ABSTRACT
No corporation is immune from crisis. In 1989 an average of 10 crises annually challenged the management of large American corporations (Mitroff, Pauchant, & Shivastava, 1989). Effective crisis management requires that organizations take a proactive stance to potentially dangerous situations, one that allows management to maximize its opportunities and minimize the dangers it confronts. However, most corporations today have yet to adopt an orientation that suggests something different than “the worst will not happen to us, the worst will happen to others” (cf. Mitroff et al., 1989; Wisenblit, 1989). This orientation suggests that at best corporate America is woefully unprepared for a major crisis—one that may face it sooner than planned.
