FOREWORD – MARTIN CADDICK, LLB MBA MBCI MIOR

It has to be admitted that most books about business continuity are dull. They shouldn’t be, because the context is the stuff of news headlines. Not only do disasters excite interest, but even the process of business continuity planning – and understanding what really matters to your business – is hardly tedious.

This book is an exception to the rule. It takes a series of case studies, familiar to us from news reports, and digs deeper into what went wrong. Where other books bore us with methodology and process, this book catches our interest; and in doing so, it brings out why business continuity and crisis management really do matter and just how all-pervasive the consequences of a disaster can be.

The scale of some of the examples, such as the Piper-Alpha disaster and Hurricane Katrina, demonstrates how important this subject is. Yet we seem doomed to repeat many of the mistakes. Had the lessons from Bhopal been applied by the West Fertiliser Company in Texas, the 2013 explosion could have been avoided.

I am constantly amazed by the number of executives who dismiss potential disasters as being too unlikely to consider, or who put off dealing with known risks because they have other things to worry about. This book is full of these people, and what happens in the case studies provides ample evidence to counter their complacency.

We live in a world where we are becoming increasingly interdependent thanks to ever-faster travel and communication. It is well-nigh impossible to foresee what combination of events might cause disaster next, nor what the range of consequences might be. The importance of being well prepared grows by the day.

The contributors to this book have taken the time and trouble to think about what lessons can be learnt from each case – not just the things that could be done better, but also things that were done well. With a little of the imagination a good business continuity or crisis manager needs, nearly all the lessons identified here can be applied in other contexts, making this a useful book for such professionals.

The nature of this subject means that we spend a lot of time dealing with catastrophes and their consequences. It is almost impossible now to avoid being struck by a so-called ‘black swan’ event at some point in the life of a business, and our success is measured in terms of ‘less bad’ rather than ‘good’. But the good news is that resilient organisations do survive disasters, and often improve their standing because they demonstrate their ability to manage crises well, inspiring confidence and loyalty in their customers and employees.