{"id":43,"date":"2026-02-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/linkedin-import-post-21"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:19:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:19:18","slug":"linkedin-post-2026-02-02-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/linkedin-post-2026-02-02-21\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Prepare for a Crisis? We&#8217;re an Annuity Development Company?!&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A message arrived: &#8216;A crisis? We&#8217;re an annuity development company. What kind of crisis would we have?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>I hear this a lot. The assumption that crisis is something that happens to airlines, hospitals, and oil companies \u2014 to &#8216;high-risk&#8217; businesses. Not to quiet, buttoned-up financial services firms. Not to companies where nothing very interesting happens.<\/p>\n<p>Let me share 10 crises I have personally been involved with that are completely agnostic to your industry:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a senior executive gets arrested;<\/li>\n<li>a longtime employee files a harassment lawsuit and goes public;<\/li>\n<li>a disgruntled client posts a viral takedown on social media;<\/li>\n<li>your CFO gets investigated for fraud even though they&#8217;re innocent;<\/li>\n<li>a data breach exposes customer financial information;<\/li>\n<li>an employee dies on company property;<\/li>\n<li>your CEO&#8217;s old social media posts resurface;<\/li>\n<li>a regulator launches a surprise investigation;<\/li>\n<li>a key partner gets caught in a scandal and your name is attached;<\/li>\n<li>a family member does something incredibly stupid on camera and it goes viral.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>None of these require you to be a high-risk business. They require you to be a business \u2014 with employees, customers, partners, and a reputation you&#8217;ve spent years building.<\/p>\n<p>Great leaders aren&#8217;t born in good times. They&#8217;re great because of how they&#8217;ve handled the awful moments. A crisis doesn&#8217;t require you to be reckless or to operate in a dangerous industry. It requires you to have people in your organization who are human, and it requires you to have built something worth protecting.<\/p>\n<p>The companies that survive these moments aren&#8217;t the ones who thought it couldn&#8217;t happen to them. They&#8217;re the ones who knew it could \u2014 eventually \u2014 and decided to be ready.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A message arrived: &#8216;A crisis? We&#8217;re an annuity development company. What kind of crisis would we have?&#8217; I hear this a lot. The assumption that crisis is something that happens to airlines, hospitals, and oil companies \u2014 to &#8216;high-risk&#8217; businesses. Not to quiet, buttoned-up financial services firms. Not to companies where nothing very interesting happens. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/90"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/checkmatepublicaffairs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}