On Leadership

There's Hope.

2011-11-13T16:50:00.000-05:00

Minneapolis

The never-ending merry-go-round of horrible leadership examples is spinning out of control these days. And yet, two shining examples emerge amidst the heinous Penn State scandals, long-overdue departures of George Papandreou and the contemptible Silvio Berlusconi, the soon-to-be "perp walking" ex-MF Global chief Jon Corzine, and the foolishness of Herman Cain and most of the field of U.S. Presidential candidates.

Dover Air Force Base mortuary employees James Parsons, Mary Ellen Spera and Bill Zwicharowski had repeatedly tried to tell their supervisors about gross malpractices at the nation's largest military mortuary. As is so often the case in these situations, however, their concerns fell on deaf ears. The predictable inclination to protect one's institution and one's career suffocated their dissent. And yet, these three persistent professionals went outside the chain of command to express their legitimate concerns and, well, justice has now been served. Unlike Paterno, McQuery and the entire Penn State crowd, these brave three transcended institutional insularity and rose to a their leadership moment.

Then there's retired NHL veteran Theo Fleury. He was one of those scrappy guys you hated when he played for opposing teams, but his recent work underscores that this man is a leader. He wrote the best-selling novel, Playing With Fire last year in which he spoke to the pain of longstanding sexual abuse at the hands of a criminally deranged coach and that coach's enablers. As the Penn State scandal unfolds for the next year and more, Fleury has been an important, informed voice on the subject of sexual abuse. His work with kids recovering from these unspeakable crimes is certainly to be commended.

Folks like Theo Fleury and the "Dover" whistleblowers should make us proud as we nonetheless feel such profound shame about so many others - insulated and invidious - who dare to think of themselves as leaders.

Connecting Dots, Incorrectly

2011-09-16T15:17:00.006-04:00

It was a surprise, to say the least. I was almost through a September 8th Fouad Ajami column in The Wall Street Journal and found myself in agreement with it. And then it happened. What was a reasonable piece concluded - as the From 9/11 to the Arab Spring headline promised – by making dubious connections between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and this year's Arab Spring.

Ajami writes, "The spectacle of the Iraqi despot (Saddam Hussein) flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism." He continued, "America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn’t brilliant at everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history."

This is dangerous, post-facto rationalization. It’s also a patronizing attempt to suggest that we Americans are the chosen ones, somehow destined in this context to give other peoples their “chance.” To the contrary, our choice to enter Iraq in 2003 continues to embitter the Arab Street. To act as if that decision somehow empowered if not mobilized people to rise up against dictators is dangerous revisionism. Qaddafi aside, most of these dictators were or are our “friends” anyway, and nobody knows that better than the Arab people. It is not clear what the Arab Spring will ultimately look like through the long lens of history. One thing is clear right now, however; it occurred in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia - and perhaps Syria - in spite of and not because of the Iraq War.

So what is said of people who jump off the deep in, for example, continuing to rationalize the Iraq War? They’re all wet! As next year's 10th anniversary of the war approaches, we'll need much greater scrutiny of these kind of claims if we are to separate fact from self-justifying fiction. We were faulted once for not connecting the dots. Claims like Ajami’s, however, connect them incorrectly.

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Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

2011-05-26T20:53:00.004-04:00

Detroit, MI

This is the problem with Berlusconi. Well, actually, there are many problems with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. But here’s one very big one. His fear of an unprecedented Center-Right defeat in Milan’s mayoral elections, fueled by a stunning loss in the first round last week, finds Berlusconi and his henchmen resorting to predictable scare tactics and – guess what? – attacking immigrants and less-than-pure Italians. Sound familiar?

With breathless claims of “Zingarapoli,” suggesting that Milan will become a sinister “Gypsy City” should the Center-Left win the mayoralty, Berlusconi is playing the petty hatred card to stoke fear and scare the vote his way. Right wingers in Europe frequently fiddle the “blame the Gypsies” tune when made insecure by economic or political misfortune or its prospect. The Le Pens in France would gladly make Gypsies the primary focus of their scorn and ridicule, too, except they have more convenient targets for their selfish, xenophobic scare tactics – North Africans.

Here’s the point that Berlusconi and anti-immigrant crowds everywhere completely miss. Nations such as Italy, Japan and Russia, for example, are confronting huge demographic time bombs. Simply put, they’re not producing enough young people to fuel future economic productivity and consumption and, as alarming, take care of all the old people. It’s the opposite problem facing Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have staggeringly large populations of restless (and unemployed) young people. Without immigrants and people of mixed heritage, Italy risks suffocating its own economic growth and regional clout. This point is conveniently lost on U.S. right-wingers, too, who can’t dare to imagine where this nation would be economically and in other ways without the energy, creativity, labor and innovation of immigrant communities.

There is good news from Milan, though. The Financial Times and other European media are suggesting that Berlusconi’s fear-mongering may be backfiring. Despite serving as Berlusconi’s power base, Milan is a considerably sophisticated place. And now even the conservative Catholic Church there is debunking “Zingarapoli” and, in doing so, perhaps thwarting Berlusconi’s efforts to steal an election by blaming “the other.” Wouldn't it be nice to send a message to Russian nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Japanese arch-conservatives, right-wing Hindu extremists and ignorant, vein-popping haters in this country that this garbage isn’t going to work anymore?

To those of us hoping we can grow beyond self-serving politicians pandering to primordial base instincts, this weekend’s run-off election in Milan may provide some comfort. There’s reason to hope.....but don’t hold your breath.

Y Not?

2011-05-07T08:18:00.013-04:00

The Woodrow Wilson Center has just published A National Strategic Narrative, which should be required reading for any serious contender for national public office. Published under the pseudonym "Mr. Y," evoking George Kennan's 1947 "Mr. X" essay The Sources of Soviet Conduct , the piece argues that in our new interconnected global system the United States must invest less in defense and more in sustainable prosperity and renewed global engagement.

No kidding, right? Except Mr. Y is actually two of Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen's top strategic thinkers, Captain Wayne Porter, USN and Colonel Mark Mykleby, USMC. This really shouldn't be a surprise. Many of the Pentagon's best thinkers have long maintained that old systems of fear-based containment - be they focused on Communism or Terrorism - are calcifying in the face of today's Internet-accelerated, asynchronous, and sometimes-unpredictable open systems. Indeed, both Mullen and Defense Secretary Gates have delivered major speeches on the need to demilitarize U.S. foreign policy. Amen! The problem is politicians and large defense contractors who insist on their big fat slabs of pork in the form of expensive and even needless weapons systems designed to fight the last war; platforms that Gates, Mullen, and many of our top warriors say they don't need and don't want.

Porter and Mykleby urge Americans to compete on innovation and trade with a renewed willingness to invest in education, infrastructure, and alternative energy sources. Yes, they fully understand that our deficit and debt addiction is our greatest national security threat. They realize, however, that reducing the deficit has much to do with appropriately calibrated withdrawals from the $3 trillion Afghanistan and Iraq forays, reductions in gold-plated weapons systems that are unneeded and unwanted by so many people in uniform, and wise, serious restructuring of entitlements.

What they and most thinking people "get," but that otherwise eludes too many politicians and pundits, is that deficit and debt reduction cannot come at the expense of addressing our second and third most serious national security challenges - energy and education. We do need to walk and chew gum at the same time. Seriously, can there be any doubt that finding alternative sources of energy for a post-oil world and ridding ourselves of reliance on the likes of Saudi Arabia is a more serious existential challenge than terrorism? Can there be any questioning that our broken K-12 mediocracy is more of a clear and present danger than terrorism? No!

Besides, how should a proud and patriotic American feel about this country spending more on defense - in what has become something of a national security state - than the rest of the world combined and at a time of untenable deficits? Well, I feel that something is very wrong. It's made so much worse by any media focus whatsoever on clowns like Bachmann, Palin, Gingrich, Trump and even Huckabee and Santorum. Mullen, Porter and Mykleby are real leaders and they are showing us the way? Will we listen?

p.s. Captain Williams and I served for a week with Admiral Mullen in the mid-90s. You'd be hard pressed to find a better leader and Naval officer, whose well-deserved retirement from service later this year is nonetheless making me squeamish.

Low Post

2011-05-04T19:30:00.002-04:00

The Washington Post was once a great newspaper. Those days are long gone, for sure. Its dwindling size and relevance is now only surpassed by its lack of judgment and good taste. Imagine any serious organization hosting Donald Trump at a public event right now, as the Post did at Saturday's White House Correspondents' Association dinner?

Trump's asinine behavior, race-baiting, self-aggrandizement, appalling lack of knowledge about public, foreign and economic policy, and flat-out lying are a shame to this nation. Worse, Trump's nonsense has been a costly strategic distraction at a time when we need serious people engaged in serious issues. It's one thing for TMZ, The Hollywood Dish, The National Enquirer or Fox News to cover, honor, or host this guy, but not the once-fabled Post.

Memo to Washington Post heir and celebrity interviewer Lally Weymouth, or whomever concocted this beaut of an idea, some suggestions for next year's dinner include Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and the ghosts of George Wallace and Father Coughlin.

Still, there are four welcome developments here. First, Osama Bin Laden's death has removed Trump and the birthers from the top of the news, let's hope permanently. Second, the Post's Dana Milbank did a fine job using his column to question his management's thinking about Trump and the whole Correspondents' dinner. Third, President Obama and Seth Meyers humiliated Trump at the dinner in front of all of official Washington with humor that exposed him with his own words and deeds. And fourth, I have cancelled my e-subscription to The Washington Post. Adieu.

It Doesn't Add Up

2011-04-27T20:00:00.001-04:00

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told our audience at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) yesterday that the Republicans are now seeing the political fallout from budget proposals that provide tax breaks for the rich while placing undue burdens on the poor and middle class. “They cannot defend it, and they’ll eventually move away from it," he said.

The “it” here are the most Draconian aspects of Congressman Paul Ryan’s GOP budget, such as the proposed Medicare voucher plan for Americans under 55 years old. Geithner said that “the politics are heavy now, very hard.” And they’re getting harder it seems for Republican Congressmen returning to even safe GOP districts now plagued by pushback against their ill-formed thinking. Some of Ryan's thinking can be refreshing, but his doctrinal blindness has him otherwise stumbling around in some pretty messy political corners.

Geithner called the reckless U.S. deficit and debt condition “completely unsustainable.” Obviously, but certain folks aren’t getting the message. CFR President Richard Haass has labeled the national debt disgrace a “war of necessity,” and it’s far more of a strategic imperative than wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Yes, everything should be on the table right now to deal effectively and appropriately with this historic fiscal mess. That starts with two blindingly obvious lessons from the not-too-distant past. First, needless wars of choice are hideously expensive propositions, measured in terms of strategic, human, financial, and opportunity costs. Second, “trickle-down economics” didn’t work then and it won’t work now. It’s time to get serious about asking the most privileged among us to step up to plate, put greed aside, and work for the common good. Otherwise, the math will never add up.

Earth Calling Jacob Zuma

2011-04-11T11:41:00.005-04:00

I'm not a big Jacob Zuma fan. Of course, it's difficult for any mere mortal to serve as South Africa's President in the formidable shadow of Nelson Mandela. Still, how can somebody agree to serve as part of the African Union's heads-of-state negotiating team in Libya and skip the Benghazi portion of the trip? Negotiating peace means speaking with both sides, Gaddafi in Tripoli and the rebels in Benghazi.

Zuma has seen fit, however, to reap the publicity and adulation of the pro-Gaddafi forces, which almost certainly has been his aim from the start, while thumbing his noise at Benghazi. His people say he needs to return to South Africa to depart for the BRICS meeting in China. Baloney. This is too important to not have carved out a day in Benghazi and, besides, his presidential aircraft is just as capable of departing for Beijing from Benghazi. The AU's mission to Libya is nothing more than posturing and window dressing and, in Zuma's case, has only made matters worse.

