A catchword these days in corporate America is “redundant.”

As in, “Your position has become redundant.” With the implied, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

But redundancy isn’t always negative. Three news items this week help make the point.

For starters, we’re not talking about redundancy as uselessness. We’re talking about redundancy in an engineering sense, as Merriam-Webster would have it, “the inclusion of extra components which are not strictly necessary to functioning, in case of failure in other components.”

As corporations have rushed into “efficiencies,” to increase dividends to shareholders, they have squeezed redundancy out of their operations. If everything goes south, there’s no backup.

Look no farther than the meltdown of Southwest Airlines during the Christmas travel crunch. A coast-to-coast storm created havoc for all airlines, but Southwest took more than a week to recover. Other airlines were in full operation within a few days, save at Storm Central, Buffalo.

The problem at Southwest was that its computer scheduling system didn’t know where its pilots, flight attendants and planes were, after they had been grounded by the storm. A system with redundancy would have had backup programming to keep up to date on where crews and planes had been stranded and when flight rules would permit them to return to action.

Instead, Southwest’s flight crews were to check in manually when their flights were grounded.

Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor and researcher on the effects of technology on society, wrote last Saturday in The New York Times, “It’s been an open secret within Southwest for some time … that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns.”

In fact, she added, the flight attendants union put modernizing the computer scheduling system ahead of pay increases in its negotiations package.

Redundancy can come with a twist of irony, too. Take Ukraine. News pages teem with reports of sociopathic Russians sabotaging the electricity infrastructure of Ukraine with missiles and (Iranian) drones. Blessedly, few people have died in these pre-dawn raids, and the electricity systems, though knocked out regularly, are usually back in operation within hours.

For two reasons. First, Ukraine is using Western anti-missile equipment to shoot down something like three-quarters of the Russian missiles and drones.

Second, as military-policy analyst Gwynne Dyer wrote in the Bangor Daily News on Monday, “The Ukrainian electricity supply system is among the least vulnerable in the world. It was mostly built in Soviet times, and was therefore designed to remain functional even during a full-scale nuclear war. The substations are spread over huge areas and even the individual transformers are widely separated. A single missile strike can never take out all the transformers in a substation, and they (transformers) are quick and easy to repair.”

In other words, Ukraine, or more correctly the Ukraine SSR, built redundancy into its system. It decentralized so if one part of the system is damaged, others still work. I wonder if former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, Russia’s sociopath-in-chief, regrets his Soviets’ beefing up Ukraine’s grid.

Finally, we saw redundancy perhaps save a life on Monday night as a physically strong and fit young man suffered cardiac arrest on a football field in Cincinnati.

Trainers and medical crews attend almost every sports event. Usually, they work on leg cramps, cuts, etc. I doubt those crews usually have defibrillators at hand. But the medical crew Monday night at Cincinnati did, and it managed within minutes to restart the heart of Damar Hamlin, who had collapsed after getting up from a tackle.

Turns out, the National Football League requires a defibrillator at every game. The NFL is not known for its concern for the safety of its players. But on this one, the league got it right.

Hamlin lay motionless for what seemed like minutes, but was really just seconds, before the EMTs got to him, sized up the situation and went to work. We don’t know if they got to him in time to keep blood flowing to his brain. That crew may never have to use a defibrillator again, but it had one when it was needed.

Two smaller examples of useful redundancy. When I was at the Tribune-Chronicle in Warren, Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio had a rail freight line through downtown. One morning, longer-than-usual trains ran through town, so we called the B&O to find out why. We learned that a train had derailed out on the mainline, and the B&O could reroute trains to the “redundant” in-town line.

I ran a mostly seasonal business (turkey farm) and always built redundancy into our holiday work schedule. If we needed 10 people at Thanksgiving, I hired 11, figuring someone wouldn’t work out and would leave on his own or by my invitation. Almost every year, someone left early, and we finished the slaughter and packing with the crew of 10 we needed, mostly family and our regular farm crew.

I built redundancy into the system, though I didn’t call it that. Have more than you need so that when everything goes south, you can adjust.

Useful redundancy.

Bob Neal blames Milton Friedman and the “Chicago school” of economics for driving redundancy out of American business, all in the service of ever-greater shareholder dividends. Neal can be reached at [email protected].