Updated July 2026. Originally published August 2010 covering Erika Hayes James and Lynn Perry Wooten's Leading Under Pressure. Rewritten in July 2026 to strip filler and refresh the 2026 AI Communications context.
Erika Hayes James and Lynn Perry Wooten's Leading Under Pressure: From Surviving to Thriving Before, During and After a Crisis is a foundational text on executive crisis leadership. Published in 2010. Continuously cited in the crisis communications literature ever since. The book works through the BP oil spill, the Toyota recalls, the 1982 Johnson & Johnson Tylenol case (still the reference positive), and the 2008–2009 banking collapse — and pulls one central argument out of the case work.
Managing a crisis is not enough. What matters is crisis leadership — the judgment work that runs before, during, and after the event. As James put it at the time: "Most leaders do not know how to lead during a crisis. Often, executives who are working wonderfully well in normal times are not necessarily equipped to deal with situations of urgency."
The book maps four disciplines. Building crisis leadership skill across career stages. Assembling a crisis team — recognizing that the qualities that make a leader effective in calm periods are not the ones that make them effective under fire. Running communications across earned media and, by 2010's standards, the emerging social layer. And engineering the recovery — emerging from the event as a stronger institution than the one that entered it.
The case studies still hold. Burson-Marsteller's Tylenol work. Coca-Cola's brand crisis history. Exxon Valdez as the canonical reputation failure. James and Wooten did not treat these as historical curiosities. They treated them as pattern generators for what a crisis leader has to do.
The Discipline in the 2026 AI Communications Era
Sixteen years after the book landed, the discipline has evolved in one direction the authors could not have anticipated. AI engines now mediate crisis discovery. Buyers, journalists, regulators, and stakeholders research crisis events through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The retrieval surface those engines build around a crisis event is permanent. It gets trained. It gets cited. It shapes the next question anyone asks about the company.
The foundational disciplines James and Wooten identified — executive judgment under pressure, team assembly, multi-stakeholder communications, sustained recovery work — still apply. What's new is the retrieval layer. AI engine training data accumulated during a crisis becomes reputation infrastructure that the pre-2022 crisis playbooks did not know to plan for. A poorly-managed 72 hours today is not just a bad news cycle. It is a bad answer inside ChatGPT for the next three to five years.
The EPR Crisis Management Guidebook operationalizes this shift. Citation Share is the recovery KPI. Restoring the earned-media citation graph is the tactic that moves it. James and Wooten wrote the book on the human judgment side of crisis leadership. The AI Communications side is what 2026 practice adds on top.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
