I work in corporate America and I was full of storm and fury at this President who was going to run the Federal Government like a corporation, and the handling of this bungled rescue and aid effort is not how it works in corporate America.
When there's a screw-up, the first thing that the organization does is to get right to the bottom of the screw up, rap the right knuckles if called for (walk them out if necessary), ensure that it doesn't happen again and then move on.
Then I also remembered that there was always a problem of problem definition.
Example:
Service organization supports corporate web site.
Corporate web site goes down because drunken IT admin reboots the wrong core switch.
IT takes three hours to notice before bringing corporate site back up.
What's the problem?
Option a. Corporate web site was down.
Option b. IT hires drunken IT admins.
Option c. IT is so incompetent that it takes them three hours to notice the web site was down.
The answer is that it depends who you are and who you're talking to.
If you’re the drunken IT admin’s manager, your problem is your drunken administrator, and you focus on that. You fire him OR get him counseling OR designate a nanny if he’s brilliant enough etc.
If you're the head of IT talking down to the manager, the problem is the slow response time and you fix that problem. You presume that your manager is fixing the drunken IT admin so that it doesn’t happen again.
If you're the head of IT talking to the CEO, you focus on the site being down.
You never talk about the drunken IT admin and anyone who mentions it is shouted down so that it doesn't reflect badly on you. You gloss over how long it takes you to respond and maybe even lie that you responded immediately but the problem was so complicated that it took your crack team three hours to solve it. If the CEO’s not an idiot (can find oil in Texas), he won’t buy your lie and will dig a little deeper and make the IT head sweat a little bit more to ensure that it doesn’t happen again OR if it does happen again, the story is a better one.
If you’re the CEO talking to the market analysts, you talk about how great your IT team was in solving what could have been a month-long outage in mere hours – lying outrageously and counting on the fact that the analysts won't know an MTTR from a TTTR.
So I understood.
In our President's mind, the whole Katrina thing was handled magnificently. His people are right now telling him how good a job Chertoff did and how great Brown was in managing an unmanageable situation. Sure there were casualties (fortunately, none of the *good* people), but if not for their magnificent work, it would have been so much worse. And he’s buying it because it would be too unpleasant not to buy it.
And when heads do roll, he will do it with a heavy heart and be quite convinced that they are being sacrificed at the altar of political correctness, partisan politics, etc.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 2 |
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