What's Left of the Right?

Let's make a list of all the people today's Republican Party has tried its best to alienate.
Gays and lesbians.
Hispanics.
Muslims.
Blacks. (What about Black Muslims? Probably a two-fer.)
Women. (Except for Mama Grizzlies, who are presumably traveling, pack-like to support Ms. Palin.)
Environmentalists. (A long time ago.)
People who are unemployed and wish they had a job, unemployment benefits until they can find a job, or both.
Anyone who feels any affinity for any of these groups.
Others I may have left out--feel free to add to the list.
Now, I don't care what your political persuasion, this is not a good state of affairs. A Republican Party that keeps practicing addition by subtraction only serves to polarize the national political debate, make every issue a black/white wedge issue, dampen down the capacity of elected officials who might want to get something, and drive more and more average Americans out of the political process.
If it is a conscious strategy, it is cynical beyond words.
If it is a death-wish, those of us who believe that politics and government are essential to our capacity to create and deliver a positive future can only hope that the process moves rapidly to its logical conclusion, and that at some point a more reasonable, moderate, and thoughtful Republican Party can be re-born.
Because it wasn't always like this.
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there was a Republican Party that was populated by interesting, smart, capable people. You might now agree with them, but they were impressive. I remember listening to "Capitol Cloakroom" on the radio (I know that dates me, but there it is) and hearing Everett Dirksen's gravelly voice argue for his side of the aisle. Bill Scranton, Edward Brooke, Mark Hatfield, and more were staunch Republicans who had workable political philosophies they were committed to as Republicans.
Today, I doubt Mark Hatfield would be admitted to the Republican caucus.
The old joke about the Democrats was, when they formed a firing squad they lined up in a circle.
Today's Republican Party has formed a circle, and then given guns to an angry mob standing outside the circle, with orders to shoot to kill.
The truth is, we need two parties in this country--maybe more. Interestingly, we also need the parties to be able to work in a more bi-partisan fashion.
That can't happen as long as one of the two parties is committed to killing the political process en route to committing suicide.
What's even worse is, the Republicans may be rewarded for their strategy at the polls this November--which would only convince them to double-down on cynicism. What's beyond cynicism?
Nihilism, I guess.
As the nihilists say in The Big Lebowski, "We believe in nothing, Lebowski, nothing."
After November, that may be where the Republicans head.
It's an ugly thought, and a dangerous game.

Apple Customer Service?

By now it's become a default position to love Apple products and hate Apple customer service--or, more broadly, Apple's attitude toward its customers.
Most Apple users and watchers have suspected that Steve Jobs has always loved his products and their design more than he loves the people who actually buy them. In fact, the old mantra was, Apple's customers aren't worthy of the company's products.
So why bother to register one more tired complaint?
Because it still rankles.
Here's a short version.
I'm in Santa Fe.
I'm flying to San Francisco on Tuesday, leaving for Europe on Wednesday.
After waiting for the votes to be counted, I've decided to take an iPad with me.
Should I drive to Albuquerque and buy one there? Or wait until I'm in San Francisco, and simply walk to the Apple store and buy on there?
Prudence suggests a phone call.
I call the Apple store in San Francisco.
Yes, they have plenty iPads in stock.
Yes, they have one configured the way I want it.
No, they can't predict whether they'll have one on Tuesday.
No, I can't buy one over the phone and pick it up on Tuesday.
No, I can't buy one over the web and pick it up on Tuesday.
No. No. No.
Oh, and have a nice day.

