Five Lessons From LeBron

Thanks, LeBron James. Your utter crassness has given us a powerful "teachable moment" in matters of decency, communication, and leadership. Here are five lessons I'm considering this week:

1. Don't Blame The Younger Generation: Too many LeBron critics are ascribing his epic lack of grace, civility, respect, and humility to the way it is with young people in today's celebrity age. How preposterous! Good people of any age know how to do the right thing, or at least know how to find out how to do the right thing. LeBron's boorishness last week owes instead to the fact that he inhabits an imaginary world, which has been exacerbated by bad advice coming from childhood buddies at his LRMR company in, gulp, Cleveland. He needs to find a mentor with wisdom, and real fast! If you find yourself blaming young people then, well, you're getting old.

2. Don't Sink To His Level, Dan Gilbert: Cleveland's majority owner Dan Gilbert, a slick mortgage banker, took the bait and absolutely choked on it. His Thursday night diatribe in reaction to LeBron's actions was an embarrassment to his city, his team, his fans, and himself. Sure, anyone subjected to what LeBron did to that guy deserves to be outraged. However, he should have had the presence of mind to wait until the morning to react. The lesson for us all is not to send any e-mail or letter in a state of rage. Gilbert will be living that one down for many years to come. Perhaps he, too, has nobody to help him achieve perspective beyond himself. "You bet, boss, it's a great letter. Go get 'em." And wasn't Gilbert the guy who grossly enabled LeBron's behaviors over the past seven years in the first place?

3. Where Was Pat Riley In All Of This? Should that source of wisdom and sanity LeBron so clearly needs have been esteemed Miami Heat President Pat Riley. Why not? He can't shrug it off as having been none of his business until LeBron joined his team. What he has to realize is that LeBron's actions discredited Riley and his Heat franchise, too. And even without preventing LeBron from hurting himself with that putrid Thursday night made-for-television non-event, Riley certainly had responsibility for the garish, out-of-control Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment-style introduction of the new "Big Three" in Miami on Friday. For some of us, that spectacle was worse than the Thursday night TV event. What were these people thinking?

4. Manage Expectations Carefully: One should learn at an early age to underpromise and overdeliver. Here's the self-anointed "King" who after seven years in the league has yet to win a championship. Here are the biggest of the Big Three ever, also self-proclaimed, who've yet to play a game let alone win a championship. LeBron should exercise extreme caution in declaring that the Heat will win "multiple championships." This is especially true under a new Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2011-2012 that could conceivably set the salary cap below what Miami's Big Three would need to make, meaning that one of them would have to go.

5. Stay Out Of It, Jesse Jackson: Please! You are only adding embarrassment to an embarrassment and, in the process, making matters worse. Jackson consistently fails to understand that leadership is not the same thing as publicity.

Blown Calls and Blown Wells

If only BP CEO Tony Hayward had some of umpire Jim Joyce's humanity. Hayward's firm blew a deepwater oil well with devastating consequences, especially for those who lost their lives aboard the Deepwater Horizon as well as their families. Every time he speaks, he loses credibility and only seems to make matters worse. This is what happens when CEOs sacrifice common sense and humanity enroute to the top and are then surrounded in crisis by too many lawyers and equivocators.

Joyce blew a call in a baseball game, robbing a pitcher and his fans of a perfect game. He apologized immediately and with a level of class, dignity, and speed not frequently seen these days. No hedging, no caveats, and no lawyers. Yes, Hayward's challenges are far more complex than those faced by Joyce, but the need for authenticity and humanity remain as fundamentally simple as they are essential to effective leadership.

Will We Ever Reform Education, Really?

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says that desperately needed education reform in the United States is "this generation's Moon shot." Of course, that's precisely how Tom Friedman frames our equally desperate need for energy reform. Indeed, desperate times require desperate analogies. Duncan spoke to a group of us at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday.

Sure, the U.S. remains the world's undisputed higher education leader. However, Yale President Richard Levin's article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs suggests it's just a matter of a decade or two before China catches up. Meanwhile, Duncan cited a sobering litany of U.S. K-12 worldwide performance statistics. For example, we're 24th of 29 nations in one study of high school math proficiency and 21st of 30 in a comparable study of science proficiency. Do we truly realize as citizens that the U.S. is suffering a 27 percent high school dropout rate, that as many as 40 percent of our college students need remedial help, and that we rank 10th in college completion globally, according to Duncan?

Remember that '80s music video in which Huey Lewis plunges his head into a sink full of ice water? Well, somehow, we the people need just such a wake-up call. Every second we spend on peripheral "wedge" issues in this country, to serve narrow political agendas, we're sapping our ability and willingness to solve the truly monumental challenges before us, such as real education reform.

In that context, Secretary Duncan speaks of the Obama Administration's "cradle to career" vision for education. Great! It's nice rhetoric, as is his welcome alignment of cultural awareness and language proficiency with the "smart power" movement, but is it really achievable in four or even eight years? Instead, I'd prefer that the Administration be a little less grandiose in packaging concepts and more focused, for example, on attacking ten programmatic reforms that are needed before we can ever credibly dream of a "cradle to career" vision.

I Hear A Symphony

New York, NY

Antonio Pappano is an interesting guy with no shortage of useful opinions. He's music director of London's Royal Opera House and Rome's Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. When asked by The Financial Times recently for his views on Italian culture and politics, his answer was instructive.

He claimed that Italy needs a new style of cultural leadership, capable of nurturing and coalescing talent, “because one of the difficulties in Italy is how to create teams”. (The Financial Times, May 15-16, Page C3) Pappano has no franchise on wisdom on this subject, for too many of us have seen the consequences of failing to develop teams, organizations, and even nations so that the whole feels greater than the sum of their disparate pieces. Politics in the United States these days comes to mind.

Pappano leads teams for a living. His job in two global capitals is to develop the whole so that it exceeds the sum of its parts, literally marking the difference between symphony and cacophony. Too many teams today are a muddle of conflicting visions and competing agendas, too often because they lack the connecting, synthesizing, and unifying qualities of an Antonio Pappano.

Unlike so many conductors, especially bygone greats such as Bernstein and Solti who were dictatorial and put their ego needs ahead of their players, Pappano is in FT's view "the opposite of dictatorial. Colleagues talk of a hands-on, hard-working boss, more approachable than many other top-flight conductors who can be charismatic but aloof."

This is what is missing in so many leadership contexts now, where entities big and small seem atomized by the selfish needs of their loudest constituents. Well, why not take Italy for example? Under a photo caption of Italy's ridiculous President Silvio Berlusconi and two coalition partner-rivals dubbed, "The three stooges running Italy," The Economist reports that far too many Italians think the unification of their country (150 years ago) was a mistake.

The truth is when leaders fail to understand their essential role in helping those they lead see beyond narrow, selfish interests, they fail generally. Berlusconi is clueless on this subject, since he's been focused solely on his own ambitions.

I saw Judy Collins perform the other night at the Cafe Carlyle here. To paraphrase her, isn't it time to stop sending in the clowns? Indeed, maybe the wrong guy is running Italy.

All Greek To Me

Buffalo, NY

Well, that didn’t work. I stopped blogging the past 10 months to complete my doctorate. Fat chance! It seemed like a good idea at the time. So I’m exercising the writing habit again, hoping that some of it will rub off on my dissertation.

The rants of those who angrily slam government and rail against taxation have grown more pernicious in recent months. We the people deserve good government, but it's impossible to achieve when the evil menace of “big government” is constantly foisted upon us by the Tea Party and other forums for angry nativism, nationalism, and nihilism. We are certainly free to question government, of course, and to be skeptical about how our tax dollars are being spent. Yet the unrelenting assault for 30 years now on the very institutions and individuals we expect to serve us well has become a clear and present danger.

After all, who else but government can and should arm and protect our brave sons and daughters fighting for freedom? Who else will ensure that the airline flights we endure these days depart and land safely? Who else will pave our highways and save our wetlands? Who else will manage our public universities and community colleges? Who else will patrol our streets and extinguish our fires?

