The Motorola Six Sigma Story – Birth of Six Sigma
No understanding of Six Sigma is complete without truly understanding where it came from – Motorola. The backdrop of the story shows how Six Sigma implementations changed the way Multi-National Corporations conducted operations worldwide. It started in 1981. Motorola like most American companies was reeling under the threat of Japanese competition. Recovering from World War-2, […]
What is Due Diligence, Why it is Important, and How it Works and, What it Does ?
What is Due Diligence? Many of us would have heard the term Due Diligence in various contexts and situations where one party to a transaction often tells the other to do their due diligence or states that it is considering the same. Indeed, as anyone who has negotiated an employment contract or a legal drafting […]
How Much Should the Government Help Struggling Businesses in Times of Crises
What the Proponents of Governmental Bailouts Have to Say about Bailing Out Businesses The ongoing economic and financial crisis due to the Covid 19 outbreak has reopened the debate about how far and how much the government help businesses struggling due to the crisis. Indeed, this was the same debate that erupted during the Great […]
Organizations Gain from Embracing Business Process Improvements
Business in present times is very challenging and dynamic. The nature of markets, life cycle of products and services as well as the Customers and their expectations have changed. So has competition. No business can survive this change unless and until they re-invent themselves and equip themselves to face competition. While some Organizations build their […]
New Emerging Markets: Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey (MINTs)
Global capital is always on the search of the next profitable opportunity and this is the reason why the BRICs or the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, and China found favor as emerging markets in the last two decades. As these economies began to sag and saturate, the restless investors began looking for the next […]
When we talk about Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan for any business or organization, we need to necessarily plan for Crisis management too. Though the objectives of all these plans might vary, they are all interlinked, interdependent and mutually inclusive.
In large scale business organizations as well as high technology organizations with large operations, managements invest resources and management time in building all these plans.
The effectiveness of these plans lie both in detailed planning as well as ensuring drills and mock sessions from time to time so as to keep all the teams engaged and aware of what is to be done in case of a disaster or a crisis.
Crisis management is also a part of Disaster management. When any disaster either man made or natural strikes the business operations paralyzing the normal operations, threatening the business, involving destruction of property, resources, lives etc, the Organization is faced with a crisis.
It is one matter that the Disaster recovery teams will start action as per their plan and work towards getting the business back to its normalcy, but there is a need for a crisis team involving the management to be activated at such situations.
The crisis team comprising of senior management and functional heads quickly gather together to form a team to oversee, co-ordinate and facilitate the disaster recovery and other plans.
Crisis management involves managing and facilitating decision making, authorizing and providing financial resources, facilitating co-ordination and support from external agencies, facilitating and overseeing medical and other facilities for the staff and employees if need be coupled with reviewing security and taking adequate measures for enhancing the security around the site.
More importantly the crises team involving senior management will need to deal with media, govt agencies, insurance as well as with families and relatives of employees as well as the public and manage communications on behalf of the Company.
Managing media and providing the right information is of vital importance to the Company’s reputation during any crisis for, the information provided can adversely affect the Company’s share prices as well as the markets.
It is the crises team that holds the executive authority to take decisions of all nature including financial decisions to ensure that the crisis is managed and recovery is underway without glitches.
In terms of executive authority and powers to ensure smooth and fast recovery, as well as in terms of managing the media and information, the Crisis team holds the highest responsibility in the Organizations during any disaster or crisis. The selection and inclusion of the members to the Crisis management committee is very important and should involve senior board members as well as functional heads and senior managers from all functions.
In practical world, businesses do anticipate business risks and build continuity plans to arrest the damage. However disasters like terrorist attacks or major fire, flooding etc can impact the business operations so heavily that the disaster recovery plans may not be adequate in the event and would warrant planning and action on a different scale involving external agencies and help. Crisis team in such situations becomes the major fulcrum around which the entire disaster management recovery and management can take place.
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