Masters of Disaster Book Summary - Masters of Disaster Book explained in key points

Masters of Disaster summary

Name: Masters of Disaster
Author: Christopher Lehane, Mark Fabiani and Bill Guttentag

Christopher Lehane, Mark Fabiani and Bill Guttentag

The Ten Commandments of Damage Control

13 mins

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Success Promotion

Table of Contents

Masters of Disaster
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? Learn how to overcome crisis and scandal.

Turn on your TV, open a newspaper or check your news feed, and you will probably find out about someone under serious pressure: a politician in a compromising situation with a lover, a multinational evading taxes, or a professional athlete accepting bribes. In short, crises and scandals hit everyday.

The constant nature of these scandals and their severity could deter you from striving for power and influence; some would instead wish for a quiet life, devoid of the risks of fame, yet also of the excitement of it.

But don’t let that fear deter you. These blinks will show you how to be resilient to crisis, based on the experiences of some of the top disaster managers in the world.

In these blinks you will learn

why Rupert Murdoch’s staff turned against him;
why the German football manager sent himself for a drug’s test; and
why no one manages a crisis better than Hillary Clinton.

Publicized crises are increasingly common in modern society.

When you hear the word crisis, what springs to mind? A plane crash? A bank collapse? Yet a crisis could be less overt, but equally troublesome: an organization’s security protocol could be breached or a high profile figure could be misquoted on an important issue.

If we think about crises this way, we can see that they happen every single day. Today, several social and technological developments have unfortunately made crises the “normal state of nature.” In our information age, virtually everyone with a smartphone can break news. Every stray comment and poor decision can immediately be shared across the world at lightning speed.

Say a risque joke at the office party and within minutes it’s viral across the company. A businessman criticizes his staff to a journalist, and in no time at all, it’s plastered all over the news feeds of his employees, shareholders and customers.

In this way, the news we receive and share via social media tends to be selective and biased. Simply through the sheer wealth of different sources of information online (social media, news sites, blogs etc.), it is increasingly easy to find news to fit your existing 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’s been done. In the next blinks, you’ll learn how.

You can’t escape a crisis by hiding or spinning information or by blaming someone else.

While crises have become increasingly frequent and publicized, we still aren’t that good at combating them.

When a crisis breaks out, the first mistake we often make is responding too hastily and releasing inaccurate information. For example, in 2011, Congressman Anthony Weiner was accused of “sexting” six women, though he was married.

Avert a crisis by planning ahead, acting calmly and thinking long-term.

Get ahead of the game to manage a crisis: if you are prepared for the worst, you can improve outcomes even after a major blow to your reputation.

Think about potential crises and develop strategies to combat them: with which audience do you need to repair trust? For example, a professional sports franchise should be prepared to respond to a fight in which a rival fan is badly injured. Or, a non-profit organization should be prepared to reassure donors following accusations of embezzlement.

Recover from a crisis by being honest and presenting a solution.

How can you restore people’s trust in you after a crisis jeopardizes it? Do you provide people full disclosure? What if the truth is embarrassing or confusing? No matter what, you must remain completely honest and accurate.

In 1992 nine people died from Tylenol pills that had been laced with cyanide. The producer of Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, told the public immediately what little they knew about the situation, and admitted that they couldn’t answer many important questions.

Limit a crisis by sticking to your bottom line and cooperating with authorities.

Say you’ve made an honest statement about your crisis and presented your solution to the public. If you want to keep the situation under control, there are two things you’ve got to do.

First, stick to the bottom line: a statement you can maintain with certainty over the crisis’ whole course. For example, Maple Leaf Foods, which was found to have released life-threatening bacteria-contaminated products into the market in 2008, responded, “Our actions are guided by putting public health first.” It was a bottom line they could commit to as they rode their crisis out.

Let others take the spotlight, as you get out from under it.

When a crisis happens, there is one place you simply don’t want to be: the spotlight. How can you shift the focus of a scandal away from yourself?

First, let the issue become bigger than you. There may be others involved who are likely to play a greater role in the crisis. A whole system might even be brought into question, while you’re perceived as just a tiny part of a systematic breakdown.

Defend yourself against unfair attacks and expose the opposing party’s motives.

What if you come under fire due to accusations that just aren’t true? Simply sticking your head in the ground like an ostrich and waiting for the storm to pass by might not be enough. Instead, you should expose those who brought the crisis into being and shine a light on their self-interested motives.

In a crisis there are always the subjects of the crisis and those who benefit from it. For example, in the 2004 US presidential election Senator Kerry made his military career in Vietnam as a commander of a Navy Swift boat a core aspect of his campaign. Shortly before the elections an allegedly independent group of Vietnam veterans calling themselves “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” published several ads and a best-selling book questioning Kerry’s honesty and integrity.

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What is Masters of Disaster about?

Masters of Disaster takes you on a journey through a crisis that characterizes today’s information age. Drawing on damage control operations, the authors have developed the ten commandments to help any politician, celebrity or company avoid scandal and a tarnished reputation.

Best quote from Masters of Disaster

Fact: According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in information from self-selected social media sites reached 75 percent.

—Christopher Lehane, Mark Fabiani and Bill Guttentag

Who should read Masters of Disaster?

Anyone in a public-facing role
Anyone whose work depends on the audience’s trust
Anyone who hopes to one day become an elected official

About the Author

Bill Guttentag is an Oscar winning director of numerous programs for TV networks including ABC and HBO, and documentaries including Nanking and Soundtrack. He is also a lecturer at the Graduate School of Stanford University.

Christopher Lehane and Mark Fabiani are damage control experts who have worked for various high-level individuals and companies, including Bill Clinton. They both graduated from Harvard Law School and specialize in the art of damage control.

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