This was actually a textbook for my crisis communication course at a large western university. The book is an invaluable primer in the characteristics of corporate crises and the step-by-step methods needed to successfully emerge. All companies should have this book and prepare themselves for what to do when a crisis hits!

I enjoyed reading this a year ago, and recently bought a copy as a gift. I remembered it as a "light" read, but it's really fairly long. The authors give you a memorable perspective on how there are completely different ways of viewing decisions - appeal to consensus; appeal to facts; appeal to authority, etc. You may take that for grant, but the book really brings this perspective alive and points out that modern-world decision making requires more complex approaches that ever before.

While this is not a book to be read for entertainment, it will certainly surprise and excite those who wish to better understand our every day decision making processes. I highly recommend it for those who need to think quickly and efficiently in business, or even for anyone who just wants to better understand their own decision making patterns for better or for worse. You'll need at least a couple of weeks to get through this one, and I would recommend reading it with a friend so you can discuss each chapter as you progress throuh the book.

This book examines the difficult task of formulating the structure of particularly complex, or wicked, problems. Wicked problems often do not have "right" or "wrong" solutions, and progress on one aspect of such a problem often leads to new problems on another aspect. By defining the multiple perspectives of stakeholders in these problem "messes", Mitroff and Linstone illustrate how one can begin to approach "solving" them in a reasonable fashion.

Mitroff and Kilmann offer an eye-opening and elegant means of typing scientific thinkers. This has import in that it clariefies the fact that there are a variety of types of scientists, indicating that there are alternate forms of science, rather than one.

They clearly present their concepts which I found exciting and a new way of conceiving others (and myself) within science.

I recommend this as both a good book to cognitively reorient those whose views of science have become stultified and as a means of providing new scientists with a respect for types other than those adhering to the fundamental hypotheticodeductive methodology of prominence.

While I agree that the media has its share of problems and is advertising driven and needs to be carefully analyzed, the arguments these two authors use are completely blown out of proportion. Everyone knows that you can't believe what you see on TV. As for the advertisements that permeate their way into programs - I don't see why the authors don't realize television wouldn't survive without clever advertising to keep the cash rolling in. As long as you can differentiate between reality and TV, you're fine, and this book will shed no new light on anything for you.

Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis are two academics heavily involved in the technological revolution. Their purpose in writing this book is to examine how technology, in what they call the "systems age," has created an all-consuming cocoon of unreality in our daily lives. They are not bashing technology, but examining how a lack of ethics has allowed technology to threaten the very nature of our system of government and of our lives. There are plenty of books available on media studies: Todd Gitlin, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and others; what makes this book different, at least in the eyes of the authors, is that it studies the underlying causes of the effects of television and mass media. This underlying effect is the creation of unreality, or a system that is so all consuming that it blocks out the real world.

The problem with an omnipresent unreality is that the real reality has not gone away. One of the reasons we create an unreality is that the real world is far too complex to understand. In the modern world, the interdependence of every aspect of global life has led to a complexity that is simply astonishing to behold. Not one human being on the face of the Earth can make heads or tails of events anymore. The result is fear on the part of humans, which leads to the creation of an alternate, unreal world where answers are easy and presented in a somewhat non-threatening way (I'm not sure this is right; the media loves to start panics). This alternate world has become so pervasive that it has become an actual industry, generating celebrities and images that people can relate to.

How celebrity is created and marketed is probably the best part of the book. The authors use charts and graphs to show how this process has become a huge industry employing thousands and thousands of people. The book also shows how the masses react to this celebrity, which in extreme cases, leads to the likes of Jonestown and Mark David Chapman. Celebrityhood is revealed to be a process of engineering; people are "remade" to fit personalities and molds demanded by the public (or is it really demanded by the public? Perhaps the demand is created.).

Other sections show how media uses archetypes from the human psyche to create shows, how heroes are generated in a society that lacks, or at least ignores, real heroes, and boundary warping, or how reality and unreality is actually defined.

This is a good book, although it is somewhat dated. Even the 1993 update makes this book pre-Internet, a new technology that would no doubt interest the authors. One of the charts uses characters from "Dynasty" as examples, and the reliance on Sigmund Freud shows that the authors are not aware that most psychologists view Freud as a quack. I think this is a necessary read, at least for those who are interested in media studies and the like. It does tend to get a little esoteric at times, which is not surprising as the two authors are engineers who are probably not used to writing directly to the masses. Recommended.

I was literally blown away by this remarkable book and its well-argued and carefully documented thesis regarding the ways in which contemporary Americans are victimized and manipulated into a kind of strange, conjured, and artificial perspective of the world around them through the rise and active ministrations of the "unreality industry". Here is an eye-opening expose on the specific ways in which we are being influenced, entertained, and carefully manipulated even as we strive to learn more about the world around us. Reading this remarkable book helped me to better understand the ways in which the rise of the electronic media to a position of prominence (if not complete domination) of the promulgation, interpretation, and dissemination of information has profoundly changed the way we have come to view, interpret and understand the world around us.

The authors carefully describe, articulate and identify those characteristics of the media that cause many of us such vague unease regarding the way the media increasingly seems to focus on provocative, entertaining and diverting news stories which often are of only tangential import to us as citizens or individuals. We're subjected to obligatory overdoses on petty, arcane and distracting stores about Michael Jackson, OJ Simpson, Susan Smith, Bill Clinton's cigar fetishes, and the vagaries of the stock market, while vital and critical issues of importance and relevance to us as individuals or as citizens are systematically ignored. According to Mitroff and Bennis, everything about the way the news programs are organized and presented leads us to increasingly view the news more as a vehicle for entertainment than as a method of informing ourselves to be involved citizens, so we come to expect ever-greater levels of stimulation and excitement by virtue of this stylized approach to what is important enough to report and present over the airwaves. Slowly we come to forget the critical differences between entertainment and information.

