Your Plan is Your Parachute: A Simplified Guide to Business Continuity and Crisis Management

By Jacques R. Island

Myriad crises can affect your business-from natural disasters to human-caused ones, like product sabotage, lawsuits, a pandemic or other health crisis, or terrorism. Your business' survival and successful recovery depends on your continuity plan.

Changes are that your business will face at least one disruptive or potentially crippling even

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quest Publishing
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780976941637

Jacques R. Island

Jacques Island has spent his working life with various U.S. Government agencies dealing with crises. After military service in Vietnam and Germany he was recruited into the U.S. Foreign Service as a counterintelligence/counter-terrorism agent-operative protecting U.S. embassies, dignitaries and diplomats on missions around the world, and foreign dignitaries on state visits to the U.S. He was awarded a U.S. Department of State Meritorious Honor Service medal for his role in organizing and executing the ground and air evacuation of U.S. embassy personnel from Nicaragua amidst chaotic civil war fighting. Crisis management was also a large part of Jacques' work during his 20-year career as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During his tenure with the F.B.I. he worked major frauds, product tampering and piracy crimes that affected the solvency of victim companies, and dealt with prison uprisings, aircraft hijackings, hostage takings, and terrorists from the left, the right and from abroad that threatened the interests of the United States. He was trained and certified by the F.B.I. as a crisis negotiator and spent most of his F.B.I. career on their crisis management teams. Upon retirement from the F.B.I. in 2002, Jacques turned his attention to the private sector as a risk/crisis management consultant to companies, large and small. This book is one more step in his efforts to help businesses reach greater crisis management awareness and preparation before they are hit by a ruinous event.

Book preview

P A R T

I

Fundamentals

This section introduces the topic of Business Continuity Management and provides a primer so the process section that follows—the creation of the actual plan’s components—will make better sense.

C H A P T E R

1

How Resilient Is Your Business?

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

— Colin Powell

WAVES OF FRANTIC people rushed through the long-emptied lumber and food markets at the eleventh hour in the Summer of 2005. Many others heeded the New Orleans’ mayor’s orders to evacuate inland to higher ground as Hurricane Katrina aimed at The Big Easy.

But trying to move through roadways chocked with thousands of frantic drivers was easier said than done. And, with a 400-mile wide weather monster at their backs, once outside of the most dangerous part of the storm there was, still, a storm and no shelter from howling winds and rain.

New Orleans, a below-sea-level city in the delta of the mighty Mississippi, had kept the river banks at bay with levees constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers a century before. But the aging levees caused worry. Countless engineers and scientists had warned through the years of potential levee and dam failures.

The danger of living on a river delta has been on the minds of New Orleanians since the city was founded in 1718, but they trusted their ingenuity and levees, and they hoped the very slim chance of a direct hit by a major storm would not happen.

So it was that the much needed costly repairs to the area’s levies were always put off for another day in lieu of other more immediate community needs.

And then the improbable happened.

This hurricane was not the most violent as hurricanes go but what the winds didn’t wreck flood waters did. The storm’s heavy rains filled the lakes and marshes until weak levees gave way and submerged 80% of the city.

Katrina killed almost 2,000 people.

SO MUCH CAN AND DOES GO WRONG

U.S. fires and storms that followed Katrina have caused even more deaths and destruction. For example, Hurricane Sandy affected the East Coast in 2012, including New York and New Jersey, caused $75 billion in damages and cost 147 lives; Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed 107 and caused $125 billion in damages to Texas, Louisiana and Alabama; Hurricane Maria’s ferocious category five winds stripped Puerto Rico of its trees, houses and infrastructure in 2017, left the island without power for nearly a year, killed nearly 6,000, and caused about $100 billion in damages; and California’s wildfires since 2018 have killed at least 88 and have burned over $16 billion in property.

These are examples of U.S. natural disasters that normally give you hours if not days of notice. Given modern warning systems and communications, there may well be a lot you can do to weather a known, looming crisis.

Now imagine you are seated in your office concentrating on an urgent project when the floor beneath you suddenly and violently convulses and your papers are tossed off your desk by a heaving earth. You hear the straining pipes as walls and ceilings crack and you smell pulverized cement and plaster along with…what?...Gas!

You only have seconds to do the right thing provided you anticipated such an event in the first place. Unlike a hurricane, an earthquake gives practically no warning.

Will you be able to run outside quickly enough or know where inside you’ll have the best chance of survival?

What if you are visiting a client’s office on the 37th floor when the building begins a dizzying back and forth sway that topples books off the shelves? Or the fire alarms go off as you sense smoke? Did your host prepare for this?

