The Art of Preparation

This week an earthquake rattled windows on Wall Street, Steve Jobs stepped down as the CEO of Apple, and the Eastern seaboard is bracing for Hurricane Irene. So naturally, I've been inundated with business continuity planning, disaster recovery and/or succession planning pitches.

Don't get me wrong, those are valuable stories to be told, for sure; but as a journalist I feel it to be an unwritten law that you can only write one BCP, DR or succession planning story every five years. I'm already on record both at Waters and at my previous job writing for US Banker, so I'll take a pass.

I will take a minute, though, to note that it's these types of events that remind us just how important being prepared is to a business. BCP was all the talk after the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, but almost just as quickly those talks were moved to the back-burner.

As that great '80s band Cinderella once lamented, you don't know what you got till it's gone. (I'm not sure that that fits here, but I really wanted to mention Cinderella in at least one column this year.) So let's all take this time to do the tedious task of reviewing our business continuity planning, disaster recovery and succession planning procedures.

We take these things for granted, but every single New Yorker that ran outside during the earthquake failed the Federal Emergency Management Agency's protocol for responding to an earthquake.

For what it's worth, I passed because I was in a plane. I planned it that way.