Business Continuity and Crisis Management Consultants
Every brand with a social media account will eventually post something it regrets. Someone tweets from the wrong account. An ad lands badly. A product problem turns your comments section into a complaint line. Social media gaffes are not rare events. They are a cost of being in public. The gaffe rarely decides the outcome. …
4 Times Brands Recovered from Social Media Gaffes, and How to Handle YoursRead More
Executive misconduct is a crisis in which the person who would normally make the decisions may be the problem. That is what makes it different. Handle it with your crisis management process, an independent investigation, and decision rights that sit with people who don’t report to the person accused. Treat it as a routine HR …
Definition of a Crisis according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: a: an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending; especially : one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome b: a situation that has reached a critical phase. The instability and pressure inherent during a crisis situation invokes …
We’re excited to announce the addition of Jennifer Otremba to the Bryghtpath LLC consulting team! Jennifer joins us from Target Corporation where she most recently led Target’s Threat Assessment Team. She spent eleven years at Target, where she worked in progressively responsible positions in crisis management, corporate security, program management, and workplace violence threat assessment. …
We aren’t talking about side-bends or sit-ups here. This is a different type of New Year’s resolution and it’s about why you need to practice your incident and crisis response protocols through crisis exercises. Exercising means talking through or acting out a scenario that your plan is intended to handle. Exercising helps your team to …
Ring, ring. Hello? “Hi, this is Jane with the Wall Street Journal calling for comment on the recent incident caused by one of your executives. I’m on deadline.” Gulp. It’s time for some solid crisis communications response tactics. You are just learning that something even happened from this call. And they want you to comment …
Here is the scenario – your team is pretty well prepared for a disaster. You’ve done the drills, have the plans in place, and feel confident that executive leaders have your back. And then, a crisis hits and the pesky communications team comes in and tells you that you cannot share messages that you need …
Crisis Communications: Friend or Foe? (en dash replaced with a colon)Read More
In this episode of the Managing Uncertainty Podcast, Bryghtpath Principal Consultant and CEO Bryan Strawser talks about the first question that any potential client asks: Shouldn’t I have a plan for alien invasion??! That’s not really the question, of course. What gets asked is this: Shouldn’t I have a plan for X?! That situation could …
Managing Uncertainty Podcast: Episode #1 – Shouldn’t we have a plan for alien invasion?Read More
Bryghtpath Founder & CEO Bryan Strawser has been named a Humphrey Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota – Humphrey School of Public Affairs. The Humphrey Policy Fellows Program is one of the country’s most respected public affairs leadership programs for emerging and mid-career professionals. The nine-month program is unmatched in its diversity, interaction with public …
Bryghtpath CEO Bryan Strawser named a 2017 Humphrey Policy FellowRead More
Most business continuity leaders who can’t get funding don’t have a buy-in problem. They have a pitch problem. Their executives like them, call them first when something breaks, and still don’t fund the program, because nobody has ever put a decision in front of them they could say yes to. The reasons for that gap …
How to Sell Your Business Continuity Program to Senior ExecutivesRead More
Communication in a crisis is tough. Emotions run high, accurate information can be hard to find, and everyone wants to know everything immediately. When a crisis occurs the event itself is the first crisis to manage but the second is the communication around the event. Mishandling communication with the public extends the life of the …
In 2013, Target Corporation suffered an extensive, unanticipated, long-term disruption to one of its headquarters buildings in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The cause? A leak in the water line for an ice machine. In a 2014 article in the Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, Bryghtpath CEO Bryan Strawser, who was at Target before founding Bryghtpath, …
On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy came ashore in New Jersey as a massive, slow-moving storm with hurricane-force winds. At the time, before founding Bryghtpath, I was the Head of Global Crisis Management & Business Continuity at Target. In Sandy’s path that day lay nearly 200 of our stores, multiple distribution centers, and the two …
Resilient Communities Need Public/Private Partnerships to SurviveRead More
