When I came back to Wired.com halfway through the summer, I really did think for a moment that the biggest news for a while would be Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. Instead, we had a flood of corporate catastrophes, near-catastrophes and responses to catastrophe that overtopped the levees until the tormented metaphors themselves cried out for it all to stop.

It would be a shame, though, if we went through all of this for nothing. So let’s try to synthesize a few of the lessons companies can learn from what went right and what went very, very wrong this summer.

There’s tremendous pressure on ...