Blog Archives

Crisis? What crisis?

An “ordinary” contingency is not a crisis. An extraordinary contingency is a potential crisis. It is only when the ordinary contingency plans fail or when the ordinary contingency measures are not enough that we have potential crisis at our hands.

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags: , ,

Another volcanic ash cloud crisis?

Air travel disruption after the volcano eruption in Iceland – Consequences for Norwegian travellers and businesses in Norway is a report published by the Institute of Transport Economics and investigates what travellers and businesses did during the volcanic ash cloud crisis in 2010.

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags: ,

A crisis is NOT an opportunity

Many will probably have heard that When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. That is not true.

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags:

A typology of crises

What defines a crisis? Are there different types of crises? In this article, crises are classified according to how predictable and influenceable they are. This generates four types of crises: Conventional, Unexpected, Intractable and Fundamental crisis.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
Tags: , ,

Seconds From Disaster

Crises build up from an accumulation of day-to-day imperfections that are small and unnoticeable (almost) and which progressively make the organization more vulnerable to any potential threats. The Devil lies in the details of these small anomalies (hence the title) and not in the sudden onset of exceptional events.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
Tags: ,

Using social media in a crisis

Scandinavian Airlines launched its Facebook page the day before the volcanic ash cloud. Perfect! SAS goes a long way to show how to use social media in a crisis. Perhaps it doesn’t help that much but shows that they care.

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags: , , ,

Book Review: Heads in the sand

What is business continuity really? It is the social responsibility to survive that your business has vis-a-vis the community it is located in, the customers it serves and the suppliers that rely on it.

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Tags: , ,

Pyramidal thoughts

If you are a supply chain or logistics academic or researcher, looking for a new research strand or looking for a new theoretical approach to preparedness and recovery, then yes, this is it.

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
Tags: , , , ,

Managing supply chains in times of crisis

How do you prepare a supply chain for a crisis, and how do you manage a supply chain when the unexpected hits you?

Posted in ARTICLES and PAPERS
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Happy Holidelays!

We rarely see news flashes of truck drivers stuck in snow, or perishable goods that has to be scrapped. That is not news that sells. What does sell are passengers and people, but should they really count so much?

Posted in THIS and THAT
Tags: , , , , ,

Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management

The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go put of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this. Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them?

Posted in BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Tags: , , , , ,

ARTICLES and PAPERS
How to secure your supply chain - 4/7
My previous post was part three of a series based on the Swedish business continuity handbook titled[...]
Organisational Resilience
Organisational Resilience Literature. "What to read, and what not to read". That could be the popula[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Operations Rules
Operations Rules by David Simchi-Levi comes with an ambiguous title. You can read this two ways: 1) [...]
Book Review: The Resilient Enterprise
To me, this book by Yossi Sheffi was an eye-opener, not so much for it's academic value, but for it'[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
The UK Transport Network Resilience...and I
UK Transport Network Resilience
For a budding and even for a seasoned researcher, nothing is more rewarding than to have one's publi[...]
London Olympics and Business Continuity
Are UK businesses, and in particular London businesses, unprepared for the London Olympics in 2012? [...]
from HERE and THERE
Fastest path problems in dynamic transportation networks
This research essay and literature review investigates some of the gateways to path finding in stati[...]
Transportation reliability and vulnerability
This is a philosophical essay on transportation vulnerability, where three fields or subjects are br[...]