Slow Horse Crisis Management

One of my favorite books and TV series is Slow Horses, created by Mick Herron. It deals with a group of MI5 (British domestic security) agents who are the rejects of the intelligence world. I have affection for the “slow horses” because there are parallels to those of us who, for some reason, went into damage control.

In the 1980s, when I co-founded our company, there weren’t really crisis management firms. Characters like me didn’t quite fit anywhere, at least not in the corporate world. The few of us who did this kind of thing had some politics in our background but were no longer in that game. We weren’t conventional marketing types. We weren’t lobbyists or publicists, and we definitely weren’t lawyers. We were the ones, you know…over there. Nobody knew quite what to do with us. Gary Oldman plays the part of such a character brilliantly — and he’s a mess, not a polished operator.

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