Masters of Disaster

In most successful turnaround situations, you'll see that approach -- if you look for it. During the Apollo 13 mission, back in 1970, flight director Eugene Kranz was bombarded with frantic messages from the flight team. The electrical system wasn't working. The oxygen level was dropping. The communication link was failing. What did he say back to the team? "Thank you. I hear what's wrong. Now tell me what's good."

Kranz's response helped people to focus on being productive, instead of on feeding the panic. And once the team identified the systems that were still working, they were able to build on that platform in order to put in place the turnaround plan that ultimately saved the spacecraft.

It's a posture. It's an attitude. If you're not calm and confident, no one else will be.

Mike Useem (useem@wharton.upenn.edu) is professor of management and director of the Center for Leadership and Change at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All (Times Books, 1998). To experience such moments, he annually organizes the Wharton Leadership Trek to Mt. Everest.

Tamar March

Dean of educational programs
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

In an unstable climate, your presence of essential optimism must be contagious. Your excitement, steadfastness, and eagerness to attend to human values will make or break your turnaround effort. That was the case at Radcliffe just four short years ago, when I became dean and had to evangelize a new vision of learning. Few people believed that change could be energizing. Many of my colleagues resisted the new direction because they thought that something would be lost because of it. They needed help seeing what could be gained from change. They needed to know why transformation could be exciting. Of course, there was talk of change before I came along; but it was academic talk, rather than visceral talk. My job was to make the talk real, to mark the excitement of change, and to personalize the effort by giving everyone authorship of the changes to be made. My optimism had to be the kind of hard-core reality that would energize my colleagues and me to work toward our shared goal.

My first move was to single out the individuals who could tolerate turbulence and give them my deep, passionate attention. I asked them to share their experiences and ideas with me, and then I let them know why I was particularly energized by the transformation to come. But I didn't bring an elegant solution to them. Rather, we defined the problem and sought the answer together. I worked side-by-side with them to tease out a new design and to promote that design among the critics. There was deliberation and debate -- and in the end, the effort resulted in a new learning organization that had been designed by many authors.

Correcting your course midway can be a major challenge -- and a major pain in the butt. It can also be exciting. Radcliffe, for example, is entering a new chapter, and my colleagues and I have become more limber in thinking that tomorrow will not be merely a replication of today.

Tamar March (march@radcliffe.edu) is the dean of the Radcliffe Center for Educational Programs, a division of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Since 1996, she has been instrumental in transitioning the once-independent Radcliffe College into one of ten schools at Harvard University.

Amy Edmondson

Assistant professor of business administration
Harvard Business School
Boston, Massachusetts

What is the opportunity? Too many managers in a crisis try to jump-start the organization with a lot of motivational talk or busywork -- without first answering a critical, yet basic, question: What strategy will take the company in the right direction?

That's a difficult question to answer. Doing so means making some tough choices about what the company is and is not going to do. But a strategy that says a company will be all things to all people is the first sign of inevitable failure. A good strategy has to have both compelling logic (a credible argument for what a company is going to do and why it thinks that such an action is doable) and a compelling vision (an image in people's minds of a future that engages their interest and their motivation).