Managing Outside Pressure: Strategies for Preventing Corporate Disasters (Language and Literacy (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

"The value of Managing Outside Pressure is that, not only is it a handbook on issues identification and issues management, but it provokes thoughts about the evolution into reputation management." --C.A.J. Herkstroter, Chairman of the Committee of Managing Directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies "We have learned a that a company needs to establish and promote a dialogue with all its stakeholders. In brief: you can only realize what you can communicate. Against this background, I find this book to be very helpful in identifying and assessing issues that have the potential to develop into corporate crises." --Jurgen Dorman, CEO of Hoechst Corporation "You dona t have to be a giant like Nike, Shell or Texaco to come unstuck as campaigners spotlight your real (or perceived) corporate weakness. Winter and Steger provide excellent advice on how to predict and manage external pressures. Remember, though, the real trick is to use such pressures to drive internal change." --John Elkington, Chairman, SustaiAbility; author, Cannibals with Forks: The triple bottom line of 21st century business "Brand and reputation are ever more important for value creation. Matthias Winter and Ulrich Steger launch a powerful new tool to manage reputation. It arms managers with a smart detector for potential public sparks or powder kegs. It offers options to keep them safely apart and rather design win--win solutions." --Claude Fussler, Vice--President for the Environment, Dow Europe

Managing Outside Pressure represents a careful and thorough treatment of a potentially highly volatile and emotive subject - that of outside environmental, health or social-related pressure issues on companies. Taking a holistic approach which looks at the issues from all sides, the book attempts to draw managers' attention to the potentially damaging effects that pressure can bring on companies caught in the middle of a campaign. The book helps managers to understand and forecast outside pressure issues, effectively determining which of the numerous demands of outside pressure groups need urgent, proactive attention and which may be treated reactively if the company considers them unjustified or exaggerated. This forecasting is accomplished with two checklists which help managers separate relatively non-urgent issues from potential public-relation disasters. Further, as Cornelius Herkstr?ter (Royal Dutch/Shell Group) states in his Forword, the purpose is also to help organisations "apply best practice all the time...(and)...move away from incidents-management to the building of relationships, from managing the most threatening outside pressures to establishing - in a proactive way - its corporate identity." There are a great variety of live examples and case studies throughout, including the experiences of such companies as ABB, Dow Chemical, Exxon, Hoechst, Mitsubishi, Monsanto, Nestl?, Novartis, Proctor & Gamble, Shell and many others.