Crisis management
The subject I’d like to speak is crisis management. All we have own problems of different sort - it doesn’t matter, but it’s fact - we have problems. It is very important to solve the problem but it is also important not to let the problem become a crisis. When does it happen? There are some variants: when the situation gets out of control, when it is too difficult to find an efficient solution of the problem or we have no enough resources (just like money, time) to solve the problem. There are the main types of crisis: economic, financial, social, cultural and private crisis. But as the 35-th US President John Kennedy once said, “Crisis has two parts - the first is danger and the second is opportunity”.
Every company which wants to be successful has to deal with crisis efficiently, because of it the biggest companies have crisis management team, which is to try to predict the crisis, creates crisis management programme and practice making decisions under stress. But if the company is already in the crisis then the management has to do the following steps: to inform Top-level management and shareholders, to disclose the maximum of information and to find the causes of crisis. After the crisis the company has to analyse the action plan, to estimate the losses and to create new more effective crisis programme.
We have a brilliant example of efficient action plan in crisis situation - the cause of Aurora’s cruise. The engine problems were found on the ship before the departure and they could not be solved in a moment, - it was obvious. But the passengers were not angry, they even did not complain. It is result of good and efficient actions crisis managers. So, what did they do? Passengers were well informed about the situation, and they were offered a good compensation: a full refund of their money and a discount on their next journey. It seems the company lost a lot of money - may be, but also the company improved their public relationships and a lot of passengers said they would travel on this cruise in the future. So, as we saw, the crisis is not just a danger, - it is also opportunity.