Speaker 1: John Maxwell here. Welcome to Minute with Maxwell. I want to talk to you today about crisis management. Several years ago when I wrote the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, we literally went on a book tour from coast to coast. We had a Learjet. We started in Tampa, Florida, and we had breakfast in one city, lunch in the next city, dinner in the next city, and we crisscrossed America, and in seven days we had done 21 cities, media, press, back and forth discussion, Q&A, passing out the book. In fact, by the time I got into San Diego and finished the trip up, literally the book was already on the bestseller list. So we're coming back into Atlanta. I'll never forget this moment. The plane's maybe 50 feet from landing. We're just coming in. Things seem to be going fine, and all of a sudden we hit a wind shear, and the plane immediately dropped, and when it hit the runway, it didn't hit it square, and I thought to myself, we're going to crash. Immediately when those wheels touched the runway, the pilot just pulled that plane back up in the air instantly. In fact, so quickly that it took me back, and we got in the air. We circled a couple of times, came back down, had a safe landing. I got off the plane, kissed the ground, and then the pilot got out, and I kissed him. I said, oh my gosh, thank you very much. And then I asked him, I said, I got to talk to you. I said, you just took that plane up in the air so fast. I just, wow, how did you think of doing that so quickly? I mean, it was just like immediately you had the plane back up in the air. I said, when did you think about that? And he looked at me and smiled. He said, I thought about that 20 years ago. And then he told me, as a pilot, I've thought about every possible way and condition that would cause the plane to wreck. And I've asked myself in every scenario, if this happens, what am I going to do? And he said, I made a decision 20 years ago that if I hit the runway wrong, I would immediately get the plane back in the air because there's just a lot more give and take in the air than there is on the ground. And that's very true. When he told me that, I thought, that's crisis management. Managing the crisis before there's a crisis. In other words, anticipating what is the problem, what is going to be the issue, and then getting answers for it. Perhaps the best answer for crisis management is not what you think when the crisis appears, but what you've thought before the crisis happens. I was having one time lunch with Rudy Giuliani and we were talking about 9-11 and when the planes went into the towers. And I asked him when he was at breakfast, he was at breakfast when they came and told him. I said, what did you think? He said, immediately I thought it was a terrorist attack because those towers are in no way in the path of the airlines. And then he said, John, before I got to my car, I was already talking to the chief of police and the fire people and he said, we already had a plan because we've been practicing for a year what to do in one of those skyscrapers if there would ever be an attack. He said, we knew what to do. I guess what I'm saying is that we're all going to have crisis and we're going to have to manage them. We can't anticipate everything, but we can anticipate some things. I would just encourage you, think ahead, plan ahead, ask yourself the hard questions. Perhaps when the crisis comes, it won't be quite the crisis it would have been because you thought about it on the front end. Sure beats thinking about it on the back end. I'm glad you're with me today on Minute with Maxwell.