Crisis Provides Opportunity Quotes

Crisis is almost a blessing providing cessation of a kind, and with it, the opportunity for change.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

him. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” If

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

One man’s real estate crisis is another’s opportunity. All markets work in this way, providing investors with cash the chance to buy—stocks, bonds, real estate, and commodities—when prices are depressed. This reality is devoid of emotional weight and is the basic truth that keeps capitalist economies working.

Man/Woman, it has always insisted, does not live by bread alone. The weakness of the church is that it has too often accepted the separation between the material and the spiritual … leaving the material to the economic and political power structure.… The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings.… Churches are … in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature. All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of people could come alive.10

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s chief of staff. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Soon afterward, the Obama administration convinced a once-reluctant Congress to pass the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.

THE 2007–2008 FINANCIAL crisis provoked no great protests, but it did provide plenty of villains. Advances in information technology and the loosening up of financial industry regulations since the 1980s had set bankers free to take enormous risks. By the late 1990s, with home prices climbing higher and higher every year, private mortgage lenders saw an opportunity to reap tremendous profits while passing the risks on to the public.

Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.

The current system for refugees who remain in their region of origin is a disaster. It is premised upon an almost exclusively 'humanitarian' response. A system designed for the emergency phase - to offer an immediate lifeline - ends up enduring year after year, sometimes decade after decade. External provision of food, clothing, and shelter is absolutely essential in the aftermath of having to run for your life. But over time, if it is provided as a substitute for access to jobs, education, and other opportunities, humanitarian aid soon undermines human dignity and autonomy.

None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. The richest had gotten richer, there being fewer to own whatever there was. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity

Our concern,” Jimmy wrote in the DU brochure, is with how our city has been disintegrating socially, economically, politically, morally and ethically. We are convinced that we cannot depend upon one industry or any large corporation to provide us with jobs. It is now up to us—the citizens of Detroit—to put our hearts, our imaginations, our minds, and our hands together to create a vision and project concrete programs for developing the kinds of local enterprises that will provide meaningful jobs and income for all citizens. To engage Detroiters in the creation of this vision, DU embarked on a campaign for open government in the city, issuing a series of leaflets calling on citizens to examine the whole chain of developer-driven megaprojects with which Young had tried and failed to revive the city (including Poletown and the People Mover) and to assume responsibility for envisioning and implementing alternative roads of development based on restoring neighborhoods and communities. During the debate over casino gambling Young had challenged his opponents to come up with an alternative, accusing us of being naysayers without any solutions of our own. Jimmy welcomed the challenge. There was nothing he liked better than using crisis and breakdown as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. His forte was devising solutions that were visionary and at the same time so down-to-earth that people could almost taste them. For more than fifteen years he had been writing and talking about the crisis developing in our cities and the need to redefine work, especially for the sake of our young people. In October 1986, at a meeting in Oakland, California, which the Bay Area NOAR sponsored to present “a vision of 21st century neighborhoods and communities,” Jimmy had declared that it was now “idealistic” to expect the government or corporations to do the work that is needed to keep up our communities and to provide for our elementary safety and security. Multinational corporations and rapid technological development have turned our cities into graveyards. “Efficiency in production,” he argued, “can no longer be our guiding principle because it comes at the price of eliminating human creativity and skills and making millions of people expendable.” He continued: “The residue of the last 100 years of rapid technological development is alienation, hopelessness, self-hate and hate for one another, and the violence which has created a reign of terror in our inner cities.

APRIL 22 Moses responded to the people, “Don’t be afraid, for God has come to test you, so that you will fear Him and will not sin.” Exodus 20:20 I have wrestled with a stronghold of fear much of my life. Like you, the combination of life’s challenges and a long list of loved ones provide the enemy no few opportunities to prey on my fears. I have often heard the statistic that 90 percent of what we fear never comes to pass. Those statistics have certainly proved true in my experience, but God has taught me as much from the 10 percent as the 90. In fact, one of the ways God has cured my fears is by allowing a few of them to come to fruition. After the crisis came and went, He seemed to ask, “Beth, did you live through it?

In many Western countries, the 1970s were the peak of both the average standard of living and income equality. Today we face a crisis of capitalism on the scale of the Great Depression — and that crisis only ended with the Second World War’s bonfire of value. Such crises are for some reason taken as an opportunity for the left, as if the backdrop of immiseration provides an impetus for action, rather than a millstone around the necks of those it intends to emancipate. It is no coincidence that labour militancy tends to correlate with economic security and a lack of indebtedness. As it is, we are stretched out upon the rack of financial discipline.

Traditional immigration countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States have always emphasized the importance of economic self-sufficiency. Therefore, providing refugees and immigrants with equitable access to the labor market even before they learned English had always been a number one goal of integration efforts. Ideally, newcomers would also receive a thorough orientation to the social mores, laws, and legal systems of their new country but understanding these traditions is not a substitute for decent employment, vocational training, and opportunities for upward mobility.

It is important to counter these misperceptions and inform the general public that most of the terrorists that launched attacks on European cities were born and raised in Europe. This begs the question: why were they radicalized? Perhaps they were easily lured by terrorist organizations because we failed to provide them with opportunities to thrive in society?

