When I talk of managing by crisis, I am not talking of crisis management, I want to make that clear. Crisis management is a field where experts try and predict upcoming problems and steer a company away from those problems before they happen. Managing by crisis is just the opposite. This is when a crisis happens and all of a sudden the powers that be wake up and try and fix the problem. Most private businesses are pretty good at managing their companies, if they weren't the companies would lose money and go bankrupt. This is exactly what happened in the case of Commodore. At one time, in the 1980s, Commodore was the biggest maker of personal computers, but due to bad management that only reacted in a crisis and not everyday business, they collapsed and went out of business. There have been other companies that have bit the dust over the years and that is what mismanagement can do to you. Shortsightedness sometimes causes this also. By that I mean hanging on to a product that is becoming obsolete without improving it. The old Underwood typewriter company was a victim of this. As computers and word processors were coming out and companies like IBM were taking advantage of the new technology, Underwood didn't seem to change their product. Today we can hardly find anyone using a typewriter anymore.

Lake Champlain
Photo Source: NOAA

The United States has a long history of managing by crisis. It started at the very beginning of the formation of our country. When we decided to break away from Britain, we were not prepared for the consequences. England was going to throw the might of their great navy against us and we were totally unprepared. If there had been crisis management then we would have been building ships of our own to defend ourselves. Instead we had only a few ships and most of them were not comparable with any in the British force. In some cases we built ships on the run. Retreating from Canada, the Americans hurriedly built ships to take on the British fleet on Lake Champlain. In under one year we built 16 ships. Benedict Arnold had accomplished this task and was ready to take on the British fleet of about 3 ships, 20 gunboats and a giant raft. This was a case of successfully managing by crisis. Did we know beforehand that we didn't have any boats on the lake? Sure. Did we do anything about it before hand? No. We waited until the last possible minute to perform a task that seems impossible on its face, yet we did it. The British ships had superior fire power and we had to retreat and lost most of the ships, but we won a tactical victory, because we delayed the British and it became too late in the season to attach Fort Ticonderoga. If we had anticipated that we should have had ships on the lake, we might have won the battle and brought the war to a swifter conclusion.

President George Washington had warned in his farewell speech that the Northern and Southern parts of the country were based on two different systems. One was slavery and one was cheap labor. With this warning did we try and resolve the problem? Not really. We instituted the Compromise of 1850 and applied it to new territories gotten from Mexico. It was a bandaid on a gaping wound and only worked for a short while. What the country needed to do was pass incentives for the south to do away with slavery, but it didn't. Instead the hatred between North and South built up, until an attack on the North was made, without the North ever seeing it coming. There were no Crisis Managers here folks. The North, managed by crisis and put all their production on full and drafted a huge military force that had to be trained mostly under fire. When the war ended, we either didn't foresee or didn't care about the cheats and frauds that went to the South to steal the land. Again the country's leaders had let the country down.

Shipbuilding During World War I
Photo Source: Believed To Be In Public Domain

World War I is anotherr example of managing by crisis. During the period before World War I, an arms race had been taking place. Almost every country was building huge battle ships and each country wanted to have the biggest and fastest ones. This was even a time when the U.S. thought that England might become our enemy. There was unrest in the usual places and you would have thought that we would have realized that war was a definite possibility. Each European country was making invasion plans and you would think that under the circumstances we would have bulked up our forces. Indications that we would have to get into the war were events like the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The ship had 128 Americans on board and was sunk by a German U-boat. Sabotage of Black Tom and the Kingsland Explosion in New Jersey were further indications that we would have to defend ourselves. I guess the icing on the cake was the Zimmermann Telegram that was intercepted. It asked Mexico to join Germany as an ally against the United States. In the summer of 1918 we drafted 4,000,000 men into the army. This was a true crisis reaction. By that time we were sending 10,000 men per day to France. This time we managed to turn the tide.

Sputnick
Photo Source: NASA

Remember the space race? You are probably too young. Here is the way it went. After World War II, both the US and Soviet Union captured many German scientists. A large amount of them had worked in the development of rockets, such as the V-2 that became the very first ballistic missile and could travel so fast that it couldn't be stopped, It had a sufficient range to reach other countries. The Soviets took their captured scientists and merged them with their own rocket specialists who were quite numerous, since that country had been interested in rockets well before the war. We took our German rocket scientists and a few American scientists and developed weapons and were working on a few different rockets that we hoped would one day actually reach orbit. Then it happened, the Soviets got ahead of us. They managed to put Sputnik in orbit and even a man into space. We were paralyzed. We panicked, having never suspected that they were that far ahead of us. We felt that we were truly in a crisis and tried to throw much of our resources at the problem. If we had devoted more people and money to the space program from the beginning, we may not have been in this fix. In the beginning, the remedy didn't work. We were being outdone by the Soviets at every turn and our rocket shots were laughable. We watched as rocket after rocket fell apart after launch or went out of control, only to crash spectacularly into the ground. It took us years, as a matter of fact, right up to the first manned Apollo Moon landing to get the lead. Did we continue with manned space flight? We built the shuttle debacle and the space station debacle, but aside from these money wasters, manned flight stopped and the government blamed us for this. They said that the public lost interest. Well I guess that scientists and the government must have lost interest also, because we destroyed our existing stockpile of Moon rockets. It seems that we must have a crisis to react to, before we take any major actions. We are about to find out that the rest of the world has not been sitting still and soon there will be foreign astronauts flying into space. This time it may be too late to react.

I don't know why the American government has such a dismal history of poor management in many areas, but I have a theory. My theory states that when you put people in charge of agencies, or use these people as advisors, they should know what they are doing. They should not be awarded these posts because of political favoritism. One can't help but notice that when a president comes into office, he brings all his friends and political cronies and they all get responsible jobs. This doesn't mean that they know anything about what they are supposed to do or that they are suited to their new positions. All we have to do is look at the failures of late by government agencies. FEMA during the Katrina disaster, Homeland Security with all the new constitution weakening laws, the Attorney General with his political vendetta.

Isn't it time that we got a government that really knew what it was doing with managers and directors who have a good record of directing large amounts of people and getting missions accomplished? I must tell you that I have met with some political appointments and they were not suited to be in private industry and yet they were pulling down big money in their positions. Until you actually meet some of these people, it is hard to visualize that some people could be so incompetent. You could ask some of these guys to stand on a railway track and they would never see or hear a train coming and even if they did, they wouldn't be smart enough to get off the track. Let's hope that we wise up sometime in the future, before it is too late and get our game together and not just wait for another disaster before we react to the problem.