Brains Aren't Enough

2011-03-03T20:22:00.001-05:00

Washington, DC

The New England Council superbly organized our White House visit yesterday. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and regulation czar Cass Sunstein illustrated the sheer brainpower of the Obama team. Too bad brains aren't always enough. Chief of Staff William Daley, however, reminded us that these guys are getting better at fighting back, with cunning, clarity, and speed.

Daley's Financial Times op-ed piece yesterday debunking the unfortunate I'll-move-the-company-to-Canada-or-Mexico nonsense from 3M CEO George Buckley, for which the patron of Post-Its should apologize, was a refreshing counterpunch from a sometimes too-tepid Administration.

School Reform: Balancing Pugilism With Patience

2010-11-12T06:46:00.004-05:00

Cincinnati, OH

Joel Klein’s resignation as Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, and that of Michelle Rhee in the comparable job in Washington DC, raise interesting and important questions about finding the right balance between the pugilistic determination and patient diplomacy necessary for achieving desperately needed school reform.

Basically, I’ve been a fan of both these leaders – though a guarded one. They’ve been unafraid to confront lethargic, insular, deeply entrenched systems that have been allowed to decay over many decades and, as a result, are doing such a disservice to children so as to represent a clear and present danger to our country. Perhaps the best thing the Kleins and Rhees of the world bring to the task is to question existing orthodoxies and shake-up the status quo, which they can only do with healthy outside perspectives and the backing of a strong mayors such as Bloomberg in New York and, or so we thought, Fenty in DC. They also buoy so many individuals and institutions that had otherwise given up hope that real and lasting reform is even possible in large urban systems.

Those who resist change and argue for gradualism in school reform are just wrong. Gradualism seems like a dilatory tactic by unions, opposing politicians, vendors, and other vested interests designed to slow down if not entirely halt reform. What’s needed instead is what organizational scholars call “punctuated equilibrium,” and lighting rods Klein and Rhee come with very big punctuation marks. That is to say, they enrage many people who stand to lose from rising performance expectations and other interruptions to business as usual.

Angering resistors can be a useful albeit anecdotal indicator of success, since nobody determined to overhaul something as sclerotic and frighteningly political as the New York or Washington systems will ever make friends. Just ask Mayor Fenty who was tossed out of office in his recent re-election bid because he dared to support (one might say, create) Rhee and her reform efforts. It seems logical and even desirable that reform-minded leaders will make some enemies or otherwise risk not being effective on these brutal playing fields. Too much patience and excessive due process risk running out the clock, continually perpetuating systems that like to talk about change but have little authentic interest in doing so. Are Klein and Rhee divisive? Yes, of course. They absolutely must be.

The two outgoing Chancellors are right to have brought a palpable sense of urgency to this seemingly impossible task. If a Taliban (or yesterday’s bogeyman, a Communist) sleeper cell had somehow formed on these shores 40 years ago and conspired to create what we have had in the New York and Washington systems, well, we would be on a war footing right now to address it. It’s that bad.

Having said this, however, Klein and Rhee often took matters too far. Teachers are not the enemy here. Most teachers are good, hard-working folks who are trying to do the best they can and sometimes against all odds. Yes, union intransigence can be a serious impediment to progress, but that doesn’t warrant stereotyping or vilifying teachers. Rhee told a group of us in Washington DC last week that she’s learned some painful lessons in this regard, about the rightness if not the utility of treating people with respect, preserving the dignity of those who must change, communicating and collaborating across the board, and understanding that some inclusion, protocol, and due process are necessary to ensure sustainable change. You don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be smart about these things.

It’s too easy to conflate these qualities and skills with simply “playing nice.” Far from it! An effective leader can be firm and yet reasonable, tough and yet respectful, determined and yet diplomatic enough to not fear communicating and collaborating with some needed measure of inclusion. Otherwise, with little or no “buy in” from those being asked to change, the system will simply reject the “foreign organism” invading it like so many antibodies gathering in reflexive self protection.

One gets the sense from Rhee that she sees matters of inclusion, respect, and dignity as unacceptable forms of gradualism, despite words to the contrary. Instead, I might suggest she see them as the tools needed to achieve and sustain lasting reform. After all, the “body politic” in DC just rejected the Fenty-Rhee “organism,” leaving those of us among her fans to wonder what they will have actually accomplished in the long term. Perhaps another year or two of due diligence and due process would have preserved the Fenty-Rhee program and ensured that it actually succeeded in carrying out large-scale systemic change. Otherwise, what’s the point? Opposition forces can simply wait it out until the flash-in-the-pan, “divisive” leaders impale themselves on the sharp pickets of personal animosity and petty resentments that may never needed to have been so pointed in the first place.

So Why Does This Happen?

2010-11-10T09:13:00.005-05:00

San Diego, CA

We were pleased once again to attend The College Board’s annual Inspiration Awards luncheon last week in Washington DC, honoring three truly excellent schools. We listened to remarkable young people from Green River High School in Virginia Beach, VA; Hogan Preparatory Academy in Kansas City, MO; and Medgar Evers College Prep School in Brooklyn, NY declare their passionate commitment to careers in public service and their desire to run for public office – even, as several of them said with a twinkle in their eyes, to be President of the United States.

The event was thrilling and inspiring in the extreme. It gave us great hope for our nation’s future, a sentiment expressed well by former Congressman Kweisi Mfune who said after the ceremony that, “It’s good to know who’s on the battlefield and who’s coming behind you. Given what we’ve seen from these young people today, there can be no doubt about our future.” Well, maybe.

The problem is the enormous gap between the earnest, honest, and public-spirited orientation of these young scholars and leaders – who truly want to rock the world – and what we actually get from the adults who purport to lead us. As I listened to these young people, occasionally with tears of joy in my eyes, I simultaneously conjured images of the “me first” blind ambition of a Mitt Romney, Andrew Cuomo, Carly Fiorina, and Sarah Palin or the utter lunacy of a Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller and, yes, Sarah Palin and asked myself, “What have we wrought?” Or better still, “Why such rot?”

How can we the people help these extraordinary kids avoid the selfishness and rancid divisiveness that is public life today? Sure, most of these great young people will ultimately avoid elective office – as so many sane people do, much to our peril – and make amazing contributions in the education, non-profit, and business sectors. That’s wonderful, but we need more of them running for Congress, governorships, and other offices. The climate that we have created in Washington DC these days – the circus, really, and it’s a litter box that’s ours to own – will find many of them turning their back on politics just when we need them most. What a shame. More important, what a peril.

We assume that youthful idealism, passion, and reason will eventually get beaten down by the “system.” Somehow the so-called “real world” is supposed to enter stage right and coat these wonderful young people with the thick syrup of doubt, unreasonableness, and cynicism. Well, enough already! Hasn’t the “system” proven to be so catastrophically broken that it’s time we embrace new ways? These kids can show us the way if our politicians would just get out of the way. I’m going to hang onto the memory of these young people during the next two years of bitter, vindictive stalemate and mind-numbing selfishness in our body politic.

Wooden Figures Behind Wooden Podiums

2010-10-09T17:00:00.005-04:00

Why do they even bother? I'm referring to the countless CEOs and other so-called leaders who deliver speeches and say absolutely nothing or worse, sometimes collecting big fees to embarrass themselves and bore us. The phrase "mailing it in" comes to mind.

Here's the "absolutely nothing" part. I recall attending a 2008 Houston speech by Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig that still irritates me today. Here's this guy, no Bart Giamatti for sure, speaking to higher education leaders about one of America's great institutions - baseball. It was clear that Selig spent not one second thinking about the many interesting issues shared by universities and professional sports such as recruiting, Asian and Latin competition and growth, drug abuse, leadership training and such. All we got were the same tired stories and PR gloss he had delivered the previous 50 speeches with not even an intern's hand present in trying to make some connection - anything, please - to his audience.

Here's the "worse" part. We at the Council on Foreign Relations heard earlier this week from Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini. Now don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for Intel and especially its longstanding visionary leader Andy Grove. I don't know anything else about Otellini other than his speech was indefensibly selfish, predictable, and contradictory.

He called for a "culture of investment" in the U.S. to "create the conditions" for entrepreneurial success. Well, who can argue with that? The key questions are always, what are the specifics and who's going to pay for it? In whining about businesses being overtaxed, it's clear that he doesn't see Corporate America as the source of such new funding? So, Mr. Otellini, where will the money come from to fund this new investment culture and what's not working with the billions of taxpayer dollars the U.S. already invests in such initiatives? He complained that California has become a "third world nation" in terms of services and infrastructure. Fine, let's grant him that point for the sake of argument. Please tell us then how your incessant call for cutting taxes will help us find the taxpayer resources needed to repair California infrastructure - and that of so many other cities and states?

This is the same narrow-interests fallacy underlying the Tea Party calls for tax cuts, especially now amidst recession and unprecedented budget deficits and national debt. Until you tell us how you will find the money - in specific policy and financial details, please - to pay for your needs and expectations and those of your fellow countrymen then, well, sit down, be quiet, and let somebody else speak. And please, speakers, do your homework before asking us to invest our time in your message.

Beware Sudden Embraces Of Democracy

2010-10-05T12:42:00.001-04:00

One has to laugh at the pronouncement yesterday by former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov that he plans to form a new democracy movement. It’s always fascinating to watch desperate political strongmen, such as the 18-year veteran of the Moscow mayoralty just dumped by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, suddenly discover the joys of democracy.

Luzhkov has been tarred by claims of corruption, some undoubtedly true and others likely not so true. What is known is that he has been notorious over two decades for helping his billionaire wife, construction mogul Yelena Baturina, secure lucrative contracts for the reconstruction of Moscow. Friends tell me that Moscow is today a high-energy “city on the move,” thanks in part to the Luzhkov-Baturina vision. Nobody should kid themselves, however, that this “new Moscow” emerged from anything remotely resembling democracy.

Luzhkov’s cynical embrace of democracy now has to be seen in the context of the strong-arm, anti-democratic impulses that built both his city and his fortune.

They Just Don't Get It

2010-09-09T21:03:00.003-04:00

High-paid jocks who just don't get it have become the norm. It's one thing for these so-called leaders and erstwhile role models to frequent strip clubs at 3:00 a.m. brandishing firearms. I guess that’s their pathetic business. It’s quite another matter, however, when they turn their backs on wounded servicemen and servicewomen recovering at the Walter Reed Medical Center.

Enter three fools from The New York Mets. It seems that multimillionaires Carlos Beltran, Oliver Perez, and Luis Castillo had better things to do on Tuesday than to join their teammates on an annual visit with wounded soldiers. Shades of Manny Ramirez's boycott when the Red Sox visited Walter Reed in 2008.

It’s pretty clear that these beauts don’t know much about much at all. At minimum, however, one wonders why their handlers failed to persuade them at least to appear to do the right thing. Beltran’s told The New York Times today that, “I don’t know who is creating this issue. I had my own things to do, and I couldn’t make it.” Here’s the answer Carlos, you are creating the issue and it is manifest in your profound selfishness and ignorance.

What would guys like this see if they possessed the ability let alone the willingness to be introspective and think beyond themselves? Nothing. Absolutely nothing! Let's leave to another day why it is that some organizations (like the Mets) acquire more than their fair share of such characterless people.

Hillary On Debt And Damage

2010-09-08T17:41:00.008-04:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed a group of us today at the Council on Foreign Relations. Once again, she demonstrated just how capable a leader and policy expert she is. We are in very good hands here, indeed, whatever your concerns may be about President Obama.

In this age of vapid leadership, here's a brilliant, articulate, thoughtful, credible, forceful, and no-nonsense woman who is working against all odds to repair the systematic damage done over the past decade to our global standing and effectiveness. One measure of the diminution of U.S. diplomacy in recent years, for example, comes in the fact that the United States has more people in military marching bands than we do working as diplomats. That's nothing to trumpet, for sure.

Council President Richard Haass asked Secretary Clinton whether and how our mind-numbing national debt interferes with the protection and projection of U.S. economic, diplomatic, and national security interests overseas. Amidst so much political trash-talking these days on the subjects of debt and deficits, Secretary Clinton response was as informed and impassioned as it was sobering.

