That’s the life for me: mogul. I’ve been driving the same car for 10 years. It’s time to move up to something that extravagantly shows how much I love the planet. Not a mere Tesla, but the Jaguar electric E-Type Zero, which costs about $400,000.

That kind of ride requires I.P.O. money. So, fellow insider, here’s my plan.

I formulated it with invaluable help from Eric Dezenhall. He runs Dezenhall Resources, which, among other things, does crisis management. In an email, I told him that my life is an unmanaged crisis, so I need advice if I am to build a future in his field.

His response was promising: “You do realize that the whole discipline is a farce, don’t you?” That convinced me that crisis management would be a good fit.

He added: “All you need is a sport jacket and a cliché (such as ‘Get ahead of the story,’ a great-sounding phrase that has no meaning.)”

This was getting better and better. As a veteran journalist, clichés are my métier. And, as it happens, I own a sport jacket. There are some moth holes, but I’ve gotten pretty good at using a felt-tip pen to match the jacket color with the lining. Mr. Dezenhall was impressed by my inventive use of the felt-tip pen. That, in itself, “is crisis management,” he said.

But he cautioned that crisis management is no longer a matter of simply altering perceptions so that a bad situation looks like something good. “What people think we’re going to say is, ‘We didn’t dump PCBs in the river, we’re shampooing the fish!’ and people will say, ‘Ooh, that’s good,’” he said. But, no. That’s old thinking, he said. His trade has evolved.

Instead of just changing perceptions, he said, the great crisis managers provide “operational solutions” that address root causes. That way, he said, a company can transcend the fickle and uncontrollable emotions that dominate the 24-hour news cycles and waves of Twitter outrage.