CEOs show how cheating death can change your life
— -- Appleton survived.
Film producer George Lucas was a deadbeat teen until he was nearly killed in a car crash about the time of his high school graduation in 1962.
Among the passengers on the US Airways jet, Flight 1549, were some fairly high-ranking business types, including a senior manager at NASCAR, an Oracle sales manager and the head of mutual fund retailing for ING Funds.
Time will tell if Amber Wells, Dave Sanderson, Joe Hart or others aboard Flight 1549 find their brush with death transforming. Jobs did. He delivered a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University a year after a tumor was discovered on his pancreas and, for a short time, he feared he had just months to live. He told Stanford graduates:
"Death is very likely the single-best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true."
Last June, management consultant Grant Thornton surveyed 250 CEOs of companies with revenue of $50 million or more. Twenty-two percent said they have had an experience when they believed they would die and, of those, 61% said it changed their long-term perspective on life or career. Forty-one percent said it made them more compassionate leaders; 16% said it made them more ambitious; 14% said it made them less ambitious.
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