Rules Of Thumb Book

President as CEO?

2012-01-19T09:15:00.000-08:00

Andrew Ross Sorkin had a column in the New York Times this week defending the role that private equity plays in the economy. The idea is, I guess, that all the talk about Mitt Romney and Bain Capital has somehow unfairly turned into an attack on venture capital, private equity, and other investment entities.

What it raised for me is a different question: Does Mitt Romney help his chances of being elected President by running on his business experience?

Now, it may be that he has no choice. That's his hand, along with his governorship of Massachusetts and his role in the Olympic games in Utah, and he has to play it. And particularly in the Republican primary, his business experience sounds more compelling than his Massachusetts political career.

But what about the general electorate?

How do Americans feel about business and business leaders?

In 2008, before the Wall Street imploded and took the U.S. economy with it, a poll of average Americans found that only 11% said they had "a great deal of confidence" in the people in charge of major corporations, while 35% said they had "hardly any confidence." And that was during the good times!

Then in 2009, as the economy deteriorated, 70% of Americans said that people on Wall Street were not as honest and moral as other people. When asked to rank the honesty and ethical conduct of different occupations, business executives came in near the bottom of the list: given a choice of "most admired" professions, "business executive" came in at 21 out of 23 choices.

Which raises a question: If your campaign is based on a career in private equity, as a CEO/business executive, how do you turn that to your advantage?

And what's your campaign slogan: Mitt Romney--He's Kinda Like a Wall Street Guy, But Not Really, Except When It Comes to Experience, But You Can Trust Him, Because He's Not Like the Other Wall Street Business Guys!

We're gonna need a bigger button!

Moral Authority?

2012-01-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

I was driving home this morning, listening to the radio. They were replaying the speech Dr. King gave in Memphis shortly before he was murdered.

All these years later, his voice, his words, his message are still inspiring.

It made me think back to an experience I had about 5 years ago.

I had just given a speech to a CEO and his top-level executives. My theme was change and leadership.

After my talk, the CEO thanked me and then addressed his team.

"Who would you say has moral authority in America today? Business, government, religion--any category. Who has moral authority?"

Who, in other words, would you listen to the way I was listening to Dr. King on my drive home?

Five years ago, the room fell silent at the CEO's question. Time passed. No one spoke.
No one came up with a name. Not one name.

After about 5 minutes of dead silence, the CEO changed the subject.

But when I got home, his question had made me think.

If there is no one today--no one in business, government, or the non-profit world--who has moral authority; if there is no candidate for President who speaks with that kind of honesty and integrity; no one running a Fortune 500 company who speaks with the public interest in mind; no one at the top of an organized religion or a major philanthropy who can address the moral issues of our time; if that's the case, then it's clear who we have to look to for moral authority.

It's up to us, people.

It's up to us.

It's up to us to care enough to speak out, to know enough to say what's right and what's wrong, and to love enough to stay true to the oldest truth of all: Love thy neighbor as thyself.

Dr. King's birthday is a good day to look at each other, and see in each other someone with real moral authority.

Ultimately, that was Dr. King's message.

It's up to us.

Boxing the Compass of Intangible Value Creation

2012-01-06T14:00:00.001-08:00

I think it's fair to say that we live in an economy that is largely made up of intangibles.
A world of brands; relationships; causes; ideas; business models.

That said, most of the way we do our accounting--either actual accounting or informal, mental accounting--still looks at tangible assets as the coin of the realm.

In an economy of intangibles, what creates real value?

These aren't the only four attributes; but if the aim of the exercise is to "box the compass" of intangible value creation, here are the four key attributes:

1. Trust. Every serious study of the history of capitalism starts with this: capitalism only works because of trust. The trust that if I invest my money in your voyage to the New World, you will actually take that journey and, to the utmost of your ability, come back with a boatload of silk, spices, tobacco and other merchandise. Trust is the glue of capitalism. Which makes Wall Street's recent sins all the more egregious.

2. Creativity. The team with the best people wins--and in an economy of ideas, creativity is the mother's milk of innovation and value creation. Granted, you have to implement: real artists ship. But if you want to build an organization that creates value, get more than your fair share of creative thinkers, dreamers, and imagineers.

3. Courage. We live in dangerous times. If you dare to be different, to play the game by different rules, to follow your own creative instincts to where ever they are destined to lead you, you gotta have heart. The world will try to tell you you're wrong, your idea won't work, you're wasting your time. Courage!

4. Teamwork. All work is teamwork. If you want to create intangible value--and then keep on doing it--create a culture and a working environment where trustworthy, creative, courageous people bring their best ideas and best effort to work every day, and where they work well together.

In an economy of intangibles, those four attributes box the compass of intangible value creation.

All the News That Fits, We Print

2012-01-05T12:36:00.000-08:00

Admittedly, I'm a little late to the party: It wasn't until last night that I watched "Page One," the video documentary about life at the New York Times.
Or watched some of it. Most of it.

As far as I could tell, the point of the documentary was that the internet had destabilized the old-fashioned newspaper business.

This I already knew.

Today I went back to my speech file and dug out a talk I gave about 8 years ago--maybe more like 10--at the Stanford Publishing course. I was never asked back, so perhaps they had the same reaction to my talk that I had to the documentary.

But for what it's worth, here is the outline of that speech.

We've got through an old economy; an old new economy (of dotcoms); and now we're into the new new economy.

The old model told publishers to cut costs, that bigger was better, that history equaled staying power in the marketplace, that it takes time for brands to develop, that tangible assets are the way to keep score, and that there's really only 1 right way to be in business.

The new new model flips everything; turns all the old rules upside down: growth beats cost cutting, fast beats slow, agility beats history, instant karma beats old brands, intangible assets beat tangible assets, and doing things your way beats anybody's notion of 1 right way.

So there's the new game with the new rules:

1. Talent and ideas are the only scarce commodities. Readers are looking for what happens at the intersection of talent and ideas: energy!

2. Speed wins. The first one to the future wins the competition.

3. The customer is in charge. It's no use chiding them for wanting what they want; if you don't respect your customers, they'll simply go someplace else.

4. Need to know beats nice to know. When it comes to journalism, "interesting" isn't a compliment.

5. Don't sell a product; build a community. Every successful magazine (publication, Web site) creates a community that already exists but doesn't know it.

6. Great editors are great listeners, not great geniuses. Forget the image of the brilliant editor sitting in the corner office deciding what pearl of wisdom the readers deserve to get this issue. The goal is create a dialog with the reader, not subject the reader to a monologue. A magazine isn't a message in a bottle; it's a conversation.

7. Iterate, iterate, iterate. It's never done. That's the good news and the hard work. You get to start each issue, each edition, from scratch. You don't get to re-print your last issue and get that cover story just a little bit better. You get to try again!

8. Do you know what your brand promises? And do you keep that promise? Particularly in publishing, a brand has to stand for something. Stand for it, and then deliver it.

9. Content may be king, but context beats content. "The job of the leader is to make meaning," says John Seeley Brown. That's the same job of every publication.

10. In a time of enormous change, trust your instincts; decide now, analyze later. Change hurts, indecision kills.

Got it?
Start the presses!

West Point Wisdom

2012-01-04T12:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of war.

But I'm a huge fan of the lessons in leadership that they teach at our military academies. Over the last few years I've had the benefit of getting to know Tom Kolditz from West Point, and to hear Tom give a number of very powerful talks about the fundamental practice of leadership and strategy that West Point imbues in its cadets.

Last year I got to listen to a talk that Tom gave to the board of AARP and just last week, as I was continuing to clean out my desk, I found the 3x5 card on which I had written some notes from Tom's talk.

Here's what it says, in its entirety. Few words, lots of power.

Minimum Plan Requirements
(The idea is, before you take action, go into an engagement, begin an assignment, what are the absolute minimum requirements you must meet? and by extension, if you can't meet them, don't start!)

Intent
(That's the top line: What is your strategic intent?)

Purpose
(What is your purpose in taking this action?)

Method
(How do you propose to go about doing it?)

End state
(What is the end state you aim to achieve?)

Risk
(Identify the risk factors in taking this action.)

Simple. Direct. Plain English. Straight forward.
I think this stuff is so simple, so common sense-based, it's just plain brilliant!
The kind of honest questioning that goes on a 3x5 card--and if used diligently, not only leads to better results, but also avoids horrible mistakes.
The kind of thing that all organizations need in developing better leaders at all levels.

Everything Old is New Again

2012-01-03T09:53:00.001-08:00

I found an old scrap of paper, a Xerox copy of a book review I wrote for the New York Times back in 1995.
It's called "Gibraltar May Tumble, How Prudential-Bache created the costliest fraud scandal ever," a review of two books, actually, one by Kurt Eichenwald, the other by Kathleen Sharp, both chronicling the Prudential-Bache Securities scandal.

It's deja vu, all over again: I wrote in the review, "By 1994 the Rock had become a house of cards."

And the explanation for how it all happened?

It starts with government regulatory changes--the 1981 Reagan tax reform bill and changes in the SEC set off a boom in tax shelters and ushered in a new era of real estate, energy, and airplane leasing partnerships.

Here are the last two paragraphs of that old, old book review:

"The picture that emerges from both books is that of a fundamental system failure at a great name in American business. The lesson is not encouraging. Mr. Eichenwald labels his book 'a cautionary tale about an abuse of the investor faith that is an essential building block of the American economy.' Ms. Sharp quotes a former manager of the San Diego office of Pru-Bache Securities: 'I don't think you can use the Nuremberg defense and say, "My superior told me to do it." Yet that's what a lot of people did.'
"And from the epilogues in both books we learn where the major players are today: almost without exception, the innocent have suffered more than the guilty, the higher-ups have escaped responsibility, the smaller investors have lost the most. It's a sobering note at a time when Washington is again fiddling with the tax code and American companies are awash with cash and looking for deals. These two books suggest that eternal vigilance may also be the price of capitalism."

Or, perhaps more to the point, history doesn't have a way of repeating itself. It's afflicted with a chronic stutter.

Jared Diamond's Stages of "Collapse"!

2012-01-02T14:09:00.000-08:00

And a happy 2012 to you as well!

I thought I'd kick off the new year with another of the gleanings from my desk-cleanings. Only rather than quote myself (if I don't do it, who will?), I want to bring your attention to the Four Stages of Collapse identified by Jared Diamond in his noteworthy book, "Collapse."

I'll simply cite them here, and leave each of us to ruminate on the obvious questions the list suggests (such as, I wonder how this might apply to the United States? to my company? to the social fabric? and other such questions).
So, here are the stages:

1. Failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives. (Because of a lack of prior experience or a tendency to forget prior experiences)

2. Failure to perceive a problem after it arrives. (Because managers are too far away to detect the signals; or it is a slow trend that is masked by wide up and down fluctuations; or because of "creeping normalcy" that makes the problem seem like "the new norm."

3. Failure to attempt to solve a problem after becoming aware of it. (Because even though it's bad for you, it's good for me; or because of the "tragedy of the commons" makes it hard to take action; or because the problem pits the interests of the power elite versus the masses; or because of a tendency to cling to values/mindset/beliefs/behaviors even after they no longer work; or because of groupthink and broad denial)

4. Problem becomes insolvable. (Too little, too late; too expensive to remedy; or it's simply beyond anyone's capacity to deal with).

Four Stages of Collapse: something to think about at the start of a new year!

Reminders from Tom, Basics from Jim, News from Me

2011-12-30T10:41:00.000-08:00

More snippets of wisdom (or detritus, you be the judge)from my on-going desk-cleaning exercise.

Buried beneath old speeches and memos, a short list of things to think about/things to remember: reminders from Tom Peters, basic premises from Jim Collins, and new rules from me.

Here they are, exactly as I found them, with no additional editorial comment.

Tom Peters' Reminders
*Think in technocolor--passion wins.
*Hire "disrespectful" people.
*Technology change is just starting: bio-tech, nano-tech, wireless, the web, more to come.
*Want to innovate? Hang out with innovators; cool begets cool.
*Ready, fire, aim; action first; avoid analysis/paralysis.
*Prototype=speed to learning
*Talent wins
*Diversity spawns innovation, sameness=extinction
*Design is the soul of business
*Branding=character, story, emotion
*Make every task an adventure
*The soft stuff is the hard stuff
*Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes
*Causes matter; causes get people out of bed in the morning

Jim Collins' on Fast Company: 5 Basic Premises
Work is not a means to an end; it's an end in itself
If your competitive scorecard is money, you will always lose
Business is a mechanism for social change--for good or for ill
Entrepreneurship is a life concept, not a business concept
Performance is the fundamental requirement; love what you're doing

Alan Webber's Reminders of the New Situation
There's no such thing as "business as usual."
There's no such thing as "back to normal."
No one is safe.
You are not in charge.

(Ok, a little editorial comment):
There you have it--short and sweet.
Thoughts on life and work, change and success as we get close to ringing out the old year and ringing in the new!

Six Two-Word Terms for the Future

2011-12-29T09:39:00.000-08:00

This cleaning out your desk thing turns out to be incredibly worthwhile!
You get to throw away pounds of paper that have been sitting there for years.
And you get to re-visit things that turn out to be interesting--if for no other reason than that they have historical value.
Take my notes from a speech I gave to EDS in May of 1992.

The premise of my talk was the arrival of a "new economy." I started out by summarizing the headlines of the day (think back to 1992--if you were alive back then!): the agony of IBM, the triumph of the Japanese auto industry, the diminishing power of the three big TV networks, the collapse of the U.S. labor movement, the marketing miracle of Nike, the market power of Intel. It spelled what I called then "the Great Divide"--the split between the old order and the new economy, the rise of global competition, technological innovation, the new workforce, and the new workplace. All of it added up to a gaping economic fault line between the old-line bureaucratic companies and the companies and managers of the future. Those who are stuck in obsolete organizational structure and competitive concepts, and those who are busy inventing new ways to compete.

Some companies were responding by focusing on what I called "table stakes"--four things they needed to do just to stay relevant: attention to quality; emphasis on customer choice and a new variety of offerings; improved customer service; and worker empowerment/flat organizations/teams.
Table stakes. Nothing distinctive there. Things you had to do (and still have to do) just to show that you get it.

But then there was "the new agenda"--six two-word terms that I said would define the future.
First, Latent Competitors. You may know how your traditional competitor was. But do you know who your new, unexpected competitor will be--or where that competitor will come from?
Second, Techno-Fusion. The old version of R&D relied on straight-ahead breakthrough. The new version demands a blending of technologies and fields, biology and physics, nutrition and health, neuro-science and economics: I didn't cite it then (because it hadn't appeared yet) but think of quantum computing as an example today.
Third, Smart Products. Products that tell you where they are, what they are doing, when they need servicing. Products that link with other products to do the work for you.
Fourth, ∫. Business transactions and experiences shift from one-way communication to interactive communication: interactive TV, in-store ordering and customization. They were big back then, before the web made everything inter-active.
Fifth, Real Time. The goal is to make everything happen in real time. Speed is money, speed is quality, speed is customer satisfaction, speed is productivity, speed is strategy.
Sixth, Systems Capability. The company is a system--get all the processes right, you deliver the product right. The system is the solution.

The bottom line I came to in that old speech, given all those years ago: "Keep learning new skills and crossing old boundaries."
Sounds like good advice to me, almost 20 years later.

What I Learned From Starting Fast Company

2011-12-28T10:38:00.000-08:00

It's getting close to the end of the year.
A good time to clean out old drawers filled with even older files.
Here's one I just found: Lessons From Fast Company. It was a speech I gave in Brazil at a program organized by the remarkable Oscar Motomura not long after Bill Taylor and I exited the magazine that we had jointly created.
Here's what my speech notes say:
1. You have to believe in your own idea. I genuinely believed that Fast Company was 'destined' to happen--even though it took more than 3 years to go from business plan to launch.
2. You have to be open to others' input on your idea. Just because it is your idea and it is 'destined' to happen doesn't make it perfect from the inception. Write it down. Show it to others. They will see it differently. They will have good suggestions. They will have bad suggestions. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. That's part of the process!
3. The world does not need your idea. It's important to remember that--people are getting along just fine without your idea. So learn to see the world through their eyes--explain how your idea solves their problem!
4. Who you are and what you've done are often the best arguments for your idea. Your track record counts as much as the merits of your idea.
5. Do you have skin in the game? If you really believe in your own idea, how do you show your commitment? If you want others to commit, you've got to make your own commitment clear and visible.
6. What's your motivation? Love is more powerful than money. If you're just doing it for the money, the day will come when you look at how little progress you've made on your idea and say, 'There must be easier ways to get rich.' If you're doing it for the love of the idea, that day will never come.
7. It's all an iterative process of learning and doing. Ted Levitt used to say, 'Make a little, try a little, sell a little.' The idea is to keep your own thinking moving forward by coming up with an idea, testing it, getting feedback, refining it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
8. If you plan some things you can leave other things looser. Leave everything loose and it's harder to innovate--constraints act as boundaries within which innovation can take place.
9. Your idea is only as good as the people you attract to work on it with you. It's all about the talent on your team, the allies you develop, the supporters you woo and win.
10. Remember Gandhi: The means are the ends in the making. Be the project you want it to be. Whether the project succeeds or fails in the long run may be less important than how you've conducted yourself in the pursuit of the project.

Every Election Is About a Question

2011-12-27T15:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes one of the candidates makes it explicit: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"
Sometimes the question remains implicit, only hinted at by one TV that only airs once: The famous "daisy" commercial that Lyndon Johnson's campaign used to ask about Barry
Goldwater, "Can you trust this guy with the atom bomb?"
Sometimes it's a question that seems frivolous: "Who would you rather have a beer with? Al Gore or George Bush?"
Sometimes it's a question that is more lofty: "What will it take to get America moving again?"
At the moment, as the Iowa caucuses approach, it appears that the Republican Party is split; there are two different questions, and depending on which question you ask, you get a different answer.
One question is, "Who in this field is the 'real' Republican?" In other words, who is a real conservative--and who is just faking it? This is a matter of ideological purity.
The other question is, "Who has the best chance of winning the general election in November, and beating Obama for the White House?" This is a matter of electoral pragmatism.
And then there is the November election to consider.
By the time it rolls around, what will the question be?
Frequently, the side that controls the question, controls the election.
But thanks in part to the Occupy Movement and in part to the internet and social media, while both sides (and a possible third party candidate) fight to define the question that defines the election, for the first time in memory, the question may get decided in a much more democratic, if amorphous and ambiguous fashion.
The question this time may emerge from emails and tweets, from Facebook postings and blogs.
It may be too early to suggest what "the question" will turn out to be.
But I think it would be reasonable to think that, no matter who the Republicans nominate, when it comes time for the first debate, the first and most important question for the candidates to answer should be, "If you're elected President in 2012, what difference will it actually make?"
And then keep answering that one question until somebody finally gets real.
That's a debate I'd like to watch.
For a change.

The Power of the Powerless

2011-12-26T12:31:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays Vaclav Havel died. The newspaper headlines of his funeral said something like, "The world says good-bye to Vaclav Havel."
I took it as an opportunity to say hello to him.
I sat down and read his amazing 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless." It's not easy going; but it's worth making the effort.
In it, over and over again he extols the importance, the virtue, the hard work and courage of "living within the truth." Because so much of what "the system" requires of people is that they live within a lie.
"Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss," Havel wrote. "While life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the post-totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states."
And the system? This oppressive regime that demands conformity and imposes over a society the requirement that everyone pretend that what is clearly oppressive is somehow a matter of free choice?
"Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but a the same time, alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals."
In other words, as long as we all go along with our own systematic self-alienation and self-imposed powerless, that is exactly how long the system will hold power over us.
And the weapon of choice for those who wish to express their own power?
"If the main pillar of the system is living a lie," Havel wrote, "then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth."
Havel wrote at a particular time and a particular place, addressing a particular political system.
But his essay and his message are still relevant and powerful today.
In some respects, the cause of Solidarity and Charter 77 are the cause of the early voices of Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Havel's words may have been prophetic in talking about the need to emphasize "human factors" in defining what makes life worth living, in the responsibility of individuals to speak the truth and live in the truth, to create examples of a "second culture" that finds alternative solutions and modes of expression to the dominant ones that define and govern the status quo.
At the end, Havel writes, "For the real question is whether the brighter future is always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?"
What if?
What if the powerless actually became aware of the source of their own power?
The power of living within the truth.

"Welcome Back to The Fight."

2011-12-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

"This time I know our side will win."
Fans of "Casablanca" will recognize Victor Laszlo's parting salute to Rick, once he's gotten off the fence, gotten over Ilsa, and decided once again to join the Resistance.
It's the same way I felt watching Barack Obama's much-hyped Teddy Roosevelt-wanna-be speech in Kansas, the one where he came out as champion of the beleaguered middle class.
"Well, Mr. President," I wanted to say, "it's about time! Glad you stopped tending bar with all those rich guys in tuxes and worrying about the beautiful women with their jewels and took a look at the Gini Index. You remember the Gini Index? The one that says that the United States is the most unequal advanced industrial economy in the world! Yeah, that one. So, welcome back to the fight, Mr. President. I sure hope our side will win."
But there were a couple of problems with the President's speech that have kept troubling me.
First was the presentation. This was no Teddy Roosevelt stem-winder.
Something has happened to President Obama. He's lost his . . . groove. His . . . mojo. This speech should have been a rousing call for action. Instead, he seemed decidedly lukewarm about his own subject. Not good.
Second was the content. The President (finally) nailed it when he pointed out the crisis facing America's middle class. And he was right: this country needs a strong middle class if we want a strong nation. Strong economically, socially, politically, you name it. The middle class is the glue that holds this nation together. And right now, the glue is starting to go bad.
No argument there.
But then listen to the solutions the President has to offer, and other than his argument over the tax code--where he is basically correct, we could go back to tax rates we had in the past without killing any jobs or destroying the corporate work ethic--his solutions are very thin gruel.
Take a look at the February 2010 Annual Report of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class.
You remember that Task Force, don't you? The one chaired by Vice-President Joe Biden? You remember Vice-President Joe Biden, don't you?
Never mind.
That report basically regurgitates all the same stuff the President tried to touch on in his speech. Preserve America's manufacturing jobs. Oops, too late.
Invest in infrastructure. Oops, all that money that was supposed to go toward jump-starting the economy after the big crash of 2008--it's still unspent.
Fix public education. Oops, no progress on that one either.
It's more than disappointing.
It's problematic.
Either the President doesn't actually know what government can or should do to come to the aid of the middle class; or he knows and can't deliver; or the whole theory of the case is wrong.
What if the federal government isn't the source of support for the middle class (other than tax policy and large budget outlays for health care and welfare)?
What if it has to come at the local level? What if we should be listening to mayors and governors, to social entrepreneurs and grass-roots organizers--what if they know what the middle class needs, because they're a lot closer to the middle class and its struggles than any policymaker in Washington, DC?
Welcome back to the fight, Mr. President!
Now, remember what you used to do as a community organizer in Chicago?
Let's try that! This time, we just might win!

What's the Matter With Business?

