Facing one of the many crises of his time, Sir Winston Churchill supposedly quipped: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The remark was meant to identify a crisis that demanded immediate and thoroughgoing change. Over the intervening years, the phrase has been used by statesmen and business leaders as a rallying cry to regroup, revamp and reinvent. In this article, McKinsey continues that tradition by applying a keen lens to the oil & gas industry’s fundamentals and the needed business changes the shifting fundamentals imply. This crisis is an opportunity for the industry to significantly reshape how it works.

"Rule 10:  The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.  Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, "Okay, what would you do?"      This rule of Alinsky’s was paraphrased by the Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, "never let a good crisis go to waste."   Obama has used the oil spill crisis as an excuse to spew green rhetoric and promote his cap-and-trade bill.

Charles Doyle of the University of Georgia, my coauthor on the forthcoming Yale Book of Modern Proverbs, has found that this expression is now commonly applied to economic or diplomatic crises that can be exploited to advance political agendas, but he traced it back at least as far as 1976, when M. F. Weiner wrote an article in the journal Medical Economics entitled “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.” Weiner meant by this that a medical crisis can be used to improve aspects of personality, mental health, or lifestyle.

"First of all, what I said was never let a good crisis go to waste when it's an opportunity to do things you had never considered or you didn't think were possible," he told FOX News when asked about the quote.

Attributions are very often wrong.