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The M3 Perspective of Crisis Management: Three Cases

All over the world, corporate scandals, big and small, affect our daily life. Since the beginning of the 21st century, major American corporations including WorldCom, Enron, Dynegy, Merk, Tyco, Lucent Technologies, Merrill Lynch, Global Crossing, and Health South were involved in corporate scandals. In Europe, accounting fraud and other criminal activities were uncovered at Switzerland¡¦s Adecco, the Netherlands¡¦ Ahold, and Parmalat, the Italian dairy concern whose owners defrauded investors of billions of dollars, including more than 1.5 billion US dollars from American investors.
Crisis management is often portrayed as reactive activity directed at problems, usually arising from human error, and already escalating. The development of a crisis is often indeterminate rather than fixed. Crisis management can mean quick actions that prevent a triggering event as it unfolds or delayed action that mops up after the triggering event has run it course.
In this paper, the proposed crisis management model is the M3 theory for managing multiple mistakes derived from Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr.¡¦s book, ¡§Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Organization.¡¨ In this book, Mittelstaedt addresses errors in preparation, execution, strategy, and culture. He emphasizes that firms need to build internal control systems that will trigger clear and actionable alarms before ¡§failure chains¡¨ accelerate beyond control. The process of Managing Multiple Mistakes (M3) can determine whether an organization ends up in a negative or positive light on the front page of a national newspaper. ¡§The concept of Managing Multiple mistakes," Mittelstaedt writes, ¡§is based on the observation that nearly all serious accidents, whether physical or business, are the result of more than one mistake. If we do not ¡¥break the chain¡¦ of mistakes early, the damage that is done, and its cost, will go up exponentially¡K until the situation is irreparable.¡¨

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0906106-133809
Date06 September 2006
CreatorsWang, Hui-Ping
ContributorsChin Tam Lee, Feng Lee Lin, Ming-Rea Kao
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0906106-133809
Rightsrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

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