2011-12-06T10:18:00.001-08:00

Another of the benefits of being off the grid for a couple of months: old news is new! And you can consume it at your own rate!
Which is to say, if you're like me, the onslaught of media, when you're trying to swim in the stream, can be overwhelming. I remember feedback from people who canceled their subscriptions to HBR when I was editorial director. They invariably said, "The issues pile up, I can't keep up, and it's easier to cancel my subscription than to feel guilty for not reading each issue."
I'm the opposite.
I look forward to random reading in piled up back issues of old magazines after I get back from a prolonged absence.
Take the September 24-30 issue of The Economist. Page 76, opened at random, offers some startling statistics about how companies work inside. According to a study commissioned by Dov Seidman, author of "How," 43% of American employees surveyed say their company works on a command-and-control culture--management by coercion. Another 54% say their employers are top-down, but with a dollop of carrots and sticks, and talented leaders who try to inspire followership--a category Seidman calls "informed acquiescence." Only 3% actually practice employee self-governance, where a shared set of values and principles guide employees in their work and align them with the company's larger purpose.
But, as Paul Harvey used to say, that's only part of the story!
The Economist goes on to report that, unlike the employees in the belly of the beast, the bosses at the tops of companies who were interviewed saw a very different picture. Bosses, according to the study, are 8 times more likely than the average to say that their company is self-governing. 27% of the bosses say their employees are inspired by the company--only 4% of the employees see it that way. 41% of the bosses say their company rewards performance based on values, rather than purely on financial results--14% of the employees agree.
What does the gap cost companies?
The Economist notes that in companies run through coercion, fewer than 20% of the employees say their company readily adopts good ideas.
In an economy of ideas, that means leadership by coercion renders your organization deaf, dumb, and stupid.
But it's worse than that.
Decades after all the initial work on the importance of corporate culture, after Peter Drucker's early reflections on the coming of the knowledge economy, after Theory X and Theory Y gave way to Theory Z, the vast majority of American companies (presumably the large ones) are still run according to the old model.
Top-down.
Rules and restrictions.
Reports and regulations.
Keep everyone in line. Tell them what to do. Give them enough room so they can do their jobs, but make sure nobody gets too adventurous or creative, too innovative or idealistic.
When Bill Taylor and I started Fast Company more than 15 years ago, we put our manifesto on the front cover of the first issue: WORK IS PERSONAL; KNOWLEDGE IS POWER; COMPUTING IS SOCIAL; BREAK THE RULES.
Maybe it's time to restate those principles. Make them part of the OCCUPY BUSINESS movement.
We need to see that 3% of self-governed businesses grow to become the majority.
The 99%.
It's something to shoot for.

Not Dead, Yet

2011-12-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

I've gotten emails lately, several of them, actually, asking me if I'm dead.
How I'm supposed to answer them if I am dead is a mystery.
But since I'm not dead yet, I answered them all.
The logic behind them was simple: My friends knew that at the end of September I'd taken myself off the grid to go with my family to trek the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal.
They figured that I would die on the trek, a notion that I myself partially subscribed to, even encouraged half-heartedly. It made a certain kind of sense. Trekking wasn't something I was partial to; the trip had been my wife's creation, going back to do again a journey she'd made 11 years earlier. So death was a distinct possibility.
But it was not to be.
Instead it was a fantastic trek, filled with great adventure, once I got past the distinct smells of the squattie-potties and the sight of goats being slaughtered in the street to celebrate a Hindu festival.
Great adventure, wonderful terrain, amazing villages, smiling people, and a shot at some new measure of self-knowledge.
And I came back with a new-found insight into the U.S. criminal justice system: Any Wall Street banker found guilty of insider trading or stock manipulation, Ponzi schemes or other financial self-serving, rather than being sentenced to prison, should be sentenced to hike the Annapurna Circuit.
He (or she) would come back at least 15-20 pounds lighter; seriously humbled by the mountain and its rigors; newly awakened to the limits of money and a fresh appreciation of what "enough" means; and an insight into the often inverse correlation between money and happiness.
If nothing else, he would return to America convinced that there is no real reason to wear pin-striped suits and power ties, red suspenders and french-cuffed shirts. There is a lot to life that involves backpacks and sleeping bags, vegetables and fried rice, and 8-hours of trekking in the most beautiful places on God's earth.
It's actually a pretty damned good shot at redemption for anyone looking for a new start.
Even a Wall Street criminal.

Doin' the Do Lectures!

2011-09-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the Do Lectures in Wales and if you haven't heard of'em or looked at their website, then shame on you! And shame on me for not tellin' you. And fook all of us for bein' such stupid gits here in America and turnin' our collective backs on this marvelous gatherin' over in Wales, where the people talk with such wonderful accents, tell fantastic stories, share the most amazin' attitude toward changin' the world, love their music, their locally farmed food, their brilliant cider and lovely whiskey, and generally speakin' live close to the land, pay strict attention to what actually matters, and roll up their fookin' sleeves and do real work to get real things done.
It's the gatherin' you always wanted to go to, mate. It's in Wales, for one thing, which is off in a corner of the world and you don't go there if you don't do it on purpose.
The people are warm, the land is green, the sky goes from blue to gray and the sunshine is as apt to be wet as it is dry.
The humor is warm, the food is delicious, and there's absolutely no pretense. No name tags, no cocktail-party behavior of people standin' there, talkin' with you but cranin' their necks to see if there's somebody more important nearby. No celebrity-seekin'.
It all takes place in a tent that holds maybe 100 people at the most, and most of the people who come pay to live four-to-a-tent, shower in communal showers, get up at 5:30 in the mornin' to go canoeing on the river or to take part in some early mornin' yoga.
It's the perfect answer to all the American conferences that try to out-do each other in size and glam and self-promotion.
Here the talk is about people tryin' things to see if they can make a difference.
Grow It Yourself--to get folks to form small clubs to grow their own veggies.
A local farmer in Wales who's gone all solar, takin' his operation off the grid.
People who love bikin' over drivin' cars, people who are passionate about fixin' education, people who want to tell other people that it's ok not to be famous as long as you're doin' what it is that is right for you to be doin'.
And great humor, the kind of humor that the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh, the English are so good at.
One speaker starts his talk sayin', "I do love all the self-deprecatin' humor, but I me-self am not so good at it."
There's a lot of anger and resentment at the current government in the UK, and almost as much at the US for it's over-reaching worship of the almighty dollar and it's exaggerated form of capitalism that's runnin' amuck.
But the real spirit is energetic and positive.
The world is a big place.
The problems are everywhere.
Pick something and go to work on it.
Start small and grow it from there.
And laugh and sing and have a pint while you're at it.
It's a beautiful thing, the Do Lectures.
So don't be a stupid git. Check it out on the web.
And then get busy doin' whatever it is that you've always wanted to do to make the world a better place.
Just Do Lecture it!
And stop fookin' around!

Absolutely Positively Apologetic!

2011-09-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, the call came to my daughter.
It was a very gracious woman calling from FedEx in Texas.
She was genuinely sorry about the service failure. FedEx had called the shipper in North Carolina and refunded the shipping cost.
She sounded genuinely thoughtful and truly helpful.
So, hat's off to FedEx for doing the right thing.

That said, the whole episode, with its emotional ups and downs, feelings of helplessness in the face of a system that didn't seem capable of responding in a timely and effective fashion, took me back to the notion of service recovery.
I remember reading Chris Hart's article on service guarantees years ago when I was at HBR, and being impressed with how much sense it made: Everybody makes mistakes; the question is, what do you do about them when they happen? Hart argued that the more a company issues service guarantees against failure, the more likely it is to design a system that won't fail--and to design in recovery systems to deal with the times when something does go wrong.
It was the kind of management article that appealed to me as a manager and as a consumer--and the message has stuck with me for a long time.

But this last FedEx experience made me think a little deeper.
It isn't enough to think about having guarantees and recovery systems. You have to design them into your way of doing business.
For instance: one of the applied lessons from the FedEx experience with my daughter's missing shipment was this: Most companies design their systems to run one direction only--from front to back. But if you want to create the capacity for real service recovery, you need to design a system that it will also run from back to front--you need to be, in effect, to play the tape in reverse, so you can find what went wrong quickly and accurately, so you can then intervene to fix it.

The same thing could be said about the idea of a Customer Advocate Team.
The name sounds great. What customer wouldn't want an internal advocate when things go wrong?
But the real operational question is, what power and what authority does the Customer Advocate Team have?
Can they actually function as advocates for the customer? Or are they limited to sounding and acting like apologists for the company?
If the only authority the team has is to explain to an unhappy customer what the company's policies are, then they don't qualify as advocates. (It was the always spot-on Seth Godin who pointed out some time ago that falling back on the answer that "that is our policy" is about the lamest answer a company can give a customer; in that case, the customer is entitled to say, "I have policies, too, and one of mine is not to pay companies whose policies are idiotic!")
So if you have a company, and you want to set up a team whose members are customer advocates, what real authority do you give them?
Can they unilaterally intercede on the customer's behalf?
Refund money on the spot?
Get a supervisor to over-ride a bad decision or an ineffective business activity?
Dispatch someone to find a missing item, track down a lost package, investigate a messed up situation--in real time?

I do appreciate FedEx calling my daughter to make things right--that was the right thing to do.
Even more, I think about all the ways companies and organizations make mistakes all the time (I just got back from a restaurant experience where they never wrote down the reservation that we'd called to make--and left us cooling our heels on a sofa for 30 minutes while a table opened up--with no offer of anything "on the house" to make up for their bad booking work. As Chris Hart sagely said years ago, mistakes are part of doing business; the question customers want to know is, what do you do next?)
And I've come to appreciate pushing deeper into this very serious issue: how do you design a system to be reversible; and how do you give real authority to your service recovery team so they can actually make a real difference?
Questions that ultimately spell the difference between good-enough customer service (barely good enough) or out-of-this-world customer service.
For me, I have to say, my biggest thanks to FedEx is for a real learning experience.

Absolutely Positively Unacceptable!

2011-09-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, if everything goes the way it should, my daughter Amanda will graduate from the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
No thanks to FedEx.
No thanks to FedEx's delivery system.
No thanks to FedEx's service recovery system. (What service recovery system, you ask? Good question!)
No thanks to FedEx's customer advocate team. (What customer advocate team, you ask? Good question!)
Here's the story in a nutshell.
Amanda ordered two special prints from a firm in North Carolina. The prints cost more than $1,000. She needed them in LA on Wednesday to put up her thesis presentation so she could graduate.
The firm in North Carolina sent the prints FedEx for overnight delivery.
That's when things went wrong.
The prints were supposed to be in LA Wednesday afternoon. Absolutely positively overnight.
The tracking information on the FedEx web site said the package was delivered and signed for--by someone my daughter had never heard of.
She called FedEx Wednesday afternoon, having stayed up in a series of all-nighters, very upset. She needed those prints.
FedEx told her they would track the mis-delivered prints--within 48 hours!
You heard that right: FedEx can deliver a package overnight--but it takes two days to find out how they mis-delivered a package!
So I called FedEx around 9pm Wednesday night. They told me the same thing: 48 hours.
I asked for a supervisor.
She told me that FedEx's LA offices were closed; there was nobody for her to ask about the mis-delivered package until the morning.
At 8 am Thursday morning I called and asked for the Customer Advocate Team. I spoke with another FedEx woman--who said they would put someone on the case.
The driver who mis-delivered the package had already left to make his rounds. How would they get to him? Why hadn't they asked him when he reported to work in the morning? What had happened all night? What was the point of taking my call Wednesday night if nothing had happened by Thursday morning? When would we hear from them?
If we didn't hear soon, we'd have to call North Carolina and have another set of the prints made, have them shipped--and hope for the best in getting the thesis presentation up on the wall.
By 12 noon, there was no word from FedEx--but Amanda had found the prints.
They'd been delivered, for no apparent reason, to a storefront shop next door to Amanda's apartment building. Not the right address, not the right person--and no word from FedEx as to why the mis-delivery had happened or where they thought the package was.
So I called the Customer Advocate Team.
I told them their service recovery system was terrible. It didn't work. In an emergency, waiting 48 hours to find out what had happened to an overnight delivery was ridiculous.
I understand your point, the woman said, as if what I was looking for was understanding.
How did they expect to satisfy me as a customer if they hadn't been able to discover what had gone wrong? When did they think their service recovery system would actually uncover and rectify the problem?
I understand your point, the woman said. Understanding wasn't what I wanted.
I want a full credit for the shipping cost, I said. It was more than $250 for them not to deliver that package!
I can't do that, the woman said. The shipper in North Carolina has to request the refund.
But the shipper is getting paid by me, I said. The shipper in North Carolina has no incentive to waste time dealing with FedEx.
I understand your point, the woman said. But that's our policy.
Your policy? I asked. I thought you were the customer advocate. Why don't you call the shipper and facilitate giving the shipper credit for FedEx's mistake?
I can't do that, the woman said. I don't have that power.
So exactly how are you a customer advocate, I asked.
She didn't have an answer to that.
Other than that she understood my point.
So what we have here, my friends, is a company that actually doesn't have a service recovery system.
They can't run their system in reverse--they can't reverse engineer their delivery system when it goes wrong.
And they can't do it fast.
They can't do it absolutely positively.
And they can't fix the billing.
They have a customer advocate team that's a customer advocate team in name only.
They have no real authority, no real power to do anything. They don't even advocate.
They just "understand."
Next time: UPS.
Or maybe Fred Smith will send me a check for $250.
We'll see.

Economics From Polanyi to Spence

2011-08-27T19:03:00.000-07:00

In 1944, the remarkable Austrian-born economic historian Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation.
It is a sophisticated and erudite work and any attempt to summarize Polanyi's argument (even the summary provided by Joseph Stiglitz) is bound to come up short.
But here's my best effort.
The Industrial Revolution, Polanyi says, ushered in a massive transformation of society and economics. With the Industrial Revolution, markets were invented; land and nature became property, and that meant things that had been valued for themselves now had external economic value. People became labor, and they, too, were transformed from individuals with intrinsic human value into a commodity.
The big transformation, says Polanyi, was that instead of economics serving society, as one component of the way people lived, after the Industrial Revolution society served economics. Economics became the way everyone kept score; it became the ultimate point of the exercise.
Along with that came new theories. One of the most pernicious was the notion of a self-regulating market--that the market needed no external intervention, that it would automatically balance itself and produce its own equilibrium.
Polanyi says no.
He says that self-regulating markets inevitably fail. That they are a fabrication, a myth. And that when they fail, they bring about so much social pain and disorder that they invariably bring out the opposite of what they promise: they require government intervention to re-balance the social consequences of market failures.
And so, the myth of the self-regulating market produces the very thing it imagines to be unnecessary--government programs and policies to protect society (and particularly the poor) from the ravages of change and economic disaster.
Which brings us to 2011 and Michael Spence.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Spence, a Nobel Prize winning economist, turns to the subject of globalization and unemployment. (My thanks to good friend Peter Sims, terrific author of "Little Bets", for calling this piece to my attention.)
Again, apologies for oversimplifying an in-depth piece of economic/political analysis.
Spence argues with clear logic and data that America's unemployment problem derives from the increasing globalization of business and work.
He divides our economy into tradable and nontradable sectors. The nontradable sector is that part of the US economy where goods and services must be consumed domestically; the tradable part of the US economy is the part that produces goods and services that can be consumed anywhere.
Between 1990 and 2008, Spence says, the US economy created 27 million jobs. Of those, 98% were in the nontradable sector. In that period, the tradable sector grew by a total of 600,000 jobs.
The problem: manufacturing has been moving out of the US.
Overall, jobs are being produced in the nontradable sector and in the upper end of the tradable sector, in such areas as finance, computer design and engineering, and top management in multi-national corporations.
This leads to an increasing gap between the rich and the poor in the US; it puts enormous stress on the middle class; and it makes education even more important for the country's economic and social well-being.
Free trade and free markets are good, Spence says--just not for everyone.
He writes, "Although everyone does benefit from lower-priced goods and services, people also care greatly about the chance to be productively employed and the quality of their work. Declining employment opportunities feel real and immediate; the rise in real incomes brought by lower prices does not. For example, according to recent surveys, a substantial number of Americans believe that their children will have fewer opportunities than they have had."
Spence is too polite to say it, but what's he talking about here is the end of the American Dream.
But he is quite blunt about who the market benefits and who it punishes: "In short," he writes, "companies' private interest (profit) and the public's interest (employment) do not align perfectly."
What is to be done?
One thing, Spence says, is for the US to put more effort into preserving what is left of our manufacturing base. "Specifically," he says, "the right combination of productivity-enhancing technology and competitive wage levels could keep some manufacturing industries, or at least some value-added pieces of their production chains, in the United States and other advanced countries. But accomplishing this will require more than a decision from the market; it must also involve labor, business, and governments."
What else?
He ends his essay with a section he calls The Big Tradeoff.
Instead of benign neglect toward jobs in the tradable sector, he says, the US must come to an agreement that good jobs in this sector is a fundamental national goal. Germany has done just that, he argues, with great success.
Then we need to focus on education: "A lack of commitment to education in families and in communities makes the entire field of education seem unattractive, demoralizing dedicated teachers and turning off talented students from teaching."
We need to invest in infrastructure and in technology that will boost employment in the tradable sector of the economy.
We need to fix the tax structure so that it promotes competitiveness, investment, and employment.
"Globalization has redefined the competition for employment and incomes in the United States," Spence writes. "Tradeoffs will have to be made between the two. Germany clearly chose to protect employment in the industries of its tradable sector that came under competitive threat. Now, US policymakers must choose, too."
Spence points out that America has been becoming increasing inequitable as a society.
The ratio of the average income of the top 20% of the population to the average income of the bottom 20% is 4 to 1 in Germany, but 8 to 1 in the US.
Spence's conclusion: ". . . tradeoffs between market forces and equity are possible. The US government needs to face up to them."
And he ends with a powerful quote from Paul Samuelson, a distinguished US economist: "Every good cause is worth some inefficiency," Samuelson wrote.
"Surely, equity and social cohesion are among them," Spence adds.
Michael Spence, meet Karl Polanyi.
The Big Tradeoff, let me introduce you to The Great Transformation.

Can Politics Self-Correct?

2011-08-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

Here's today's counter-intuitive notion.
I'm not even sure I buy it, but it's worth thinking about.
Here goes.
Most systems have a self-correcting feature. Especially in nature. Too many bunny rabbits running around in your fields? Coyotes will take care of that and reintroduce something approaching equilibrium. (Okay, this may be a New Mexico-driven example, but you get the idea.)
Economics believes in this idea: supply and demand, balancing each other out.
Physics, too: for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
How about politics?
Is there a self-correcting mechanism in the American political system?
You could argue that you see it in the way the country votes in national elections: a Dwight David Eisenhower brings out a John F. Kennedy, a Lyndon Johnson produces a Richard Nixon who then makes necessary a Jimmy Carter, who in turn delivers Ronald Reagan, George Bush gives us Bill Clinton, the second Bush produces Barack Obama.
Just like the laws of economics or Newton's third law. There are laws of politics.
But do those laws govern what happens inside a political party?
Conventional wisdom today says that to win a party's presidential nomination, a candidate has to start off appealing to extreme groups. They're the ones who turn out for primaries and caucuses, the ones who contribute serious money and are willing to do the hard and tedious work of political organizing.
So veer hard to the extreme to get the nomination, then move to the middle in the general.
But what if?
What if there is a self-correcting mechanism for political parties?
What if, this year, when faced with more and more candidates who appear to be running from the extreme for the Republican nomination, the party discovers its self-correcting mechanism?
What if Republicans wake up one morning to discover that it's lunacy to turn their party over to candidates who don't accept evolutionary science? To candidates who reject evidence of human contribution to climate change?
Or who genuinely think that the national economy can be rejuvenated simply by revoking all environmental regulations?
Or who want to restore the gold standard?
Or who think that being gay is a form of "personal enslavement"?
What if Republicans veer to the middle during these upcoming primaries and re-discover the old Republican roots?
Here's why that's an interesting idea to consider.
First, in the middle of a pack of candidates who do espouse extreme views, there are a couple of Republicans who are very clearly signaling to voters that they are . . . reasonable. Civil. Pretty mainstream, actually.
Wouldn't it be healthy, for the Republicans as a party, and for the country as a whole, if Americans suddenly discovered, or re-discovered actually, an appetite for reasonableness.
What if the Republicans, of all things, became the party that espoused a return to old-school politics?
What if the Republicans, who can take credit for inventing modern scorched earth politics, actually walked away from that technique and announced to American voters that the Republican Party was going to campaign on a platform of sensible, mainstream, non-culture war policies?
The Republicans could claim to have invented a whole new law of politics--a law with as much power and appeal as anything in nature, economics, or physics.
And I'll bet they'd find a lot of people who would jump at the opportunity to see what it's like to have the debate over America's future suddenly sound . . . sane. Positive. Practical. Down to earth. And back to reality.
But like I said, I'm not even sure I buy it.
Conventional wisdom is so hard to shake. Still, I'll be watching.
Maybe we'll start seeing some coyotes roaming around in the Republican primaries.

The False Claims Department

2011-08-23T09:22:00.001-07:00

Reading the papers this morning, two headlines catch my eye.
In Libya, Seif al-Islam, Muammar Qaddafi's son, the one who the rebels claimed they had captured? He made an appearance in public at a hotel in Tripoli.
Looks like he wasn't captured after all.
In New York, the district attorney has asked the judge in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case to drop the charges. The woman who accused DSK of the sexual assault was deemed to have lied repeatedly to law enforcement officials. The NYT quotes prosecutors as saying, "the nature and number of the complainant's falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt, whatever the truth may be about the encounter."
And then there's the headline about the rise in allegations of cheating in New York public schools--complaints of test-tampering and grade-changing have tripled. With bonuses, jobs, and reputations all on the line based on student test scores, the incentive to lie, cheat, and cover up have all grown.
So here's the headline I didn't read.
There are no secrets any more.
And if you think you have a secret, you won't have it for long.
Every since satellites detected the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, it's gotten harder and harder to lie.
The second headline I didn't read is the one every politician has heard since Watergate. It's not the crime that will get you, it's the cover up.
No secrets, no cover ups.
Or as Mark Twain once wrote, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
It's worth a try, right?

My Meeting With Rick

2011-08-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

I know I've already blogged on this, but now that he's running for President, it's useful to re-tell the story of my meeting with Rick Perry.
It was a number of years ago. I was in Texas to give a speech. But I had a few hours free before the speech, and the very friendly fellow who'd brought me down to address his group made me an offer I couldn't refuse: How would I like to meet Texas Governor Rick Perry and sit in on a meeting he was having with two gentlemen from Mexico.
I soon found myself sitting in a small conference room in the hotel where my speech was to take place. I was introduced to the two gentlemen from Mexico: an older, distinguished looking man who, it turned out, was the publisher or Mexico City's largest and most influential newspaper, and a young, movie-star handsome gentleman who was a member of the Mexico Senate.
They were there, they explained to me, to ask Governor Perry about the open-meetings law and provisions of US law that required more transparency in government.
In Mexico, it seemed, there were no such laws, and they were researching the ways the laws worked in the US to make the case back home that Mexico would benefit from more open government.
After we waited awhile, the Governor came in. Sat down across from us. Put his big boots on the glass-topped coffee table so we could all admire his official state-seal-of-Texas cowboy boots.
And then, without warning, he started in on a diatribe about water that Mexico was illegally withholding from Texas.
"We know it's there," he said, twanging away like a hillbilly. "We got satellites kin prove it. Satellites show us real clear you all are keeping that water on yer side of the border. And that's wrong, see. That's against the treaty we have with you all."
And on and on. All about the illegal impoundment of water by the Mexicans, depriving Texans of their legal rights to all that water.
There was nothing to do but sit there with the two Mexicans and listen to him rail on about something these two gentlemen had no authority over and hadn't come to talk about.
Finally, having had his say about water, Perry turned to the matter at hand, government transparency, open meetings, sunshine laws.
"What ya got to understand," he said, "was these laws are a double-edged sword. Now you take the problem of bidness plans."
Let me stop here.
"Bidness."
He actually said "bidness."
Not business. Bidness.
"Now you take the problem of bidness plans."
He looked at the two Mexicans.
"You all know what a bidness plan is, right? That's what you got to have when you want to start a bidness. Well, in Texas, if someone writes up a bidness plan and then goes to the government for some kind of assistance, well, they got to show the government their bidness plan. Now, under all those laws, that means that bidness plan could be read by just about anybody who wants to. So that's how transparency works, see? It's a double-edged sword."
The meeting was over soon.
After Perry left, I looked at the two gentlemen from Mexico
They shrugged.
I tried to apologize to them, although I had nothing to apologize for. Other than being an American and in the same room.
Finally, the young, handsome Senator said, "I'm glad he explained what a business plan is. That wasn't something we covered when I was getting my MBA from the Stanford business school."
Ouch.
Now Rick Perry is running for President of the United States.
He doesn't accept the science behind global climate change.
He wants to teach creationism in the schools on a par with evolutionary theory.
He sees nothing wrong with conducting a Christians-only prayer rally as Governor of Texas.
He threatened to look into Texas seceding from the Union.
I only got a glimpse of the remarkable insensitivity and mind-numbing simplicity of the way this man thinks, talks, works, and treats others.
Imagine what he could do in the White House.
Maybe it's time for another prayer rally--all denominations.
We'll think of something appropriate to pray for.

