A whole collection of colleagues will be heading to Chicago next week for NeoCon, the largest North American furniture and design trade show. There will be about 1,200 bustling showrooms at the Merchandise Mart, which is called the world’s largest commercial building.

Now if you think that’s numerically and/or statistically significant, consider that this spring you may have missed Baselworld, the international watch trade show held in Basel, Switzerland. Baselworld had nearly 2,000 exhibitors, 93,900 attendees, and nearly 2 million square feet of exhibit space.

And this week Apple Inc. announced that there are now over 50,000 iPhone apps available at their App Store, and that over 1 billion apps have been downloaded in just the past 9 months.

Numbers like these give us context, they put things in perspective. Or do they? Perhaps they are just one element of context. Perhaps other numbers, even if they are not large and amazing for their scale, create context that might be just as jaw-dropping, like:

• the number of email messages that made you genuinely smile today
• the number of new ideas you generated and shared in the last week
• the number of times you greeted someone you didn’t really have to greet
• the number of times you suppressed the urge to speak, and chose to instead first listen

Context is really context when it includes more than just how big the numbers are, but also how much richness they add to the world.

Alexander Cutler, CEO of the $15-billion Eaton corporation, seems to have recently coined the term “short-termism,” to name the dangerous concept within some companies to currently curtail crucial activities. It seems some organizations, in the name of caution amidst the current economic challenges, have cut back on things like research and development, innovation, productivity enhancements, market exploration, etc. He is right to sound the alarm. In Cutler’s view, adopting a vision that is unfairly weighted by the near-term conditions.

However, it is not enough, in my view, to name the potential pitfall. We must also name the antidote… how do we avoid “short-termism?”

My answer is three-fold… vision and intelligence and courage. It requires a vision for the direction of your organization that is true to its nature, its mission, its brand. It requires a respect for intelligence… both gathering information and converting it into strategies. It requires the courage to take risks, to be first perhaps.

If organizational leaders can embody those three things… vision and intelligence and courage… we will easily see “short-termism” disappear from the business landscape.

There is a native American proverb from the Lakota that says, cryptically, “Wisdom lives in places.” Some colleagues in the interiors and furniture business expressed that idea some years ago in somewhat more pedestrian fashion when they alleged to a less-than-captivated marketplace, “space matters.”

It’s one of those maxims, however, that instinctively finds a home with me. Settings, surroundings, furnishings, color, texture, adjacencies and all else that comprises ‘place’ has always seemed to embody and present an element of wisdom. We humans seem to treasure a sense of place… our homes, our museums, our cathedrals, our monuments, and all of our movements toward and around all those places.

The lesson for us seems, at the very least, to take great care in creating and designing places, for ourselves and for others, that embody wisdom. Its corollary also perhaps… to be as attentive as possible to each place we inhabit or come upon, seeking its embedded wisdom.

The likes of John F. Kennedy, decades ago, and now Robert A. McDonald (the new CEO at P&G) have each referenced the Chinese term weiji as meaning the joining in one word of crisis and opportunity. It is certainly an attractive idea, especially in these strained economic times. Who wouldn’t want to advocate seizing moments that seem tumultuous as positive opportunities?

Too bad that’s not what the term means. It’s a complete stretch, if not a misrepresentation, according to Chinese linguists. So why do consultants and leaders and motivators perpetuate the idea of weiji?

I submit it goes beyond the desire for hope and improvement and recovery. I think we are simply fond of wanting to reduce powerful ideas, like mathematical fractions, to their lowest expressible form. Is there somehow instant credibility achieved by alleging that one foreign-language word captures the wisdom contained in simply saying we have the power to find opportunity in the midst of crisis?

Let’s worry less about less-than-accurate one-word reductions, and let’s worry more about concrete actions that resurrect opportunity from amidst crisis.