MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Leading With Your Head and Your Heart

CEOs who manage emergencies using emotion as well as logic and intuition find the best results in the short term and the long.

Over the past 30 years, we have studied and consulted for nearly 100 CEOs in Europe, Asia, and North America who had to deal with large-scale crises. Based on these CEOs’ responses to various emergencies, we have identified three ways leaders tend to think during emergencies.

Functional smart leaders rely on their survival instincts. Focused on the bottom line, they do whatever it takes to keep their companies afloat. Business smart leaders are opportunistic. They find clever ways to leverage a crisis and develop strategies to capture post-disaster opportunities. We estimate that 90% of corporate leaders we observed went into one of those two modes during past crises.