Ian I. Mitroff

Every so often, a truly great book comes along. When God Talks Back: Understanding the Evangelical Relationship With God by Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann is certainly one of these.

Let me recount briefly the main argument of Luhrmann's book. Doing so not only helps us to understand better...

Co-written by Murat Alpaslan

Earlier this year, we published Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega Crises and Mega Messes. It was an in-depth study of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. While it was written long before the latest JP Morgan Chase debacle,...

Let me state my main thesis at the outset: There is a dangerous class of companies and organizations that are Severely Crisis Prone. (For brevity, I shall simply refer to them as companies.) These companies pose a severe threat to our health, safety, and the environment. Since they are largely...

In two recent op-eds in The Huffington Post, "The Republicans' Masterful and Insidious Prey on America's Founding Fears," and "The Republicans' Masterful and Insidious Prey on America's Founding Fears, Part II," I talked about two masterful analysts of America's founding myths and stories, Rupert Wilkinson and...

What an incredibly boring and uninteresting world it would be if one needed nothing more than a surface understanding of things in order to take action against wrongs.

Over 40 years of professional experience has taught me that deep unconscious forces, of which we are by definition largely...

Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is highly admirable. It deserves all the good reviews it has garnered. Nonetheless, I want to take exception with it because I believe it fundamentally violates one of its own main theses.

In a recent op-ed, "The Republicans' Masterful and Insidious Prey on America's Founding Fears," I talked about the fact that in 1988, Rupert Wilkinson published a remarkable little book. Wilkinson identified four fears that not only have been present from the very founding of the Republic,...

The senseless killing of Trayvon Martin is not only a monumental tragedy, but it has all the elements of the great epic Greek and Shakespearian tragedies. In fact, all crises do.

The prime lesson: Get thee to the Greek playwrights and Shakespeare if one would better understand crises!

First...

In 1988, Rupert Wilkinson, who has taught at leading universities in America and the U.K., published a remarkable little book, The Pursuit of American Character. It is nothing short of brilliant. I only wish that more people everywhere were aware of it. If they were, they might really...

The confusion that reigns in the "marketplace of ideas" is as great as it's ever been. To say that the Republicans candidates for president exploit this state of confusion for their own benefit is a gross understatement. (Indeed, they provoke it by spreading vicious lies. In this sense, "confusion" is...

In two recent op-eds in the Huffington Post ("Is Truth in Politics Possible? Is Truth Possible in Anything Human?" and "Absence of Truth: Why the Republican Candidates Can't Get Anywhere Near the Truth"), I argued that historically there are at least four different kinds and meanings...

The recent "reprehensible outburst" -- if that's what it really deserves to be called -- by Rush Limbaugh towards Sandra Fluke has predictably set off a War of Words between conservatives and liberals.

Liberals, among whom I enthusiastically count myself, are completely -- and in my view, rightly --...

I have been researching and consulting with regard to major crises of all kinds (criminal, natural disasters, financial, reputational, etc.) for 30 years. During this time, I have seen individuals and organizations of all types become trapped in the same disastrous pattern from which they rarely escape, or at least...

In a recent op-ed in the Post ("Is Truth in Politics Possible? Is Truth Possible in Anything Human?", Huffington Post, 02/28/2012), I made the point that historically there are at least four different kinds and meanings of "truth." (There are of course many more than four, but four...

With so much deception, if not outright falsehoods and deceit, offered up daily by the current and recent crop of Republican candidates, one has ample reason to ask, "Is truth possible in politics, let alone in anything done by humans?"

To respond adequately to this ponderous question not only requires...

As a nation, we are fighting several "reality wars" at once. These wars are not only political, but deeply psychological. As a result, our collective mental health as a nation is being severely challenged and tested.

Like that of individuals, the mental health of a nation is measured primarily by...

Like many Americans, I suffer from a constant tug of war going on deep inside of me. On the one hand, I believe deeply in reason and scholarship. Why else would I have been a professor my entire life and currently be working on my 30th book? I also believe...

During his time in office, President George W. Bush gave a new meaning to the awful disease known as IBS. I called it Irritable Bush Syndrome, the gross inability to "digest and pass the truth."

In the same spirit, let me "offer" the "list of diseases" that the current crop...

The view that "politics is akin to a marriage" is a casual, if not an often-expressed, sentiment. Unfortunately, almost no one takes the metaphor seriously and thus uses it to do a serious evaluation of the state of health of American politics. If we did, we would soon conclude that...

When my colleagues and I first started doing surveys of the crisis preparedness of major colleges and universities, we were shocked but not totally surprised to find that as poorly prepared large business organizations generally are for major crises, colleges and universities were even worse off. It is not that...