Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Day, colleagues and I in a fledgling homeland security practice had to choose whether to take our one variable holiday on this Monday in January or, instead, to opt for taking off Veteran’s Day later in 2002. All of us were veterans, yet most of us chose this day. Why?
To begin with, we were all new to the organization and to each other, and all recent transplants from other employers, some having recently left the military or military contractors. We left to join what was then mainly a State Department contractor who had decided to invest in a practice area aimed at supporting homeland security efforts of state and local government. None of us knew with any certainty how this would pan out or what we would be doing as the year and our practice developed in earnest. So, what guided our decision?
The current state of affairs and the projected operating tempo later in the year were our only guides. The current state of affairs was more than a little chaotic, with mad scrambles to find office space and work stations for the new hires coming on board. Location no doubt played a part. Our office was in the Metropolitan Washington D.C. Area, and our first customer was the government of the District of Columbia, albeit through two intermediaries, a world-renown engineering firm and a virtual nonentity known only to the District as a favored contractor. What were we doing? Vulnerability assessments for complexes of local government offices and activities, most of which had been chastened by the events of 9/11/01 and, in the aftermath, had managed to capture $900,000 of federal funding for shoring up their vulnerabilities, with promises of even more subsidies to follow. Vulnerability assessments were things my firm understood well from working overseas for the U.S. Department of State. Our engineering prime contractor, who was then discussing a strategic partnership with us, felt particularly well suited to taking our products and transmuting them into task lists for work that they could then project manage based on the government customer’s desires and budget. Meanwhile, our local DC prime contractor offered insider knowledge of the byzantine contracting practices of the local government and facilitation skills to handle the kind of client-facing, invoice-processing duties that would free the rest of us to concentrate exclusively on productive work. So much for the theory, in any case.
By the time this holiday rolled around, however, the business relationships were still in their larval stage, some of our people had yet to get hired, and the ultimate customer had not yet fully prioritized the work. Meanwhile, the vice president heading our group, an inveterate marketeer with a flair for grand visions, confided to us that we were only scratching the surface. By the end of the year, he was certain that we would be growing exponentially, that our funded backlog of work would keep us triple-booked, and that the national and business importance of our growing commitments would be so great that we would not want to pause for time off by the time November came along. Take the holiday now, before this juggernaut gets into full swing, was the ultimate message. And so we did.
Was it a wise choice? Not on business grounds. Few grand predictions come to fruition as initially conceived, and this case was no exception. We did some good work, some productive work, and some profitable work. But the business arrangements that were hastily formed had an Alka-Seltzer constitution and life span. They were built to fall apart. Within two years, those of us on the front lines of performing vulnerability assessments had all moved on to find other employers and productive assignments, many of us disappointed with not so much our work as with the lost opportunities we saw as public and private entities started finding in homeland security a Procrustean bed in which to fit any pet project in need of liberal funding.
The only connection to MLK surfaced in retrospect. Martin Luther King had a dream of social justice. We, too, had a dream. Ours was of shoring up critical vulnerabilities of our country and advancing the cause of anti-terrorism when most of us were too long in the tooth to return to uniform to engage in counterterrorism, the direct fight against al Qaeda and its like-minded counterparts. Both dreams guided action. Martin Luther King’s, though, proved much more transformational than our little answer to what we considered a clarion call to action for security practitioners. In a small way for us, perhaps, there remained a little nobility in the struggle.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.