Quote of the Day: Arnold H. Glasow on Leadership

Our lives now run on alerts: Slack pings, calendar nudges, AI summaries, and the endless scroll of social media telling us what matters this minute. In a world optimized for reaction, the quiet discipline of anticipation can feel almost radical. Yet that’s exactly the timeless point behind Arnold H. Glasow’s line: “One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.”

Leadership isn’t proved in the fire; it’s proved in the smoke. The emergency is usually the last chapter of a story everyone had a chance to edit earlier, an ignored metric, a fraying relationship, a small process shortcut that becomes a systemic failure. The best leaders don’t possess magical intuition; they build habits that make weak signals louder: asking inconvenient questions, staying close to the work, and rewarding candor before damage forces confession.

This is also why foresight is a moral skill, not just a managerial one. When leaders wait for disaster, the cost is paid by everyone else, teams scrambling, customers disappointed, trust eroded. Preventing crisis requires patience: time to listen, gather input, and choose a measured response over a dramatic one. Done well, it creates a culture where raising concerns is normal, not risky, and where leadership looks less like charisma and more like stewardship.

Arnold H. Glasow, a satirist with a businessman’s eye for incentives and human nature, understood how small lapses become expensive stories. His wit lands because it’s practical: it names what people avoid, then hands them a better habit.

Whether your “team” is a company, a classroom, or a family group chat, apply this wisdom today by choosing one simmering issue and addressing it while it’s still cheap, one conversation, one checklist, one clear expectation. That’s how resilience is built: before the sirens.