Standing on it's own, it's a nice piece of wisdom. But it's completely wrong:
"The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like "incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes)." Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis."Link
There's no real danger to thinking that in every crisis one should look for opportunity.
One of the best examples of that, I think, was the Tylenol scare. Tylenol bottles were tampered with, and resulted in the deaths of seven people. It's still unsolved. However, Johnson and Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, responded with triple sealed safety bottles to ensure no bottle could be tampered with again. So while Tylenol took an initial hit, it came back aggressively and won back even more market share.
In a crisis, they found opportunity. But not right away. Right away, they had a huge nightmare on their hands. It took them two months to reintroduce their new packaging. And they had a plan to discount the bottles. But when you really think about even this, you wonder what other choice they had. Clearly the new packaging was more expensive, meaning they lost margin. They basically had to respond.
The point is, the Chinese wisdom almost welcomes crisis. Which really is a scary thought. No one is looking for it. And when crisis comes, there isn't always an obvious answer.
But the whole point of this is, what else do we think we know, but actually don't?
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