FSU EXPERT ADVISES BUSINESSES TO HEED THE LESSONS OF SEPT. 11
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--The business climate has changed in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, but there are lessons both the private and public sectors can learn from the tragedy in order to be more effective and better protect the public, according to an internationally known Florida State University researcher.
"If we keep doing business as usual instead of looking out for the societal good, we're going to have Sept. 11 all over again," said Roger Kaufman, professor and director of the FSU Office for Needs Assessment and Planning and an expert on strategic planning, needs assessment, performance improvement and quality management.
Kaufman, who for years has been using a strategic model he developed that calls for government and businesses to place societal needs and good over short-term profits, is finding new, receptive audiences in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Kaufman has conducted workshops on the lessons of Sept. 11 for the Portuguese Department of Labor, the Armed Forces Chapter of the International Society for Performance Improvement and the Australian Department of Defense. His articles on the topic will appear in the journals Educational Technology and ISPI News and Notes.
"We can learn from our tragedies and our failures," Kaufman said. "If organizations don't now base everything on the health, safety and well being of all stakeholders, they are letting us -- and themselves -- down. They expect their own survival to be No. 1 on everyone else's priority list and so it should be on theirs as well."
The first thing organizations must realize is that making money and doing societal good are not mutually exclusive, Kaufman said, noting that it is always good business to do what's best for the customer and society as a whole. For example, food producers may be thinking of the bottom line when they cut corners, but they are risking more than the consumer's health. Frequent food recalls may shake consumer confidence and cut into company profits in the long run.
"Can you think of anybody that you do business with -- whether it's a gas station or the place you buy your food -- that you would not want to put your health, safety or welfare first?" Kaufman asked.
Many organizations, however, are blind to the big picture and focus solely on the performance of individual employees, Kaufman said. Thus, when a problem arises, the first response is often to increase hours of employee training or change the method of instruction without ever reassessing the organization's goals.
Before Sept. 11, U.S. airport security was one industry that clearly forgot what its ultimate goal was -- to protect airline passengers so that they would "arrive alive," Kaufman said, explaining that the goal became obscured by the motivation to keep costs down and to avoid inconveniencing passengers.
"If the security organizations focused on safety and not just on passenger flow through check points and short-term profits by hiring marginal employees," Kaufman said, "there might have been some concern for such things as 'why are four unrelated passengers on this flight each carrying box cutters?' "
Kaufman advises organizations to begin to define "needs" in terms of gaps in results, not insufficient resources, means or methods. When a need is defined as a gap between "what is" and "what should be," it allows company leaders to see what their objectives should be as well as the criteria for evaluation and improvement. Once this is established, hard data, not intuition or conventional wisdom, can be used to evaluate the costs and consequences of meeting the needs as compared to the costs and consequences of ignoring them.
"Think about our most recent tragedy and hypothesize if training and security were rooted in safety-linked performance based needs -- hard data -- and not just on perceptions of activities and probably loose performance standards," Kaufman said. "What did it cost all of us to ignore the needs?"
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