Blindsided is the authoritative guide to crisis management.

This "how to" handbook gives essential advice that every manager needs to know when a crisis hits. Written by CMI Founder/CEO Bruce Blythe, it's a fascinating, easy-to-read guide that draws on Blythe's 20+ years of experience as a pioneer in crisis management.

  Return to Business Not to Normalcy
by Michael McCarthy and Andrew Backover



NEW YORK- Lewis Eisenberg, chairman of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, puts the cell phone to his ear and listens to the voicemail message of a coworker who perished in Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the call, Ezra Aviles describes the planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, built and owned by the port authority. Rather than fleeing for safety, he called agency directors with emergency guidelines Ð and warned colleagues to stay away from the building.

It was his last phone call.

Eisenberg was given Aviles' message to listen to during a tour of the rubble of the World Trade Center, where he talked about his admiration for employees like Aviles, who kept working even as disaster struck: "It's the best of America in the worst of times."

Now, it's up to the survivors to keep working.

The terrorist attacks hit companies large and small. Some lost a generation of leaders and can-do workers like Aviles. The have no handbook on how to cope with a tragedy of this magnitude. And they are rewriting the book on crisis management. They are scrambling to set up new offices, customer links, charitable funds, grief counseling and temporary housing for all dislocated workersÑall while staying in business.

Companies also have learned that their people and their organizations can be quickly destroyed. Planning for floods, earthquakes, and fires is no longer enough. Their on-the-job training is likely to change the way they manage crises in the wartime economy.

"Terrorism is a part of corporate America now," says Bruce Blythe, CEO of Crisis Management International. "The terrorist attacks will transform standard business practices." They already are. More than 500 businesses were destroyed in the trade Center complex, the port authority says. More than 14,000 businesses in Lower Manhattan have been affected.

The logistics have been a nightmare.

Paul Ribardo, co-owner of Servco Copy Centers near the Trade Center, hasn't been able to get into his store for two weeks. He can't get customer lists. He has lost a third of his business and laid off 20 percent of his workers. At a smaller location about three miles uptown, he sends out invoices by hand, along with personal notes.

"Our biggest fear is our clients will think we're dead," Richardo says.

Phones, desks needed
Hundreds of companies are battling back from a virtual shutdown.

Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, headquartered on 10 floors in the Trade Center, initially set up emergency headquarters at a service office in Melville, N.Y.

Two weeks later, it shifted 500 of its 1,914 Trade Center staffers to facilities in Melville, Albany and Middletown, N.Y. An additional 200 are working from home. More than 1,200 have not returned to work because there is not enough space. Nine employees are missing.

Blue Cross says customer service is getting back to normal Ðcallers wait 40 seconds rather than the typical 30 seconds Ðbut the company doesn't know how its bottom line will be affected. It plans to call back the 1,200 idled workers once it finds 390,000 square feet of space in Manhattan and Brooklyn, CEO Michael Stocker says. The workers will be paid regardless through Oct. 11.

The company's operation largely survived because of luck and pluck. During the attack, one employee transferred key company data to Albany. The headquarters was mostly administrative, so electronic claims processing was not affected.

The firm lost two or three days of mail. Customers and health care providers who submitted paper claims to the Trade Center office must resubmit them. Voicemail and e-mail cam back online this week. And many employees are commuting three hours each way to the temporary Melville headquarters.

Stocker says communicating with managers and employees scattered across different locations is the biggest hurdle: His top 20 managers have gotten together only twice since the attack. "It's certainly more frustrating. But you can do it."

The CEO is stepping up videoconferencing. But cell phones are the silent heroes of the company's recovery. Managers use them to hold conference calls. "The cell phones saved us," Stocker says.

Communication woes have hurt many firms. Neat the Trade Center, as many as 100,000 phone lines remain down. Eight of them are in the offices of TemPositions Group, a staffing firm with a nearby branch office.

