Celebrities - managing the unmanageable.

So many entertainment stars and sporting personalities are being positioned as requiring crisis management. In perspective, three immediate criteria define a crisis situation. The first is loss of life or people being critically injured, the second is major damage of assets, and the third is serious loss of reputation. While it can be argued that loss of reputation is a threat to star status, the real purpose of crisis management is to make qualitative decisions to take control of an escalating critical situation and to expedite recovery. Rescuing celebrities from their own bad behaviour is not crisis management, it is issues management.

Managers of high-profile people need to think about threats to their stars' status or image long before the worst-case situation occurs. Good issues management is getting ahead of the agenda by planning to avoid one or many eventualities. Let's keep crisis management out of show business.