Ironically, the shrillest anti-tax voices are often the same people who nonetheless demand everything from a government they perpetually bash and, in the process, make less capable of actually delivering it. These are the same folks unable or unwilling to cite specific, meaningful examples of how to reduce the national deficit or cut big-ticket defense platforms designed to fight yesterday's Cold War. Hey, maybe that's what Tea Partyers mean when they state a longing for the way things used to be in this country. I don't think so.

Among the many painful lessons of the current financial debacle in Greece is what happens when citizens want it all but are unwilling to pay for it. The system collapses.

Frightened Little Men

New York, NY

This is what frightened little men do. At the sign of people exercising their right to live, work, love, and vote in freedom, they shut down the system. The pathetic cabal of “holy men” who run Iran must be apoplectic at the thought that their hand-picked stooge – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – may have lost last week’s presidential election to the moderate Mir Hossein Moussavi. As a result, they rigged the election in favor of their boy and denied what is likely to have been a majority of Iranians – a great Persian people who are as westward leaning as any in the Middle East – their choice of leader. In quintessential Ahmadinejad fashion, however, their vote-rigging was done so clumsily and awkwardly so as to have blown their cover.

These characters are now predictably resorting to the totalitarian playbook, expelling western journalists and cutting access to websites and cellular networks. People like these in leadership positions – one cannot seriously call them leaders – who fear the freedom to think and communicate openly and seek to block the unrelenting advance of technology are doomed. The only question becomes, how long will they cling to power? No country today can turn a deaf ear much longer to the aspirations of its young people, and 70% of Iran’s population is under age 30. No country today can deny much longer the rights of women who comprise more than 50% of its population and over 60% of its college graduates.

The events now unfolding in Tehran will prove truly historic. Either these frightened little men will be forced to cede power and relax their holy dictatorship over the next several years or, more likely, they will become more brutal and isolated enroute to relinquishing power a decade or more from now. Either way, the deed is done and the deal is sealed. For Iran, quite simply, there is no turning back.

Cheer For Old Notre Dame?

Twelve years of primary and secondary education at Roman Catholic schools will make almost anyone respect and appreciate the University of Notre Dame, and that includes me. It is a very special place. That is why it has been so distressing to see some misguided souls in the Fighting Irish community choose the wrong fight in making it so difficult for the President of the United States to speak there today and to receive an honorary degree.

The Notre Dame leadership's early reaction to the idea that President Obama might receive an honorary degree was almost laughable. Word from the top was that, well, the former president of The Harvard Law Review, community advocate, law professor, State Senator, U.S. Senator and sitting U.S. President in the cross hairs of one of the greatest set of challenges ever facing a national leader needed more seasoning before such a privilege could be bestowed upon him. Oh sure.

Of course, the real opposition to Obama's presence in South Bend today was fulminated by hard-right Catholics who oppose abortion. Yes, there are effective arguments opposing a woman's right to choose as there are some good people who argue this point of view in a decent, open-minded manner. To contend that the most important leader in the world, however, should be denied access to the pulpit because he happens to disagree with this aspect of Church doctrine is patently absurd. It also weakens pro-life arguments by forcing reasonable people to ask, "What are you afraid of?"

After all, Notre Dame has seen fit in recent years to honor President George W. Bush whose support - if not palpable zeal - for capital punishment runs counter to Church doctrine. So too, the university similarly feted former NSC Chief and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice who joined her boss in creating one of the most immoral wars of our time, which also ran afoul of the Vatican's appropriate opposition to the Iraq War. Where was the right-wing furor then?

The narrow-minded but ever-predictable histrionics of Randall Terry, Pat Buchanan, and the Cardinal Newman Society underscore, once again, the embarrassment that is fundamentalism. These certain few who insist that the rest of us share their fear of intelligent voices who may disagree with their particular orthodoxy expose the weakness of fundamentalism. Regrettably, they also tarnish those otherwise noble institutions that choose to enlist them in their cause. These are especially treacherous waters for serious academic institutions that, above all else, must provide platforms upon which all reasonable people can express their views.

If commencement speakers are to pass narrow ideological litmus tests that must constitute agreement with the views of 100 percent of the members of any community, let alone the official views of the host institution itself, we will simply no longer have any commencement speakers. And that would be a victory for those who wish to silence any and all voices that contradict their own.

Take Him Seriously

It didn't seem possible. Nonetheless, former Vice President Dick Cheney has somehow succeeded at turning himself into an even greater comic-book villain. Imagine any sane, mature individual stating a leadership and political preference for Rush Limbaugh over Colin Powell, a sentiment Cheney gravely intoned on last week's Face The Nation. One would be hard-pressed to think that even a comedian in a Saturday Night Live sketch would go so far as to say, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." The joke would be too lame and obvious, right. Wrong!

Cheney has to be taken very seriously, even though he is no longer the staunchly conservative but nonetheless serious man we saw earlier in his career. Yes, he is pushing even greater numbers of thinking, moderate Republicans toward Independent and Democratic status, like no voter-registration drive could ever do. And yes, he is an even greater embarrassment to the increasingly smaller numbers of Republicans remaining in the detritus of Karl Rove's "permanent GOP majority" and wrestling with their own demographic issues. (Make no mistake about it, though, the Republicans will recover if for no other reason than ours is not a one-party system. Cheney's craven antics will only delay the inevitable pendulum swing back to what one hopes will be a more humble, diverse, fair-minded and less-angry party.) Still, the media is covering him and the world is listening to him if for no other reason than unending lies, outrageous comments, and dark, sinister threats make good copy.

His inadvisable and painfully (self) destructive attacks on an Obama Administration attempting to pick up the pieces after eight years of Cheneyism could represent a stunningly calculated gamble. It almost seems as if Cheney is betting that the United States will again be victimized by some form of domestic terrorism, however large or small, and that he will have been the lone, accurate voice to have said, "I told you so." This is the customary game plan for so many prophets of doom. Yet, painfully, the odds make it quite possible that we will be attacked again over the next 3 1/2 or 7 1/2 years of an Obama Presidency. I know; it is hard to imagine that anyone could work this way. However, there is no other rational reason to explain Cheney's astonishing behavior. Oh yes, irrationality is always a possibility, too.

p.s. God bless Major Steven Hutchinson, the 60-year-old Vietnam War veteran who rejoined the Army in 2006 and was killed by an Iraq roadside bomb last week in Basra. He was the oldest veteran to serve in either Iraq or Afghanistan, falling victim to yet another Cheney folly. Throughout history, men like Cheney have used bluster and bombast coated in faux courage and patriotism to sentence other real patriots and truly courageous men and women to needless death.

Like, Plagiarism

I unintentionally overheard a young woman engaged in a heated cell phone conversation the other day at the Columbus Airport. I mean, how can you help not hearing endless cell phone chatter seeping into any cherished moment we actually find to think, reflect and relax.

It seems that this college student was quite "kan kan" - "that's 'pissed off' in Japanese" as Sean Connery bellowed in the movie, Rising Sun - because she had to do a semester's worth of homework that day. She was supposed to create a blog on a particular subject, solicit comments and build readership over the course of several months. Now, it seems, she was copying other people's blogs and making their thoughts her own, all while waiting for a plane.

She said, "You know, it's, like, for this PR class that really sucks and, like, nobody knew we were supposed to do this." Pause. "Ya, it's in the syllabus but, like, nobody reads that." In concluding the conversation, she asked her friend to find somebody to do her statistics homework this summer. "Like, I'll pay them to do it, you know. I'm really, like, bad at that stuff."

I'm trying to avoid all the feelings this encounter naturally evokes, not the least of which is that somebody is paying countless thousands of dollars so that this young woman learns only how to beat the system. The responsibility for doing the work rests solely with her, but the responsibility for detecting that she did not do it belongs to her professor. We can only hope that the system works and may not always be so damn beatable. It would be, like, wonderful.

Power Rules

New York City

Les Gelb minimizes the value of so-called "soft power" in his new book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy." Who can disagree that a return to common sense among policymakers is as welcome as it is essential. However, Gelb plainly underestimates the value of economic, diplomatic, technological, media and cultural leverage when he writes that "persuasion, good values and leadership won't - by themselves - cause foreign leaders to do your bidding...To me, soft power is foreplay, not the real thing." That's nice rhetorically, but flawed conceptually.

