Gospels of Failure

Here's a riddle. What is the only business book ever to spend more than 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, sell more than a million copies, and be nominated for the prestigious National Book Award?

Give up? It's The 9/11 Commission Report, which is shaping up to become the surprise hit of the last year. It's a trick question, granted: The 9/11 study isn't a traditional business book; at least, it's not the overhyped, how-to, warmed-over fluff that all too often dominates the genre. But the commission's report is a careful analysis of flawed organizations, and of the devastating effects of siloed cultures and ineffective management.

So it's finding fans in pockets across the business world. Felix Barber, a Zurich-based senior adviser to the Boston Consulting Group, says he thought the report was "one of the best books on organization I've read." Ian Mitroff, a professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, observes "virtually every page is about flawed organizations."

And Jamie Gorelick, one of the 9/11 commissioners, says she has spent a "tremendous" amount of time talking to business groups and senior management teams since the book's release. Their intense response to the commission's 567-page volume, already in its sixth printing, has startled her. "There are bunches of people I've come across who have read the whole thing cover to cover and carry it around with them," she says. "For some people, it's the Little Red Book. It's weird. I expected people to read it. I didn't expect people to inhale it."

Really, the fervor isn't so surprising. We live and work in a world where organizational failure is endemic -- but where frank, comprehensive dissections of those failures are still woefully infrequent; where success is too easily celebrated and failures are too quickly forgotten; where short-term earnings and publicity concerns block us from confronting -- much less, learning from -- our stumbles and our blunders.

Now we have an opportunity to buck the tide -- in the form of three brutally honest anatomies of catastrophe, none of them directly from the business world, published in the last year and a half. The 9/11 Commission's gripping book, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's thorough report of the space-shuttle tragedy, and the New York Times' reflective account of the scandal involving the fabrications by reporter Jayson Blair are windows on our own organizations' vulnerabilities. With the glaring clarity of hindsight, all of these tragedies are striking reminders that while individuals can be quite adept at picking up on hints of failure in the making, organizations typically fail to process and act on their warnings.

The FBI field agent warning about terrorists in flight schools; the engineers requesting better photos of the space shuttle's wing after it was struck by debris; the department editor who wrote a memo warning that Blair shouldn't be writing for the paper -- all these individuals were sending signals of impending disaster. "The biggest screaming headline is that all the knowledge needed was already inside," says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of executive programs at the Yale School of Management. Or as George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, told the 9/11 Commission, "The system was blinking red."

Reacting to those weak signals -- to the information trapped within the system -- may or may not have prevented these catastrophes. Indeed, we cannot begin to sift through every cause that led to what are unthinkable disasters. But each report stresses one of three factors -- imagination, culture, or communication -- as the greatest culprit in ignoring, trapping, or suppressing crucial warning signs. These were the factors that made the blinking red signals so hard to see.

Imagination

Institutionalizing Disruptive Intelligence

On September 4, 2001, just before a meeting of cabinet-level officials called the Principals Committee -- the first such gathering under the Bush administration to address al Qaeda -- Richard Clarke sent a fervent personal letter to Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser. The real question, the former counterterrorist coordinator insisted, was "Are we serious about dealing with the al Qida [sic] threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal?" It seems preposterous in hindsight, but it's a breathtaking illustration of how, even seven days before September 11, government leaders still were underestimating the severity of the threat Al Qaeda posed.

The 9/11 Commission calls this lack of imagination "the most important failure" of leaders in the September 11 tragedy. A sort of "cultural asymmetry" had taken hold, blinding leaders to the gravity of the danger. "To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away," the commission members wrote. "To members of Al Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were."