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|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.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

The guy in the next seat reminded me that Americans are, on average, bulkier than citizens of most other nations.

Some theorize it’s because of how much fast food we eat, others that it’s because we spend too much time watching television and not enough exercising.

I have a different theory: Everyone wants to ingest the same total amount of flavor. Most of the food we eat has been engineered to survive harvesting and distribution without excessive damage. One side-effect: less taste. To get the same total flavor we have to eat more quantity.

My seatmate offered no opinion, and in fact didn’t actually say anything about the subject. He didn’t have to — his body language spoke volumes, and he occupied same. The result was that I’d paid for a full seat but received only 75% of one.

Don’t worry — we’ll get to running IT. Eventually. But first: The airlines all claim their contorted pricing systems are based on sophisticated mathematical models that base fares on value. They are, of course, telling the truth, but it’s a truth for a different Earth than ours. On this planet, in this dimension, aisle seats are more valuable than window seats, which in turn are more valuable than center seats. Ever see a center-seat discount? Me neither.

It’s unlikely the airlines price as they do, and don’t do, just to be meatballs. My best guess is that each airline’s pricing committee is simply doing what business managers do best — hiding behind the herd.

As mentioned previously in this space, biologists explain herding as a way for individuals to reduce their chances of being eaten by predators. The herd is, of course, a more prominent target than an individual. But in a herd each individual member is less likely to get eaten. One member is taken — usually old or infirm — while the rest escape.

Don’t worry — we’ll get to running IT. Eventually. To do so, though, we next have to visit some research about elks in Yellowstone National Park. Ecologist Scott Creel discovered that bull elks let wolves walk right up and take them down. They’re so busy eating that they can’t be bothered to run away or defend themselves. As Creel put it, “The bulls will pretty much keep eating until you pry the grass from their cold, dead lips.”

It turns out that bull elk expend so much of their time and energy in mating-related activities that they end up too skinny to do anything else. They have to keep eating or they’ll die. So they keep eating, hoping the wolves will either find a different herd or take a different member of theirs.

This does sound just a bit like the airline industry, doesn’t it? The traditional carriers keep on doing what they’ve been doing until one by one they eaten alive by more efficient competitors. Right now, Northwest is the carrier that’s on the edge of Chapter 11. Its answer is the same as everyone’s answer — get concessions from the unions. And since the unions haven’t changed their business strategy since maybe 1955, they aren’t exactly well-equipped to help construct a decent defense, let along a creative, win/win solution.

Everyone is hiding behind the herd.

What’s bothersome about the situation is this: I’d bet that someone, somewhere at Northwest published an analysis years ago warning of the impending challenges and recommending creative ways to circumvent them. Maybe the solution was to charge more for aisle seats than center seats. Maybe it was to replace aging, fuel-guzzling, high-cost-of-maintenance airplanes with cheaper-to-operate upgrades. Maybe it was to offer a seat or two on the board of directors in exchange for wage restructurings. Who knows.

I’d bet an analysis was published and ignored because it turns out there’s an analysis like this, published and ignored, prior to every catastrophic organizational failure. After the Challenger exploded investigators found that NASA management had estimated flight risks at 1% of the risk level recognized by NASA’s engineers. The Army Corps of Engineers has been publishing warnings about the levees protecting New Orleans for years, only to see its budget cut to a fraction of what was needed.

So the chance that nobody at Northwest published an equivalent report is small. The odds that managers up the chain of command each downplayed the report to an increasing extent are high.

And that, at last, brings us to you. Someone, somewhere in your organization knows about a problem, has a pretty good idea of what you should do about it, and wants to tell you. The question is, are you ready to listen?

Or are you imitating a bull elk?

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