She told us "there is no free lunch" and that our profligate record of deficit spending certainly does constrain our capacity to act internationally. "It sends a message of weakness abroad," she added. While suggesting that "we don't have to relitigate how we got here," she then did just that by reminding us that the U.S. attempted to wage two wars and make excessively large tax cuts without any mechanism to pay for these choices. So be it, lest we ever forget these financially calamitous follies of the recent past. How could we, it would seem, since we are paying for them in triplicate?

Secretary Clinton concluded by saying that "responsible voices are not being heard right now" on the subjects of debt and deficits. Well no kidding! It's only going to get worse between now and the November elections. At least we have one responsible voice on this and other subjects who merits our continued support and gratitude.

Five Lessons From LeBron

2010-07-13T05:03:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-05T12:36:00.011-04:00

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?

2010-05-26T05:30:00.002-04:00

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

2010-05-16T14:54:00.007-04:00

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

2010-04-26T19:19:00.008-04:00

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

2009-06-17T07:37:00.003-04:00

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?

2009-05-17T18:10:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-16T09:44:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-08T17:43:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-06T00:01:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-05T01:17:00.000-04:00

San Francisco

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

PhotoJournal: World Baseball Classic

2009-03-25T09:10:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-25T07:45:00.000-04:00

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?

2009-03-24T16:35:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-22T09:35:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-21T05:17:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-14T09:26:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-12T16:38:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-07T09:25:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-26T13:09:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-25T13:56:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-24T11:11:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-23T08:17:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-28T05:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-21T20:41:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-16T16:10:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-14T07:58:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-13T16:02:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-01T08:36:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-22T06:35:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-21T08:55:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-19T06:33:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-08T15:59:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-06T18:39:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-05T17:39:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-02T20:24:00.002-05:00

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

Turkish Temperament

2008-10-30T11:27:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-22T06:19:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-11T09:18:00.000-04:00

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.

Theo And Succession Planning

2008-10-05T14:43:00.000-04:00

Succession planning ranks as one of the most difficult components of any talent management program. After all, employees want to know what's being said about them in all those hush-hush meetings informed by mountainous three-ring binders. Like most any task involving the discussion and selection of people, succession planning can be a very political exercise, too. Is it any wonder then that so few organizations do it well, or at all?

The Boston Red Sox are a notable exception. They correctly see succession planning as more than some kind of "nice to do exercise." Rather, GM Theo Epstein and his management team understand succession planning for what it really is - a risk management and business continuity matter as well as an investment in the future. Yes, we are told that all professional sports teams engage in some kind of succession planning process, position by position. After all, the National Football League is one giant depth chart, right? The difference as with most things in life is the degree to which organizations take the task seriously, invest the time needed to produce excellence, use the right tools to gather and weigh the necessary evidence with fairness and relative impartiality, and make reasoned decisions based on those data.

The Red Sox under Epstein understand the need for patient, evidence-based processes that have the potential to improve the organization while keeping it on top. The Red Sox chose to make serious investments in talent development under new owners earlier this decade. Then, they chose to take those investments equally seriously by designing and implementing an effective succession planning program. They have won two World Series championships in the last four seasons and are contending right now for a third. And yet, through all this glory, they have become considerably younger and even better over that same period.

So if you are having difficulty convincing your boss of the need for succession planning, here is one case where a sports metaphor may actually be useful.

p.s. Can it possibly be true as Tom Friedman tell us in his new book Hot, Flat and Crowded that the American pet food industry spends more on research and development than the country’s power companies? I think we're going to the dogs.

Stop And Think

2008-10-03T12:35:00.000-04:00

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zikek is a piece of work. He would be the first to admit it, too. However, Zizek is one of the few polymaths who talks about the need for a new grand theory of everything and yet can actually deliver one. I disagree with him on some matters, but strongly support his contention that we as a society risk losing a sense of what is happening amidst so much complexity, who we are, and where we are going. He is right to say that journalistic shorthand labels such as a post-modernism simply don't work. They not only fail to explain current realities; they actually make discussion about them more difficult.

Zizek says that the West needs to withdraw and think. Let's simply call it stop and think, since we Americans would have a difficult time dealing with the word withdraw. Nonetheless, we need to sort out the unprecedented events happening around us these days, why they are happening, and what to do about it. Yet we know in everyday organizational life how painfully difficult it is to get people to take a moment to stop and think. The U.S. Congress comes to mind, right? Why is that? Have we forgotten how to think, or at least how to think well? The best leaders create opportunities for their people to think and then to build plans based on the products of that mindfulness. Regrettably, too many folks in leadership positions are as caught up as the rest of us in the unrelenting pace of doing to create new, thoughtful narratives that better explain what we are doing and to help us do it better - or not at all. (See August 24, 2008 entry, Why We Fail To Learn).

Zizek calls for greater development of cognitive mapping skills to help us achieve these new and better ways. Otherwise, we are getting near the time when some imaginary global parent of ours should pick us up by the scruff of our collective neck, issue a "time out," and send us to our room to think about what we have just done.

p.s. Agree with his politics or not, the endlessly fascinating and always controversial Zikek uses movies as teaching tools as well as anyone I have ever seen.

Tito And Servant Leadership

2008-10-01T11:55:00.000-04:00

It is generally agreed that the modern servant leadership concept has one founding father, the big thinker, author and consultant Robert K. Greenleaf. Servant-leadership rejects power-centered authoritarianism and underscores the leader role in achieving organizational goals by serving the needs of others.

In his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf wrote of the differences between leader-first and servant-first leaders:

"The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?"

Over the years, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley and scholars associated with the Greenleaf Center in Westfield, Indiana have refined the concept into a full-fledged movement whose leadership tenets include listening, empathy, self-awareness, humility, teaching and stewardship all coupled with a commitment to helping people grow. Not surprisingly, these collaborative, non-hierarchical characteristics are closely identified with the attributes of successful leadership "tags" working in complex adaptive systems, too.

The Boston Red Sox manager Terry "Tito" Francona would seem to be the embodiment of servant leadership. He knows that it is simply not all about him. Mediocre players such as Francona often become superb managers because they embrace - and maybe they have no choice but to embrace - the precepts of servant leadership. Everything Tito does works to steward organizational resources by letting talent emerge, repair and grow. He maneuvered endlessly this season to orchestrate, integrate and heal a revolving cast of frequently injured players, putting himself in front of the media so that his players could concentrate on baseball. Yes, some managers happily hog the media spotlight - Ozzie Guillen anyone? - because they want the attention. With Tito, however, one gets the sense that he does so to serve the needs of his players.

It is clear why Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and other sports superstars find it so difficult to succeed as coaches. They have always been leader-first oriented and likely lack the orientation let alone the disposition to "serve" others. Servant leaders like Tito Francona are superstars in their own right, however, which two World Series rings over the last four seasons surely underscores.

As we worry here in Boston about getting past the Los Angeles Angels in the playoffs, and for good reason, I must nonetheless add, Go Sox!

Vision: The Credibility Test

2008-09-29T05:37:00.000-04:00

This is the first in a series of ongoing entries entitled Vision. We will regularly focus in this space on leadership and organizational vision and why, at once, they are much ballyhooed and just as frequently ridiculed.

Visions must tell us where we are going as an organization and why it matters. At best, they create vivid, compelling and directionally useful portraits of some future state and our role in achieving or creating it. Well beyond the empty rhetorical calories of "maximizing shareholder value" exist some visions that are truly inspired and inspiring. One such case in point is the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics whose vision is "restoring the joy of motion for patients around the world." IMD Professor Michael Watkins has written that this is an "evocative encapsulation. It brings to mind great athletes who can return to competition or grandparents who can play with their grandchildren again." (Vision Decisions, Harvard Business Online, January 7, 2008.)

Vision statements run into trouble when they do not stretch people far enough or, conversely, when they stretch them too far. There is a fine line between strategically placing one's reach just ahead of one's grasp and simply tilting at windmills with Don Quixote-like impossibility. Here is where wisdom governed by facts makes all the difference.

Let's consider two presidential clarion calls in this context. President John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress in 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Collins and Porras (1994) call such visions "Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs)." Yes, these visions are ambitious and daunting, but they also perform essential energizing, mobilizing and focusing roles. Why? Because they are doable. Kennedy and his aides knew that the science underscored the possibilities of a safe moon landing and return.

Collins and Porras also suggests the role that specificity plays in successful visioning. They write that "Kennedy and his advisors could have gone off into a conference room and drafted something like, 'Let's beef up the space program' or some other such vision statement." The specificity of landing on the moon and returning safely captured the public's imagination and the line added last minute to his speech that the United States would do so "before this decade is out" lent urgency to that specificity.

When President George H. Bush called for a $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative during his 2003 State of the Union speech, he offered America what, in the abstract, was a wonderful vision of our energy future. The President subsequently dropped this vision from speeches and policy formulations because, well, the facts suggested it was not practical or even particularly doable.

Yes, we all like the idea of clean hydrogen-powered automobiles, but Professor Robert Muller of Berkeley tells us (On Point Radio, July 21, 2008) that the scientific community was not able to get to the President or his political advisors until after the announcement. They ultimately told the White House that in liquid form hydrogen has less energy than gasoline by a factor of four. Furthermore, energy is not a fuel source, per se. You have to make it and making it costs substantial amount of money and requires widespread new infrastructure costing substantial amounts of money. Also, it takes coal or gas to manufacture hydrogen, emitting considerable carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Hydrogen cars may not pollute, but the processes used to create the hydrogen itself are enormously polluting. We will someday arrive at a point when hydrogen cars are possible. They are simply not possible on any meaningful scale right now or anywhere near a 20- or even 30-year horizon.

Visions need to be rooted in the doable and vetted by the people who know how to achieve them. Kennedy's vision animated a specific cause and moved us forward. Bush's vision caught our fancy but smashed upon the rocks of reality. Kennedy's informed vision was credible. Bush's uninformed vision detracted from his credibility. It's all a question of knowing how far to stretch and whether, in the final analysis, the vision is real enough to encourage anyone to try to stretch that far in the first place.

Does Aso Matter?

2008-09-28T08:39:00.002-04:00

It is not easy to decipher the meaning of Taro Aso’s election as Japanese Prime Minister last week. One thing is virtually certain. The former foreign minister and first-ever Catholic to lead Japan will call for snap elections very soon. It will be a high-stakes gamble, however, since fatigue with Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party could favor the Democratic Party of Japan led by Ichiro Ozawa.

In the long term, however, Aso’s election may mean very little on the world or regional stage as Japan continues through a less muscular period under the weight of a greatly enfeebled economy. It will be a weak coalition government with relatively few policy innovations. Still, some there are some downside concerns that are worth watching. First, Aso is widely thought to have a big mouth. His fiery conservative rhetoric can be as “colorful” as it is unpredictable, especially when directed at China. As with a United States weighed down these days by financial crises, loose lips can and will sink economic ships of state.

Furthermore, Japan suffers from a mounting demographic challenge that could fuel acrimony over the nation’s single biggest taboo subject – immigration. Japan has both an aging population and a declining birth rate, so it grows increasingly more reliant on legal and illegal immigration to deliver the services its people demand and won’t perform for themselves. Sound familiar? Most of these immigrants are Chinese. So the combination of the rhetoric of anti-Chinese posturing and the reality of Chinese immigrant-dependency could make for a disturbing and even destabilizing road ahead for Tokyo.

p.s. Atlantic Monthly's Jack Beatty said it well last week on Tom Ashbrook's On Point broadcast. "Our (the U.S.) economy can no longer handle our politics."

Images from Tokyo's Grand Aki-Basho Sumo Championships, a Shinto religious procession, and the fabled Tsukiji Fish Market.

On Courage: Michelle Bachelet

2008-09-25T15:23:00.000-04:00

Members of the Council on Foreign Relations were privileged today to hear Chilean President Michelle Bachelet speak about world and hemispheric matters. She is a truly remarkable human being whose life story is the stuff of movies. She has demonstrated the courage that too many other politicians display only in rhetorical terms.

