Introduction

Every year, businesses around the world are thrown into crisis because they suffer the impact of a severe, unexpected event. Many of these, such as shipping accidents, train crashes, chemical leaks, sudden financial collapses or terrorist attacks, hit the headlines and become high-profile disasters. For the management of these businesses, having a prepared plan to respond is critical and is likely to be the single most important factor in minimizing long-term damage to the organization. The right response is especially important today considering that organizations operate in a global goldfish bowl ; the globalization of news networks and advances in communication technology means that any disaster will soon become common knowledge around the world.

Crisis management has different drivers in different industries. In some, such as oil and gas, crises represent a very major and repetitive threat to normal activity. Here, management has become highly attuned to crisis management as a fact of life. In others, such as the financial services sector, crisis management as a subset of risk management has been driven more by regulation and recent upsets to global institutions caused by rogue traders, currency devaluations and economic upheavals. Crisis management will inevitably differ in strategy and implementation according to industry sector, and the particular significance of a crisis at a given time will depend partly on the nature of that industry.

Business continuity planning has been a management issue for at least the last twenty years. But crisis management should not be confused with disaster...