The first came when President Obama visited the Center for Disease Control for a briefing on the Ebola crisis. It was found that a contracted security guard of the premises that shared an elevator with the President was not only a convicted criminal, but was also carrying a gun. The second, just three days later, was when an army veteran armed with a knife jumped the White House fence and entered an open door to the White House.
I think the key part of these stories is that everyone is looking at the wrong thing. They are concentrating on the service’s failings, and not looking at the specific cases. It is clearly not good that the Secret Service was not performing their own set protocols. How can an armed ex-convict be in touching distance of the president? How unfortunate that a soldier who had fought for his country tried to get into the White House. It seems as if the Secret Service is spreading themselves too thin. In trying to stop every single supposed threat, they are missing the more important, less obvious ones.
Obviously the security of the most powerful man in the world is a very important subject and I am not qualified to be making decisions for the secret service. We love to use these blogs as a learning tool where we take other life and business situations and draw parallels in to the insurance brokerage industry. What can we learn from the secret service that would help us run our agencies better?
It is most likely that the secret service relied on very well established procedures that have worked for many years. When we do things the same way for so long, it is very easy to become complacent. I hope the secret service would be better than that because one moment of complacency could have dire consequences. I’m sure there are many things within each of our companies that have been working well for years. Just because they are working, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t reassess how things are done.
Don’t be afraid to change. Don’t be afraid of change. In the many reviews we conduct of agencies, the greatest weakness we encounter in those agencies is complacency. We find most agencies focus almost exclusively on servicing their customers and attracting new ones. We don’t challenge those priorities. We just want you to continuously challenge yourself about how you attract and retain those relationships.
