Are companies really suffering due to a global crisis?

In my role as turnaround and M&A consultant, daily confrontation with critical situations is a constant factor: financial disasters, and companies going down the drain for quite some time, dealing with problems due to consolidation or spin-off. There isn’t really anything that would get one of us interim managers out of focus or off track – we are used to dealing with difficult times, used to managing a (large) group of people with different objectives in life, with people who are full of fear (about what’s coming up next), people who simply can’t handle change very well.
Now – do we define difficult times as a “crisis” or is it rather a matter of managers’ state of mind, lack of required leadership skills and a mix of poor market research and related corporate strategy?
I’d like to briefly refer to the description of crisis by the Institute of Crisis Management (http://www.crisisexperts.com/) in the US, which I think very accurately reflects my thoughts: 

“A significant business disruption that stimulates extensive news media coverage. The resulting public scrutiny will affect the organization’s normal operations and also could have a political, legal, financial and governmental impact on its business.”

The basic causes of a business crisis are four in number:

1. Acts of God (storms, earthquakes, volcanic action, etc)
2. Mechanical problems (ruptured pipes, metal fatigue, etc.)
3. Human errors (the wrong valve was opened, miscommunication about what to do, etc.)
4. Management decisions/indecision (the problem is not serious, nobody will find out)

Most of the crises ICM has studied fall in the last category and are the result of management not taking action when they were informed about a problem that eventually would grow into a crisis.

As far as I have noticed during many of my assignments, most of the critical situations are NOT caused by market-related issues, but much more driven by internal problems – the character and management style of the leading team, the lack of internal communication power, the way a vision is lived and moved forward in daily business.