Endless Knots

Superstorm Sandy collides with Supermess LIPA

"Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area."

Remember that famous line from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? In case you've forgotten, here's the awful story.

The week after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Aaron Broussard, then-president of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, sobbed on national television as he spoke to the late "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert, recounting the death of the mother of his county’s emergency services director. Eva Rodrigue, 92, along with perhaps thirty or more residents, drowned in St. Rita’s Nursing Home, after what Broussard described as days of bureaucratic promises broken.

He ticked off the list of the guilty:

“Were we abandoned by the federal government? Absolutely we were…nobody came here, sir. Nobody came. The federal government didn't come. The Red Cross didn't come. I'll give you a list of people that didn't come here, sir, and I was here…Did inefficiencies, did bureaucracy commit murder here? Absolutely, it did.”

We've yet to hear that bureaucracy is being charged with murder following Superstorm Sandy but the reports of massive dysfunction at the Long Island Power Authority certainly suggest organizational culpability. Consider this from Danny Hakim, Patrick McGeehan, and Michael Moss's piece in Tuesday's NY Times:

Customers have been exasperated not only by a lack of power, but also by the authority’s inability to communicate basic information. Long Islanders have recounted tales of phones unanswered at authority offices, of wildly inaccurate service maps and of broken promises to dispatch repair crews.

It gets worse (or is still worse--as of this writing 8,000 are still without power more than two weeks after the storm) and it's really echo-y of what Broussard said 8 years ago:

“Resources came late,” said Frank P. Petrone, chief executive of the Town of Huntington and a former official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “When they came, there was no management to utilize those resources effectively. And it took 10 days for them to get their act together.”

Also from Petrone who tried to plan ahead only to discover that LIPA's crews didn't communicate when they finally arrived:

“The upper management couldn’t communicate with the middle management,” he said. “The middle management couldn’t communicate with the crews. And finally, when we had sufficient crews coming in — resources that should have been arranged before — they came in and had very little direction and they were flabbergasted at the condition of the infrastructure, the wiring, the entire system.”

A quick look at LIPA's publicly available 13-page PDF organizational chart shows 3 executive-level vacancies as of August 2012. Add to that the recent resignation of its COO and LIPA's leadership team resembles Swiss cheese more than an organization worthy of public confidence and trust.

Lastly, we arrive at news that reeks of the BP spill in the beleagured Gulf of Mexico. It turns out that LIPA is a shell company that outsources its operations. Remember all the finger pointing after the BP spill as it became nearly impossible to know which company was responsible for what, who was accountable for what, and who ultimately made the bad decisions that led to the spill? Lots of outsourcing. Here's what Reuters reported on Tuesday of this week:

LIPA, however, is a state-owned shell company that has only about 100 employees [all of whose positions are represented on their publicly available org chart]. It has outsourced the operation of its electric system to a unit of British power company National Grid PLC, which has said it is responsible for implementing LIPA's restoration plan.

Outsourcing is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that if you outsource, leadership must be fixated on clear lines of communication and have complete confidence in the competence of outside organization(s). And in yet another twist to the story, National Grid is "set to hand operations over to a unit of New Jersey power company Public Service Enterprise Group Inc in 2014," according to a Nov. 6, 2012, Reuters story. Although our research on this is still to be completed, it's likely that National Grid currently has massive outsourcing operations itself. That, coupled with the planned turnover of operations to yet another company in a short time (PSEG), makes the accountability/commitment-to-excellence worth questioning.

Given LIPA's empty leadership and problematic outsourcing, it is no wonder that a historic Frankenstorm is causing so much suffering. Going forward, it would be interesting to use OrgScope to fully analyze LIPA's (and/or National Grid's) organizational structure, examine lines of communication, and provide recommendations for transforming LIPA from a dangerous disconnected bureacracy to a fluid, communication-rich storm-proof network.

 

 

 

 

David Goodman on food, water, energy, health & wellness, governance & public policy

Each year, my friend (Antioch alum, too, we met in college) David Goodman sends a letter to friends with his thoughts of days past and those soon to come. This year's letter, posted with David's permission, is particularly cogent and forward thinking with a lot of downright useful information (be sure to read down to Governance and Public Policy). Hope you enjoy it too.

