Gartner Fellow David McCoy interviews former ambassador to Lebanon John Kelly. The transcript is here. Snippets:
McCoy:
I'm thinking of the "duck and cover" mentality of the 1950s for surviving a nuclear blast. You'd see the news clips of the kids putting their heads down on their school desks in preparation to survive an atomic bomb.
Do we have a naiveté like that emerging now, where enterprises are taking similar reactions to the threat of terrorism? Is a lot of the scenario planning they're doing really just a feel-good exercise?
Kelly:
Some of the scenario planning is a feel-good exercise. It reminds me of an old quote from General, then President Eisenhower, who said: "Plans are worthless. Planning is everything." This means that the intellectual effort to try to understand what you might do in a given set of circumstances is worthwhile even though the actual plan that you've drawn up may be overcome, overtaken by events within a little while.
It's worthwhile to try to anticipate what might happen. But I don't think we can allow that to immobilize ourselves — either in business or in our personal lives.