A son's reflections on his father's unquestionable influence
A week or so before Christmas I was luxuriating in the cozy confines of my office when the phone rang. It was my good friend and work mate Terry Garrison. Terry is the boss of the shift commanders and works on the second floor of Fire Administration with the senior staff. The conversation went like this:
Terry Garrison: Did you know about the memo your dad is sending out tomorrow?
Me: No.
TG: It's online. I'll wait while you pull it up.
It only took a couple of clicks of the mouse to pull up the fire chief's memo on my work computer. The memo was going out to everyone the next day. It was very brief and stated that a combination of bad knees and an inescapable retirement clause required our chief to retire on the last day of June 2006. There had been a strong rumor floating around that the fire chief was going to stay anyway. For various reasons, this didn't work out. I was in mild disbelief as I went back to our conversation.
Me: Wow. I would have lost money on that one.
TG: Yeah, me too. I got sick to my stomach when I read it. Be thankful you're not here right now. All the secretaries are crying. There's a really bad vibe hanging in the air. It feels like Princess Di got killed all over again. I think the best thing for me to do is go home and drink heavily. I'll talk to you later.
After hanging up I sat at my desk with a head full of noise. A few minutes into my confused state I became obsessed with the notion that I was born with webbed toes and fingers and had been adopted. I was pulled from this nightmare when my left eye started to spasm. Reasoning that I had to channel my mental energy to other things, I turned to the TV for diversion. The news had just started, and the lead story was the ongoing trial of Saddam Hussein. A group of legal pinheads were pontificating on whether Mr. Saddam could get a fair trial in his native country. The whole world was out to lunch.
My father began his career in 1958; Eisenhower was president and Elvis Presley had just been inducted into the Army. Twenty years later, after holding every position within the Phoenix Fire Department (PFD), Big Al was appointed to serve as the fire chief. To be completely honest, I don't believe that Alan Brunacini actually "served" as our fire chief a single day in his life. The moment he took the position he quite literally became the chief of our department. It's the same phenomenon as George Washington being known as the "Father of our Country," Marlon Brando always being the Godfather and Tommy Lasorda bleeding Dodger blue. Big Al is one of the few people who have merged their private and professional personas. The manner in which he did this hypnotized all of us into believing that he would always be our chief. Most of the members of our department haven't worked for another fire chief during their careers. I feel safe in the declaration that down to the last member, none of us ever wanted anyone else to be our chief.
I have had more than my share of conversations regarding the "magic" that Alan Brunacini brings to the position of fire chief. There really isn't a simple answer to this question. Leadership is most certainly one of the core elements of this elusive magic.
Great leaders tend to be individuals. The last grand act resulting from a committee occurred during the summer of 1776 when the Continental Congress drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence. It is not my intention to minimize the power and potential of groups, but all groups must be led. Without Napoleon, the French Army was just the French Army. On the other hand, Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein have given dictators a bad name. History's best leaders have been benevolent. After Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the brink of collapse, the press asked him if he'd be interested in running for president. He didn't think he would make a very good president because dealing with Congress is a lot different than working for a board of directors terrified of bankruptcy.
It is a lot easier to patrol the perimeters and enforce the rules when everything stays the same. For this simple reason, most change is unauthorized. Bosses use processes and their power to control — and in many instances stop — change. Our fire chief has commented that our fire department is a gigantic experiment where the prevailing motto isn't "question authority" but rather "question everything." Many control freaks liken this philosophy to accelerating your car to 100 mph then throwing your steering wheel out the window. During the last 28 years, Big Al has handed the keys of the organization over to the workforce. He sketches goofy drawings on the back of restaurant placemats and napkins, using them as very loose directions for where he thinks we need to head. The only real rules that he has given us are prevent harm, survive and be nice. Under his tutelage we have yet to crash and burn. This simple management theory has allowed us to focus on the reason we exist as an organization — to deliver service. It has also allowed us to refine and improve the ways we survive while delivering that wide range of emergency services to the community.
I think Big Al's greatest leadership quality is his ability to get results without producing casualties. Many bosses will look for heads to chop off when things don't go according to plan. This gives the false appearance that the masters are still in control. When bosses assume the "management by machete" approach, its effect reaches far beyond the small circle of senior executives surrounding them. All human interaction has the potential to turn vicious. When the rest of the organization sees that management by amputation is the standard approach used by the leaders, it sends a strong organizational message that it's OK for the middle managers to baseball-bat their minions in the name of workplace order and harmony. Good leaders eliminate cannibalism among the workforce. They do this by focusing on why we exist in the first place, training the workforce to do the work and supporting everyone to these ends.
