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Today, it is commonplace to see media stories about the recalling of faulty goods, from motor vehicles to bottled water, as well as advertisements warning consumers about such problems and telling them how to have the problem resolved. People have become accustomed to such actions and regard them as reassuring indications of an organization's sense of responsibility towards its consumers and society in general.

Fortunately, few chief executives in the food and drinks industry are ever likely to have to face a crisis on the scale of 9/11, the horrifying terrorist attack on the twin towers of New York in America. However, the tenets that enabled Mayor Rudi Giuliani to display such an outstanding example of leadership hold good for any CEO facing a crisis.

In the affluent parts of the world, a new crisis is leading to criticism of the food industry: the increase in obesity. It has become the most common health problem in the United States and is also causing concern in the United Kingdom as well as parts of Europe and Australia. Governments are being attacked for not cracking down on TV advertisements aimed at children which promote foods and drinks containing excessive quantities of salt (sodium), sugar, acid, and artificial sweeteners. The fast-food culture is being blamed for worldwide obesity.

Think of crises that have recently swept the food industry. Remember bovine spongiform encephalopy (BSE)? It was suspected BSE, or ‘mad cow disease’, arose from unsuitable animal feed being fed to ruminants. A frightening off-shoot of that was new variant vC-JD, which tragically led to the deaths of its victims and even raised questions about its transmission through blood transfusions. Amid the concern about the implications of the disease, many countries stopped importing British beef. France was among the most vociferous and raised a storm about British beef. Yet, on July 4, 2004, the United Kingdom's Sunday Telegraph claimed that the mad cow disease epidemic had gone undetected in that country and had led to almost 50 000 severely infected animals entering the food chain. The report was based on a ‘shocking’ report by France's own government researchers.

The most challenging areas of crisis management are dealing with attacks from individuals and organizations with extreme views as well as terrorist threats. They are distinct from product tampering and extortion demands linked with them, which are dealt with in Chapter 6.

Until a few years ago, the thought of anyone highjacking a crowded airliner and deliberately crashing it into skyscraper buildings in one of the world's major cities would have been dismissed as fantasy. The event would have been unthinkable. But then, on September 11, 2001 fantasy was turned into chilling fact.

One of the classic crises which continues to be quoted is that which hit Tylenol in 1982. It was a tragedy without precedent. Yet there were no established guidelines to follow, no public relations agencies or crisis communications experts with experience of dealing with such a calamity. Nevertheless, drug maker Johnson & Johnson (J&J) demonstrated how a major business should deal with such a situation and their actions have long been a textbook example of the finest socially responsible behavior by a major business. They continue to be followed to this day.

No crisis is ever exactly the same as any other. There are always variations and different factors to be taken into consideration, even in incidents which appear to be identical. But much can be learned from case histories. The details of those which follow have been culled from published information or personal experience. Some have been selected as interesting examples of how a problem has been tackled or even exploited. Others have been chosen because, in the view of the author, they have been watersheds in establishing guiding principles in the way in which crises should be handled. Some of the content may even be hearsay, but this is felt to be important to convey the atmosphere at the time .

The world of crisis management changes by the day and even by the hour. In the few weeks between the completion of the manuscript for this book and its setting in type, several significant events have occurred. They reflect the ever-increasing power of the Internet and particularly that of web loggers or ‘bloggers and the new breed of podcasters who use the system to broadcast their own radio-style shows, the remorseless technological progress of television news channels and developments that take two of the case histories mentioned in Chapter 18 to a new level of concern. The two case histories concerned, those relating to a red dye called Sudan 1 and bird flu, have been left in their original form because the information provides relevant background .