Crisis Communication

This is a course on how to maintain the trust and confidence of critical stakeholders when things go wrong. Effective crisis response is a competitive advantage and a critical attribute of leadership. Effective crisis response protects a company's reputation as well as its financial condition, operations, relations with key stakeholders, and strategic focus. This elective course focuses on the business decisions, management processes, and leadership skills necessary to anticipate, plan for, manage through, communicate about, and recover from crises affecting corporations and other complex organizations. In the first session students will be assigned research into a crisis recently in the news. The students may choose the corporation or organization that will be the subject of their research, as well as the particular crisis experienced by that organization. Students will be asked to report back on a number of issues relating to the crisis, including: the nature of the crisis, when it was discovered, the timeliness of the organization's response to the crisis, the nature of the response, the unintended consequences of the response, the effectiveness of the response, how individual constituencies were affected by the crisis and response, how the crisis was resolved, the student's assessment of what worked; what didn't; and how the organization might have been more effective in its response.