For the authors, as for an increasingly alarmed number of academics and social critics, the basic dialectic at hand revolves between objective and discernable "reality", on the on hand, and this artificially-generated, diverting, entertaining, but basically incorrect version of it called "unreality", a dialectic which more and more favors the organized collective forces of the media, who present such entertaining and stylized notions of what is relevant, cogent and important for us to pay attention to is not necessarily as accurate or as objectively disinterested as it may seem to be on the surface. We would do well to remember that the outcome of this struggle to correctly understand the world and how it operates is of desperate importance, and our eagerness to be entertained and diverted from the most egregious and disagreeable aspects of the modern environment must not allowed to become an addiction to fantasy, growing ignorance, and critical stupidity.

About the first 1/3 of this book is a good, if brief introduction to systems-based problem-solving. The book focuses on taking a broad view of all aspects of the problem, not on a highly-analytical breaking-down of a situation. This is fine, though not earth-shatteringly good or original. Unfortunately, the middle half of the book is an unfocused meandering about the contributions of Hollywood to violence in society, and then to the problems faced in managing nuclear weapons. The last part of the book has a fairly good discussion of the four basic Jungian personality types, and how personality type affects problem-solving. This is pretty good stuff, but it is about the length of a magazine article. Not a worthless book, but not a particularly good value for your money.

In this book, Ian Mitroff attacks problem-solving by defining the first step: asking the right questions. He shows you how to use critical thinking skills to find the right problems, frame them correctly and implement appropriate solutions to solve or resolve them.

This book is thoughtful and well-organized, just as you might hope it would be since it teaches critical thinking. It is also well-written and well-illustrated, featuring numerous diagrams that illuminate better ways of thinking. Mitroff includes examples of well-known companies which have made major mistakes that cost millions of dollars because they failed to recognize the right problem in time. He also gives examples of companies that succeeded through improved critical thinking and problem identification. We [...] recommend this interesting book to all business problem-solvers.

Mitroff's book offers a refreshingly fast walkthrough of the complexity of problem-solving. Scorning the usual breathless introductions about how fast things change, Mitroff focuses hard on 5 ways we confound ourselves when trying to address problems with ourselves or with others. I found the first two sections, on how to formulate problems, and how we choose (the wrong) stakeholders highly illuminating. The exercises were significantly difficult and useful, because they required real-life application, they did not simulate it. A limited amount of philosophy on aspects of cognitive science and psychology made the work feel as grounded in academia as it feels in business and professional contexts.

Another good volume in the never-ending monday morning quarterback look at other companies' crises. This book, however, does not deliver on its promise of helping business manangers anticipate or prevent crisis...there are only a few hundred words of abstract advice on this topic. Most of the book is a rehash of publicly-known crises that the author then explains to us after the fact. There is little information to help managers actually find internal or external trouble spots and respond preemptively, other than vignettes about actions a company might have done differently...the old monday morning crisis prevention.

Managing Crises has helpful checklists of things to consider and the author's Rules for dealing with crises but it is short on convincing analysis. For example, one Rule is that all crises "send out a repeated trail of early warning signals." This is probably true in many, if not most cases, but the author fails to provide a convincing analysis that it is true for all or almost all cases. The Tylenol crisis is the books primary example, but the book fails to analyze what the early warning signals were for the Tylenol crises that the manufacturer failed to detect and act on. The book is higher on salesmanship (promoting the author's business?) than on substance.

Mitroff (with Anagnos) explains "what every executive and manager needs to know about crisis management." He correctly asserts that crises occur because "a significant amount of the overall system fails. Thus, CM is inherently the process of seeing and dealing with larger, whole systems." Moreover, "The basic or most central problem is that [because it goes sharply against the grain of of current management thought and practice] it requires cultural acceptance, and unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, major cultural transformation." The material is organized as follows:

Chapter One: Why Crises Are an Inevitable and Permanent Feature of Modern Societies

Chapter Two: The Failure of Success: The Tylenol Poisonings, Crisis Management's "Ancient History"

Chapter Three: A Best Practice Model: A General Framework for Crisis Management

Chapter Four: Should We Tell the Truth? The Varieties of Truth and Telling the Truth

Chapter Five: Assuming Responsibility: Victim or Villain?

Chapter Six: Detecting Weak Signals: Making Sure That You Are the First to Get the Worst News!

Chapter Seven: Thinking Far Outside of the Boxes

Chapter Eight: Treating the Big Picture

Chapter Nine: Crisis Management 2002: The Challenges Ahead

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu asserts that every battle is won or lost before it is fought. Hence the great importance Mitroff assigns to anticipation and preparation. I think his book would have even greater value if read in combination with Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View. Given the importance of this subject to any organization (regardless of its size or nature), I also recommend Steven Fink's Crisis Management.

When concluding his book, Mitroff offers these suggestions: "Start by designing and implementing signal detection [ie early warning] mechanisms throughout your organization. Start by amplifying the signals that already exist in your organization of impending crises. In many cases, the databases that indicate signals of impending crises may already exist, but they need to be reconceptualized to show their relationship to CM." Sound advice. But ultimately, even the most comprehensive and sophisticated CM system cannot predict or suggest, much less prevent, every crisis. Once a crisis occurs, one of the most important questions Mitroff answers is "Now what?" That answer alone is well-worth the cost of this important book.