Among other things, we decided to train people who didn't have advanced degrees to act as caseworkers. We forged partnerships with local family-care homes to provide extra beds. And we launched a day-treatment program, because we didn't have enough staff to run the wards all night. In the end, several of our solutions allowed for better care than the ways of the good old days. Today, programs like day hospitals are standard in community mental-health centers nationwide.
Succeeding in adversity makes success all the sweeter. At the end of the day, it's not how far you fall but how high you bounce.
Sheila Wellington worked in mental-health facilities for 18 years. Before joining Catalyst in 1993, she was secretary and vice president of Yale University, where she was the first woman to hold the office. Her book, Be Your Own Mentor: Career Strategies for Women, was published in February by Random House. Catalyst is a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women in business.
Chairman
The Blackstone Group
New York, New York
Don't sacrifice your long-term vital future for the temporary present. Just as it is a mistake to assume that boom times go on forever (an assumption that got us into this e-commerce fiasco in the first place), it's also a mistake to assume that the business cycle has been repealed and that today's bad times will go on forever. The latter assumption can lead to so much emphasis on cutting costs today that we forget that we're also managers of the future.
That advice applies not only to organizations but to the country as well. Today, more than ever, we need business leaders who not only build their own companies but also assume new roles in building the macroeconomy. Trouble on the horizon -- such as the imminent retirement of the huge baby-boomer generation and the $15 trillion or so of unfunded liabilities for social security and medicare -- isn't going away. And severely reducing the country's revenue base through tax cuts could, over the long term, make an already unsustainable problem even more so.
This issue of entitlement reform is as politically toxic as it gets. But since our unsustainable senior-citizen entitlement programs threaten the medium-term and long-term macroeconomic future, it's exactly the kind of issue that requires sustained business leadership. It will be up to e-commerce executives -- who are often young and not normally active in public-policy issues -- to pay attention and get involved. After all, they're the ones who will be operating in the macroenvironment of the future.
Peter G. Peterson, a former U.S. secretary of commerce and former chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, is chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among other organizations. He is also founding president of the Concord Coalition, an organization devoted to fiscal responsibility, and is a special limited-advisory partner to Millennium Technology Ventures LP. His latest book is Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform America -- and the World (Times Books, 1999). The Blackstone Group is a private investment bank in Manhattan.
Chairman of the John Templeton Foundation
Founder of the Templeton Growth Fund
Nassau, Bahamas
The cliché is true: Tough times build character. The best thing that ever happened to me was when the Great Depression hit, and my father couldn't give me one more dollar for college. In order to return to school, I had to learn to be self-reliant, resourceful, and diligent. I took several jobs -- the most lucrative of which was playing poker with rich boys -- and I was able to pay my college expenses. When dealt a bad hand, you learn to play smarter.
Given the changing economy, many young investors today are probably looking at their first bad hand. The smart players will learn from history. The wildly insane Internet bubble wasn't so different from previous bubbles that I've studied in my 88 years. In almost every case, within a year after the bubble burst, people were eager to buy again. Invariably, it was too soon. Think about the great stock-market collapse of 1929. After a few months, stocks began to climb, and people jumped in again, thinking the downturn was over. But it lasted for three years. You'd be surprised how low the market can go and how long it can take to recover. If you had bought on the top day in 1929, you wouldn't have seen a net profit for 17 years. The lesson? Don't buy too soon.
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