The Reason? Your Stakeholders

If you work for a company where your entire operation—materials, processing, manufacturing, distribution, sales and service—happens within the United States, you may not need to worry so much about cultural issues. But if you’re one of the other 99 percent of us, you do.

Why? Because crisis management is all about mitigating the damage a crisis may cause to an organization, and that’s directly related to the organization’s stakeholders since they are the ones in a position to most damage the organization.

If your stakeholders are limited geographically, you may not need to concern yourself with cultural issues. But most companies and organizations aren’t in that position anymore. As I’ve mentioned, most are today operating multinationally, which means they may have stakeholders anywhere in the world. And that means they have stakeholder audiences with potentially entirely different expectations of how the organization will deal with a crisis.