Upfront: Coping With A Crisis

It's among a CFO's worst nightmares: a catastrophe that cripples one or more business units or company processes. Such an event can take a variety of forms -- a hurricane, an infrastructure collapse, a shift in regulatory mandates or armed conflict, for example. As serious as these occurrences sound, nearly 50 percent of top executives polled in a PricewaterhouseCoopers' Management Barometer survey say their organization has experienced one such event in the past three years.

"Today's business complexity increases the likelihood of an adverse risk event triggering failure," says Miles Everson, partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers' advisory practice in New York City. "Moreover, because large multinational operations are interconnected and can be concentrated in terms of geography or supply chain, the potential impact of a failure is multiplied, as compared to the situations businesses dealt with only 10 years go."

But the group that experienced a major adverse event seems to view the disruption as a bad news/good news story; almost three-fourths report that their organizations performed well during the catastrophe, recovering quickly and with minimal financial fallout.