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Press  Release - Proactive Crisis Management

Project manager Boris Hornjak explains how to avoid “retroactive” methods and embrace an active, resolution-oriented approach.

(USA) — Problem solver. Troubleshooter. Fire extinguisher. If you are an operational manager, you have penciled these on your job description under “Other duties not assigned.” It seems to be a law of business that the best and brightest end up using their talents to minimize losses and contain damage with only their intuition as a guide. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a guidebook aimed at making crisis management easier and, ultimately, more profitable? 

The Project Surgeon: A Troubleshooter’s Guide To Business Crisis Management —written by career project manager Boris Hornjak—arms the reader with practical tools and methods to solve, not avoid, problems. Using the surgical metaphor and tested project management tools, Hornjak addresses the immediate symptoms of a crisis situation, diagnoses its underlying causes, and builds an enduring crisis prevention system.

 “Putting out fires is hard, precisely because it is repetitive—you reinvent the wheel every time the flames flare up,” Hornjak writes in the introduction. “You are so busy playing a fireman that you have no time to devote to fire prevention and protection.  Absence of a systematic fire prevention approach leads to burnout. This book provides project managers with a logical, systematic framework for addressing and preventing crises once and for all, and eliminating the need to deal with the same type of problem over and over again.”

Without such a system a company is forced to react to problems by focusing on the aftermath of a crisis, blaming others and protecting the culprits. There are at least four informal and all too common ways this is done:

1. Belt and Suspenders Approach: The adherents of this approach believe that investing in teflonization and back coverage to insure them against the consequences of a bad situation. Like overweight chain-smokers, they delude themselves that the million dollar insurance policy will make them bullet-proof.

2. Pin the Blame Approach: Practitioners of this approach are similar to the belt and suspenders managers in their unwillingness or inability to deal with problems. But in addition to just covering their behinds, they concoct often elaborate get-away plans to pin the blame of failure on others. “If we do nothing, we can’t do anything wrong.” The effort expended on establishing “plausible deniability” often exceeds the effort that would have been required to do things right in the first place.

3. Tombstone Approach: Surely the laziest of all reactive approaches. Tombstone managers totally disregard the potentially dangerous consequences of inaction, and even fail to cover their own behinds or pin the blame on others. True procrastinators, they ignore symptoms and warning signs of a crisis. When a catastrophe occurs they make a half-hearted and usually futile attempt to correct the problem. But they make great scapegoats. To paraphrase a line from the movie “A Clear and Present Danger” – they are the guys without a chair when the music stops.

4. Slash and Burn Approach: This approach involves outsiders waiting in the wings to “turn-around” or dismember a terminally ill company, rather than company insiders trying to stave off a disaster. Corporate raiders and turnaround artists who come to the battlefield after the war and bayonet the wounded are slash and burn experts. There is no value created here and the sum of dismembered parts is worth more than the whole. All of these sins of omission leave companies weakened or bankrupt and the perpetrators safely re-employed by a one-time competitor. After a wave mergers and acquisitions in the 1980’s, this is starting to happen again in the new millenium with a new wave of corporate implosions, layoffs and takeovers.

 Managers who make a commitment to an active, resolution-oriented crisis management approach need to read Hornjak’s book. He is one of the few practicing project managers to focus attention on the tragic business consequences of incompetence and procrastination. He explains the dos and don’ts of crisis management and prevention in a sparse, carefully thought-out and superbly organized style.

 “This book touches upon a myriad of subjects, ranging from management and finance to engineering, statistics and logic, but it is deliberately concise and action oriented, and does not focus on any reference subject in depth,” he writes. “You, as the Project Surgeon cannot be an expert in any one narrow technical field. Instead, you have to learn to draw upon and synthesize the specialist knowledge and resources, while remaining a generalist; you must know what you don’t know, know who knows, and put it all together quickly and effectively in a time of crisis.”

