Protecting Your Business in a Pandemic: Plans, Tools, and Advice for Maintaining Business Continuity

A pandemic is an epidemic that covers a huge swath of the country or even the world. And it's just as scary as it sounds: For example, it's estimated that up to a third of the U.S. population could fall ill in an Avian flu pandemic, costing the U.S. economy alone up to $675 billion. Worse, pandemics shatter lives and businesses and tend to rock society to its foundations. But humanity has been through pandemics before. As disaster-management and business-continuity expert Geary Sikich shows in this book, there are ways to make the best of a bad situation. These methods improve the chance that businesses will remain resilient, and people healthy, employed, and productive--even in the darkest days of an international disaster.

"Protecting Your Business in a Pandemic" helps managers and owners understand the threat pandemics pose to society, the overall economy, and their businesses. Using illustrative examples, it offers readers a practical guide for assessing the threat of pandemics to their own organizations and help in developing business-continuity plans to deal with the economic and medical consequences. Chapters include: -The Initial Response, which investigates possible pandemic scenarios and outcomes. - Global Reaction, which compares each scenario with previous pandemics and projects real-time reactions from all sectors of society. -The Danger of Reassortment, which introduces the reader to the resources they will need to respond to the long-term and/or possibly permanent changes to the economy. -After the Shock: Potential Risks for the Global Economy outlines important aspects of how business operations and society could be altered--forever--by the pandemic. Practical and hands on, the book provides step-by-step guidance in the form of evaluation and assessment tools, exercises, and detailed examples. Special tools include an easy-to-use roadmap for developing and maintaining a comprehensive business-continuity plan. Experts agree--it's only a matter of time before another pandemic strikes. That's why every business needs to keep a copy of this book handy, before a global nightmare comes true.