Martin Langford - Managing Director, Kissmann Langford
Crisis management: how the ground rules have changed
Many of us have been through the experience. The adrenalin rush that is triggered by a phone call on a Friday afternoon, with an agitated London-based client informing you that something is afoot in one of the subsidiary companies on the other side of the world that needs addressing NOW.
It appears that one of the global activist NGOs is lodging a complaint, claiming violation of the country’s laws and the company’s own code of conduct. The details are vague, and the extent to which this is damaging is unclear as well.
Of course, “now” is just before the weekend, when most of the client personnel who can explain what the ” something ” might be, and why this is important are gone. Yet your professional nouse tells you that this IS important: the country is one of the client’s strategic market, the business is one of their jewels, this is the second or third encounter with the activist NGO… and the company’s new code of conduct is both recently announced and one of the CEO’s reform platforms.
Reality is changing in a twinkling of an eye.
We instinctively know how long it takes a corporation to build a positive reputation with its stakeholders. We also know and often witness how a mismanaged crisis can not only ruin that reputation but even affect the very survival of the company.
Who would have anticipated that one of the world’s leading accounting firms would cease to exist only weeks after shredding documents in their Houston office? Or how one of the world’s leading private banks could be obliterated by the overzealous actions of one employee in distant Singapore? At what point did a leading healthcare company realise that the single day drop in share value of 30% was caused by the statement to the media of one disgruntled employee, in a far-off factory.