The Healthy Workplace Nudge

Chapter 1A Slow-Moving Storm: The Existential Threat to Business and the Economy

Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.

—Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma

In the beginning, I thought our team came together to write a book. But, in fact, we were like those once described in a Cormac McCarthy novel: “They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke.”¹

Like that band of cowboys, our troupe stopped in the road when we saw the distant storm. We knew what it meant; our original purpose and destination no longer mattered. I saw the first flashes of lightning and heard the faraway muffled thunder when I met Dr. Michael Roizen at the Cleveland Clinic. Although it was distant, I could tell the storm carried deadly ferocity. For the first time in my life, I saw a true existential crisis. Before I give you a peek into that slow-moving storm, let me explain why and how we came to write this book.

A writer friend of mine was once embedded with a gaggle of reporters for a seven-day papal visit to a Middle Eastern country. In his first experience of being one of “the boys on the bus,” my friend's biggest surprise was what seemed like a total absence ...