Crisis: A Global Primer

Jason Miklian, John E. Katsos

Cambridge University Press, 2023

Cite

Crisis: A Global Primer is the first of Miklian and Katsos's volumes on crisis and polycrisis. It treats crisis as a global phenomenon spanning political, economic, environmental and health dimensions. The primer sits alongside the Harvard Business Review crisis playbook (November 2021), the evidence on small-firm survival from 34 interviews in Beirut (Business Horizons, 2025), the Cambridge Element Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis (2024) and the casebook Responsible Management in Crisis: A Global Case Primer (2025), which turned the material into teaching cases and the Force Majeure simulation.

Key Messages

  • The primer treats crisis as a global phenomenon spanning political, economic, environmental and health dimensions (Miklian and Katsos 2023).
  • The primer is the first volume in a sequence that runs through the 2024 Cambridge Element on ethical leadership and the 2025 casebook with its Force Majeure simulation.
  • The research base includes the 2021 Harvard Business Review crisis playbook, a seven-city survey of 78,000 people during the pandemic, and 34 interviews with SME owners in Beirut.

The research behind the primer

The crisis strand of Miklian and Katsos's work began with the observation that three converging trends, climate change, globalization and growing inequality, magnify crises, so that playbooks written for single events fail. The Harvard Business Review article setting out a new crisis playbook appeared in November 2021, alongside a piece on community partnerships, built on the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia's ten-year community engagement plan begun in 2008, and a survey-based piece on what Covid-19 taught firms, drawing on 78,000 respondents in seven cities.

The empirical work on small firms followed. A review in the International Small Business Journal (40(2), 2022) set out how small businesses experience shocks, and 34 interviews with SME owners in Beirut produced a framework for survival strategies in perpetual crisis (Business Horizons, 2025). The leadership argument became the Cambridge Element Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis, online in May 2024, and the teaching material became the 2025 casebook and the Force Majeure simulation at conquercrisis.io.

Where to Find It

Research Topics

crisis global governance management polycrisis crisis leadership

Citation

Jason Miklian, John E. Katsos. Crisis: A Global Primer. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Related Research Areas

BibTeX Citation 
@book{miklian2023_crisis__a_global_primer,
  title = {Crisis: A Global Primer},
  author = {Miklian, Jason and Katsos, John E.},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://miklian.org/papers/crisis-a-global-primer/}
}