Strategic Corporate Crisis Management
Building an Unconquerable Organization
Strategic Corporate Crisis Management: Building an Unconquerable Organization (Routledge, 2022) challenges the idea that a central crisis team can swoop in and save the day. Drawing on two decades in security and crisis leadership, Brendan Monahan makes the case for decentralizing crisis response — building readiness, leadership, and crisis competency across your organization, where it’s needed, when it’s needed.
Hardcover, paperback, and eBook · Routledge, 2022 · ISBN 978-1-032-10737-0
Frequently asked
- What is the book about?
- Strategic Corporate Crisis Management argues that a central crisis team cannot swoop in and save an organization when things go wrong. Drawing on two decades in security and crisis leadership, Brendan Monahan makes the case for decentralizing crisis response — building readiness, leadership, and crisis competency across the whole organization, so capability is present where and when a crisis actually lands.
- What is Integrated Crisis Management?
- Integrated Crisis Management is Monahan's framework for handling crises that do not fit a plan — wicked problems and creeping crises that build slowly or resist a single owner. It routes each situation by how much is known, matching the response to the conditions: delegate the clear, coordinate the complicated, orchestrate the complex, and take command only in genuine chaos.
- Who is the book for?
- It is written for executives, security and resilience leaders, and crisis and business continuity professionals — anyone accountable for how an organization holds together under pressure. Readers building crisis competency beyond a central team, or preparing for threats no playbook anticipates, will find a practical argument and an approach they can put to work.
- How is it different from traditional crisis management?
- Traditional crisis management concentrates authority in a command center and a central team. This book argues that model breaks the moment a crisis gets messy. Instead of tighter plans and stricter hierarchy, it builds readiness across the organization — on the edges and the front lines — so people can recognize and respond wherever the crisis appears.
What readers say
Crises are progressively becoming more complex, frequent, and severe. As a result, your crisis preparedness and response capabilities must adapt to the new landscape when there is only one chance to "get it right." Brendan Monahan provides Crisis Management 2.0 insights that go beyond traditional preparedness and response approaches. Strategic Corporate Crisis Management: Building the Unconquerable Organization is a well written and visionary guide for handing crises of the future.
This book serves as a cautionary message to public and private sector managers and leaders that crisis will continue to confront them, increasing in number and unfamiliarity. While public sector organizations such as fire and police departments have come to rely on the usefulness of an incident command type system and command post for managing an unfolding crisis or critical incident, it would serve them well to heed the principles and recommendations of this author. Monahan brings to the fore the criticality of public and private sector organizations being adaptive to ever changing circumstance and situations, developing competencies among organizational personnel and planning and preparations that should continue to evolve. It is beyond difficult if not impossible to plan and prepare for the type and nature of every crisis, however, the author provides thoughtful insight into how leaders and crisis team members can better serve their organizations with the goal of successful outcomes.
As a corporate security senior leader with close to 40 years of federal law enforcement, state government, and private sector security experience, I am excited to see this book from Brendan. From his time as an intelligence analyst, crisis management and business continuity professional, Brendan has developed unique insights on the emerging and complex global risk environment facing businesses today. This book will serve as a great introduction to the next generation of crisis management and business continuity leaders. It will also serve as a clear reminder to my peer/legacy security professionals on the variety, complexity, and impact from these new threats and challenges. As Brendan's book highlights, we should see such incidents/crisis as an opportunity for growth and betterment.
More about the author: about Brendan Monahan.