Chile lived through its own "9-11" on September 11, 1973 when strongman General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende - complete with U.S. support. At the time of the coup, Bachelet's father was a General loyal to the government who refused political exile and was tortured and killed by Pinochet operatives in the Santiago Public Prison. The President and her mother were subsequently detained, imprisoned and tortured at the infamous Villa Grimaldi detention center in Santiago.

So here is a surgeon, pediatrician and epidemiologist who speaks five languages, has training in military and defense matters, served as her nation's Minister of Defense and knows the horror of torture firsthand. It's a curious thing, but some people are actually experienced, trained and ready to lead a nation. This brilliant, honorable and proven woman is one of them.

She was diplomatic in discussing the United States. And why not? Our two nations enjoy reasonably productive relations. What a blast from the past she delivered, however, when asked how she could help the next U.S. President take Latin America more seriously. She said, "You can’t see us as children. We’re adults and we’ve been behaving well." Indeed, she cited 21 free and fair elections in Latin American in the recent past; none of them doubted and disputed. Those of us watching Latin America for many decades remember all too well the interchangeable line-up of thuggish juntas that led most of these nations for much of their post-colonial periods. She urged the U.S. to rediscover the benefits of multilateralism as the only platform from which to address three immediate global crises: food, fuel and finances.

In defense of democracy, Bachelet said that Brazilian President Lula told her yesterday that over 20 million Brazilians have been lifted out of poverty and into the middle class. These trends are wonderful, although they have as much to do with changes in global commodity markets, improvements in the Brazilian economy and infrastructure, and Lula's somewhat effective tenure as President. After all, China is also lifting tens of millions out of poverty without any pretense of democracy. Still, the region is blessed to have effective, stable leaders like Bachelet and Lula.

She was passionate about conditions on the ground in Haiti where 600 Chileans serve as United Nations peacekeepers, reminding us of what four devastating recent storms can do to an already-destitute land. She was also entertainingly canny in dodging anything to do with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Go figure!

See earlier blog entries on Chile from Santigao, Valparaiso, Melpilla and Isla Negra from January 5-11, 2007.

Testy Lavrov, Testy Relationship

2008-09-24T19:26:00.000-04:00

We just concluded a conference call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and, well, he was rather testy. He assured us that it wasn't because he had just left a meeting with Secretary of State Rice. Perhaps it had something to do with being on the receiving end of repeated questions about Russian imperialism, hegemonic intentions and otherwise atrocious conduct in Georgia last month.

Lavrov made points both insightful and inciteful, once clearing past the usual empty rhetoric about acting in Georgia in accordance with international law. He called Russian actions - provoked by Georgian actions that had been, in turn, precipitated by Russian actions - the right to "exercise the human security maxim" - whatever that means. When asked by The New Yorker's David Remnick about a reported quote from President Medvedev that Russia was surrounded by enemies, Lavrov denied the President ever said this. However, he later added the elusive comment that, "We are not enemies with anyone, but the military planners must take this into account." You decide.

When asked about the various "color" revolutions bringing grudging democracy to some former Soviet states - rose in Georgia, orange in Ukraine and tulip in Kyrgyzstan - he oddly claimed that "it was not right, for democracies to make revolution in the name of democracy." He said that Russia's own 1917 Revolution was red and didn't quite work out. Remnick reminded Lavrov that Soviet Leninism was hardly a democratic movement, a point that did not seem to amuse Lavrov as best one could tell on a phone line.

Lavrov said that Russia welcomed a more "practical" Bush Administration, which he perceives to be moving away from holding Russia "hostage" to the raw emotions of Georgia. Yet he tartly added that President Bush needs to produce a list of the areas in which the United States will and will not now cooperate with Russia, suggesting that Moscow never really knows where and when we will choose to play ball with them. He chastised the Bush Administration for offering condolences for loss of life in Georgia without doing similarly over loss of Russian lives, adding the dig that such one-sidedness is "not consistent with Christianity." Ultimately, he urged us to accept, in his words, that the time when "the U.S. is always right is absolutely at a dead end."

The U.S.-Russia relationship is not merely troubled, it is deeply troubled. Foreign Minister Lavrov's comments tonight were tough in both substance and tone. They suggest just how much work a new U.S. President needs to undertake to rebalance this vitally important relationship and, in doing so, to make desperately needed progress on Iran, North Korea and nuclear non-proliferation to name just a few pressing matters.

On Courage: Magomed Yevloev

2008-09-12T16:28:00.000-04:00

Washington, DC

How many politicians or journalists could ever demonstrate the courage and leadership abilities of slain Ingush website owner Magomed Yevloev? It's not even close. As with so many journalists and opposition figures speaking truth to Kremlin power these days, Yevloev was assassinated because he operated a website that attempts to hold Russia accountable for its actions in Ingushetia and throughout the Caucuses.

Yevloev died on August 30th from a single bullet wound to the head while in custody of state police in Narzan. Ironically, Yevloev had recently stepped up criticism of the treatment of Ingush civilians by Moscow's police puppets. He had just landed at the Narzan airport on a flight also carrying Putin-buddy and Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, who upon disembarking from the flight immediately ordered police to apprehend Yevloev.

To learn more about the website Moscow is trying to eliminate along with its now-deceased owner, click on the title of this blog or go to www.ingushetia.ru.

Leadership And Humility

2008-09-06T10:37:00.006-04:00

Senator John McCain's bravery under unimaginable circumstances as a prisoner of war in Vietnam is so far beyond the call of duty that, well, words could never do it justice. Those of us with relatively easy military careers really have no idea what heroes like McCain sometimes endure.

The history of one of the proudest and most distinguished of American naval families - the McCains - is also worthy of our utmost respect. I have met the Senator on several occasions. The first time was in 1992 at Maine's Bath Iron Works for the christening and launching of the guided missile destroyer USS John S. McCain, named for his father and grandfather who were both Navy admirals. Thank you for your service to all three John McCains.

We were all much younger then.

His controversial choice of Vice Presidential running mate raises many issues about leadership. Chief among them is humility. We'll let the political blogs slice and dice everyone. From this perspective, however, one of the most difficult moments during Charlie Gibson's ABC-TV interview with Governor Sarah Palin was when she told him that she "didn't blink" when asked by Senator McCain to be his running mate. Wouldn't and shouldn't any otherwise thoughtful person blink, take a deep breath, pause for reflection and reach for an extra dose of humility - if they have any?

Why is it that some people in leadership positions think that we expect them to be superhero cartoon-panel perfect? Are they lacking that much self-awareness to attempt to hide that they are human? Ironically, here is somebody who gets all kind of political points for being average because, mysteriously, we are somehow supposed to see ourselves in that reflection? And she didn't blink? Excuse me?

Ancona, Malone, Orlikowski and Senge (In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, Harvard Business Review, February 2007) underscore the power of personal humility in the best of our leaders. They write that "It's time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the top who's got it all figured out." (p.93) They suggest that leaders often gain credibility, trust and even power when they appropriately reveal the natural and normal condition of human fallibility. I reported to some Fortune 200 CEOs who never got this point and often struggled to appear perfect and all-knowing. The deceit must have been exhausting. It also often prevented the executives around these CEOs from offering ideas and insights because, well, the boss already had all the answers. They never blinked.

On Courage: Ambassador James McGee

2008-08-28T08:15:00.000-04:00

Monterey, CA

In an age of shallow tough talk, truly courageous leaders such as U.S. Ambassador James McGee can and do emerge. A career foreign-service officer with four previous African postings as well as a Vietnam War hero, our envoy to the failed state of Zimbabwe presents a portrait of real courage under fire - literally.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is a first-class scourge, an embarrassment to all that is civil and civilized in our world. (OK, so tell us how you really feel.) He has banned most media from his rotting country, once an agricultural and economic powerhouse regionally, so as not to reveal to the world his ruinous tenure since the decolonization of the former Rhodesia. We must increasingly rely, therefore, on heroic renegade reporters, NGO employees and others such as Ambassador McGee to protect innocent lives and to shine a bright, hot spotlight on Mugabe's many atrocities.

In the recent issue of Vanity Fair, Peter Godwin tells us that against Harare's wishes McGee assembled a team of diplomats and employees from several embassies and set out to locate and interview victims of Mugabe's abuses. During the investigatory field trip, a plainclothes police officer supported by shotgun-wielding colleagues stopped McGee, inspected his credentials, blocked his convoy's passage, and ordered him to report to a local police station for questioning. Godwin writes that McGee then walked to the gates blocking his way, opened them against the police officers' threats, and asked, "What are you going to do, shoot me?" He stared them down and waved the convoy through to freedom. As the late Bernie Mac said in the Ocean's 13 movie, "enough said!"

p.s. Today's 24-mile cycling tour around the Monterey Peninsula confirms that everyone should bike the coastal stretch from Monterey and Pacific Grove to Pebble Beach and Carmel. What beauty! Images below.

PhotoJournal: Big Sur

2008-08-27T16:25:00.004-04:00

Big Sur, California

Some of these views are from the astonishing Nepenthe Restaurant, carved into Big Sur's sloping hills.

Steinbeck's Cannery Row

2008-08-26T20:17:00.000-04:00

Cannery Row, Monterey, CA

I try to avoid most tourist spots, at least during the hours of 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Despite its obvious tourista sensibility, Cannery Row still lets even the casual observer hearken back to an earlier day when Monterey Bay was a global capital for sardine harvesting. Imagine that time in the '20s, '30s and '40s described so vividly by John Steinbeck in Cannery Row (1945) when the purse seiners arrived loaded to capacity with fresh catch. What was then called Ocean View Avenue would come alive as townsfolk raced for spot employment cleaning, preparing and packaging the sardines.

Of course, we fished the living daylights out of the Monterey Canyon and by 1973 all 17 of the longstanding canneries had been shuttered. Thanks to some effective marine management since that time, however, Monterey Bay has returned to life. This would have been a source of pride for Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck's best friend and the inspiration for the "Doc" character in both Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday (1954).

Steinbeck's work is joyous for so many reasons. He wrote with such simple elegance, believing that accessible words, short sentence structures and compelling narrative communicate best. Too much writing today is turgid and unnecessarily opaque, seemingly designed to hide meaning rather than reveal it. A visit to the National Steinbeck Center in the author's hometown of Salinas is a worthy destination for any student of literature, Americana or Californian history. (www.steinbeck.org)

Why We Fail To Learn

2008-08-24T00:22:00.011-04:00

San Francisco

We sometimes choose not to learn from history because it is situationally or politically convenient to do so (see previous entry). Still there are ample occasions when reliving history unnecessarily and unproductively actually does stem from a failure to learn. For example, Chris Agyris has for many years underscored the difficulties that smart people have learning new things within their professions. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but anyone who has worked at the highest levels of Corporate America understands the paradigmatic fixation of very smart leaders who sometimes can't see the forest for the trees. After all, wasn't the Enron leadership team dubbed "the smartest guys in the room?"

Argyris says that senior executives must look inward and reflect critically on their own views and behaviors if they are to become better learners and, as a result, more capable leaders. Argyris long ago coined the terms "single loop" and "double loop" learning to distinguish between knowing how to do something and knowing why you're doing it. Highly successful professionals get that way because they excel at doing certain things in certain ways, reluctant to change what got them to the dance in the first place. Without healthy reflection and self-examination, however, these philosophical and performance patterns calcify over time and make it more difficult to ask whether there are better ways to do things or question why these things are being done in the first place. Wasn't former Digital Equipment Corporation CEO Ken Olsen, the inventor of the minicomputer, credited with failing to see the next logical step in computing miniaturization by asking, "Why would anyone want a computer on their desktop?"

