Tuesday, April 1

 
Wow, just noticed the Wal-Mart posts below on the day I see this story, something I've heard about for a couple years but now has been fulled studied. The opposite of corporate policies preventing employees from doing the right thing, it's what happens when a company empowers employees to act as they see fit, as the Wal-Mart CEO did on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005:
This extraordinary delegation of authority ... saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.
Empowered, decentralized actors - people on the local level given the authority to act - and the resulting response was leagues ahead of what FEMA was doing. This isn't testimony to Wal-Mart per se, but to the power of local, community actors as being in the best position to respond to disaster - look how well they did it!
Of course these managers would do everything they could to help these people - it's their freakin' home town(s)! Contrast this urgency with the disinterest of a remote FEMA bureaucrat in Washington who's never been to Gulf Coast... is the resulting difference any surprise?
(Note: The article I linked to takes this to a certain anti-federalization level, which you may or may not agree with. Personally, I'm always shocked at how many people who railed against FEMA in the case of Katrina support the same disinterested and distant federal government in rebuilding the Gulf Coast, and many other projects of this nature.)





<< Home

Archives

05/01/2000 - 06/01/2000   06/01/2000 - 07/01/2000   07/01/2000 - 08/01/2000   08/01/2000 - 09/01/2000   09/01/2000 - 10/01/2000   10/01/2000 - 11/01/2000   11/01/2000 - 12/01/2000   12/01/2000 - 01/01/2001   01/01/2001 - 02/01/2001   02/01/2001 - 03/01/2001   03/01/2001 - 04/01/2001   04/01/2001 - 05/01/2001   05/01/2001 - 06/01/2001   06/01/2001 - 07/01/2001   07/01/2001 - 08/01/2001   08/01/2001 - 09/01/2001   09/01/2001 - 10/01/2001   10/01/2001 - 11/01/2001   11/01/2001 - 12/01/2001   12/01/2001 - 01/01/2002   01/01/2002 - 02/01/2002   02/01/2002 - 03/01/2002   03/01/2002 - 04/01/2002   04/01/2002 - 05/01/2002   05/01/2002 - 06/01/2002   06/01/2002 - 07/01/2002   07/01/2002 - 08/01/2002   08/01/2002 - 09/01/2002   09/01/2002 - 10/01/2002   10/01/2002 - 11/01/2002   11/01/2002 - 12/01/2002   12/01/2002 - 01/01/2003   01/01/2003 - 02/01/2003   02/01/2003 - 03/01/2003   03/01/2003 - 04/01/2003   04/01/2003 - 05/01/2003   05/01/2003 - 06/01/2003   06/01/2003 - 07/01/2003   07/01/2003 - 08/01/2003   08/01/2003 - 09/01/2003   09/01/2003 - 10/01/2003   10/01/2003 - 11/01/2003   11/01/2003 - 12/01/2003   12/01/2003 - 01/01/2004   01/01/2004 - 02/01/2004   02/01/2004 - 03/01/2004   03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004   04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004   05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004   06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004   07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004   08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004   09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004   10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004   11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004   12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005   01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005   02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005   03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005   04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005   05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005   06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005   07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005   08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005   09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005   10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005   04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006   10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007   11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007   12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008   01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008   02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008   03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008   04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008   05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008   06/01/2008 - 07/01/2008   07/01/2008 - 08/01/2008   08/01/2008 - 09/01/2008   09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008   11/01/2008 - 12/01/2008   12/01/2008 - 01/01/2009   01/01/2009 - 02/01/2009   02/01/2009 - 03/01/2009   03/01/2009 - 04/01/2009   04/01/2009 - 05/01/2009   05/01/2009 - 06/01/2009   06/01/2009 - 07/01/2009   07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009   08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009  

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?