Sometimes it pays to be paranoid. When it comes to planning for disaster, in fact, its almost a necessity. Anyone can imagine a hard-drive crash; a good disaster plan considers an asteroid strike. You might even think of the planning as the fun partthinking about what might go wrong. The un-fun part is when it actually does.
Disaster plans that focus on graphic, end-of-the-spectrum examples are tempting. And, thanks to last September, theyre a little less fictional. But disasters on that scale remain, thankfully, rare events, and your planning should focus on more realistic thingsthose that are a lot more likely to hit your business.
September 11 changed a lot of peoples ideas on disaster preparedness. They realized that, unlike with hurricanes and even tornados, sometimes there is no warning. Others realized that disasters can happen on a larger scale than anyone imagined. But perhaps one of the biggest lessons many people learned, in terms of disaster planning, was that it doesnt have to happen to you directly to be a disaster for you. How many businesses in lower Manhattan were closed for weeks because of dust, or because people couldnt or didnt come in?
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