The biggest concern I have right now is I am not picking up any prof statements, or proof visuals, that the Federal Government has developed a big time, fully coordinated, task force to address everything that needs to be done.
From everything I read and hear, progress has been made on getting the vast majority of people to adopt physical separation, to wash their hands when coming into contact with foreign places, to self-quarantine if you feel symptoms or if a family members gets tested positive, etc. Apparently, that is really all you can do, and even that depends on the belief that you need to sort of physically encounter the virus from substances flowing from an infected human. If we eventually learn that it can also float around in the air for hours and days – well, that’s another game. WE are told that scoence really doesn’t have a handle on this particular strain so we should expect to get surprises, perhaps some positive, other negative.
So, given that, it seems that the next major mission – other than repeating the principles of mission one summarized above – is to get the materials, supplies, and equipment to hospitals so they can ramp up to handle the work load that is about to hit them.
So, what would any serious manager/leader do:
- Get the smartest people around you who know what is coming and what generally will be required. This they may have done if Dr. Fauci is representative of the advice they are getting from the CDC, etc. crowd.)
- Get the major governors of the most infected states to appoint a single coordinator who will talk with the Federal Government. *Don’t just get them on the phone and bull shit. Define how you are going to operate. Who’s on point? The next call needs to be with the people who actually do things.)
- Identify the component parts you’ll need. From the discussions, it seems they need things like:
- Masks
- Gowns
- Beds
- Bedding
- Whatever is always present in an ICU (like electrical power)
- Serious specialized equipment: ventilators, etc. stuff that needs to be built.
- Etc.
- In short, they need a once in a hundred years expansion of capacity to do things that they know fully well how to do.
- Select a federal project manager over each of these areas. (Have the States select a state level project manager to do issue identification on behalf of the states and to manage coordination with the Federal lead.)
- Have project leaders identify the top 3-5 companies in the US who manufacture each of these items.
- Take your first shot at what you will need so you can start capacity planning.
- Get the CEOs of these companies on a joint telephone call ten minutes later. Discuss capacity/volume.
- Tell them you want 2X, 3X, or whatever x capacity as soon as possible, meaning 1/3 how long they think it will take. Give them numbers. In effect, give them the first order of product.
- Then, ask them what they need to do to expand capacity. Simply as an example:
- Do you want manufacturing capability from GM? Can you give them a blue print. Can you manage it? (GM doesn’t have the intellectual capacity/content knowledge to direct this ramp up. But they might have space, smart production people, etc. who could be cross trained if they k knew what was required.)
- Staff expanison
- Resources and materials
- Protections.
- Threaten them if they don’t move on this that the President will invoke the right to take over and direct their company. (This is theory. The Trump Administration doesn’t seem to have anyone who actually knows how to run anything. So these powers are meaningless if you don’t know how to use them.)
- Put price controls on everything. That is, they are now a government contractor. In the end, their costs will be audited by experts, and they will be allowed, for example, a 10% profit on all direct and honestly allocated costs. Whatever the States buy, the cost/price relationship will be controlled by the Federal government.
- Appeal to the patriotism of these company leaders.
- Put a senior lawyer against all of this to protect the companies from legal exposure. (Yes, you need as many lawyers as you have project teams.)
- Set up a war room in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, and get all of this up on a wall, with target time estimates, discrete tasks, etc. Get the smartest procurement person from the Defense Department to run the war room. Give the person running the war room real authority over the individual project leaders.
- Pick your strongest guy/woman to manage the War Room, to ride herd on the subject matter project leaders.
Now, I realize the above is a lot of words. But, I don’t get any sense that the White House is doing anything like this – I see no proof statements/visuals, etc. Of course, I hear from the usual suspects that they are doing nothing. But, I don’t make decisions based on what people shout out on Morning Joe, or CNN, or Fox. In fact, I want to believe that they are doing all of this, and doing it with experienced people – people who have actually run big, complicated projects. I just want real proof that they are doing these things. Real names. I want to see the war room.
IF WE KNEW that they were doing these things, then we could go back to CDC and all of its component parts, related parts, integrated parts to build the data sets that will be needed in order to direct all of these resources to the right place. We don’t just need capacity, we need capacity planning that fits with the unique requirements of areas, down to specific hospitals. One size does not fit all.
And if we were managing all of this with the skill it takes to manufacture a 787 airplane, or run the operations department of J P Morgan, or build a new phone or develop new software at Apple and Microsoft, or simply do what Amazon does, which must have some of the best project management going on anywhere; then we can put our creative energies against really coordinating the bio-tech industry, like Patton’s fifth Army during the Battle of the Bulge, against anything that can abate illness from this disease, maybe even constrain its expansion in the body, maybe even make it stop, or eventually even prevent its’ infection. 60 Minutes ran a story last night on what some bio-tech companies are doing. If I had a competently led Federal Government I would want them pulling all of these companies together – as the CEOs claimed last night they were doing – so that we develop critical mass in this battle.
Then I would quickly iterate around everything written here, change what is wrong, add what was missed, and tighten it all together.
