Just do it!

There's nothing like a crisis to get people singing off the same hymn sheet.
The summit about Nottingham's economy that took place last week seemed like a good display of joined-up thinking from the private and public sector.
I wonder whether they still feel the same warm glow a few days afterwards?
The summit was convened by county and city council leaders to map out a five-year future for the Notts economy as it faces huge challenges.
Yes, there are immediate challenges, but Mick Burrows and Jane Todd, the chief executives of county and city authorities, are quite right: a long-term plan is just as important as the here and now.
What came out of the seminar was a shared desire to make it easier for local firms to win contracts with local councils, the need for Nottinghamshire to shout about its Unique Selling Points, and a recognition that councils and businesses don't talk to each other often enough.
All well and good. But beyond the agreement that 'something needs to be done' there were no specific action points, no commitment to particular projects, no detail on how we might achieve them.
There's the rub.
The mutters afterwards were that the event was a genuinely good idea but risked being seen as an outbreak of nothing more than the modern-day governmental disease of initiativitis.
You won't find it in any medical dictionary, but it's loosely defined as a rash (of ideas) that disappears without a trace. There have been several outbreaks in Nottingham, and as yet there is no known cure.
Nottinghamshire does need to find a cure, because the risk in this case is that if nothing is done then the local economy will emerge from this recession damaged and rudderless.
Digby Jones, who gave a typically rumbustious performance at the summit, made some pointed comments about the tendency of councils to act like a 'Not the Sales Department'. In place of decisive action, they discuss, report, decide, frequently agreeing to shut the stable door months after the horse has bolted.
Businesses, on the other hand, tend to just do it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
At a time when some of the busiest people in business are accountants supervising companies in administration, Nottinghamshire may well be in just do it territory.
A year from now is too long to wait for another meeting. There should be an action plan within a month, a progress check every quarter.
Both business and the councils are in uncharted territory right now, a situation which will tend to exaggerate their natural behaviour: councils will want to analyse and analyse, business will grab at what might be a good idea.
Both could do worse than talk to the managers of Formula One teams.
Why? This may seem a bizarre idea, but Grand Prix racing is a technical environment which changes faster than any other, often in unpredictable ways. Other than races on Sunday afternoons, it is also a multi-million dollar business.
To stay ahead in that kind of frantic, highly-charged environment, teams employ highly-qualified strategists who look at all the factors that affect performance and run models to find out what happens when they try different tactics.
They can analyse risk very quickly, and know when to think 'outside the box'. It is these teams of strategists and risk analysts, based back at the factory, who tell the team at the track when to call their driver in for a pitstop.
If an F1 team is thrown a new challenge on Saturday, it knows there is only one certainty: it must find an answer by Sunday afternoon.
Nottinghamshire's economy is facing the same challenges as everyone else. It will only get in front if it finds an answer fast.