chapter 9

Chapter nine is all about crisis management. To prevent a crisis from happening, or having a good response time to a certain crisis, every business whether it be a fortune 500 hundred or the mom and pop shop in small town needs to have good crisis management. Having good crisis management can keep your business thriving after said crisis and keep the company in good relations with the public and its clients. Crisis management is the the managing of outside influences on your company, no one can do that. It is the managing of response to the crisis. The practitioner needs to have a thorough understanding of three things,that one, the public and political environment in which the crisis occurs, two the culture and inner workings of the organization facing the crisis, and three, human nature. That is how will the persons and groups involved most likely react to the crisis itself, to attempts at alleviate it, and to various communications, events and activities. A crisis that has happened that we all know about is enron. Enron was lying to people about what they were doing with peoples money, and in turn Enron went bankrupt and lost a lot of people their jobs and their income. First of all, Enron could have prevented this whole scandal if they wouldn't have been sneaky about it in the first place. If they didn't even start lying to people about what they were doing, they wouldn't have to have had faced this crisis. Two, since they weren't being honest about what they were doing, their crisis management team probably had to work way more than if they would have been honest about it the whole time. I really don't know what their crisis management team could have done to ensure enron would still have a good reputation and would still be around, but since they didn't handle things well being to end, enron is no longer around as a company.

Chapter 10

Chapter ten talks all about standards, ethics, and values within the P.R. field. The very first sentence in the chapter is this, "Regulation of human conduct by standards rather than by brute force or basic biological drive is the definition of civilization." That if you are regulating human conduct by standards rather than by force, things will be more civilized. And that within that definition there are five factors when talking about regulation. Tradition, public opinion, law, morality, and ethics. These factors add up to the five standards for the regulation of human conduct. Big companies are just names on paper, and it is the people that run them. And that people do put their own conscience and moral judgement into their line of work. Depending on whoever is running things is going to determine what kind of moral your company will have. I think a case that one can look at and see that no ethical thought was put into what he was doing is the Bernie Madoff case. That he was stealing from people for many many years. His company was very successful, and he was already a very rich man, outside from his stealing from other people. Because of what he did, he is now in prison for the rest of his life, and from his thoughts and moral on the issue of stealing, he has cost people everything they have in their life. Companies themselves do not have moral or ethics. Its the people that are in charge that place their own moral and ethics into the company. And whatever you believe does come across in your work.

This chapter also talks about someone giving a gift to a company and if the company can accept it.In our society, gifts and favors are looked at as bribes to get better in with a person with authority. An example from my own life comes from whenever I played basketball in high school. We had a parent on the team that "donated" all new shoes to the varsity team. Well the next game his daughter all of a sudden was a started and played all the games for the rest of the season. That gift or "donation" was highly frowned upon because of the implications that it had.