How To Survive The Storm

I have been following the writing of Nancy Koehn a professor at Harvard Business School.  She has turned her thoughts to how leaders of nations and companies cope with recession, downturn and the loss of business.  She says "Stepping out of the chaos is difficult. Especially now as companies are imploding, entire sectors of the economy are dying, and demands for time and energy are intense."

I agree with her, today you are always at work, the Blackberry humming every time an email comes in.  The work colleagues who think it is perfectly OK to call you early Saturday morning about a trivial matter that could have easily waited till Monday.

So how do our current leaders deal with the chaos?  President Obama spends 90 minutes every day in the gym.  Marty Nesbitt one of his close friends says. "Those ninety minutes in the gym each morning put the outside world on hold."

When Bill Gates was running Microsoft he took biannual "reading weeks" and spent time alone in a log cabin reading, thinking and considering the larger landscape.

So one of the ways to weather the storm is to build a shelter away from it and spend some time on how you can better cope with the new challenges that now lay ahead.

To read Nancy's full article in Fortune Magazine click here