You can support IMTER fall prevention initiatives, such as community-based exercise and education programs and research, by making a donation on the Lessons from Quail Roost Drive campaign page. In addition to your donation, you can also reserve your copy of the upcoming book Lessons from Quail Roost Drive: What Employees Really Need from Leadership in the Aftermath of a Crisis, authored by IMTER founder Mark R Luciano. Your advance purchase of one or more copies of the book will help offset the cost of publishing and distribution of the book. The scheduled release date is August 2022. Also, when the Lessons of Quail Roost Drive book is released, we will offer the book through this website, as well as online sellers such as Amazon, and download applications such as Kindle. Proceeds from the sales revenue of the book will go toward the continued funding of IMTER initiatives. For more information on IMTER, please access this link (link here).

About the book by its author Mark R. Luciano:

The first 15 years of my career I was employed at American Bankers Insurance Group (now part of the Assurant Group) in Miami, FL. I served in various capacities throughout my years there, beginning as the company's first management intern in October 1982, and finishing my 15 year tenure as vice president of the Consumer Finance Market in July 1996. During this time, I had the unique experience of working with and learning from the most brilliant leaders that I have been associated with in my 40-year career. Over many decades going back to the early 1960’s through the end of 1999 when the company was sold to Fortis, it was under the leadership of CEO and Chairman of the Board R. Kirk Landon, along with many other key executives that joined the company in the mid-to-late 1970’s, such as Gerald Gaston and Eugene Becker. It was during this time that top management adopted the philosophy of “you don’t get in trouble for what you do, only for doing nothing”. This philosophy permeated throughout the organization. It wasn’t a rah-rah statement that would die in time like most do from management, it was a philosophy that was put in practice and expected of employees on a daily basis. It created an environment of management and employee interaction, accessibility and accountability that help resolve problems rapidly rather than kick the can down the road or make it someone else’s problem. This enabled employees from top-to-bottom to adopt a “can-do” culture, primarily because you were not afraid to fail trying to resolve a problem. Dr. Bob Nelson, author of the bestselling book “1001 Ways to Reward Employees” refers to this can do attitude as “thank goodness the weekend is over and it’s Monday” attitude. Unbeknownst to everyone at the time, this attitude would become the heart and soul of one of the most remarkable crisis recoveries in U.S. business history.

            On the morning of Monday, August 24, 1992, at approximately 5:00am, Hurricane Andrew came ashore in a direct westerly path over the Straits of Florida making landfall in Homestead, FL in south Miami-Dade County as a CAT 5 hurricane with gusts up to 165 MPH. American Bankers headquarters was 9 miles to the north of Homestead, operating out of a six-story, 300,000 square foot building on an 85 acre campus off of Quail Roost Drive in Cutler Ridge. Andrew whipped across the American Banker’s campus and destroyed everything in its path, including its headquarters that left 1,500 employees with no place to work. In the first few days of the aftermath, it was soon discovered that approximately 600 employees had their place of residence destroyed to the point that many were displaced for months, or permanently due to the wind damage from Andrew. Some employees were showing up to the American Bankers headquarters wearing the same clothes they had on since the day that Andrew hit. They had nowhere else to go. That familiar feeling of security felt by employees just hours before landfall of knowing that they will have a paycheck every two weeks and a roof over their head suddenly turned to insecurity. Although the company had a crisis recovery plan for continuation of operations, no one in the company was prepared for the personal impact from what had unfolded the morning of August 24, 1992. It was a new experience for everyone and for that snapshot in time, it could have been deemed hopeless. However, just the opposite occurred. The company survived and thrived, and the recovery was nothing short of a miracle.

           With the 30 year anniversary of Hurricane Andrew approaching in 2022, I decided to write a book (scheduled released date is August 2022) called Lessons From Quail Roost Drive: What Employees Really Need from Leadership in the Aftermath of a Crisis . The book examines how American Bankers and its employees not only survived the worst of times following this catastrophic event, but thrived, despite the unthinkable barriers it had to overcome. Although part of its success came from a crisis recovery plan that was carved out just months prior to Andrew, in retrospect, it was the company’s leadership-style, communal-like culture, and employee dedication that was drove the process for what was considered one of the most remarkable crisis recoveries in history. Seven years after Andrew destroyed the company, it was the darling of Wall Street as the company sold for five times greater than its value immediately before Andrew. If you were standing outside of the building like myself and many other employees the days following Andrew, you would have never thought it was possible. What makes the crisis recovery even more remarkable is that it was done without the communication technologies and social media that we take for granted today. The use of the internet by the public didn’t exist. Even laptops were scarcely used at the time.

            What makes this book different than many of the crisis leadership books in publication today, is rather than focus heavily on the business recovery processes, it delves into the people side of the crisis recovery process through the eyes of the employees who went through the Andrew crisis. There were many lessons learned in the days, months, and years following that unforgettable day that Andrew hit. The book captures these lessons through interviews conducted of American Bankers’ former and current managers and employees, who will tell their stories of what employees really needed from leadership during this crisis. The book also examines what management felt that it needed to do to rebuild the company, such as a decentralizing leadership in order to avoid delays and bottlenecks within the recovery process.

            To keep these lessons alive and relevant for current and future leadership, the book will pivot three decades forward to 2022 and interview those that experienced more recent crisis as leaders and employees, and then compare it to 1992 interviews. Interestingly, you will find what employees need from leadership in times of crisis has not changed much as you would think. The only real change from 1992 to 2022 was the way we communicate to one another, otherwise, we as humans and our basic needs have not changed. What worked back in 1992 will work in 2022. However, the way we go about managing the process through today's technology and personal handheld devices has changed the dynamics to solving problems from a centralized, time-delay environment to a decentralized real-time environment. This has obvious advantages over what we had to work with in 1992. Yet it does come with its own set of problems that we address in the book, such as misinformation circulated with the click of a send button that may create confusion and even panic for employees, customers and possibly all points along the supply chain for an organization.

         Lessons From Quail Roost Drive provides a proven, timeless blueprint from 1992 that still works in today's world and can be used as a guide for today’s generation of leaders and employees to produce positive outcomes during times of crisis.