September 11, 2000 New Thinking:
Titanic, Concorde, Kursk, Firestone
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September 11, 2000
Titanic, Concorde, Kursk, Firestone
By Gerry McGovern
I read an interesting article in The Irish Times recently. It compared the length of time it took the news about the sinking of the Titanic to spread with the time it took the news for the crash of the Concorde. With the Titanic it took several days. With the Concorde it took twenty minutes, thanks to all our modern media tools, including, of course, the Internet.
What wonderful progress we have made, I thought. Then the Kursk tragedy occurred. People got the wrong information, slowly. In fact, it was quite possible that people got the correct information on the sinking of the Titanic faster than that of the Kursk. Why?
Well, we can say that it was a military operation, and military information never likes parading itself. However, if the same happened a US submarine today I believe the information would come out quickly regardless of what the military wished. The difference really lies in the fact that America is an information economy and Russia is not.
There are many reasons why Russia is in the dumps. One reason that will make sure that it remains behind is the inability or unwillingness of the Russian system to create accurate information and to distribute it quickly to those who need to know. This is quite simply a fundamental building block of an information economy. If it takes days or weeks to move information, then you might as well be back at the beginning of the last century.
America is by no means perfect, as witnessed by the Firestone tire recall fiasco. Various pieces of information about defects in the tires were available for years to Firestone, Ford, and the American road safety authority. But it took a TV station to “connect the dots” as one commentator put it. Another commentator observed that a similar problem was caught much more quickly in the late Seventies because the road safety authority had more staff on the ground. (So maybe “big government” has some uses after all?)
Advanced industrial economies focused on time-to-market. Product life cycles got shorter and shorter, as the need to get the latest gizmo on the shelves got stronger and stronger. Information economies bring it to a next stage. Now it’s also “time-to-publish”, with the focus being on getting the right information to the right people as quickly as possible.
All this speed can create a big squeeze. Faster, cheaper, exerts a lot of pressure. Sure, I want cheaper tires but not at the price of quality and safety. And if there is a fault I want to be informed as quickly as possible.
Economies, organizations, individuals; we’ll all be judged by our ability to create quality information and publish it quickly. The Russian public is disgusted with the Russian government, not so much because the Kursk sank, but because the truth sank with it. The American public feels let down because information that could have saved lives was either ignored or not acted on quickly enough.
This is the age of the informed citizen, the informed consumer. Those who do not inform will pay a harsh price.
Gerry McGovern
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