The Business Coaching Toolkit

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Life Leadership Dashboard

Mae Owens of Winter Park, Florida, a suburb of Orlando, woke up to her worst nightmare. What she described as “a strange swishing noise” and then a “ploop,” Mrs. Owens watched from her window as a sycamore tree in the lot next to her house plummeted into the earth. Then went her yard, her driveway, and five cars—one of them a brand new Porsche 928—all like the sycamore tree, straight into the ground.

Not knowing what else to do, Mae Owens called the police. Imagine being on the other end of that call, “No, officer, my car wasn’t stolen. It disappeared!”

All officials could do is cordon off the area as hundreds of sightseers came to watch this void in the earth grow to 340 feet across and 100 feet deep. Ultimately it swallowed Mae Owens’s house, half of a six-lane highway, the municipal swimming pool across the street, and three local businesses.

Geologists refer to this phenomenon as a sinkhole. Sinkholes develop in times of drought, as underground caverns, usually full of groundwater, are drained dry. What are left are dangerous gaps in the earth’s ability to support anything that is aboveground. When the weight of roads, buildings, and businesses press down, the earth literally caves in. As urban sprawl makes its way through Florida and other densely populated states, sinkholes are becoming a common occurrence.

Leaders can be caught in the collapse of a sinkhole as well. When responsibility grows in our external world, the groundwater ...