One of the more frequent questions I get as a crisis manager is, “What are the best practices for laying people off, executing cutbacks or rightsizing?” (No, Target did not call me.) Management expert Tom Peters calls these management maneuvers “corporate capsizing.” The answer is pretty simple: There really aren’t any.

A friend of mine recently told me he was planning to write a book on global public relations crises. He suggested I write a chapter. So that I could understand what he was talking about, I asked him to name a truly global PR crisis.

The public relations profession continuously suffers from schizophrenia.  On one hand, we want to be at the table making decisions and guiding strategy with the boss in good times and bad.  On the other hand, many of us want to serve as the guiding conscience of our organizations.

This is the time of year when many of our senior colleagues are nominated for election to the PRSA College of Fellows. As I begin my 21^st year as a Fellow, it’s interesting to reflect on the experiences of all those I have coached and mentored over the years.

There has been a moderate amount of jibber-jabber about Brian Williams’ situation, probably about what the situation deserves. Lucky for him, there have been an enormous number of significant and newsworthy events about the news business during the week when he would have occupied almost all the headlines otherwise. He’s one lucky dude.

Mr. Williams’s career, like most journalists of note, was largely built on catching perpetrators and fakers by spotting those who failed to observe or purposely avoided heeding these axioms.

A Contingency Mindset throughout your readiness thinking and planning acknowledges that as comprehensively and carefully as you prepare for the communication, contact, interactions and engagement that will be expected of us throughout the course of a crisis, and your forecast responses applying all of your years of experience, there will still be those off-the-wall, large and surprising situations and circumstances that blindside. Coming from nowhere these events will be extremely time and attention-consuming, and very costly to manage, mitigate, control or overcome.

This is the beginning. It is a quest. It is a personal study every communicator can participate in, will participate in, and should participate in. The result will be more powerful, effective, positive, professional speech and writing.

Somewhere in the world there must be a school where managers study apology avoidance. It is easy to imagine that perpetrator-like managers have already built an impressive array of personal apology avoidance habits and language. Here are four of the most popular strategies for avoiding apology.

Leadership language choices in difficult situations are often early indicators of the dysfunctional nature of leadership. In fact, their behaviors and language choices are often diagnostic of this dysfunction. Here are some examples to watch for.