Jack Welch on Katrina

Interesting take on the crisis management involved in the disaster from the former GE CEO:

In the terrible days since then, there has been a hurricane of debate about what went wrong in New Orleans and who is to blame. Mother Nature, perhaps for the first time in the case of a bona fide natural disaster, has been given a pass. Instead, the shouting has been about crisis-management--or the lack thereof. Everyone from President Bush to the police chief in a small parish on the outskirts of the city has been accused of making shockingly bad mistakes and misjudgments. The Katrina crisis, you would think, is unlike any before it.

Unfortunately, that's not completely true.

I had recently read Welch's new book but it never occurred to me that the Katrina aftermath fit the five stages of crisis management. Fortunately Welch is here to point out the interesting parallels:

The first stage of that pattern is denial. The problem isn't that bad, the thinking usually goes, it can't be, because bad things don't happen here, to us. The second is containment. This is the stage where people, including perfectly capable leaders, try to make the problem disappear by giving it to someone else to solve. The third stage is shame-mongering, in which all parties with a stake in the problem enter into a frantic dance of self-defense, assigning blame and claiming credit. Fourth comes blood on the floor. In just about every crisis, a high profile person pays with his job, and sometimes he takes a crowd with him. In the fifth and final stage, the crisis gets fixed and, despite prophesies of permanent doom, life goes on, usually for the better.

We are a way off from the fifth stage in New Orleans, but the first four played out like an old movie.

Read the whole thing - Welch goes into detail on what happened in each stage. And if you're involved in business - his new book is a must read.