Раскрытые топики к ГОСу по Английскому / 16 eng

16. What types of crisis do you know? Give some examples of how to handle with crisis.

The main crises facing companies today is that loss of reputation or damage it. It refers to damaging share price and public confidence.

To save it companies invest in reputation and can make planned withdrawals and other measures, because it costs huge amount of money to retain the reputation that you’ve lost. So Johnson&Johnson, the American company, had a major crisis with one of their headache pills, which was called Tynenol. They had noticed that there was a poison in one or two their Tynenol tablets and without questions they withdrew every single one. They weren’t sure, there might be, however, they told that there might be a problem and their reputation and share price didn’t suffer. And so the main aspect in dealing with a crisis is to understand what’s going on around you and continue dialogue with company’s stakeholders. Admit mistake quickly, tell the public, tell stakeholders what went wrong, tell them what you are doing about it and keep communicating.

But also there are many examples of poorly-handled crises. Shell, for instance, refused to take apart their oil-well in the see, but company was forced by Greenpeace and by public opinion to do it and of cause their reputation was damaged. The other example of bad dealing with crises is handling the situation of disaster of Trans World Airlines’ Jet. Such tragedy as loss of Swissair’s flight had several similarities with that, but two disasters provoked sharply different reactions. The TWA did some mistakes: at first process of determining victims of disaster took almost a full day. Parallel to this Swissair’s passenger manifest was issued within the hours. Swissair set up fully-functioning hotlines, but calls to TWA’s toll-free telephone number went unanswered, and the flow of information was inadequate. Also insufficient attention was paid to relatives’ travel and accommodation needs. One factor that worked at Swissair’s favour was legislation passé by Congress requiring airline to be much more responsive to the needs of victims family after crashes. Furthermore Swissair benefited from its code-sharing agreement with Delta Airlines, the third biggest US carrier, in contrast TWA – twice bankrupt, and now a relatively small carrier – was on its own. By that agreement, Delta treated the loss of flight as if it had been the loss of Delta aircraft, and deployed the full weight of resourced in the crises management efforts.

So we can see that Swissair was more ready to disaster than TWA. One obvious lesson from that example is that companies should rehearse for the worst to react right and immediately.