As the current meltdown on Wall Street makes painfully clear, today's managers are never too far from a crisis where the priorities set and the decisions made will critically impact everyone around them. While the situation may vary—the crisis could be anything from an S.E.C. investigation to a hostile-takeover attempt—the consequences are the same: One bad move could cause things to blow up in your face.

No one knows better the unique challenges of managing a potentially explosive situation than Detective Kevin Barry, who spent 16 years as a bomb-squad technician in the New York Police Department during the '80s and '90s, and is now chairman of the advisory board of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators. Barry holds the distinction of being the only bomb technician in America to ever deactivate a live explosive device while it was still strapped to the body of a suicide bomber, having been called upon in 1991 to defuse an armed-robbery suspect in Queens, New York, who'd rigged himself to explode if he was caught.

Do the practical skills of a bomb-squad leader offer any value for the less visceral (and more complicated) disasters of the enterprise? Author and professor at University of California–Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Dr. Ian Mitroff, thinks so—with one caveat: "In business, crisis begins in one place and a chain reaction results," he says. "You usually can't defuse one thing and call it a day." But, he notes, that doesn't mean there isn't useful common ground: "The general training first-responders get in dealing with [a] crisis is superb. I've been trying like hell for 25 years to get the corporate world to do something similar, without success."

"You've got to have a plan in place before a crisis happens, because, believe me, the guys on the ground [will] have other things on their minds." But Barry and Dr. Mitroff agree that whether you're dealing with an I.E.D. (improvised explosive device) or the S.E.C., the phases of crisis management are consistent. "You have the 'before' stage, where you ready your capabilities and audit the situation; the 'during' stage, where you enact your plan; and the 'after' stage, where hopefully, you have the margin of error to do some no-fault learning about what you'll do better next time," says Dr. Mitroff. They offer a few key points to follow.

Be Ready for Anything Barry's advice for the "before" phase of disaster readiness comes down to what he calls the "three P's"—planning, preparation, and practice. "In a disaster scenario, you want to be making as few decisions as possible," he says. "You've got to have a plan in place before a crisis happens, because, believe me, the guys on the ground [will] have other things on their minds."

A crisis plan should define a preset crisis management team, indicating who can and should do what under various conditions. It should also provide orderly priorities of what to protect first when things start to go south.
 
Next comes preparation, which to Barry means knowing every resource you'll have available in a crisis in advance—especially human assets. "Know your people," he says. "Know their names, know what they can do, know how much you can trust them. If you have good people and you know it, you have a sense of how much you can delegate away so you can focus on solving the problem."