By Tom Mueller I’ve been watching the communications effort around the Refugio Oil Spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California over the past week and how the effort has evolved over time. Here’s my take on the first week’s response and communications effort. Plains All American Pipeline clearly had some crisis management plans in
By Tom Mueller For those who follow crisis management issues, here’s a quick look at crisis communications around the Delta Airlines plane crash in New York this week. As we have seen in many other incidents, social media lit up immediately after the incident. Passengers were tweeting and posting to Facebook from the plane. There
AUCKLAND, New Zealand – I came out of the turn and twisted the throttle open, feeling the big 1300 cc motor growl as the rpms came up and the horsepower spooled out to the wheels. I’m on a motorcycle and touring the New Zealand countryside. I feel good. I’m cracking down a two lane blacktop
Five days in India recently left me with many stories to share. The most touching interaction came about with my driver for the week. His name is Raj. He is 30 years old, he has a three-year-old daughter, and he is very sad. His wife of 10 years died three months ago, leaving him to
By Tom Mueller Mike Newman is an entrepreneur on a mission these days. Known by a growing number of Texans as the man who built his own castle in the Texas countryside, he’s now diligently building a business around the castle and attracting thousands of visitors a year to the small town of Bellville. And
‘The acceleration is amazing!’ By Tom Mueller If you ask 8-year-old Marcus Rodriguez what he likes most about racing karts at speeds up to 60 mph around a track in northwest Katy, you get an unexpected response. “I like driving in the rain,” he says. “It’s fun.” Kart racing in the rain? Well, this isn’t
Tania Weber recounted those words to me recently at an IDPA shooting competition when I asked what got her into competitive shooting. A petite and intense 36-year-old mother of two, she had joined the competition to help hone her gun-handling skills and to get in some practice with one of her handguns. Tania wasn’t always
I rode the escalator up from baggage claim at Shanghai’s Pu Dong airport, rushing to get checked in for my 1:10 p.m. departure to Japan. I had 90 minutes. I was five and a half hours in to my trip from Zhuhai, China over to Tokyo. I hadn’t expected it to be a difficult day,
TOKYO – Somewhere over the Pacific, on a three hour-delayed flight aboard All Nippon flight 920, it struck me that I was being taught a new lesson in patience. I thought I had handled it pretty well so far, and I thought I was on the final leg of my China adventure, ready to be
