You need a team to help you come up with your message. Preferably, this isn't something you're deciding at four in the morning, when you first get a phone call from a plant factory manager or someone else you already have people it could be certainly your chief executive officer, the head of the organization, your top communications person, if you're a publicly traded company, your head of investor relations. If you have any kind of in house legal counsel, outside legal counsel, they need to be a part of this. But we do not have the luxury of taking two days to round up every possible person and having a committee of dozens. It needs to be as small a group as possible, so that you can quickly brainstorm on messages and narrow it down to your top messages and make sure everyone is signed off on it. Now, we'll talk about this later.

No, you're not going to lecture to learn Lawyers draft this message. You've basically already destroyed your reputation. If you're putting it in the hands of your lawyers, and I'll talk about that, in a moment, apologies to any of the lawyers out there who think I'm being overly harsh. So get your team together. That's the next step. Now, some of you may have a big giant, gigantic crisis communications management plan and it's on a shelf somewhere or it's on a DVD or it's in your hard drive or your intranet somewhere.

And in a perfect world, yeah, you would just go through all those steps in my experience. Nobody consults their crisis communications manual, right. When a crisis hits and all of a sudden reporters are coming in. You have to narrow your focus and your focus is you got to come up with a good message. You've got to deliver that message in a compelling, believable way, as quickly as possible.