Tag Archives: emergency preparedness

Humanitarian aid is better when decentralized

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Humanitarian operations rely heavily on logistics in uncertain, risky, and urgent contexts, making them a very different field of application for supply chain management principles than that of traditional businesses. Decentralization, pre-positioning and pooling of relief items are key success factors for dramatic improvements in humanitarian operations  performance in disaster response and recovery. So say Aline Gatignon, Luk N van Wassenhove and Aurelie Charles in their newest article, The Yogyakarta earthquake: Humanitarian relief through IFRC’s decentralized supply chain. I believe they are right.

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Resilience Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake

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Revised on: 2011-03-22

The recent earthquake in Haiti is a poignant reminder of how vulnerable a country is when it is facing disaster on a grand scale. To me, it is a reminder that that while natural disasters are not man-made, the aftermaths and consequences of the disasters often are. Disasters like this call for resilience in all parts of the community, including the infrastructure, the supply chains and society as a whole. Some of the older posts on this blog , and which do not see daylight too often may shed some light on this.

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Happy Holidelays!

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

The idea for this post came from a question on Linkedin: Holidays = Holi.delays? One thing is the usual Christmas/New Year slowdown. Add to that Global Warming suddenly giving the Copenhagen Agreement the cold shoulder, almost literally, causing  severe weather all over Europe, the UK, and the United States, leaving travellers stranded on the Eurostar trains under the English Channel, prompting a major rethink of Eurostar’s customer service. People were stuck at airports like Frankfurt, Germany or Luton, UK. It’s the same scene everywhere, chaos, chaos and chaos and lots of people desperate to get home for the holidays. But what about their Christmas presents?

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Book Review: HBR on Crisis Management

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them? Published in 1999, the Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management is my third post on the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, not that I intend to review all 73 of them. But this book reflects much of what is on my mind these days. I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for some time now, and I was planning on a review later this month, but the news on SAAB’s demise compelled me to move up my review in my posting schedule. The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go out of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this.

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