 

WINTER SOLSTICE LETTER
FROM DAVID GOODMAN
DECEMBER 21, 2010

Dear Friends, Family and Business Associates:

We are now starting the second decade of the 21st century. This season’s 10 second sound bite seems to be “The American people are angry at their elected politicians. They went to the polls on November 2, and voted accordingly.” My grandfather used to say that when I was angry and blaming someone for a perceived wrongdoing, I should take a deep breath, look inside myself,and see what part I played in causing the problem in the first place.

The seeds of anger leading up to our November mid-term election were sown long before October, 2008 when our economy collapsed. They were sown by unsustainable practices in business, politics and how we live our lives. Didn’t we learn in Sunday school that ‘as ye sow, so shall ye reap’? What will be the harvest of excessive self-interest and lack of willingness to take responsibility for making changes? Here is my take on some of the problems we face, broken down into 5 interconnected global categories:

Food is something we all need - but US citizens are amongst the most obese in the world. 66% of all Americans are overweight, according to the US Center for Disease Control. Certainly the politicians we voted into office did not force us to SuperSize ourselves by eating unhealthy junk food promoted by Mad Men. When people are either malnourished, or overnourished, psychological problems magnify and may result in extreme frustration and anger. Many people are alarmed about our food stock’s nutritional value. They are angry at food agribusiness practices based on intense chemical fertilization, related soil erosion, patented genetically modified seeds and Roundup Ready herbicides that are poisoning us, the soil and contributing to the demise of agriculture’s most important ally, the pollinating honey bee (Colony Collapse Disorder); all of these practices and more directly affect the quality of our food supply and are unsustainable.

Water is critical to our survival as is food. Globally, humans are either depleting or polluting their water resources at a rapid rate; we have basically run out of potable water in much of the world. None of our politicians told us to despoil our sacred global water resources although they may be doing little or nothing to abate this continuing disaster. Americans consume about 150 gallons of water per day while many in other countries consume less than a ½ gallon per day. In the US, many natural subterranean aquifers are overused and are not renewing. This includes the largest underground reservoir used for irrigation in the United States (and the world) called the Ogallala aquifer which runs from the Dakotas down through Texas. The Ogallala waters one of the most “productive” farming areas in the entire world which is our country’s breadbasket. This depletion of water was not caused by any coordinated effort from our elected representatives, but rather by our collective demand for “cheap” food grown and delivered by big corporations, which includes irreversibly sucking up our water resources...all of which is unsustainable.

Energy is needed by humans for everything; including growing food, lifting water out of the ground for drinking, and purifying water for health and wellness reasons. Much of our energy comes from fossil fuels formed in the Carbonaceous Era 300,000,000 years ago; but in the last 100 years, the world population has used half of the planet’s oil stores. It appears to me we take energy for granted in the United States, where it remains about the cheapest in the richest 33 OECD countries (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Gasoline, the oil derivative we consume (and waste) more than any other country, costs about $2.70 per gallon in the US. In Europe, gasoline costs about $7 per gallon because they accept a higher tax to “discourage” wanton consumption. If our government levied a $4 gasoline tax on us, you would see a revolution and politicians wouldn’t be yelled at by the voters, they would be lynched by both voters and corporations. US consumption runs at about 1000 gallons of gasoline per person per year while average global consumption, not counting the United States, is about 140 gallons per person per year (the Chinese consume 100 gallons annually per person). The global result of this massive consumption of fossil fuel is an unprecedented concentration of atmospheric CO2. This is why we have global warming which along with many other energy derived pollutants is unsustainable.

Health and Wellness is a subject about which virtually all US citizens have an opinion – most often unhappy and angry. Politics aside, all of the above three paragraphs describe global dynamics detrimental to our health and wellness. Without a necessary abundance of food, usable and plentiful water, and sufficient sustainable energy, we have no basis for assuming that global health and wellness is likely to continue into the future. Even though the average life expectancy is improving globally, the health and wellness of Homo sapiens in geologic time may be coming to an end if we continue our present ways which are unsustainable.

