The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Which CEO did it better - American Air or India Air?
When disaster strikes, every word matters. The recent Air India crash that claimed 270 lives has revealed a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at crisis communications - their CEO's statement was virtually identical to one previously delivered by American Airlines following their own tragic incident.
This apparent copy-and-paste approach has ignited debate across social media, with critics creating side-by-side comparisons of both CEOs' delivery styles and questioning the ethics of reusing crisis messaging. But does originality truly matter during a crisis, or is effective communication the ultimate goal regardless of its source? As we analyze this controversy, we unpack why the content of a statement might matter more than its originality, especially when lives have been lost and stakeholders need immediate, transparent information.
The incident highlights a critical aspect of crisis preparedness that every organization should implement: having template statements ready for deployment. The impressive speed with which major airlines like Southwest, American, and Air India have issued statements following incidents demonstrates the value of advance preparation. Your crisis communications plan should include pre-approved templates for your most likely scenarios, allowing your team to quickly customize and deploy messaging within those critical first hours.
We also touch on the emerging role of artificial intelligence in crisis communications. Could AI have helped generate Air India's statement? As communicators, our challenge isn't whether AI will replace us, but how we can harness its capabilities to enhance our work. The question becomes: will you be a victim of technological change, or will you master these tools to become more effective?
Want to discuss crisis communications strategies for your organization or share your thoughts on this controversy? Email tom@leadinginacrisis.com - we'd love to hear from you and possibly feature your questions in an upcoming episode.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast, we talk all things crisis management and we deliver our content through storytelling and lessons learned as shared by experienced crisis leaders. I'm Tom Mueller. Thanks for joining us again on this episode. I want to start today and just talk about just a little recognition that the podcast has received recently. We were recently ranked the fifth best crisis management podcast for 2025 by a group called Million Podcasts, which is a podcast advertising agency. So we're grateful to Million Podcasts for the recognition of this the Leading in a Crisis podcast and the work we are doing here. We've had some really interesting guests and that certainly drives listenership here, and we're thankful to all the guests who've joined us over the past two years on the podcast.
Tom Mueller:On today's episode, I wanted to just do a quick deep dive onto a bit of a tempest in a teapot, but it's something that's getting a bit of attention. This is around the Air India crash that happened on June 12th in India. A Boeing aircraft was just taking off and apparently lost power and then crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 270 persons on board. Now you may remember this flight because there was one survivor one person in seat 11A walked away from that crash. That in itself is an amazing story, and there's lots of news coverage around that. What I want to focus on today, though, is the crisis statement that the Air India CEO used in issuing their first statement about the incident. At the time I heard that, I thought boy, it sure sounds familiar, and if you listen to our podcast, episode number 44, you will recall that we did a deep dive on the American Airlines crash at Washington Dulles Airport, where an aircraft collided with a military helicopter there, killing everyone on board. But we critiqued the American Airlines initial statement, the video that was put out by the CEO, and gave them high marks for empathy on the delivery, for informative content. Everything about that statement just caught us the right way. We thought American Airlines did a very nice job. You can go back to episode 44 if you want to hear our take on that.
Tom Mueller:It gets interesting today because the Air India statement that the CEO issued it was a CEO video is almost identical to the American Airlines statement. It's been a little entertaining to watch because Air India has gotten some criticism from folks on the internet who take issue with the fact that they are copying the statement from American Airlines For those watching on YouTube, I'm going to share some content here from the X platform just showing some of the criticism that's come across. There's several people out there on X who've done side-by-side comparisons with the two CEOs, the two statements, and have actually sort of panned the Air India CEO because his delivery was not quite as empathetic as the American Airlines CEO's delivery on that. That said, is it a big deal that they copied the American Airlines statement and used it pretty much verbatim? What are your thoughts on that? My thought is that's probably okay. It's a good statement as long as you deliver it well. Good content is good content. So I do not take issue with Air India doing that and in fact, the it's high praise for the team over at American Airlines, for the communications folks who wrote that statement, for the lawyers who approved it and, of course, for the CEO who delivered it so eloquently and empathetically. Was it an honest statement? Was it transparent? Did that all come together and make it a good statement for Air India to use and in my view it did and quibble about the delivery form, the style and that, but in terms of content I thought it was a good statement. I didn't have a problem with that.
Tom Mueller:Now, if your crisis plan doesn't include a pre-prepared statement like that for you know the top three or four issues that your company or your agency might face, well, that's something you should probably get to work on. Every crisis plan should have a couple of template statements built in there that you can fill in a few blanks or modify it just a little bit based on circumstances and then get it out there as quickly as you can. We've been impressed in the past as we've seen how quickly companies are turning around crisis statements. I think the all-time winner in recent years is Southwest Airlines, who got a statement out very quickly. American Airlines likewise turned a CEO statement around very quickly, and you have to give credit to the communications teams at both companies, and probably Air India as well, for being prepared, for having those statements ready, for getting it through the approval process quickly, for getting the CEO to sit down and record it and do a nice job in the process. All of that is a huge challenge in an emergency situation. Your teams have to be ready, your executives have to be coached and they have to understand the importance of communications in those first critical hours and minutes after an incident like this. So take a look at your plan and make sure you've got that content in there ready to go. You know there's some speculation too.
Tom Mueller:Did AI write that statement, at least in the Air India use of it? And AI is, of course, a very interesting part of the communications world and the business world. Now I don't know about you, but I find myself using AI more and more. I quite enjoy talking to Grok and asking questions and just probing to see how much detail Grok can can pull up from its database on various topics. What's fascinating and quite entertaining is just the conversational nature of that AI of Grok anyway, and as opposed to doing like a Google search or ask Siri, the Grok AI is much more friendly and personable and it's kind of fun. Literally it's fun to go in and ask questions and have a little dialogue with it, and I can see the hype and why there is so much hype around AI, because it is going to be used for so many things so soon it's coming.
Tom Mueller:Our challenge as communicators and as any business person is, you know, how do we leverage it? Is it going to take my job or am I going to master how to use AI to do my job better. That's the challenge each one of us face in this current dynamic environment. So don't be a victim of it. Learn how to use it, get out in front of it and you'll have some job security out there. Hey, that's all I wanted to cover with you today. So thanks for joining us again on this episode of the podcast. If you'd like to drop us an email, you can email me, tom at leadinginacrisiscom, and I sure look forward to that. So thank you, and we'll see you again soon.