One Cheer for The Pope

2011-08-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

According to this morning's papers, Pope Benedict XVI is in Spain, where he gave a speech on the problems caused by pure bottom-line-driven capitalism. Not a bad theme to take up in a country where, last time I checked, the unemployment rate was above 20%--one of the highest, if not the highest, in Europe.
(So even though I'm not a fan of this particular pope, let's give one cheer to him for raising the right issue in the right place at the right time.)
Seeing the coverage reminded me of a conference I attended in Rome some time back at the invitation of the Opus Dei-affiliated university there.
The theme was capitalism and social change.
The opening text was a papal encyclical on the subject, and the participants ranged from academics who wanted to debate the history of capitalism in Europe and the fundamental properties of the free market to social activists using their faith as the basis for economic and social activism to the former head of the IMF and the current head of the Vatican Bank.
Talking with one of the university professors after the formal conclave was over, I was struck by a huge opportunity--and reminded of it just now by the pope's speech in Spain.
The idea goes something like this.
Capitalism, as we practice it in the United States, isn't working--or, to be more accurate, needs to work better.
As the pope said in Spain, capitalism that focuses only on the bottom-line leaves out too much--too much social, environmental, emotional, even spiritual value.
Voices around the world are joining in this discussion; Michael Porter's recent piece in HBR is one example; the rise of social entrepreneurship globally is another; the efforts by finance professors to generate interest in integrated reporting, yet another.
But who can lead the conversation?
It seems unlikely, maybe even undesirable, for the US to lead such a discussion, a gathering compared by a friend in Vienna to a "Geneva Convention on Capitalism."
Who might have the standing to bring together the nations and interests for a convocation on the rules of capitalism?
My thought after the conference in Rome: What if the road to the future of capitalism runs through Rome?
What if a pope--not this one, but perhaps the next one, a younger, more enlightened one--were to take up the message that capitalism needs to find a new basis, a new way of keeping score, a more fully articulated set of values?
Could the future of capitalism emerge from a forum in Rome? Could we some day be talking about the Rome Convention on Capitalism, the way we talk about the Geneva Convention?
So: here's one cheer for this pope. And we'll hold off on the other two until we see who his successor might someday be.

America, In Reverse

2011-08-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

All it takes is one quick read-through of this morning's New York Times--a superficial read of a superficial view of America, admittedly--to get me thinking that my wonderful country, like Jubilation T. Cornpone in 'Li'l Abner,' is leading the charge, right back to the rear.
A few articles of note.
The Republicans (except Mitt Romney) hate the EPA. They want to shut it down, board it up, stop it from enforcing environmental regulations.
Which means, what?
They want children drinking dirty water. Breathing dirty air?
I thought we all agreed, a long time ago, that a clean environment and a healthy economy aren't opposites--they're mutually reinforcing.
Now, the Republicans are charging, straight back to the rear.
Then there's the article on mass transit in America.
Let's review the situation.
Gas prices are high and likely going higher. Auto ownership, with insurance, is expensive. The cost of living is up. Jobs are scarce.
Ordinary people need transit to get to work. They need a good transit system for their own needs. America needs transit to conserve energy.
Right?
So the news is, transit fares are up, service is down--and ridership is way up, 10 billion trips per year, levels not seen since the 1950s.
And this is good for America, how exactly?
But don't despair.
The op-ed page has a great solution, offered up by a guest columnist, Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby College. Jennifer's father had a wonderful practice at dinners where all kinds of people who were quite happy to disagree with each other would gather around the table and argue the issues of the day.
Then, at a certain point in the dinner-table debate, Jennifer's dad would announce that it was time for every guest to argue the opposite side of the issue they were debating--to reverse their earlier position.
Jennifer's suggestion: the Democrats come up with $2 billion in tax cuts, the Republicans are assigned $2 billion in tax increases.
Ding! Everyone argue the opposite side!
Maybe that's a way to get our country moving ahead, instead of charging full speed, right back to the rear.

Rick Perry: Republican Mike Dukakis

2011-08-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

Conventional wisdom says Rick Perry is the second coming of George W. Bush--only worse.
I say he's the Republican version of Mike Dukakis--only worse.
Now, most Americans who think of Michael Dukakis--if they do--only remember the Presidential campaign. The goofy shot with the tank and the helmet, the awkward answer in the Presidential debate about what he'd do if his wife were raped, the Willie Horton ad. They remember a man who looked about two sizes too small for the job.
I wrote speeches for Michael Dukakis when he was Governor of Massachusetts.
That was a job he excelled at.
He had a terrific team working for him; he was smart, shrewd, in command. He was the longest tenured Governor in the history of Massachusetts. He had techniques and programs that he put to work in Massachusetts that got results.
Remember the Massachusetts Miracle?
Probably not. But that was one of Dukakis' campaign themes: that he had brought jobs and economic growth to Massachusetts in the middle of an economic downturn, and he could do the same thing for the country, if he were President.
Remember the response the Greek community gave his candidacy?
Probably not. But that was another of Dukakis' secret weapons--he was the first American of Greek descent to run for President and gain the nomination.
Which brings me to Rick Perry.
He's running on the basis of his record in Texas--his version of a Texas Miracle. In an economy that's flat on its back, his state has generated a stunning percent of the nation's total new jobs.
And he's running as a Texan--his version of the Greek identity. Texans love their own, take care of their own, support their own, and, most important, finance their own. Already the call has gone out through the Longhorn State (and through the President of the University of Texas, who, apparently, has already put out the word for alums to whip out their checkbooks and write some big numbers for Perry) that it's time to bring the White House back home where it belongs.
But just a few days into his campaign, and already you get the feeling that he's too small for the job.
He's never run a national campaign before, and it shows.
What worked for Dukakis in Massachusetts, where he could be a technocrat, a liberal, a guy who rode the T to the office every morning, didn't work for America; he came off as a man without big ideas, out of touch with ordinary people, and, frankly, a little odd.
Perry?
What worked in Texas may not play in the U.S.--especially not when people hear his voice and catch his style.
The swagger and boots and big talk, threats and cavalier dismissals of complicated issues could very well get him the nomination.
The field, other than Romney, looks kind of weak, splintered, undistinguished. Kind of like the field Dukakis beat.
And like Dukakis, Perry will have his core supporters and their money.
But I'm also betting that, like Dukakis, Perry will find, if he does get the nomination, that the job is several sizes too big for him.
He could well be another Texan who's all hat, no cattle.

We Need More Ray Andersons

2011-08-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

Ray Anderson's obituary appeared in the New York Times today.
I'd gotten an email two days ago telling me that Ray had died. And while the obituary was okay, it hardly did him justice.
The headline read, "Ray Anderson, a Carpet Innovator, Dies at 77."
A carpet innovator?
How about, "Ray Anderson, A Giant, A Great Man, A Hero, Dies Too Young."
I shared a platform with Ray about a year ago in Atlanta at a conference on design and the environment.
He gave a simple talk, speaking in a simple way.
He told us he had cancer. That was how he started. Just like that.
Then he told us that America was sick, too. That our national way of doing business was poisoning the environment.
He talked about his own epiphany and transformation.
How he'd made a commitment to turn around Interface. To make a carpet company into a green company.
It wasn't a business decision. It was a crusade.
And it has been a wonderful crusade, a brilliant campaign, a teaching lesson, a preaching lesson.
The company thrived when Ray turned it into a model of environmental practices.
Carpets, which are typically the greatest contributor of waste to landfills, under Ray's guidance, became a source of best environmental practices.
He cut waste; he cut emissions; he cut energy use.
He got so good at it, he started a side business, consulting to other companies that wanted to learn how to do what he was doing.
He was a hero.
He was a great man.
He was a remarkable, modest, giant of a man.
Very simply, we need more Ray Andersons.
Because the one we had, the original one, is gone.

Life Is Short, Art Is Long

2011-07-24T15:08:00.001-07:00

In the last week, I've been to two operas, a rock concert by a (the?) legend of rock n' roll, and a jazz concert.
Let's talk about art.
First, the rock concert.
Bob Dylan and his band in Albuquerque. Before driving down, I do my homework. Check recent set lists and accompanying reviews. By all accounts, Bob is on a roll. Now 70, his shows of late have been energy filled, vocally edgy, full of passion.
Yeah, I know. And this is Bob Dylan I'm talking about.
So we drive to ABQ, make the hike to the funky little hatch-shell-like stage. Not a big crowd. Amazing. If Bob Dylan comes to my town, I'm gonna be there! But apparently, New Mexicans have something better to do.
The band comes out--grey suits, cool hats, looking good. Bob comes out. Little flat-brimmed hat, boots that make it look like he's wearing spats, dark pants with a strip up the side, a little-boy-lost jacket, some kind of shirt that sparkles when he speaks--little goatee. He looks good.
He sounds great! Rips through his songs. Terrific vocals, sharp elocution, a real poet's elocution, singing the words sharp and biting them off. The band is tight. And Bob! He comes out from behind the keyboard and sings! He croons! He sells the songs to the audience! He freakin' emotes!
No, he doesn't talk to us, but he looks at us! He grins at us! He dances around for us!
I've been to Dylan shows where you wonder if he's got a pulse! This 70-year old dude is rockin'!
Oh, and his Oscar is on stage with him. Very cool.
Not one encore, but two.
Great show. Amazing songs by an amazing song-writer, poet, recording artist, voice of our time.
Then a couple of nights later, at the Lensic, it's the kick off event of the New Mexico Jazz Festical, and Ms. Dee Dee Bridgewater, channeling Billie Holiday.
She's the un-Dylan.
Flirts with the audience. Gets propositioned by a guy in the audience! Appears to take him up on it! Flirts with the band, a brilliant quartet that can flat-out play jazz.
She sings beautifully, dances, shimmies, shakes, works it. She talks about her loves, her life, puts on a great show.
She's not Lady Day, but she does a great Lady Day. Even stops the let's-all-have-fun vibe long enough to do a deeply moving version of "Strange Fruit."
And then there's the Santa Fe Opera.
Two operas, in fact: Griselda and The Last Savage.
It's not cheap to go to the Santa Fe Opera, but it is a fun experience.
There's tail-gating before the opera in the parking lot; a fun talk before the opera to explain and describe the background of that night's performance; a beautiful setting; a terrific opera house.
And then there are Griselda and The Last Savage.
In talking about Griselda before the performance, director Peter Sellars called it "weird" Said he didn't understand one of the characters at all; said he'd but out a number of arias and substituted one that isn't in the opera; said he'd tried 30 or more different endings, and still wasn't sure about the ending we'd see that night.
Not a good sign: when the director says he doesn't understand his own characters, edits the opera, and doesn't like his own ending.
And indeed, it was a terrible opera.
All operas may be strange--this one was unintelligible. And given what a questionable opera it was to put it, you can credit Sellars for at least trying.
He was given a lemon to work with--and while he didn't produce lemonade, at least he produced a sliced lemon.
Then there was The Last Savage.
It's supposed to be a comedy. The director did everything with it except provide a laugh track.
There were three spit takes; one spoof of King Kong; one spoof of Chicago; a set and costumes that were pure TV sit-come.
More a Broadway show than an opera.
Which raises the question: Who do you hold responsible when art fails?
If Bob Dylan puts on a bad show, it's Bob Dylan's show and his responsibility.
If Dee Dee Bridgewater can't deliver Billie Holiday, it's on her (shiny, bald, beautiful) head.
But Griselda and The Last Savage?
Who do we hold accountable for something as big and complex and complicated as a bad opera?
The singers tried mightily to sing, act, emote, connect.
The orchestra played with great skill; the conductor tried to present a masterful combination.
The director, set creator, costume creator, arguably, tried to come up with smart, interesting interpretations.
But these were two terrible operas.
So is it the artistic director? Someone we never see, never interact with, never encounter? Who doesn't explain in the program his choices, the story behind, not the opera itself, but why he picked these operas for us to experience?
He is, in the jargon of our time, the curator.
But is curation an art? Or a job?
And how do you evaluate a curator? How do you review a curator?
How do you walk out on a curator?
Questions after a week of art.
A week that showed, once again, that life is short, and art is long.
And in the case of the Santa Fe Opera, the art right now is very, very, very long.

Tyrants and Revolutions

2011-07-21T08:55:00.000-07:00

In a distant land sits an aging, angry, voracious tyrant.
His grip over his people is powerful. Based on random acts of violence, unmeetable expectations, and unquestioning loyalty. Everyone is afraid of him. Everyone seeks to please him. He has money, power, reach, the ability to reward or ruin whomever he pleases.
And then one day, it all changes.
One day the people rise up, demonstrate, assert their power--and the despot's world is changed forever.
No, I'm not talking about Hosni Mubarak. Or Moammar Gaddhafi.
I'm talking about Rupert Murdoch.
It has taken this emerging hacking scandal in England to reveal the inner operations and cultural underpinnings of his empire.
But in some way, we already knew that. We knew about his politics, his appetite for power, his insatiable drive for control.
What was less clear was how willing, first, elected officials and police authorities were to subjugate themselves to Murdoch and his minions, and, second, how easily the rest of us convinced ourselves that, since this was the way things were, this must be the way things are meant to be.
In other words, to accept a horrific version of journalism and media as the new norm.
If it weren't for this scandal, for Murdoch's over-reaching (or under-reaching) of his abominable standards of ethical journalism, we'd all still be wearing status-quo colored glasses.
And, to be honest, less has actually changed than we might wish. But like Arab Spring, this uprising offers us a little crack through which some day light might filter, and a set of questions worth asking.
Why does it take so much obvious intolerable abuse to get us to voice our collective outrage at the status quo?
Where else can we look, emboldened by this example, to see other version, other models of large scale social-self-hypnosis? Where else are we convincing ourselves that everything's ok, just because it is what we've become benumbed into accepting?
Where should we be lending our voices, our energy, our dollars to try to right large-scale social wrongs (and I would put today's over-whelming media consolidation into the category of a very large-scale social wrong)?
And if what we are witnessing is the global practice of a huge convergence of money, power, politics, and opinion-making, then what can we do to fight back?
Can we launch a Media Spring? A Journalism Spring?
Is it time for social uprising that mirrors the twitter and facebook revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East?
Are there more aging tyrants who need to be toppled?

How Is Education Reform Like A Fad Diet?

2011-07-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

Americans are getting fatter and our public schools are failing.
It's a toss up as to which will get us first, obesity or stupidity.
To make matters worse, our approach to dealing with both national crises is the same.
Take obesity.
We all know what it takes to lose weight. Eat healthier foods, eat smaller portions, and get more exercise. It is a time-tested program that works. It may be the only program that works.
But every year Americans spend millions of dollars on fad diets, diet books, videos, and programs. We buy the fad diet book, then buy the products pushed by the author of the fad diet book, then buy the sequel written by the author of the fad diet book.
The predictable result: obesity is spreading across America like a plague.
What about the crisis in public education?
Here we're more inventive than with obesity.
We pass a federal law that mandates testing. The idea is, if teachers, principals and students know that they'll be tested, everyone's performance will improve.
(It's like saying, if you have to weigh in every day, you'll feel compelled to lose weight.)
Except those creative educators in Atlanta found a better way. They cheated.
An investigation into Atlanta's remarkable improvement in test scores found that cheating was rampant, involving 44 schools and at least 178 teachers.
And the head cheater was the superintendent, Beverly Hall, who, by the way, was America's 2009 Superintendent of the Year.
Memo to obese people: When you get off the scale, just lie about what it said. You'll still be overweight, just like our school kids will still be unable to read, write, and do math. But the numbers will look better.
Here in my home town of Santa Fe, we know a little something about cheating.
At the last school board election, three new reform-minded candidates were elected, forming a new majority on the 5-person board, as close to a referendum on the public schools as you could get.
To thumb their noses, the outgoing school board members, as their last official act, gave the superintendent a contract extension, basing their action on a report that the administration produced detailing areas of improvement by Santa Fe students.
Turns out, upon closer inspection, that a data analyst in the administration cooked the books. She said she was tired of only hearing bad news, so she came up with some numbers that made the district look better. The truth, however, is that Santa Fe public schools are something like third worst in the state, and the state is about dead last in the nation.
When in doubt, fudge the numbers.
Then there's the strange case of the hard reality of education reform, in general.
In a terrific piece in the NY Times Sunday magazine, Paul Tough, who wrote the book on the Harlem education project, took reformers to task for the same kind of phony baloney with numbers.
He came to the defense of Diane Ravitch, who had criticized reformers for over-promising and under-performing.
One example: the highly touted Bruce Randolph School in Denver. The real numbers for the school show just how hard it is to make real progress in educational reform: Tough points out that the average ACT score at the school last year was 14, the second lowest of any high school in Denver; in tests given middle schoolers, the school place at the first percentile in reading and writing (in other words 99% of Colorado schools did better), and in the fifth percentile in math.
The reformers' response: unfair comparison! Our students are starting way behind and have farther to go.
Memo to obese people: it's unfair to compare you to healthy, fit people! You are starting way behind and have farther to go!
The truth is, when it comes to obesity we know what to do.
When it comes to education we also know what to do.
As Diane Ravitch wrote in a letter to the NY Times on July 10, "Good schools are no mystery. They have a dedicated principal, a stable staff with a mix of veterans and young teachers, and a strong curriculum that includes not only basic skills but the arts, history, civics, science, world languages, literature and physical education. And they engage parents and community leaders to support their goals."
In other words, eat better food, smaller portions, and get more exercise.
We know what we need to do to lose weight and to improve education.
The truth is, both are hard. They take time. They take dedication. They don't admit to fads, silver bullets, or overnight moon-shot programs. Snake oil salesmen have a field day in both categories, making ridiculous promises, muddying the debate, scooping up tons of money, and never delivering results.
In Rules of Thumb I wrote that change is a math formula.
It happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change.
Today, in obesity and education, the cost of the status quo is exorbitant.
So far, we've tried to lie, cheat, and fake our way out of it.
Isn't it time to try the hard, honest, patient path, the one we know yields real results?
Otherwise, it says here we'll die fat and stupid. And that's s sad combination.

Racing Headlong, The Wrong Direction

2011-06-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

The headline in today's San Francisco Chronicle says, "Poor, students feel pain in new budget."
The Democratically controlled legislature, lead by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, has passed a new budget which cuts the state's support for poor people, who'll be getting less medical care and welfare support, eliminates services for disabled people, closes down state parks, and increases the cost of tuition for students who want to go to one of the state's public universities.
At the same time, the state will cut its sales tax from 8.25% to 7.25% and drop vehicle licensing fees by almost 50%.
In other words, faced with a budget crisis, the great state of California is going to stick it to the poor, the needy, the sick, the old, and the young who want to get an education, while cutting back two highly regressive taxes--disproportionately benefiting wealthy Californians.
And these are the Democrats!
In Ohio, the Republican governor has produced a two-year budget plan that dramatically changes Medicaid benefits and slashes state support for education and financing for local government. Critics say the Republican plan will lead to lay offs of teachers and cops.
But the governor is proud that his budget keeps in place an $800 million cut in personal income taxes.
From coast to coast, and in the halls of Congress, where President Obama is pleading with the Republicans to consider raising a few taxes on business if he'll make considerable cuts in social programs, America is racing headline the wrong direction.
We are taking a country that is already the most unequal advanced capitalist economy in the world, and making it more unequal.
We are trashing schools, slashing social services--and safeguarding the privileges of the wealthy.
It's worth taking a minute to review the bidding, as they like to say at country clubs where bridge is the game of choice.
How did we get here?
We got here because the super-rich of Wall Street turned the American economy into a casino. With them as the bank. They got to use our money. When the game went well, they got even richer. When the game went belly up, we lost our money--and they got even richer.
Now, in the interest of--well, I'm not too sure what it's in the interest of, actually; maybe in the interest of continuing to play make believe that America is a land without social classes and a country where the game isn't rigged--something, our political leaders seem trapped in brain-lock.
We have huge financial problems, so let's stick it to the poor and the vulnerable, punish our children, who need the best education they can get to have a shot at competing in the global economy, and instead safeguard the interests of the wealthy.
Remind me again: what is it that rich people do for America? Do they actually create jobs? Produce valuable goods and services? Those 11,000 Americans whose combined wealth is greater than the combined wealth of America's poorest 23 million citizens--what do they do that they deserve even more tax breaks?
America has always been the nation on earth that is racing the fastest to get to the future.
Now we're running as fast as we can, in the wrong direction.
I hope we either change direction right now, or else get wherever we're headed soon, so we'll at least have more time to put right all the things we're getting wrong.

The German Question

2011-06-22T09:49:00.001-07:00

At dinner the other night with friends in San Francisco, the question of Germany came up: The German economy seems to be doing well, much better than the rest of Europe, better than the U.S., with much lower unemployment and much higher economic security.
How do they do it?
A friend at the dinner table suggested it was a function of German industrial policy--that Germany was doing today what we accused Japan of doing in the past with its Ministry of International Trade and Industry, namely orchestrating a set of policies that would favor the competitiveness of national industries, particularly manufacturing. So, while the U.S. has largely let the market dictate what has happened with our manufacturing base--and seen jobs move to other, lower-cost parts of the world--Germany has retained its manufacturing base, its jobs, and its overall economic well-being.
Of course, none of us at the table had a lot of facts at our fingertips, just widely divergent opinions. While this would have made us exceptional pundits on every TV talk show, it left me wondering if there were any facts to be had.
In other words, a job for The Global Detective!
Thanks to some friends in Austria, who quickly hustled together a series of banking advisory reports and newspaper and magazine articles, I quickly had some data, facts, and arguments from informed sources that I could draw on.
Some interesting stuff: for instance, not everything we thought was true, or assumed was true, turned out to be true.
One Economist report noted that a study found that Germany's performance with manufacturing jobs wasn't what we all assumed: Over the last 40 years, Germany has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs, more or less the same percentage as the U.S., despite, as the economists note, a "union density" that is twice that of America.
Another report explained Germany's current economic performance in light of a rather dismal performance in the decade prior--when Germany was thought of as "the sick man of Europe" (which I mistakenly thought had always been Italy's claim to economic fame).
Yet another analysis pointed out that Germany's overall economic growth hasn't been particularly stellar; what's made it look so good is its declining population, which means that when you calculate growth per unit of population, then Germany starts to look very good.
But overall, Germany today has been getting good reviews.
The question is still, why--and secondarily, what can the U.S. learn?
There are a number of explanations that recur.
One answer has to do with historically strong German corporate brands. For a nation its size, Germany has a substantial number of global brand leaders in a wide variety of sectors. These companies have grown from national champions, when economic borders were more closed than today, to global champions, able to compete and win around the world.
Germany has benefited from its well-documented Mittelstand companies--the mid-sized companies that often specialize as top-quality suppliers, producing the parts and components that other companies then assemble into finished products.
What explains those two factors?
You could chalk them up to history, education, and culture: how the German corporate structure has evolved, how young Germans are trained and educated and brought into the workforce, and what German culture values and stresses.
Another broad set of factors involve labor costs, which Germany has managed to keep relatively low, and management-labor relations, which seem to be generally collaborative and highly productive.
This, along with the overall orientation of German firms toward steady, stable, if unspectacular growth, you can attribute to governance: co-determination, which puts union members on the management board, seems to produce decisions that are aimed at a broader sense of social good and public and national well-being, rather than pure individual financial gain or even "shareholder value maximization," which is the mantra in the U.S.
There is geography: Germany is benefiting from its proximity to Eastern Europe, which is experiencing its own economic burst.
There are factors that seem to relate to social habits, cultural patterns, and personal values: a high savings rate, low personal indebtedness, a general lack of interest on the part of average Germans to leverage themselves to the hilt. Germany didn't get hit by the housing bubble and the derivatives disaster the way America (and the PIGS in Europe) did. Perhaps Germans simply have better and longer historical memories that Americans: after World War I, Germany was seared by inflation and monetary collapse, so much so that generations later, the country still seems thoroughly committed to moderation in all things economic.
To me, however, one of the most telling factors in the comparison between Germany and the U.S. today is the difference in economic equality.
When you look at the Gini Coefficient ratings for the two nations, the numbers tell the tale: Germany, at 27, is one of the lowest, if not the lowest, rated nation among all advanced, industrial, capitalist countries. It is, in other words, the most equal.
The U.S., with a rating of 45, is the least equal.
In other words, it is as if we were two countries playing the same game with totally opposite definitions of victory, totally opposite goals, totally opposite values, totally opposite aspirations.
Germans want stability, predictability, equality, social and economic sustainability. They want a society that is coherent and cohesive.
This is not a function of industrial policy. Rather it is an outgrowth of culture, history, and experience.
Americans, apparently, want the opposite.
We want huge disparities within society, great divergences between the haves and the have nots, an economy with vast differentials that holds out the promise of great fortune for individuals who make it, and the certainty of deep misfortune for those who do not.
What can we learn from Germany?
That you can have a capitalist country and still have much greater social and economic equality than the U.S. does today.
That you can rely on markets to perform, while creating "economic design specs" that channel market choices in directions that benefit society as a whole.
And, perhaps, as the old saying goes, that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

What's The Point of the Exercise?

