Old Man Of The Sea

Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, wrote a bluff and hearty editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (available on their OpinionJournal service), regarding the five stages of crisis management, as applied in this case, to Hurricane Katrina. The editorial makes interesting reading, on its own terms, about the limitations of large organizations in dealing with calamities.

Welch's editorial is written in the familiar, exaggerated over-confident, cheerily sloppy way that men of Big Business seem to prefer to write. For example, he doesn't check his facts too closely:

Yes, there has never been a natural disaster of Katrina's magnitude in our history. An entire city has been devastated, hundreds of lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. In terms of impact, only an extended catastrophe like the Great Depression can compare in scope.

Actually, disasters of this scope HAVE occurred before: Salon compiled a list of the Top 10 killer disasters, and so far, Hurricane Katrina is just number 10. This list doesn't include big property disasters, like the 1930's Dust Bowl, Mt. St. Helens in 1980, the Mississippi floods of 1993, or the even bigger floods of 1927. Perhaps in the long run, Welch may be right, once everything is totalled up, but he's a bit out-on-a-limb at the moment.

Nevertheless, I can't come down hard on Welch: he makes me smile. He introduces his editorial with that familiar stock character, an 'Old Man of the Sea' type, a man wise to the ways of Mother Nature:

Our last day in Nantucket this summer, we bumped into a crusty old islander we know, a sea-hand who has seen his share of hurricanes. We asked him about the storm bearing down on New Orleans. "Probably just another overhyped Weather Channel event," he mused. We saw him again the next day, a few hours after the storm's landfall, and he repeated his take, this time with relief. We agreed--the pictures on TV weren't that bad.

Welch inadvertently reveals his 'crusty old islander' as being uninformed at best, or an idiot at worst. On Saturday, August 27th, two days before landfall, while Hurricane Katrina was still far out in the Gulf of Mexico, it required just one glance at the satellite picture (I even blogged about it) to reveal that the storm had, overnight, morphed from a run-of-the-mill minor hurricane into one of the largest, strongest hurricanes ever observed by humankind anywhere, an awesome, thrashing killer that would level anything it even approached. Perhaps the Weather Channel didn't make that point sufficiently clear at the time. Perhaps people were in the first stage of crisis mangement that Welch identifies: denial. In any event, it's quite clear now how powerful Hurricane Katrina was. Maybe even that 'crusty old islander' learned a thing or two from the experience!