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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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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.

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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?

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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?

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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?

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ARTICLES and PAPERS
Interpreting Resiliency
In yesterday's post on Freight Transportations Systems Resilience I mentioned Kelly Pitera and her M[...]
Six levels of risk management
In spite of all efforts to design safer systems, we still witness severe, large-scale accidents. A b[...]
BOOKS and BOOK CHAPTERS
Book Review: Reputation Risk
Reputation. Not only is it practically impossible to measure, its value is also frequently underesti[...]
Book Review: Managing Risk and Security
One of my readers suggested this book to me via  a comment on my supply chain literature list pages[...]
REPORTS and WHITEPAPERS
Global Risks 2012
Are economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization? Should we s[...]
Future Value Chain Trends 2020
The twelve future trends that will shape value chains and supply chain management during this decade[...]
from HERE and THERE
If the UK goes cold, blame me
Still thinking about my recent post on the importance of security of supply, I first added salt and [...]
INSTR 2012 - Call for papers
This is a conference that you shouldn't miss if transport reliability and vulnerability is what inte[...]