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Even if cartoonists still call it “disaster recovery,� maybe we’re in a profession after all if it’s in Dilbert comic strips. Here are Dilbert cartoons with ‘disaster recovery’ as the theme. Thanks to Scot Phelps of the Emergency Management Academy.

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Perhaps it’s not surprising that last August’s rioting in London got out of control so quickly. My colleague and former Metropolitan Police officer Peter Power wrote afterward in The Telegraph that changes in public expectation of what police should do reduced their abilities to respond properly. Peter wrote,

As P.J. Waddington says in his book ‘The Strong Arm of the Law’: ‘The legitimacy of the police in Britain has traditionally been founded not upon conformity to popular wishes, but upon impartiality.’ [T]he force is crippled by a devotion to community consent in a country that has become a patchwork of discrete and often intolerant communities. [A] dispirited police force… truly stopped being a force, preferring instead to now be a ‘service provider’.

A service provider is a vendor. Would you ever let a vendor put you in handcuffs? Or in jail? OK, I can hear the jokes already…

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From Bruce Schneier’s August 2011 Cryptogram newsletter

This 2.5 minute video showing how to break into your suitcase without unlocking it got my attention. Like millions of travellers, I have a bag just like that.

My hard-sided suitcase was ransacked in the United States last March. I checked it at an airport. When I opened my suitcase in Singapore, a brand-new iPad2 was missing; its box was still inside, but empty. Nothing else was taken or disturbed. A thief can’t be that precise without inside help, probably from someone at an x-ray machine, right? I figure that narrows it down to baggage handlers or Transportation Security Administration personnel at CLT or EWR airports, where I changed planes. I filed a report within the U.S. and with the Singapore police. I eventually got SGD500 from my travel insurance company.

• If a TSA employee in Newark stole my iPad, I wasn’t the first victim: http://usat.ly/nRaLXC
• Because TSA screens things – bags, laptops, shoes, baby bottles, knitting needles – not people, it will inevitably find “badâ€� things but not bad guys. DHS Secretary Napolitano finally agrees: http://usat.ly/nxlCCO
• I’ve railed about American airline transportation silliness before: http://bit.ly/smhoiD
• A former U.S. Senator suggested last month that TSA be abolished http://bit.ly/sYiB39. Then he fell down and hit his head Probably no connection.

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Here’s an eerie, chilling video from inside a car caught in Japan’s March 2011 tsunami. I’d really like a full English translation of the audio narration. At the end, the narrator apparently says, “The vehicle hit a building and sank.” I hope I never get closer than this to drowning in a tsunami.

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Everybody’s other favourite pastime: comparing salaries! The deadline is 31 December 2011 for recruiter BC Management’s Asia BCM compensation study. Click here to complete the survey. Results for 2010: 27% of BCM people in Asia get SGD 50K or less per year, 23% get up to SGD 100K and another 23% get up  to SGD150K. 75% of the SGD 50K or less were in India. View the chart for Asia Pacific. Hey, you do this for love, not money, right? When you complete the Asia BCM compensation study, you get a free copy. Pass it on to your HR department.

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Everybody’s favourite pastime: comparing themselves with others! Complete the KPMG-Continuity Insights BCM Program Benchmarking survey and maybe win this Amazon Kindle Fire.

They say it takes twenty (20) minutes to complete; the deadline is 15 January 2012. To hear how your BCM program compares to everyone else’s, register for the Continuity Insights conference in Scottsdale, Arizona (USA) in April 2012. Or just read the May 2012 issue of Continuity Insights magazine. Here are the 2007 KPMG-CI Benchmarking Survey results, for comparison.

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Most industrial parks don’t include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand – but nowhere near the ocean – had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. “No one thought about such a worst-case scenario”, said one company president. “In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk.”

They sure will. Three (3) major rivers – the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak – converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.

Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand – eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.

• In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes – not generally worries in Europe or North America.

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Why take Nathaniel Forbes’ BCI’s certification preparation course and exam?
• Save time:  take just three (3) days instead of the usual five (5) days
• The highest-rated BCM instructor in Asia, year after year for 16 years
• More than BCM theory, Nathaniel shows you real-world examples
• 80%+ of the students who’ve taken this course from Nathaniel passed the exam
• Save money: our course fee includes the USD 500 exam fee
• Our ’No Fail Guarantee’: if you don’t pass, you don’t pay again
• The food in Singapore!
• Want even more reasons? http://bit.ly/sVK7cR

Only two 2012 sessions in Singapore: 21-23 February 2012 and October 2012 (dates not set yet).  Sorry, insane offer not available in October. We will have recovered our sanity.

A Peek Inside Course Day 2: RTO vs MTPD
A message from Nathaniel Forbes:  The BCI religion is that Recovery Time Objective, or RTO  – how soon you plan to recover – is not the same as Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption, or MTPD  – how long before your company’s existence is threatened.  The BCI rule is: RTO is always shorter than MTPD.  You probably won’t pass the exam if you don’t believe that in your heart.  Read more... (492 words, 2 images, estimated 1:58 mins reading time)

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Is sexual abuse an organizational resilience issue?

It is for Pennsylvania State University, a large, multi-campus public university (“collegeâ€�) of 44,000 thousand students in the eastern United States. It could be at any organization – not just a school – if one of that organization’s employees were accused of abusing vulnerable individuals, especially children. Sexual abuse of children is a “significant public health problemâ€� in many parts of the world, including the United States.

College (university) sports are a billion-dollar business in the U.S., a source of weekend pride and prejudice for millions of Americans. The top thirty (30) college sports programs alone raked in $5 billion in revenue last year (the 2010-2011 season). Penn State’s football team generated $73 million for the school, and they don’t even pay their players.  So the business impact of losing the trust of a campus, a community or a country because of criminal sexual conduct is enormous.

If you were a trustee of an educational institution at which lurid charges of sexual abuse by an employee had publicly exploded onto every screen in the land, you’d have a right to expect the school’s administrators to have a crisis management plan, and to brief you about it.    The trustees of Penn State have hired a public relations agency, Omnicom Group’s Ketchum agency, to advise them about crisis management.  Read more... (2930 words, 2 images, estimated 11:43 mins reading time)

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International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium

Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly

Most industry conferences don’t have a “Survivor Reception”, but there will be one at International Humanitarian Assistance Symposium (IHAS), 7-8 June 2012 in Miami (USA). In fact, one day is just panels of disaster survivors, including 9/11 New York and Pan Am Flight 103, and TWA Flight 800. IHAS is organized by the Family Assistance Foundation (FAF); FAF board member Jeff Morgan was Manager of Emergency Response & Contingency Planning at Delta Airlines. Check out the sponsors (bottom of the home page). A whole conference on private sector humanitarian assistance in the cruise, energy, manufacturing, retail and transportation businesses is new in organizational resilience. IHAS is affordable, too: USD 350 for two days, and even less if you register now. Miami in June? Just like a Singapore monsoon . . .

I learned about IHAS from Jeff Morgan at the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) Emergency Management (EM) conference in Kuala Lumpur in September 2011.

I was on a panel at AAPA EM with Dave Parsons and Jason Kelly answering the question, Are Crisis Leaders Born or Made? Our answer: both: about1/3 born, 2/3′s made. See our slides on SlideShare. We were moderated by Cathay Pacific Airways‘ Crisis Response Manager, Carrie Shiu.