For its 2016 Annual Crisis Report, the Institute for Crisis Management expanded its news tracking research database, tracking more than six hundred thousand crisis stories in the news world-wide. We broadened our review of the news in 2016 with more media outlets and adjusted to account for some extraordinary occurrences in highly-charged environments across the globe. Some crisis trends remained consistent year over year, while others grew from spikes in some categories in election-year...

The media continue to be filled with stories about companies that fail to manage crisis situations, costing them millions in damage, fines and reparations, lost revenue and lost jobs. Many of those failures can be tracked to a few common causes: 1) lack of attention to the identification and assessment of risks, 2) weak leadership commitment to effective risk mitigation and crisis management, 3) no crisis communication plan, and 4) no process to assess, investigate and mitigate a crisis.

As...