At the third special session, a host of developing countries demanded that the United States, Russia, Japan, China, and the European Union release their technology and provide all advanced technology, including aerospace technology, free of charge to the international community so that all nations of humanity would have an equal opportunity to face the Trisolar Crisis. The supporters of the socialized technology movement brought up a precedent: At the beginning of the century, several major European pharmaceutical companies exacted high license fees from African countries for the manufacture of state-of-the-art AIDS treatments, prompting high-profile litigation. Under pressure from public opinion and the rapid spread of the disease in Africa, the companies renounced their patent rights prior to trial. The ultimate crisis that Earth is now facing means that open technology is the unavoidable responsibility that advanced countries have to all humanity. The socialized technology movement found a unanimous response from developing countries and even won the support of some members of the EU, but all related initiatives were rejected at meetings of the UN-PDC.

The Global Plan’s most impressive feature was its incredible adaptability – successive US administrations amended it every time bits of it came unstuck. Their policies toward Japan are an excellent example: after Mao’s unexpected victory, and the demise of the original plan to turn the Chinese mainland into a huge market for Japanese industrial output, US policy makers responded with a variety of inspired responses. First, they utilized the Korean War, turning it into an excellent opportunity to inject demand into the Japanese industrial sector. Secondly, they used their influence over America’s allies to allow Japanese imports freely into their markets. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, Washington decided to turn America’s own market into Japan’s vital space. Indeed, the penetration of Japanese imports (cars, electronic goods, even services) into the US market would have been impossible without a nod and a wink from Washington’s policy makers. Fourthly, the successor to the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, was also enlisted to boost Japanese industry further. A useful by-product of that murderous escapade was the industrialization of South East Asia, which further strengthened Japan by providing it, at long last, with the missing link – a commercial vital zone in close proximity.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

German reunification not only caused unemployment to rise even further, but also placed an enormous strain on the state budget. The disintegration of the Eastern bloc put further pressure on German capitalism, for it meant not only new markets for German products, but also new geographical opportunities to relocate production. This proved extremely attractive for German companies, which were able to find enough qualified workers at significantly lower wages without modifying their training systems significantly. The introduction of the euro provided Germany with the medium-term advantage that other European countries could no longer counter German wage pressure by devaluating their own currencies. In the end, Germany’s export orientation produced large export surpluses at home, but also caused growing international trade imbalances.

Rahm Emanuel, once gave him. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.

Undeniably, economic factors can and often do exacerbate antisemitism, and often create crises in which antisemites may flourish. After all, such factors impinge on virtually all aspects of society, and when an economic crisis occurs, the resultant social upheaval may unleash many of the worst aspects of a society, among them Jew-hatred. But economic factors do not cause Jew-hatred; they only provide opportunities for it to be expressed. For one thing, there is little if any correlation between Jews’ wealth and antisemitism. Jews have often suffered the worst antisemitism when they were poor, as was true of the overwhelming majority of Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Russia, and have encountered the least amount of antisemitism when affluent, as in the United States and Canada today. As regards attributing medieval antisemitism to the Jews’ role as moneylenders, this puts the cart before the horse. Because of Christian European antisemitism during the Middle Ages, Jews were often denied the right to practice professions other than moneylending. Jews were not hated because they lent money; they lent money because they were hated. Obviously, once Jews became moneylenders, Jew-hatred was exacerbated.

Covid-19 has been, by anyone’s reckoning, a crisis—and it’s just getting started. Things are going to happen or change now, whether people take control of them in the broad interests of humanity or not. It may be an opportunity to achieve things we could not achieve before. The popularity of Kennedy’s statement shows we recognize this deeper truth—that crises can provide those opportunities. Or, we might just be swept along by the economic and political storms the pandemic has unleashed and never deal with any of the underlying problems that got us here.

As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such as priests and teachers (Hechler 1988). Adults in psychotherapy described similar experiences. The dichotomies that had previously associated organised abuse with the dangerous, external ‘Other’ had been breached, and the incendiary debate that followed is an illustration of the depth of the collective desire to see them restored. Campbell (1988) noted the paradox that, whilst journalists and politicians often demand that the authorities respond more decisively in response to a ‘crisis’ of sexual abuse, the action that is taken is then subsequently construed as a ‘crisis’. There has been a particularly pronounced tendency of the public reception to allegations of organised abuse. The removal of children from their parents due to disclosures of organised abuse, the provision of mental health care to survivors of organised abuse, police investigations of allegations of organised abuse and the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of organised abuse have all generated their own controversies. These were disagreements that were cloaked in the vocabulary of science and objectivity but nonetheless were played out in sensationalised fashion on primetime television, glossy news magazines and populist books, drawing textual analysis. The role of therapy and social work in the construction of testimony of abuse and trauma. in particular, has come under sustained postmodern attack. Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.

privatising the weaker ones, this space could become even more interesting. The government’s intention to continue with economic reforms is clear from the fact that it brought two ordinances, to clear bills relating to insurance and coal, after the legislative process was stymied by the opposition. Without going ahead with auctioning of coal blocks, India’s power sector would have been badly hit in 2015, and hence it was necessary to bring in an ordinance. What’s in store for 2015? The US will raise interest rates, which will lead to some outflow from emerging markets. But after that foreign money will return, provided that the government continues with its economic reforms. The Make in India campaign would bring back jobs with Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking all his ministries to make it easier to do business in India. A dip either caused by foreign institutional investment outflow or due to a harsher than expected budget or to a political crisis, should be an opportunity to enter the markets.  (J Mulraj is a stock market commentator and India head for Euromoney Conferences;views are personal) Now,