Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Islander,
My sarcasm reader is alive & kicking.
Maybe I've spent too much time delving the depths of Your Views, where such sentiments about Field Marshal Brownlee would be uttered with absolute sincerity. It definitely throws one's grasp of satirical utterance completely out of whack.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Islander,
“Gerry knows about building construction – he was a high school woodwork teacher before entering politics.”
Kinda gives a hint about the letter-writer’s seriousness eh?
“John Key knows about running an economy. He made millions as a currency trader at one of the largest banks in the world. [ETA:And he knows about making hard decisions, because he had to lay off hundreds of people.]” (paraphrased).
So, no, it really doesn’t.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
Classic letter to the editor from the Press today
I suspect my sarc-o-meter is broken. I cannot tell if the author is serious.
Possibly the worse prospect is that I can see a non-parallel reality where he is serious, and I don't think I'm being silly for thinking it :s -
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
He said there aren’t enough port-a-loos or chemical toilets for the scale of the event but that is quickly being rectified and the need for toilets is being re-assessed all the time.
A shortage of port-a-loos and chemical toilets was the top concern expressed by residents at community meetings in the eastern suburbs yesterday.
One of the lessons from this event will be around logistics of temporary services replacement, clearly. Assuming that "The squeaky wheel" was the allocation modality used for sending out the limited stocks of port-a-loos, it's obviously a system that fails. Unfortunately these lessons are generally learned the hard way, since planning exercises never quite manage to get inside the heads of people who've really been affected by a real disaster.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
So, he might as well be at John Key’s place in Hawaii then?. Gimme a break, what about the ” symbolic moral support to the citizens and the rescue/recovery effort.” coming from a man who could actually organise a response?
Who would recognise him if he was to walk up and knock on the door? Key is a nationally-recognisable figure with a nationally-recognisable role. You're busy chastising Hamilton for what he hasn't done when you obviously don't actually know what he's meant to do, and that you even know his name puts you one up on a lot of people.
And yes, he could've been in Hawaii and it still wouldn't have made a difference to his ability to communicate.You were the one who said he had to be in Christchurch. I said he had to be in Wellington to counter your assertion. Ultimately it doesn't matter where he is from a communications perspective, but the national EOC is not in Christchurch. The MCDEM bureaucracy is not in Christchurch. The political leadership to whom he answers are not, by and large, in Christchurch.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
What was in place for Hamilton to trust and verifiy their performance?
Why Hamilton? Why not a subordinate? That's getting into detail that would be outside his ordinary purview until it became a significant problem.
I think we can all agree that the way the needs of residents has been handled is a cluster, but blaming that on Hamilton not having been trotting all over Christchurch loses sight of his role.
In the grand scheme of things, this is like laying directly at Paul Reynolds' feet the lax security around the Telecom customer database. It's a big problem, but not directly his concern. Do you blame him for that? No, didn't think so. -
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
you can’t just rely on what senior managers are telliing you
And if you cannot possibly verify everything they tell you for yourself, at some point you have to trust them and their judgement. That's why they're senior managers. Hamilton cannot feasibly visit even a fraction of the affected area for enough time to get a good feel for what's going on, so he has no choice but to put his faith in his senior managers' judgement.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
communications are disrupted he should be close to the emergency, within radio range
Satellite phones and HF radio cover pretty much the entire globe, entirely independently of land-based infrastructure. He can be wherever he happens to be and still be in contact. He does not need to be in Christchurch, or even in New Zealand. One of my volunteer roles is establishing international communications links in an emergency, so don't try and tell me he has to be in Christchurch to know what's going on.
His job is in Wellington, where he's got ready access to all the best advisers MCDEM has at its fingertips. His immediate subordinates may well benefit from being in Christchurch, certainly for the Intelligence and Logistics functions, but there is no need for the guy at the top to be anywhere other than the national Emergency Operations Centre.
We have seen plenty of people turn up in Christchurch including John Key. Are you suggesting we didn’t need the Prime Minister there?
The PM's not there as a manager, he's there as a politician. He's there to lend symbolic moral support to the citizens and the rescue/recovery effort. If he was there to gather intel, he did a pretty shit job if he managed not to visit the worst-hit suburbs until after there'd been an uproar about how neglected they were.
And the moral support aside, no, I don't think we do need him there, for the same reason I don't see any real need for John Hamilton to show his face in Christchurch. -
Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to Sam F,
Interesting piece on the Whitcoulls crisis in the Business Herald – unfortunately haven’t been able to locate it online.
Instead, they claim, the company's current predicament is an all-too-familiar tale of mismanagement: of shiny new executives rubbishing the opinions of experienced staff; of a bizarre attitude to discounting which saw popular books slashed in price and less popular ones quietly hiked; of cash being bled from the business in the form of management fees and interest payments on debt; of relentless cost-cutting that left many of its staff and suppliers utterly demoralised; and of short-term business decisions which proved a huge millstone around the owners' necks.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
National Civil Defence controller had not even seen the Eastern Suburbs almost two weeks after the event.
And why, pray tell, should he have? His job is in Wellington, controlling the response. If he cannot trust the decisions of those on the ground that's a problem, but it doesn't mean he should be in there with his sleeves rolled up.
Much as I consider Key to be a complete lightweight, I don't expect him to be in up to his elbows on every detail. He's the top manager, which if he's any good at it means he trusts that others will do their jobs so that he can focus on the strategic view. It's the same for the National CD Controller.Going back to CIMS, again, since it's the model in play here, it's fairly unusual for the Incident Controller to have seen first-hand what's going on with any given operational aspect of the incident. They're very unlikely to have been to the end of the hose that's in the deepest part of the fire, or to the body of the aircraft that's crashed, or to the fence of the property containing the armed nutter. That's not their job, or their place. Their place is the Incident Control Point, and their job is to take the detailed reports from others and create a strategic plan that is then parcelled out to subordinates to implement.
I want senior emergency managers managing, not getting bogged down in small-picture detail. That's not what they're paid for.