Governance and Public Policy mixed with public anger often results in a volatile and
unpredictable outcome. Unfortunately, I have seen this “dynamic” up close and personal when my brother was murdered in 1964 by angry extremists (The Ku Klux Klan) who objected to our public policy that all citizens have an inalienable right to vote. I believe the anger we see today manifests as a result of complex challenges humans are facing that are almost overwhelming, but that we have created ourselves. The matter in which Food, Water, Energy and Health and Wellness are dealt with are decreasingly requiring local solutions and increasingly requiring
global public policy solutions. A majority of Americans overwhelmingly voted in a Democratic Administration in 2008 because so many people were fed up with the Republicans. Now, a majority of Americans overwhelmingly voted in more Republicans. It is unlikely that our governance and public policy will be able to address the underlying challenges when so much money and effort goes into “political football” games. If each of us is not paying attention to public policy, someone else will make it for us (most likely the business community). Flip flop
voting and perpetuating the fight among politicians is a net losing game for all of us and is unsustainable.

What can we do to address some of these issues? I have attached Exhibit A with a few
suggestions on improving our condition in all of the five topics above.

I hope you have a good holiday season,

Warmest Regards,
David Goodman

PS: I have taken the 5 topic words of “Food”, “Water”, “Energy”, “Health and Wellness”, and “Governance” from Antioch College’s Pedagogy for the 21st Century in a new initiative called the “Global Seminar”. However, what followed in each of the paragraphs above are my own thoughts, albeit similar to what others are discussing around the world today.

Exhibit A
THINGS YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE THE WORLD (Just Examples)

Food:
1. Eat sustainably produced food. Support small, organic farms and be willing to pay more for better quality. If possible, eat locally grown food that has not traveled 1500 miles to your table; this will help avoid loading our air with unhealthy diesel fumes.

2. Eat more meals at home because it is probably healthier (and less expensive).

3. Cut down on red meat irrespective of where or how it is grown. It is a huge contributor to GHG’s (greenhouse gases)

4. Eat less ocean fish; we are globally exhausting our fish stock and fish we eat are often laced with PBTC’s (perpetually bio-accumulating toxic chemicals), like mercury, which are detrimental to your health.

Water:
5. Stop drinking bottled water. If you are concerned about water quality, invest in a filter and re-use bottles. Shipping bottled water, particularly from Europe, does nothing but poison the air with more diesel fumes.

6. Give money to support clean water for underserved US communities and people in
“Third World” countries.

7. Read as much as you can about water practices. Understand water public policy in your community.

Energy:
8. When your existing incandescent bulbs burn out, buy fluorescent, halogen or LED bulbs which last longer, use a fraction of the electricity and therefore lower pollutants and GHG’s.

9. Try not to use your clothes dryer, one of the biggest users of electricity or gas in your house. You can buy a $10 clothes drying rack instead.

10. Drive a car (Prius or other hybrid) that uses less fuel. Insist that car companies sell electric powered cars and power companies deliver renewable energy, particularly wind and solar. The US has about 1 million megawatts of installed electric generation. There are potentially 4 million megawatts of wind power that could be developed off the US coast and even more inland. Insist on public policy leading to healthy uses of renewable and sustainable energy.

11. If you are buying a new house, make sure it is green certified. See this website for an example www.e-solarproperties.com. It should not cost a lot more and will add big resale value later, and can eliminate most of your energy uses. Buildings of all types generate 40% of US GHG’s.

Health and Wellness:
12. Do all of the above

13. Get rid of your supermarket-purchased cleaning agents and buy green products or use plain soap and vinegar. Many studies show our home air environment is more
concentrated with carcinogens from cleaning fluids than the air outside our houses or
apartments.

14. You know what to do.

Governance and Public Policy:
15. Be sure to vote since only 41.5% of the eligible voters cast their ballots in 2010.

16. Work hard at understanding what drives public policy. After having been a CEO of an electric generating power company for 23 years, I have seen how business determines most public policy over time. When the voting public does not pay attention (or understand), business gets what they want. Follow the money. Unlike 50 years ago, big corporations are global and less beholden to their country of incorporation, but are still driven by profit. We, the people, must take control of public policy and demand that corporations not only make a profit, but are also socially and environmentally responsible. We may be angry, but let’s not get discouraged and leave public policy to others, particularly corporations, because that is unsustainable.

“Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten”.
-- Cree Native American Prophecy

Can you count to three?

What kind of stupid question is that? Next time, try it with someone else, this way. I explain.

Went to a meeting on Friday with about 20 others. As an icebreaker, the facilitator suggested a cooperative game. Pair off in 2s. Count alternating between you: 1,2,3.

Seems simple enough. Well, try it. First time you mess up, shake it off, sort of like doing the hokey-pokey.

