BUKD-J 510 Crisis Management
- 12 weeks
- 3.00 credits
- Prerequisite(s): Core 1
It is Tuesday morning. You are the Senior Director for Volkswagen cars and you have just come into your office at the corporate headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. You open an email from the Director of North American operations and see a story from the New York Times website with the title: “400,000 Volkswagen cars sold in America are designed to cheat one mission (pollution) tests. The U.S. Government demands answers.” What do you do now? If your company faced with devastating news would you be able to manage the crisis? Do you know how to respond to the problems, deal with the stakeholders, answer consumer and media questions and limit the damage to your company and its brand? Managing a business is complicated and challenging even when there is no major problems. But, when business organization faces a crisis the decisions made and the actions taken become much more complex. One wrong decision can mean millions of dollars in sales loss, long-term damage to the brand and an escalation of the problems. A series of incorrect decisions can lead to the failure of the entire company.
In the class, you will learn the skills and techniques to manage during a business crisis. The class will work with ‘real world’ business examples and learn the best methods to effectively deal with crisis situations. You will learn how to analyze the crisis, develop a strategy and formulate a plan. In addition, the class will teach you the best ways to use social media, communicate with customers, answer the difficult questions from the news media, and reduce the damage to your brand, along with techniques to minimize sales losses. During the course, Professor Davis will share his ‘real world’ experiences of helping companies through crisis situations along with providing students a framework to develop a crisis plan for their company.