Leadership Principle No. 2–Followup.

(Note to pastors: Many years ago, a church member paid the fees for me to take a one-day Dale Carnegie Management Course. The one great lesson I’ve carried with me these 40 years is that “if you delegate a task, you may assume it will not get done unless you follow up on it.” It’s an invaluable lesson. I ran across the point being made this week in a book on the Battle of New Orleans, and feel it’s worth passing on.

Bear in mind that the no. 1 principle of management (or leadership) is delegating–matching people up with the right jobs–and the no. 2 principle is following up on that assignment.

Toward the end of this, I’ll drop in my own horror story on the matter of following up. Just because I learned it in a class in the late 1960s does not mean I would get smart and actually practice it. How does that line go–too late smart, too soon dead.

Let’s call this: “What Andrew Jackson wished he had done” or “How Jackson Came Close to Losing the Battle of New Orleans.”)

The best lessons we ever learn are the ones we got wrong and suffered from and thus determine not ever to let happen again. Which is to say, experience is the best teacher.

After General Andrew Jackson entered New Orleans late in 1814 and took charge of its defense, he toured the perimeters of the area, found the city to be exposed on all sides, and assigned officers to various tasks.

In his book on the Battle of New Orleans, “Patriotic Fire,” Winston Groom writes: “…there were any number of bayous, streams, and canals that, left unguarded and unobstructed, could have allowed the British through. Jackson ordered all of these blocked by felled trees, with guards from the state militia posted to watch them.” Then, Groom ominously adds, “Lack of diligent enforcement of this order proved to be his greatest mistake.”

Here’s what happened.

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Standards for Leaders and Plans for Leaving

Everyone down here is depressed over having a congressman under indictment for fraud and racketeering. We’re still trying to keep Washington’s focus on helping us rebuild this city, and now our chief advocate representing Orleans and parts of Jefferson Parish will be using all his resources to stay out of jail.

William Jefferson has been charged by the FBI with a long list of corrupt activities, all of which he is denying. Half our people are calling for him to resign from Congress and the other half are trying to put the best face on this, saying things like: “You’re innocent until proven guilty.” Which is not true, of course.

In a court of law and only there, you are considered innocent until you are proven guilty. But it’s inane to say a person is innocent until he’s proven guilty.

Up in Mississippi, they’ve arrested some old KKK member for a 1964 murder of a couple of Black teenagers and he will be going to trial soon. Now, it’s been 43 years and he hasn’t been proven guilty. Is there anyone around who would say the guy is innocent because of that? No, the point is that the courts must treat him as innocent and the burden of proof is on the state. But whether they prove it or not has nothing to do with whether he’s innocent. If he did the crime, and even if he’s the only one who knows it other than God, he’s still plenty guilty.

Big, big difference. (You’ve just stumbled onto a pet peeve of mine. Sorry.)

The other pet peeve is congresspeople (is that a word?) and other leaders who try to subdivide their lives into categories–one part for my official functions, another part for my private business affairs, and so on. And so we have Mr. Jefferson on the front of Saturday’s Times-Picayune saying, “Did I sell my office or trade official acts for money? Absolutely not.”

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Ready for the Next Hurricane?

Even people who live in this city like to turn to one another and pose what, before inflation, was called ‘the 64 dollar question:’ Do you think New Orleans is better prepared for a hurricane than we were 2 years ago?

I answer an emphatic ‘yes.’ For a lot of reasons. Here are some.

1. The levees are stronger in many places and no worse anywhere than before Katrina.

2. At the entrance to a number of crucial waterways, the Corps of Engineers has installed massive and expensive floodgates to regulate the amount of water inside the city. Every workday, I drive over the “Hammond Highway” bridge in Bucktown, which spans the 17th Street Canal where the levee broke after Katrina and devastated the neighborhood around our Pontchartrain Baptist Church, and gaze upon what perhaps 50 million dollars have bought in the way of intricate, huge, impressive floodgates. We had nothing there before.

3. We have fewer vulnerable properties now than pre-Katrina for the simple reason that the storm cleaned out thousands of flimsy buildings. Okay, we still have lots of FEMA house trailers throughout Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines parishes and I do not want to even imagine what a strong storm would do with those lightweight missiles. Turn them into kites?

4. Everyone knows a hurricane can actually hit the city now–previously, we had become blase’ about that ever actually happening–and everyone has a plan of some kind. When someone asked me my hurricane plan this week, I said, “Leave.”

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Lots to Miss in New Orleans

One of our newspaper columnists was absent for a number of weeks. I didn’t know what had happened. One day this week the column reappeared and he admitted he’d taken his family away on an extended vacation. We wanted to go someplace normal, he said, somewhere you could go a whole day through and not once hear the word “Katrina.”

We all know the feeling. Consider the following and see if we make our point.

The front page of Friday’s Times-Picayune was made up of these lengthy articles:

1) “Road Home gap hits $5 billion.” This federal program of providing up to $150,000 to each homeowner whose residence suffered extensive damage from Katrina or her floodwaters has been known to be seriously underfunded, but the amount keeps escalating. Now they’re saying we will need an additional $5 billion, a staggering amount. And while the governor and state leaders have been crying for Washington to make up the difference, leaders in our nation’s capital have pointed the finger southward, suggesting that since Louisiana is projecting a budget surplus, we ought to come up with much of the money ourselves. The front page article suggests state legislators working on the 2008 budget are feeling the pressure to do just that.

2) “State rejects 5-year storm model.” A California company called Risk Management Solutions, Inc. comes up with projected costs of damages and insurance rates in hurricane-prone states for a five year period. In this case, the rate of increase in the dollar cost of damages and insurance is so alarming that the state of Florida has rejected the RMS projections and Louisiana is following suit. These were guidelines to have been used by the state insurance commissioners’ offices in making projections about rates, etc.

3) “June 1.” Yep, that’s the big bold headline. Underneath are these: “It’s hurricane season: Six months of bracing for the worst while hoping for the best.” “Corps chief promises 100-year protection.” I’ll spare you the details.

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For the Chosen

“We’ve been chosen,” writes Ann Corbin. She and husband Steve are MSC volunteers assigned to the Global Maritime Ministries, working out of Reserve, LA, a few miles upriver from New Orleans. However, often they’re working the ports in this city also.

The Corbins have been selected to be among the recipients of the “Christmas in August” promotion for the year 2008. This is a joint missionary effort of our National Woman’s Missionary Union and the North American Mission Board in which the stories of these missionaries are “told” to church groups all over the country, and those groups are invited to send resources their way. Hence the name “Christmas in August.”

In many publications of the WMU and NAMB, the story of Steve and Ann’s missionary work will be featured and readers will learn what supplies they can use for their ministry. They might, for instance, ask for office supplies, building supplies, or other items which they can use. Or, they might simply request gift cards for Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, etc., which they can use with the seamen and port workers who come to their port ministry centers for hospitality and witness. Some missionaries have gotten so much response to this August emphasis they’ve had to rent storage space to hold it all.

Some 35 to 40 missionaries in all will be featured in the “Christmas in August” promotion. Most churches will choose one or two or three missionaries and focus on their work. There’s no way of knowing what level of response Steve and Ann may expect.

Anyone know of a good, cheap vacation place for Steve and Ann in the Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg area of Tennessee? They’ll be headed to a conference in the Carolinas and want to have a few days vacation in mid-July. Their e-mail is steveandann@portministry.com.

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