The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage by Yossi Sheffi

Author:Yossi Sheffi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2008-03-15T00:22:00+00:00

In contrast, it took Japanese government officials four hours to decide that the event warranted disrupting the schedule of higherups and to route the news through the chain of command up to the prime minister. After the quake, some faulted the central government for its slow response to the events in Kobe; clearly, lowlevel Japanese officials (and the local government in Kobe) knew about the quake immediately. The delay in informing the prime minister demonstrates the difficulties in getting a large organization to the point that it internalizes the event and starts thinking about a response.

Similarly, in the case of 9/11, there is no single identifiable moment one can point to and say "this is when the U.S. government knew about the terrorist attacks." Instead, all that can he said is that different parts of the government knew different facts at different times and only after accumulating enough facts did enough of the government know enough information about the events to take action. In fact, when told of the attack on the morning of 9/11, U.S. president George W. Bush did not immediately internalize the meaning of the news and famously kept reading stories to children for seven more minutes.

Even before the attack itself, and regardless of all the events that were its precursors (see chapter 3), the U.S. 9/11 commission has found out that U.S. Federal Aviation Administration officials received 52 warnings prior to September 11, 2001, from their own security experts about potential al-Qaida attacks, including some that mentioned airline hijackings or suicide attacks. The report comments that aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security" and "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures."" In other words, the FAA officials did not internalize the warnings.

The way most organizations are structured, information percolates up the chain of authority and commands percolate down to the people who implement them. This process takes time and is imperfect, but it works for non-emergency situations. In an emergency, people have to be empowered to bypass the normal structure of information. Unless the organization has created the requisite culture of distributed decision-making power (see chapter 15), there are numerous barriers to deviations from the normal process (such as actions without explicit authority), especially in the early hours when information is unclear.

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