According to Argyris, because very smart, successful people "have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure." This finds these highly capable people getting defensive, shutting down and blaming anyone but themselves when their single-loop learning outcomes predictably fail. "In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it most." (Teaching Smart People How to Learn, Harvard Business Review, May/June 1991, p. 100) Fiol and O'Connor (2003) say that leaders who are honest about imagining failure or actually experienced some of it themselves can be more effective at resisting bandwagons that otherwise find organizations pursuing mindless or even dangerous strategies.

In his landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), Thomas Kuhn demonstrated the difficulty smart people have questioning the professional premises that define their self-identity and self-worth. It is no surprise, therefore, that so many scientific and technological innovations are achieved by relatively young people who have yet to buy into existing paradigms. Of course, their success creates new orthodoxies beyond which these innovators then find it difficult to travel. Salovey and Meyer (1990) and then Daniel Goleman (1998) say that critical self-examination is essential to creating self-awareness, which as the foundation of healthy emotional intelligence gives leaders the needed oxygen to continue thinking anew. Donald Schon (1987) underscored the success of leaders who thrive at being "reflective practitioners" in this context. Finally, Karl Weick (1995) tells us that reflection is the essential pivot point that translates sensemaking into actual learning. Otherwise, without considered learning, leaders are doomed to rerun the old scripts and not create new ones more appropriate for changing times.

One gets the sense in the Russia-Georgia situation (see previous entry) that Secretary of State Rice and other leaders here and in those two countries are locked into old scripts. It is difficult to discern whether these reportedly smart people are doing so for political expedience or because it is just so difficult reflect and create needed new scripts. After all, Secretary Rice is an expert on the former Soviet Union. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the hammer of single loop learning seems disconnected from the larger tool box of reflection and double loop learning, thus turning this and other challenges into good old-fashioned nails. Hey, it isn't easy or popular to be discerning and to resist dangerous bandwagon thinking that finds it so easy to condemn Russia without a moment of consideration about our role and that of Georgia in creating and worsening this current mess.

p.s. Aqua is one of this city's best restaurants, located in the Financial District near the fabled Tadich Grill. But Frascati's is a true find, nestled in a cozy Russian Hill neighborhood. We loved them both. However, Aqua's exceptional chef Laurent Manrique is something of a foamer. Supporters of molecular gastronomique certainly bring "interesting" ideas to the dinner table, such as foam, enzymatic infusion, methyl cellulose as a gelling agent, and liquid nitrogen for flash freezing. But one questions whether any of it qualifies as food. I did not know whether to admire the foam coating my Alaskan halibut or to scrape it off. I chose the former.

The "foamer" versus "forager" debate is like all bipolar "us against them" arguments. We love to form simplistic, mutually exclusive camps around, for example, liberals and conservatives, believers and nonbelievers, or functionalists and interpretivists. Doing so misses the point. In this case, foamers are experimenters. Most of them are not abandoning fresh, natural food. Their welcome curiosities are actually pushing cuisine in new, intriguing directions. And this assertion is made despite the fact that I may not prefer or enjoy much of what they offer. Hey, I support and encourage paradigm interplay, right? In this spirit of the new, Elena Arzak of Restaurant Arzak in Basque's San Sebastian made the case well when she told the QWR (Autumn 2008), "If I didn't create new dishes, what would be the point of being a chef?" Tradition and experimentation can and do together; in fact, they must.

Folly And The Failure To Learn

2008-08-23T12:53:00.006-04:00

San Francisco

So why is that we keep making the same mistakes? The belligerence between Russia and Georgia demonstrates once again humankind's collective inability – often, it’s really our politically convenient unwillingness – to learn from our mistakes. Yes, Russia is the much-larger aggressor here. Moscow has far more blood on its hands than Tbilisi and it has earned our strong condemnation. Yet it was Georgia that naively succumbed to Moscow’s constant school-yard provocations by choosing to attack South Ossetia in the first place. It was just the excuse Russia craved to help "liberate" its "citizens" and occupy two breakaway territories - lest we forget Abkhazia, too. Russia's espoused concern for human rights in South Ossetia and Abkhazia is ludicrous in the face of its own historic atrocities stifling breakaway territories in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia and elsewhere throughout the Caucuses.

Behind Georgia’s patently stupid move, however, are some American hawks eager to revive the traditional Russian menace. Blaming ambiguous terrorists for everything has stretched pretty thin in recent years, so some armchair warriors welcome the return of a tangible, familiar enemy that you can actually locate on a map. Sure, the Georgians are to be commended for choosing democracy and Western integration, irrespective of President Saakashvilli's imprudence and impetuousness. We are right to support Tbilisi in this regard for there is little that Putin’s Russian fears more than real democracy. As is too often the case, however, we have overplayed our hand.

First, we have been relentless in taunting the Russian bear from its post-Cold War sleep. Hasn’t much of 20th century history underscored the intensity of Russian nationalism that we so brazenly helped reignite during the Clinton Administration and fanned furiously during the Bush years? One look at Versailles in the rear view mirror shows the limits of bullying a bully when he is momentarily down. Our support for Kosovar independence and Georgian, Ukranian and Baltic integration into NATO, while conceptually correct, have been implemented with incompetence in consistently creating new opportunities to rub the Russian nose in our Cold War "victory." Add to this the painful decision to place American missile defense assets in Poland and the Czech Republic and, well, can Dr. Strangelove be far away? Poland had been thoughtful in its considered nervousness about this new conceit, which Russian aggression in Georgia ironically eviscerated.

Next, we undoubtedly helped create expectations in Tbilisi that the United States would somehow come to Georgia's rescue when Russia repelled its clumsy invasion, fueled as it was by U.S. arms and logistics. Did President Saakashvilli actually expect U.S. forces to confront Russian troops on the Russian border? Some in the U.S. raised Hungarian expectations about our possible role in their 1956 revolution. Yet there was nothing we could have done to support the Budapest revolutionaries in frontal military terms then, which is also true in Georgia now. If hindsight in that rear view mirror is so perfect, why do we remain blind to the mismatch between theoretical expectations and practical capabilities in these scenarios? The Georgians should have understood we could not have - and should not have - saved their bacon with any direct military action. The mere thought of it is utterly preposterous!

Finally, we have no direct military card to play anyway. Our Army and Marine Corps forces are spread too thin in Afghanistan and Iraq to give any bite to our rhetoric. History repeatedly shows that Russia will pounce when it understands that an adversary is too weak to act on its rhetoric. That rear view mirror makes vivid a post-Vietnam America embroiled in the Iran hostage crisis with neither the might nor the will to respond militarily to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Moscow understood this fact, although its ill-conceived, unjust invasion of Afghanistan was a major contributor to its unraveling. Still, one price of the war in Iraq is that it robs our capacity to wage an effective war in Afghanistan and respond to other contingencies around the world.

The Giants' Aaron Rowand was called out on this play. From our perch in the first row at AT&T Park, he was safe.

John, Kwame and Monica, Meet Ted

2008-08-20T07:41:00.001-04:00

Ted Sorensen's new book, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, is as delightful as the man himself. (See entry for January 7, 2007.) Yes, it is possible that Sorensen gave too much of his life to one politician. However, his 11 years with Jack Kennedy serve as testament to decency and thoughtfulness in what in his case truly was public service. Sorensen's approach to public life stands in sharp contrast to the now-disgraced former Senator John Edwards, indicted Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and former Justice Department political operative Monica Goodling. We are all human beings and we all make mistakes that warrant forgiveness. Yet it is the arrogance, narcissism and duplicity of these three individuals that set them apart from natural human frailty.

Sorensen is a pacifist and was once a conscientious objector. This is a difficult and even courageous position that repeatedly haunted him throughout his career. I am sure Sorensen would support those of us who believe that two-year national service should be mandatory for all young men and women with non-military options such as the Peace Corps and City Year. Just as he registered with the military medical service - and those guys are on the front lines without weapons - Sorensen would likely have readily enlisted in one of the civilian service options had they existed at the time.

Still, he makes a powerful point that is too often missed by folks who only think of the military in one, stereotypical way - war. No organization has done more to create economic opportunity, train and educate, develop leadership skills, and send young men and women into the mainstream than the U.S. military. Besides, the last people who want to wage war are those who actually risk losing their lives or limbs. Sorensen's stated regard for Generals Eisenhower, Maxwell Taylor and Wes Clark as well as Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was that they knew the folly of war and sought first to exercise all options short of outright war to achieve peaceful resolution. It is arguably true that we would not be here today had Jack Kennedy listened to General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay's advice to bomb Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yes, LeMay was a Dr. Strangelove character who was the exception rather than the rule, having observed countless flag and general officers for many years.

p.s. Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Ronnie Musgrave bellowed the other day that he is "Pro Life and Pro Gun" without a hint of intended humor or irony at such an absurd statement.

Love And Hate On The Diamond

2008-08-03T18:44:00.000-04:00

Yankee Stadium, New York City

It is a cliche, no doubt, but these truly are hallowed grounds. The Red Sox are family for whom I have nothing but love and a rabid rooting interest. However, the bigger cliche is that one's love for the Red Sox automatically means hatred for the Yankees - or vice versa. I want to see the Red Sox crush the Yankees whenever they meet, but that does not reduce my independent capacity to recognize that the Yankees are a first-rate organization for whom it would be objectively impossible not to respect and hold in high regard.

The "Yankees Suck" moron screeds and t-shirts are an embarrassment. The treatment of Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon's pregnant wife by Yankee fans at the All Star Game is even worse. And to think that there have been several murders lately in Boston and New York involving people wearing the wrong team's paraphernalia. In this bitter rivalry, as elsewhere in life, too many people buy into utter nonsense and do no work whatsoever at developing or even questioning their outlook or the verbal and even physical violence that it creates. It seems when we lack for "tribes" to hate, we create them.

Just looking at the field below one sees.....Spike Lee. Yes, he's here.....and feels the memories of Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Whitey Ford, Lou Gehrig, Goose Gossage, Ron Guidry, Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth and, yes, Derek Jeter. How can this place be anything but great? As the new Yankee Stadium rises here by Jerome Avenue, however, it must also be said that it is sorely needed. Yankee Stadium and its neighborhood are much less comfortable and convenient than Fenway Park. Without the winning tradition, this place would be mediocre at best.

Words Mask Merger Realities

2008-07-31T18:14:00.003-04:00

Washington DC

Was there anyone who honestly believed the Alcatel-Lucent merger would deliver as promised? Six consecutive quarters of losses after only seven quarters of attempted integration finally forced the ouster of Chairman Serge Tchuruk and CEO Pat Russo this week.

The simple truth is that the vast majority of large-scale mergers of this nature rarely deliver as promised. Of course, most large-scale mergers of this nature are not mergers. They are acquisitions, pure and simple. The dominant, acquiring organizational culture almost always crushes the acquired culture, despite contrived projected financials and pre-deal rhetoric about synergies and mutual best practices. The Alcatel-Lucent deal was further complicated by matters of divergent national cultures, too.

Why do we continue to accept inflated expectations surrounding big mergers? And why upon their failed-merger departures do executives like Tchuruk make matters worse by saying things like, "I am proud that Alcatel-Lucent has become a world leader in a technology which is transforming our society," with Russo adding that "I am very pleased with the progress we are making." (Fortune Daily Briefing, July 29) It is hard to tell whether the words or the deeds are worse, since language masks the real merger challenges and then spins the results so as to reduce our ability and willingness to learn from merger history.

Behind Bars, Finally

2008-07-25T19:12:00.000-04:00

How coincidental that Radovan Karadzic was finally captured just as Serbia strives for ascension to the European Union. It certainly underscores the situational power of economic leverage. Still, it seems that the BBC and others had a good sense of where Karadzic had been hiding - when he was not otherwise visibly working and living among the citizenry - over these past 13 years. Yet the Serbs chose not to apprehend him, until now. Nonetheless, his capture is well worth celebrating. This man is a butcher, as was his enabler former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. So it is right and just that he now face the most severe penalties administered by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. It is also damn well about time!

p.s. Happy 90th Birthday, Nelson Mandela. Your goodness reminds us why evil like Karadzic must be relentlessly ostracized, vilified, pursued and put away - for good. The fact that you spent even one day in that Robben Island prison cell while this guy walked free for 13 years is an affront to humankind.

