Real People Real Crisis - Softcover

Steve Wilson learned about crisis management the hard way shortly after graduating from high school. He was working on a farm in Rush County, Indiana, when he managed to wreck the boss's tractor and found himself unemployed and forced to find a new line of work. His job search ended when he found an opening for a reporter at a weekly newspaper near Indianapolis. The job didn't pay much, it had long hours, but it sounded interesting and there were no tractors involved.

That was the launch of a career in journalism that later took him to Vietnam where he served as an Army combat correspondent and later to the campaign trails of American politics. He served as a political reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer and won one of the nation's top awards for business and economic reporting while a reporter for Gannett News Service. He later joined the staff of USA Today and was chief of its Chicago news bureau.

He eventually traded in his press card for a career in public relations and in 1987, launched Wilson Group Communications, a consulting firm specializing solely in crisis management communications and media training.

His consulting work has taken him to nearly every U.S. state, as well as Canada and Mexico. Each year, he conducts more than 100 workshops and seminars across the U.S. and has lectured on crisis management at various universities and professional associations. He's authored scores of articles on crisis management and media response training for magazines and newspapers and has been interviewed as a crisis management specialist for publications ranging from Modern Healthcare to The Wall Street Journal.

Not all crises are created equally. Some are a lot worse than others.

Some strike out of the blue, with little or no warning whatsoever. They explode. They burn. They can injure and even kill. They have short fuses and they burn quickly.

Some crises are slower burning. They can be that contaminated product you learned about this morning, the layoff announcement planned for next week or the potential class-action lawsuit that might be filed within the next few days.

In planning on how you might deal with crises, you first need to run an inventory of the potential crises that could impact you and your organization.

What could go wrong? What could happen? How would you react to it?

Those are the first questions you should ask yourself as you begin the task of how you would deal with a crisis situation.

Most people don't.