2011-06-21T10:28:00.001-07:00

Ah, the joys of hanging out in San Francisco!
You get to hear smart people talking about interesting things, for one thing.
Like last night, when the good folks from the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, lead by the truly exceptional Roger Martin, hosted an evening discussion of a new book, Artistry Unleashed, by Hilary Austen, and then this morning, when the topic was Roger's new book, Fixing the Game.
The two books, and the two discussions, had much in common, without actually making the link explicit.
Hilary's book argues for the importance of the artistic instinct in business--using the kinds of creative tools that artists use to make their art. The discussion last night was framed around "quantitative versus qualitative"--business loves what it can measure, fears what it can't. Artists are all about what can't be measured--your instincts, your imagination, your creative spark.
Roger's book takes on the dominance of stock-based compensation as the incentive to drive CEOs and top managers to higher performance, comparing the business game to the NFL. In the NFL, you've got the game on the field, which is all about winning and losing, and the game in Las Vegas, which is all about the point spread. But, Roger points out, the players and coaches can't bet in Las Vegas--which is exactly what CEOs and top executives are not only allowed to do, but encouraged to do through their incentive-based compensation.
Two good discussion, both of which stopped short of asking the fundamental question: What's the point of the exercise?
Why do companies drive creative thinking out--and then hire consultants to bring it back in?
Why do companies believe that their stock price is the true measure of their performance?
The answer in both cases, it seems to me, is that since the last half of the 20th century, American business has lost track of the real point of the game.
We've substituted pure financial return for the larger purpose of business--to create and grow a sustainable organization capable of making and keeping customers, developing a strong group of committed employees, and contributing to the larger benefit of society. And make a profit.
But not just to make a profit.
And not to maximize shareholder value.
Not to make a profit at the expense of sound business practices.
Not to make a few people as wealthy as possible.
According to Marcus Buckingham and others, something like 80% of all Americans hate their jobs (those who still have jobs).
According to the Gini Index, America is the most unequal advanced capitalist society in the world, and become more unequal over time.
The deeper issue that both Hilary and Roger are writing about is the widespread system failure that our current approach to business represents.
What is exciting is the thinking and questioning and commenting that Roger and the folks at Rotman are leading.
Now we need to see it spread.
Spread and go deeper.
Go back to first principles, to first questions.
Questions like, What's the point of the exercise?

Darwin Is Alive and Well In Tanzania!

2011-03-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Do Animals Trust?
Or, Why Animals Would Die If They Trusted, and Why Humans Would Die If They Didn’t

Polls say something like 40% of Americans don’t “believe in” Darwinism. It’s safe to say that here in Tanzania 100% of life not only believes in Darwinism, it also practices it and depends on it.
Rule #1: All life wants to live and will do everything in its power to stay alive.
Rule #2: A mutations either contributes to the ability of a living plant or animal to survive—or it doesn’t.
Conclusion: Nature is the ultimate pragmatist. What increases the capacity of a living thing to survive—what works in evolutionary terms—itself survives. What doesn’t, doesn’t.
Look at a plant, a bush, a tree, an animal, a bird, and you will find clues as to what has helped it survive.
The whistling thorns on the acacia have two lines of defense against hungry giraffes. The first are the thorns designed to discourage hungry giraffes from grazing on the tender green sprigs of the acacia. But giraffes evolved with lips and tongues capable of nibbling around those sharp thorns. So next came gull-shaped bulbs that sit between the thorns—and are filled with attack ants. When the bulbs are shaken, disturbed, moved in any way, the ants swarm out and attack whatever has caused the gull-shaped bulbs to move. For instance, the tender tongue and lips of a hungry giraffe.
Or take the honey guide, a bird that uses its distinctive song to attract the attention of human hunters from the Hadza tribe. The men of the Hadza tribe depend on a supply of honey as part of their hunter-gatherer diet. The honey guide sings to get the Hadza’s attention (and sometimes the Hadza whistle the honey guide’s song to see if any are around) and then lead the Hadza to nearby trees where bees have hidden their honey combs.
It’s easy to see what the Hadza get out of this arrangement, but what in Darwin’s name do the honey guides get?
The answer comes when you watch the Hadza harvest the honey and what happens next.
The Hadza stick their arms into the honey holes, ignoring the stings of the bees—or trying to numb the bees by smoking them out with a punk fire. Then they pull out comb after comb of the bees’ honey and eat it right on the spot, slurping down the deliciously sweet honey, eating the larvae, and spitting out the wax.
But it’s the wax the honey guides want! Without the help of the Hadza, the honey guides wouldn’t be able to get to the honey combs in the first place—the birds have no way to get inside the trunks of the trees to access the combs. And then without the Hadza chewing up the combs and spitting out the wax, which the humans don’t want, the birds wouldn’t be able to get the one part of the combs they want, the wax.
It’s all existentially pragmatic, on both sides. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t survive. And if it didn’t survive, it wouldn’t work.
Which brings us to the topic of trust.
Do animals trust each other? Is trust a survival instinct for animals?
When a herd of zebras is grazing together, do they stand so that the stronger ones can protect the weaker? When the leaders start to run and the rest of the herd takes off instantly, is that a measure of trust?
My friend and mentor Richard Leider says yes.
Animals do, in fact, trust each other. Look at how younger elephants learn to look up to, to respect and to trust the older ones. Look at what happened some years back when young male elephants had no older males to teach them the ropes. The herd was running riot, and it wasn’t until some older, mature males were introduced into the mix that the younger males settled down and learned the ropes. Trust, he says, is part of the animal kingdom.
I say no.
What we’re seeing in animals, what he’s describing, isn’t trust. Animals don’t know about trust, much less practice it. What we’re seeing, what they’re practicing, is behavior that results from millions of years of evolution.
Their leaders aren’t leaders because the other animals “trust” them. They’re leaders because they are the biggest, the strongest, the toughest, the fastest.
If you are, say, a zebra, and you are none of those things—not the biggest, strongest, toughest, fastest—and one of the zebras who is all of them starts to run, you don’t ask yourself whether you trust him. You don’t call a meeting of the other lesser zebras to see what they think. You run. He runs, you run. Otherwise you’ve just increased your chances of being eaten.
Or try flipping it the other way: for animals to be capable of trust, they also have to be capable of not-trust.
Can you honestly imagine a herd of wildebeest who stop as their leader starts to run, and engage in thoughtful wildebeestian dialog as to whether or not they trust this particular leader? Should they run? Or not run? He’s been wrong before, you know. Remember that time he thought he smelled something, but it turned out to be nothing? This is a pretty nice grazing spot. And if we run, and it turns out there’s no reason to run, we’ll have left it for no good reason!
Of course, if the leader was right, the weakest of the wildebeest is now jackal fare. So much for not trusting the leader!
But what about humans?
We have a problem very different from the other animals.
We are small and relatively weak. We do have opposable thumbs and a great big brain. We have a fight or flight mechanism like the other animals, but we also come equipped with an over-ride switch: our left-sided, problem-solving brain. Our consciousness. Our social networking skills. Our ability to work with each other, plan with each other, depend on each other. In other words, to trust each other.
We need to be able to trust each other to survive. Animals need not to have to trust each other to survive.
Darwin is alive and well and surviving in the Serengeti of Tanzania. It’s where you go to see how the world really works, how life works, what it takes to survive.

What's the Opposite of Capitalism?

2011-03-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

No, it's not communism.
It's Hadza-ism.
Never heard of it?
Try checking out the Dorobo Fund website (and while you're there, make a contribution).
Or read yesterday's New York Time's piece on what separates men from apes, based on studies of hunter-gatherer societies: collaboration and cooperation.
The Hadza are a tribe of about 1,000 people living in Tanzania as they have for something like 70,000 or more years. As hunter-gatherers.
Every day, the men of the tribe get up with their hand-made bows and hand-carved arrows, some more blunt-tipped for shooting at birds, others with metal-honed arrowheads and shafts carefully covered with poison derived from a rose bush, and go looking for animals to shoot and honey to collect.
Every day, the women get up and collect their digging sticks so they can sit at the base of a large bush and tear away at the ground until they uncover tubers that will feed them, their families, and the tribe.
As hunter-gatherers, the Hadza are constantly on the move. So they have few possessions. The men carry knives and hatchets, bows and arrows, and perhaps a small bag with a few important items. But if a Hadza man already has a knife, for example, and he somehow gets another one, he'll simply give it someone in the tribe who needs a knife. He has no need of another thing to carry. The same applies to the women.
The Hadza are a non-hierarchical society, with no "leaders" and no apparent need for leaders. The men and women are equal; the lack of "stuff" makes it easy for a woman who objects to the way she is being treated or who simply wants a fresh start to go off on her own or join a new camp.
The hunting and gathering part of their lives take up roughly 10% of their time. The rest is spent talking and telling stories, gambling (the men throw pieces of wood against a tree until only one of the wood pieces turns up with the same side as the "guide" piece), and enjoying the company of each other in camp.
The Hadza are remarkably happy and easy going. They laugh a lot (and sometimes argue loudly).
They are a society that operates on immediate gratification: an animal that is killed is eaten immediately, as is honey that is gathered, and tubers that are unearthed. They live in the perpetual present.
They seem to lack for nothing, at least nothing that they actually want or seem to need.
Now you could call them primitive. Or backward. Or maybe even uncivilized.
But none of that is true. Far from it.
They live as emerging humans lived tens of thousands, maybe even millions of years ago.
The live close to nature. They live with a way of life that is deeply connected to the animals they hunt, the honey they collect, the tubers they dig. They don't want to use guns--guns would upset the fragile and sustainable balance that they've learned about over centuries and continue to practice. They don't even use matches--not when they can make fire with a stick and some punk and a knife they can use as a flat surface.
Now I'm not saying I want to swap places with the Hadza. I couldn't make it, for one thing.
But we could learn from them.
We have so much stuff, and we still want more. We get everything we can ask for, one way or another, but it doesn't make us happy. Have you checked out the figures for the number of people in the US who are taking anti-depressants every day?
Having stuff doesn't make you rich, and being rich doesn't make you happy.
Wanting more stuff than you need just fills your life up with things you don't need and can't use, but doesn't do anything to fill the hole that's inside, the one hole that matters when it comes to figuring out what your life is about and what your way of life is worth.
For what it's worth, the Hadza have it figured out.
And we need them around to remind us.
Fact is, we need them a lot more than they need us.

When You Ask the Wrong Questions . . .

2011-03-11T08:46:00.000-08:00

You Get the Wrong Answers.
One of the first things you notice when you return to the good old US of A after a prolonged absence (especially an absence that was all about cutting off all connections to the web, emails, and media in general, while living in a tent in Africa) is what America and Americans are talking about.
No, I don't mean Charlie Sheen, although apparently he has a firm grasp on the media's imagination.
I mean things like the Wisconsin State Legislature, which apparently thinks that the real, deep, underlying, systemic cause of that state's economic problems is the ability of public employees to bargain collectively. Interesting connection, that one. I did not see it coming. I thought the deep, underlying, systemic cause of that state's economic problems--and much of America's--is our national sense of economic entitlement. We want what we want, except we don't actually want to pay for it.
Or I mean the hearings called by US Representative Peter King, an elected official who is apparently the poster-child for Ding-Dongs, or maybe that's just a connection that I make based on his seriously misguided attempt to explore the connection between Islam in America and radicalization. Perhaps it would be unkind to point out to Representative King that it wasn't exactly Muslims who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or holed up in a mountain cabin sending exploding letters to people, or dropped anthrax powder into the mail.
Maybe we should have hearings into why Americans are disaffected from America.
Because that's the hit I'm getting upon my return home.
Americans aren't too happy about America these days.
The feeling is, I sense, that, for too many people, we've gone over to the dark side of the American Dream. The old deal was, work hard, study hard, pay your taxes, play by the rules, and you'll get ahead.
Today, people hear that and just laugh.
Today the tax code seems reserved for the already-wealthy, access to power is reserved for the already-powerful, and the laws protect those who are already very well-protected, thank you very much.
A meritocracy (or the promise one) has turned into a plutocracy. Them what has, gits. Them what doesn't have, gits blamed.
It's not a pretty picture, and it wasn't always this way, and there are plenty of things that can be done and are being done to try to fix the situation.
But meanwhile, we've got people in Wisconsin and Washington, DC, to name just a couple of places, who are steadfastly asking the wrong questions and consistently coming up with the wrong answers.
It may make for great political theater.
But it also makes for lost national opportunities and a sad betrayal of the promise of America.

So Near and Yet So Far

2011-03-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

I'm back on US soil after a 16-day safari in Tanzania, much of it spent camping with Masai and Hadza tribespeople. But more about that later.
This morning, my first in the US since enduring about 19 hours of flying torture at the hands of the amateur-night-at-the-opera airline known as KLM, I walked 15 minutes down to the nearest newstand and picked up the NY Times, the FT, and the local paper, all of which featured headline news from Africa. Not just the stories of Libya and Egypt, but also the implications of all the changes shaking that continent--from terrorism to oil prices. All of a sudden a continent that most Americans don't care much about and know even less about (even as China races to lock up rare and valuable minerals and raw materials) is dominating the world's attention.
But what I'm thinking about is slightly different: it's the relationship of proximity and news.
For 16 days I was roughly in the same neighborhood as the events that were shaking the world.
Every morning I'd rumble out of my tent around 6:15 and walk up the gentle hill to the campsite and the first fire of the day. I'd pour myself a cup of cowboy coffee and then find a place to stand and watch the sun rise over a landscape of stunning beauty and simplicity. Each morning the moon would gradually surrender another slice; the Southern Cross would still be visible as I sipped my coffee and then all of a sudden it wouldn't be. The birds would start slowly and quietly to greet the new day and before long they'd be loud and constant in their songs.
But what made the morning were the reports from what my fellow campers and I came to call "Radio Pallangyo"--named for Pallangyo, the trusted right-hand man of Daudi Peterson, the remarkable leader of Dorobo Tours who dazzled us with his easy command of facts both natural (he's the #2 ranked birder in Tanzania) and political (he's been working steadily to safeguard the rights and dignity of Tanzania's badly treated tribal minorities).
Pallangyo would come out of his tent and stroll easily to the campfire, greeting the early morning risers with Swahili words of good morning, pour his own cup of coffee. And then, after he was settled, we'd ask him for the latest news from "Radio Pallangyo."
Because as near as we were to the events in Africa, we were off the grid when it came to news.
All we had was Pallangyo's lone plastic radio, tuned every morning to the BBC World Report and Voice of America--when he could get a signal.
And so like small town Americans from another time and another era, we'd sit around the campfire and ask Radio Pallangyo for a recitation: what had he heard that morning? What was going on in Libya? Would Qaddafi hold on? Who was the military backing? Had the dictator actually threatened to kill his own people? Was it possible: first he was blaming Al Qaeda for fomenting revolution, then attacking the West with the same charge!
Every morning Radio Pallangyo gave us the headlines and set the tone for the talk around the campfire.
We were in Africa, Africa was on fire, but we were off the grid and all we knew came from a tiny plastic radio that sat in one tent and gave us the news we craved before we set off to hike the green hills of Africa, spotting wildebeest, zebras, antelopes, and countless birds.
There we were, on the front lines of global change, so near and yet so far.

How Pragmatic Is America?

2011-01-17T07:55:00.001-08:00

My 2011 began with a 2-alarm fire down the street a scant two hours into the new year.
Tucson's 2011 began with a horrific and senseless attack on a Congresswoman and a group of innocent bystanders who'd come to participate in democracy.
For governors around the country 2011 has begun with the realization that the cupboard is empty.
For individuals and families around the country, the empty cupboard isn't a metaphor. It's every day reality.
The recession that was triggered by financial corruption and rampant economic dishonesty is dragging on. There are signs of recovery: huge corporate profits that so far haven't translated into new hiring. But there are more signs of trouble ahead. Paul Krugman's piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine points out the problems still afflicting Europe and the possibility of national defaults by more than one member of the EU. Incoming governors in the U.S. are taking different tacks in their response to state-level economic crises. Some are cutting government services to the bone, other raising taxes. The predominant metaphor is "right-sizing" government to the times we're in. So far, only Dave Bing, the mayor of Detroit, has taken this metaphor literally and has adopted a plan to physically shrink his city to fit the down-sized population that now lives there.
A two-year recession will take its toll. On budgets, on hopes. So much of economics, and by extension society, is emotional. Despite the "rational man" theory of economics, how we feel determines how we act, how we treat each other, how we invest, how we share.
At the start of 2011, it's fair to ask, what will be the "geist" of our "zeit"?
I'm hoping for pragmatism. It's an essential American quality, something that always stood us in good stead when times were tough in the past.
What really works? Let's take a look at empirical evidence.
The states are about to return to their time-honored role as the laboratories of democracy.
Enough ideology about taxes and spending.
Different states are taking different paths. Let's see what actually works. What brings about economic recovery. What inspires new business development. What generates a spirit of community and sharing.
Let's look at businesses and how they go about their work.
What companies are able to go beyond profits to produce real value--economic and social? What industries harness innovation in the service of both economic rejuvenation and social cohesion?
Where do we find new social entrepreneurs who can provide fresh solutions to old problems? Are there grass-roots leaders whose creative problem-solving can point us toward new ways of looking at troubling social concerns by bringing entrepreneurial thinking into the public realm?
What works. Small fixes for big problems. Petri-dish size solutions that can start us toward real improvements and real results.
We used to call it Yankee ingenuity.
Today it's solutions that work for problems that matter.
Let's make 2011 the year we return to that old American virtue.

So Much For Civility

2011-01-15T15:10:00.000-08:00

Last Monday I got an email from the Washington Post leadership blog. It was in the form of a question, something to the effect of, did vitriolic attacks and heightened political rhetoric contribute to the horrible shootings in Tucson? (I'm one of countless commentators and writers on leadership who get these weekly invitations from the Post; some weeks I reply, some I don't; this week I did.)
I fired off a prompt reply: If you think rhetoric wounded and killed the victims in Tucson, I said, you need a crash course in ballistics. It was a Glock. I went on to say that I'd fired Glocks. They're terrific weapons. They're light and accurate and easy to fire and aim and reload, if you need to. And, I said, they were used to kill innocent people. (Mistake on my part: I should have said they're used to kill people, since Glocks have become the weapon of choice of law enforcement agencies around the world and are used to shoot and kill guilty and dangerous people as well as innocent people.)
I thought I'd scored a point for clarity and accuracy.
Then along came an online column written for the National Review Online by some guy named Robert VerBruggen.
He's an associate editor at the National Review. Summoning all his cleverness and wit in the wake of a national tragedy, Mr. VerBruggen wrote a column called, "How to write about firearms--a guide for liberals who don't want to sound stupid about guns."
Pretty funny stuff, huh?
In his funny funny column, he included my line about Glocks being for killing innocent people.
He left out the part about my having fired Glocks. He left out the part about the qualities that make Glocks a good gun of choice as a weapon. Since he didn't call me to check on anything, he didn't get a chance to find out that as a kid I grew up shooting .22s at a rifle range in East Alton, Illinois, owned and operated by the ammunition manufacturer Olin Matheison. Or that I got to be a pretty fair shot--not as good as my older brother, Mark, who became an Expert marksmen, but still pretty fair. Or that my mother and uncle took us duck and dove hunting.
He didn't even bother to check if I was a bona fide "liberal"--although he must have assumed that anyone who's in the Washington Post and says that it was the gun that did the crime must somehow qualify as a liberal.
He was just too busy be funny. And let's face it, clipping out quotes and leaving out facts that don't make your piece as funny as you'd like is an old journalistic practice, although judging from photos of Mr. VerBruggen, he's not that old.
Then, in his oh-so-clever effort to instruct the rest of us how to write and think about guns, even Mr. VerBruggen gets carried away, trying to make the case that his beloved handgun is actually for sport--you know, the kind of weapon you take out with you on your hunting expedition. I guess you could make that argument, if, for example, you needed your Glock to administer the coup de grace to a badly wounded animal. But here again Mr. VerBruggen would rather be fatuous than factual. People he doesn't like or agree with ("liberals") are trying to make the distinction between handguns and hunting rifles, and he's pretending either not to understand or not to accept the notion that any difference in use or application really exists.
And so it goes.
A serious tragedy, the loss of life, the murder of innocent young people turns into another game of word-baiting.
Pretty funny, huh? Yeah, it's a real laugher, Mr. VerBruggen. We're all laughing ourselves to death.

The Finger or The Moon?

2011-01-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

Already we've lost the thread of the actual event that took place in Tucson, the killing, the wounding, the shock and horror.
The President wants us to be more civil. You know, why can't we all just get along?
The punditocracy says they didn't do it and that the people who blame them are the ones who should be blamed.
Sarah Palin says she's a victim of a blood libel. But you get the impression that she has no idea what gibberish is going to come out of her pie-hole next, and that's okay as long as it keeps her in the public eye.
The fat guy on the radio says that the killer is going to be cuddled by the Democrats, because we live in a society where personal responsibility has gone missing. As if that made any sense whatsoever.
Let's look at this for what it is: one more time, a semi-automatic handgun in the hands of a disturbed person has created a national tragedy.
Civil discourse would be nice. But wouldn't have made any difference in Tucson.
Blaming talk radio is always fun. Kicking it off the air wouldn't have changed things in Tucson.
Sarah and Rush and all the gang? Background noise.
Why do we allow people to buy and own and walk around with semi-automatic handguns?
That's the question.
Why is that legal? Why is that deemed appropriate, necessary, part of being American?
The shooting in Tucson is another fire bell in the night, calling on us to take a hard look at Americans and our weapons. Not guns for hunting or sport. Guns for squeezing off 19 or 20 bullets in rapid fire, to kill or maim another person.
That's what Tucson wants the President to talk about, the pundits to address, Sarah and Rush to say something about, the Congress to do something about.
The old saying goes, "When a wise man points at the moon, only an idiot looks at his finger."
Here we are, from the President on down, staring at the wise man's finger.
Maybe it's the trigger finger.

