There will be an endless number of post-mortems concerning the tragedies that befell the residents of New Orleans last week. More important are the actions, if any, which may result from them. In this regard, can lessons learned in the private sector be brought to bear in minimizing the suffering and damage from inevitable future calamities?
Many personal experiences come to mind in thinking about this question. The first was my involvement three years ago in the reenactment of a plane crash at a major U.S. airline that has never suffered an accident-related passenger fatality. Executives were assigned to "battle stations." A command post was established. Along with the CEO, teams were designated to be flown to the crash site within hours after the tragedy to make necessary arrangements with the next-of-kin of the simulated victims. This was not a one-time exercise; it is carried out periodically. Ironically, the mythical crash had occurred at the New Orleans International Airport.
Another was a successful effort to tie the radio communication system of a private security company, of which I was a director, to that of the New York City Police Department. A direct result has been a number of arrests by the NYPD of criminals fleeing buildings guarded by the private security firm. Contrast this with reports of the initial reluctance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to evacuate certain hospitals in New Orleans because they were private.Many large retailing organizations with facilities on the Gulf Coast made extensive preparations in advance of the incoming hurricane. Only hours after the storm had receded, all but a handful of employees had been contacted and offered financial as well as other forms of assistance.
Clearly, there are significant differences between the challenges facing private firms and public agencies at times of disasters. Employees are easier to track and help than other citizens, some of whom may be unemployed. The magnitude of the responsibility is incomparable. For example, the repair and maintenance of levees is a task requiring long-term vision and effort difficult to muster in a political environment in which deferred maintenance is an easy and invisible solution to budget problems for elected politicians with limited terms. (The irony of this is that the average tenure of the CEO of a large company today is shorter than that of the typical U.S. president.)
The real tragedy will be if we learn nothing from New Orleans that leads to effective action. But just what should these lessons be? And what actions should result from them? In this case, can the public sector take some of its cues from private organizations? And what should these be? What do you think?
What is the Right Size for Government?
In the wake of the Gulf Coast disasters, it is inevitable that questions will be raised about the nature and magnitude of government required to provide a range of servicesfrom security and protection to the construction and maintenance of a basic infrastructurein a developed economy. We can expect, for example, a number of proposals for increasing domestic spending (and consequently the overall government budget) as a proportion of the national budget.
Some will maintain that a preoccupation with terrorism, among other factors, has led to a neglect of basic expenditures for social services. That failure to maintain the infrastructure not only invites disasters of the kind that befell New Orleans, but also creates a basic drag on economic productivity by failing, for example, to maintain an efficient transportation system or provide adequate incentives for the use of alternative sources of energy.
Others will argue that there are a number of reasons why government should continue to shrink as a proportion of total economic activity. Among them are the increasing potential for the use of technology to increase productivity in the delivery of services. This is the "doing more with less" philosophy, reflected in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's efforts to overhaul the military to make it a more mobile, flexible force built around smaller numbers of personnel using more and more sophisticated technology. A related idea is to make use of part-time or reserve personnel to deal with peaks in demand for government services, as represented by the deployment of National Guard members in Iraq. To those who question the effectiveness of this strategy either in Iraq or the Gulf Coast, one might reply that it takes time to change the basic strategies by which public services are provided, and that these untimely events occurred before the new strategies could be fully implemented. Third are the opportunities for outsourcing the provision of certain public services to private organizations that can provide them faster and more efficiently. This will require willingness on the part of the public and private sectors to plan, communicate, coordinate, and act in concert.