Made in Crises

Book excerpt: In Chinese, the character for the word crisis is made up of two symbols, , danger and opportunity. A crisis is an ultimate test a leader can endure as while it swiftly reveals a leader’s capabilities and strengths; it can also expose the underlying weak spots. The unpredictable, dramatic, and highly charged events surrounding a crisis can profoundly affect the people in an organisation and threaten its very existence. A crisis is a condition of instability in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change. Most of us are ordinary people until a crisis finds us. It is an interesting study of how various crises inspired great leadership icons and how these symbols of prominence stirred a distinct set of events. Crises bring with them opportunities for the leaders to stretch, embrace, and evolve new behaviors, solutions, and attitudes. Like every seriously committed business leaders of today, if you too are overwhelmed what the world experienced in 2020 in the form of Coronavirus pandemic and searching for a new growth trail for your company and have not yet traced out a trajectory towards it, this book is our gift to you. This ‘mother of crises,’ caused a series of unthinkable events; millions got infected in the first world, hundreds of thousands died in the most advanced clinical setting, thousands of billions were lost in the bloodbath in the stock market, capitalism embraced socialism, and nuclear-armed global economies shuddered like a house of cards in the face of the pandemic. And mighty leaders, business and political, crumbled like Icarus, the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, whose waxen wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.