On a wing and another prayer

Perhaps the best soundbite to emerge out of the protest outside St Paul's Cathedral came at the weekend from Ken Costa, former chairman of Lazard's Investment Bank who has been tasked by the church to head a group looking at what can be done about the issues which have been highlighted. He is, he said, looking to reconnect "the financial with the ethical." And he goes on to argue that maximising shareholder returns should no longer be the sole criteria for judging how a company is run (or sins).

Sterling stuff but there is still a whiff of a church trying to catch up. The structure of the Church does not allow a command and control system in the normal form, so the fragmented system in place has allowed the Cathedral response to appear disjointed. The Archbishop of Canterbury has, in the word of one commentator, broken his silence and attempted to rest control of the agenda; it was a rudderless ship with events taking over.

On a wing and a prayer

To lose one cleric may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde.) St Paul's has now lost its Dean, following on from the resignation of the Canon. All driven by confusion of how to deal with the anti-capitalist protest on the doorstep.

To be fair it is hard for a symbol of the established church in England to come up with a coherent way of dealing with an event which has managed to close the doors of St Paul's with a subsequent loss of revenue and international prestige. Hard, but not impossible.

Goodnight Irene

For a reader whose memory stretches back into the 1980s, you might recall the above track from Dexy's Midnight Runners. Over the weekend it was turned into a slogan by some residents of the US East Coast who refused to evacuate in the face of the hurricane. “Come on, Irene!” proclaimed the posters of the protesters. “We can cope” was the sub text.

As the hurricane, downgraded to a Cat 1 storm, moves on the inevitable questions are being asked. This was no Katrina so was there over-reaction by politicians and press?

Quote, Unquote

Economist John Maynard Keynes once said of the business cycle that in the long run all would be well. He added waspishly, "but in the long run we are all dead."

Watching last week's unraveling of the financial system he might have a point ... but this time in the short run. $2.5 trillion has been wiped off global stock exchanges. It has been the worse week in the markets since 2008 and Lehman Brothers.

And the response from government? As another economist J K Galbraith put it, "In the US though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes." Barack Obama has been characterised as being well meaning but ineffectual. Things have hardly been any better in Europe.

Dipping below the radar

The word Radar … Radio Detection and Ranging … was coined by the Americans. Pity nobody shared it with US company News Corp. It has become self-evident that the Murdoch Empire did not have in place anything approaching a crisis management plan to deal with the fallout from the phone hacking scandal, which could still engulf the corporation. Leaving aside the issues of corporate governance, although the shareholders probably won't, it is extraordinary that seemingly nobody in the company was using radar to scan the horizon for potential incoming. After all, hacking is hardly new.

Perhaps even more extraordinary is that a media conglomerate seemed very unsure about how to deal with the media when the crisis broke. As we have pointed out before, summarily sacking 200 journalists who had nothing to do with the hacking does nothing to endear you to the Fourth Estate. There seemed to have been no joined up thinking. Do we appear before the Select Committee or stay away? How do we deal with the BSkyB bid? What are the key messages? Surely, it wasn’t just us who knew nothing about it?

A hacking good crisis

Maybe more of a Sun headline than that of a News of the World (NotW) lead, but after 168 years of exposures what more fitting end could there be for a paper dedicated to making the news? But is it the end? The Murdoch business machine is not going to easily let the circulation figures for NotW be lost and the rumours of a Sunday Sun seem to indicate the direction they are thinking of taking.

So post crisis planning and turnaround may already be well advanced and perhaps the only question left to answer is how to long to mourn the News of the World before launching its successor.

They think it's all over

Football, say the pundits, is a game of two halves. Try telling that to FIFA boss Sepp Blatter who told the press, "Football is not in a crisis, only some difficulties." Remind you of the Winter of Discontent? Crisis, what crisis? This game is already in extra time as the allegations continue to mount.

Sponsors such as Coca-Cola and Adidas have already raised concerns. "The current allegations ... are distressing and bad for the sport." "... The negative tenor of public debate is neither good for football nor for FIFA nor its president."

Dust off the Plans

Knowing what to do when everything starts to fall apart around you is a key skill that Politicians and Directors need. Forget competence when things are going well. It’s when they aren’t that the true mettle and character of leadership shows through.

Just as Greece is lining itself up for another round of Ponzy scheme investments, which are seemingly designed to keep the European banks from revealing the true scale and interconnectivity of the bond debts. We lose the head of the IMF to allegations of a serious assault, which not only exposes the fragility of the European Community, but the gulf in culture between America and France.

Land of the Rising Sun?

A week is a long time in politics; in a quake zone it can seem forever. It was just last Friday that so much destruction was wrought on north eastern Japan. Few cannot have been moved by the images beamed around the world. As one US reporter said, it was like Apocalypse Now meeting My Worst Nightmare. Ocean-going trawlers thrown onto dry land, houses smashed like matchwood, and a death toll already over 11,000. An appeal has now gone out for more body bags and coffins as local supplies are overwhelmed. Our thoughts are with the relatives.

To make long term matters worse the quake and accompanying tsunami ... ironically a Japanese word ... has renewed the arguments about nuclear power, thought by some experts to be capable of generating one fifth of world energy supplies in the near future.

Strategic Defense review won't fly!

Every organisation understands the importance of an effective strategy and that one of the key indicators of crises is the failure to meet its stakeholders expectations. As reports from Libya signal a rapidly deteriorating situation where protest dissolves into a civil war, the role of the British Armed forces and the Coalition's defence strategy is brought into stark focus.

Following the strategic review which seems to have been neither strategic or about the UK’s defence can we really feel that the Coalition approach to defence is providing support to businesses trying to deliver export growth to the UK in difficult parts of the world. Think of the emerging risks not just to Libya but to the Arabian Gulf states and North Africa, both during current events and going forward as nations struggle to find stability. How much further can this spread? What other opportunities to resolve old conflicts may arise? Where are the new safe havens for pirates?

A Tale of Three Cities

Handling a crisis relies on understanding the issues, recognizing future impacts and responding appropriately. So who is taking the lead in the Middle East?

No doubt who was first off the blocks in fronting up to the crisis in North Africa and the Middle East. Step forward UK PM David Cameron who flew out from London to take part in what used to be called shuttle diplomacy. First a photo opportunity in Takrir Square, followed by a meeting with the new military caretaker government, then private meetings with some of the protestors who were described as inspirational. Except the Muslim Brotherhood, who seemed not to have been invited.

New Dawn for the Middle East

The rapid spread of protests have caught the policy makers flat footed, with some Western powers praising the Iranian protestors whilst appearing less certain of the position to take with the Bahrainis and rightly delivering outright condemnation of Colonel Gaddaffi, who appears to have declared war on his people.

For the moment people power is flexing its muscles, nowhere more surprising than Libya with over 200 dead; (live on the internet) demonstrations in Morocco; street battles in Teheran; (live on YouTube) continued unrest in Egypt; more protests in Bahrain. What started out as a little local difficulty in Tunisia brought down the president there and eventually ended the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarack in Egypt, the Arab world's most powerful state.