Ironically, there is a painful echo of false bravado in Gelb's statement. It sounds too much like the previous Administration, which lacked common sense in tragic proportions. Does Gelb really think that the result of policy should always be to require other nations to do our "bidding"? It doesn't sound like a formula for success in today's complex, multipolar world in which rebuilding American respect and admiration abroad is a high priority.

I certainly don't like the term "soft power," largely because it is misleading. There is nothing soft about effective leadership that knows when and how to apply diplomatic, economic and legal resources to achieve objectives while avoiding unfortunate rushes into needless wars. Power may be in the eye of the beholder, but let's never be blinded again by the limits of power that only sees the world in one-dimensional terms.



p.s. We had the pleasure of seeing Arturo Sandoval perform the other night at The Iridium. Sandoval ranks among the great jazz trumpeters of our time, but he is also a marvelous producer, arranger, songwriter and keyboardist and able to let loose with the flugelhorn and tympani, too. No less than Dizzy Gillespie helped the Havana-born Sandoval defect to the United States while touring with his band in 1990, a wonderful story that is captured well in the 2000 movie, For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story.

A Saab Story

San Francisco

How the mighty are falling. I remember spending several days at Saab-Scania headquarters and at various manufacturing facilities in and around Stockholm as a graduate student there in 1980. Saab-Scania enjoyed both a rich history in automobiles, trucks, engines, and airplanes as well as a distinctly bright future. The company was nimble and technologically innovative, and it seemed to value its employees.

Saab-Scania was ultimately split up in the mid-90s and, left to the vagaries of the global automobile market, Saab Automobile AB began its long slide into oblivion. The company's deterioration was predictably exacerbated when General Motors acquired a major stake in the firm at the same time. Now, having lost $343 million last year, Saab Automobile is on the brink of failing.

The intriguing part of this sad tale is that the Swedish government has no intent of bailing out the company, despite French, German, British and American government support (actual or intended) for their ailing automobile firms. This is not to say that a bailout is the right thing to do; far from it. But who would have imagined that Sweden would be the nation to say, "Nej, tack." After all, the traditional Swedish "third way" between Darwinian capitalism and socialism was supposed to present capitalism with a human face. One might wonder what will happen to those workers in Saab company towns like Trollhattan?

The center-right Swedish government seems to have drawn a line in the sand on this issue, citing the usual mush about market forces taking care of themselves. They won't. Enterprise Minister Maud Olofsson told The New York Times last month that, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories" although they were prepared to own the failed banks they nationalized in the recent past. So Saab may well fail some day very soon.

Of course, the real issue here appears to be the General Motors role, which has clearly (and understandably) irked the Swedes. Olofsson told the Times that "We are very disappointed in G.M., but we are not prepared to risk taxpayers' money. This is not a game of Monopoly." G.M. has indicated that it will pull out of Saab by the end of this year, further infuriating Minister Olofsson. "They're washing their hands of Saab and dropping it in the laps of the Swedish taxpayers," she said. Hey Maud, it's G.M. What did you expect?

p.s. There is no doubting why One Market ranks as one of this city's best restaurants. It's a marvelous room with exquisite views of the Ferry Terminal and the Embarcadero trolleys. Plus, Billy Philadelphia's renditions of Kern, Porter and the Gershwin tunes make a great place even better.

PhotoJournal: Marin Headlands' Surf

San Francisco

The surf is the star at the Marin Headlands, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

PhotoJournal: World Baseball Classic

Los Angeles

Scenes from the 2009 World Baseball Classic, where the action in the stands is as interesting as the play on the field.

Geithner Speaks

Columbus, Ohio

We heard this morning from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Agree with the Obama Administration’s decisions or not, we need this man to succeed both in terms of economic recovery as well as long-term structural reform. There is little doubt that Geithner is extremely well qualified for the post and that his intellect and bearing are first rate. A major question remains, however, as to whether this or any broken system is best rebuilt by a knowledgeable outsider or an insider like Geithner who participated in its original demise.

Geithner and his boss deserve our support. The Administration’s approach to economic repair and reform is not only sound; it’s essential. Sure, no budget is perfect, especially under current circumstances that are the result of three decades worth of budgetary excess and regulatory indifference. Geithner correctly reminded us this morning of four key lessons from history, reminiscent of what Fed Chairman Bernanke told us on March 11. (See entry, Bernanke Speaks, March 11, 2009)

- Most governments underestimate economic crises.
- Governments are typically too slow to act and fail to engage powerfully enough to solve the problem. “We can’t be too tentative and gradual,” he said.
- The public sector puts the brakes on too early and fails to stay the course with discipline and determination. “This is all about will and not ability,” he added.
- Governments tend to try to solve economic downturns first without attempting to achieve the structural reforms needed to prevent the next crisis. Without the necessary simultaneity between repair and reform, economies may recover but people soon go about their business without applying the key lessons learned. Geithner is right to say that the Administration is “taking advantage of the moment to reform.”

“We won’t ignore these lessons,” he said. Obama and Geithner are taking considerable heat for choosing this moment to invest in essential education, health care, energy and infrastructure reform. Critics without any alternative budgets or solutions of their own are nonetheless invited to bash the President on national television all day. They brandish the Administration for creating deep, unprecedented budget deficits over the coming years that, as their argument goes, will be inherited by our children and grandchildren. Well, for starters, these critics are the same people who created this mess in the first place. They should simply go to their rooms. We’ve had quite enough of them.

Next, if not now, when will we ever find the political will to start investing in the bright future that our children and grandchildren can hardly achieve without desperately needed improvements in schools, health-care delivery, energy use, and roads and bridges? Yes, the projected deficits are frightening in the abstract. However, some of these investments will produce the innovation and jobs needed to move us forward. Politicians always talk about making these investments in our future. Now we finally have one doing it and he is bathed in criticism that is little more than short-term, selfish political opportunism. Yes, there are always legitimate concerns about corruption when so much taxpayer money is floating around, just as we worry about investment recipients harvesting the funding as some of our financial institutions have been doing as well as lobbyists snouts slurping-up as much of it as possible. Yet, these concerns do not diminish the need to take these actions and to do so forcefully.

Ambition For The Public Good?

Los Angeles

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is about as politically ambitious as it gets. And that’s saying a mouthful for today’s politicians. Oh, alright. It does get worse. Sorry, Newt.

The benefits of some of Cuomo’s past highly publicized interventions into, say, the college financial aid market seem unclear and may have done more harm than good. If his particular brand of publicity-oriented populism can be somehow linked more to the public interest and less to his own ambition, however, it may be just what we need – at least in the short term.

Cuomo has now set his sights on AIG. Specifically, he is methodically asking each of the AIG mega-bonus recipients to return their loot and, so far, he is doing so in private. We learn today that nine of the top 10 bonus recipients have coughed up the dough at Cuomo’s urging, returning $50 million to the U.S. Treasury. How would you like to be that one holdout? He hopes to recover another $30 million. One conjures in Cuomo a Jack Russell Terrier with an unrelenting, biting clutch on the metaphorical cuff of these bonus babies. His example illustrates, however, how certain leadership styles can be just right for the times. Cuomo has found his time and he can now do some real good. Go for it, General. Lead us!

p.s. I had never been to the Getty Museum high atop the Santa Monica Mountains, until now. It is a breathtaking location. How exquisite it is at this time of Japanese baseball supremacy to have seen The Mazarin Chest and the Van Diemen Box, two of the finest examples of Edo Period export lacquer.

Say Wa

Santa Monica

Well, it’s their loss. Baseball fans and those passionate about international, cross-cultural exchanges had every reason for euphoria last night at Dodger Stadium. The championship finale to the World Baseball Classic between Japan and Korea was the pièce de résistance. Those who spurn this still-awkward tournament with all its growth pains are missing a point. This is larger than traditional American baseball. It’s an emergent phenomenon that one treats with the unfolding, patient delight of so much of Far Eastern culture.