It is next to impossible to have harmony in the workplace when the person at the top manages with the dogma of acceptable losses. The PFD's workforce doesn't look any different than any other large fire department. We have the same mix of smart, pretty, funny, pissed off, capable and mean-spirited members you find in departments across the spectrum of all the blue and red states. I've had some bosses who didn't see eye to eye with me. Sometimes these relationships fermented to the point where we would have enjoyed nothing more than staking one another to an anthill. In many organizations it is completely acceptable for the boss to flay employees who they find upsetting. There is an indescribable comfort in working for an organization where the main man rules with the philosophy that once a person makes it through the hiring process and training academy, they become a lifetime member. If you want to know if a fire department really lives up to the motto, "No man left behind," find out how it deals with the members who piss off the boss. This organizational water flows both ways. I have been involved in personnel matters where every cell in my body wanted to inflict long-lasting, painful stimuli to the member. My boss told me before I punched anyone's ticket we were going to try to train and educate the troubled member. Because my boss stopped me from torturing one of our members, I became a better person and a better boss. The troubled employee straightened up and is a productive member of the department. This didn't happen by accident; in fact, the only reason we don't beat one another to death is because our fire chief never allowed it. He has made all of us better, more kind people.
This is where our labor management process was born. Thirty years ago, the fire chief and the president of our local, Pat Cantelme, came to the joint conclusion that they could have a much greater effect if they took the non-traditional approach of working together. This is still considered a radical concept. I offer this up as an example: A pair of my very close associates returned from visiting a far-off fire department within the last three months. Part of their tour included an audience with a high-ranking union official. The group of them was engaged in the standard comparisons of their departments (much like young adolescents playing "I'll show you mine if you show me yours") when the topic of union dues came up. My homies lost their breath when their union host told them they paid more than $140 per month in union dues. Their host sensed his guests were having trouble processing this piece of information and asked, "How much do you guys pay?" Their answer, "About one-third of that," caused the same confused reaction in the host.
He asked, "How do you guys manage to sue everyone that you need to sue? At any given time we have lawsuits pending against the fire department, the city and the state. How can you afford to do business with such low monthly dues?" It seems to me that when we are not fighting fires we spend far too much time fighting one another.
Because Phoenix has a reputation for having positive working relationships, visitors from outside our system have become a normal occurrence at our labor-management get-togethers. The standard question revolves around the magic dust we ingest that causes us to get along. Sorry, but it ain't as easy as grinding fairies into a magic get-along potion. It works because the leadership said this was the way it is going to be. This has got to begin with the fire chief. It requires the group to put their egos on hold and focus on figuring out the best way to deliver service. We still disagree about things; we just don't assassinate one another over it. The issue shouldn't wreck the relationship. It is no mystery why one of the fire chief's favorite sayings is, "Egos eat brains."
For a man who is known as the leading change agent in our service, it is odd that the only electrically powered devices in his office are a phone and a lamp. Every morning his secretary brings him his e-mail. The man has been described as "eccentric." When Big Al joined the force, the first rig he worked on didn't have air conditioning, power steering, seatbelts, an automatic transmission or a roof. He is as responsible as anyone else in our department for ushering in a fleet that comes standard with engines located outside the riding compartment, CAFS, outside-the-cab storage for all pressurized cylinders, full-time A/C (when the rig is parked in the bay and plugged in, the A/C stays on) and ALS engine companies. For a man so known for vision and a thirst for positive change, it's odd that his favorite fire truck remains the first one he rode on. Today he owns this piece of roofless apparatus and is on the verge of finishing its 20-year-long restoration. The only word I can think to describe it is obscene.
A few years ago my dad told a story about an event that lit his fuse early in his career. During the early part of the 1960s, he was assigned to escort a group of insurance professionals who had come to town to determine the city's ISO rating. For a couple of days, the young AVB shepherded the group while they counted lengths of hose, measured water mains and visited fire stations. During this time our future fire chief asked one of the insurance adjusters how we stacked up. He told the young firefighter, "Phoenix is a little desert town with a mediocre fire department." The insurance man went on to proclaim Los Angeles City as the nation's premier Class 1 fire department.
Big Al finished his story: "The insurance guy was a prick, but he was right. Our department suffered from poor leadership. Back in those days most of our time was spent enforcing the volumes of rules that had absolutely nothing to do with the work we did. We spent more time persecuting one another over the wearing of hats and bow ties than we did practicing hose lays and ladder evolutions. When the group of us operated at structure fires, we looked more like inept filling-station attendants and ice-cream vendors than firefighters."
Firefighters are fiercely proud of their fire departments — sometimes to the degree that we feel all others are second best. This trait dates all the way back to our ancient tribal times.
We may act like we have evolved beyond our tribal roots, but you can still see it in the helmets we wear, the nozzles we use and the way we adorn our apparatus. This makes compliments from firefighters outside one's department rare and meaningful. The world came full circle when John Nowell gave a presentation at one of the national conferences last year. John is a battalion chief for the Los Angeles City Fire Department and is responsible for LA City's tactical- and command-level training programs. John referred to Alan Brunacini as "America's Fire Chief." I have heard this uttered from other fire-service leaders, but it didn't carry the same weight or street credit as it did coming from John. It is my thought that all of the accolades afforded to my father are the result of his being the highest-ranking member of the Phoenix Fire Department. You cannot separate Alan Brunacini and the Phoenix Fire Department. They are one and the same.
Nick Brunacini has been with the Phoenix Fire Department since 1980 and has served as a firefighter, captain, battalion chief and shift commander. Brunacini helped develop the Fire Command and Command Safety-Saving Our Own curricula packages. He has been an instructor at Phoenix College since 1990.
