By Admiral James Stockdale
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
— Admiral James Stockdale
Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001).
Collins interviewed Admiral Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for over seven years. When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied: “The optimists… they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go… And they died of a broken heart.”
We should never belittle the severity of our current situation, but confront the brutal facts as they are; and believe that this will be the thing we look back on and consider our defining moment.
Juan Enriquez
The key to managing a crisis is to…