keep in their personal library. This recently re-released book is truly a crisis management standard.

Fink's "yellow book" is still one of the most comprehensive and well-built guide for crisis related subjects. Its systematic approach and case-analyze supported explanations provides readers to understand the issue well

This book covers the subject of Crisis Management with factual review and analysis. It gives practical examples of do's and don'ts while keeping the reader's attention. Anyone dealing with crises, even in their personal life, would do well to read this book. This one goes on my library shelf to keep!

I read this book when it was first published more than 15 years ago and decided to re-read it recently as various corporate crises occur or continue. (Who knows what the latest Enron and Arthur Andersen developments will be by the time this review appears?) What sets this book apart from almost all others which discuss the same general subject is the fact that Fink's observations, insights, and recommendations are (if anything) more relevant in 2001 than ever before. How can this be true? My answer is that he correctly emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive and cohesive process which consists of four separate but related components: anticipation and preparation, rapid response, follow-through, and post-event evaluation. For obvious reasons, each is critically important but post-event evaluation has even greater importance (and value) if it guides and informs subsequent anticipation and preparation. In an ideal world, seamless anticipation and preparation will eliminate all crises. In reality, "the best laid plans" can almost instantaneously become irrelevant, if not counter-productive. Presumably, major airlines such as American and United as well as the City of New York (not to mention federal agencies) involved some exceptionally talented people to formulate a number of "What if?" scenaria. And then the events of September 11th occurred. The efforts to formulate such scenaria were not invalidated by those events; nonetheless, as in Hawaii almost 60 years ago, the challenge was for various corporate and governmental entities to respond immediately and effectively, as indeed they did. In time, as with the events which occurred on December 7th, the events which occurred last September will be evaluated even as preventive measures are taken and new scenaria are formulated, as indeed they should be.Fink organizes his excellent material within 18 chapters which are arranged in a sequence appropriate to the aforementioned components. With meticulous care, he defines various terms (thus providing a nomenclature for crisis management which most readers probably did not have before) while establishing a context within which to illustrate and apply those terms. Of greater value, I think, is the matrix of different perspectives which Fink provides. This strategy reminds me of the way Henry James develops his major characters in various novels. That is, look at a given situation from every possible angle. This Fink does brilliantly as he explains how to measure the nature and extent of a given crisis, decide who must do what immediately, how to manage information (he devotes Chapters 13 and 14 to crisis communications), and how to make the most effective decisions under what are inevitably severe pressures ranging from shock and fear to grief and anger within compressed timeframes. He also includes what he calls "A Catastrophic Quartet" in Chapter 17: case studies of crises involving Ohio Savings and Loan, Union Carbide, Procter & Gamble (Rely Tamp

When I "suffered" my own Management Crisis back in 1994, I turned to my library collection to see if there was anything there to help me. I found Stephen Fink's "Crisis Management" and started to impliment his suggestions. What transpired, not only helped me deal with the immediate issue, but started a course of action that I still employ today. Based on my own experience, and finding that others in my profession have felt lost in their crises, I started to give presentations, using Fink's text as my guide.I encourage anyone who's in busisness, management, or in some decision making role in an organization, to get a copy for themselves, and pass it on to your colleageues. I also encourage libraries to add this to their collections.As the subtitle suggests, Crises are inevitable, so why not "be prepared?"