This week in our Crisis Communication class we are talking about strategic planning and how to assess the vulnerability of the crisis. No matter what the organization or company is they need to always be prepared in the case that a crisis may occur. They need to understand where the crisis could originate from and they need to plan ahead to make sure that when it becomes public they know how they will handle it or better yet how they will prevent it from ever happening. If the company has a crisis management team then they can be aware of what is going on both internally and externally so they can do all they can to avoid the crisis.

There is a strategic way to approach the prevention of a crisis that can be summarized in five steps. You need to begin with analyzing the external threats and the internal vulnerabilities. The team should then formulate a strategy after deciding what the most important things are in the internal and external environment. Then they must execute the strategy and finally control it.

Tiffany & Co. sells luxury goods and does mining all over the world. With America becoming such an environmentally friendly place I feel that Tiffany & Co. should be prepared for any issues that may arise from what they are doing because they could be very vulnerable to an issue of this nature. Although Tiffany & Co. is known to be socially responsible I feel that at any point this could be a problem because slowly but surely the earth’s resources are diminishing. Many people may look at the mining for luxury goods as a negative thing.

A crisis management team should be prepared to be able to back up Tiffany & Co. and the work they need to do to produce their products. There have been some disputes about mining for Jewelry companies and the CEO of Tiffany’s was quick to back up how responsible Tiffany & Co. is when it comes to mining!