Trainwrecks

Every year corporations and individuals stumble into crises that damage and sometimes destroy their reputations. These crises strike companies across the economy in sectors as diverse as banking, manufacturing, oil and gas, food processing, high technology, resource development and professional sport. What triggers these corporate disasters? How can a company minimize the risk that it will be hit with a crisis? If you land in a crisis, what’s the best way to practice damage control? In the event that your reputation implodes, what’s the path back to public acceptance? John Barr reaches into his thirty year career as one of North America’s leading crisis managers to answer the toughest questions about “the day every good executive worries about, or should.” His tough-love answers are required reading for executives of companies large and small who care about their reputations. Barr zeroes in on executive behavior (and misbehavior) in nine different corporate crises. Viewed up close, he warns, “crisis management is not a pretty picture.” TRAINWRECKS: How Corporate Reputations Collapse And Managements Try To Rebuild Them is no dry academic treatise. It is one of the first books on crisis management written from “inside the storm”, by an expert who was in “the war room” during the darkest days of major businesses. Successful executives, Barr argues, need to learn the rules of engagement in what he calls “The Mind Field” -- the dangerous and fast changing world of investigative journalism, NGO politics and the minefield of the Internet. Ignorance of these rules can be fatal, not just to corporate reputations but their very survival.