My war room experience was with the telephone company. The principle of a war room is to bring all the decisionmakers together in once place to bypass bureaucracy and act quickly. This concept makes sense for utility companies that must keep service going in emergencies such as storms and disasters.
Full disclosure: During my years in the Navy and periodic assignments in the Pentagon, I never saw an actual war room. I’m sure war rooms exist in the bowels of that five-sided behemoth, but as a public affairs officer I didn’t have access to them. And you probably can’t fight in there, as they did in Dr. Strangelove.
Illinois Bell had a well-organized war room. A conference room with extra telephone and data circuits was quickly converted to an emergency operations center by pushing the tables together and plugging in the phones. Each department sent a representative with authority to act under the coordination of an emergency director, and the center was staffed 24 hours a day when necessary.
Most of the folks assigned to emergency operations were seasoned managers from the installation, repair and engineering organizations. They were accustomed to teamwork because the center was activated a couple of times a year for weather events and the occasional strike. Moving repair crews from one district to another, or dispatching a truckload of supplies, was handled across the table instead of through departmental channels.
Working an emergency was an adventure, a welcome change from the daily routine with sleeves rolled up and neckties loosened. The hours were long but there was a lot of friendly banter, plenty of coffee and food. Especially food.
Whenever the emergency operating center was activated, the first order of business after the phones were connected was to bring in food. On one occasion the center was activated on a Sunday and the only snack available on short notice was an assortment of cookies from an upscale bakery: fancy, dainty cookies suitable for a ladies’ tea party. The guy responsible for the food got a lot of kidding about the effete cookies. The next time the center was activated he was ready with husky sandwiches and fist-sized cookies.
I participated in another kind of war room when Unilever merged pieces of three companies into a foodservice business unit. The transition team, with representatives of all three companies and consultants, spent several months around a series of tables in a vacant warehouse with phone wires and computer cables dangling from the ceiling. I shared a table with a woman from Puerto Rico who cursed at her computer in Spanish and a guy from Canada who chatted on the phone in French with the Montreal office.
When Ameritech sponsored the annual Senior Open golf tournament, company managers set up a war room at the country club to coordinate every aspect of the tournament, from arranging transportation and lodging for the golf pros to organizing events for customers. The operation was so efficient that some of us asked, only partly in jest, if we could run the entire company this way.