MissionMode Corporate Blog

ebrary - Natural disaster and extreme weather information center

We have located a valuable resource that we at MissionMode want to share with our readers. The National Disaster and Extreme Weather website is a searchable information center that provided public domain PDF documents from government websites.

The categories or topics now available are:  droughts, earthquakes, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, land/mud slides, lightning, medicine, tornados, tsunamis, volcanoes, wildfires and winter storms.

The material on this website is informative and educational for anyone -- business or individual -- facing one of these natural disasters, helping them to be prepared for the crisis resulting from the natural disaster in question.

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Business Continuity, not data breaches, among top concerns for tech firms

Through research based on SEC filing, Joan Goodchild has discovered that data security and breach prevention rank fairly low as a risk factor for most big technical firms.  This research examined the risk factors listed in the FY 2009 10-K SEC filings of the largest 100 US public technology companies.

Among security risk, natural disasters, wars, conflicts and terrorist attacks were identified by 55% of respondents as a risk concern and #16 on the list and much higher than breaches of technology security, privacy and theft, which was cited by 44% of the companies, making it 23rd on the list.

This was a surprising result since it had been thought that data security and breach prevention were the focus of risk management; but rather business continuity seems to be driving the majority of worries about natural disasters and conflicts risks.

Aftab Jamil, leader of the Technology Practice at BDO Seidman, the consulting firm that released this research, expresses this concern, "Can they get back on their feet relatively quickly?  If you are in the path of a hurricane or an oil pill, can you keep your business going?"

For more details on this business risk and crisis management research, read the full business continuity article.

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Flunking crisis management

As reported in JoongAng Daily, the statement, "The first rule in corporate risk management is thata those at the top are in charge.  Entrepreneurs are warned not to take the backseat and let the chief risk officer take command at times of crisis," proves to be true over and over.

An example of this rule is when then-CEO of Johnson and Johnson, James Burke, quickly responded with sincerity and urgency to the company's crisis when seven people died after bottle of Tylenol were found to be laced with cyanide. Their disaster recovery was successful with this approach.

An ineffective response by Exxon Chairman Lawrence Rawl to a company tanker's spill of millions of gallons of oil off the shores of Alaska proved shatter the company's image.

The second rule mentioned in this article is that risk management is all about honesty.  Again, Exxon broke this rule when they tried to dodge responsibility by finger-pointing at coastal guards and public officials.  Countering this approach, Ashland Oil in 1988 took full responsibility when one of their oil tanks collapsed and sent millions of gallons of diesel into the Ohio river.  This response afforded the company forgiveness and praise for a cool-headed management team.

Read the full crisis management article...

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