Sharp-Image Diagnosis

2008-07-15T11:32:00.000-04:00

We management consultants play an essential diagnostic role in our work with clients, or at least we should be doing so. Too often, however, consultants appear to move to prescription and prognosis before undertaking sufficiently rigorous description and diagnosis. Indeed, how many times have presenting symptoms in a given leadership and organizational context been confused with underlying causal factors? Too often!

My love of photography finds me readily embracing the simple metaphor of the zoom lens. Here, the consultant undertakes a broad scan based on a theoretical frame of some kind, such as seeing organizations as complex adaptive systems. The consultant then selects the most promising areas for close-up investigation, zooming in as needed but often zooming back into a wider angle to verify that he or she truly understands the larger context and interdependencies.

In their useful book Organizational Diagnosis and Assessment, Harrison & Shirom (1999) take the analysis to another interesting level, however, with their use of the term sharp-image diagnosis. Sure, many consultants zoom in and out in the manner described above, but that's where the diagnostic process typically ends. Harrison & Shirom invoke another imaging technology - the MRI - to push the metaphor even further. The "MRI goes below the surface of the body to produce three-dimensional cross-sections showing the condition of body tissues and blood flow." (p.18) So too, sharp-image diagnosis goes below the surface of presented leadership or organizational problems to examine underlying systems and their dynamic interactions. After all, most of the actual problems or challenges clients face are buried deep, inextricably linked to other problems and challenges, and quite different from the presenting issues described at the outset of an engagement.

Knowing That We Don't Know

2008-07-06T17:45:00.004-04:00

Dublin, Ireland

You can feel the weight of generations here at the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College. It's quite a place. One is reminded of the story of Umberto Eco's 30,000-volume library in which people often ask the great philosopher and novelist, "How many of these books have you read?" As the story goes, Eco tells his wide-eyed visitors that the more interesting question concerns how many books he has not read.

His point is that the celebration of curiosity is a joyous, never-ending pursuit and that libraries are living, ever-expanding things. Eco seems to suggest that it is healthier to acknowledge the vast majority of knowledge that eludes us than to cling only to the narrow limits of what each of us already knows - or thinks we know. Petrarch of Arezzo captured the humility of unknown or yet-to-be-known knowledge well when he wrote, "My library is not an unlearned collection, although it belongs to an unlearned person."

p.s. Connor McPherson's The Weir at The Gate Theater is marvelous, epitomizing the best of Irish theater in its ability to elicit tears and laughter at the same time. And as we entered the Tripod Club last night we were reminded by many fans that the Australian Tommy Emmanuel may be among the very best guitarists in the world. He is! See for yourself at:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=TX0eTp7SoNU

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GZzUCuCosnE&feature=related

PhotoJournal: Crystal Clear Craftsmanship

2008-07-02T07:02:00.000-04:00

Waterford, Ireland

Readers of this blog know well my respect for fine craftsmanship and its ready association with the leadership craft. These magnificent glassworkers at the Waterford facility here serve in varied apprenticeships for 6-8 years to learn their trade and, in the process, to acquire a humility and reverence about it.

These men are paid on a piecemeal basis, placing an incentive on speed. However, they receive no compensation at all if the piece they produce is flawed in any way. As always, effective professionalism seems to require a balance between speed and quality as well as one between financial incentives and personal accountability. How well do we really teach these balancing acts in our leadership training programs?

Fear Need Not Apply

2008-06-29T15:18:00.000-04:00

Galway, Ireland

This is an important moment in Ireland’s remarkable economic renaissance. Even from the Republic’s fastest-growing city, Galway, one regularly hears the Irish use the phrase “the ‘R’ word” to refer to the possibility of the first recession here in recent times. One newspaper headline yesterday featured a front-page quote from a Limerick teenager who asked his parents, “What’s a recession?”

Ireland’s challenge over the next year or two is to avoid turning inward and blaming others for what, at worst, will be a short-term setback. GDP forecasts for 2008 peg economic growth at a reasonably healthy 4.0 percent, albeit down from 4.5 percent in 2007. There is a young generation of Irish here that knows nothing but economic growth approximating that of the Asian tigers. There is also an older generation here that says "never again" to a return to the darkness of much of Ireland's economic history.

A provision in the Irish Constitution required that a public referendum be held to ratify the European Union reform measures packaged as the Treaty of Lisbon. The Irish electorate rejected "Lisbon" on June 12th by a vote of 53 to 47 percent. The Treaty of Lisbon is a flawed instrument, but it has already been ratified by 18 EU member nations. By turning its back on Europe and the very EU mechanisms that helped give rise to the "Irish Miracle," Ireland actually risks pushing itself away from prosperity and back to older, insular ways. Blaming "bureaucrats in Brussels" is hardly the answer to Ireland's momentary concerns about recession. Indeed, fear is almost always the handmaiden of even greater economic decline.

An impromptu "session" at O'Connor's Pub yesterday in the rocky, seaside village of Doolin, Ireland's traditional music capital. The nearby Cliffs of Moher in western County Clare.

Rwanda Rebirth?

2008-06-26T18:26:00.000-04:00

It is almost unimaginable. Rwanda as an economic role model for Africa and beyond? Rwanda as a finance and high-technology entrepôt in the fashion of the Asian tigers and Dubai? This from a country racked by a monstrously bloody civil war between Hutus and Tutsis resulting in the near-genocidal death of 1,000,000 people only 15 years ago?

Veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer asks us to consider these possibilities in his new book, A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It. It seems quite a stretch, but Kinzer is a serious thinker and terrific journalist who merits our momentarily suspending judgment on the matter. For those of us who so greatly admire Canadian General and '90s Rwanda peacekeeper Romeo Dallaire and his painful book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, it is hard to see Rwanda through anything but blood-colored glasses.

Still, in producing what Publishers Weekly calls a "hagiographic account" of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Kinzer believes that this one man - no innocent himself - is in his own autocratic way moving Rwanda toward unprecedented single-generation change. In a video plugging the book, he says that Rwanda has "riveted the development community” and that Kigali is "on the way to becoming one of the great stars of Africa." Hmmmm. Let's hope so.

In light of the brutal incompetence and Stalinesque thuggery of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, coupled with the continued dismal performance of his "quiet diplomacy" enabler, South African President Thabo Mbeki, the continent could use a dash of hope these days. Kinzer certainly has us looking for it in a most unusual place.

PhotoJournal: Mt. Washington Summit Run

2008-06-21T20:24:00.024-04:00

Pinkham Notch, NH

The Mt. Washington summit run certainly ranks among the most grueling athletic competitions anywhere. Few professional athletes in the NBA, NFL or MLB could ever race 7.6 miles climbing 5,000 feet through a 30-degree temperature change in an hour or two.

These astonishing athletes display many superb qualities of value to leaders, such as preparation and perseverance. However, it is their authenticity and humility that appeal most to the casual observer. They seem to epitomize the humility of Jim Collins' Level 5 Leaders, balancing in his words a “paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will.” What a refreshing contrast to dances over sacked quarterbacks, home-plate preening at the latest home run, and the other demonstrative antics on display in "professional" sports.

So next time the office louts fist-pump their latest conquests, often at the expense of the people who actually do the work, go tell them to attempt a run to the summit of Mt. Washington. A more humble perspective may well be within their reach.

Tim Russert's Preparation

2008-06-16T11:58:00.000-04:00

Tim Russert's death is a staggering blow to any citizen who demands truth from his or her elected officials. It would be difficult to find a better prepared, more well read, and more analytically insightful interviewer than Russert, who excelled at penetrating the flim-flam too often regurgitated by politicians. Of Russert's many formidable assets, his greatest may have been the intensity of his professional preparation.

In his latest book, The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria writes that U.S. national politics has become little more than "ceaseless, virulent debates about trivia - a politics of theater." He contends that a "can do country" is losing competitive advantage at the hands of "doing nothing politics," although like many of us he does remain bullish about America's future. His point is lamentably accurate and no better evidenced than during the Congressional leadership tenures of Messrs. Gingrich, Hastert and Lott. Russert saw through this nonsense and held Republicans and Democrats alike accountable and within reach of informed public scrutiny. His loss in this and so many other contexts is almost unimaginable, given the dreadful state of contemporary, mainstream journalism.

I did not know Tim Russert. Too bad. The only encounter was a wonderful session in a hotel lounge in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. It was the night before his beloved Buffalo Bills suffered their fourth consecutive Super Bowl defeat, this time at the hands of the Dallas Cowboys. He was joyous and effusive, telling stories of sports and politics and buying a round of drinks for a small group of us lucky enough to be there when he and several friends arrived. He seemed warm, generous and so very much alive. Age 58 is hideously too young to die, but Tim Russert nonetheless found the time to show us how to live.

Comments

I believe the points you made are very well taken. I could add that although he was a memorable political journalist and interviewer in any medium, he was particularly outstanding in the arena of network television. I can't think of anyone, at the present time, who would be considered his peer. Network television still reaches a huge audience and a journalist of his quality will be sorely missed.
Jane Christo, Brookline, MA
June 16, 2008

It is very sad for our world to have lost this man’s voice.
Diane Hammer, Boston, MA
June 16, 2008

He was way too good and way too young.
Dick Gorham, Westbrook, ME
June 16, 2008

Radio Leadership: What The Mann Gulch Forest Fire Teaches Us About Sensemaking

2008-06-11T17:15:00.000-04:00

Click Here to Download PodCast!

We can learn much about team sensemaking from the tragic 1949 Mann Gulch Forest Fire.

On Courage: Million Signature Campaign

2008-06-05T15:17:00.000-04:00

The world may be suffering from disturbing shortages of cheap food and oil, but one commodity seems in full supply - fear-mongering, hate-filled ignorance. And it's hardly inexpensive, costing us dearly all around the world.

A President of the United States inappropriately and incorrectly invokes the name of Hitler in the Knesset, Sharon Stone blames China's tragic earthquake on "bad karma" stemming from Beijing's Tibet policy, and a right-wing commentator sets off a firestorm of protest among the crazies over Dunkin' Donuts Rachel Ray's wearing in the firm's latest television spot what Michelle Malkin conveniently but incorrectly believes is a keffiyeh.

This last item is so stupefying that it is difficult to discuss. Malkin excels at playing to the lowest common denominator, generating self-serving heat with very little light. She claims the scarf resembles a keffiyeh and that keffiyeh are symbols of terrorism. Oh really? In whose mind? Malkin certainly knows that Ray's all-too-trendy scarf is not a keffiyeh, which is worn around the head by Arab men. Scarves like Ray's are worn by women all over the world from New York and Paris to Stockholm and Tokyo.

Are we unraveling to such an extent that this kind of nonsense is allowed to occur let alone be effective? Apparently, yes. Dunkin' Donuts has pulled the ads, and who's to blame them? What they don't need is 20 or 30 far-right bloviators with too much time on their hands making trouble. Yet how does Dunkin' explain their actions to customers, employees, suppliers, investors and business partners around the world, some of whom likely wear the keffiyeh?

So, what's the remedy? Through the stench of ignorance, it really is possible to find pain relief. It's the opposite of ignorance. It's smart, respectful, open-minded, thoughtful and courageous. It tries hard to place the interests of the many over the selfish ambitions of the few. It's the very best of leadership. Today's example is the Iranian One Million Signature Campaign. Imagine the bravery of women (and some men) in Iran risking their lives right now to collect signatures to call for an end to discriminatory laws against women embedded in the Iranian system of justice. Bush, Stone and Malkin seek expedient political or economic benefit for themselves and worry little about the scorched earth they leave behind. The Iranian campaign organizers, on the other hand, look at the scorched earth around them and insist that we can and must do better. So, for a moment at least, try not think of these usual suspects. Consider instead heroic Iranian signature-campaign leaders such as Jelve Javaheri, Amir YaghoubAli and Maryam Hosseinkhah.

