I could probably spend more time thinking about it, but now as Bush is speaking I continue to be frustrated. Beyond the extraordinary destruction and subsequent travesty in our "(dis)organized response", I think there was a failure in management theory. Specifically, the scope and magnitude of the disaster would overwhelm any solution based on a "deterministic model"...rather plans based on "stochastic model" were required. In other words...there has to be room in the response for things gone wrong, things unknown, and enabling a response that isnt' totally premediated.
In Bush's speech he stated: "greater federal authority and military intervention is required...every cabinet secretary is to participate in an evalution of the federal response to the huricane". This is what created the problem to begin with...as we often say - "things are the way they are, because they got that way and they're going to stay that way until they change".
Tom Peters has provided an excellent review on this item.
Link: Has Management Theory (Me?!) Let Us Down? (see more in this link).
Yes. And no.
I've been in a funk, beyond immediate concerns over human suffering, about New Orleans: (1) I "do" management, and have so done for 40 years. (2) New Orleans was a failure of down-and-dirty management as much or more than a failure of sublime leadership. If systems and processes had worked as we imagined or hoped they might, it wouldn't have mattered whether Mr Bush, for instance, was in Crawford or Timbuktu. Wal*Mart did its part—and none of us except Mrs Scott has a clue as to where her husband Lee, Wal*Mart CEO, was at the time, right?
