A new study at Harvard has revealed a shocking statistic. CEOs spent just one per cent of their time working on crisis management. That’s pretty shocking considering nothing destroys reputation or market value faster than a crisis.

Moreover, the Institute for Crisis Management records that more than half of all business crises are triggered not by workers or other causes, but by management. So there is no doubt that the CEO and top executives have a critical role in crisis management. Yet the evidence is clear that companies have a long way to go to get this right.

While the newly published Harvard study identified that the subject CEOs – monitored over a three month period – spent just one per cent of their time working on crisis management, the reality is that this worrying number should not come as a surprise.

For example, a 2016 Deloitte survey of Board members around the globe found fewer than half said they had engaged with management to understand what had been done to support crisis preparedness or to discuss crisis prevention. And the same survey showed 73 percent of the non-executive directors named reputation as a crisis vulnerability, but only 39 percent said they had a plan to address it.

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