Wanted: Gene Krantz

There’s this one moment in the movie Apollo 13 when mission control manager Gene (failure-is-not-an-option) Krantz, frustrated by the steady stream of bad news, asks his colleagues to identify what is working on the crippled spaceship. From that starting point, from that solutions oriented point of view the process of rescue begins for the mission and crew. Which brings us to the current economic malaise.

In the current climate of all misery and all doom, in a world where nothing seems to work and crooks and incompetents emerge daily, perhaps someone should take the lead and begin to ask the same type of questions and, with the same determination that Mr. Krantz had, apply it to the US and global economy and thereby begin the transformation process from what is wrong to what is right, what is working, and with something that resembles a failure-is-not-an-option attitude.

Frankly, I am sick of listening to the Dr. Doom’s of the world prescribe their vision that the only medicine the world economy needs is an even more bitter elixir. What happened to the can-do spirit of America? What happened to focusing on what is working? Where is that solutions oriented process that includes some out of the box thinking? Too much myopic, woe is us, bureaucratic thinking and not enough innovation, what’s working, and let’s fix and not fiddle around the edges.

This is not to say that problems should be ignored. Nor am I suggesting that the problems are easy to solve. But, give me a break, for as complex as CDS and CDOs might be, they can’t be more complex than the human genome. And they certainly cannot be more pressure cooked than saving three lives in a crippled spaceship.

Where’s Gene Krantz when you need him?