BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

More often than not, the most successful responses to business crises are about more than just the company at the center of controversy. Think of Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol tampering of the early 1980s or El Al’s handling of hijackings in the 1970s. Those companies leveraged their own problems into solutions that ultimately changed entire industries for the better. That’s the foremost goal of any crisis communications engagement – and it’s precisely what Heartland Payment Systems has achieved in the wake of what many experts are deeming the largest data loss in history.

As I wrote on Forbes.com last week, no company has done better during a large data breach than Heartland. After hackers stole more than 130 million files, CEO Robert O. Carr didn’t retreat into radio silence, as so many executives that experience data breaches often do. No, he personified the Jack Welch wisdom to “always over-communicate in a crisis.” Within a few days of receiving investigators’ clearance to disclose the breach, Heartland had reached out to more than 175,000 merchants and countless consumers with the same consistent message of concern for, commitment to, and action on behalf of affected stakeholders.

After the company announced that it would be accelerating development of an encryption system to protect credit cardholder data from the first swipe to the end of the payment process, most stakeholders would have deemed Heartland’s response adequate. But Mr. Carr understood that true leadership in crisis often requires going above and beyond what’s expected. Like Johnson & Johnson and El Al before, that’s exactly what he did.

In co-founding the Payments Processing Information Sharing Council, an organization that disseminates information on the latest threats to data security, Heartland is now leading an effort to see that no company ever experiences such a large data breach again – thus demonstrating its commitment not only solving its own problem, but a problem that could potentially impact any business, in any industry, at any time. That’s how companies transform crisis into opportunity. More important, it’s how they exhibit the style of leadership during crisis that is often remembered far longer than the crisis itself.

Richard S. Levick, Esq. is President and CEO of Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm, and a contributing author to Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him @richardlevick.