The White House has had a bad fourth quarter: Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, growing dissension about Iraq, Scooter Libby's indictment, low approval ratings, and so on. All the President wants for Christmas is an air bag to stop his free-fall.

Putting politics aside, the White House has done a poor job of managing multiple mistakes that created the current situation.

Here's just one example: the White House justified the Iraq war in part because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. When WMD failed to appear, someone inside the administration allegedly leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame as revenge against her husband, who had debunked the Niger-Iraq nuclear connection. Then, Libby allegedly lied to the grand jury about the leak to protect someone inside the administration. It all adds up to one big mess.

And, then there's Mike Brown. Horse show judge. FEMA director. Never mind, that's too easy.

The real problem for the Bush Administration is problems begetting problems instead of problems begetting solutions. A problem is nothing more than a decision waiting to be made. If President Bush wants to salvage his legacy, he's going to have to make some tough decisions and make them fast.

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Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the Blackberry PDA, is locked in a colossal battle with NTP, the company that owns the patents behind Blackberry's e-mail service. RIM thought it had reached a licensing agreement to use NTP's technology but is now facing a suspension of its entire U.S. e-mail service.

NTP doesn't have much to lose in this case. The company happens to own the patent (worth $450 million at minimum) to the world's most popular wireless e-mail service.

By contrast, RIM has much at stake. The company has more than three million users -- some would say addicts -- who rely on it to receive wireless e-mail every day.

What are RIM's public relations options in this case?

1. Play the victim.

RIM can blame NTP if the service shuts down. Playing the victim is a risky strategy that rarely works in business, especially for a company as successful as RIM. Steven Covey said it best: "Victimism gives your future away."

2. Promise a workaround.

The company has alluded to a workaround that will maintain e-mail service even if RIM fails to reach a settlement with NTP. That's all good, if we as Blackberry consumers have enough time to install and test the fix. Don't make us compete with three million fellow addicts to download a patch (an ironic name) on the last night. And, make sure it works, or we'll all go buy a Treo.

3. Promise a settlement.

RIM's stance so far has been to fight NTP at every turn in the courts. Changing its tone and promising a settlement would cause us to look up from our collective thumb keys and thank RIM for its newfound wisdom. Analysts have estimated the company can afford to pay the $1 billion they believe it will cost to settle the suit.

RIM has put up a good fight for what it believes are valid reasons. Maybe, it's time to stop fighting for millions of dollars and start fighting for the millions of loyal users.

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Next time you have an important presentation, try using ethos, pathos, and logos to order your material.

Ethos asks you to establish your credibility at the outset and win the trust with your audience. Pathos means empathy and seeks to create a personal connection with your listeners as you demonstrate an understanding of their needs. Lastly, logos means logic and allows you to be powerful and persuasive in your presentation. The order is supremely important as both ethos and pathos set the stage and make listeners receptive to your logos.

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Mississippi Power got it right in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The company restored power to 195,000 customers in just 12 days.

Company executives attributed the company's success to its can-do spirit, clear lines of responsibility, and decentralized decision-making. The relief effort exceeded its own goals in large part because employees knew exactly what to do in the situation. As one employee put it, "If you don't know what you're supposed to do, the manual is not going to help now."

Mississippi Power's success provides an outstanding framework that any company can use to evaluate its own crisis planning. The USA Today website has an excellent article about the effort and lessons learned.

"The little company that could" -- Oct. 10, 2005

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http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

The Wayback Machine is an Internet archive that functions more like an Internet scrapbook. When you input a website address (a.k.a. URL) into the Wayback Machine, it shows you a list of dates as far back as 1996. When you click on one of the dates, you see how that website looked on that date. So for example, you can see how the New York Times homepage looked on Nov. 12, 1996, and compare that to Jan. 24, 2002. The Wayback Machine claims to have archived more than 40 billion individual web pages. The site also features special archives for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and last year's presidential elections.

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Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, makes a comprehensive and daunting case about how the world is losing the war against illicit trade. He quotes one expert who estimates that 38 percent of the world economy today is illicit, including substantial activity in Mainstreet USA towns -- everything from fake Prada bags and pharmaceuticals to drug trafficking and money laundering.

The book discusses how global criminal networks are organized in decentralized, cell-like structures that make them as hard to eliminate as al Qaeda. The networks use cutting-edge technology, like global positioning systems, that make them difficult to track.

He makes the case for government, law enforcement, and the private sector all working together to develop a comprehensive, integrated strategy rather than trying to shut off the supply of drugs or illegal immigrants. A startling statistic -- we had 500,000 illegal immigrants coming to the United States from Mexico before 9/11; today, in spite of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, we still have 500,000 coming each year.

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