Take Action Before the Crisis!!!!

Our text "Crisis Management in the New Strategy Landscape" by Crandall, Parnell, and Spillan takes a different approach to crisis management and the classification of strategic communications then many other texts that I have been familiar with in the past. The authors outline a crisis management framework that is based on four stages of crisis management:

First, landscape survey, which focuses on identifying potential crises and their sources before they occur based on industry standards, culture and business environment. Second, strategic planning, which deals with forming an actual crisis management plan and crisis team. Third, crisis management, is the stage when the actual crisis is occurring and offers guidance regarding communication during the crisis. Lastly, organizational learning, which occurs post-crises and focuses on how an organization can learn from and change for the better as a result of the crisis. According to the authors of the text, the actual crisis will hit between the second and third phases.

This text is unique in the fact that is it identifying both internal and external "landscapes" or audiences and addresses how to deal with them differently. I think learning about crisis management in this way will be beneficial for future public relations practitioners because when a crisis hits there are many different audiences you must address and often times internal and external audiences need to be dealt with very differently.

During last week's class we discussed how to survey the crisis management landscape in order to pinpoint potential crises that can impact your client or organization and how to determine the life cycle of a crisis, on both an organization and industry wide level.

When looking specifically at Nike, I can clearly see that many of the potential categories of crisis could have a great impact on their business. A Internet search for Nike's crisis management plans did not turn up very much, as far as concrete plans that are open to the public. There are several both internal and external crises drivers in the text that I could see having a great affect on Nike due to the nature of their business. For example, society's increase reliance on the internet has had a negative effect on the company, because anyone who has had a bad experience with the company, even if it is not necessarily newsworthy, it can be viewed my millions of people on a Web site. Another issue that Nike has faced is due the increase expectation that organizations needs to promote sustainability and environmentally friendly practices as well the increased trend toward globalization and outsourcing. Nike has come under serious fire throughout the past decade for the conditions in its factories abroad.

Overall, it is clear than no organization is immune from crises, although different types of organizations are more prone to certain types of crises. To prevent future damage that an organization may not be able to recover from it is essential that each organization surveys the crisis management landscape as relevant to their industry and business!