The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin, a wonderful baseball scribe by the way, writes today that fans of both sides “exuded passion and spirit for 10 of the most memorable innings ever played at Dodger Stadium, a weirdly wonderful mix of baseball game, rock concert and pep rally.” You bet, although this is not a new thing for those of us who have enjoyed béisbol in the Caribbean and besuboru in Japan. (See March 7, 2009 entry Recurring Dreams and Nightmares.) The games evoke the joyous feeling and colorful sensibility of a world-class soccer match without any of the hooliganism, drunken self-indulgence and angry nationalism.

Tonight’s game came against the backdrop of memories and histories of brutal Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula on and off for centuries. One can only imagine from Chavez Ravine, adjacent as it is to LA’s Chinatown, what emotions were stirring in Little Tokyo and Koreatown here as well as in Tokyo and Seoul. After all, the Japanese won the 2006 WBC and yet the Koreans had twice beaten the Japanese in this tournament and served up starting pitcher Jungkeun Bong – dubbed “the Japan killer.” Still, many of the young Korean and Japanese fans at Dodger Stadium tonight seemed far more interested in baseball rivalry than political revenge. With Korea’s loss, we will never know whether the team would have planted their flag on the mound with a certain self-righteous albeit understandable indignation, as they had in previous victories over Japan. Well, for tonight at least, the Japanese side successfully displayed great "wa," or team harmony.

For more on Japanese baseball, see the three Robert Whiting books below. My introduction to the culture came via his first entry, You’ve Gotta Have Wa.

p.s. Photos from the tournament will come later. The small device for transferring photo files to my computer was crushed under the weight of some wonderfully exuberant Korean fans seated next to me.

This Is When It Counts

Los Angeles

It's easy to be personable, professional and effective in good times, whether in leadership or customer-service settings. The true test comes when times are tough, which means right now. The problem is that we mortals tend to hunker down in a defensive crouch at moments like this, just when we need to open up wide to people, promises and possibilities.

Richard gets this point. He's a Virgin America gate attendant at Boston's Logan Airport. When he noticed my quandary this morning in being unable to locate a Sunday New York Times - it was so early that they had not yet arrived at the gate's lone shop - he approached me, smiled and said, "I can go back through security and get a Times for you." This cost his employer virtually nothing, and yet it has earned one very loyal customer in me. It's a mindset that just seems so utterly lacking at United, Delta or U.S. Air. Those employees are every bit as nice and professional as Richard, but there is little or nothing in their organizational culture, climate, training and reward system to do what Richard did for me. In fact, there are probably company rules against it.

An open approach that places a premium on communication, collaboration and due consideration is essential for leaders right now, as well. I'm hearing of too many folks abrogating their leadership duties just when they are needed the most, even if the reasons for doing so are understandable. Now is when we must rise above ourselves and not submerge under the weight of fear. Best leadership practices these days include staying on strategy, clarifying matters for our teams when we know the facts, honestly indicating when we do not know the facts but attempting to discover them, utilizing self-awareness (if we have any), practicing situational awareness and listening skills, rewarding our best people, avoiding reckless decision-making made in the name of short-term budget-cutting, being visible and available, and modeling the behaviors we expect from others. Yes, it's a pain in the neck, but that's the job. Nobody said it was easy. Richard certainly understands this point.

The Indian Ocean: The Next Wave

The Indian Ocean is back. Of course, the world's third largest body of water never really went anywhere. In the latest Foreign Affairs, however, The Atlantic Magazine's Robert Kaplan reports that the China-India rivalry coupled with those nations' quests for blue-water navies has revived the U.S. strategic focus in the area. Can 1970s and 1980s talk of the importance of the U.S. base on the British atoll Diego Garcia be far away?

Kaplan says the IO is much more than a "geographic feature;" it's an "idea." This is reminiscent of how the Atlantic Rim Network's Jim Barron describes the Atlantic Ocean as a "body of water surrounded by a state of mind." The Indian Ocean serves as an "arc of Islam" with dangerous strategic chokepoints such as the Bab El Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz in the west and the Strait of Malacca in the east. Kaplan actually suggests that Malacca is the strategic equivalent of the Cold War's Fulda Gap in Germany. The Indian Ocean also features two enormous bays with highly unstable nations at their apex, Pakistan on the Arabian Sea and Mynamar on the Bay of Bengal. It accounts for half the world's container traffic (see February 23 entry from Singapore, Shipping News And Other Fears) and 70 percent of oil shipping in an increasingly energy-starved world.

Of course, the IO is also backdrop to Beijing and New Delhi expansionism. China and India worry as much as anyone else about how Islamic extremists, pirates and natural disasters can blunt their commercial and military ambitions. As a result, for example, Kaplan tells us that India's growing alliance with Iran finds the two nations building a state-of-the-art port facility at Chah Bandar, Iran, in the Gulf of Oman. Similarly, China is helping Pakistan construct a massive port in Gwadar not far from the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz. It is expected that both these ports will be connected to current and future oil and gas pipelines to oil- and gas-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkeminsitan. This is enough to get the attention of any American or European analyst, and it is doing so.

Kaplan sounds downright Mahanian, for those of you who know the work of the 19th Century naval officer and scholar Alfred Mahan, in stressing the importance of American seapower in the region. He speaks to what are now the obvious limitations as well as political and financial costs of relying too much on occupation-minded land forces as a primary tool of foreign policy. He speaks to the benefits of more mobile, forward-deployed maritime power and, in doing so, argues that the U.S. should not (and one might add, cannot) focus on dominance in the region. Instead, he calls for a power-balancing role between China and India that finds the U.S. Navy making itself "continually useful." In a starkly different future role for the American fleet, Kaplan writes that "rather than going it alone, the U.S. Navy should be a coalition builder supreme, ready to work with any navy that agrees to cooperate with it."

p.s. The Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA is worth seeing, but only if you're in the neighborhood. Like many of us, I know best Lautrec's poster art depicting Jane Avril and other performers in 1890s Paris. I was hoping to see and learn more at the Clark, but the exhibition seemed rather thin to me.

Ah, The Customer

Market downturns often find old-line businesses rediscovering their customers. The fear and insecurity created by a recession can return senior executives to common-sense principles and remind them why their institutions are in business in the first place - or at least they should. Now is the time when organizations become awash in "back to basics" and "customer delight" mantras that risk being temporary, cliched and insincere.

I lived through successive rounds of customer rediscovery - as if they ever went away - in my commercial banking career. In an attempt to prevent another embarrassing declaration that a certain year would be proclaimed, "The Year of the Customer," I floated the idea that we appoint a Director of Common Sense. I only half meant it, but the suggestion never flew. Only years later did I figure out why. It seemed to me that nobody wanted to be held to any common-sense standard. I don't think people feared ridicule of an appointment that would then, and now, earn a Wall Street Journal headline. Instead, they may have feared the ridicule that would come the very next day and for days, months and years ahead when common sense would be violated.

This is why it is so painful now to hear top executives in financial services and elsewhere brag about their movement back to the customer. A top New England banker I do not know and have never met just told The Boston Globe, "When things are difficult, you go back to your customer focus, and that's what we're doing." It is likely that this official does not understand the revealing quality of this statement. If institutions actually wanted to acquire and retain customers, they would hire, train and pay well customer service specialists who understand the primary language of the country they serve and are truly knowledgeable about the institution. These folks would be ready, willing and able to relay, remedy and reward customers who call, write or e-mail the company. In doing so, these firms would rip out the front-end, voice-mail-hell to which many of them subject their customers.

When mediocre leaders enjoy good times, they move away from customers and take them for granted. Their focus moves to mergers and acquisitions, the usual musical-chairs, who's-on-first office politics, and all manner of "luxuries" that could not be tolerated in tough times. Perhaps they could eliminate or at least reduce trouble if customer focus was not so situational and variable.

Bing Bang

It was wonderful to learn that basketball legend Dave Bing is running for Mayor of Detroit. At long last, it seemed, the city might benefit from the discipline, integrity and high standards of this great player and good man. Bing was as dignified on the court as he has been successful as a businessman off the court. Besides, the good people of that long-besieged city could hardly do any worse than former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, recently released from prison for lying under oath.

