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Connecting
the Dots --
Lessons from 9/11
that We Learn in Business
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by K. Jack Speer and Carol
Kallendorf, Ph.D. |
It’s the end of an era. The search of the hulking
holes of the Twin Towers has ended and the final memorial
services have been held. Solemn words have been said and
the cries of the living and the dead go up in unison. We
may again experience a tragedy of the magnitude of the
World Trade Center, but we’ll never, we think, experience
it with the same kind of appalled shock.
We have slowly made our
emotional way from the horror of 9/11 to the point in time
when we can finally ask the question, "What really
happened?"
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K. Jack
Speer
President
The Delta Associates |
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"Who knew what and when? Could this tragedy
have been avoided?" As nagging pieces of evidence
emerge that there were hints and perhaps warnings of what
was to come, we are all asking the question, "Could
someone have connected the dots?"
Could Government Agencies Have Connected the Dots?
Congress has just launched its investigation, yet
fingers are pointing in every direction. Certainly there
were serious gaffes in handling information. The President
says that from all he knows, no one could have averted
this tragedy. Really?
Well President Bush is right that based on how we were
operating before 9/11- there might have been little chance
we’d connected the dots if the AFLAC Duck were screaming
"Anthrax!" in front of the Pentagon. Connecting
the dots was dependent on a system that wasn’t built to
connect dots.
Business, Too, Failed to Connect the Dots
But based on our experiences as a business leaders, we are
extremely reluctant to point fingers at anyone in charge
of our homeland security for their
failure to connect dots. We too experienced a great failure just a few
months before. The date is 1/01/01 and we failed to see
what is more than an economic downturn, but a failure of
multiple systems that could have been seen had we
connected the dots.
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The year 2000 was the most profitable year American business
had sustained, coming off of a lot of profitable years.
Warehouses full of equipment that we worked double-time to
produce, office buildings we had built for the coming glut
of business all testify that we never saw it coming. Debt
was high, but we "knew" that revenues justified
it.
Comparison of 9/11 to Business’s 01/01/02
The Sheep’s Mind Paradigm (with apologies to our sheep
friends). While thousands look for complicated reasons for the
intelligence failure of 9/11, many of the reasons are painfully
simple if not obvious to many. The first is what we call the
Sheep’s Mind Paradigm and is the mentality that in hijacking
situations both crew and passengers should be submissive to
their captures. Experts suggested that more people would get out
alive by acceding to their captors' wishes. Then negotiators
would use the tools of their trade to get the captors to give
up. The underlying teaching has always been, "You are
better off in the hands of the experts. It’s the best thing to
put yourself in their hands." Some experiences should have
helped us connect the dots.
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Carol
Kallendorf
Founder
The Delta Associates |
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Experience told us
as early as October 1985 that if this old paradigm was ever
true, it had become a cruel mockery. Four heavily armed Palestinian
terrorists in October
hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, with 400
passengers and crew, in the waters off Egypt. The hijackers
demand that Israel free 50 Palestinian prisoners. The
terrorists killed a disabled American tourist, 69-year-old
Leon Klinghoffer, and throw his body overboard with his
wheelchair. It was a sorry day for America, and unfortunately
taught us nothing that would help us almost 20 years later at
9/11.
To the credit of Americans, the passengers on United
Airlines Flight 93
that crashed over Pennsylvania on 9/11 overcame the prevailing
paradigm and rushed their captors.
But the tragic point is that all of the passengers could
have been saved and the whole attempt could have been thwarted
by a change of paradigm. The cockpit door is reinforced
and the pilot and copilot (or armed guard) are trained and
armed with Uzies in hand—end of subject.
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So what does this have to do with business? Well, who didn’t
see the downturn of 2001 coming? Were any of us really that
blind? We don’t think so. As a small business owner who works
out at our gym told us, "I wish that people could see that
there are always economic cycles—especially me!" Every
credible analyst told us that the ratios of stock prices to
values was way out of kilter, but we thought that the rules of
economics had been suspended. To our credit, we saved a good
bit of cash. If we had realized, however, that companies like Intel
would be operating at 70% less profit that they had a year
before, believe us, we now see we could have saved a lot more
money.
Who’s Reading the Tealeaves?
