Ok, I'll explain what I got from the article
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Economic incentives. Heavily subsidized companies or government agencies get paid no matter what happens. A private company like Waffle House has to be open and serve its customers to get paid.
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Dealing with Black Swans: In his book "
The Black Swan",
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about rare events that have a high impact on people's lives.
People often respond to these kinds of events by constructing massive structures they believe will be robust enough to withstand future "Black Swan events". This is however usually not very effective and comes at a great cost.
If you look at military history for example, you'll see that armies are often prepared to fight
the previous war. At the eve of World War II, the French and British armies were prepared for a First World War type of trench warfare. The French had their massive concrete fortresses (that the Germans just ignored), the British had their heavily armored Mathilda tanks (that could be outrun by a German soldier on a bicycle).
While a hurricane in a country that is regularly struck by hurricanes is not a Black swan event
per se, this Waffle House scenario does illustrate the different ways one can respond to "high impact events".
What we have here is essentially a centrally structured organization (focus on top-down) vs an organization that is structured to support local initiatives (focus on bottom-up).
Bloomberg applied the classic let's-hide-inside-the-castle-at-the-first-sign-of-danger approach while Waffle House's risk management plans focus on flexibility. Each one of the Waffle House stores is (or was) in a different situation. Waffle House focuses on maximizing the output (services) of each Waffle House store based on each store's potential and situation (and had a flexible network in place to do so), Bloomberg focused on reducing exposure everywhere at the cost of providing services.
On the comments in this thread:
- I have no idea what party Bloomberg belongs to. OP was not political or whatever.
- Waffle House managers are just as responsible for the lives of their employees while they're at work as the mayor of New York is for its citizens. One could even argue that Waffle House's image would suffer even more than the mayor's if anything happened to a Waffle House employee while serving waffles.
Besides... A life lost is always a tragedy.
- The size of the organization doesn't matter. Whether it's one of the biggest cities in the world or a chain of waffle stores. If anything, that large city probably has a lot more resources than a chain of waffle stores.