Toxic Leadership

Once again, I've got to hand it to Joe Nocera.
I've been scratching my head for more than a week, puzzling over the dismissal by the HP board of CEO Mark Hurd. The way the story of his firing broke made no sense. Hurd had presided over a remarkable reversal of HP's performance. He came in on the heels of Carly Fiorina, who'd run HP as if it were a corporate platform for her own celebrification, and in short order had made the place spin like a top.
And then, all of a sudden, he was fired.
A woman alleged sexual harassment. The board investigated, and found no sexual harassment. But it discovered something on the order of $20,000 worth of phony payments to the woman. And Hurd was fired. Fired and awarded a going away present of roughly $72 million.
How did any of this make any sense?
In today's New York Times, Joe Nocera explains.
Hurd was a toxic leader. He made HP spin like a top. And he did it by destroying the lives of the work force, slashing the company's investment in R&D, poisoning the company's culture, and earning the hatred of the company's top executives.
It was all about Mark Hurd.
To get at the story behind the story, Joe turned to Tony Bianco, who I knew 30 years ago when he cut his reporting teeth at Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and who recently wrote an book investigating the HP spying scandal that wracked the board a few years back. Tony is an investigative reporter in the best tradition of muckraking, and what he found about that spying scandal made him conclude, he told Joe, that Hurd lacked "the moral character" to be HP's CEO.
Then Joe interviewed Chuck House, who I knew back in the days of HBR and Fast Company. Chuck practically broke into a chorus of "ding dong the witch is dead" when talking about the evil influence that Hurd had had on HP. He made the numbers; he destroyed the company's capacity to do great work going forward.
All of which raises a couple of questions.
Why did the HP board need a trumped up $20,000 payoff problem to fire a man that they deeply distrusted and who had lost the confidence and support of the people who did the work to make the company go? Why couldn't the board summon the "moral character" (to borrow Tony's term) to fire Hurd for toxic leadership, and do it on the up and up?
Maybe, just maybe, boards of directors have become so distanced from their real responsibilities and from the actual world of work that they can't do their jobs responsibly. They need some smokescreen that gives them permission to do what they're actually there to do--provide real oversight and governance for the company, and to evaluate management's overall performance and hold it accountable.
And second, why did it take more than a week for a good, solid journalist to sniff out the real story?
Among my friends in business journalism, the Hurd firing was the biggest head scratcher, not just of the week, but of a good long time.
You'd have thought that enterprising reporters would have wanted to be the one to suss out the real story and bring it to light.
Joe Nocera did it. He gets the credit.
And it's the kind of reporting we need a lot more of. More digging, more putting the sources together, more asking the right question.
Hats off to Joe; now let's have more of it.

The Problem With Conventional Wisdom Is . . . It's Conventional

For the last several months I've had a ring-side seat at one of America's most fascinating media circuses--the sale of Newsweek magazine.
My ticket to the show was provided by Fred Drasner, the man to whom Bill Taylor and I first brought Fast Company magazine as a concept and who, with his then-partner Mort Zuckerman, made the decision to back our magazine.
A few months ago, after a decade-long hiatus, Fred called me out of the blue. He was going to bid on Newsweek, he told me. Would I agree to work with him on developing an editorial strategy, and, if things worked out, to serving as the editor under his ownership.
What evolved over the next few months was a free updated education into the current economics--and thinking--about news, journalism, and publishing in America.
Of course, I told Fred I would join his team, out of a mix of loyalty and curiosity.
But naturally, I started out as a skeptic.
We all know, after all, what conventional wisdom tells us about magazines, in general, and weekly newsmagazines, in particular: they're irrelevant.
News is a commodity. I wrote that myself in Rules of Thumb.
It happens on the web 24/7.
What we need are people who can provide context. Tell us what the news means--don't just produce more of it. Especially more of it that's later, slower, and less interesting that what we get in short, concise blasts that show up on our cell-phones, laptops, iPads, and other devices in real time.
Then I went to New York with Fred and Paul Ingrassia, my editorial team mate, to meet with the current Newsweek team.
And I began to re-think conventional wisdom.
Before we met with the Newsweek people, we had dinner with a refugee from the publication. Our own editorial "DeepThroat."
He made a compelling case that conventional wisdom is dead wrong.
What the world needs, he said, is a respite from the constant blasts that come at us on the Web. We need to be reminded that "the week" is not a useless increment of time. It's vital one, an important rhythm to events and human life. The news that passes as news, streaming across our electronic screens, usually isn't really news, anyway. It's data, information. It doesn't inform us; it numbs us.
What if a news-weekly actually concentrated on the two things its name says it is: all about news; and weekly.
While we were sitting in New York, preparing for our Newsweek meetings, a funny thing happened: Rolling Stone broke a story. A journalist (as it happens, a former Newsweek stringer) had spent a week (that pesky time period, again) in Europe with General McChrystal and his top team members. The result was a story that blew the lid off the Afghanistan command, cost the General his job--and reminded us all what real journalism does: It reports.
The New York media cried foul! Didn't this guy know he was burning his bridges with the General and his staff? Losing access? Probably sacrificing his seat at the correspondent's dinner in DC?
I made a mental note: We need more journalism, more reporting. We need more content, less context.
Then we had our meetings with Newsweek. The magazine had placed a hefty bet on context, not content. The prize of place went to the magazine's columnists and pundits, the public faces of Newsweek who appeared, along with the editor-in-chief, on TV talk shows and radio. They were smart, they were well-informed, they fit the bill for what magazines in America are moving toward--very bright talkers who can tell you convincingly what they think about what they've been writing about. It's created a world of journalism where "news" consists of journalists interviewing journalists.
When I got back home, I picked up the most recent biography of Henry Luce, "The Publisher" by Alan Brinkley. It's not only a great biography and a historical review of the American Century. It's a primer on publishing and the forces that created our ideas of what magazines can and should be. It's a book, ultimately, about America and Americans, and Luce's ability to tell us our own stories, report on our own national dreams and aspirations.
Then I turned to "American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone" by D.D. Guttenplan. Another must-read for anyone who's grappling with politics, journalism, and present-day America, as well as the journey of one of our most doggedly determined journalists, a national treasure who valued reporting and truth-telling above all else.
And I came away convinced that we need Newsweek, and Time, and The Nation, and all the other struggling news-weeklies out there. But we need them to do what they started out to do, not what they've bent themselves into.
Convinced that we don't want hard-core reporting, they've morphed into "theme-based" magazines. They try to guess the direction of the "national narrative," and then "make sense" out of it for us.
Never mind that most of the time their guesses of narrative arc are wrong! How could they be right? Even the best analyst who tries to connect the dots rarely nails it.
The real question is, at this point in American journalism, is that what we need our reporters doing?
Michael Wolff has long argued that American journalism took a wrong turn with Watergate. All of a sudden, the hard-working, hard-drinking shoe-leather-using reporters of the old school became media celebrities themselves.
Journalists got too smart for their own good, too Ivy League for their readers.
Compound that with the Web, that makes news nothing more than a constant crawl across the bottom of whatever side screen you're blind eyes are staring at, add Twitter and every other social media feed to the mix, and make everyone a blogger and a pundit, and you've got the Tower of Babel replacing serious reporting, tough-minded fact-gathering, and relentless questioning of authority.
We need fewer celebrities, and more muckrakers.
We need less streaming and screaming, and more investigative reporting.
At the end, my original skepticism was replaced by a lengthy memo that Paul and I wrote, laying out an editorial strategy for Newsweek, a plan to take the magazine back to its roots and forward to renewed relevance.
Then Sidney Harman outbid Fred Drasner for the magazine, and the memo became, well, a memo.
But here's what I learned from several months of thinking about something that I was sure I already knew the answer to, before Fred called: The problem with conventional thinking--about journalism, magazines, you name it--is that its conventional.
Which means it's probably wrong.
And certainly boring.
Let's hope that whatever Mr. Harman does with Newsweek, whatever TimeWarner does with Time, and whatever else happens to the magazine and journalism world writ large, we end up seeing more experimentation, more back to the roots thinking, and less conventional wisdom.
In their own opposite ways, it's what Henry Luce and I.F. Stone both stood for.

