Inside Fukushima – in pictures
I’ve written several posts about TEPCO and what happened in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami on March 11 last year. TEPCO recently let a group of journalists and photographers into the Fukushima nuclear plant where three reactors suffered meltdown after the earthquake. The communication strategy behind this is worth a post in itself, but in the meantime the Guardian has posted a slideshow of fascinating pictures from the visit.
September 11: In Memoriam
Most Americans have the same hollow pit in their stomach when they think about 9/11 as they did for JFK’s assassination a generation earlier. I was in London that fateful day watching in disbelief, then could not return to my family for over a week.
What stuck with me the most during those early days, however, were the heroic acts of leadership by a number of executives trying desperately to boost spirits and focus on returning to normality. I interviewed a number of people and collected my thoughts in a Harvard Business Review article that was published a bit over a year later. The article was republished this spring in the Japanese version of Harvard Business Review as well. It’s nice to know that some positive lessons can still be taken away from something so tragic. I hope you enjoy reading the article again or for the first time. Drop me a line to let me know what you think.
Paul Argenti
How well did TEPCO Perform?
Originally posted on the Page Society Page Turner Blog
Last March, I blogged on “Page Turner” about the challenges and opportunities for Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) as it tried to deal with the early days of its crisis in Japan. We wanted to see how well they did in seizing the opportunities I offered up back then as we launch our new Page Society website. Here is my update:
Overall, TEPCO has not faired well: it announced a loss of $7.4 billion, the company’s bond rating has been cut to junk, and TEPCO has struggled to communicate with some very angry shareholders. Add to this the fatal radiation levels still being found in its plants, and you have what everyone would most certainly consider a major crisis.
But let’s take a closer look at how they did in terms of the opportunities we discussed back in March:
Tokyo Electric Power’s Communication Challenges and Opportunities
Originally posted on the Page Society Page Turner Blog
As Japan sorts through three separate disasters: the earthquake, the tsunami, and the potential nuclear meltdown, the media has focused on the disaster appropriately from the perspective of lives lost, and the potential for things to get even worse. Lost to the back pages, however, is a potential disaster looming in the background for Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
For those of you old enough to remember, we have seen this kind of disaster in the making before at Three Mile Island (TMI) in 1979. I was just starting my career when this accident unfolded on my birthday that year. All of us held our breath as one of the worst handled crises turned into a media frenzy of oversized proportions as a result of poorly handled corporate communications and a popular movie (The China Syndrome, which had come out only two weeks before about a nuclear meltdown and cover up). What can TEPCO learn from that crisis, and how can TEPCO and Japan seize the opportunity that lurks right around the corner in every crisis?
Here are five opportunities waiting for TEPCO to carpe diem on.
Crisis Communication: Lessons from 9/11
Excerpt from a Harvard Business Review Article published December 2002
At 8:45 am on September 11, 2001, John Murphy, the CEO of Oppenheimer Funds, was out for a run in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park. He was thinking about the company’s reorganization plan, which he had announced the day before, when suddenly he saw an explosion near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He stopped to watch black smoke pour from the place of impact—an awful lot of smoke, it seemed, for what was probably a small plane that had lost its way. He thought of his own employees in the neighboring south tower and made a mental note not to renew Oppenheimer’s lease in that building. “First the bombing in 1993 and now a plane accident,” he thought. “What’s next?” He continued jogging, now in the direction of the office.
Read the rest of the Article at the Harvard Business Review
Paul A. Argenti 