So where can you sign up? It's at http://www.we4change.info/english.

Zipf's Law: Using The Same 135 Words

2008-05-19T07:39:00.001-04:00

New York City

The Second Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the English language may possess a quarter of a million distinct words. Achieving an exact count is impossible, given the abundance of current use, obsolete use and derivative constructions. It is also likely that English contains more words than any other language. Sociolinguist John McWhorter tells us there have been 6,000 languages over time with another 10,000 dialects - most of which are dead or dying.

The linguist George Kingsley Zipf was credited with illustrating and proving what became known as Zipf's Law in which the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in frequency tables. That is to say, the more we use certain words, the more use they get. The Brown Corpus contains "only" 50,000 English-language words, but Zipf's mathematical formulations of the 1930s and 1940s demonstrated that nearly 50 percent of the corpus is comprised of the same 135 words.

Zipf's work is a classic case of Power Law. It's inverse logic and Pareto-like distribution underscore how "preferential attachment" works. As in the "the rich get richer" framework, use accumulates more use just as money accumulates more money. It makes sense that we should use such few words to be efficient and effective in daily conversation, conventions and commerce. How many time has somebody dropped a pretentious word in cocktail-party chatter only to silence the conversation? "Who was that creep, anyway?"

Nassim Taleb rightly tells us in The Black Swan that Zipf was not the first to understand this phenomenon, nor is Zipf's Law a "law" in any real sense of that word. Still, its implications for leaders and language are very clear. On the one hand, a leader must achieve concise, unambiguous meaning in language use. On the other hand, leaders seem to use the same words all the time, thus rendering those words relatively meaningless. Boring too! The key is to find the right word-use balance between what is direct and understood and what is interesting, compelling and different from everyone else's cliches and bromides.

With content analysis, CEOs and other leaders can actually determine how much they sound like everyone else in today's language risk-averse, "me-too" business environment. In doing so, they may decide to move fractionally out on Zipf's distribution and embrace a slightly more distinctive spoken and written vocabulary that will help them distinguish their organizations and themselves and extinguish the tired, lazy verbiage found too often in today's business lexicon.

p.s. Patti LuPone is her usual brilliant self, starring here in Gypsy. That girl has some pipes! I first saw her as Evita in 1979 here and, until Sunday, last saw her at Michael Feinstein's club. She is a delightful force of nature.

Radio Leadership: What A Burmese Dissident Teaches Us About Humor

2008-05-10T17:35:00.000-04:00

Click Here to Download PodCast!

What we can learn from Aung San Suu Kyi about humor.

Our Man: The Dangers of Simple Narrative

2008-05-04T12:26:00.001-04:00

Washington, DC

There is a longstanding practice among U.S. officials to invest great faith - let alone money, weapons and unrealistic hopes - in "our man" in whatever hot spots arise. We historically buy into dubious personal narratives and even manufacture some of them ourselves to position somebody as our trusted tough guy.

We have cast our lot over the years with Chiang Kai-shek in Tapei, Ferdinand Marcos in Manila, Shah Reza Pahlavi in Tehran, Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad, Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon and Syngman Rhee in Seoul, let alone enough Latin American generals throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to populate a Gilbert & Sullivan production. Sometimes these alliances are necessary, however, as was FDR's choice to work with Stalin during World War Two. He once explained the uneasy relationship with the unspeakable evil of a man he lightly called "Uncle Joe" as holding hands with the devil in order to cross the bridge. The devil, indeed!

In his account of The Korean War, The Coldest Winter, the late David Halberstam suggests that the American-educated Syngman Rhee was a manipulator of the highest order. Like all of the characters above, he knew when to play the anti-communism card or, in other contexts more recently, the anti-terrorism card to induce the reflex on our part to pour weapons, money and political support into his cause.

One painful example of the risks associated with simplistic narratives is that of Ahmed Chalabi. He reinvented himself many times and, together, we reinvented him yet again as the purported embodiment of a free and democratic Iraq. Remember that in 2002 and 2003 some neoconservatives dubbed Chalabi "the George Washington of Iraq." We both bought and sold a personal narrative that bore little relationship to reality, using it as a key storyline in our run-up to Iraq. For more on this history, read Aram Roston's book, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.

The trouble in all these cases is that we exhibit what in The Black Swan Nassim Taleb calls "the dangerous compression of narrative." After all, it is much easier to buy into a simple "good versus evil" story line with readily identifiable good guys and evildoers. "Our men" are always the good guys, of course, until they almost always prove otherwise. The problem with creating and enabling simplistic narratives that align our short-term interests with the wrong guy, however, is that we miss the long-term strategic benefits. Perhaps limited by our own ontologies and ideologies, we fail to work with the complexity that defines actual reality, unable to see embryonic democratic movements stirring beneath most any dictatorship. Eventually we find ourselves on the wrong side of the equation, which is precisely our dilemma in Pakistan right now as it will be in Saudi Arabia some day perilously soon.

Complexity leadership theorists tell us that nations, organizations and individuals exist in complex adaptive systems. These systems are marked by dynamism, interactivity, non-linearity and unpredictability, carrying with them the potential for small, unforeseen events to manifest out of proportion to their scale and in ways that obliterate the large-scale story lines otherwise intended. Indeed, it is very difficult to achieve a simple, linear story arc in highly complex environments and trying to do so can actually make matters worse. The complexity folks tell us that these systems are less dependent on the one leader, per se, and much more engaged in constantly shifting patterns of leadership and followership undertaken by many actors - a much tougher story to tell. Yes, politicians and the media often want to create simple stories with clear beginnings and endings, identifiable antagonists and protagonists, and grand, compelling plots. We love these stories. They're called fiction.

p.s. What a wonderfully rousing version of Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony Kurt Masur and the Orchestre National de France delivered last Sunday at Boston's Symphony Hall. And a diamond of a very different kind is the new Nationals Stadium in Washington's Anacostia District. It is a very nice building, but lacks the class and intimacy of parks in Baltimore, Cleveland, San Diego, Philadelphia and elsewhere. What happened?

Yum = Ugh: Situational Awareness Matters

2008-05-03T21:00:00.001-04:00

Washington, DC

I felt bad for Yum Brands CEO David Novak. That was hard to do, having been ready to throw a shoe at the television with the incessant promotions for Yum's various fast-food joints throughout the Kentucky Derby broadcast. Yum sponsors the Derby, which meant that Novak could congratulate the winner on live television.

So here he was tonight using his allocated 15 seconds only to list the five names of those fast-food joints - yet again! It seems that he was oblivious to the death of the second-place finisher Eight Belles moments earlier. How is it possible to not know something that others on the podium acknowledged in their remarks? It is unimaginable that Novak wouldn't have insisted on real-time situational awareness prior to appearing on global television. Where were his people and what was their knowledge of the tragedy on the track? How could he not have heard something about the horse's death from Bob Costas and the other NBC people prior to going live? Ironically, this is one moment when somebody actually needed a PDA or cell phone at the ready. Reciting those fast-food names again would have been unappetizing enough, but doing so in such a tragic context is humiliating.

Radio Leadership: What The Abilene Paradox Teaches About Decision-Making Clarity

2008-05-01T20:14:00.000-04:00

Why do management teams so often find themselves on that road to Abilene?

Click Here to Download PodCast!

On Courage: Jackie Speier

2008-04-15T12:28:00.001-04:00

Princeton, MA

This blog will feature a regular item On Courage in its many forms, from physical, moral and social courage to situations in which individuals choose to continue living meaningful lives against all odds.

The late journalist Dorothy Thompson's definition of courage is useful. She was the first woman reporter expelled from Nazi Germany. Thompson once said that, "Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow." Yes, absolutely!

The truth is that there are many stories of truly courageous people out there that lend needed perspective to endless reports of the evil, banality and cowardice among us. Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) is a case in point.

Some people say that Speier is a royal pain in the butt in fighting for causes she believes are just. It's likely that some do not appreciate her style. It's also likely that her brand of liberalism may be too liberal for pragmatists and even centrists. Yet there is simply no denying the considerable courage found in her life story. Speier was shot five times by Jim Jones' henchmen on a tarmac near Jonestown, Guyana, an event that resulted in the assassination of her boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, on that fateful day in November, 1978. Speier was left for dead in the Guyanese jungle, somehow survived and underwent 10 operations over 25 years to repair her brutally damaged body.

It's hard to believe after the events of Jonestown that Speier also endured several miscarriages, a lengthy but failed adoption process, an auto accident while jogging, and the chilling death of her first husband in another auto accident at the hands of an unlicensed driver with faulty brakes. How would any one of us choose to handle these ordeals? Well, Congresswoman Speier appears to have handled them as well as could possibly be expected. She is someone well worth respecting and well worth watching, no matter how uncompromising she is said to be. Hey, she's earned it, right?

Project On National Security Reform

2008-04-11T10:49:00.001-04:00

This blog will comment occasionally on the Project on National Security Reform, an initiative of the Center for the Study of the Presidency (links in Resources). It would be difficult to imagine anything in greater need of reform than the U.S. national security apparatus. Still, it is essential in these circumstances to accept that the word "reform" itself is socially and situationally constructed and has little meaning outside the true intentions of the reformers. Politicians have foisted on the public all manner of stupidity in the name of "tax reform," "regulatory reform" and "immigration reform." Anyone for "reform reform"?

Happily, PNSR appears to be led by men and women of exceptional intellect and character who seem truly interested in repairing and improving national security. One hopes their talent composition enables new voices to be heard throughout the process, however, since many of the "old hands" populating this effort are products and beneficiaries of the status quo.

The Project is right on target in arguing that we must move well beyond a system still largely built on the National Security Act of 1947. While some Goldwater-Nichols reforms of the 1980s seem to be effective, such as the strengthened role of the Joint Chiefs Chairman, future historians may well charge that the post-9/11 reforms creating the Homeland Security Department were a disaster. The most important PNSR reform is also the most politically volatile, however, ensuring in the future that the United States only enters into just and necessary wars and prosecutes them capably and competently.

In its own words, PNSR is "conducting a rigorous examination of the origins, history, and performance of the national security system. Based on this analysis, PNSR will identify alternative solutions and propose recommendations for improving the national security system to include a draft new National Security Act." The initiative is organized into working groups - Strategy, Structure, Knowledge Management and Human Capital to name four - that appear to be working quite well. Their use of historical case studies is to be commended, as well, as among the few methods for guarding against repeated foolishness. This initiative is well worth watching and appears to be in very good hands. Of course, and as always, it risks being cherry-picked by future Presidents and Congresses whose key players will probably never read it. But for now, so far so good!

Pacman And The PRC

2008-03-27T17:20:00.001-04:00

One measure of leadership is choosing to do the right thing amidst temptations to do otherwise. The astonishingly hamhanded persecution of Tibetans by the Peoples Republic of China continues with an official American response that can only be called muted.

On the one hand, President Bush and Secretary of State Rice are unwilling to hold China's feet to the fire. It is undoubtedly the case that they do not want to anger one of our largest import partners and creditors. China understands this well and takes advantage of our reliance on them. On the other hand and at the other extreme, House Speaker Pelosi races full-throttle to Dharamsala, India for a photo-opportunity with his Holiness the Dalai Lama to protest China's actions. It is undoubtedly the case that she sees the political advantages, fundraising appeal and publicity value in such a move, albeit at the expense of raising false hopes that the U.S. will do anything of value to actually help the Tibetans.

These are very complex issues. It seems that the right thing to do here is to work behind the scenes to encourage the Chinese to account for their actions. Furthermore, while threatening or actually undertaking a boycott of the Beijing Olympics would be counterproductive, it seems that President Bush could hold open the possibility that he would not attend the Games and place the still-valued imprimatur of the U.S. Presidency on them until and unless the Chinese allow inspectors and journalists into Tibet to account for what has happened and why.

