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1-Page Summary of Masters of Disaster
Overview
You’ll probably watch the news and read a newspaper to find out about someone who is under pressure. People in positions of power are often involved in scandals, such as politicians having affairs or companies evading taxes.
There are many scandals in the world today, and they can be very discouraging. Some people may want to avoid fame because of that reason. However, this passage will show you how to overcome those obstacles with the experiences of experts who have been through a lot of scandals themselves.
Here are some key points to remember about the fall of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, why a German football manager took a drug test, and how Hillary Clinton handles crises.
Big Idea #1: Publicized crises are increasingly common in modern society.
When you hear the word crisis, do you think of a plane crash or bank collapse? In reality, a crisis can be less obvious. For instance, an organization’s security protocol could be breached or someone could make a bad comment about something serious on social media. When we think about crises in this way, we see that they happen every single day. Several new technologies have unfortunately made it easier for people to spread news quickly and widely when things go wrong.
If you tell a joke at an office party, it will spread quickly. If a businessman criticizes his staff to a journalist, the news will be all over the Internet within minutes and everyone in the company will know about it.
People tend to share news that fits their beliefs. They also find more sources of information online, and therefore can easily find news that fits their own beliefs.
So, major crises can be created by people who naively think what they’ve heard is true and spread the false information online. Remember those claims that President Obama was not born in the USA? They were widely proliferated by Republicans and led to crisis-fed journalism, even though they were complete nonsense. Once misinformation goes public, it’s hard to restore one’s reputation. But it has been done before with some clever tricks. In the next few key points, you’ll learn how this has happened before and how you can do it too when your reputation is on the line.
Big Idea #2: You can’t escape a crisis by hiding or spinning information or by blaming someone else.
We’re often not that good at handling crises because we respond too quickly. For example, in 2011, Congressman Anthony Weiner was accused of “sexting” six women even though he was married.
When the scandal broke, Weiner immediately responded by denying it. Then he claimed that his Facebook account was hacked. In the end, he was proven to be guilty and had to resign from office. If instead of responding in a panic, he would have calmly provided accurate information about what happened, then maybe things wouldn’t have been so bad for him.
In a crisis, we tend to hide details or lie about them. However, hiding and lying will only make things worse in the long run.
For example, after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP tried to make it seem like everything was fine. However, when things didn’t turn out as expected and damage was done, people were angry with BP for not being honest about what happened. Also, if you try to shift blame onto others during a crisis situation, they will only fight back against you even more. This is what Rupert Murdoch learned when he blamed his employees for phone hacking at News of the World.
We’ve seen all the things we shouldn’t do during a crisis. Now let’s take a look at what we can do to avoid those mistakes.
