Communicating When Your Company Is Under Siege

Marion Pinsdorf (Author)

9780823217847

Paperback / softback, published 1 March 1999

171 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg

Pindsdorf has elevated thought and communications to appropriate prominence – and just in time.---—Sidney Harmon, CEO, Harman International ...offers sound, clear, sensible advice on how to recognize public relations problems and how to solve them...---—Larry Speakes, current senior vice president of the U.S. Postal Service When controversies and crises arise, business news coverage moves from the financial pages to the front page. Since its first edition (CH, Apr'87), Under Siege has been the best of the few books on this topic, giving executives practical strategies for explaining their activities while reminding them why public opinion matters and how journalists contribute to its formation. In this readable guide, Pinsdorf tells executives how to "speak to employees, public, and the press in intelligent lay language--not as a put-down, but as dialogue." To her extensive experience as a reporter and a corporate communications officer she adds extensive case histories illustrating the best and the worst of corporate and governmental communication during crises. This edition adds new chapters on the communication minefields of mergers, the delicate communication situation caused by a CEO's illness, and the critical task of communicating internally. The bibliography is not comprehensive, one serious omission being the 1994 landmark study The Headline vs. the Bottom Line: Mutual Distrust between Business and the News Media, by Mike Haggerty and Wallace Rasmussen. Also, errors in the names of organizations and people are distressing. Despite these caveats, this book is heartily recommend for business and journalism collections, upper-division undergraduate through professional. (—Choice) Cogent and timely. (—The New York Times)

Marion Pindsdorf's prescription to prevent a corporate disaster is: "when public health and safety are involved, tell it all and tell it fast." This book is a guide for companies large and small for surviving a public crisis. It is a battle tested guide written by a veteran public relations expert that is packed with information on working with the media during a corporate public crisis. Pindsdorf uses specific cases as examples of how to and how not to handle public relations during a crisis.