Responsible Management in Crisis: A Global Case Primer

Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos. Cambridge University Press, 2025. The casebook that follows Crisis: A Global Primer (2023), with the Force Majeure simulation as its classroom companion.

Crisis  is a book about how businesses and people can better manage the reality of crisis, and better anticipate the challenges and opportunities that socio-political strife presents. It does so by pulling back the curtain on how business works in the toughest situations on earth. 

Readers go on a global tour of business, from rebel-held coffee plantations in the jungles of Colombia and a factory amidst the urban battlefields of Iraq to diamond-studded Dubai resorts and stately London corporate nerve centers. Over 10 chapters, we walk through experiences as varied as how Ebola-stricken Liberia could have helped Facebook stop a genocide and what a brewery in New York can learn to manage social media outrage from a Venezuelan motorcycle repair shop. 

These lessons can be distilled into our book’s three key lessons: business needs what we call a social license to operate effectively, companies need to embrace their roles as political actors, and leaders need to create crisis-proof company cultures by integrating values that counter the roots of crises.
The Uncertainty Doctrine also shows why businesses outside of conflict zones need to care about the lessons they teach us. The book traces  how corporate decisions impact local populations and the bottom line, map what can and does go wrong, and show how firms that successfully navigate these challenges are more successful everywhere else.

This book is also a wake-up call to corporate leaders who think they can stay above the fray of contentious political issues. Crisis shows just how destructive this thinking can be. The question isn’t if a business will have to navigate through political and social issues, but when and how. These are not just questions about success - but about survival. 

As academics with an insatiable curiosity for how the world really works, we have spent the last ten years studying businesses in some of the world’s worst war zones: Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Liberia, Myanmar, Iraq, Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Former Yugoslavia, Lebanon. What kind of lunatics do that? The kind who needed to know how companies could possibly survive those situations. The kind who realized that if they could uncover the secret to their success, they'd have a once-in-a-lifetime insight to share.

The solutions aren’t easy - there’s no win-win back-patting nonsense in these pages - but over the long term they pay off almost every time. The good news is that the ‘hard path’ also happens to be the one that’s best for society too.

The casebook is built for the classroom as much as for the boardroom. It follows a dozen leaders who faced extraordinary pressure and had to choose between leading on principle and retreating from responsibility: Starbucks in Sumatra, Unilever under Paul Polman, Chobani's hiring of refugees, and a brewery caught in a social media storm among them. Each case comes with MBA-aligned frameworks and a teaching note, and the digital edition runs to 393 pages.

The three lessons that run through the cases are stated in the book's own description: a business needs a social licence to operate; companies have to accept that they are political actors; and leaders build crisis-proof cultures by putting values that counter the roots of crisis into daily practice. The cases draw on the authors' fieldwork in Iraq, Colombia, Syria, Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Palestine, and on two decades of research on firms in war zones from Syria and Ukraine to Venezuela, Liberia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia and Lebanon.

A seminar can take one case through one question: what happens when the firm's own playbook becomes the biggest threat to the business? The evidence the authors bring from their earlier work is that firms embedded in their communities were about three times as likely to stay profitable through a crisis and nine times as likely to survive one, the finding of the 2021 Harvard Business Review study that the simulation site cites.

The companion simulation, Force Majeure at conquercrisis.io, is mapped to the casebook chapter by chapter. Students run a company across roughly 200 real-world markets while the game runs the crises, with scoring that rewards the community-embedded strategy and grinds down the extractive one, and instructors get a course kit for MBA and executive teaching. Organizations use the same engine for rerunnable crisis exercises built on their own sector and country footprint and scored into a board report, as conquercrisis.io describes it in October 2026.

Crisis: A Global Primer. Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos. Cambridge University Press, 2023. The first volume.

Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis. Jason Miklian and John E. Katsos. Cambridge Elements, 2024, ISBN 9781009446891. The Element on leadership when crises overlap.

Crisis management and polycrisis on miklian.org: the research behind the cases, from the Beirut SME study to the Harvard Business Review crisis playbook.

Order on Amazon. The casebook on miklian.org, with the full record. Force Majeure at conquercrisis.io, the simulation. All books.