Now comes the revelation that, well, Bing lied, too. He does not have an MBA degree from the General Motors Institute nor did he graduate from Syracuse University in 1966 as he has claimed. He did finally graduate from college in 1995, which is a better story and therefore makes even more mysterious why the candidate would lie about it. His more serious transgression it seems to me is in fronting a spokesman named Clifford Russell to make matters worse with statements like, "Given all the hard knocks he had gone through and the rigors of being an auto supplier, he felt he had an MBA in terms of the amount of knowledge he had acquired." This is bullshit, and it's not even good bullshit.

So here is yet another edition of what happens even to good people when they taste political success and yet somehow feel inadequate to the task. Should we forgive Dave Bing? Likable basketball star aside, he deserves at least one more shot at the truth. Everyone is entitled to one mistake and Bing has earned our respect as an employer and civic leader. One more fib, however, may well end a promising political career before it ever started. It would be, as the late Boston Celtics play-by-play man Johnny Most used to say about one of his favorite players, "Bing Bang."

Bernanke Speaks

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke joined us this morning for an on-the-record conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations. He called for "consolidated government supervision" of financial institutions, underscoring the need to deter efforts by companies in the future to shift excessive risks from more to less regulated markets. If human nature is any guide, we will be be reading stories in the not-too-distant future of corner-cutting financial buccaneers trying to shield themselves from appropriate risk regulation and ultimate accountability.

The Chairman also contended that the current financial crisis should, once and for all, end the unthinking, cliched view that markets somehow fix themselves. Wrong! Markets can profoundly screw themselves up, especially with government complicity. However, markets in the current condition can and will not correct themselves naturally, at least not in time to prevent outright economic disaster. There is simply no such thing as pure laissez-faire capitalism, though some cling to the view for ideological reasons. As stated elsewhere on this blog, we are all most definitely Keynesians now.

Bernanke also spoke of the lamentable procyclical effects of poor government regulation. He is pointing here to our all-too-human bandwagon tendencies to stimulate even greater access to credit in boom times, when excessive credit is unneeded and unhelpful, while slamming credit availability shut during credit crunches when it is otherwise so desperately needed. It's easy to lend in good times and to bolt the doors shut in tough times, although the effects of doing so can be catastrophic. I have sat in many credit committees over the years. Real leadership emerges when, for example, bankers understand an innovative vision in tough times and finance it as part of economic recovery. Lemmings need not apply!

Finally, the MIT-trained economist and scholar of the Great Depression cited two lessons from the 1930s. First, he reiterated that monetary policy needs to be supportive and not restrictive in a crisis. The Federal Reserve Bank of the Great Depression spurned easing credit and was far too conservative in its approach. By contrast, today's Fed has been aggressive with interest rates and other countries are now following suit. Then, he added that the Fed of the 1930s also chose not to intervene in bank failures, a hands-off attitude that exacerbated the contagion of fear and added to our illiquidity.

Recurring Dreams And Nightmares

On TO And World Baseball

The sports news today is completely predictable. Once again, Terrell Owens (TO) is available on the NFL free-agent market. Just as the sun rises in the morning, some foolish team will now take an expensive gamble on this character and discover in short time that they have wasted their money and decreased their franchise value. Yes, TO will sell a few thousand additional tickets in his first year with a new team. However, his sociopathic behaviors will soon metastasize throughout the organization. Why are we so incapable of learning from history and seeing the obvious?

We have been at this point before, reinforced by my blog entry three years ago (below). Has anything changed in the TO category? No!

Sunday, March 19, 2006
TO or not TO?
San Diego

The Dallas Cowboys signed controversial receiver Terrell Owens yesterday. He is a predictably destabilizing force for any organization. Like too many people in the business of acquiring talent, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is gambling that TO's extraordinary ability will trump his pathological foolishness. Don't bet on it.

Hasn't the New England Patriots' success demonstrated the advantages that come with excellent strategy, superb execution and a selfless team orientation? Consider that the finalists of the inaugural World Baseball Classic here -- Cuba and Japan -- place individual star power behind cunning strategy, sound fundamentals and a focus on execution. After elimination of high-profile All-Star squads from the U.S., Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, tomorrow night's final features just two players on MLB rosters.

Terrell Owens will make a great deal of news for "America's team," some of it predictably ridiculous.

Interestingly, that TO chapter was occurring as the then-maiden voyage of the World Baseball Classic was reaching its conclusion (photos below). Yes, sports talk-show hosts are supposed to motivate feisty conversation, however inauthentic. But why is that seven-plus years after the events of September 11, 2001, we continue to have such difficulty understanding if not embracing events beyond our borders? To listen to some of the talk-show crowd - the hosts and not the callers - the current World Baseball Classic is some kind of ridiculous amateur sideshow in which "nobody" has any interest. Oh, those must have been mannequins this morning packing the Tokyo Dome to the rafters to witness Japan's utter dismantling of Korea.

Why does the American global lens continue to be so narrow? After all, those of us who knew about Daisuke Matsuzaka in 2005 did so because we attended games in Japan and later saw his conquest of Cuba in the 2006 WBC, just as the Red Sox fans among us now long for the services of the Nippon Ham Fighters young ace Ya Darvish. Why are these talk-show hosts really saying about themselves and about us when they make fun of the pronunciation of players' names from other countries, profess no interest in the tournament, suggest that our best players are better off engaging in less-meaningful spring training contests, and proclaim that "nobody" has any interest.

Yes, I'm biased. And yes, the WBC is mainly about money. Still, I have enjoyed international baseball over the years at the Caribbean World Series, in Japan, and at the initial WBC. Try it; you will like it. You may also see its potential for creating ever-greater numbers of peer-to-peer exchanges between and among peoples of different cultures. The world can remain a hopeful place if things like baseball still have the power to unite us and yet, in turn, we demonstrate the power to detach ourselves from the TO-like personalities that will only divide us.

Scenes from the 2006 WBC in San Diego.

Rashomon, Encore Edition

Singapore

It has been over 30 years since I last viewed the Kurosawa-Miyagawa classic film, Rashomon. (1950). How can it be that people see the exact same events and interpret them so very differently, as is the case here in the rape of the woman and murder of her husband?

This question is certainly the scourge of courtroom lawyers and anyone else who tries to discern truth (or at least their version of it) from the same set of facts. Our personal ontologies blind us to reality and especially to the realities of other people’s lives. We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear to avoid the hard work of rising above ourselves. This is why a liberal and a conservative, each of whom derives so much self-identity from their chosen labels and the lockstep theologies they require, will use a political speech only to validate their own beliefs and discredit non-conforming ones. The cognitive dissonance that the truth produces can be otherwise too painful to bear.

For those of you who know the movie, the woodcutter’s agreement at the end of the film to take the abandoned baby home to raise it as his own fills the priest with renewed hope for humanity. This provides a welcome metaphor for where we are today as a people. Getting to a better place, however, will require each of us to work that much harder to surrender clichéd views of the past and open wide to seeing and hearing the possibilities of some very different futures.

p.s. Rashomon is a classic, but my favorite Kurosawa film is the 1966 Heaven and Earth (aka High and Low) also starring Toshiro Mifune and set in mid-1960s Tokyo.

The Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple in Singapore's Chinatown, of all places.

Singapore Tops The List

Singapore

It is no surprise that Singapore placed first in global innovation and competitiveness in a recent survey undertaken by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. I do not know this group and cannot vouch for the methodologies used in their work. However, the United States ranked sixth overall in this widely reported study behind Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and South Korea.

Particularly disturbing for we Americans is a finding that places us 40th and last in terms of innovation over the past 10 years. One case in point is the claim that while Singapore and South Korea increased corporate R&D investment over the past three years, the United States actually shrunk private R&D expenditures by 5 percent. How breathtakingly abysmal historians will someday label the state of American public- and private-sector leadership in the 2000s. There may now well be nowhere to go now but up.

p.s. Kusu Island is a fairly remote place outside Singapore’s Harbor. It is certainly worth the trip, however, to enter the 90-degree waters here and gaze at the Indonesian islands of Batam and Bintan on the horizon.

