It's Saturday afternoon, and Ronit Herzfeld's cell-phone is bellowing. And Abbott, the youngest and least-experienced member of his executive staff, wonders if anyone is even listening to him. In the risky and uncertain world of technology startups, the ultimate test of an organization's mettle is how well it copes with chaos. Her firm, Inside Solutions, is carving out a niche by counseling startups through the kinds of struggles that invariably plague young businesses. But that's not based on reality.
People create the wrong stories around events and paralyze themselves into indecision.
A petite, Israeli-born psychiatric social worker, she spent eight years working in the mobile crisis unit of the Visiting Nurse Service for New York City's Department of Mental Health, parachuting into such disaster scenes as the World Trade Center bombing and the TWA Flight 800 crash. Now she jumps into the world of business conflict. That's when they're most committed to making things happen. Such was the case at Bigsafe. One of Abbott's managers, who was just coming off a 21-day work jag, became enraged and threatened to walk when a colleague questioned his authority and his decisions.