I am very pleased to announce a great book by a great colleague.  As of today, The Crisis Leader: The Art of Leadership in Times of Crisis is available for purchase from Amazon.

It is a book that explores the very tough, but very real problem of leadership in crisis.  This leadership skill is distinct from other types of leadership and Gisli tackles to the subjects with a direct approach and simple writing.  He interweaves stories from his vast personal experience to highlight the complexities of the subject.

Gisli draws on his vast experience as a crisis leader having worked in numerous crisis situations.  Here is his full bio:

Gisli Olafsson has been the Emergency Response Director of NetHope since November 2010. In his current role he is responsible for emergency preparedness and emergency response activities related to information and communication technology (ICT) within the fortyone NetHope member organizations.

Prior to that role he worked as a Disaster Management - Technical Advisor for Microsoft Corporation from September 2007 to October 2010. In that capacity, Gisli was responsible for providing guidance to international organizations, such as UN, IFRC, World Bank, Commonwealth, USAID and NATO, on the effective use of ICT to enhance response to natural disasters.

Gisli has over 15 years of experience in the field of disaster management and is an active member of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team, a team of experienced disaster managers which are on stand-by to deploy anywhere in the world on a 6 hour notice to coordinate the first response of the international community to disasters on behalf of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Gisli was also a team leader for Iceland's international Urban Search and Rescue team (ICE-SAR) which is classified as a medium USAR team by the UN. Gisli was the team leader for ICE-SAR in the Haiti Earthquake in 2010. Gisli has years of experience as an incident commander and served as part of Iceland's National Search and Rescue Command for years. Gisli was a lead member of King County's Emergency Operation Centre's Support team while living in Seattle and took part in coordinating over 500 disaster management and SAR incidents.

In recent years Gisli has participated in disaster field missions in connections with floods in Ghana (2007), Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (2008), Hurricane Ike in Texas (2008), Sichuan Earthquake (2008), Pandemic Outbreak (2009), West Sumatra Earthquake (2009), Haiti Earthquake (2010), Japan Earthquake/Tsunami (2011),Horn of Africa famine (2011), and Typhoons Bopha (2012) and Haiyan (2013) in the Philippines.