Butterflies in New Mexico: The world community does not seem prepared to accept panglobal authority in the face of panglobal crises.

• Author: Augustine, Norman R.
• Position: THE AGE OF RISK: Boards in Crisis

With schools, sporting events, and many businesses shut down in an attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus with "social distancing," many companies are scaling back or entirely eliminating in-person shareholder events and transitioning to virtual meetings instead.

During my decade as a CEO of what became Lockheed Martin, I kept a card on which I had listed the 10 worst things I could think of that could happen to our company. I occasionally referred to it to assess how well we were positioned to avoid, or at least respond to, disasters writ large. My list included such unthinkables as a major factory destroyed by a tornado, a competitor making an existential technological breakthrough in our major product line, one of our products causing a catastrophic failure of a human spaceflight, a corporate aircraft crash with key members of the management team aboard, a massive penetration and collapse of our computer systems, and other draconian nightmares (but no COVID-19).

Two of the 10 things on my list actually happened.

One was a surprise hostile takeover of our company by another firm that possessed ample assets but little experience managing a major aerospace business such as ours. This incident occurred late on my predecessor's watch, while I was on the executive committee. Our antagonist rapidly accumulated some 70% of our stock and thus owned us lock, stock and barrel, as the saying goes. Under the strong leadership of my predecessor and a remarkable board, we managed to survive and prosper. The strategy our firm employed was a simple one: Quickly buy a majority of our new owner's shares before they could stop us! The result was that we literally owned each other. Then we offered to sit down and talk. Our antagonist firm did not survive.

The other crisis occurred when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and took down with it much of the U.S. aerospace industry. Within a few years, that industry would lose 640,000 employees and nearly three-fourths of its companies would cease to exist. Our firm had a reasonable strategy, albeit not entirely for the right reason.

As it happened, the former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and 1 had been writing a book on national security. We became convinced that the U.S. defense budget would soon precipitously decline due to the approaching end of the Reagan defense buildup, abetted by the severe financial pressures that seemed about to consume the Soviet Union. Although we never...