Next step: Clap each time you say 1. Harder.

Next: clap at 1, jump at 2. Er, pretty hard.

And then: clap at 1, jump at 2, touch your heel at 3. RRRREALLY HARD.

Good icebreaker. Noisy but good.

 

 

 

Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf

Harvard Business Review Blogs carries our post today on the role BP's organizational structure may have played in causing the horror show in the gulf. See "Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf." I wrote about this briefly here shortly after the explosion on April 20.

Message to other consultants about BP disaster

Dear colleagues,

Many of us have worked with BP (we did one small project for its-then Organizational Engineering group in 1993, thanks to Lilly Evans).

Many more of us have pointed to some great examples at BP, like its early start in knowledge management, communities of practice, and its unusual organization designs.

Now BP is at the heart of a colossal safety failure that killed eleven people, seriously injured many more, and which threatens the entire Gulf of Mexico.

Those of us in consulting spend so much time talking about communication and organization and so many other terms that I first listed them here then deleted them all because the stream together sounds like so much gobbledygook.

Although it will take time to determine everything that went wrong (here's an excellent piece by Forbes blogger Christopher Helman, "BP's Deepwater Disaster: What Happened and Why?", who suggests, among other reasons, a decision-making call that may have been in part to blame), this horrific incident offers both a practice field for prevention and a readiness plan for the next time something like this happens.

What advice can we, brilliant consultants of the world, offer BP and the US government right now--and offer to future BP-like disasters? No one in this catastrophe may ever hear what we have to say but every disaster (Haiti was barely 14 weeks ago) cries out for better collaboration, faster knowledge exchange, greater innovation.

I posted an initial thought yesterday. Yours?

Were you in NETWORKING? Please pass along

In 1982, Doubleday published Networking: The First Report and Directory, Jeff's and my first book.

The story of how that book came to market someday will, or rather, should appear in the annals of publishing -- first publisher (Methuen, a British publisher aiming to break into the US market) shelved its whole list just after we'd submitted manuscript; Doubleday picked it up, offering more than twice the original advance (great agent at time, Ron Bernstein); we got the contract to do the electronic typsetting, making it the first commercial book to be electronically typeset under auspices of the authors, never having been retyped by its publisher; translated into Japanese by that country's Economic Planning Agency, and on and on -- but alas this post is about the treasure hunt that we're launching here today.

Networking was, as its subtitle says, a "report" on 1600 grassroots and nonprofit networks focused on the seven topics listed on the cover, along with a directory of those networks.

Within the book was everything from the theory and practice of networks -- with a chapter-long essay devoted to each topic -- to the directory itself, organized in various ways -- by organization name, by location, by keyword, and by title of the network's publications.

Those listed range from The Sun Magazine to World Future Society to Franz Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Group (now Practical Action) to Tilth to Aspen Institute to CoEvolution Quarterly to Dr. Dobb's Journal to the National Center for Citizen Involvement, now the Open Library (where our two earliest books, including this one are listed) and Boston Women's Health Book Collective, now Our Bodies, Ourselves, to which we devoted a chapter of its own because of its unique networking skills. The fact that it's still going after nearly forty years makes the point.

We did all the research via networking, beginning with one letter (as in type it, sign it, put it in an envelope, attach a stamp, go to the post office - remember that?) that we sent to one person whom we knew to be a richly connected networker, who suggested nine others, whom we wrote to, who in turn sent us other suggestions -- and within 18 months, we'd received the names of 50,000 "networks" around the world. We wrote to 4000 of them and got back an astonishing 40% response rate - 1600 letters, packages, publications, descriptions, many with heartfelt expressions of why their leaders networked and how they did it. Incredible experience, to say the least. No Internet. Limited email (a little because a few of us pioneers were already online). Need I say: No web, no listservs, and, of course, no Google, Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook. Just the poor postman, who left a trail of whiskey nips along our sidewalk.

So now it's 2009, more than a quarter-century later and we're wondering how many of those networks have survived (I chose the ones above that I could google). Why now? Not just idle curiosity but intense awareness that there are similarities between the early 1980s and today. Principal among them unemployment, as per Paul O. Flaim's, "Unemployment in 1982: the cost to workers and their families:"

The economy entered 1982 in a severe recession and labor market conditions deteriorated throughout the year. The unemployment rate, already high by historical standards at the onset of the recession in mid-1981, reached 10.8 percent at the end of 1982, higher than at any time in post-World War II history.

