eric beaudan
CREATIVE EXECUTION
what great leaders do to unleashbold thinking and innovation
KATRINA WIPES OUT FEMA
When Katrina made landfall near New Orleans on August 29, 2005,no one believed that the Category 5 hurricane was about to becomeone of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. The city’s levees andflood walls failed, leading to the deaths of 1,200 people. The federalorganization charged with the rescue and response effort, the FederalEmergency Management Agency (FEMA), soon became overwhelmed with the task at hand. Despite assurances by FEMA director MichaelBrown that the federal government was ready to respond to the crisis,there were no emergency response teams from FEMA in New Orleans,or buses and ships ready to evacuate wounded or sick people from thearea. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, was attending aconference at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whilePresident Bush was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Whilethe 9/11 attacks had sensitized the Bush administration to the need forhigh vigilance in preventing another act of terrorism on American soil,the thought of a hurricane devastating New Orleans was nowhere nearthe top of the secretary of homeland security’s priority list. As the dev-astating break in the 17
th
Street Canal levee widened to 500 feet and
Who Needs Creative Execution?
We must be bold.
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—John F. Kennedy
INTRODUCTION
Creative Execution2
water from Lake Pontchartrain spewed into New Orleans, residents were left scrambling to deal with dead bodies and the 22 million tonsof debris strewn around the Louisiana coast, including 350,000 auto-mobiles and 35,000 boats destroyed by the storm.FEMA’s inability to respond to the worsening situation in New Orleans, evidenced by its leaders’ panicked reactions, was a total fail-ure of an agency created at the height of the Cold War—believe itor not—to coordinate national relief efforts in the event of a Sovietnuclear attack on American cities. FEMA’s local deputy, Marty Bahamonde, admitted in congressional testimony that “there was asystematic failure at all levels of government to understand the magni-tude of the situation. The leadership from top down in our agency wasunprepared and out of touch.”
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Arkansas senator Mark Pryor was lesskind: “When FEMA finally did show up, everybody was angry becauseall they had was a Web site and a flyer,” he testified in front of a bipar-tisan congressional committee.
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FEMA’s disgraced director, MichaelBrown, resigned in September 2005. It didn’t help Brown that, beforehis appointment by the Bush administration, his most prestigiouspedigree had been commissioner of the Arabian Horse Association. While FEMA was fumbling for resources in Washington, DC, andtrying to decide whether it was safe to send supplies into New Orleans,its sister agency inside the Department of Homeland Security, theUnited States Coast Guard, was exerting itself doing what everyonehoped FEMA would accomplish: saving lives and restoring order.How the Coast Guard got there isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. By 2005, the 40,000-person-strong Coast Guard organization was stretched and partly orphaned. After the post-9/11 shakedownof the federal government, the Coast Guard was pulled out from theUnited States Navy and told to refocus its mission on port security and maritime interdiction, operating anywhere from California to thePersian Gulf. The great fear of the Department of Homeland Security at the time was that terrorists would smuggle a dirty bomb into a U.S.harbor (think Los Angeles or New York), and from 2002 onward, theCoast Guard was busy patrolling U.S. harbors and providing in-shore
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Creative Execution: What Great Leaders Do to Unleash Bold Thinking and Innovation
With tactics, strategies, and calls to action to help any organization shape and apply the dynamics of Creative Execution, this powerful one-volume manifesto will help any leader get in the trenches, learn firsthand the impact of their decisions, and restore ingenuity, cooperation, and a sense of collective commitment to the workplace.
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