Never waste a crisis

From the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel:

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

What do you think he meant by that? (He said it back in November.) Don’t you find that a rather scary philosophy of governing?

But are there other, more benign, applications of that maxim, not in government but in the vocations of business, churches, families, and everyday life?