Sudden disasters that give only moments to react can be, among others, a building fire, a failing structure like a bridge, an earthquake or a tsunami.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that originated off the coast of Sumatra killed 228,000 people! Many of the victims were foreign vacationers in Thailand, Indonesia and other nearby countries. More recent tsunamis have occurred in Japan, Chile, the Solomon Islands, British Colombia (Canada), Samoa, Sumatra, New Zealand, and Iceland.

Even if [a crisis] does not visit you early on, take heart in knowing that the time you spent preparing for the worst is not wasted; your business continuity preparations are also opportunities to fine-tune your truly essential business precesses, and identify company fat you can shed.

Coastal cities and low landmasses, like the Florida peninsula, are at increasing risk of going underwater as a result of a storm surge or a tsunami.

So far we’ve talked only about natural disasters. What about unnatural ones? The ones we humans cause by accident or design? There are plenty of those to consider for your plan.

In fact, businesses are as likely to face a crisis of the man-made kind: a deranged or vengeful gunman who sprays gunfire throughout your school, house of prayer, or workplace, or leaves a bomb in a shopping center or sports arena; an armed robbery that turns fatal to an employee or client; a disgruntled employee who sabotages your products and causes irreparable harm to people or your business.

School shootings are an example of what deranged young and not-so-young minds are capable of. These attacks are not new and they have become commonplace (almost monthly if not weekly) and increasingly deadly. Our children are no longer safe. They are now sought-after targets.

Terrorism also poses a larger threat with each passing year. The September 11th, 2001 destruction of New York’s Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (9/11) heralded a plague of well-funded, trans-national, fanatically murderous extremist religious groups like al-Qaeda (the Center) and ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).

They may seem to be defeated but they are sure to rear up again before they finally do die. As ISIL morphed out of a defeated al-Qaeda, so are ISIL’s remnants reconstituting into a new threat. What was an army concentrated in Syria is metastasizing throughout Africa and Europe as small, dispersed cells.

The world can expect to face more fascist and extreme religious terrorists from all branches, from abroad or from home-grown groups, at least into the near future.

These groups and others carry out spectacular acts of terrorism through organized, coordinated attack cells and through sympathetic lone wolves—disaffected, self-radicalized people.

Entirely domestic extremist groups also cause tremendous destruction to life and property within a country’s borders. The bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1995 that killed 168 people and injured hundreds is an example of U.S. domestic terrorism.

A small sampling of other domestic terror attacks against U.S. businesses and non-profits since then that merit mention are—

the anthrax poison letters mailed in 2001 to U.S. Congressmen in the Washington, D.C. area and to the National Inquirer (a publisher) in Florida that killed five persons and injured 17 was probably motivated by personal grudges held by the prime suspect, who committed suicide;

two ISIS-inspired terrorists that set off bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon killing four and injuring 280;

a white supremacist who attacked a Charleston, South Carolina church with gunfire and killed nine people in 2015;

a shooting attack at a Colorado Springs, Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic against its staff and patients in 2015 that resulted in three dead and nine wounded;

two self-radicalized Jihadists who in 2015 attacked the San Bernardino, California (government) Regional Center with gunfire, and killed 14 and injured 22;

a Jihad-inspired gunman who in 2016 attacked the Pulse nightclub, a gay locale in Florida, and killed 49 patrons and injured 53;

the 2017 vehicle ramming attack in Charlottesville, Virginia during a neo-Nazi demonstration in which a neo-Nazi group member intentionally drove into counter demonstrators, and killed one and injured 28;

another vehicle ramming in 2017 in New York City in which an ISIS-inspired terrorist drove a truck into cyclists, runners and pedestrians, and killed eight and injured 11;

a terrorist who in 2018 posted anti-Semitic comments opposing Jewish support for Central American immigrants, then rampaged a Pittsburg synagogue with gunfire that killed 11 and injured 7;

and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School attack in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 students and faculty and wounded 17 more.

This short list is but a smattering of the violence that is now commonplace in the U.S.

An example of domestic terrorism outside the U.S. is the Moscow Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis in the Russian Federation, in which about 40 Chechen separatists and 130 of the 850 hostages died in 2002.

A newer trend is for militants from the former Soviet Union’s southern republics, who previously fought against their own repressive regimes at home, to focus increasingly on the international scene. Over 8,000 such militants flocked to Syria and Iraq during this decade to fight U.S. and NATO troops. We can expect this to continue and to expand their activities beyond the Middle