ABSTRACT
Business managers need to break out of the cycle of everyday planning and deal openly and directly with the subject of crisis. A large measure of the responsibility for urging reluctant managers to prepare for a darkening of their typically rosy outlook lies with the board of directors. Business must develop a theory of crisis management that will be of practical use to managers. Wartime physicians have developed a crisis management system that allocates scarce resources so that they will do the most good. Once crisis has been accepted as a normal-if less than pleasant-circumstance, the next step is to find commercial counterparts to the emergency treatments devised by medicine. In trying to understand how crises affect business organizations, it has been found useful to consider psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's studies of the terminally ill. There are today nine distinct types of business crises. Each has its own symptoms and treatment, and all have some common characteristics.
