All Posts in Business Ethics

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I wonder how the guy who said, “There are no problems, only opportunities,” would explain New Orleans.

The combination of tragedy, mind-boggling incompetence, and failure to prepare for a long-predicted preventable catastrophe is a problem. For all of us. If it’s an opportunity, it’s to remind us of a few basic facts effective leaders, including IT leaders, can’t ignore.

Blaming the victim takes less effort and is more satisfying than understanding the situation.

A popular talking point is that “they” don’t deserve sympathy, since “they” built a city five feet below sea level. Let’s not stop there: Nobody gets any help after a disaster unless it couldn’t have happened where they live. A lot of the Netherlands used to be sea bottom. Forget them! Californians? They chose to live near an earthquake fault, as Floridians chose to live in a hurricane zone. As a Minnesotan I think it’s a fair policy, so long as we Midwesterners get help after tornadoes, blizzards and spring floods. We live here to avoid the earthquakes and hurricanes, after all.

Of course, only parts of New Orleans are below sea level, and it’s been sinking at a rate of three feet per century — do the math. When, exactly, was everyone was supposed to pack up and leave?

Lesson for IT: When someone’s PC stops working don’t crab at them and don’t assume they’re morons who went out of their way to annoy you. Help them solve their problem. Uh … opportunity.

Achieving a leadership position bestows neither expertise nor acumen on the ignorant.

Three of the top five executives in FEMA had no experience or training in managing emergencies. Expertise does matter.

Lesson for IT: Some CIOs have no technical background. If you’re one of them, seek out the best engineers in your organization — those with the most knowledge and best judgment. Spend a lot of time listening to them. Doing so isn’t a sign of weakness. Failing to do so is.

This is how you can make sure you get early warnings about problems while they’re still solvable. Don’t rely solely on your chain of command. Develop direct relationships with your experts, too.

Turning your back on a problem doesn’t put the problem behind you.

Politicians of both political parties ignored the clear, loud warnings of scientists and engineers that that the drowning of New Orleans was inevitable. This, for example, appeared in Scientific American in 2001:

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.

If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”

Mike Parker, former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, showed Mitch Daniels, then Director of the OMB, two pieces of steel. One was new, the other had spent 30 years under water in a Mississippi lock and was completely corroded. Complaining about a 33% budget reduction in 2002, he said, “Mitch, it doesn’t matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates — either way it’s the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame.” Shortly thereafter, Daniels made sure Parker was fired.

While maintenance funds were being cut, Representative Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) made sure Congress allocated $194 million to increase capacity for barge traffic while barge traffic had been steadily declining and the Army Corps of Engineers had advised against the project. Meanwhile, Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) obtained $230 million to build a bridge connecting a city of 8,000 to an island with 50 inhabitants.

Lesson for IT: Don’t allocate budget to placate political constituencies in your company until after you’ve taken care of business.

An ounce of prevention continues to be less expensive and more convenient than a pound of cure.

Beefing up the levee would have cost less than $30 million. The cost of failing to do so will be at least a thousand times more.

Lesson for IT: It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

Last, beat-the-dead-horse word on all of this: Managers deal with financial and political realities. Engineers deal with the reality imposed by the laws of physics.

In the end, engineering does matter.

Comments

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

We went to see the Rolling Stones open their A Bigger Bang tour in Boston. It put to rest an event that’s haunted me for 16 years: Walking through the halls of my then-place of employment, a friend gleefully brandished his two tickets to the Stones’ Steel Wheels concert. I nearly burst into tears — I’d just bought four tickets to Sesame Street Live.

A Bigger Bang was, if you’re wondering, phenomenal but that’s not why I’m bringing up the subject. You’ll have to wait for that while I tell you about Larry Brody’s new book, Turning Points in Television. (I hope you appreciate me. What other IT column bases its content on the Rolling Stones and the history of television instead of XML and web services?)

Larry, a creative force in the television industry for several decades, wrote Turning Points in Television to be less a walk through memory lane than an insightful analysis of the history of an industry. (One of the more minor insights, given an overly kind mention, came from a column yours truly published some years back — that in most media businesses, you and I are neither customer nor consumer. We’re the product, sold to advertisers. The material we consume is not the product — it’s bait.)

The history of television is, sadly, the history of every industry. Founded in a burst of creative energy and fostered by periodic injections of brilliant innovation, it was run by the creative innovators. But only for awhile.

In the case of television, the writing was on the wall in 1978 when Larry met with Deanna Barkley, vice president of “long form development” at NBC. “What’ve you got that’s generic enough for NBC?” she asked. Now we have Survivor Guatemala. Having lived in Guatemala for six months, I feel comfortable asking this question: What’s the point? Just give the money to the millions of Mayans whose ancestors survived the Spaniards. What’s next — Survivor Mall of America?

An unsettling aspect of the industry’s evolution is the nature of the early innovators. They were characters, and that describes those toward the middle of the pack. Many of the most important were bullies, screamers, and head cases. Larry describes, for example, David Gerber — one of his mentors. Faced with a network market researcher who tried to change their hit series Police Story, “the Gerb” screamed, ranted, raved, swore, knocked his chair down and stormed out. Then he screamed, ranted, raved, swore at and threatened his writers (the threat: working at NBC). “In the TV business,” Larry explains, “that’s called being a mentor.”

Meanwhile, the business punditocracy is very fond of concepts like “Emotional Intelligence,” measured by EQ — an even more pseudoscientific measure than the IQ its proponents want to supplant. EQ is supposed to be a Good Thing to have. In most industries, EQ is, in fact, a valued trait. I wonder, though, whether that’s healthy. The Gerb’s EQ was un-measurably low. His value was immeasurable.

We’ve come to treasure a near-robotic persona in our business managers and leaders, and we’re in danger of extending this preference to those who do real work. The synonym for professionalism is, too often, blandness.

Which brings us back to the Stones. It occurred to me while pondering the value of EQ, individual skills, group process and so on (don’t worry — it was after the concert, not during) that not one member of the band is the best at what he does. Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler are better guitarists than Keith Richards and Ron Wood (and just about the entire rest of the guitar-playing world, too). Charlie Watts is a competent drummer, no more. Jagger’s singing voice is, by any objective standard, awful.

But together they’re a killer touring band and have been for more than forty years. A management theorist would probably use them as an object lesson in the value of teamwork over individual skills. Who knows — maybe Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood all have high emotional intelligence.

This management theorist thinks the point is different — that the Stones aren’t bland. They aren’t the most talented performers, but they’re among the most flamboyant, and you have to give a 62-year-old guy credit for running around on stage for two and a half hours without a break like, as someone once said, a rooster on acid.

I figure these guys have something more useful than being good at getting along — they get along with each other.

Or maybe it’s only rock and roll. But I like it.

Comments