Rule #1

2011-01-07T10:52:00.001-08:00

I took the opportunity of a 10-day stint in San Francisco to go to the movies! Twice!
Interestingly, what I saw reminded me why Rule #1 in Rules of Thumb--"when the going gets tough, the tough relax", a rule about dealing with fear--was the right place to start.
Both "The Fighter" and "The King's Speech," it turns out, are about fear.
And both revolve around the fear of speaking up, of being heard, of having your own voice.
In the ring Micky Ward is a tough fighter. He can take punch after punch and never go down.
Outside the ring Micky is a pansy. His coke-head older brother and self-absorbed mother run his boxing career with a single-minded focus--what's good for them. His harpy sisters operate like a Greek chorus, making sure nobody strays too far from the family fold. Everybody may be miserable, but at least their all together.
Enter Charlene, Micky's new girl friend.
At a family meeting (called by Charlene), Micky can't find the voice to tell his family that he's ready to break with them and do what's best for his own boxing career. Charlene has no problem speaking up, calling a spade a spade. Or in this case, calling a harpy a harpy.
It turns out that the fear that paralyzes Micky and keeps him from finding his way to the top isn't the fear of getting hit; it's the fear of breaking with his own family, the fear of losing their support or, perhaps, the fear of being judged disloyal for doing what's best for him, if it leaves the others behind.
"The King's Speech" has exactly the same theme, but here the platform isn't the squared circle, it's the throne of England.
We meet "Bertie"--the Prince of York, en route to becoming King George VI--as he bounces from speech therapist to speech therapist, vainly attempting to overcome a debilitating stammer that makes him feel ashamed and incompetent.
He finally finds Lionel Logue (think of him as a male Charlene), an unconventional Aussie who unlocks the source of Bertie's problem: since childhood he's been denied his "voice," made to feel "less than" and even punished for his left-handedness. Bertie has redeeming qualities, much like Micky. He's tough, determined, resilient. At the same time, what paralyzes him with fear is dealing with his family and the issues he's inherited.
Fear.
Fear, it turns out, is what takes away people's voices, prevents them from saying and doing what they know they can do, know they should do.
Not fear of getting hit in the ring, or even the fear of being the king.
Fear of what others will think of you.
It is the most paralyzing force of all.
It's why Rule #1 still is Rule #1: when the going gets tough, the tough relax.

The Dark Side of Design

2011-01-02T22:14:00.000-08:00

Design is everything.
I should know.
I went to Finland for a conference on design as a tool for solving large scale social problems.
I went to New Zealand for a conference called Better By Design.
I went to Atlanta for a conference on design. Just design.
So I'm a huge fan of design, design thinking, design as the new language of innovation, design as a methodology, design as a verb, design as a noun.
But I'm also painfully aware of the dark side of design.
That's when we get design that is so aware of itself that it's not about anything else except the thin veneer of design that can cover anything, like, well, like a Michael Graves building. Which is arch-design, so self-conscious it leaves room for little else.
That's what's on display at SFMOMA at a highly touted exhibit curated (the verb of the year) by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, one of the hot architectural firms of the day. The exhibit is called "How Wine Became Modern: Design+Wine, 1976 to Now."
It has a series of beautifully, um, designed glass upscale Petri dishes from wineries around the world with a small sample of earth--terroir--from that vineyard. A bottle of wine lay beneath each Petri dish. The lighting was gorgeous.
In the next room was a wall of wine bottles, also beautifully, um, designed, organized by brand name: names that were sinful, names that were heavenly, names of animals, names of family members, weather-related names. You get the idea.
There was a grape vine, severed in the middle, suspended in the air with the root structure and vine structure balanced with great grace.
There was a display of a piece of technology developed with NASA to track the health of vineyards.
There were beautiful wine glasses in a case and a handful of elaborate glass decanters in a window.
The next room had a wall with a map of a couple dozen wineries and one photo each of buildings designed by brand-name architects as their showroom/visitor centers.
There were four models, two of which, a Gehry building and a Graves layout, were grotesque.
There were a series of commissioned photos of people visiting wineries that seemed to be making fun of people visiting wineries.
There was a movie of a video artist walking through the streets of Bordeaux wearing a white suit, while carrying a goblet of red wine, filming himself trying not to spill the wine.
There was a long glass case with a few random wine related objects and a chance to smell a handful of decanters with liquids that demonstrated some of the current vocabulary of wine-smelling. there was a video display of snippets of wine-drinking scenes from movies and a bank of small video screens with wine-related TV reports.
It was all done with a great sense of design. Handsome. Clean. Modern. Multi-media. Interactive.
It was also a vast amount of space given by SFMOMA to the designers with the hope, the expectation, that visitors might actually learn How Wine Became Modern. How design and wine have interacted to create experiences for people, how design and wine have developed into a massive, fascinating global industry with clearly delineated design specs for the making and marketing of wine around the world. There are a lot of fun and interesting questions that you could think of to address in trying to explain how wine became modern, including how far it had to come, what the ingredients are that made wine into such an elaborate social expression, who the people are who contributed to the transformation of wine, and much much more.
But what we got was a triumph of design over substance, which is also the dark side of design. Design is best when it's a tool for something significant, when it's a means to an end, and not an end in itself, when it's used purposefully and powerfully to make a point, to teach, to solve a problem, to express a point of view, to demonstrate a way of thinking or a way of living.
When design becomes about itself, when it is self-referential to the point of caricature, then design is so thin, it's impossible not to see through it.
And that's not even modern--it's post-modern--and the dark side of design.

The Fire This Time

2011-01-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve.
It should follow a familiar, comfortable, and comforting ritual. Bringing in the new year should not be filled with trauma.
We celebrated last night with a comedy show over in Oakland (lots of Palin jokes, Bush jokes, husband/wife jokes, a relatively limited repertoire of humor). Then drove back to the San Francisco side for dinner at The House, a terrific fusion restaurant within walkable distance of our house (not to be confused with The House).
We got back to our place in time to make it up to the roof for the fireworks at midnight, then came down the stairs and talked for a couple of hours.
At around 2, our friends John and Adisa took off and as we started to head for bed the phone rang. It was John. We should look out the window, even better, go out on the balcony and take a look.
A block away, an old apartment building was on fire.
I went outside and gaped in disbelief. Flames were shooting out of two windows, about 4 floors up, less than a block away. Smoke was already pouring out of the building, gray-black, thick. Sirens filled the night.
In a matter of minutes the sound of the sirens grew, but so did the sounds of the fire. Glass shattering, flames crackling, the fire growing in size and intensity. Fire trucks parking in the blocked off street. The slow and laborious process of getting hoses laid out on the ground. Ladders up to the building's roof, more ladders at the side of another building down the street, so firemen and lights could get to the roof and take a look.
We watched in disbelief.
Have you ever watched a building burn?
I never had.
Seen the flames spread from window to window. Watch fire come pouring out of the empty windows and take out the wood frames. Watch the roof go up in flames, the smoke swirl into the sky in huge clouds.
And feel absolutely helpless.
Who lived in those rooms?
The building, when I'd walked by it on a day to day basis, looked like a run-down tenement. But people lived in it. Where were they when the fire broke out? Did they all get out? Where could they go if their building burned down? They'd lost everything to the fire--what happened next?
It took more than an hour for the firemen to subdue the flames, and even today there were smoldering chunks of the building that were out on the street.
What a way to begin the new year: political humor giving way to the harsh reality of forces greater than ourselves, disrupting the comfort and routine of daily life.
Whether we like it or not, we'll see more of that kind of disruption in 2011.
We can't prevent it.
But we can be on the look-out, and we can be prepared to respond when it comes.
Stay alert. Already 2011 has a motto.

12.31.2010

2010-12-31T17:08:00.000-08:00

In the end, of course, it's about the people.
Thinking back to the places I've been over the last year, the conferences I've attended, speeches listened to and speeches given, conversations over coffee in restaurants and coffee shops from New Zealand to New York, from Beijing to Helsinki, all the miles logged and all the words exchanged.
In the end, it's about the people.
There are amazing people all over this funny little planet.
People working hard to change the world, to solve hard problems with caring answers.
People who are funny and charming, people who hold to their faith and people who embrace yours.
There are people who've written wonderful books, and people who tell you that you've written a wonderful book.
People who simply want to be friends. People who want to share. Who want to have a laugh and people who want to have a serious discussion about the shape of things and the shape of things to come.
To all the people I've met in 2010, to those I'll be meeting in 2011, to those who go back decades, and those who go back just hours--thanks to all of you.
Here's to you, here's to me, here's to us.
And here's to 2011.
Let's make something wonderful happen, working together, playing together, and sometimes just in the peace and quiet of being together.

All Recoveries Are Local

2010-12-30T15:11:00.000-08:00

Tip O'Neill's famous dictum was, "All politics are local."
Based on what I saw yesterday as I walked down Montgomery Street in San Francisco, the corollary is also true: All recoveries are local.
Here's what I saw that made the point.
About a block from my apartment is an old three or four story brick building. Several years ago the run-down building was bought for renovation. It looked like the whole neighborhood was going to turn into a blend of antique shops complemented by new, up-scale housing.
Except that shortly after the new developer bought the building and put up the scaffolding signaling that work would begin, the entire economy imploded. With real estate leading the collapse.
The scaffolding sat for month after month. For almost a year it sat looking like a skeleton outside a decayed body of the building.
Then one day the scaffolding disappeared, replaced by plywood boards. The universal symbol for a building project that's not just temporarily delayed, but on long-term, maybe even permanent work stoppage.
It sat there.
The sidewalk was narrowed where the building was because of the plywood panels.
In bad weather the boards warped and splintered and looked even worse.
Instead of a renewal project bringing new residential to the area it became an eye-sore.
Until yesterday.
I walked by the site. The plywood was gone. There was a man sweeping up the sidewalk. A door was open to an inner view of the building's interior courtyard. It had already been swept clean. Site preparation was underway. Work will begin soon in earnest.
It's not "the recovery."
But it is "a" recovery.
And at the local level, that's the best kind of recovery there is.

Today's Puzzler/Mystery

2010-12-29T15:29:00.001-08:00

So, in the tradition of Click and Clack, who offer their puzzlers, here's today's puzzler courtesy of the Global Detective.
Or should we call it, "today's mystery"?
What does it mean if stores that sell high-quality travel maps have all gone out of business?
We spent this morning trying to track down a travel/map store that could offer two hiking maps, one for the Grand Canyon, the other for Nepal.
Even in San Francisco, the specialty travel map stores that used to carry exactly items like those have dried up and blown away.
Why?
Are people hiking less? I've seen a boom in adventure travel and fitness-related vacations.
Are people downloading detailed topo maps for their hikes from the web? I kinda doubt it.
Are people doing less homework before they take off on an adventure hike? Possible. Last time I hiked the Grand Canyon I was appalled at the sight of tourists descending into the canyon as if they were going on a day-picnic at a Disney property. So maybe all those new fitness buffs and adventure travel-istas are doing it without proper preparation.
Or?
It's not as important to come up with the answer as to respect what the puzzler has to teach about smart approaches to business--or journalism.
Everything is a clue. Even the extinction of a class of small, specialized businesses.
Storefronts are as fascinating as crime scenes, in terms of the stories they tell and the mysteries they hold.
Go out and buy yourself a fedora and a trench coat.
Get a small note pad or a stack of 3x5 cards.
Then start looking for clues.
As far as job descriptions go, you can't beat "Global Detective."

The Book Store Parable

2010-12-28T23:20:00.001-08:00

I just got home from a visit to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
After a short and entertaining visit to the book store, I walked out with two books.
Once I walked into the book store it was clear to me--obvious beyond any need to state it, actually--that I was going to buy a book. At least one. I didn't know which one. But I kind of knew I'd buy at least one.
Which made the following proposition clear: The task of a book store isn't to sell books. It's to get people to walk in the front door.
Selling books: easy.
Getting people to walk in the front door: hard.
Essay question: how does this parable apply to your business?

What About Those Banks, Any Way?

2010-12-27T08:44:00.001-08:00

Picking up where I left off yesterday, thinking out loud about WikiLeaks.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent development is the decision by Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to suspend WikiLeaks banking business.
The question is, what is the justification for doing this?
The most obvious answer is, it came in response to pressure from the U.S. government. Ever since the government figured out that it could put Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, rather than the other crimes he'd committed, money has become the favorite tool for putting the squeeze on people, nations, and movements the government doesn't approve of. If you can freeze accounts, dry up contributions, and disrupt the ability of your target to do business, the thinking goes, you've just put a big dent in their ability to do whatever it is the government disapproves of.
But why would MasterCard, say, agree to cooperate with the government's request?
One reason is that the leadership at the top think it's "patriotic" to help the government.
Another is that the leadership wants to curry favor with the government. Recognizing that there are always quid pro quos exchanged in the world of politics--even geo-politics--it might be smart to throw WikiLeaks under the bus and hope that, at some point in the future, there'll be a little government consideration for a banking problem down the road.
Another possibility that's been mentioned is that the banks are feeling threatened by WikiLeaks--the next set of documents due to appear reportedly have to do with banking scandals--and the government's interests in closing down WikiLeaks and the banking industry's interests happen to coincide.
Or it could be that there's actual evidence that WikiLeaks has done something illegal with its money, and the banks have complete legal justification for their decision.
The last explanation is the only one with any kind of validity--and so far, nobody's actually tried to make that case.
All the other explanations are either craven, cowardly, corrupt, or completely self-serving.
Is it "patriotic" to comply with a government request that has no legal background? What if the government decided it didn't like your blog? Your religious affiliation? Your political beliefs?
What if your banking rights were suspended?
Patriotic? Or pathetic?
This kind of conspiracy stuff has become a staple in the movies--all of a sudden, some one discovers their credit cards cut off, their bank accounts frozen, their creditors knocking on their door.
Usually the hero finds a way out, at least in the movies. Usually there's a buddy who comes to the rescue, who finds out why ordinary life has been disrupted in the interest of some shady version of national security.
This time, however, it's not the movies.
And so far, there's no buddy coming to the rescue, nobody pointing out that the "national security" threat is actually part of what makes America a democracy.
Maybe, just maybe, if we all ask Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to justify their decisions, we can find out what's really going on--and maybe they'll even change their craven little minds.

More on WikiLeaks

2010-12-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

In retrospect, we all should have seen it coming.
We should have been able to predict the arc of the responses to WikiLeaks' massive dump of diplomatic cables.
There was outrage and invective. Julian Assange was declared a public enemy. Equal to Osama bin Laden. The leaks were putting American lives in danger. American interests had been compromised.
That part was predictable and, frankly, about as new, striking and remarkable as the leaks themselves. Because let's face it, there really wasn't much that was truly earth-shattering in the leaks. And there wasn't anything truly useful in the outrage.
But then things took a turn for the worse. For the seriously dangerous.
It was reported that students at an international relations program at one of America's most prestigious universities were warned against visiting the WikiLeaks site or reading the leaked cables--for fear that it would jeopardize their future employment with the U.S. State Department.
Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal cut off WikiLeaks' account--refusing them banking services for reasons never quite made clear.
There were reports that lawyers in the Justice Department were examining ways to retrofit U.S. laws designed to punish spying to fit the WikiLeaks case and attempt to apply statutes with no historical relevance to this situation.
All of which makes the WikiLeaks situation less about the leaks themselves--because the leaks, frankly, don't really add up to much.
And it's not even about Julian Assange--who seems to aspire to the role of martyr and to hunger for the opportunity to be a media star over-hyping the importance of the material he's dispensed.
What WikiLeaks is about is America's character in the balance.
It's a movie we've seen before.
In the 1950s, with a scary enemy outside our gates, the growing fear of American global vulnerability, and the terrible gnawing sensation that things at home weren't going right, the U.S. allowed itself to get caught up in a paranoid nightmare. If there were enemies outside our gates, surely there were agents within!
And sure enough, there were.
Not as many as the fear-mongers wanted to pretend were there. But enough to make the claims credible.
Fear gave way to more fear--legitimate news sources censored themselves, for fear that they'd be censored even more harshly if they didn't "comply" with the dominate mood. People who objected to the loss of freedom (in the name of protecting freedom, which is how we in the U.S. always justify these kinds of irrational acts) found themselves black-listed, out of work, on the outside looking in.
As others have noted in the run-up to the November elections, there is a deep strain of the paranoid style in American politics.
And in the American public psyche.
So far, WikiLeaks is a Rorschach test of how far America has traveled down the road to national paranoia. If we were being totally honest about the leaks themselves, we'd conclude that they are almost laughably uninformative:
The U.S. doesn't trust Putin.
There are back-deals going on in the Middle East, with Israel negotiating with nations that publicly wish it ill and privately hope it will stay strong militarily (didn't anybody else see the film "Charlie Wilson's War"?).
American ambassadors are known to say one thing in public and something different in private.
We don't really like or trust the leaders in Afghanistan.
It's all pretty thin gruel.
Except the response is treating it like we need to go back to the 1950s and rediscover our inner Red Scare.
Now it's not the Soviet Union--it's China. They're big and growing and dangerous and maybe they'll overtake us.
It's not nuclear weapons--it's global economics. And we're slipping behind as we lose our competitive capabilities.
Our economy is in the doldrums--unemployment refuses to budge, companies won't hire, the world is not a friendly place.
It must be somebody's fault.
There must be people who need to be punished. There must be traitors in our midst.
How do you treat paranoia?
By having the good sense and strength of purpose to go back to first principles.
We need more good, smart, tough reporting, not less.
We need more digging into the truth of America's strengths and failings, not less.
We need to focus on what needs fixing and how to fix it--and not to fall prey to mindless fear-mongering.
What we need is for the journalists and writers, commentators and opinion-makers who got scooped by WikiLeaks to redouble their efforts at finding out what's really going on in the world, and bring that news to the American public.
The best reaction to leaks, if they really make Americans uncomfortable, is more solid journalism. We need more digging, not more cover-ups.

More on Magazines: Once and Future Greatness

2010-12-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

And while I'm on the subject of magazines . . .
Can anyone enlighten me as to the current version of the Harvard Business Review, my old publication?
Take a look at the December, 2010 issue for a moment and you'll see what has me scratching my head.
The cover, to begin with: years ago, Fast Company featured an award-winning cover designed by the brilliant Patrick Mitchell to promote Tom Peters' "Brand Called You" article. Now comes HBR with its "brand-called-you-lite" version of that cover. Only it's all over the place. Too many words (Social Media and the New Rules of Branding--Spotlight Page 61). Too little focus. No real impact.
Which could be said of the whole issue, and, for the most part, most issues of HBR in its new manifestation.
It's been a while since the powers that be handed the reins to Adi Ignatius and, frankly, it's still hard to tell what the "theory of the case" is for the new HBR.
Back in the old days, under the leadership of Ted Levitt, HBR had a purpose: stir up debate, challenge conventional wisdom, spark conversation, be provocative.
Ted always said that HBR was a magazine written by people who can't write for people who don't read. His mission was to make it both easier to read, and ultimately, necessary to read if you wanted to be part of the conversation about where business and management were going.
He respected the HBS credential, but didn't let it get in the way of kicking up controversy where ever and when ever he could.
He wanted to exploit the benefits of HBR being a hybrid: part academic, part journalistic. The academic credential gave HBR cover when Ted wanted to do something dramatic, like find a way to get Robert Redford in the magazine on his efforts to negotiate environmental truces out West, or feature Felice Schwartz's memorable essay on the real differences between men and women in the workplace. And the nod in the direction of journalism made sure that even the most academic treatment was readable and accessible--that professors were challenged to make an argument and present a strongly reasoned point of view, not just go through the motions.
If Ted found the way to have the best of both worlds by combining academic respectability with journalistic freshness, the new HBR manages to find the worst of both worlds, somehow.
Yes, the piece by Tom Hout and Pankaj Ghemawat falls squarely in the tradition of the good old days. But most of the rest of the issue not only isn't need to know--it isn't even nice to know.
The cover package on social media is at best a mish-mosh; the piece on Robert McNamara as a manager manages to recite a litany of historical facts without ever arriving at an important point; and the look and feel of this new HBR is as chopped up and unfocused as the editorial product the design is supposed to embody. Of course, it's hard to do great design when the theory of the editorial product is so thoroughly obscured.
Part of the problem may be frequency.
In the old days, HBR came out 6 times a year. That meant every issue was carefully developed and every piece was nurtured and valued. Now that HBR is a monthly proposition, the pressure is on the editors to generate excellent editorial content that respects the magazine's academic credential and also breaks new ground in bringing to the fore important themes in business and management. Tough to do, especially if you take seriously the academic part of the equation.
But something else is missing: a clear definition of HBR's role and responsibility today.
With so much to argue and work on in the world of business (like the points raised by Hout and Ghemawat) you'd think HBR would have its hands full.
What is the right strategy for dealing with the nation's--and the world's--economic crisis?
What should we make of Wall Street and the culture of money?
Do we need a whole new theory of the MBA?
What model of capitalism is emerging to take us into the future, and where can we find traces of it?
Are there limits to the promise of entrepreneurship? What is the value of a back-to-basics approach to business and competition?
Is CSR a thing of the past? And if so, what's the thing of the future?
Maybe it's too soon.
Maybe the new regime will get its arms around the hybrid nature of HBR that has always been part of the package.
At a time when the issues are critical, when change is relentless, and there's more room than ever for fruitful debate, a healthy and vibrant HBR could provide important relief from the business-celebrity combination that dominates so much of the rest of business journalism.
Here's hoping!

