Wednesday’s Smart Shibboleth #11: Lukaszewski’s Crisis Realities

Crisis Definition

A people-stopping, show-stopping, product-stopping, Trust busting, reputationally redefining event that creates victims and/or explosive visibility.

Grand Crisis Response Strategy

  • Stop the production of victims
  • Manage the victim dimension
  • Communicate internally
  • Notify those indirectly affected
  • Manage the new media, legacy media, bloggers, guessers, and
    people smarter than you

Crisis Truisms

  • Bad news always ripens badly
  • Crisis management is fixing mistakes faster than you make them
  • Critics and victims accumulate
  • Every moment of indecision creates unseen but avoidable
    collateral damage
  • Failing to talk promptly is the death of any effective response
  • Failing to talk to your critics rots your internal credibility
  • Failing to talk to your critics triggers people to make things up that
    you end up owning
  • Negative aggressive responses empower your opponents, aggravate the victims, and give all media bad headlines you will live with forever.
  • Once a critic, enemy, or victim, always a critic enemy or victim
  • Silence is the most toxic, top executive career-busting strategy
  • Speed beats smart every time, when in doubt do something . . .
  • Talking to your critics builds your credibility and silences or invalidates key adverse audiences.
  • There is no such thing as 2020 hindsight because there is no such thing as 2020 foresight
  • There will always be bellyachers, bloviators, gripers, secondguessers, and backbench complainers

See also:
OUR MANIFESTO FOR COMMUNICATIONS SUCCESS

LUKASZEWSKI’S CONTENTION SURVIVAL MANIFESTO – Keeping Yourself and the Things That Matter Under Control