Planning for Human Continuity

The passage on the left was written in the late 1980s after a series of disasters thrust the issue of corporate crisis management onto center stage. With the Exxon-Valdez spill, the Bhopal India chemical release, the Tylenol tamperings, and the space shuttle disaster, a new responsibility was added to the CEO’s job description: assuring stockholders, directors, employees, and customers that the company would survive a potentially business-ending crisis. Despite these high-profile events and additional crises over the remaining decades of the century, the fields of crisis management, emergency planning, and business continuity continued as they had, confined to their specialty…