Karima-Catherine Goundiam is the founder and chief executive officer of digital strategy firm Red Dot Digital and business matchmaking platform B2BeeMatch.
A detail of a richly decorated but uncommonly small house with finely preserved frescoes of mythological scenes is pictured in the archaeological site in Pompeii, Italy, in this handout photo obtained by Reuters on October 24, 2024.Parco Archeologico di Pompei/Reuters
We’ve called so many crises in the past five years “unprecedented.” Maybe it’s time we admit that history has seen worse – and use that to our advantage.
Certainly, recent world events have often been shocking: a global pandemic, the rapid devolution of Canada-U.S. relations, environmental crises on a scale we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. But that’s the trick: our lifetimes aren’t that long and the world has seen a lot of wild things happen long before we were ever here.
As a business leader, I’m often future-focused – predicting trends, planning for contingencies and working toward goals. In this article series, I’m looking to the past instead, to examine a few major historical events and see what we can learn from them about how to manage today’s challenges.
To begin, let’s go back to ancient history. Specifically, the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 CE, which, as Annalee Newitz writes in the book Four Lost Cities, covered the city of Pompeii in “a thick layer of fiery ash,” instantly killing all the people within its walls as it “turned fertile farms into sterile wastelands.”
Most people think of Pompeii as being a story of sudden crisis: a massive eruption that stopped an entire city in its tracks, which archaeologists then excavated hundreds of years later.
In truth, it was a more nuanced situation. Vesuvius didn’t give much warning – but it did give some. “Smoke filled the sky for at least a day, and maybe two, before the mountain began to launch rocks,” writes Dr. Newitz, who earned a a Ph.D. in English and American Studies. Earthquakes foreshadowed the eruption, and people began to flee in wagons and on foot. To date, only 1,150 bodies have been found in the ruined city; “archaeologists generally estimate that a tenth of the city’s population of 12,000 perished.”
So what happened to the 90 per cent that left? Dr. Newitz writes that the refugees from Pompeii fled to the nearby coastal cities of Cumae, Neapolis (Naples) and Puteoli (Pozzeoli). Many wealthy Pompeii businesspeople had holdings in these nearby cities and they and their employees, many of them freed enslaved people known as liberti, simply moved operations and kept doing business. New streets, neighbourhoods and temples were built to accommodate the refugees and Pompeiian culture lived on.
It was a disaster, to be sure, but the Pompeiians knew how to build business continuity, even in the face of a volcanic eruption the likes of which most of them never even knew was possible. By contrast, today, only 54 per cent of organizations have a company-wide disaster recovery plan in place. Clearly, the ancients had some planning skills we could learn from.
And what of the ones who stayed? Well, Dr. Newitz tells us that the docks in the wealthy neighbourhood of Herculaneum were crowded with skeletons clutching bags full of valuables, pressed together at the back of the warehouses where they waited for rescue boats that never came. Some chose to be there; some stayed because their masters commanded it. All were cooked by clouds of superheated volcanic gases – for the crime of waiting too long to act.
We can glean many lessons from the disaster at Pompeii, mostly about adaptability. Today we’re facing environmental crises at increasing frequencies and scales. It’s not just one mountain – it’s heat domes, forest fires, sea level rise, flooding and more, all over the globe. Natural catastrophes are the third-biggest global business risk in 2025. We need to have backups already in place before disaster strikes, whether that’s warehouses in different towns, top-notch data security or contingency plans to cope with a range of potential emergency scenarios particular to our area of business. For some businesses, that means you need to consider physical relocation away from higher-risk areas. For others, it means adapting to greater levels of unpredictability more broadly, whether that’s supply chain fluctuations, shifting regulations or employees who need more flexible schedules. If we don’t plan ahead, the consequences can be dire: 25 per cent of companies that close because of a disaster never reopen.
Fortunately, today, we have many tools the Pompeiians didn’t –everything from climate and weather forecasting to business processes such as SWOT analyses (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), planning tools and disaster recovery plans. We aren’t living in 79 CE, never having heard of a volcano.
But we need to be willing to use those tools. We need to be willing to look for the signs of disaster, make careful but timely judgements about how to manage and take action before the eruption hits.
I’m not arguing that we should flee at the first sign of smoke. Abandoning the places we live and do business is not our only option. But I’m suggesting that with proper planning, we can avoid being the ones squeezed into the back of a warehouse, burned to death while holding a sack of jewels.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.