“Hey, What if One of Our Ships Gets Stranded?”
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Project Management
Note from Art: this intrepid reporter has spared no effort to observe at least three or four news reports on this topic. And note to executives and managers everywhere: get your act together on assessing, planning for and responding to customer catastrophes!
By now, most of us have seen or heard news footage of the Carnival Splendor stranded at sea after suffering an engine room fire and a subsequent loss of core systems including most power and importantly, the plumbing. Thankfully, no one was reported injured, but that’s about as good as the news gets in this situation.
The fact that something went wrong at sea on one of those floating Mall of Americas is not surprising to me. Thanks to my wife, I’m a veteran of a good number of these trips, and I’ve increasingly found myself looking beyond the surface trappings of the experience and wondering just what might go wrong. It’s a lot like making a mental note of where the fire exit is on your hotel floor, except the conclusion here is that if something bad happens, there’s no ground floor escape option.
What is surprising and disconcerting about the situation, is the apparent complete and utter lack of a risk response plan by the company that is in business to float people around on these palaces and feed them until they can barely waddle off the gangplank.
From the chronology indicated by the Carnival, it appears that fire took place in at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, with a subsequent loss of power and plumbing. The information indicates that by 8:15 p.m. that evening, toilet service was restored, as was cold running water. While I wasn’t a math or biology major, let’s look at the variables in this situation:
- 6:00 a.m. fire and plumbing failure
- 3,300 passengers well fed from the day before
- No bathroom service for 14 hours
Here’s hoping that the risk response plan included something really creative for this particular human issue.
Beyond the biological challenges, the Cruise Line required airlifting of Spam (the food, not the e-mail kind) by the U.S. Navy to feed the passengers and crew. Right about now, your olfactory senses should be battling with your gut to contemplate the smells on board this sweltering sweatbox sans air conditioning and plumbing, as well as the sight of sweaty meat or a meat-like substance being served in the sun.
Last and not least, one gets the impression that there was no clear idea on how to move the becalmed vessel from its stranded location to something resembling civilization. For a great while the ship just sat there while it appears that company officials scrambled for someone, anyone that could help them rescue their passengers from this Gilligan’s Island debacle.
What Part of the Risk Management Plan Didn’t Consider This Situation?
Much like we are hearing finally from BP (or at least its former CEO), it appears the oil company was not prepared for the calamity it faced at the Deepwater Horizon. We certainly are to be forgiven if we raise an eyebrow at Carnival’s response to their own Deepwater debacle and conclude that these people didn’t have a clue and a plan to deal with something as fundamental as a ship getting stranded.
The Bottom Line for Now:
There’s no doubt it’ a non-trivial task to deal with a floating object two times as large as Titanic with thousands of people aboard. However, given the nature of the firm’s business (entertainment, fantasy) it is reasonable to expect lightening fast effective response to a problem of this magnitude. To those of us viewing this via the media, the clueless and seemingly uncoordinated response seems all too familiar. We’ve seen this movie before and the ending sucks.
Are you prepared in your firm to respond effectively to catastrophes with your customers? You may be in the entertainment business, Carnival, but this is not the type of entertainment that will help your cause.
Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measurements Include a Warning Light?
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Count me as one of the last idealists. Or perhaps the last of the naïve idealists. In a world filled with Quality Management Systems and Performance Measurement techniques backed by legions of people trained to implement and sustain quality performance, it seems reasonable to me that organizations are capable of not only keep themselves from imploding, but that they are armed to the teeth with tools to ensure prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of Dr. Deming.
As an aside, Dr. Deming once famously indicated that it was his hope that his legacy was to keep U.S. companies from committing suicide. Perhaps it is good that he is not here to see the firms elbowing each other out of the way in an attempt to get to the front of the line on the edge of the cliff.
- The U.S. auto companies are almost finished carrying out their joint suicide pact in a world where the rules for success as an automobile company are on display for everyone to see.
- Motorola, an icon of U.S. electronics has systematically destroyed itself by flailing and flailing in the mobile device (read: cellphone) world, and stands a reasonable chance of failing to survive without drastic action. (See my earlier post on the Dollar Bill Auction to get a feeling for Motorola’s problems.) The fact that Motorola is a Baldrige winner, one of the founding fathers of Six Sigma and an organization staffed with brilliant engineers, yet it cannot seem to engineer success is both puzzling and frustrating.
- Earlier this week, Boeing indicated that they would again delay the launch of its now several years late and much hyped 787 Dreamliner. The article indicated that the latest problem had to do with quality issues related to a new type of fastener required for the high tech and lightweight materials being used in the plane. The advance sale of 900 of these puppies at $178 million a piece and the expected 20% fuel consumption savings has customers hopping mad over this latest in a series of seemingly endless project management and supply chain problems.
- Financial services, banking, investment banking. Ugh. These icons of risk management succeeding in maximizing risk beyond their wildest expectations.
How does this happen in a world filled with balanced scorecards and legions of certified quality professionals constantly measuring, monitoring and striving to improve performance? I suspect that my own answer is that while we have ample tools available for our use in building, the one tool that we haven’t yet mastered is staring back at us in the mirror.
In discussions and lectures with the up and coming generation of leaders, there is widespread cynicism over the intentions and the capabilities of many of their firm’s senior leaders. There is little faith expressed that their leaders understand their firm’s key drivers and little confidence that the leaders are taking actions and measuring performance based on anything other than preconceived notions of what they think is right. Fewer organizations than you might think are doing anything to engender employee satisfaction…which is ironic given the mountains of data that indicate that employee satisfaction flows through to customer satisfaction and strong financial performance.
This current generation of senior leaders is failing, and the very imbalanced scorecard is visible all around us. The business cycle is one thing, but our problems go way beyond the business cycle to our preconceived notions of how to lead, how to run businesses, how to fuel innovation and how to create an environment where talent and calculated risk-taking are carefully cultivated.
Many organizations are hives of activity with no vector and the output is chaotic. Firms and top leaders need to quit guessing and start using the tools available to identify key business drivers and to measure and monitor the efforts and outcomes of focusing on those drivers.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned crisis to engender creativity. Well, we have one. In spite of the difficulties, it’s a great opportunity for organizations and leaders to quit paying lip-service to cliché’s like customer-satisfaction, performance excellence and quality. It’s a big world with a growing population and while the forecast is stormy now, the seas will eventually calm and the sun will shine. It will be interesting to see who has the courage and fortitude to do the things necessary to make it through the storm. Even money that we find a whole new generation of leaders in the process.
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