The Crisis-Prone Society ― A Brief Guide to Managing the Beliefs That Drive Risk in Business

Our modern society is increasingly prone to all kinds of crises: corporate malfeasance, crime, 'death of the middle class,' dysfunctional politics, economic/financial, housing bubbles, environmental, chronic unemployment and underemployment, mass shootings, natural disasters, poor educational system, and terrorism. Worst of all, crises are no longer separate or distinct. Instead, they are highly interconnected. Individual crises interact in strange and unpredictable ways such that they not only reinforce, but actually contribute to one another. Any crisis is capable of setting off an uncontrolled chain reaction of other crises. This is why it is not enough to be prepared for one and only one type of situation.

The good news is that even if it is humanly impossible to prevent all crises, much has been learned from the field of Crisis Management that can help lower the chances and the ill effects of the next disaster. The Crisis Prone Society offers preventative measures that can be taken by business professionals and scholars alike to alleviate the growing potential for crises today. These measures are distilled by close analysis of our recent social history of disasters. Mitroff and Alpsalan use their twenty plus years of scholarly and professional knowledge to break down the calamities businesses and society face today.

Ian Mitroff is Senior Investigator in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, University of California - Berkeley, USA, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Health, St. Louis University, USA. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Southern California, USA, where he was Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business. Mitroff is regarded as one of the founders of the discipline of Crisis Management. He founded and directed the USC Center for Crisis Management. Known for his thinking and writing on a wide range of business and societal issues, Mitroff is the author of 28 previous books.

Can M. Alpaslan is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at California State University, Northridge, USA. His multidisciplinary research approach focuses on the causes, consequences, and the management of large scale crises. He is the author of Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega-Crises and Mega-Messes, (with Ian Mitroff).