Without phones or electricity, TemPositions relocated seven employees to an office in É.they are, President James Essey doesn't expect phone service in the office until Oct. 10. "There is an awful lot of juggling going on," he says. Then there's the financial toll. The port authority lost $3.2 billion in rent over a 99-year lease for the twin towers. It is considered rebuilding, but it will take 6 to 12 months just to remove the rubble. Software firm UDICo. which was shut out of its office about 500 yards from the Trade Center for 11 days, lost about $9,000 in business because many of its customers were shut down or destroyed.

"Everything stopped," CEO Adam Greissman says.

His firm was about to close a $30,000 software deal with a Trade Center bank client. That's on hold. "This is going to delay a lot of buying decisions," he says.

The people factor
While they rebuild the mechanics, the companies also are grappling with shell-shocked staffers and logistical losses. Here are some of their strategies:

--Invest in healing. Companies are focusing on employees like never before, spending millions on counseling, beefed-up security, memorials, charitable funds and travel.

March & McLennan, which is missing 295 employees out of 1,900 at the Trade Center, gave $10 million to a fund for families of victims. The financial services firm will pay the salaries of missing employees until the end of the year.

Insurance firm Aon, which lists about 200 workers out of 1,100 at the Trade Center as missing or dead, held a memorial service Monday at St. Patrick's Cathedral that was simulcast at 10 East Coast movie theaters. It had opened support center at hotels, reimbursed family members for travel expenses and supplemented medical benefits. Its Web site is a clearinghouse of information with 15 people working up to 18 hours a day to update it.

Empire's Stocker is personally involved in the company's counseling sessions for employees. Fidelity Investments has organized employee softball games. Bond brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald has pledged 25 percent of its profits to the families of about 700 victims.

These kinds of outreach efforts are crucial. "They are working through the grief and loss says John Challenger Gray & Christmas.

The efforts also may determine how strong a company emerges. "A crisis can lift you up or it can bring you down," says Blythe of Crisis Management International.

--Cut workers some slack. Some managers expect employees haunted by images to have trouble returning to work. Workers from one unit of ITT Industries saw body parts drop.

One ITT worker jumped into the Hudson River, fearing a fire might spread. He hung onto a pier for a while before climbing out and getting onto a ferry to Staten Island.

"People will need a little extra care," says ITT executive Jonathan Blitt. He's counting work missed as paid leave, and he's letting people work from home.

-- Keep going. Many organizations had lost all their phones computers and paper files.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley, the Trade Center's largest tenant, was open for trading the day the markets reopened. Of its 3,700 Trade Center employees, 800 are at an emergency site about one mile from the Trade Center. The rest are spread throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City or are working form home. To get the emergency site ready, workers installed 25,000 square feet of carpet, added 200 phone lines to the existing 400 and bought or borrowed 1,000 laptops and 150 cell phones.

The port authority, which operates the airports, bridges and tunnels of New York and was the second-largest Trade Center tenant, lost its headquarters. Its executive director, Neil Levin, is missing. Six employees are confirmed dead and 68 are missing.

At the height of the crisis, port authority executives has only BlackBerry text-messaging devices with which to communicate, Eisenburg says. Its first temporary command post collapsed. After digging out, bleeding and dust-covered employees showed up at the next command post in Jersey City.

The port authority had backed up all of its data, including blueprints, in off-site centers, Eisenburg says. But an unknown number of personal files where destroyed. When asked for a business card, port authority executive, Cosmo Servidio gestured helplessly at the rubble that used to contain his office. "My cards were all in there," he says. The port authority is looking for a permanent location in Manhattan or New Jersey.

The biggest challenge, though, is working while grieving. The Fire Department of the City of New York lost nearly and entire top layer of leaders. It has 343 dead or missing. The death toll is almost half the number of on-duty deaths in the department's 100-year history. Entire units are missing. The carnage claimed fathers and sons, brothers and brothers-in-law.

"You have to put it behind you -without forgetting your people who were killed Ð and carry on," says FDNY Battalion Chief Tom McCarthy while attending the funeral of his... .