This story is about a guy called Ben Sliney and his first day at work. Ben had applied for the job of the Federal Aviation Chief and in an interview, he had asked several times whether he would have complete authority to do his job independently. He was assured he would. All this was tested on his first day at work – it was 9/11. He walks into office and very soon finds out that there are several planes up in the air which were in control of terrorists but there was no knowing out of the five thousand planes in the airspace that day which ones were under the control of terrorists. At that point he decided to take a decision which was unprecedented; he decided to ground all 5000 airplanes. Now there was no rulebook for this, there was no procedure and so they sort of made it up as they went along. They didn’t even have space in the regular air fields for all those planes so people in different ATC’s were calling up friends they knew in smaller air fields and within four hours they managed to ground all 5,000 planes, something that was never ever achieved or even known how to do. A month later when the crisis was over the FAA decided to create a body that would look into what would be the standard operating practices, the best practices if such a situation were to happen again. Very quickly the team figured out that you couldn’t put a rulebook for this. This was taken care of only because of the relationship and networking that people had across the aviation industry, one ATC guy with another. Therefore, instead of creating a rule book what they did was invest in various ways and means in which these people could meet such that each other could build relationships and have the connect and the network What a beautiful story! Business Points ( Tags ) #relationships #networking #rules #Rulebooksarenoteverything #decisionmaking #presenceofmind
