Crisis in Business is Rarer than Unicorns

Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 by Frank Roche

You know what’s a crisis? Drought. Famine. Disease. Nuclear annihilation.

You what’s not a crisis? Meetings. Rumors. Performance reviews. Fake deadlines.

When you get as old as me you’ve seen a few things come and a few things go. I’ve worked for a lot of years in leadership positions and as a business owner. I am wracking my brain to think about a single crisis since I started working. I can’t really think of one, even though there have been a few tense moments here and there.

Here’s something I know: There are very few times there’s a genuine crisis in business. Sure, some things need to be done sooner than others. There are priorities. People need to work together. (Poisoning people or the environment — that’s a crisis.) Even when a business is in peril, running around like Chicken Little never makes the situation better.

What you call things matters. If getting a PowerPoint presentation done is a crisis, then what’s it like to prepare a brief for the CEO? Is that Armageddon?

Call things what they are. And realize that those events that look like a crisis at the time rarely ever are.

Bikini Atoll Explosion
(My dad was at this one when he was in the Navy. It wasn’t good for his health. That became a crisis.)

User Comments

Wally Bock

Aug 27th, 2009

Nice rant, Frank.
Frank Roche

Aug 27th, 2009

@Wally…thanks…it is an advantage of age…both knowing things are never as bad as they seem…and being able to rant.
Bill Strahan

Aug 31st, 2009

Frank – Doesn’t age have something else to it as well? The perspective of experience helps put a faux crisis and a real crisis into their proper context. Youth and inexperience sometime fail to distinguish the real from the imagined because there is no ability to measure them against other events and outcomes. For those of us lucky enough to have seen a few dramas play out we sometimes know the way it may go. We also can recognize some of what will not matter. Conversely, the beautiful thing is when you can spot early on something that is really important and then have the capacity to focus on it.

The Greatest Generation learned that one pretty early; anything they didn’t get in WW two they got building post war America. “Precinct House as Classroom”.
Frank Roche

Aug 31st, 2009

@Bill I do thing age gives us that gift of knowing how it will go. What all seems so dramatic and life changing at the middle school lunch table all of a sudden isn’t such a big deal. You’re right, though — it also gives us the insight to know when things really are jumping off the tracks. Then we (generally) know what to do. So true about the Greatest Generation: they knew it and did it. I aspire to 10 percent of that output.
Wally Bock

Aug 31st, 2009

I agree that the perspective of age helps us understand what’s happening and how it’s likely to play out. But those of us with experience have to remember that history rhymes, it doesn’t repeat. We have to constantly ask, “What’s different this time?” Otherwise you draw lessons for Viet Nam from Munich and lessons for Iraq from Viet Nam without out asking if your lessons are universal or time-bound.
John H.

Aug 31st, 2009

There is nothing like an emergency market pricing. Right out of college I worked at a big HR consulting firm and we had a big red Coke cup – one of those big gulp size cups. When the emergency market pricing came in, the red cup went up on the cabinet – followed by the sound of sirens from my fellow early career comp consultants.

Although, maybe we didn’t take enough seriously, because we also once staged a picket line using Disney character stuffed animals (fully equipped with sandwich boards and all). The protest was over changes to the height of the cubicle walls.
Frank Roche

Sep 1st, 2009

@John That is a funny visual…ring the fire bell and slide down the fireman’s pole! It’s an emergency market pricing!

That had me laughing for 5 minutes about staging a protest with Disney stuffed animals. You guys had a blast over there…what a great work environment you created.
Bill Strahan

Sep 3rd, 2009

I blushed when I read John H’s comment.