Staying the Course as a CIO: How to Overcome the Trials and Challenges of IT Leadership

CHAPTER 8 Epilogue—What Might Overcome You?

“Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.”

(Annie Lennox)

If for some reason you are ever curious about which real-world show-stopper is likely to be the one to shorten your life, then there is a myriad of statistics available with which you can cheerfully depress yourself. The World Health Organisation datasets are particularly extensive (World Health Organisation, 2013). You can spend a long, miserable morning mulling over their macabre mysteries. Even surfing LeDuc Media's comprehensive world life expectancy website (LeDuc, T., 2013) probably won't make you feel any better. You can for example, find out which is the biggest killer in the Cook Islands (it's coronary heart disease if you were wondering). Most “Premier League” biological diseases are fairly easy to spot. The same old culprits tend to crop up again and again, year after year, all over the place. For example, even though Nepal is about as far away from the Cook Islands as you could imagine, this beautiful Himalayan kingdom (where we sought project enlightenment earlier) also sadly sees coronary heart disease at the top if its killer list. And disappointingly, being eaten by a Yeti doesn't even make it onto the bottom of the Nepalese mortality list. Or anybody else's list for that matter.

It's Always the Same Culprits, Except When it Isn't

While there are depressing similarities in the mortality statistics of different countries, geography still has an ...