ooking for a way to solve today's corporate financial problems? In an opposite spin to Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman's what-me-worry attitude, try this technique: Start worrying.
"Worry works," says Harvard Business School Professor Richard M. Ruback. Well, it works, he adds, with this caveat: "The trick is to figure out how to worry constructively." The reason is quite simple: "While you're worrying about something, you're thinking about what to do. You are really just developing an action plan, so that when the situation you have been worrying about occurs, you're ready with a plan and more able to make rational decisions.
"If it's a brand new situation that you've never worried about--and you don't have an action plan--you may be unprepared to make an important decision."
Ruback, the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance, will lead the HBS/FEI Executive Program for Chief Financial Officers from March 16 to 20, 2003 at the Harvard Business School in Boston, which is accepting only a limited number of participants. The program, in its seventh year, will take the classic Harvard case study method a significant step further. For the first time, this year, the program will combine solving actual problems that participants submit, as well as adding a systematic approach to problem solving.
"We all think that we are more rational than we are, and...