Crisis communication is the exchange of information within and between authorities, organizations, and media during and after

a crisis, which poses a threat or a challenge to the company or country. In Crisis Communication: Lessons from 9/11, the author, Paul Argenti, described how companies, such as Starbucks, Verizon and Dell, responded to the 9/11 crisis. He distilled five lessons to guide companies when crises strike. These lessons are: 1) get on the scene, 2) choose your channels carefully, 3) stay focused on the business, 4) have a plan in place, and 5) improvise, but from a strong foundation. I believe if companies apply these steps to the communication strategy, they can handle crises well. Blood Screening kits are the laboratory testing kits used in blood banks and hospital to screen blood samples for infectious diseases, such as Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), West Nile Virus (WNV), etc, prior blood transfusions. However, these tests are not hundred percent accurate. After the product lunched, there are patients get infected with this diseases. As the chief executive officer (CEO) of the diagnostic company, I contact the hospitals and blood banks to define the problem. Once I figured out the cause, I will contact patients who get the infectious disease after blood transfusion from the hospital and visit them. I will come up a solution to help these patients out physically and financially. Because this is an event that harms innocent people, it will attract major media attentions because members of these media are always into news with victims, villains, and visuals. If the company decided to withdraw the Blood Screening kits, the company can take advantage of these media and use these media to disseminate information quickly to a large number of people, such as employees, customers, shareholders, communities. These media will become an effective way to get the word out. We can even use these media to reinforce our commitment to patient safety, and reminded the public of our high ethical standards. Following the withdrawal, our employees will have different questions. The employee would want to know if the company is going to close down or going through a layoff. As the CEO, I need to keep our employees motivated and ensure that the business continued as usual. I will let our employees how that we will develop the second version of the blood screening kits as soon as possible, and we need to work together to make these kits better. Once the storm passed, our company will make plans to avoid such occurrences to happen again. We will make change to the kits, and we will suggest hospitals or blood bank to screen there samples twice. If they did not get the consistent results for both tests, they should consider that blood sample as infected. According to Paul Argenti, employees will know what to do only if they have been absorbing the companys guiding principles all along. Once everything settled down, our company will generate some training courses to train our employees how to deal with crisis. We will also have monthly meeting to update our employees, so that we are on the same page on business direction. We will also form a centralized crisis management team, including individuals from public affairs, investor relations, marketing, research and corporate counsels. It is impossible to avoid crisis, but if we follow the lessons that Paul Argenti mentioned in Crisis Communication: Lessons from 9/11, we can handle the crisis well.