Temptation can make doing the right thing difficult. One can only imagine how tempting is any photo opportunity with His Holiness. Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, many New England football fans would like to see Adam "Pacman" Jones in a Patriots' uniform this season, even while holding their noses. However, this thug need not apply and one clings to the hope that the wonderful Kraft family - true leaders, themselves - will not succumb to this temptation. Let Jones play for Dallas or Detroit instead. Yes, the Patriots are desperate for cornerbacks and Jones is among the best in the game. Yet how much of one's soul is lost in not adhering to one's values and falling prey to such temptation? Randy Moss was a sullen prima donna, but he was no criminal nor was he a sociopath. The right franchises can take risks on guys like that and both parties benefit. This is not a risk; it would simply be wrong.

Working past the empty rhetoric and staying true to one's values means finding the right middle ground working with the Middle Kingdom. It may mean President Bush saying no to his participation in the Beijing Olympics. It also means saying no to Adam "Pacman" Jones, which the Kraft Family will likely do. Therein lies the distinction between pretenders and true leaders.

PhotoJournal: Grapefruit League

2008-03-19T17:24:00.000-04:00

Lakeland, Florida

Tigertown is the real deal. Spring training as it should be and has long been. Joker Marchant Stadium speaks to the many decades the Tigers have called Lakeland home. Just consider that this wonderful little park right in the middle of town has seen the likes of Al Kaline, Denny McClain, Micky Lolich, Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Mark Fidrych, Allan Trammel, Kirk Gibson, Jack Morris, Cecil Fielder and, well, you name it. The list seems as long as the memories.

This is baseball at its very best, as the Tigers faced the Washington Nationals this afternoon for an ESPN-broadcast Grapefruit League game. The experience comes in contrast to watching the Nationals beat the New York Mets over in Viera yesterday, on Florida's east coast near Cocoa Beach. Sure, it was another pleasant day in the sun, but the Nationals, their Space Coast Stadium, and the town of Viera don't have much soul or the sense of place that history provides. So vacant is the history of the former Montreal Expos franchise that a huge statue in front of the stadium honors a generic, no-name batsman of some kind.

While the Tigers will be a superb squad this year, look for the Nats to do nothing. In thinking about the first Washington Senators' move to Minnesota to become the Twins and the second Senators' exodus to Texas to become the Rangers, one wonders about this franchise's ability to succeed over the long term. New stadium in DC's Anacostia district aside, the old barb about the Senators will have to be changed to "Washington, first in war, first in peace, and last in the National League."

Civilized Workplaces

2008-03-18T10:11:00.016-04:00

Orlando

The world is filled with them. In turn, they fill the air with the noxious odor of maniacal and even deranged arrogance. Too many of us have worked for one or more of these absurd people in our careers, witnessing the true costs of their brutal pathologies and wondering why the boss and the board fail to recognize the grenade that will soon blow up in their faces. It almost always does.

This sentiment comes after so many are now dealing with the shrapnel of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's implosion. Such abusive, self-absorbed people almost always destroy themselves but, tragically, their demise too often comes after much needless damage has been done to other people and organizations. Just read David Margolick's troubling article about Spitzer's arrogance, rage, selfishness and abject disdain for others, The Year of Governing Dangerously (Vanity Fair, January 2008), and you would think he was writing about Spitzer now, after the fall, and not before his abrupt resignation. So many people made past-tense references to Spitzer in the piece because only one year into his four-year run, nobody wanted to work for or with him.

Why? Because he fits Professor Robert Sutton's definition of being an asshole. And a pretty big one at that! As reluctant as I am to use that term in this venue, it can now be found in the title of Sutton's new book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. Sutton's is a wake-up call for employers to understand the difference between being tough, firm and decisive and just being a garden-variety "kiss-up, kick-down" asshole. Some friction and creative tension in organizations is useful, if properly channeled. However, Sutton tell us that true assholes care little about balancing such energies in the workplace. Instead, he says these people are certifiable assholes if they meet two criteria: 1) making others feel oppressed, humiliated, excluded and de-energized and 2) inflicting their pain on those less powerful than themselves. Who comes to mind in your office, huh?

Sutton reminds us of some the very best assholes such as "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. He compares them to tough, driven leaders like Intel's Andy Grove, Men's Wearhouse's George Zimmer and Costco's James Sinegal who endure over the long term and whose organizations thrive because they mercifully emerged from childhood without the need to destroy others to protect their own fragile egos.

Of course, the real test always comes when these jerks appear to be driving effective performance, often coated in tough talk. Here is where those distanced from the asshole, such as board members, too often protect the status quo to derive short-term gain only to find several years later an organization fearful of creativity, innovation and collaboration and a workforce shorn of morale and depleted of its best talent. Sutton quotes Google's Shona Brown whose company "acts on its 'Don't be evil' motto by making Google a place where it simply isn't efficient to act like an asshole." (p.49) And that's the key. Abuse must be seen in operational and financial terms and it must be understood to produce needless inefficiency and ineffectiveness which, by the way, the asshole is typically very good at hiding. Sutton calls these costs "asshole taxes."

Now Sutton reminds us that assholes don't always do more harm than good. Calculated sound and fury has its time and place. Sutton says General Patton and Bobby Knight seem to fit the asshole definition, but on balance they achieved conditions in which, well, people "worked their asses off" for them. (p. 143) Maybe he has a point, albeit he is reluctant to fully embrace it. Still, most of us would decline entering into such a megalomaniacal manipulation. Give me General Omar Bradley and Duke's Coach K anytime.

p.s. The K Restaurant and Wine Bar here on Edgewater Drive in Orlando's College Park neighborhood is an exceptional find. Yes, the wonderfully named Vito's Chop House here has one of the best wine lists in the Southeast, and well worth the trip, but K Restaurant and Wine Bar is one of those subtle, gentle places that can and did emerge unexpectedly.

Dark Forces

2008-03-13T18:48:00.005-04:00

The world is a better place with the arrest in Bangkok late last week of Russian arms mercenary Victor Bout. I have been following the escapades of the Merchant of Death for many years. Here is man who is and has been both an enemy of and a collaborator with the United States, simultaneously at times.

The noxious Mr. Bout has for years been smuggling arms and aircraft to the likes of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Charles Taylor's thugs in Liberia, Somalian insurgents, Sudanese cutthroats and, well, you name it. One has to applaud the efforts of U.S. and international law enforcement officials whose sting operation lured him into a trap from which he may never escape.

Three Trillion And Counting

2008-03-09T07:48:00.006-04:00

Baltimore

I remember the day in 2003 when Larry Lindsey, then President Bush’s CEA chair, said the Iraq War could cost as much as $200 billion. While then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dismissed Lindsey’s conjecture as “baloney,” I remember thinking that it was a dangerous underestimate.

Surely, I recall thinking, this war would exceed $1 trillion when one honestly considered the costs of long-term nation-building, veterans’ health-care needs, armed forces re-equipping and inevitable oil-price escalations. I worried back then that oil prices could climb past $50 a barrel for several years and that we would be stuck in Iraq for 15-20 years. I was wrong on oil, now priced at a staggering $103 a barrel, but I will regrettably stick to my guns on the tenure issue – five years and counting. Of course, none of this speaks to the horror of so many lives and limbs lost.

Lindsey was fired for attempting to calibrate the truth. After all, others above his pay grade were claiming at the time that the war would cost only $50 billion to $60 billion. Now Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes suggest in their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, that the real cost to U.S. taxpayers is $3 trillion and rising. They assert that costs these high coupled with tax cuts and staggering deficits have contributed mightily to our economic crisis. Their views also remind us how ludicrous it is when politicians, pollsters and pundits suggest somehow that we the people are now more interested in the economy than we are in this war. The two are and have always been inseparable.

PhotoJournal: Dubai and Margham

2008-02-23T18:17:00.000-05:00

United Arab Emirates

Wadi-Bashing

2008-02-22T11:15:00.008-05:00

Dubai, UAE

We went wadi-bashing today at the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, taking the Al Ain Road toward Abu Dhabi paralleling the border with the Emirate of Sharjah. Two humorous word-play billboards enroute; the first featured penthouse condominiums called "pentominiums" and the second was another real estate promotion with the catchy line, "We think outside the box so you don't have to live in one."

Real estate development is one the driving forces of Dubai today. We have been told more than once that Dubai has 25 percent of the world's large-scale construction cranes. Just looking around here, one thinks that this claim might actually be true. Living quarters for guest workers are rising everywhere as are opulent commercial developments and luxury residences.

On Qatar

2008-02-20T15:24:00.011-05:00

Doha, Qatar

Qatar has the unbridled energy and singular focus of a place on the move - and on the make! There seems no limit to what can be bought here and no subtly about building or buying the world's biggest "that" or tallest "this." It is an adolescent growth stage similar in some ways to the settlement of the western United States in the 19th century, at once exuberant and exorbitant. Of course, who wouldn't have such brash ambitions with one of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world?

Of the nation's 800,000 residents, only 20 percent are Qatari. The rest are guest workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya, Tanzania, the Philippines and elsewhere. One can live and work here for many hours a day and never actually see one of the 160,000 or so Qatari who cannot possibly build and run this nation without imported labor. They would not be winning medals in the Asian Games or elsewhere either, without imported distance runners and other world-class athletes from Tanzania, Kenya and Morocco.

Still, the Qatari are smart in how they are going about their development. Taking a page from the Dubai playbook - and the competition between these two emirates is intense, so the Qatari would not appreciate the comparison - government officials understand the need to move well beyond the energy sector. As the prime minister told The Financial Times last year, "Our hydrocarbons won't last forever - we need to secure the same standard of living for our children." (September 22-23, 2007) That is why the al-Jazeera media empire is based here as well as the Education City project whose tenants include Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth. That is why Qatar is becoming a global investment and financial services powerhouse, almost overnight. And that is why the new Doha International Airport will feature the longest runways and most military-friendly facilities found nearly anywhere. For better and worse, the long shadow of U.S. foreign policy, economic and national security interests is never far from Qatar's remarkable development.

One looks at the skyline under development here in Doha, already larger and taller than Boston's, and shudders at the notion that Qatar was nearly bankrupt just 15 years ago. What will they do for an encore? Well, don't be surprised when Doha makes a serious run at the 2016 Summer Olympics and actually wins it. The ruling al Thani family can make anything happen here; just witness the extraordinary athletics infrastructure already in place. Furthermore, Qatar can come as close as to any other benign dictatorship to guaranteeing a peaceful games that would also be free of any debt. Besides, the Games have never come to this part of the world and what a statement that would make, despite the improbability of asking athletes and spectators to endure summer temperatures well in excess of 100 degrees. Hello to a late-October Olympiad.

Our Thoughts Turn To "Nothing"

2008-02-19T14:53:00.005-05:00

Doha, Qatar

We heard from Georgetown's John Esposito at the gorgeous Diplomatic Club here last night. Professor Esposito has written a new book with Dalia Mogahed entitled, Who Speaks For Islam? The authors argue that we need to let the data drive discussions and opinions of what Muslims actually think, since so many politicians, pundits and reporters around the world speak for Islam incorrectly or incompletely.

Esposito and Mogehed worked with the Gallup World Poll, which conducted tens of thousands of interviews with Muslims in 35 nations. He underscores the need to resist the painful, fear-mongering stereotypes of Arabs, Persians and Muslims perpetrated by some in the U.S. and Europe who knowingly "choose to play the extremist card."

He reports on many views Muslims have of America and Americans, some of them quite negative but more of them neutral to positive. When asked about what they like or do not like about the United States, respondents had much to say on both counts. What was profoundly disturbing, however, was that when Americans were asked what they knew about Muslims 57 percent responded either "nothing" or "don't know." I thought we were supposed to learn the painful lessons of 9-11 about the damage done by our ignorance of the world and how it works.

p.s. Yes, Porcini's at the Ritz is considered by some to be the best restaurant in Qatar. Yet, I found it less interesting and inviting than the Indian restaurant Chingari, where I sampled curried hammour (a type of grouper found in the Arabian Sea), Tajine's in the Old Souk where I had camel stew, or the Bukhara Qatar Tennis & Squash Club where I tried the local mutton.