Leadership Exchange - Winter 2008

Tips for Damage Control

An Interview with Author Eric Dezenhall

BY NANCY GRUND

Much of the conventional wisdom about damage control and crisis public relations is self-serving, self-congratulatory, self-deceiving— and flat out wrong, according to Eric Dezenhall and John Weber, authors of Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management is Wrong (Portfolio, 2007). Eric Dezenhall is the founder and CEO of Dezenhall Resources, one of the nation’s leading crisis management firms. He represents many clients in industries such as consumer products, entertainment, law enforcement, health care, and pharmaceuticals. He shares with Leadership Exchange 10 tips for senior student affairs officers as they consider their roles in campus crisis management.

1. Establish realistic objectives. Avoid the myth that there are clever, cunning ways to turn bad situations into good ones. There is no easy way out of a crisis.

2. Crisis teams must be small. They must also be benevolent dictatorships, not democracies. A crisis team with too

many people is not a crisis team, it is a committee. Committees do not solve crises.

3. Have access to a decision-maker. Not all situations should be kicked up to senior management, but don’t place yourself in a position to get hung out to dry by senior management looking for someone else to take the fall.

4. Appeal to what people intuitively understand in times of crisis: Random tragedy is unavoidable.

Americans believe in acts of willful malfeasance easier than they believe in acts of God. It is an unfortunate reality that there is not a sure-fire way of preventing or predicting such tragedies. We can only reduce their impact.

5. Individuals who are not comfortable with the
media should not engage the media. Some individuals

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