This is the fourth piece that Peter has written for this site, this one with a post script provided by his wife, Jackie.
Peter Flatow is one of the smartest people I know, though he would blush that I write this. Before becoming a dreaded consultant, he covered himself with glory at some of the biggest and best marketing organizations in the world.
You can reach Peter directly at flatowp@coknowledge.com
Lessons from Columbia
By Peter J. Flatow
Greenwich, CT: February 2, 2003. It is now a little more than 24 hours after the Columbia disaster or tragedy has occurred. It has become almost impossible and for me depressing to watch any of the commercial channels or news channels on television. Rather than looking at the Columbia trip as an example of what we should be doing, the news media and the talking heads appear solely focused on what we shouldn’t be doing.
I will leave for another day the news media’s unrelenting need to turn these situations into a 24 hour nonstop crises in which everything else should be ignored. Losing Columbia was a tragedy not a crisis. The world did not come to end. Seven heroic people in search of new learning lost their lives. These seven took a risk knowing that risk was required to learn what they were out to learn.
Should we stop taking risk? Should we stop manned flights? Was NASA under funded? Was the management of NASA at fault? Lots of questions all seeing the glass half empty. It would seem to me at a time like this we should be looking at this event for important lessons about what we should be doing, and not what we should not be doing. My mind cannot get off the similarities with what is going on in the business community today.
The minute the business community saw the slightest interruption in what appeared to be a flawless program, it crawled into a cave of its own construction. Using a host of excuses it appears the same business community is fearful of climbing out of its self imposed cave. We didn’t get to some of the advanced technological advantages that we take for granted today without risk: risk to reputation, risk of capital and I suppose the most of all, risk to ignoring conventional wisdom of what can and cannot be done.
Nobel prize winner Arno Penzias determined that during the fifties and most of the sixties over a trillion dollars were spent on telephony and computing power with little to no financial advantage derived from the promised and expected productivity. It was not until the convergence of telephony and computing power that significant financial advantage occurred. Through this period many companies took significant risks allowing them years later to reap the financial rewards.
If you look at what’s going on in our economy today, we could take a real lesson from this Columbia tragedy. From the little that I’ve seen, as I said most of this is not watchable, no one at NASA, and thankfully even the President, is suggesting the end of space travel. What they are suggesting is that we need to find the problem and fix it. No matter how directed the question, how rhetorical the question, none of the NASA spokespeople have even hinted at anything other than this has to be a learning experience so we can move forward.
Is this not also a time when our business leaders should be studying what has gone wrong so as to determine how do we fix it? What can we learn from the last three years and correct it? Why has the war potential caused paralysis within the business community? Let us remember this down turn began long before 9/11 and the focus on Iraq. Why do we allow litigation to paralyze investment? Why have we lost faith in free enterprise and allowed regulations of regulations to inhibit innovation? It would seem the time is now to determine what converging factors can bring us prosperity in the future. With prosperity comes profits and isn’t that what the free enterprise system is all about.
It would appear there are significant and identifiable needs that the business community can fulfill and make a profit at. Let us identify those and move ahead. Let’s stop talking about what could go wrong and focus on what could go right. As our future relies more on the business community moving us forward to prosperity than NASA, maybe it is time to take a lesson from NASA, learn from our mistakes find new solutions and move ahead to the next frontier.
Peter
To which, Peter’s wife Jackie wrote . . .
Thanks, enjoyed reading this. A couple of thoughts:
As you know, I agree totally with your disdain for the media coverage and its
quick and regrettable leap to throw the baby (space exploration) out with the
bath water. If the military botches something in the early days of the
coming war -- we'll see the same second guessing/fear resurrected.
Unlike NASA, the business community has no recognized spokesperson or team or collective management that could have publicly said, "something's broke -- we've just found it; let's now fix it and move forward". But I do think individual companies have been doing this -- which in fact has contributed to publicizing more corruption. I think they are moving forward but nobody gives profit-driven entities points for doing things right/ethics ... it's just not expected like in agencies (govt. and non-profit). After all ... it's business.
And that brings us to the main difference -- the
underlying "thing broken" in the Columbia tragedy is probably not corruption;
the issue with the businesses we’ve been reading about is the now obvious
intent to deceive. NASA probably cut some corners like business does;
thought short term like business does; operated in denial like business
does. But I don't think NASA was covering ... do you?
Thanks for getting me thinking ... :^)
Send mail to
webmaster@kevinhoffberg.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2002
Kevin Hoffberg
Last modified:
07/24/05