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Interview with Tom Ridge

Former DHS leader Tom Ridge talks about the practicals of communication and collaboration

By Katherine Walsh

November 20, 2007 — CSO —

Ask Tom Ridge, the two-term governor of Pennsylvania and first U.S. secretary of homeland security, about preparing for disaster and his answer won’t surprise you: Collaboration is paramount, whether it be between public and private sectors, CEO and CSO or IT and security.

Ridge recently launched Ridge Global, an advisory firm based in Washington, D.C., with practice areas such as technology innovation and integration, global trade security, risk assessment and contingency planning, and crisis management and communications. Ridge spoke to CSO Associate Staff Writer Katherine Walsh about his challenges at the Department of Homeland Security, the importance of disaster preparedness and how to battle complacency.

CSO: One frustration with security has to do with complacency. Why do you think that is, and how does our current level of preparedness as a nation compare to pre-9/11?

Tom Ridge: Complacency is what keeps me awake at night. It’s predictable in human terms, but unacceptable as well. It’s predictable in the sense that it’s been six years. And in spite of global communication, when we see risk and tragedy and disasters and terrorist attacks, we just don’t seem to have that same sense of urgency that we did in the first couple years after 9/11. The professionals have it: the police, firemen, emergency service personnel and the military. But in the corporate world—and even to a certain extent, the political world—there isn’t quite that same sense of urgency.

One of your themes is the importance of collaboration. Why is that so necessary to disaster preparedness at an organization?

To give an example from the public sector, homeland security is much bigger and more important than one cabinet agency, although the agency does have to be the catalyst for change, the catalyst for communication and the catalyst for collaboration. But at the end of the day, the country cannot maximize its ability to protect itself or maximize its ability to become as secure as possible without involving all levels of government, as well as the private sector. Homeland security goes far beyond distributing billions of dollars to state and local governments to build infrastructure. It’s actually building a network of, and building and sustaining relationships with, the private sector. Frankly if [the federal government] had built a better mechanism for disaster recovery and allowed the private sector to assist, Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have been such a mess. But right now it’s very difficult for the private sector to contribute to and collaborate with the government. As such, we are missing enormous opportunities to make ourselves safer. So that’s why at the end of the day collaboration is critically important. The federal government, as big as it is, needs to work with the private sector. We can’t secure the country from inside Washington, D.C.