Crisis Leadership

Concise read about the core tenets of crisis leadership. Dr. Klann breaks crisis leadership down into three principals: communication, clarity of vision/values, and caring. He further organizes his discussion according to three of the phases of incident management (preparedness, response, and recovery). Dr. Klann's efforts to distill the elements of crisis leadership to a small number of succinct elements are both effective and serve to make a complex phenomenon accessible. Further, the brief, direct style of the text is appropriate given the crisis context.

The title of this book suggests that successful crisis leadership in the military will be a strong theme, and it is via the U.S. Army. Dr. Klann does a nice job of using military lessons learned and translating those to the civilian context. The book focuses on corporate America (as opposed to crisis leadership in the community disaster context). I continue to look for more discussions set in a non-military context because I strongly feel that while the military is an excellent example of leading in crises, the community sector offers a number of excellent examples as well. Dr. Klann, however, does not hold the military over the reader's head. He skillfully includes examples from well-known military campaigns and quickly relates those the business world. From my perspective, that was much appreciated.