A few other interesting stats from then: the Dow was, get ready, 776 in August of that year, down 30% from its high of 1011 five years earlier. And, the drop in exports and spending just announced is mere fractions shy of "the 6.4 percent rate drop seen in the first quarter of 1982, when the economy was in a recession that lasted 16 months," according to Lucia Mutukani's "US economy weakens," in the Feb 29, 2009, Boston Globe.

Clearly, we made it through that tough time, not purely because of networking, of course (I'm not that much of a romantic), but in part because people got together and figured out some things they could do themselves. We're interested in how those networks have survived and intend to include them in the new bit of writing we're engaged in, details to come.

So would you please pass this note along to anyone you know who might have been in the book? When we have a spare minute (ha!), we'll scan the whole list and begin publishing that. Thanks in advance! And, Networking networkers, please post comments here.

Telecommute up, says Geek Doc

John Halamka, the vegan-rock-climbing smart-beyond-words if-it-makes-sense-I'll-try-it CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (and Harvard Medical School to be precise) has a great report on his telecommuting initiatives. It's so good that I'm stealing most of it. Execs, telecommute up! Saves carbon, money, time, and releases the emission most treasured by those in charge, productivity. And, friends, John's up for "The 2008 Medical Weblog Awards Sponsored by Epocrates: Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog Category" - I just voted for him. You can too (hint):

Some staff members are working from home on a full-time basis and others are doing so only one or two days a week. We have about 10-15% of the IT workforce (35 of our 350 staff) who work at home on any given day.

What is the impact? 35 people x 260 workdays = 9,100 days per year saved in commuting. That's 9,100 car-days off the road. This reduces the demand for parking, office space, and most importantly the employee stress/strain of fighting traffic.

From a management perspective, the past year has been very successful. Employee turnover is at 2%, employee satisfaction is high, and productivity has improved. Employees spend 2-3 hours a day working instead of preparing for their workday, commuting, and returning home.

Costs of the technology to empower home workers has been low - a partial subsidy of home internet connections, a fixed amount of prepaid cell phone time added to employee paychecks, and the use of the Juniper SSLVPN for secure remote access/desktop sharing.

"Not-so-lonely planet"

Oliver Morton, author of Mapping Mars and Eating the Sun and features editor for the journal Nature, has a brilliant piece about our extraordinary little orb, where it fits in the history of the universe, and how to draw a line between the durability of life here and global warming. Very few authors are capable of this kind of range, this manner of huge thinking, and this unusual insight. Read his NY Times op-ed, "Not-so-lonely planet," and you'll feel much better about everything.

Knights and Dames of the round table

This appears to be it, with nominations today of Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Illinois) for Secretary of Transportation and Rep. Hilda Solis (D-California) as Secretary of Labor. Click, wait for OrgScope map of US Gov to load and open, and you've got the Obama round table of cabinet nominees. You can dive down into the departments, change what you're looking at by clicking on the menu bar, and have a high ole' time.

Or just get used to the new faces here. (FYI, Dennis Blair nominated today as National Intelligence Director--thanks to Siobhan Gorman at Wall Street Journal for that news; still waiting for final touches at CIA, Federal Election Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, and FDIC - Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and a host of other agencies -- none of which are cabinet-level jobs.)

The real green team

You know how interested I am in green teams, which I first wrote about here almost exactly a year ago (Carbon neutral, or shall we say, green teams).

Now PEBO has gone and appointed one that can really make a difference. Here's the scoop from CNN's Steve Hargreaves's piece, "Obama names energy team, vows new tack:"

The team -- the subject of speculation for weeks -- includes physicist Steven Chu as Energy secretary and former Environmental Protection Agency head Carol Browner in the newly created position of "climate czar." [Ed. note: One more czar - soon we'll need a Council of Czar(ina)s]

The team also includes Lisa Jackson, a former head of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, as director of the EPA; and Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor from Los Angeles, as head of the Council on Environmental Quality.

So guess what? We've added them to the ever-growing map.

And here are their faces with their organizations, all in one little picture. Clockwise, Lisa Jackson at EPA; Nancy Sutley at Council on Environmental Quality; Carol Browner (welcome back, EPA head during Clinton administration) at Office of Energy; Climate & Environment; and Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy ("Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has headed the Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004"). Go PEBO Green Team!