Balance Change with Routine

Joseph Badaracco-Harvard Business School professor, leadership and ethics.

The first thing for managers to consider is the importance of preparation. It's true that preparation for Y2K helped many CIOs on Septem-ber 11 because they had redundant systems.

So contingency planning is important. But the kind of contingency planning most people do is"best case plus 20 per cent","worst case minus 20 per cent". September 11 presents us with a much more dramatic situation.

But there's only so much you can do. There will always be things you can't foresee. What you can do as a manager is keep all lines of communication open so you can communicate quickly when something unexpected happens, even something drastic. You've got to be ready to scramble - and not just as an individual but as a team. The team will always be more resourceful than a single person. Scrambling means learning about what's happened quickly and formulating a response.

Another thing to consider is that it's going to be very hard for people to differentiate between long-term and short-term changes after the September 11 attacks. One scenario is that we really stamp down terrorism. Another comparably probable scenario is that there are more attacks, and [the US moves] to an Israel-like state, with permanent insecurity. Those are radically different worlds. It's going to be hard to know for a while how things will turn out.

If flying is an inescapable part of someone's job and they refuse to fly, at some point you're going to have to find somebody else to do the job. At some point, the work has to go on. But somebody who says:"I can't deal with flying now" might be willing to fly in a month.

Try to think creatively about other ways to get business done. My sense is that people relied on planes vastly more than they needed to. The cost and inconvenience of flying is very high. We're getting streaming video from Afghanistan right now; I don't understand why everyone's got to fly to [conduct business].