Business Continuity and Crisis Management Consultants
Your CEO probably likes you. That is not the same as believing your program pays for itself. Two recent research studies about chief marketing officers explain this gap better than anything published in our own field, and they explain why executive buy-in for business continuity keeps eroding even when the relationship with leadership feels strong. …
Executive Buy-In for Business Continuity: Being Liked Is Not the Same as Being BelievedRead More
Hour three of a ransomware response. Someone on the call says what someone always says. “Didn’t we work through this in the spring?” They did. There was a tabletop in April that ran this exact scenario. The team reached a decision on the payment question, wrote down the criteria, and named who owned the call. …
Your Crisis Decision History Is a Single Point of FailureRead More
In March 2020, days into the first COVID-19 lockdowns, Harvard Business School put Professor Dutch Leonard on its Managing Through Crisis webcast to answer the question every executive was suddenly asking: how do you lead when nobody knows what to do? I recently went back and rewatched that conversation. Six years on, it is the …
Crisis Leadership When the Playbook Fails: Dutch Leonard’s Framework, Six Years LaterRead More
A McKinsey survey published this month found something I see in nearly every engagement: organizations will happily study the future, but they will not put their leaders inside it. The numbers are blunt. Fewer than a third of the executives McKinsey surveyed call their geopolitical risk management “mature.” A majority, 53 percent, say scenario planning …
Geopolitical Scenario Planning Is the Easy Part. Exercises Are Where Leaders Break.Read More
Most resilience programs don’t fail because the plans are wrong. They fail because the people running them make the work more complicated than it needs to be, and never tie it back to what the business actually cares about. Over the past years, I’ve watched multiple experienced, capable executives run resilience programs inside large, complex …
Jackie King, executive director of Ibec Global, recently argued that resilience is a profit issue, not just a risk issue (per Business Plus). She is right. And most boardrooms still do not act like it. Here is the claim, stated plainly. Resilience is a profit center. The work you fund to keep operating through disruption …
General Mills announced yesterday that most of its North American headquarters employees will be in the office four days a week starting September 8. The current return to office mandate is three. CEO Jeff Harmening tied the change directly to disappointing business performance. The implicit logic: if our people were in the office one more …
Four Days in the Office Won’t Fix a Product ProblemRead More
The cyberattack your organization planned for in 2024 is not the cyberattack you will face in 2026. That is not hyperbole. It is what the data shows, and it is what we see in the resilience and crisis work we do with clients across financial services, healthcare, technology, and critical infrastructure. The change is not …
