Managing Corporate Communications in the Age of Restructuring, Crisis, and Litigation ― Revisiting Groupthink in the Boardroom

Corporate executives, lawyers, and board of directors suffer from groupthink when confronted with a crisis, restructuring or litigation, which results in a communications meltdown that hurts a company's number one asset—its reputation. This failure to understand how to communicate in distressed situations results in lost credibility and trust on a global basis in front of target audiences: customers, employees, vendors, business partners, the media, analysts covering the company, lenders, bankers, regulatory agencies, and elected officials. This book gives examples of corporations who failed to communicate in a crisis, litigation, or restructuring in this era of financial meltdowns. By analyzing real-life examples (Lehman Brothers, BP, Toyota, MGA/Mattel, etc.), it offers innovative solutions and communications strategies for decision makers to help avoid groupthink and keep good reputations intact. If you are a CEO, CFO, general counsel, board of director, or part of the C-suite, understanding how to communicate in a distressed situation is crucial. A public relations nightmare might be just around the corner. Be prepared!

David Silver is the chief executive officer of Silver Public Relations, a public relations and investor relations firm in Los Angeles focusing on crisis, litigation, and restructuring financial public relations for publicly traded companies and private corporations. He has counseled more than 1,000 national and global corporations and its boardroom executives in his 25 years as a financial public relations executive.His proprietary crisis and litigation communications audits are sought out by corporations as he focuses on the cause-and-effect of corporate crises. He has written for a number of newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the Daily Journal, has been profiled in the Leaders and Success page of Investor's Business Daily, and has been interviewed by CBS national news and other network news media as a crisis and litigation public relations expert.A well-known speaker on the topics of mergers and acquisitions and crisis and litigation public relations, Silver was the only public relations executive to be accredited by the State Bar of California to teach the class “Managing the Litigation PR Process: When Public Opinion Matters,” for hundreds of lawyers and general counsel at corporations in California. He was the 2009 chair of the Executive Committee for the Financial Communications Section of the Public Relations Society of America and was elected to the board of directors of the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI), Los Angeles chapter, for 2009-2010.