Icons on and enroute to Kusu Island.

The Mozart of Madras

Singapore

How wonderful it is to see the “Mozart of Madras,” the incomparable A.R. Rahman win two Oscars for his musical score for Slumdog Millionaire. The CD has completely sold out on this island just one day after Rahman’s well-deserved recognition by Hollywood.

As an African-American President of the United States attempts a political, financial and moral recovery like no other, our nation now finds an appetite to award Oscars to three Muslims including Rahman, his lyricist Gulzar and soundman Resul Pookutty. It is a hopeful moment. Maybe we can move beyond ourselves.

Peter Gabriel’s work provided my first introduction to the musical diaspora represented by Sufi-convert-from-Hinduism Rahman and others. The blend of Sufi mysticism, Afro-pop, Arab hip-hop, Tamil folk, western rock and much more conveys an energy that one readily feels in Singapore, Tokyo, Mumbai and Istanbul these days. It sure beats the Gordon Lightfoot muzak playing here at the Sheraton Grand Towers. Salamat!

p.s. Try the murtabak (chicken, onion, garlic and spices in traditional Malay bread with curry sauce) at Zam Zam on Arab Street across from the Sultan Mosque here, where there are no Americans or Europeans to be found anywhere.




Scenes from Singapore's Chinatown.

Shipping News And Other Fears

Singapore

The number of heavy cargo ships idle here in Singapore's harbor bears brutal witness to the depths of this recession. So little merchandise is shipping through these Straits of Malacca that efforts are being made to rent cargo carriers for one-tenth the going rate. One reads in The Straits Times and elsewhere that citizens here cannot recall a time when so much shipping was dormant.

And speaking about scary, one can only grimace at the dangerous rightward shift of the Israeli government. Yes, tough times coupled with perceptions of insecurity generally reward those who sell fear, anger and hatred. As if a return to Bibi Netanyahu is not bad enough, however, his re-emergence is being made possible with support from ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman, head of the far-right Yisrael Beiteini and a dangerous guy. There is hardly any doubt that this rightward shift will deepen the current crisis there and result in a failed government. The question in these reactionary thrusts is always how many more lives will be sacrificed and how much precious time wasted before more rational, centrist adjustments are made?

The news in the fear-mongering department is not much better in Moscow, either. What a profound tragedy it is that the two Chechen accessories to the October 2006 murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya were acquitted this week. Everyone knows these clowns were accessories before, during and after the fact, but that they are not Politkovskaya's muderers. Unhappily, it seems, nobody will ever face justice for actually killing this brave PEN and Amnesty award-winning woman who dared to write truth to power about then-President Vladimir Putin. The result? Well, such political witchhunts continue with Putin allies and other crazies feeling completely empowered to keep killing anyone who threatens them. Just witness last month's assassinations of human rights attorney Stanislav Markelov and young journalist Anastasia Barburova. Few can imagine the extent of murderous totalitarian rule as is the case today in Mother Russia.

A vendor on Desker Street in Singapore's Little India today.

Strategic Distraction

We heard last night at The Council on Foreign Relations from The New York Times' chief Washington correspondent, David Sanger. I have just added his new book The Inheritance to the reading pile. The "inheritance" he refers to are the many messes President Obama now inherits from his predecessor and some policy prescriptions to address them.

Sanger said that among the most unfortunate aspects of the previous Administration's fixation on the Iraq War have been the terrible "costs of strategic distraction." This notion of strategic distraction should be an essential consideration in every organization. How little energy we invest in calibrating opportunity costs in ways that will help us limit or prevent them in the future. Of course, it is easier to consider outcomes stemming from actions that have been attempted or undertaken. Accountability in these scenarios is detectable although not always ascribable. On the other hand, we make it so hard even to discuss accountability and develop lessons learned for actions not attempted or undertaken because, well, they were crowded out by other less worthy pursuits.

It's a creative leap, for sure, but one could imagine opportunity costs somehow appearing on a corporate balance sheet or income statement. For every firm that discovered or invented something amazing, how many of its competitors with access to the same or similar talent, technology and market intelligence simply missed it. What were they doing when the other guy pulled the end run and disrupted the market with breakthrough innovation? Strategic distraction matters in concept because how we spend or fail to spend our time and money matters in reality.

Auntie Beeb No More

BBC Worldwide Chief Executive John Smith was in Boston last night to spread the word about the impressive growth of the BBC's commercial arm. Smith is a finance and accounting professional by training and he is repositioning BBC Worldwide as a profit-oriented business.

Changing the internal culture of this segment of Auntie Beeb must be a substantial and recurring challenge. As Smith focuses on matters of external image, he and his executive team must also be wrestling with the issues associated with changing their internal identity, too. BBC Worldwide maintains six business segments - Channels, Sales & Distribution, Magazines, Home Entertainment, Content & Production, Digital Media and Global Brands - with 2,800 brands distributed to 200 countries. It may represent one of the biggest multimedia powerhouses that so few people know about, at least in the United States. If Americans think about the BBC at all, which is rare, it is likely in connection with the World Service Radio or even venerable productions such as Monty Python or Fawlty Towers.

BBC Worldwide is talented, creative and energetic. Like everyone in this business, they are chasing the youth market for its celebrated appeal to advertisers and sponsors. It is always a balancing act, however, to shake loose older customers - who actually have most of the disposable income - while hoping to appeal to the highly fickle youth category. There may already be 50 networks in the United States chasing this ever-changing "youth vote." In doing so, too many of the longstanding, quality media players risk losing their self-identities if not their souls.

I have been an ardent fan of the Beeb since I was 14 years old. I suppose I'm in that older base of customers who love the BBC World News, Planet Earth and some of the better shows - and use a few of their excellent Lonely Planet travel guides, too - but recoil at some of the tragically hip programming that seems even more saturated these days with advertising than what one finds even on the traditional American networks. Except, of course, this apparent level of advertising serves as testimony to the effectiveness of Smith and his team. Don't bet against them. Here's a team that jump-started three new television networks in India just last year.

BBC Worldwide's objectives and business plan sound just right in this context, but these balancing acts between programming quality and commercial success are never easy. Interestingly, Smith underscored the importance of the U.S. market last night, reminding us that we are five times larger than the next national market. He left us with at least two other interesting data points. First, Americans watched 142 an astonishing 142 hours of television per month in 2008, up from 2007. Plus, 100 million people watched five billion videos on YouTube in 2008.

Much Work To Do

How extraordinary it is to learn that 1.5 million people gathered in Washington for yesterday's historic Inauguration without a single arrest. This says something remarkable about the power of hope and the potential of leadership. I truly believe this. Now, having said it, the reality of what surrounded that extraordinary turnout yesterday is a U.S. capital city in which School Chancellor Michelle Rhee tells us only 12 percent of eighth-grade graduates meet baseline reading requirements while just 8 percent meet the minimum standards for mathematics. How is this possible? And why is it that we accept such an appalling circumstance?

True, But Obvious

Columbus, Ohio

I have long respected Bob Gates. I believe our Defense Secretary to be an effective leader. I had the honor of hosting him several times at the World Affairs Council of Boston and he strikes me as a decent, reasonable guy. How far have we dipped, however, to be told by Secretary Gates that, “over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory.” No kidding! The national security lessons are pretty rudimentary these days when somebody of Gates’ caliber has to remind us what a college freshman learns in any basic foreign policy survey course. Chalk it up as yet another reminder of how far down the Bush Administration propelled us.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009), Gates echoes J. Anthony Holmes’ sentiments (below) that much greater balance is needed between defense and diplomacy. He wrote that “we should be modest about what military force can accomplish and what technology can accomplish.” Yes, but try telling that to the civilian defense decision-makers who think, somehow, that war can be made clinical and antiseptic. Far from it! Gates understands, as he writes, that “war is inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain and it is important to be skeptical of systems analyses, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise.” War is human. In fact, it is among the lowest common denominators of human existence.

p.s. There is a good reason why Food and Wine Magazine once named Lorenzo Savona the Best Sommelier in Boston. We first knew of his outstanding taste back when he owned Les Zygomates in Boston. He is now wine director and co-owner of the superb Tomasso Trattoria where, last Friday night, he introduced me to a new Super Tuscan. The 1999 Flaccianolla della Pieve from the Fontodi Estate is 100 percent Sangiovese grape and absolutely superb. Try some.

