Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control

Whether you're a politician caught with his pants down, a publicly traded company accused of accounting improprieties, a family-owned restaurant losing business because of a bad Yelp review or just the guy in the corner cubicle who has inadvertently pushed "reply all," a crisis can quickly become the make-or-break moment of your career. Regardless of if you work on Wall Street or Main Street, the President of the United States or principal of a school, a corporate counsel or a small town lawyer, most of us aren’t natural spin doctors, and it’s hard to resist the impulse to cover your tracks, lie, or act like nothing happened. But resist you must! In Masters of Disaster, crisis gurus Christopher Lehane and Mark Fabiani teach executives, lawyers, publicists and anyone else who may find themselves or their clients under the public microscope the ten commandments of damage control – that magic formula for mastering your disaster when it is your turn to take a tumble in the modern spin cycle. Based on their damage control work for clients like Bill Clinton, Goldman Sachs, and Lance Armstrong, the authors show how to play to win in today's world of real time news alerts, Twitter trend lines and viral videos rather than playing not to lose; how to meet your detractors head-on as opposed to taking a one-sided pounding; and how to emerge from a setback with your reputation intact instead of in tatters. Full of both lively personal anecdotes and hard-knuckled straight talk, this is a must-read if you want to be the master of your disaster.