Stopping to Think About WikiLeaks--Really Think

2010-12-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

Having just gotten back from a long and fascinating trip to New Zealand and China, and having traveled almost non-stop for the last 4 months to Germany, Austria (twice), Italy, Denmark, Finland, and Canada, I'm feeling pretty patriotic these days.
When you leave the U.S. for any length of time, and then come back home, you can see things with clearer eyes than when you stay inside Bubble America and only view things through the lens of domestic reporting. The Scandinavians have a name for too much time spent inside the bubble: home blindness.
Which is what has me scratching my head over the recent and on-going WikiLeaks controversy.
To some people, Julian Assange is a terrorist.
Members of the Congress have called for his arrest and trial as a person every bit as dangerous as dangerous as bin Laden. WikiLeaks, as an organization, has been compared to Al-Qaeda.
The argument has been made that the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of diplomatic cables "threatens American lives."
The atmosphere is breathless, filled with outrage. Republicans accuse President Obama of somehow failing to do something he should have to have prevented the leaks in the first place. After an inquiry from Senator Joe Lieberman, Amazon stops hosting WikiLeaks. Interpol has made Assange one of its top arrest targets, pulling out all stops to bring him to justice in Sweden for two alleged rapes.
All of this makes me want to stop--really stop--for just a minute and reflect.
What do we actually know at this point about Assange, about the reports leaked through WikiLeaks, about the government?
A few things, actually, most of which fly in the face of all the huffing and puffing that's going on.
Thanks to a deeply insightful profile on Assange in The New Yorker a few months ago, we know quite a bit about the founder of WikiLeaks. We know that he's lead a chaotic personal life from childhood. Always on the move, often on the run, he's practically a character out of The Terminator--a fictional character with a deeply anti-authority bent, verging on a desire to martyr himself for a cause that gives his life meaning. We know that he's technically brilliant, socially inept, impossible to get close to, and driven by his own belief that the powers that be (not just the United States) need to be exposed for the hypocrisy and double-dealing that is the ordinary business-as-usual way for rich and powerful nations and individuals to conduct themselves.
In this respect, he has more in common with the driven muckrakers and investigative reporters who have always felt it their mission to rip the veil of secrecy from the face of governments, corporate titans, and others in positions of power.
We know that he's accused of rape in Sweden. Two women, friends who know each other, both tell similar stories about Assange's encounters with them.
My friends in Stockholm, who know Assange, while not excusing the charges, have a reasonable explanation for a situation that ultimately can only be judged in court. Assange is an Australian and, as noted previously, a socially inept person. Sweden is a country where there is probably more sexual and gender equality than any place on earth. Men and women conduct themselves as equals in all matters. It is possible, my friends tell me, that Assange, as a newcomer to Sweden, had a harder than usual time decoding the rules of sexual situations--that he mistaken misjudged what was going on in his relations with these women. Or it may be that he actually did commit rape. That we don't know.
Back to what we do know.
We do know that his rape charge has been handled in a way that is completely different from other, similar charges that come to the attention of the police and prosecution in Sweden. For example, before any charge had even been confirmed by investigators, his name was released in conjunction with the accusation, a step that is never taken in the Swedish criminal justice system, according to my friends in Stockholm.
It would not be far-fetched to imagine that pressure has been brought to bear (through diplomatic cables?) by the U.S. government, to do whatever can be done to make Assange's life more difficult.
We also know, from the wise words of America's greatest investigative reporter, I.F. Stone, that governments lie. It's what they do. They lie routinely. They lie about what they do and what they don't do. They lie about their reasons for what they do and don't do. Then they lie about lying.
And we know that nothing makes a government more angry than having its lies revealed.
I know from personal experience. When I worked in the Carter Administration, I was outraged at the coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis. I was convinced that anti-American journalists were intentionally making things harder for the government to pursue our nation's interests in Iran by the way they belittled the administration's attempts to conduct foreign policy in the Middle East. When you're on the inside, everybody on the outside is out to get you. So we know that the response from highly partisan, politicized government officials will be outrage, anger, and hyperbole.
What else do we know?
We know that, according to today's New York Times, finding a charge to levy against Assange would be difficult at best. The Times quotes Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has written about the Espionage Act, as saying, "There is a haze of uncertainty over all of this. The government has never brought an Espionage Act prosecution that would look remotely like this one." In fact, the one attempt to prosecute recipients of leaked documents under the Espionage Act happened in 2005 and ended in utter embarrassment for the government, the Times reports.
What don't we know?
We don't know more than we do know.
We don't know exactly what crime Assange and WikiLeaks have committed.
We don't know exactly how American lives have been put in danger.
We don't know exactly what, in these leaked documents, is so remarkable. (This is not, it turns out, The Pentagon Papers.)
Other than enraging Mr. Putin, who apparently doesn't like being compared to Batman, we don't know what awful national interests have been compromised by the release of these cables.
One thing I don't know: why more of the serious journalistic community hasn't explained that uncovering important stories and tearing the veil of secrecy off of government is what journalists are supposed to do. And the government is supposed to howl.
This is what I.F. Stone did his whole life. It cost him an easy and comfortable life. It made him an outcast among certain parts of the American landscape. Until he got old enough to be made a hero for doing what the Constitution says is the right of every American: to ask uncomfortable questions, to challenge authority, to raise issues that need to be raised, and even to raise hell when things are going wrong and need to be fought over.
You would think the press would be outraged at any thing that smacks of a return to the days of government repression of the freedom of speech. You would think people would still remember the 1950s when responsible journalists were intimidated by the threat of government censorship. While WikiLeaks isn't The Pentagon Papers, you'd think journalists would remember the days of the Nixon White House, the enemies list, and attempts to prevent that leak from being read by the American people.
But the response of the press to this episode reminds me of the earlier response from much of the press to the Rolling Stone article that lead to General McChrystal's resignation after he and his team talked too much and too freely in Europe in the presence of a reporter: the press chastised the reporter for doing the story--he was at fault for having committed real journalism!
The current WikiLeaks debate reminds us of two things we do know or at least should know.
There are no secrets.
I first learned it after Chernobyl. The Russians denied anything had gone wrong at their nuclear power plant. The U.S. had satellite evidence. And that was before the advent of the Web.
There are no secrets. So what your mom told you as a kid is true today for all of us as adults--including ambassadors and government officials: don't do it if you aren't prepared to read about it in the morning paper.
And the second thing is, there's nothing new.
I'm with Defense Secretary Gates on the whole WikiLeaks uproar.
As reported in the New York Times, Gates, who has an untarnished career at the Defense Department working for both Bush and Obama, said, "Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who's been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: 'How can a government go on, publishing all their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.'
"Now, I've heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy as described as a melt-down, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with United States because it's in their interests, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments--some governments--deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.
"So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us.We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.
"Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."
In this instance, I think Defense Secretary Gates knows best.
I'd say that's something else we know. Or at least should.

Where Have All the Magazines Gone?

2010-11-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

I was sitting a few minutes ago looking at the Esquire covers created by George Lois.
George has been feted as a genius for his magazine covers. They defined an era. Kind of like "Mad Men" but the real thing.
You flip through the covers and there are some great ones. And a lot of not quite great ones. And even more could have been great ones. And some that you wonder, what was he thinking?
Because magazines are hard. And covers are even harder. So George did amazing work, especially when you think about what everybody else was doing.
Which brings me to Tina Brown, Newsweek, and Sidney Harman.
I've never met Sidney Harman (this is standard for all pieces where someone is about to be hammered--I've never met him...but.)
Sidney Harman bought Newsweek for $1, all the debts the Washington Post had run up by not paying attention to what was going on, and the promise that he wouldn't fire anyone.
I know this because I was part of a team trying to buy Newsweek. Our promise was, we'd try to make Newsweek a great magazine again.
We lost, Sid won.
Then a lot of people left Newsweek while Sid tried to figure out what he wanted to do.
Fact was, he didn't know.
He wanted to be a player. He's 92. He has a bundle of money. Newsweek was relatively cheap and made him a player. Beyond that, I doubt Sid had an idea.
Then he had an idea.
Tina Brown.
Tina Brown was Sid's next big idea. She's a famous editor, a celebrity editor. Maybe he could get her to be Newsweek's new editor.
It's an idea.
It ignores a lot of facts.
Like the fact that Tina has left a bunch of wreckage in her path in the last few years. Remember Talk magazine? Remember the launch party at the Statue of Liberty? Lots of money, liberally thrown around, supporting a kind of a concept: America needs a magazine that's kind of like the high-toned, low-class, cheesy, sleezy mags of Europe. Didn't work.
Before that Tina worked at The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker.
According to folks who know, Tina's version of The New Yorker lost $1 million a week.
If my math is correct, that's more money than Newsweek lost last year. $52 million a year is a lot of money to lose.
But she's a celebrity editor.
Which raises the question: what's happened to America's great magazines?
I look at the George Lois covers, and I don't see great covers. I see an editor who had ideas. I see an editor who had the courage to do smart, bold, challenging edit.
That's what we need in American magazines today.
Not more celebrity garbage. Not more flash and trash.
These are amazing times. The conventional wisdom is boring. The celebrity circuit is overcrowded.
Where's the editorial courage to ask tough questions, to pay for serious investigative reporting, to challenge the easy way and propose a new direction?
Sid Harman has given more than his fair share of cool interviews and hip speeches since buying Newsweek.
But I'd be greatly surprised if The Daily Beast-Newsweek combination spells more courageous journalism for America.
If I'm wrong, I'll be the first to say so.
If I'm right, it's just another loss for a country that actually needs some great journalism to ask the right questions and produce great covers.
In the end, it's not the art directors, or even the owners, who do the work that we gasp at in awe. It's the great editors.
Where are they when we need them?

Look Back in Anguish

2010-11-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

I've been in New Zealand for the last week, having arrived here one day before the U.S. election.
It's the first time I can remember being happy to be out of the country on election day. It's not so much that the hateful Republicans were poised for huge gains at the expense of the hapless Democrats. Or that the Tea Party is such a sad commentary on the mood and temperature of the American public.
It's that the whole exercise of democracy in the land of the free and the home of the brave has become an exercise of money in the land of the rich and the home of the unemployed.
The last election cycle had so little to recommend it. Sure there were the candidates-as-jokes. A Senate candidate--a candidate for the U.S. Senate! the greatest deliberative body in the world, by its own admission--goes on TV to announce she's not a witch! It's like the old days in corrupt Rome when the emperors nominated their favorite animals to that Senate. And it wasn't just the unbelievable amounts of money being dumped into elections by candidates themselves--Carly and Meg--and by companies with bottomless money pits.
My desire to be out of the country when the votes were being counted had more to do with the spirit of America at the moment. Anger, lost confidence, lost hope, lost community, lost optimism. A seeming incapacity to generate smart solutions to pressing problems, and an even greater incapacity to execute solutions in ways likely to produce real results.
I keep thinking back to Jared Diamond's diagnosis of the four stages of failure that afflicted societies in the past that disappeared.

Failure to anticipate a problem before it arrived.
Failure to recognize a problem after it arrived.
Failure to act on solving a problem after recognizing it.
Total failure because it became too late to act.

It's quite possible that America is mired in stage 3: we've recognized our problems--social, political, environmental, economic, educational, you name it--but we seem incapable of acting to solve them.

And it's not as if the rest of the world hadn't noticed.
Here in New Zealand my wife and I went to dinner the other night with four Kiwis. It was an informal, fun, out-spoken evening, which is pretty much the character of this independent-minded nation.
Somehow or other, the conversation came around to the state of the world--maybe because New Zealanders uniformly refer to themselves as being "at the edge of the world." This is a land where the people have a keen sense of nature, of the environment, and of the ways in which humans directly impact the quality of life--and the future of life--on the planet. After all, before humans arrived in large numbers on New Zealand, there were no land mammals on the two islands! No land mammals! So all the rabbits, stouts, and possums that afflict the birds in New Zealand were introduced by humans. In some cases, humans kept bringing animals over, long after the negative impacts had already become apparent (see stage 3 above).
The question was posed to the group at the table: If you had to appoint one nation to be in charge of emergency measures to rescue Planet Earth from its gradual but seemingly certain decline, what country would you pick?
One Kiwi picked Ireland: if we're all going under, he reasoned, what better group to throw the wake for the Earth than the Irish?
Another said Denmark. The people are smart, considerate, the quality of life high, and the likelihood to come up with good solutions better than anyone else.
One picked China. Not so much for human rights--that she let slide. But on the grounds that the Chinese are recognizing their impact on the earth, moving aggressively to alternative energy sources, and clearly able to implement solutions and get things done. Witness the Olympics.
None of the Kiwis--not one--selected the U.S.
None of the Kiwis even mentioned the U.S.
The attitude was, the U.S. is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
That the U.S. is focused on consumption, hooked on wasteful habits, undisciplined in social and environmental practices, incapable of implementing strategic solutions that could actually benefit the earth as a whole.

For a fun evening of lively conversation, the attitude toward the U.S., coming on the heels of our own dis-spiriting election, left a slightly bitter after-taste.

It's not just what we're doing to ourselves.
It's that the whole world is watching while we do it--and do it to them, as well. We may not have the distance to be able to see ourselves as others see us.
But be clear: they do see us, and in ways that would help us, if we could only see ourselves through their eyes.

Justapose This!

2010-10-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

Flying cross-country from Albuquerque to Atlanta, I had all the time in the world to read today's New York Times.
Try it some time. I recommend it.
Not just scanning headlines or checking sports scores.
Read it carefully. Clip it. Look for things that jump out at you.
They can range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Start with the ridiculous: Christine O'Donnell's first TV commercial is set to air in the hotly contested Senate race in Delaware.
And the first line of her first TV ad is . . . "I am not a witch."
That's right.
We've reached a new point--high point? low point? you be the judge--in American Senatorial politics. A major contender for a seat in "the world's greatest deliberative body," as the Senate likes to bill itself, is carrying her message to the voters. And that message is? "I am not a witch."
Richard Nixon famously said, "I am not a crook." He did not say, "I am not a wizard." In retrospect, a missed opportunity by Tricky Dicky.
And Ms. O'Donnell's closing message to the good people of Delaware?
"I'm you."
Well, that's not true, either. So the question is, can you trust a candidate who lies about "being you" to tell you the truth about "not being a witch"?
The voters will have to decide.
Meanwhile a truly important article on the front page, first column: The U.S. military command has ordered less dependence on fossil fuels--not for the whole country, just for the military.
This is a big story.
Here are a few quotes and para-phrases: "After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies--which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years--as providing a potential answer."
The data are compelling: according to one study, for every 24 fuel convoys that set out in Iraq and Afghanistan, one soldier or civilian engaged in moving the fuel was killed.
According to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, guarding fuel is keeping troops from doing what they're really sent to do, whether that is to fight the enemy or engage the population.
It's expensive in terms of money, lives, troop use, you name it.
But the reason this is huge news is that, while the civilian economy can try things, experiment, give change a shot, it's the Department of Defense that moves the needle.
Let's face it: that military-industrial complex that Ike warned us about? Well, it's here, now.
But it can work for us.
If the DOD jumps onto renewable energy as a military priority, you can bet that problems of cost, of scale and scope, of moving down the experience curve--all the things that bring industries to commercial success--will now be handled by the military. We'll have a lot of spin-off benefits to the civilian economy, as the military economy becomes the prime source of renewable energy solutions.
It is a de facto change in national energy policy--at long last.
What's the explanation?
Why this, why now?
Perhaps, just perhaps, it's the work of a white witch!

The Change-Leadership Puzzle

2010-10-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

How is a column like a train wreck?
I found myself asking that question after puzzling over Judith Warner's opening piece in this morning's New York Times Magazine.
In "The Way We Live Now," Ms. Warner finds herself wondering in print about the lessons to be learned from Michelle Rhee's tenure as school superintendent in Washington, DC. The defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty at the polls has signaled the end of Ms. Rhee's contentious effort to deliver real change to the public schools of our Nation's Capitol, which, everyone agrees, are desperately in need of real change.
Except, according to Ms. Warner, you're not supposed to say that.
Americans are angry, upset, worried about the future, and dis-spirited about the present. They want leaders who can promise real change--you might call it the audacity of hope.
They just don't want leaders who indict them for the failures that they're so upset about. Or who make them feel bad. Or who seem to suggest that they should be leaders because they're smarter than they are. So apparently what Americans are hungry for are leaders who are as angry as they are--but not upset with them. They want leaders who can help them express their outrage--and feel like ordinary people as they do it.
Can you say "Tea Party"?
What Ms. Warner seems to be suggesting is that Americans don't like elitist leaders.
Fair enough.
But what her column doesn't come to terms with is what kind of leadership it takes to produce real, important change in a system that is failing.
That system could be a public school system, a city, a company, a country.
In fact, almost every where I go, I find two topics intertwined, like a DNA strand: Change and Leadership.
And in almost every case the same pattern emerges. We--the people involved, regardless of the entity or enterprise--know that what we're doing isn't working. Or if it is working, it can't and won't continue to work indefinitely.
Think of America's energy policy, think of urban sprawl, think of large, publicly traded companies that worry about their stock prices but don't make strategic decisions that can carry them into the future, think of the Washington, DC public school system, for that matter.
We know that what we're doing can't continue indefinitely--and yet we can't seem to bring about real, serious, systemic change.
Why not?
There are all kinds of theories. Some suggest that it goes back to the earliest humans and the evolution of the human brain--we don't have a brain that helps us imagine consequences out into the future. Lizard brains don't work that way. Some suggest it's all about MBA-trained financial calculations: what's the net present value of doing what you're doing versus taking the risk of change. Or human nature: Change is hard, the status quo is easy. The list goes on.
What most people ultimately suggest is that it takes some form of leadership to get the rest of us to agree that the status quo is unsustainable and change, hard and uncomfortable as it is, makes much more sense. (By the way, the same issue of the Times magazine has a long profile of Glen Beck that takes him back to his "moment of truth" as a drunk--the moment when his status quo was unsustainable and change was the only viable option, if he wanted to live, which suggests that the concept of "if" is an important, moment of truth proposition.)
So what kind of leader can make unwilling ordinary Americans recognize that we need to do the hard work of real change--and not just rant about it on TV or sell books calling for it in the abstract?
In companies, the model that gets praised the most is the tough-minded, non-egotistical, fact-facing leader who puts the good of the organization ahead of his/her own wealth and fame. (Jim Collins writes about this with clarity and insight in "Good to Great.")
Or it's the equally tough-minded leader who shows little concern for consensus building but holds the whole organization to high standards and adopts a my-way-or-the-highway attitude. (Successful coaches are often praised for this kind of laser-like focus; business leaders like Steve Jobs come to mind, as well.)
What about leaders in politics? Leaders of social change movements? Leaders who want to make serious and important change happen, who feel the urgency of the moment, but--God forbid!--recognize that they can't come off as elitists?
Ms. Warner is right: Nobody likes someone who keeps telling you how much smarter they are than you.
On the other hand, if we're going to solve most of these huge, complicated, swirling systems problems, we probably need some people who actually are smarter than the rest of us.
Say, Barack Obama, not George Bush.
So it is all about style, and not substance?
Is it about tone, not policy?
Or are we all going to have to take a deep breath and admit that we've gotten ourselves in a mess of our own making (see Glen Beck's moment of clarity!) and that now we do have to listen to leaders who have more experience, more insight, and more hands-on knowledge about how to fix things than we have?
After all, as Glen Beck knows, the first step in any 12-step program is to admit that we are powerless, and to turn our lives over to a Higher Power.
Couldn't Michelle Rhee be a higher power?
Next question: How is a blog posting like a train wreck?
Just wondering in print here.

Careful, You Sometimes Get What You Deserve

2010-10-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I went to a terrific gala put on by the Wild Earth Guardians, which, despite its name, is not a cross between Whole Foods and the Guardian Angels, but rather a dynamic and dedicated environmental outfit doing important work on behalf of the wild things (in which there is salvation, remember).
The guest speaker was Joel Sartore. If you haven't seen his work, pick up the current issue of National Geographic. His photos accompany a clear and powerful article on the reality of the oil spill in the Gulf. If you don't want to read the story (which is the clearest, best piece as I've read on this disaster), just look at Joel's pictures.
Then a couple of days later I got an email from Joel. He was commenting on the state of journalism today, saying that given the kind of reporting we were getting, we were likely to get the kind of government we didn't want.
Turns out he was reading my mind.
I've been thinking about the relationship between what you deserve and what you get, triggered by thoughts of union-management relations in the old days.
In business, the old saw was, companies get the unions they deserve.
The classic example was the old days in the auto industry, when Henry Ford hired spies to watch men on the assembly line. Laughing on the line was an offense that would get you fired. Trying to organize a union, well, who knows the punishment for that!
There were pitched battles, physical confrontations, between workers who wanted to organize and strike, and hired goons whose job was to beat them into submission.
Any wonder that, when there finally was a union in the auto industry, relations between management and labor were confrontational.
The companies got the unions they deserved.
Today, the media have decided that Americans don't read, won't read.
They've concluded that all we really want is a steady diet of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and celebrity rehab.
Advertisers have decided that print is dead. Journalism schools have concluded that old-school journalism is, well, old-school. Which is another way of saying, no longer relevant.
So don't be surprised, when the polls close on Election Day, if we've elected a crop of wing nuts and bozos to the highest offices of the land.
Of course, the truth is, there is still great journalism being done.
Less and less, but more than gets credited to the U.S. journalism account.
Wanna make a difference? Wanna take a stand? Wanna stand for something that can make a difference?
Go to your local news stand.
Buy $40 or $50 worth of serious journalism.
Pick up The New Republic, National Geographic, The Nation. If you haven't read Time or Newsweek in a while, give it a go, see what you learn! Pick up The New York Review of Books--it won't hurt you, I promise.
Sit down and actually read about what's going on in your country.
Look for articles that name names, that give credit where results are being forged, and reveal hypocrisy where it's being perpetrated.
When you find a magazine or publication you haven't read before, but you like, make a real stand: Subscribe!
Get serious about the future of America--before America's future turns into a joke.
Remember, we're likely to get the country we deserve. Based at least in part on the journalism we support.

You'all Know What a Bidness Plan Is, Right?

2010-09-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I introduced Texas Governor Rick Perry into the discussion.
But have I ever told you the story about the time I met him and watched him in action?
Well, here goes.
I was in Texas to give a speech. The sponsor asked me, before it was my time to talk, if I'd like to meet the governor.
Sure, I said.
Having written speeches for the governors of Michigan, Massachusetts, and Oregon, I figured it would be fun, a real treat, to meet the Governor of Texas.
The sponsor told me that the occasion was a meeting Governor Perry was having with two visitors from Mexico: one of Mexico's leading newspaper publishers, a distinguished leader and accomplished businessman, and a member of the Mexican Senate. They were eager to talk with the governor about the state's laws and practices concerning open meetings and freedom of information. What could they learn to help Mexico have a more transparent public sector?
I could sit in on the meeting as an observer.
I was ushered into the room where the meeting was to take place; the newspaper publisher and senator were already there. We shook hands and waited.
In came Governor Perry.
He sat down and immediately plopped his cowboy boots on the coffee table that sat between us.
I think the idea was to show us the map of Texas that had been engraved on the boots.
Then he started to lecture the visitors from Mexico on a long-standing water dispute between Texas and Mexico.
I know you're keeping our water on your side of the border, he told them. We got satellite images that show it. And it's illegal. Strictly against the law, violates a treaty between us. You're gonna have to give us back our water.
He went on like that for about five minutes. It must have taken him that long to realize that he was talking about the wrong thing to the wrong people--or maybe hat's just what he does when he's introduced to people from Mexico.
Finally, he shifted gears to the topic of transparency in government, open meetings and freedom of information.
It's a two-edged sword, the governor said. I know you're thinking it's a good thing, but let me tell you, it has another side to it.
Interesting, right? The governor says there's a negative to public access to information. What could that be?
Now say you come to the government and you're asking for money for a project you want to do. And you show the government your business plan. (Only, of course, he didn't say "government" he said "go'mint" and he didn't say "business plan" he said "bidness plan." But I digress.) Now, you'll know what a bidness plan is, right? That's the document you need to write up when you're starting a bidness that explains how you're gonna do it. So say you want money from the go'mint and so you have to show them your bidness plan. Now, if there's freedom of information, your competitors can go into the go'mint files and read your bidness plan! So all this transparency stuff, it's a two-edged sword!
And he sat back, very pleased with himself for having educated his Mexican visitors on the real nature of open meetings laws and freedom of information acts, and even what a bidness plan is.
After he left, however, it was clear that his guests were a little under-impressed.
I'm certainly glad the governor explained to me what a business plan is, said the senator from Mexico. That's not something we covered when I attended Stanford Business School.
Ah, arrogance!
Ah, insensitivity!
Ah, general stupidity!
No wonder the chairperson of the Texas Board of Education, appointed by Governor Rick Perry, is a creationist who believes that our history books betray an Islamic bias!
I'll bet she doesn't know what a bidness plan is, either!

Is This a Great Country, Or What?