Creativity The Right Way

Delray Beach, Florida

Nancy Schaffer of the Tribeca Film Festival recently told The New York Times that Qatar is a vastly more sophisticated haven for culture and arts than most other Persian Gulf nations. “Doha is much less flashy and more sophisticated than some of its Arab counterparts,” she said.

Dubai should take notice of how to do things the right way, at least in this context. Money buys most anything, but credit for doing so with acumen and some minimal measure of class owes in large part to Qatar’s Sheikha Mozah and her daughter Sheikha al Mayassa. It turns out that the Duke-educated Sheikha al Mayassa interned at Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Productions, without ever telling her Tribeca employers at the time that she was one of the wealthiest young women in the world. The Sheikhas' imprint is all over the nation, which we discovered there firsthand last year at Education City as well as in a raft of art galleries in Doha’s Souk Waqif. Of course, the new I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art is now the signature building on Doha’s corniche and DeNiro expects to open a Tribeca Film Festival there soon. It sure beats Dubai’s indoor ski slope.

How interesting it is to learn that Roger Mandle, the former Rhode Island School of Design president, is now that executive director of the Qatar Museums Authorities. Roger helped us develop and launch the Creative Economy Council in the late ‘90s. I wondered what had happened to Roger after discovering the compelling new RISD president several weeks ago, the new-media guru John Maeda. Maeda's integrated background in computer science, graphic design and fine arts coupled with his most recent stint as an associate director at MIT's Media Lab will serve RISD well.

What I like so much about Maeda, and what we tried to communicate with the Creative Economy Council with only marginal results, is that there is no longer any line between creative and commercial enterprise. Much to the detriment of our culture and economy, old stereotypes linger that place "the arts" in the non-profit sector somehow divorced from all the creative energies found in technology, new-media, publishing, advertising, music, cuisine and so much more. Maeda gets this point because he knows no other way. One suspects that Sheikha al Mayassa, Roger Mandle and their colleagues in Doha get it, too. We need to do a much better job of "getting it" in New England, too.

Reinvest In The Foreign Service

Palm Beach

The Council on Foreign Relations’ J. Anthony Holmes writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009) what we already know to be painfully true. The Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development have been thoroughly gutted over the last decade. In essence, the greatest country on the planet has very little capacity to carry out sustained diplomacy everywhere it is needed. Far too many national security, intelligence, diplomatic, peacekeeping and nation-building requirements have been deposited in a Defense Department that is both operationally inappropriate and philosophically ill-suited to handle some of them. Just ask the best colonels when their armchair-warrior politician bosses are not in the room, and they’ll validate this contention.

Holmes writes that the number of lawyers at Defense exceeds the entire U.S. diplomatic corps and that there are more musicians in military bands than there are U.S. diplomats. I have worked with many of those military bands, so this is no knock on them. It is simply a matter of proportion. Holmes also notes that the 2008 DOD budget was over 24 times as large as the combined State and USAID budgets. No serious analyst would argue for anything less than a robust defense budget in these treacherous times, but the imbalance here borders on insanity.

If the United States stands any shot at rebuilding its position in the world, we will need to reinvest mightily in the Foreign Service and place it on a somewhat more equitable status with the military. The only major weakness in Holmes’ argument is predictably placing 100 percent of the blame for this situation on the train wreck otherwise known as the Bush Administration. To be fair, the disinvestment in diplomacy long preceded George Bush and Condi Rice. They complicated and magnified the dilemma exponentially, as they did most things. But they didn’t start it.

p.s. You know, The Breakers never gets old. We enjoyed a delightful dinner just yards in front of a frothy Atlantic and an even frothier young coupled embraced in a lip lock for, oh, 20 minutes. And they say halon removes oxygen from the room.

Milgram Redux

The infamous 1963 Milgram experiments taught us something very painful about blind obedience to leadership. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to know why seemingly decent German citizens long supported Hitler's monstrous regime. The original Milgram research demonstrated that otherwise ordinary New Haven residents were willing to administer increasingly violent electric shocks to "learners" in another room who failed to answer quiz questions correctly. Of course, the shocks were not real. However, the participants thought they were real. People readily administered what seemed to be painful shocks to their fellow citizens because some guy in a lab coat and badge told them to do so. In the original experiment, 80 percent of participants administered 150-volt shocks and 65 percent took the punishment right up to 450 volts.

We wondered at the time how it was possible for good people to lose sight of right and wrong in the presence of authority, however twisted. Well, keep wondering! Jeffrey Burger of Santa Clara University recently replicated Milgram's study. After four decades of exposure to Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Clinton and Monica, Iraq, Abu Ghraib and many other abominations, polls consistently tell us the unfortunate news that Americans are far less trusting of our leaders. Still, Burger showed that 70 percent of participants delivered a 150-volt shock simply because some guy in a lab coat told them to do so. Sure, some of the outcome is contextual and not especially generalizable. However, there is clearly something innate in humans that finds us ready to follow obviously terrible orders. This fact has long been intuitively understood and recklessly exploited by the likes of Mussolini, Mao and Mugabe.

Recognizing this unfortunate aspect of human nature, the challenge becomes one of effectively advancing and protecting the laws, educational approaches, social systems and media mechanisms needed to prevent our next march to folly.

p.s. Students in the wonderful Denzel Washington-Oprah Winfrey film, The Great Debaters, were asked the age-old question whether it is ever moral to engage in civil disobedience. Apropos of the above discussion, it seems we have long confronted the inherent tensions created by leaders and laws that are unjust, immoral and ultimately proven to be illegal.

Ah, The Children

There they go again. Why is it that disgraced politicians - let's see, we have Boston's Chuck Turner and Diane Wilkerson and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich among the recent bumper crop of failed public servants - always spin appropriate legal and public reactions to their wrongdoing as an assault on the people? Remember when Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) said that "a cloud hangs over Idaho" when he was caught in that Minneapolis men's room? No cloud there, Senator. Idahoans had nothing to do with your unfortunate conduct. (See Where Do Clouds Hang?, September 1, 2007)

The utterly preposterous Blagojevich said on Friday, "Afford me the same rights that you and your children have - the presumption of innocence." As any self-serving politician knows, it's always good to work "children" into the conversation. Okay, if a child-Governor was saying and doing the things Blagojevich has been saying and doing, that child's parents would insist that he or she resign from office. Blagojevich may be legally exonerated someday, perhaps on a technicality. Who knows? But his ethical and moral breaches coupled with his sociopathy means that he must leave the public arena, now and forever. It has nothing to do with legal guilt. Otherwise, Governor, what lessons are the children of Illinois to learn from your conduct? And what costs will Illinois incur over the coming days and weeks as a result of your selfishness?

The Conflict Barometer

The Heidelberg Institute released its annual Conflict Barometer this week. Not much has changed in recent years. Some 345 conflicts were cited globally in 2008, 39 using "massive force" and 95 marked by "sporadic use of violence" in the Institute's words.

We all know of longstanding conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan as well as violent eruptions this year in Georgia, Kenya and Pakistan. Let's remember, too, that Armenia remains in conflict with Azerbaijan, the Sri Lankan civil war lingers in seeming perpetuity, the Turks continue to fight the PKK separatists and the Congolese civil conflict is still flourishing.

These data are always harrowing. However, Fareed Zakaria reminds us in the Post-American World (2008) that the number of global conflicts these days is down considerably from previous decades and even centuries. It is sometimes hard to believe, since the media now make every conflict so readily available to us, but we are less prone to war than ever before in our history. Reason for hope?

Bob Gates On Leadership

Defense Secretary Bob Gates told Council on Foreign Relations members last night that great chief executives welcome diverse points of view. Having served seven U.S. Presidents, Gates believes the best of them are "liberated" by environments in which people are free to speak openly. He told us that the drive toward consensus typically produces mediocre results, especially when that consensus is shaped by what everyone thinks the boss wants. Yes, Gates' assertion is obvious. Varied perspectives generally do produce better-informed decisions. So why are most bosses so terrible at encouraging, sustaining and applying diverse perspectives?

