On September 12, 2005, ASU's very own Robert E. Mittelstaedt Jr., Dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business, was on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor discussing the chain of mistakes that caused massive flooding and disaster in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina hit.
His book, "Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal", which came out early this year, deals with "the parallel between the mistake chain you see in physical accidents and how to apply that to business," therefore making him a perfect candidate to speak about the events that led to tragedy in the New Orleans area.
Mittelstaedt's book discusses the fact that physical accidents, such as an airline accident, are not often the result of only one mistake. "It's usually two, three, four, five mistakes that it takes to cause an accident," commented Mittelstaedt. This is what happened in Louisiana.
In the interview, Dean Mittelstaedt discussed two main problems that occurred in New Orleans: the lack of levees to control flooding and the fact that a large number of people, mainly the poor and elderly, were not evacuated in time. Mittelstaedt, a New Orleans native, commented that everyone was focused on the possibility of the Mississippi River flooding, not Lake Pontchartrain, which turned out to be a huge mistake. According to the Dean, the evacuation problem was a failure of leadership and a lack of proper action.
When he isn't being interviewed on national television, the Dean is occupied with making improvements and building the reputation of the School of Business. "I want us to become known as a top of mind school of business, which means that when you ask people to name good business schools, they will name a dozen or so and we'll get named in that," said Mittelstaedt.
"What I have done most of my first year here has been to try to just continue to raise the standards for what it means to be a great business school," commented Dean Mittelstaedt. "What we are interested in doing is finding ways to help students to understand that business principles can be applied in a wide variety of industries and situations," Dean Mittelstaedt said.
Some improvements the Dean has been working on include the restructuring of graduate programs "to make our different MBA platforms more similar in terms of requirements."
The undergraduate program is also receiving some modifications. "We are changing some things in the undergraduate program to admit more students directly as freshmen into the professional program," said Mittelstaedt. The School of Business also hired 12 new faculty members at the end of last year, has started to grow the Executive Education Program, and launched Knowledge @ W.P. Carey.
"The world is global as it has never been before," said Dean Mittelstaedt. "I want us well-known and well-recognized nationally and internationally. We are doing lots of things that will help us move in that direction."
Jessica Clemmons is a freshman journalist major. Reach her at jessica.clemmons@asu.edu.