Let’s face it, U.S. Intelligence hasn’t been worth much
since World War II. The days of J. Edgar Hoover (and I don’t
care if he wore women’s underwear, he made the FBI) and his
famous G-men are long gone. In 1989 just before the fall of
the Berlin Wall, I knew a goofy City Manager who went on a
trip to Moscow. When got back to Bryan, Texas he told me,
"You know, something big is about to happen with the
Soviet Union." In a few months the Soviet Union was
history and the Berlin Wall had fallen. The FBI said it was a
total surprise to them. I don’t think the FBI was faking it.
I believe they didn’t know what a less than genius American
tourist would figure out on his own just by talking to a few
Russians on the street.
Ditto in the case of business and the
economic fall of 2001. There were lots of dots we could have
connected. Viable innovation ran out five years ago. This is a
point few business leaders understand. The innovation of
Windows and the use of email created a demand for technology
that was exponential. The creation of sophisticated IS systems
fueled huge sales. Cell phone technology created thousands of
small businesses.
We should have connected the dots that there was nothing new
to buy. Microsoft, instead of innovating, began to bully its
way to profits, intimidating competitors, vendors, and
customers. Now they want to muscle their way into existing
markets, which they may be successful in doing, but without
some young inventor bringing us the next productivity product,
we’ll just experience slow, incremental growth. True
prosperity will return when true creativity returns.
Who is Talking to One Another? Intelligence problems
were never more painfully obvious than when the Phoenix memo,
written by FBI agent Kenneth Williams, was revealed. He just
couldn’t get his bosses to read it. Again in the case of
connecting the dots of our economic debacle, Fed Chairman
Allan Greenspan told us about irrational economic exuberance,
and we just didn’t listen. And do we listen to our
employees? Especially not in a downturn. We want everyone to
hunker down and be quiet. In the moments we need creativity
most, we just want everyone to go comatose and not spend
money, to wait until things get better to innovate. We have to
listen to everyone right now for the right answer.
Where is the Economy Going Now? How Do We
Connect the Dots?
You know all the economic scenarios if you’ve
been following the financial news. Some saw the economy as
roaring back in 2002, and I think it’s pretty obvious that
this scenario is wrong. Then there are other analysts who
really warm our hearts by telling us that tell we may be going
into a period like Japan, a decade or two of an economic Dark
Ages. That’s a cheery thought! Then there are others who
have been talking about the "double dip" recession,
kind of floating up to the top again but then sinking back
into the quicksand.
Here are BizWatch’s predications:
- President George W. Bush will do better
than most of us ever suspected in handling the problems of
the nation.
We say this with
some embarrassment by confessing that we consider ourselves
to be Independents who lean toward the Democratic Party.
Time and again Bush has displayed a sort of general "cluelessness"
about almost every important issue, including the economy
and foreign affairs. However, once faced by a crisis he
suddenly learns what no one else could learn in a short time
and displays a genius for picking people—except his
financial team, who seem to lack the rhetorical abilities so
necessary for leadership.
- Business leadership will remained
determined and resolute.
We do
not see us discovering many innovations that will increase
productivity as did email, the Internet, and Windows-based
software. Yet we do sense a determination in business leaders
to dig themselves out of economic recession and restore
profitability.
- We will avoid another attack of the
magnitude of the World Trade Center, miraculously.
Here we're really going out on a limb, and our words a year
from now may prove to be the ultimate in naiveté. We do believe that Osama Bin Laden was one of the only true evil
geniuses of Islamic Fundamentalism, and dead or alive, we don’t
think he’s a player in the game right now.
- The economy will gradually improve over
the next 12 months.
We will not
experience the Japanese stagnation or the double-pronged
recession. Growth for 2003 will not exceed three percent.
The stock market will limp along, gradually trending upward.
Small and intermediate businesses will have to fight
fiercely for market position. Larger business will gradually
begin to open their coffers and spend more for vendor
services.
We hope our economic outlook is much rosier
than we have projected, and we hope we’re right about the
points in which we’ve been optimistic. One thing certain is
that, as with all journalists, if we’re right, you’re
certain to see a reprint of this article a year from now. If
we’re wrong, one of you will have saved it to send it back
to us marked up in red ink.
Connecting dots seems to be easier in
downtimes because there are not as many dots to connect. It’s
simple. You sell like hell and don’t spend any money. It’s
when times get good that it’s harder to connect dots. We’re
too busy. Let’s hope that in the next boom we’ll spend
more time collecting and connecting the many, almost always
contradictory, signals we’re seeing and hearing.
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