2010-09-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

Back in the US, back in the US, back in the US of A!
After more than a month on the road, I'm back home, in the greatest country in the world! And you know what, this country is so great, it will never disappoint you.
Don't believe me?
All you have to do is read the morning New York Times, and it will fill you up for the whole day. America: The Only Vitamin Your Body Needs!
Take the piece in today's paper about the Texas Board of Education. You remember them. They're the whack jobs who thought Thomas Jefferson was too far left to be in American history books.
Well, they're at it again.
Apparently, according to Chairperson Gail Lowe, our history books have a concealed pro-Islamic bias!
You remember Gail Lowe, don't you?
She's the creationist, appointed by Texas Governor Rick Perry, he of the over-sized cowboy boots and under-sized intellect, to be the head of the school board.
Gail is famous for saying, among other things, "Our country was founded on religious principles . . . and our students will know that. . . . I think the [Founding Fathers] fully intended that our government would not separate church and state."
Yep, you read that quote right. And this woman is the head of the Texas Board of Education.
Or take Gail Collins' column of the Senate's latest incomprehensible inability to do the right thing. Faced with an opportunity to get rid of the inane "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military, the Senate folded its tent, with the always righteous Republicans claiming that procedural issues unfairly used by the Democrats made it impossible for them to vote for the defense authorization bill that the "don't ask, don't tell" repeal was attached to.
Highest honors goes to John McCain, who is rapidly moving from maverick to mutton-head. McCain said, according to Collins, that he'd never seen such an awful trick as the ones the Democrats tried to pull, "for as long as I have been privileged to be a member of this body."
Except, as Collins points out, McCain himself had used the exact same technique for legislation he favored, as had his obstructionist Republican pals.
Question: Does John McCain just say stuff now, and assume that nobody will fact-check the stuff that comes out of his mouth?
Then there's small up-date news item on the latest allegation concerning Bishop Eddie L. Long, a pastor at a Baptist mega-church outside Atlanta.
Bishop Eddie is a God-fearing religious leader, and an out-spoken critic of homosexuality!
And today a third young man said that he'd been molested by said God-fearing, homo-hating bishop. The new accuser says that, as a teen-ager, he exchanged trips and gifts from the bishop for sex with the bishop.
You can't make this stuff up.
Which is what I love about America.
We have creationists running boards of education, but wonder why our children don't do well in school.
We have hypocrites in the Senate, but wonder why voters don't trust their elected leaders.
And we have child-abusers in the pulpit who preach against the sin of homosexuality, but wonder why organized religion no longer has moral authority.
The good thing is, it's all in your morning paper, delivered to your door step every day.
My advice: invest in good, old-fashioned journalism.
It just may save America yet.

What's Left of the Right?

2010-08-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-08-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-31T15:34:00.000-07:00

"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

2010-07-28T11:42:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-06-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

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.

A Lesson Learned at Reunion

2010-06-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Last week I went back to college--but just for reunion. But to paraphrase Yogi Berra, you can learn a lot just by going to college.

One of my class's speakers was Bud Alpert. Bud's a doctor out in the Bay Area; what he talked about was his experience going into Iraq one week after the fall of Baghdad (and the famous fall of the Saddam statue) to help organize and teach Iraqi docs how to upgrade and modernize their care.

He passed on a couple of remarkable lessons.

The first was that Catch-22 is alive and well.

Here's what that means.

According to Bud's experience, the only way the U.S. policy makers could possibly devise a sensible policy for U.S. involvement in Iraq, is to meet with real people and find out what they think, what they want, how they feel. (To do that, Bud says, go to 4H's: hospitals, houses (coffee houses, houses of worship), homes, and hair salons.) U.S. policy forbids U.S. policy makers from going out and meeting with real people. They are thereby forbidden by policy from doing the one thing they need to do to make sound policy.

Sounds like a Lewis Black routine!

But when I thought about it, it explained more than our ill-advised adventure in Iraq. It explained the debacle on Wall Street: as long as the traders didn't have to think about the actual real life consequences of their financial adventures, they could continue selling garbage--because no real people's lives were being destroyed.

It explains how so many corporations explain away their environmental and social disasters--they never saw the people whose lives were being ruined, they never visited the waterways, the forests, the fields that were being destroyed.

It explains how political leaders blithely vote for measures that harm real people but reward interchangeable lobbyists: they see the lobbyists, they never see the real people.

We live in a society, an economy, where things are getting more and more attenuated. Where connections are distant or non-existent; where creating a financial time bomb has no more meaning that playing a video game; where you never have to see the real consequences of your self-serving choices.

Leaders think their time is too valuable to waste rubbing shoulders with real people; corporate jets and limos, appointment books and private elevators are reality buffers.

Bud was talking about Iraq and policy on the ground there.

But he could have been talking about corporate policy, university policy, any policy that emanates from an organization that has gotten so big, its head is in the sky and its feet no longer touch the ground.

Want to know what's really going on? What makes sense for your company, your organization, your career: go visit a hospital, a coffee house or house of worship, the home of an average person, or a hair salon.

Your feet will be back on the solid earth in no time flat.

Worthwhile Things Are Always Hard

2010-05-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

On a long and taxing cross-country plane ride I watched what looked like an old, from-the-vault documentary about the early days of NASA.

There was footage of men in white polyester shirts and skinny black ties staring into huge and bulky computer screens tracking primitive rockets as they lifted off from launch pads.

There were early efforts at configuring rockets. There were flight trajectories, rockets spiraling into low orbits, all of the familiar footage of a program struggling to be born.

I remember watching some of those launches live. I'm old enough to have sat in a class room in school, staring at a small black and white portable TV, hoping that this time, this time the rocket would get off the pad, that it wouldn't spiral out of control, that it wouldn't have to be destroyed before it veered dangerously off course.

But the video on the plane had a different feel to it.

It gave the feel that our exploration of space, while difficult and challenging, was virtually inevitable. That one way or another, we would find our way into space, to the moon, and beyond.

It made me wonder what the video of this period of American and world history will look like.

Will we see America struggling to deal with the challenges of energy, global climate change, education, health care, social change, financial meltdown--and doing it with a sense that our time will yield solutions that feel just as inevitable in retrospect as the space program does looking back today?

Will we remember the spirit of contention and lack of civility that is so widely commented on today?

Or will we erase that part of the experience and focus on the determination, grit and problem-solving resolve of the American character?

What story will we tell ourselves in the future--after we've written the facts of the story today?

I don't know how we'll look back on this period. Whether we'll think our best selves rose to the occasion and came up with creative solutions. Whether we'll pat ourselves on the back for doing the hard work that positive change always demands.

I don't know.

But I do know, and that vintage film reminded me, worthwhile things are always hard.

That's true for us as individuals, and for us as a society.

If it's worth doing, it's going to take hard work. In part, I think, it's the hard work that makes it worth doing--and the fact that it's worth doing that makes us shoulder the hard work.

We Have Met Our Customers and They Are Thieves

2010-05-24T04:50:00.000-07:00

I know it's hard to be in retail.

Especially in big cities.

In big box stores.

But really. Are all customers thieves? Or potential thieves?

I went into a pharmacy in San Francisco the other day looking for a simple tube of toothpaste.

Never mind the fact that a pharmacy is no longer a pharmacy. Now it's a grocery store. With more food items than health items.

I finally found the aisle with toothpaste.

And after a while I even found the toothpaste.

But it was locked behind a plastic box. To make sure I couldn't get any.

So I went looking again. This time for someone to help me.

I found a young woman stocking shelves. But she didn't have a key to the locked plastic box.

She called a young man who did. We walked back to the locked away toothpaste and he opened the box for me.

"People still this stuff?" I asked.

He made a gesture with his arm as if to sweep the whole container into his coat.

"They steal the whole box of it?" I asked.

He grinned.

"Do I look like a thief?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Funny," I said. "Because your locked up toothpaste makes me feel like you think I'm a thief."

I took the toothpaste to pay for it.

There was a sign on the side of it warning anyone who tried to buy it on the street that it had probably been stolen.

I won't be shopping at that pharmacy again.

Apparently it's only there for thieves.

And I hate rubbing shoulders with thieves.

Staple Yourself to a Problem

2010-05-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

I was down in Houston at a fascinating event put on by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The program was all about business and social responsibility and community engagement. Hard to think of a more compelling subject in this time of oil spills that prompt "don't blame me" responses, Wall Street melt-downs where nobody is guilty of anything, and a jobless recovery that has cities and states across the country feeling enormous pain, particularly when it comes to dealing with pressing social problems.

It was a good program, a good day, and lots of good people.

But in the aftermath I got to thinking about why it's so hard to get real traction on the social problems of our time. I'd recently been in San Francisco at another program on social enterprise. The litany of problems that seem "too big to solve" was endless. Childhood obesity. Teenage pregnancy. Poverty. Homelessness. Rampant drug and alcohol abuse. High school drop out rates.

We have programs designed to address all of these problems. There isn't a problem that doesn't have a non-profit or even for-profit enterprise that's trying to take it on.

So why don't we seem to get real traction? Why can't we come up with solutions that work for problems that matter?

Then I remembered a terrific Harvard Business School article that I worked on with one of the delightful faculty members back then, Professor Ben Shapiro. Ben had the cool idea of suggesting that if a business leader wanted to know how his or her company really operated, the trick would be to "staple yourself to an order."

In other words, metaphorically (or actually, if you could), walk your way through the entire company tracking the progress of an order. From the moment the order enters the system to the moment it is fulfilled, try looking at your company and its operation from the perspective of the order!

Brilliant idea! Staple yourself to an order!

What would it be like, I wondered, if we stapled ourselves to a social problem?

How would our solutions look from the perspective of the problem? What if you stapled yourself to "childhood obesity?" What would you see?

Some TV ads promoting better eating habits. Some pioneering school lunch programs that not only give kids healthy, wholesome food, but also actually try to teach kids better nutritional habits. Some schools that have kicked soda and candy machines off campus. A new initiative by the First Lady to put more attention on the problem. Non-profits in cities around the country trying to raise funds and raise awareness about the problem.

Now if you were "Childhood Obesity" and that was the opposition, what would your reaction be?

I think you'd fall over laughing. I think you'd think the opposition is a sad, uncoordinated, poorly organized, badly thought-through, un-serious rival. If you stapled yourself to Childhood Obesity and ran through the gamut of organizations, agencies, public and private entities that are ostensibly trying to put you out of business, I think you'd have a field day!

Which is precisely why we aren't getting any traction on fighting against childhood obesity. Or a host of other problems.

What would it take to get serious?

Try stapling yourself to the problem you're most passionate about.

Do the economics favor a cure? Or favor a continuation of the problem? Are we, as a society, still content to pay the price that problem exacts? If so, don't expect much to change.

Are the organizations that want to end the problem working together? Or are they fragmented? Is there a serious systems analysis of the problem? Or does each part of the non-profit world see the problem through its own worm-hole? If we want to get serious about a systemic problem, we'll need to devise systemic solutions. Otherwise, the problem wins again.

It's a great exercise--if slightly discouraging. Pick your own problem, the one you care most deeply about.

If you want to see what it will take to win--instead of putting up with tolerable failure--try stapling yourself to your problem.

It's the end of the world as we know it . . .

2010-05-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

. . . and I feel fine.

As the old song goes.

Last week, Jon Stewart again played pin the tail on the news of the world, highlighting a week of catastrophe, disaster, human error, and just plain folly that was enough to make you laugh or cry or both.

The stock market goes on a roller-coaster ride--and even worse than the ride, nobody can explain why it happened. Greece was so far in debt it faced national bankruptcy--and the EU intervened and awarded it more debt. The out-of-control oil spill off the Gulf Coast stayed out of control. Goldman Sachs and Wall Street also stayed out of control.

It made for great Comedy Central fodder.

But when you stop laughing, what do you do?

If you're running a business, starting a business, trying to make sense of your business (or your life--not that there's much difference these days), what do you do?

A few thoughts:

If you keep score by tracking the stock market you will drive yourself insane. It's the default metric for our economy, and it's a really really bad one.

Try measuring customer satisfaction instead. Or customer retention. Or customer loyalty.

Long ago Peter Drucker famously said, the purpose of a business is to make and keep a customer.

He famously did not say, the purpose of a business is to maximize shareholder value and drive up your stock price.

Another metric that matters: Try measuring employee satisfaction. Employee retention. Employee loyalty.

Do an audit of your corporate culture. Have you let toxic times make your corporate culture a toxic waste dump?

Another key task of leaders who get it: How are you making sense out of these turbulent times--times that defy anyone making sense of them, times that require you to make sense of them? Your job--as leader in a company or leader of your own life--is to make sense out of all the noise that fills the airwaves. And after you've begun to assemble your own story, to tell it to those around you. Test drive it. Get feedback. Adapt it to new information and fresh facts.

Take a hard look at the economics you've adopted in your work and your life. Does your spending pattern reflect a past that no longer exists? Are you paying for the vestigial remains of a way of life that has gone by the boards? With so much inexplicable change, why carry excess baggage? Why not use the chaos of the moment as a chance to lighten your load, challenge your spending habits, reexamine business as usual?

Then flip that coin on its head: where are the opportunities that you see that others may be too sea-sick to see? I've said it before: innovation is applied logic. What is the logic that's unfolding in front of you that represents a chance to grow, innovate, explore new territory, exploit a time of change?

It may be the end of the world as we know it . . . so the question is, what comes next?

Why not seize the moment to help create the new! Try it--and see if it makes you feel fine!

Art and Commerce

2010-05-06T20:50:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about art and commerce today. And why one makes the world go around, and why the other makes our hearts go faster.

"The Gift," by Lewis Hyde is a brilliant exploration of art and commerce. He talks about the power of the gift culture and how giving something away always leads to increase; selling the same thing and pocketing the proceeds ends the growth in meaning of that work.

"Red," the brilliant Broadway play that chronicles Mark Rothko's artistic mission makes the same argument, in its own way. In the play Rothko seethes with anger at American culture that is all about "fine." How was your day? Fine. How do you like that painting? Fine. It isn't fine, Rothko fumes. I don't want it to be fine. I don't want you to like my picture. I WANT TO STOP YOUR HEART, he says.

These days we tell ourselves that business men and women can be artists. Sorta.

We create design language to apply to entrepreneurial start ups. Apple's products are perfect little works of art. There's a way to have the best of both worlds: BOBW. BOBW lives in the application of art to commerce.

Except it actually doesn't. It's a nice story. It just isn't true.

Commerce doesn't want to stop your heart. It doesn't bleed to death over its pain. It doesn't leave us amazed and enraptured by its performance.

Lewis Hyde's book is brilliant. "Red" is brilliant. Rothko was doomed, and brilliant.

I can't think of a single business person who could compare. They don't belong in the same category.

But I'd like to think that, for instance, the way to save journalism, the way to rescue American civil discourse, the way to fix the cognitive disconnect in the way our society functions is by calling out the passion of a Rothko, the synthetic thinking of a Lewis Hyde.

What if reading a newspaper or a magazine made you stop in wonder the way seeing "Red" does?

What if journalists and editors didn't want to be the same as each other. What if just one of them wanted to STOP YOUR HEART?

I'd read that magazine or newspaper. Or watch that TV program. Or hang on to that web site.

So maybe art and commerce aren't ever going to find some happy medium.

But here's hoping the desperate love that suffuses art can somehow find its way into more of our commerce. And more of our daily lives.

It's official!

2010-04-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

Powerpoint is dangerous to our national security!

That wasn't quite the headline in the New York Times yesterday.

But it could have been.

The front page story detailed what a bad joke Powerpoint presentations have become in the Pentagon. Long, complicated Powerpoint slide briefings end up obscuring military strategy, rather than identifying best possible strategic choices.

The Time is only, oh, 15 years late on this story.

That's how long ago we banned Powerpoint from all Fast Company conferences, when Bill Taylor and I ran the magazine.

It was a time of great live events.

One of our rules of thumb (pardon the self-reference) was absolutely no Powerpoint presentations.

Not because they were bad for national security.

But because they were bad for lively discourse!

The habit we've all observed: a speaker produces his/her Powerpoint deck; sends them ahead to the conference organizer; the conference organizer puts the deck in the conference materials for distribution to the audience; the speaker then puts up his/her slides on the screen and reads them out loud to the audience, which already has the slides in their binders!

Off-the-shelf presentations delivered to an audience that's already read them!

Boring!

But now the Pentagon has found out that Powerpoint is a national security problem.

The same finding showed up in one of the many books on the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in the Bush years. Back then the Pentagon was already complaining that the Powerpoint briefings obscured any thinking that might be going on, preparing for the invasion.

In that case, of course, it turns out there wasn't any thinking going on.

And Powerpoint was the camouflage that enabled it to slide by the military brass.

But with the Times article yesterday, it's time to put Powerpoint on the shelf.

It's a non-communication device. A weapon of mass obfuscation.

We should unilaterally disarm!

Lay down your Powerpoint! Step away from the slide deck! Keep your hands in sight!

Now try communicating, not hiding behind Powerpoint!

Losing Track of Yourself

2010-04-27T19:36:00.000-07:00

What happens when a company, an organization, maybe even a country loses track of itself?

What happens when it was started for one reason, with one set of values and one purpose in mind--and then finds itself veering wildly off course?

Yesterday's headlines were filled with two such examples.

The first wasn't Goldman Sachs (it was, to be fair, the second).

The first was, oddly enough, Craigslist.

I remember sitting on stage with Craig Newmark, almost 5 years ago, and interviewing him about the original intent of the phenomenon he started. I'm sure it was a question he'd been asked many times. Still, I found his answer compelling.

Craigslist was intended to give everybody the same chance, he said. If you needed a job, needed an apartment, wanted to get people interested in something you were doing or offering, Craigslist was designed to democratize opportunity. No more special advantages for people with inside information. Craigslist was for every one.

That was then. This is now.

Now, according to a well-researched piece in the NY Times, Craigslist has become one of the main vehicles for prostitution. And this isn't a cute web-based version of "Pretty Woman." According to the newspaper article, one of New York's major crime families has been offering the services of underage girls. This is not pretty woman--it's not even pretty girl. It's plain flat-out ugly.

Now, nobody suggests that Craigslist is breaking the law.

But what the site is allowing to happen is wrong. And it has absolutely nothing with the original intent that Craig Newmark expressed as the fundamental purpose of the list that bears his name.

Something here is wrong. In more ways than one.

And then there is the Goldman Sachs example.

A storied firm which has often been held up as what a service firm ought to be, a client-focused operation which historically has had only the highest sense of purpose, Goldman is now the poster child for self-enrichment, self-advancement, and self-interest.

In a narrow 3-2 vote, the SEC is bringing charges against Goldman.

But much as is the case with Craiglist, it may be the case that, legally, Goldman is operating on the edge of the law.

But on the edge of the law isn't where Goldman started. It isn't how it earned its reputation. And it isn't what the original intent of the company was.

Something has gotten lost.

Some sense of purpose and mission, values and original intent has come unmoored.

It is part of a Great Disconnect that afflicts much of American business.

We have important companies that have lost track of themselves.

We have cool new startups that have veered from their original purpose.

My friend Jim Collins recently called to mind a quote from John W. Gardner, who, among other things, founded Common Cause.

The quote says: "Freedom and responsibility. Liberty and Duty. That's the deal."

Too many of our business "leaders" want freedom and no responsibility. Freedom to make as much money as possible. Freedom to do business in a way that confers the greatest rewards for them, the greatest power for their firm, the greatest growth for their operation, the greatest reach for their egos.

And they want liberty--liberty to do as they please. Liberty to take liberties.

But responsibility and duty?

They seem like ancient words from another time, another place.

That's the Great Disconnect.

We need to put what Gardner called "the deal" back together.

We need a New Old Deal.

Without it, everything we are, everything we could be is at risk.

That's what happens when you lose track of yourself.

New York State of Mind Part 2

2010-04-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

If I ran a large American company I'd be worried.

Not about foreign competition. Or government regulation. Or limitations on my salary or bonuses.

I'd be worried about the hopes, dreams, aspirations, and career paths of young, talented Americans.

Because from what I saw in New York, large American companies are simply not on their occupational radar screens. If "the team with the best talent wins"--which is not only a Rule of Thumb but also a shared precept of both Tom Peters and Jim Collins--then large, old, bureaucratic companies are likely to run into a string of competitive losses.

What makes me say that?

Anecdote #1: Lunch with a good friend, a remarkably talented young woman of 24 who is about to leave her job at a traditional company after only 9 months. She's found a better offer--at a start-up that squares with her values, is working in an area that she cares about, has more energy and passion for the work, and is going to give her more responsibility, better team-mates, and a more rewarding learning environment. Notice what it's not about: It's not about the money.

Also notice what it's about that she didn't like about her traditional job. Here's what she told me: "Essentially I was doing all the work and passing it off to my boss. I didn't get the credit for the work. I didn't get recognition for the work. I didn't grow by doing the work. All I did was make my boss look good. The idea was, if I stayed at it long enough, one day I'd have someone working for me who'd do my work."

If you look closely at her description of the big-turn off, it contains a number of interesting attitudes toward what work is supposed to be--and what traditional companies don't get.

Traditional companies see careers, still, as ladders. You put in your time on one rung, and then after an appropriate amount of time, you get to move up a rung. Each step on the ladder takes you closer to the top. As you go up the ladder you get more money, a bigger title, and more people under you. They do the work; you do the supervision.

My young friend doesn't want that version of a work-life. She wants a collaborative environment. A place where people bring their skills together and share what they know and what they do well. She wants a boss who is in the game, not on a higher rung on the ladder.

Or, alternatively, she wants the traditional game to change so the hypocrisy is at least honest hypocrisy. "Want me to do all your work?" she asks. "Fine. Then pay me your salary."

Of course that's not going to happen. So she's gone. At her entrepreneurial start-up she'll find something a lot closer to what she's looking for.

Anecdote #2: The Kairos Summit, a meeting of roughly 650 college students from around the world, all of whom want to be entrepreneurs. The highlight of the Summit was a day of meetings at the New York Stock Exchange where the trading floor was flooded with booths and displays of the ingenious projects these students were bringing to the market--from their dorm rooms.

What was fascinating wasn't just the variety and creativity of these young people's ideas. It was that nobody commented on the striking incongruity of a Summit that celebrated entrepreneurship taking over the temple of Big Business for a day.

I didn't hear any of these bright and motivated proto-entrepreneurs talk about how much they're looking forward to going to work for a big company. Nobody said this was great practice for the job they really want, joining the ranks of General Electric, General Mills, General Motors, General Dynamics, or any other General.

They want to start something. They want to bring something fresh to the market.

They want to challenge the status quo.

That's great news for America. It's great news for the economy.

Maybe, if big companies get the message it'll be great news for them, too.

If they look inside and see that what they've been offering their workers isn't what their workers want, maybe, just maybe, they'll discover some new well-springs of entrepreneurship.

Maybe they'll see that "security" isn't what it used to be.

That size isn't such a great advantage.

That status doesn't appeal as much any more.

That the old ladder has been replaced by a new circle.

Meanwhile, the energy, vitality, creativity, and spirit of this fast-charging generation is exciting.

They've got a lot to learn about business.

And a lot to teach to business.

New York State of Mind

2010-04-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the blogging hiatus!

Last week I spent almost a week in New York. It was the first time I'd been back for a more extended stay since I was there more than 6 months ago. At that time I visited with friends, stopped by the near-empty office building that was supposed to house a major media company, and walked the streets of Manhattan looking for signs of life. They were few and far between. The mood then was bleak. Wall Street layoffs were in full force. The New York Times was shedding reporters--not just back office employees, but hard news people. Remember the old neutron bomb--the one that was developed to kill people and leave buildings intact? That was the general situation in mid-town Manhattan back then.

Things have changed. There may not be a national recovery. There may be record unemployment, disastrous state and local budget deficits, staggering mortgage defaults on homes, and desperate personal bankruptcies. But in the heart of New York City things are looking up.

That's the good news.

And the bad news.

Because the down side of the up side is that already too many of the people I met with and talked to have forgotten the near-death experience of 2008-2009.

Imagine a grotesquely obese person suffering a nearly fatal heart attack.

Almost against his will he's dragged to the hospital where massive intervention--some of it unprecedented and highly experimental--saves his life. Barely. This time. And just for now.

When he comes to in the ICU he starts to make all kinds of promises.

To lose weight. To eat right. To exercise. To stop the risky behavior that nearly cost him his life.

He's forced to stay in the ICU for weeks, and weeks turn into months. That's how severe his case in.

Finally the vital signs begin to revive.

The hospital releases him. He leaves full of heart-felt thanks and still promising to mend his errant ways.

But I'm sure you can see where this parable is going.

Having been spared this time, our patient quickly loses track of the promises he made.

As he starts to feel healthier he laughs about the things that landed him in the hospital.

True, some things change. He isn't quite as profligate or spendthrift; at the same time, he's a lot less generous than he used to be.

But as his health improves his old habits start to reemerge. Why change? Obviously he leads a charmed life. No need to modify old habits of mind or behavior.

