Business Continuity For Dummies

Chapter 10

Managing a Crisis

In This Chapter

Defining crises

Preventing what you can and preparing for the rest

Responding during a crisis

Recovering from a crisis

Are you good at managing your business? Although we can’t test our assumption, we’re prepared to bet that most of you would answer ‘yes’, ‘probably’, ‘definitely’, ‘sure’ or something positive to this question. And it follows that if you’re good at managing your business, you may also believe that you’re going to be good at managing a crisis . . . yes? Of course For Dummies readers are a superior bunch and perhaps not representative of society as a whole, but logic dictates that not everyone can be better than average (which is our working definition of ‘good’).

In a classic survey on this human tendency to be overconfident (it’s fine, everyone does it), 50 per cent of responding Fortune 500 CEOs during the 1980s had no crisis plan in place, and yet 97 per cent were confident that they’d respond well if a crisis occurred. These numbers just don’t stack up. The fact is that being good at leading and managing a business ...