I’ve worked in operational environments over the years as a systems administrator.  When I worked at IBM one of my responsibilities was ensuring uptime for the semiconductor design environment in Austin.  One of the most valuable lessons I learned there was about panic.

Downtime in that environment could cost millions (the rough planning figure I used was in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars an hour in lost productivity with the first 15 minutes of the outage losing between 4-24 hours of work.  Lots of money was on the line, and I had plenty of senior management at IBM regularly telling me how criticial it was.  I even got a phone call once from the VP in charge of the Server group to let me know how critical uptime was for a particular chip build.

Needless to say, in that environment it would be easy to panic.  Most times I didn’t because I had a strong team backing me.  The few times I did panic were very instructive.  Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Panic will not make the solution better.  It usually prevents the solution.
2. Panic will not get anything done any sooner.
3. Choices made while panicking will almost universally prove to be the wrong ones.
4. Panic immobilizes.
5. Panic equals FAIL.

Panic is what I see going on with the bailout.  We don’t know what to do, so we gotta do *something*.   And we do need to do something.  But does it need to be so panic driven?  What will change between today and tomorrow that will make such a huge difference?

Bold and decisive action does need to be taken, but it should also be deliberate action, not the panic driven need to do anything to show we are doing something.

Rudyard Kipling (under read in our politically correct society said this:

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same . . . yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

We forget this to our peril.

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