By preparing beforehand and educating yourself so that you have an incident response life cycle plan in place, you can mitigate some of the pain of delivering the bad news to the CEO or other upper management and prevent panic on the part of the boss. This article contains some valuable tips for making yourself ready in advance.
http://www.eweek.com/security/what-to-do-after-discovering-a-breach-at-your-organization.html