 Learning these critical crisis management skills can bring immense personal and business rewards. “If your company is faced with a $10 million loss that can be reduced to a $2 million loss by spending $500,000 on crisis management it sounds like a pretty good deal,” Hornjak declares. “But that’s just the first step. The real value is added when you spend another $500,000 for a crisis prevention program to ensure that the $10 million mistakes are never made again. Consequently you can free your best and brightest people to focus on opportunities instead of on problems, and ultimately break the failure/recovery cycle.”

What was the motivation for writing this book? “The intent of my book is to provide a best practice primer for operational crisis management, as well as company and project turnarounds in general business environment,” says Hornjak. “I envisioned this book as a hands-on troubleshooting manual, a “toolkit” for operational managers, the corporate combat soldiers fighting daily battles in the trenches of business warfare. It is written from the operator's standpoint, for a practical manager thrust into a crisis situation with a mission to turn things around, make tough decisions under fire, address problems when they occur and prevent them from happening again. The focus of this book is on business recovery, not on dealing with failure - you are the corporate emergency room physician, a MASH surgeon and an intensive care nurse - not a forensic pathologist or a coroner.”

This book was not planned – it evolved from a set of author’s notes, compiled over the years of troubleshooting projects in the construction industry. “I wrote the book as “Cliff Notes” for my daily work” says Hornjak. “It has evolved out of necessity, simply because I could not find a book that would give me practical tools to address various project crises when and where they occur, and I was tired of stumbling into the same problems over and over again. Every text I had consulted, everyone in the business that I had talked to, told me how to address the aftermath of the crisis situation and pass the buck. So over the years, I compiled a “lessons learned” file, especially from the hard lessons learned from my own numerous mistakes, and it eventually evolved into a book.” 

How is this book different form all the other “crisis management” books out there? ”My book is “hard core” analytical reading, rather than “pulp non-fiction” that you are probably accustomed to seeing in the business book sections of major bookstores,” explains Hornjak. “Search for “crisis management books” on the web and what do you get? Invariably, public relations books focusing on “how to deal with the media”, “preserve corporate image” and otherwise rearrange the deck chairs on Titanic, after it has sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There is nothing in this book for those who deal in the aftermath of a crisis - the arbitrators, media handlers, litigators, bankruptcy experts, or public relations specialists. For these and other assorted blame experts there is a plethora of books dealing in the exculpation and explanation of failure. These soft “touchy-feely” books are dime a dozen. Instead, I offer practical problem-solving tools such as failure mode analysis, and emergency triage, applied to general management situations. My book is heavy on management science, operations research, project management and statistical concepts, and requires “prerequisite” knowledge of basic engineering and economics. It also borrows heavily from high-risk crisis situations such as emergency medicine and warfare, and applies these concepts to business situations.”

This book is engaging, easy to understand, and is based on as many real-life examples as the circumstances will allow. “The worst crises make for the best case studies,” explains Hornjak. “Being a career project manager and not a professional writer, I had a varying degree of personal involvement in the resolution of all the crises which served as a basis for this book. This book was not written from the sidelines, looking from the outside in. However, being an active participant in these crises, rather than an outside observer, makes it thus more difficult to write about them objectively, without going into potentially touchy details. Most of the cases are based on recent events, and most of the participants are still alive, if not all that well. Thus, although the resolution framework for all the cases and examples is real, I have changed all the specifics and thoroughly mixed them among the cases and examples. So, in a sense the cases are fact-based fiction, a docu-drama.”

Also, the targeted audience for this book is intended to be as broad as possible. “My targeted audience are real life managers - people with a finger in the dam, and fire extinguisher in the other hand. There are a lot of us out there, out of the limelight, down in the boiler room trying to make things work, day in and day out. This huge audience of “working managers” is waiting to hear from one of its own, rather than to be talked down to by pundits.”

In the end, why should business executives read this book? “ Because incompetence in business should bother us, and our own incompetence should bother us the most. Edmund Burke said: “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Same applies for competence in business – “the only thing necessary for the triumph of incompetence is for the competent to do nothing.”

 end

For More Information Contact the Author:



Internet: hornjak1@cs.com

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Last modified: 05/11/03