Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management is Wrong.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf

Damage Control: Why Everything You Know About Crisis Management Is Wrong. By Eric Dezenhall and John Weber. Portfolio, 212 pages. $24.95.

Authors Dezenhall and Weber should be saluted for writing clearly and directly about damage control, a subject often dimmed by obfuscation. While the title oversells their message, they maintain that a lot of conventional wisdom about the topic is wrong-headed.

For one, they take on the hagiography accorded the Tylenol crisis of 1982, which is almost always cited as the best example of corporate damage control in modern history. They note that the terrific outcome for Johnson & Johnson in the Tylenol poisoning owes much to the fact that a deranged killer was the culprit, not the company--and the public clearly perceived that.

In contrast, they write, "the corporate scandals that dominate today's news are mostly of a different strain: the company's very character is on trial--for making faulty products or betraying the...