Gates was previously president of Texas A&M. He jokingly told us that the political dimensions of his job there were tougher than at CIA or the Defense Department. He said that each of the three public institutions share many traits, particularly deeply entrenched cultures populated by long-term employees and consultants resistant to change. He offered one case in point of a DOD, now and seemingly forever, sharing with defense contractors, K Street lobbyists and national security interests at our leading universities a selfish institutional bias toward slow, inefficient and vastly inflated big-ticket procurement. He said that "DOD doesn't do speed well," which by its very nature is a profound national security threat.

Fingers Crossed

Houston

The world is potentially a far better place with the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. Presidency. However, "potential" remains the operative word. First, the bleak moment we are in coupled with the unusually powerful charisma of President-elect Obama have raised expectations for his leadership performance beyond what might be considered reasonable. He needs to reduce unrealistic expectations in coming days, knowing full well that what is left of the Republican attack machine will start a vigorous, four-year effort to undermine him any minute now. Just wait.

The truth is that it took the last three decades of arrogance and the last eight years of utter incompetence in Washington DC to create today's mess. Sadly, it will take many years to repair it. No amount of Potemkin village-like “morning in America” superficiality will solve today’s deeply entrenched and thoroughly intertwined challenges. Also, it is always instructive to remember what President Harry Truman said about what he predicted would be President-elect Eisenhower's disillusionment in actually trying to get something accomplished from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To paraphrase Truman, "That General is going to come in here and give orders and think that people will actually carry them out." Ike never quite got his arms around the bureaucracy. Let’s hope for all of us that President-elect Obama fares better.

Crowing About Innovation

Houston

I found myself agreeing with virtually every word Arizona State University President Michael Crow said here at the College Board Forum about the lack of innovation in higher education these days. Not lacking in self confidence, Crow is pointed about the changes colleges and universities must embrace if they are to compete effectively in today's global economy.

Crow is right in arguing that most college vision and mission statements are bland, meaningless offerings that fail to differentiate one institution from another. He is correct in stressing the importance of what he calls "intellectual fusion" on college campuses, exhorting rigidly separated academic disciplines to work together in an interdisciplinary manner that mirrors how the world actually works. He is absolutely right in calling for administrators to speed it up, considerably. He distinguishes between "university time" and "civilian time," urging colleges to move much, much faster in making and implementing decisions. Finally, Crow says we "need to quit patting ourselves on the back and get real" about the collective lack of innovation in higher education. Well, the data Richard Rodriguez's panel shared with us last night suggests Crow is right and the time to act is now - fast!

p.s. Downtown Houston remains an uninspiring, desolate place. However, Vic and Anthony's Restaurant is a welcome oasis, at least if your taste runs to gigantic Texas steaks and dark, wood-paneled solemnity.

America's Place

Houston

The commentator and essayist Richard Rodriguez moderated a panel here tonight at the annual College Board Forum. One marvels at a deliberate speech cadence that makes his every utterance seem thoughtful and worthy of our attention. Rodriguez exemplifies the power of speaking softly and, conversely, how easy it is is to dismiss the blowhard's diatribe.

Rodriguez asked about America's place in the global knowledge economy, and the answers were ominous. Whereas the U.S. ranked 1st in global college graduation rates as recently as 1995, we now rank 15th. While we continue to rank 1st in the age 55-64cohort in percentage of college graduates, we are now 13th in the 25-34 cohort. We are slipping and the consequences are dire.

Feature Image: Pond Near Mt. Wachusett

The handiwork of beavers combines here with the serendipity of optical illusion.

Turkish Temperament

Well, Turkey is at again. Readers know of my affection for this wonderful country. Unfortunately, that high regard always seems coupled with astonishment over Turkey's penchant for engaging in self-defeating activities. In a page ripped from Beijing's playbook, the government announced last week that it had banned 850 websites including Blogger and YouTube. This is yet another setback for those of us who support Turkey's accession to the European Union.

If Istanbul can't take the heat of today's technology, they risk removing themselves from the kitchen of modernity. It is hard to understand such overreactions to the occasional and even unwise mockeries of Ataturk or other forms of political opposition. Mustafa Akgul summed up the heavy handedness best when he told the Christian Science Monitor (October 30), "It's like having a huge library and finding an error on a page in one book and closing down the entire library." Whether it's burning books or shutting down websites, those who fear the free flow of information always fail in the end. Closed systems naturally devolve to entropy.

p.s. One can only assume that GE Chairman & CEO Jeff Immelt is accurate when he says in stump speeches that the United States graduates more majors in sports management than electrical engineering. If we are to compete effectively with China and India in the coming decades, we must understand the primary factors shaping economic competitiveness, acknowledge that these subjects are rigorous for very good reason, and motivate young people to pursue them.

Imagine That

The 9-11 Commission suggested in its 2004 report that the September 11th terrorist attacks were not prevented, in part, because they were never imagined. The commissioners labeled it a distinct "failure of imagination" among U.S. policymakers. Despite endless fictional portrayals of airplanes crashing into skyscrapers over many decades, nobody in senior government circles ever imagined its possibility. Creativity it seems is not especially valued in some government circles, although it often makes the difference between success and failure in policymaking and governance.

There is little doubt the business-as-usual crowd thinks that one of Stephen Kinzer's imaginative ideas for Afghanistan is crazy. Quite the contrary. Kinzer is a creative thinker whose ideas often appeal, especially during tough times when people are open to new ways of doing things (See Rwanda Rebirth entry, June 26, 2008). He suggested in a recent Boston Globe column that instead of bombing villages in Afghanistan in search of Taliban, and earning the lifelong enmity of countless Afghans, we consider more constructive long-term approaches.

For example, the economy of Afghanistan relies immensely on poppies used for production of opium and other drugs. Kinzer writes that, "the country will not be stable as long as the poppy trade provides huge sums of money for violent militants." However, trying to eradicate poppies is an unachievable objective and what little we destroy in non-stop spray-and-burn campaigns once again works against us by needlessly creating enemies on the ground whose livelihoods depend solely on this crop. Instead, Kinzer suggests that the U.S. "should allow planting to proceed unmolested, and then buy the entire crop and burn it." We are spending much more than the $4 billion annual value of the crop in spraying, burning, bombing and enemy-making. That's why Kinzer adds,"That sum would be better spent putting cash into the pockets of Afghan peasants than firing missiles into their villages."

So many bold, creative ideas seem politically untenable at first. This imaginative offering, suggested in different forms in the past, deserves study amidst the growing recognition that too many of the old ways are broken.

On Courage: Martti Ahtisaari

The world is far better place for the likes of former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. He is not exactly a household name in the United States, but he should be. I will trade you one Ahtisaari for 10,000 Paris Hiltons. Finally, this global mediator par excellence received his just reward yesterday with the announcement that he has won the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

Ahtisaari has been on the front lines of peacemaking for decades, from Namibia and South Africa to Banda Aceh and Kosovo. He now heads the Crisis Management Initiative based in Helsinki (learn more by clicking on title of this blog). This good man reinforces the essential value of discipline, maturity, patience and creativity in the name of peace, contrasted as these qualities are with the boorishness, arrogance, hate-mongering and propensity for needless war found in too many of those who purport to lead us today. There are better ways, and they are available to us in the work and wisdom of Nobel Laureate Martti Ahtisaari.

p.s. And speaking of boorishness, why is that Boston Celtics' legend Bob Cousy has to find out that he is being fired from his Comcast in-game commentary role via telephone and from somebody he barely knows. I'm sure Comcast leadership locally were always pleased to pose with Cousy in publicity shots over the years. So where were they when the hard call had to be made? Yes, in the usual places. People are too often fired by individuals who are not their bosses in tasteless, classless and uncaring ways or, worse, by e-mail or in the newspapers. As somebody who has had to fire more than a few individuals over the years, some of them good employees and some of them not, I suggest following the Golden Rule of treating others the way we wish to be treated. Cousy deserved better.