America At War

"Restrepo," a documentary about American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan had a special showing in Santa Fe last night.
The film offers an unflinching look at what is going on in the lives--and deaths--of American soldiers in a war that most Americans at home appear to know little--and care less--about.
It's not an anti-war film--although any film that depicts what war really looks like seems to me to be by definition an anti-war film.
And while the film is riveting to watch, at the end of it I'm not sure what question it answered--or even what question it asked.
Unconnected to the movie, but not unrelated, was a report in the local paper yesterday, picked up from the McClatchy Newspapers. Written by Nancy A. Youssef, the piece reports on a 300-page Army report that studied rising rates of drug abuse and criminal activity among soldiers leading to record-high levels of suicide among troops.
Here's the money quote from the article and the report:
"As we continue to wage war on several fronts, data would suggest we are becoming more dependent on pharmaceuticals to sustain the force. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that the force is becoming increasingly dependent on both legal and illegal drugs."
About one-third of soldiers are on some kind of prescription drug; 14% are on pain medication; crimes committed by soldiers are up--50,223 offenses committed in 2009 compared to 28,388 five years previously.
And suicide rates are up to 20.2 per 100,000 population, above the civilian rate for the U.S.
In my local paper, that report appeared next to a piece that recorded the number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan as having reached "at least" 1,122 military personnel since 2001.
Now back to the movie for a minute.
One of the more arresting images in the film isn't a battle scene.
It's a meeting between the major in charge of the U.S. outpost and the local tribesmen. He's explaining that he's the new guy in charge. He wants them to know that what happened under the previous commanding officer is old news; the slate has been wiped clean. He's a fresh start.
His promise to the tribal leaders is to help build the local economy. Jobs and economic development. Build a road that will open up their region for trade and new business. A chance for them to get rich!
They sit there and look at him and the looks on their faces seem to say, "What in the world are you talking about?"
It's not just a different language.
It's a different universe. Maybe a different century. More than a different culture. A completely different frame of reference, a different time frame, a different world.
After the film, the major in the movie and one of the film-makes answered questions.
The film-maker made the point that Americans have little connection with this war.
There is no draft.
Taxes haven't gone up to pay for it. We're just putting it on our national credit card.
Even the leak of documents through Wikileaks hasn't stirred up much in the way of comment.
We have a national disconnect between the wars we fight and the world we live in back in America.
Soldiers come home, young boys, young girls really, having been damaged and broken by their experience. They may be on drugs; they may simply have awful nightmares and bad dreams. They may be injured physically; they may be injured spiritually.
Our political leaders talk about taking care of our veterans; it's hard to know what really taking care of them would look like.
Jobs? Economic development? A chance for trade and business? A chance to get rich?
And what about the undertaking of war in the first place?
There's no national dialog about it, no conversation as to why we're there, what the price is we're willing to pay, or who has to pay that price.
The disconnect is almost total, except for the young people we send over to do the fighting and the killing and the dying.
Today, America is at war.
And if you don't go to the movies to see a documentary, you'd hardly know it here at home.
And that's a real tragedy.

