Preparing for Evil
Summary of the reading
The article is designed to create some tools, in order to help managers to think about the crises in their companies before they happen. The writers created these tools based on data gathered over twenty years, and they explained two different types of companies : those that are prepared for the crisis, and develop plans to deal with many different cases of emergencies than they have faced before. The other type are those who prone to crisis, these companies have crisis plans based only on disasters that have really happened in the past.
The writers have data of 500 companies, this data has majority of companies who are crises prone, and minority of companies who are crises prepared. These companies who are prepared to crises had to deal with much less crises comparing to the companies who are in the crisis prone group. Also, the crisis prepared group show better long-life, 24% higher than the less prepared group. Also, the group of the prepared companies have much better financial performance, and they did better in the fortune corporate reputations survey.
The companies who are in the crises prepared group can put the misfortune into three different forms; The first form is natural accidents, such as earthquakes, he second one is normal accidents, based on technological failure. And the third is abnormal, or intentional, accidents such as bombings or kidnappings. The last form has grown very fast in the last decade, and very few managers in the survey believed such crises may happen to their businesses. This is exactly the ability to think the unthinkable before it happens.
The writers explain the tools to help these unthinkable thinking processes:
- Wheel of crises: this model is a spinning wheel, where we can add different crises. When spinning the wheel, different analyses are created which the manager then have to discus and deal with.
- Internal Assassins: To help loyal employees change their loyalty and make them destroy the company, we can make them role play as bad guys or internal assassins and will find it easier and legal to start seeing the company´s weak points through the eyes of enemies.
- Mixed Metaphors: if the managers look at threats more traditionally, and similar to another industry, they can give imaginations about possible but not yet recognized risks to the company.
- Spy Games: nowadays, some companies are using journalists of customers' experts in order to investigate the imaginary assaults, in order to make the employees and managers in the company react to theses assaults, as they are real.
Snow Brand Milk Products Co.
Story Summary
In the year 2000, in the west part of Japan, 15.000 people got poisoned with food after consuming dairy products made by Snow Brand. The problem was stated that there is some bacteria on one of Snow Brand's Osaka factory that processed milk. The bacteria concerned was located in a valve which it should be cleaned regularly. but the inspections of the plant condemned hygiene standards as being horrible.
The company at the beginning tried to downplay the incident, and it was trying to give the impression of being more concerned for its reputation in the market more than it was for the victims of the accident. The company tried to limit the extent of the product recall that it had to do. The public health center in Osaka city issued a recall order for two products. Snow company was reluctant to do. After the city responsible pressed the recall, the company barely agreed to the recall. But then requested that the recall order not be announced, but the city publicized both the recall and the request. The company was also trying to cover the information about the full nature of the accident. At the beginning, it claimed that the valve where the contamination was found was used rarely, but the reality that it was used almost daily. They also claimed that the area of contamination was tiny small, but investigation found it to be large enough to contaminate the line. Snow asked authorities not to issue official recall.
The public health center in Osaka city issued a recall order for two products. Snow company was not welcoming to do so. After the city responsible pressed the recall, the company barely agreed to the recall, but then requested that the recall order not be announced. The company was also trying to cover the information about the full nature of the accident. At the beginning, it claimed that the valve where the contamination was found was used rarely, but the reality that it was used almost daily. They also claimed that the area of contamination was tiny small, but investigation found it to be large enough to contaminate the line. Snow asked authorities not to issue official recall. At the end, the impression was that the poisoning was the end of a company full of corporate arrogance. The President of the company tried to win support, and finally he was admitted to hospital suffering from the stress of the accident. The end result was that he resigned with other seven managers.