Prior Preparation Prevents Problems

Often, it is not until something actually goes wrong that we realize what could have been done to prevent it.  And by then, of course, it is too late.  In the business section of yesterday's New York Times, Roger Lowenstein looks at the examples of companies overcoming disaster (or not) in Yossi Sheffi's The Resilient Enterprise and finds solutions that could have lessened the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the "botched" response that followed:

There was the thunderstorm in Albuquerque, the port strike on the West Coast, the Quake in Kobe, Japan.  There was bankruptcy, terrorism and theft.  There was foot-and-mouth disease, toxic chemical reaction, product tampering (Tylenol) and product failure (Firestone/Ford Explorer, and the flawed Pentium chip). 

Engineer that he is, Professor Sheffi calls them "high-impact/low-probability disruptions."  That means they happen infrequently but are a real pain when they do.  None is likely to befall any one company at any given year.  But something from his "Catalog of Catastrophes" will surely happen to  somebody.  Over the years, General Motors has suffered virtually every type of disaster—even a tornado.  (At least nature does not play favorites: Toyota has also had it's share).

Professor Sheffi's focus is on what companies can do to avoid disaster, and to minimize the effect and quickly return to business as usual when one occurs.  Government, he observes in an aside, is focused only on the first priority—preventing disaster.  In a passage that after New Orleans seems spookily prophetic, he quotes Stephen E. Glynn, a senior fellow at the Concil on Foreign Relations, saying, "The U.S. government has not worked out protocols for how to restart the trade and transportations system after an event. . . . For managers—and mayors—who hope not to be caught flat-footed  after the next Katrina, this books has much to offer.  When the author writes that a resilient culture "may be the real secret" to preparedness, the weary residents of New Orleans will surely relate.

LINK to the entire review.