The Case of the Missing Middle

(Let's see. Where was I before I took a little time off?)
For a variety of reasons, I just finished reading the wonderfully well-written biography of Henry Luce, "The Publisher" by historian Alan Brinkley. (And recommend it without any reservations!)
It's a great book with useful and important lessons about publishing, journalism, magazining--and America then and now.
And it's this last category that has me thinking.
One of the sources of Luce's success with Time and Life (in particular) was the rise of the middle class. Over a period of about four decades, the United States took shape as the middle class was created--and then, in turn, created America.
The middle class defined what it meant to be an American. What the aspirations of the average American were, what the values and habits were, the consuming patterns, the work styles, and even the shortcomings and failings.
Under Luce, Time produced newsreels, featuring what has since become an iconic (and much parodied) voice booming, "America goes to work!" or "America goes to war!" or "America thinks this or that!"
And back then, there was that kind of America--a kind of general consensus about what the country was, how it worked, what it stood for, where it was headed (with, of course, huge gaping holes in areas like racial equality, gender equality--things like that).
Luce and Time/Life could ride that wave, even help define and shape it.
Americans wanted to know what Americans thought; wanted to know what Americans looked like; wanted to know what it meant to be American. And Luce and his magazines could tell them.
In 2010, that's a tougher assignment.
There are more Americas.
And more narcissism. More interest in "me" than in "us."
But most significantly, we're witnessing the wholesale destruction of the middle class.
Over the last decade or so, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer--and the middle class has been ripped to shreds.
Globalization has cost America a wealth of middle class jobs.
The economic melt-down of the last 2 years has cost more. And has taken away the equity that many middle-class families had struggled to build up over years.
The middle-class, the glue that used to keep the country together, is losing its hold.
I saw this same problem at the city level back in the 1970s in Portland, Oregon.
Portland then was at a tipping point: it had lots of older, poorer residents, and lots of younger, single residents. What it was fighting for were middle-income families with children--the people in the middle.
It's the people in the middle who hold the whole thing together. In Portland's case, if the middle went missing, moved to the suburbs, the city would lose its demographic center. And so we developed "the population strategy"--a series of government policies and initiatives designed to get the people in the middle to vote with their feet, to stay in the city, to turn their backs on the suburbs.
Today, America faces the same challenge--only on a national level.
We need to have policies and initiatives that rebuild and resurrect the middle class.
In the 1970s, government programs had to have environmental impact statements filed before they could move forward.
Today we need "middle class impact statements" for federal, state, and local government programs--analyses of the impact on the people in the middle of spending programs, tax programs, education programs--the gamut of policies and initiatives.
Because, very simply, if the middle goes missing, those who are left at either end of the socio-economic spectrum will be unable to keep things from imploding.

What You See Is Where You Sit

Is there a better sporting event than the World Cup?
Like the slogan says, "One game changes everything."
Yesterday I found myself holding my breath for 90 minutes while the U.S. team struggled to a 1-1 tie against England--thanks to a stunning error by the British keeper.
When the game was over I turned into a bitter U.S. fan: why hadn't the American team done a better job of controlling the ball? What was wrong with the defense to allow a goal in the 4th minute? Where were the sustained build-ups that world class teams showcase?
Then I went on the web to read the coverage of the match by the British press.
Of course, the soft goal scored by the U.S. got a lot of attention. But the Brits gave enormous credit to the tenacity of the U.S. defense, to the improved soccer know-how of the team, to the role played by Landon Donavon, the speed of the U.S. team overall.
They'd watched a completely different game, a game in which their team, favored to win, had been thwarted by a rugged U.S. effort.
I had a similar moment when, after reading U.S. press coverage of the B.P. oil spill, and President Obama's apparently too-soft response, I read the weekend editorial in The Financial Times.
Their point: Obama should lay off BP. What good did harsh attacks against the company and its leadership do?
BP's stock price was plummeting--which was bad for U.S. shareholders, as well as those in Britain.
Why not put aside the emotional response and tackle the problem with clear, cold pragmatism?
What you see is where you sit.
It applies to companies, customers, suppliers, vendors, entrepreneurs--and soccer fans (sorry, football, for the World Cup) and leaders coping with vast environmental disasters.
Try changing where you sit if you want to see the same set of circumstances with fresh eyes.