crisis communications

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes Do your teeth hurt? Imagine what it would be like to have severe dental pain that persisted for years and no hope of treatment… I’m seldom able to be public about crisis communications in which I’m involved. My column today is the happy exception. No harm will come from publicizing the […]

Reading time: About 2 minutes When the votes are counted in the BC transit plebiscite, I fear the answer is going to be a resounding no… A mail-in vote — a plebiscite — is being held now in Greater Vancouver, where I live. Citizens are voting on whether they’re willing to pay a 0.5 per cent

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes You’ve undoubtedly heard the expression ‘tempest in a teapot.’ Today I write about a crisis in a coffee cup. I’d missed the whole brouhaha over Starbucks’ ill-advised scheme to start a public discussion about race. Perhaps that’s because I’m Canadian and the program didn’t exist here. Or maybe it’s because I

Reading time: Less than 1 minute Universities need to learn that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away… Let’s talk about the issue of sexual assault on university campuses. Check out, for example, this story about Brown University, published yesterday in Bloomberg Business. Protesters said wrongly ending an investigation into sexual misconduct allegations because the accused student’s

Reading time: Less than 2 minutes There’s plenty of collateral damage from Jian Ghomeshi — an object lesson in crisis communications gone wrong… When I coach clients on how to prepare for crisis communications, I have one key message for them. It’s something my mother told me when I was a kid: Don’t guess. This may

Reading time: About 3 minutes I never thought I’d see the words crisis communications and Jian Ghomeshi in the same sentence. Now, they seem inseparable… If you don’t live in Canada, you might be unaware that Jian Ghomeshi was a media god in this country. He was host of the popular CBC radio program Q. He

Reading time: About 1 minute When things are going badly, many organizations want to act rapidly. But don’t make decisions too quickly…. Parents with “challenging” offspring learn one manoeuvre early on: they don’t dish out consequences too quickly. That’s because they know that if they have to retract or change their minds, they’ll lose face with their children.

Reading time: About 2 minutes No one wants to communicate bad news. But what happens when your leader gets sick?… When Toronto mayor Rob Ford recently revealed he had cancer, he did more than change the face of the upcoming Oct. 27/14 Toronto mayoral race. He also changed the rules for politicians and company leaders reporting their own illness. Now, everyone

Reading time: About 1 minute Kris Bulcroft doesn’t look as harsh as her sculpture suggests. But she doesn’t behave with the authority of a really smart leader either… Here’s a basic rule about leadership: If you have thin skin, stay out of the business. Kris Bulcroft, president and vice-chancellor of Capilano University in North Vancouver, doesn’t

Reading time: About 2 minutes What can a labour dispute teach you about communications? Quite a lot if you look at the current BC teachers’ strike as an example. A series of rotating strikes by teachers and a partial lockout by the employer (the provincial government) is crippling the school system in BC right now. It’s