That's the down side of the up side.

The bottom fell out of the financial barrel, not because of a few bad apples. The whole barrel was rotten. This was a system failure, not an isolated instance of criminal behavior, Wall Street gone rogue, or pockets of fraud.

So a New York State of Mind says there's nothing better than recovery. It sure beats near-death.

But a recovery with any serious reconsideration of what really caused the crisis is only a temporary reprieve.

The disconnects between our economic philosophy and our economic behavior are so deep, it'll take a lot more than an Obama bill to reign in Wall Street to keep us out of the ICU.

It's time for a national commitment to remedy these deep disconnects and make the system right again.

The Power of the "Off" Button

2010-04-11T09:23:00.000-07:00

March 27th was Global Earth Hour. In case you missed it, let me remind you: all over the world, people turned off their lights for one hour. It was a simple act that connected people all over the world in a silent reminder of the wonder of nature and the fragility of the planet. Something like 1 billion people participated. Simple, powerful, and silent.

For me it's a reminder of the power of the "off" button in a society that is increasingly dominated by the "always-on" mindset. Not only "always on" but also "always on at peak volume."

Part of the lack of civility in America today is the sense that we're always shouting at each other. The notion, I suppose, is that in an attention economy, if you want to be heard, if you want people to pay attention to you, you have to scream at the top of your lungs. Of course, it's a principle that leads to its own escalation: the more you scream to be heard, the more the next person tries to scream even louder, and so on. It's a nuclear arm race of incivility, noise, ever-heightened claims, and ever-worsening stunts just to get noticed.

But as Global Earth Hour reminds us, every piece of electronic equipment we own--including our homes--comes with an off button.

Tired of being screamed at by some idiotic TV talk-show host fomenting political mindlessness. Hit the off button. Tell your friends to do the same. Practice "offing" the noise.

If you don't like being shouted at, don't shout back--try Gandhian passive resistance. Just hit the off button. It's the equivalent of a sit-down strike against those who scream, shout, and rail at us.

There are some media platforms and communication devices that don't include an off button.

Things like, oh, books. Newspapers. Magazines. Dinner parties.

In the spirit of Global Earth Hour, let's try hitting the off button on those devices that raise the volume of argument without raising the level of discourse.

It's time to take back the conversation! Just hit "off" and see how quickly we can all get back on--to reasonable discussion and debate about things that really matter.

What's a Role Model?

2010-04-09T09:25:00.001-07:00

The guy who runs the Masters golf tournament thinks Tiger Woods let us all down. He turned out not to be a role model.

Let's pause right there.

Raise your hand if you ever thought Tiger Woods was a role model. Or Brad Pitt. Or any Hollywood star or starlet. Or any professional athlete. Or any super-rich CEO from the world of big business. It was, after all, Charles Barkley, pro basketballer and notorious gambler at the high-stakes tables in Las Vegas, who famously pronounced that he wasn't a role model and didn't want to be considered one.

Which raises the question: what is a role model?

For me, a role model is someone who acts as a teacher; someone who sets an example through their behavior and values; someone who espouses a philosophy of life that merits following. In my experience it's been someone who didn't call attention to themselves; someone who wasn't out to make a name or a fortune.

And most important, it was someone I actually knew.

My grandfather, the most ethical, up-right man I ever knew. A grandfather can be a role model. A grandfather isn't some distant figure, cooked up by the media, promoted by a flack, subject to tabloid scrutiny. A grandfather is a real person in your life, someone you can look up to and learn from.

Aunts and uncles, moms and dads--they can be role models. My mom used to come to all my games when I was a kid, cheering for me to do my best. I remember one morning when I was little playing basketball in the school gym against another team of 8 or 9 year olds. I was pinned in the corner with the ball; my mom was sitting right in front of me, close enough that we could talk.

"Take a shot," she said.

"It'd have to be a hook shot," I argued back.

"So?" she said.

I took the hook shot and somehow the ball banked cleanly off the backboard in for a bucket.

I looked over at her after the ball went in.

She just shrugged her shoulders. You can't score if you don't shoot, right?

A mom can be a role model.

In the last 40 years or so we've suffered from a plethora of disconnects--we've had a societal disconnect, in fact

When it comes to role models, we've once again confused celebrity with role models. How can you have a role model you don't even know?

We've confused leaders with celebrities. Would you follow someone you'd never even seen or heard or met in the flesh? Even political campaigns give you the chance to interact with the candidates--something few of us have ever done with Tiger Woods, Brad Pitt or any other celebrity.

We may have celebrities who actually do good work. (I was struck recently in reading an architecture magazine how the people who were featured were now identified not only by their work, but also by their social cause! "So-and-so is a famous actor and also devotes time to Save the Children." It's expected that our celebrities have a favorite cause--but that still doesn't make them role models.)

But let's reserve the title "role model" for people who actually deserve it; people we actually know and respect; people who love us and want to nurture and grow us.

Those people aren't celebrities, people. They're your friends and family, your colleagues and collaborators.

Maybe we can have a more reality-based society if we kick the celebrity habit and try to get back to things that matter, things that make sense.

Maybe it's time for the great re-connect.

How Is Innovation Like a Glass of Water?

2010-04-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

I just spent an inspiring weekend with my friend Eddie Sturman and his wife Carol at their home in Colorado. Eddie, in my book, is today's version of Tesla: a brilliant inventor whose contributions are substantial--but could be even more significant if big companies that have a vested interest in the status quo of our nation's energy policy would simply take his digital technology seriously. (Check out Sturman Industries on the web for a little snapshot of Eddie and Carol's company.)

Eddie is a master story teller as well as a brilliant inventor/innovator.

My favorite Eddie Sturman story of the weekend goes like this:

Eddie had a meeting with the Chairman/CEO of one of America's corporate giants, a company with which Sturman Industries had done business in the past--and had some disagreements over patents.

Now it was time to see if they would work together as partners.

Eddie put a glass of water in front of the executive. It was filled about half-way up.

"What do you see?" Eddie asked.

The executive was eager to answer.

"I'm an optimist!" he declared. "I see a glass that's half-filled. Not half-empty, but half-filled!"

"Here's what I see," Eddie said. "I see a vehicle."

The executive was genuinely puzzled.

"A vehicle? You mean like a car or a truck? With tires?"

"No," Eddie said. "A vehicle that you can use lots of different ways. Right now, it's a vehicle for satisfying my thirst, if I drink the water. Or it could be a vehicle for delivering medicine, if someone is sick. I don't see something in terms of half empty or half full. I see it as a vehicle that can do a lot of different things, depending on how we want to use it."

Okay, a couple of points here.

First, that's how an incredibly creative innovator thinks. Eddie sees things the way Eddie see them, which is why his "wall of patents" at Sturman Industries has more than 100 plaques commemorating his unique vision.

Second, that's how we need to see the power of innovation in this country. It's not about faux optimism vs. unfortunate pessimism. It's about embracing creativity that changes how we see problems, how we seize opportunities, how we reject simple answers that don't take us anywhere new.

Innovation is the game changer America needs for the future. It will cause disruption: that's the nature of innovation. That's the nature of capitalism.

But without it, we end up with large and listless companies. We end up with a status quo that gradually runs out of energy, runs out of enthusiasm, runs out of jobs, and runs out of options.

What we need is to look with fresh eyes. We need to reframe the old debates that turn into dead-end "either-or" choices.

When you look at a glass of water that's filled to the mid-point, what do you see?

Eddie sees a vehicle.

I'm going to try to learn to see the way Eddie does. It's the wave of the future--and the spirit of innovation--that America and the world need.

"Get busy living or get busy dying"

2010-04-03T08:48:00.001-07:00

It's a quote from "The Shawshank Redemption." But it could be the kind of advice every American who's hurting from the economy should take to heart.

I was sitting in an office in Santa Fe the other day. Across from me was a man roughly my age. His jeans were pressed, his Italian loafers polished, his shirt nice tailored. He was a man accustomed to having life "just so." And he was in the real estate business.

It's not a good time to be in the real estate business, not even in Santa Fe. And his face was the tip-off that, despite his clothes, things were not going well for him. There was an air of despair surrounding him as he sat there. Unmistakable and deep. A feeling that the world had somehow betrayed him.

I know another person with a different take on things.

She's a friend of my daughter's, a recent graduate from architecture school who got her degree at a time when there aren't any jobs for architects. She got out of school with a heavy burden of student loans.

She found a job in retail. And in a few months she's distinguished herself as a remarkably valuable new employee. She uses her design sense to offer suggestions about how the retail store could do a better job of displaying merchandise. She keeps the store fresh-looking, changing the displays frequently. She taps into her own experience to come up with ideas for better customer service. The fact that she doesn't really want a career in retail, the fact that she's hoping that someday, someday soon, the economy will open up for architects again and she can get a job doing what she trained to do, what she loves to do--that doesn't enter into the equation at all.

Last month's job figures showed something like the largest gain in new jobs in three years.

And the U.S. has the largest number of long-term unemployed people ever. 6.5 million Americans have been without a job for at least 6 months.

So it's getting better.

And it's not getting better.

Even when it gets better, it's not going to go back to the way it was.

That means we have to make a choice. One option is to sit in a puddle of your own despair like the man in Santa Fe. He was in real estate. He'd ridden real estate to the top. He was now at the bottom. But he couldn't imagine trying anything else than what he'd done--mostly with great success--for all those years. He's busy dying.

Another option is my young friend, the architect turned retailer. She's busy living. It wasn't what she imagined for herself when she was in school, staying up all night to complete high-pressure design assignments. But it's what she's got--right now! Maybe not forever--but right now!

And right now, she's busy living. She's making new friends, impressing her co-workers, using her skills and her positive attitude to make a positive contribution. Nights and weekends, she works on her own architectural projects, looks for a job in her chosen field. And then, when it's time to go back to work, she shows up ready to make that job work.

That's the choice from "The Shawshank Redemption": get busy living or get busy dying.

Take your pick.

Who's Kidding Who?

2010-03-31T09:37:00.001-07:00

I was driving home this morning from picking up the morning paper at the coffee shop. At the corner to my street I stopped and waited while a young man jogged by. He was in his running outfit, T-shirt, shorts, favorite sneakers, dripping wet with sweat from the effort he was making and the pace he was setting. And he was pushing a high-tech stroller, with a young baby tucked inside.

I looked at the jogger. He was working hard, getting in his work out.

I looked at the face of the baby. He was getting jostled, bumped, knocked from side to side as his daddy took him for a jog--in the stroller.

Who are we kidding?

I'm sure that dad thought he was multi-tasking: He gets his work out in, the baby gets a nice ride in the stroller.

Doesn't match reality, unfortunately.

Dad gets his work out in; baby gets banged around while dad jogs.

It's the same with the myth of multi-tasking that goes on in most organizations, and in most of our work lives.

The temptation of technology is to try to do too much: talk on the phone, surf the web, answer email, sort through papers on the desk--all at the same time.

Can't be done--at least not well. Something's gotta give.

It applies to entrepreneurs and startups as well.

I remember years ago when Tina Brown was launching Talk magazine.

The idea was a magazine as a platform: Talk would have great journalism, the best articles would migrate into books, and the books would turn into adaptations for movies, and her investors, Harvey Weinstein chief among them, would have a multi-media platform with a virtuous circle: celebrity journalism, celebrity books, celebrity movies, and then the magazine covers the movies, and the merry-go-round spins again.

I also remember thinking: It's hard enough to launch a successful magazine! How can Tina possibly also launch books and movies?

The answer was, she couldn't. I don't think anyone could, not on that scale.

You can go for a jog. Or you can take the baby for a stroll.

You can't do both at the same time and do either one very well.

When it comes to all this multi-tasking, the question is, "Who's kidding who?"

I suspect we're all kidding ourselves.

All kidding aside, it won't work.

What's a "Salient" Industry Today?

2010-03-30T16:09:00.001-07:00

The business section of the NYT carried a report yesterday: Volvo was about to become a Chinese-owned company! Big shock or not a big shock? On a scale of 1-10, I'd say it barely rated a shrug.

After all, Jaguar is now part of the Indian Tata empire.

And the sale of IBM's computer business to China happened so long ago, nobody even remembers.

Not long ago autos and computers were considered "salient" industries. Salient because they represented so much more than just cars and computers. Cars were the touchstone of a nation's productive economy. If you had a thriving auto industry you also had rubber, steel, aluminum, glass. You had all of the components that made up a car--engines, batteries, even upholstered seats. A healthy auto industry was part and parcel of a healthy industrial economy. Which is why every nation that wanted to be globally competitive treated its "national champion" auto brand (or brands) as a salient industry.

When Japanese imports threatened Renault and Peugeot national champion brands in France, the French government stepped in. All of a sudden Japanese imports were stacked up on the docks at French ports. The explanation? More inspections were needed. All of a sudden the streets in front of dealership selling Japanese imports were being dug up, repaved, dug up and repaved again. The explanation? The streets needed repaving! It was only coincidence that they happened to be the streets where Japanese car dealerships were located.

Computers held the same elite status as the industry of the future. Computers were weapons in another form. It was imperative that the US dominate the race to the future; the US had to have the fastest super-computer, had to safeguard critical computer technology, had to guard against exporting computer technology that could fall into the wrong hands.

Computers and cars were salient industries because they were about more than computers and cars. They were about national security--national economic security (a term that seems to have disappeared from the national conversation lately--perhaps due for a serious comeback).

But today nobody cares who owns Volvo or Jaguar (or Hummer which was briefly set to be sold to the Chinese as well). Nobody cares if Lenovo makes IBM laptops.

So what is a salient industry today?

You could make a case for global finance--especially in light of the weapons of mass financial destruction unleashed on the world by Wall Street warriors. In this scenario the titans of Wall Street were playing the role of Brig. Gen Jack Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove." Financial bombs away!

But if finance is a salient industry, all the more reason for new and tight oversight of how it works, how it operates, what the rules are, what the regulations are.

You could also make a case for education--if we live in a knowledge economy, what is more salient than the educational performance of the people who live and work in this country? Here again we seem to be stuck in a bad movie--"Blackboard Jungle", perhaps.

Again if education is a salient industry, we need to muster a new national effort to fix the public schools, rethink "no child left behind," and take a systems approach to our failing national public education platform.

Money and schools. What else belongs on the list of salient industries? Renewable energy? I'd vote yes.

Other nominations? Let me know what you'd propose!

False Hustle Is Bad Customer Service

2010-03-29T18:19:00.001-07:00

Years ago I interviewed the legendary Red Auerbach, the godfather of the Boston Celtics, about what made his team so remarkable.

One of the key things that stuck with me was the notion of "false hustle": Auerbach said the Celtics players didn't try to fool him by faking like they were hustling. They gave every game, every play their all, knowing that Red could tell the difference between the real thing and false hustle.

Today, thanks in part to the web and techno-marketing, thanks in part to lead generation software, thanks in part to the phony vocabulary of "customer delight", most of us get treated every day to false hustle from company after company. False hustle comes in the mail in the form of oh-so-concerned customer solicitation letters from our bank, our mobile phone carrier, our health insurance company. Thanks to data mining, they can fake it with the best of them; they can even send you a card on your birthday, while jacking up the rate on your credit card.

When I walk into my dry cleaner here in Santa Fe, Barbara calls me by my first name. She jokes with me about my car, and when I can put the top down. And she counts my shirts and promises to have them back by 5 the next day. When I get my morning paper and first cup of joe at the locally owned magazine stand/coffee shop, I get a personal greeting from the guy behind the counter. He gives me his best Jersey accent, and tells me a joke.

That's not false hustle. That's not even a hustle. That's a genuine customer interaction. That's how more and more of us need to pick our stores, our shops, our vendors.

It's not just about the convenience of the web, which all too often masks false hustle.

It's about giving it your best, every play of every game.

Don't reward false hustle, don't give it your business. Red Auerbach never would; why should you.

We're Number 2!

2010-03-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

The headline in last week's LA Times Business Section simply said: "China Takes Clean Energy Lead--U.S. falls to No. 2 in funding for such alternative sources as wind and solar."

Just another mid-week, easy to miss headline--unless you believe, as I do, that energy policy is one of the deciding clues for the future: who wins, who loses, who prospers, who falters. Energy is one of a few economic, political, and security cross-cuts: it touches every aspect of our lives, from producing goods, to transporting them, from economic and security independence to things as simple as the quality of every day life. So every update on renewable energy investments is a signal event.

What this article said was that a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that last year the United States invested $18.6 billion in "clean energy"; China invested $34.6 billion. Five years ago, the report said, China invested only $2.5 billion on clean energy.

Why is the U.S. faltering? Last year's economic meltdown certainly played a role in reduced U.S. efforts. But the Pew report pinpointed a more systemic problem: the United States has no national mandate that promotes investment in renewable energy nor is there a surcharge or tax on greenhouse emissions that would drive up the cost of our current unsustainable energy policy.

So without a carrot to promote new investment or a stick to punish old programs, we languish. We're stuck in an increasingly unsustainable past, without the will or drive or incentives to push ahead into the increasingly high-stakes future.

What are the stakes?

The same Pew report warns that the U.S. is "comparatively weak" when it comes to participating in the fast-approaching clean energy future. At risk: economic growth, jobs, technological leadership. Not to mention more control over our own future, our own security, our standing in the world.

Here's my take: Innovation is applied logic.

The logic here says we need to lead the world in developing and commercializing alternative, renewable, sustainable, clean energy.

To make that happen will require the cooperation of business, government, science, higher education, venture capital.

And that will require new thinking, new practices, new partnerships.

Maybe as we build a sustainable energy future, we'll build the organizational infrastructure to create a sustainable future.

That's what the applied logic says should happen.

Now we need to be organizational innovators to make it happen.

Temporary (Political) Insanity

2010-03-26T21:06:00.000-07:00

One of our country's two major political parties has lost its mind.

To prove how angry it is at the other party, it is stopping all committee meetings promptly at 2 pm. This is the political equivalent of a two-year old holding its breath to show mom and dad how upset he is.

To prove that the other party passed a law it doesn't like, it is using all kinds of angry rhetoric and inciting its supporters to throw bricks at the windows of people in the other party, cut a gas line to a home, and make other ugly threats.

This is what we'd expect from a school-yard bully who was finally stared down on the playground, not the behavior of a major political party.

This party is trying to win votes by demonstrating that it has the emotional maturity of a small child. It wants the American people to vote for it, so it can stop holding its breath, so it can calm down and stop threatening to repeal legislation, so it can get back to doing the people's business. An odd bit of political logic there.

We've seen a major political part lose its mind before.

The Democrats did it around 1968, after the convention in Chicago went off the rails. The Democrats then created an elaborate reform effort that splintered the old guard and the new guard, and in 1972, to demonstrate the wisdom of this strategy, George McGovern carried, oh I think it was, 1 state.

The Democrats did it before that, unless I'm mistaken, when the Dixiecrats walked out of the party. This time it was over race, not the War in Vietnam. But the results were the same.

When a political party decides that it needs to act out in public, the public often decides it needs to opt out of that party.

That's the cure for temporary political insanity: losing elections.

Jobs

2010-03-22T19:12:00.001-07:00

No, not Steve.

I'm talking about the desperate need for jobs for young Americans.

Sitting in LA with my daughter, who's a second year student at architecture graduate school, the stories I heard about her friends and fellow students are only a tiny--and even privileged--microcosm of the jobs crisis that's afflicting a whole generation of young, talented and deeply frustrated Americans.

Young students who've completed a rigorous program of education in architecture and design, only to discover there are no jobs in their field.

They're deeply in debt, having borrowed to get their education, and now no one needs them for what they've gone to school.

When they send out job applications to work at retail, or on a loading dock, or anyplace to earn money to pay back their student loans, they get rejected . . . because they're overqualified.

I heard stories of young graduates taking off for foreign jobs and leaving behind families; stories of young graduates who can't pay their rent; stories of young graduates who are desperate for any kind of work--a dust bowl for white collar graduates with master's degrees.

Now that health care reform is about to become the law of the land, the next step is work--and not just any work, but work that puts this young and talented generation into jobs that will help them design, build, innovate, and grow an American economy that is also desperate: desperate for rejuvenation and revitalization. What these kids have to offer in the way of infrastructure redevelopment, green design, and innovative urban planning is exactly what America needs to put to work, if we're going to be competitive in the future.

Jobs? Yes, we can!

Separate And Unequal

2010-03-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

Roughly 52 years ago, the Supreme Court (this was back when we had a Supreme Court, understand) ruled that separate is fundamentally unequal.

The subject at the time was education, public education, and the problem was that there were several million young black children, predominantly in the South at that time, who were going to segregated schools. Not because they wanted to; because they had to.

They were getting a vastly inferior education, if they got any education at all. They suffered from this treatment, their families suffered, and, if anyone stopped to think about it, the whole country suffered, as well. Suffered from a loss of moral authority, by virtue of turning its back on its own best values and highest principles, and suffered from a loss of economic opportunity, by squandering the human capital represented by millions and millions of young Americans.

It's 52 years later, and we have a segregated health care system. Segregated not by race, at least not officially; but segregated by wealth.

In America today, if you have a job and it happens to have benefits attached to it, you have health insurance. If you don't have a job, but you have money, you can buy health insurance--usually. Unless the private companies that get to decide who does and doesn't get health insurance rule you out of the system.

If you are poor or on the cusp of poverty, or if you're unemployed, or if your job is one of the millions that no longer offers health insurance as a benefit, well, then you're separate--and unequal.

Then if you get sick, you end up in the emergency room of your local public hospital. That's the most expensive and wasteful care there is. Back in 2001, one study said that it costs Americans about $35 billion to pay for the health care of those of us who are uninsured; another study said that the costs of health care that wasn't provided--and resulted in health problems--totaled between $65-130 billion. And that's just the monetary cost. As with education in America in the 1950s, there are social costs, there are moral costs, there are individual, family, and community costs. Most of the time, it's not about the money--it's about the social capital that we squander.

We have two health care systems, at least. One for the wealthy and the employed (never mind the fact that the attaching of health care benefits to jobs is an accident of history, an FDR concoction designed to allow some kind of improvement to workers' pay packages at a time when wages were frozen), and one for the poor and the unemployed.

They are separate and inherently unequal.

Put aside the insanity of allowing private, for-profit health insurance companies, which pay their CEOs outrageous salaries, in the tens of millions of dollars. (Which I wrote about when I asked what would it be like if Aetna owned the Grand Canyon?)

Think instead of a system in the richest nation on earth that has two side-by-side health care systems, separate and unequal, and pretends that a system like that is just fine. No need to change. It's working quite well, thank you, at least it is for the employed and the wealthy, kind of like the schools in the South in the 1950s.

What would you call a system like that?

Back in 1958, the Supreme Court called it unconstitutional. Citizens were being denied equal protection. Citizens were being denied equal opportunity. Citizens were being denied their inalienable rights.

Tell me: how is the health care debate any different?

How is separate and unequal good enough for 30 million Americans without health insurance?

How is it good for the rest of us, who do have it?

How is it good for the country?

Contentment vs. Complacency

2010-03-18T10:52:00.001-07:00

I get contentment. Especially in today's world: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." My friend Chip Conley nailed it at his TED talk this year when he talked about happiness deriving from being content with what you have, rather than always seeking more of what you don't have, can't have, don't really want, don't really need.

What I don't get is complacency.

I was just in Detroit giving a talk on leadership and change. The speaker before me assured the audience that, when it comes to the Michigan economy, there's a "light at the end of the tunnel."

Today the New York Times reports that Detroit is set to close 45 of its 172 public schools at the end of this year--and that Detroit has closed more than 100 schools since 2004, and still has seats for more than 50,000 students than are actually in the system. Here's the money quote from the Times: "I think you can say Detroit has hit bottom," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a research group in Washington.

Yesterday in the Times, David Leonhardt wrote a brilliant column. His topic: Wagner's Law--a principle that says that as a nation gets richer, it taxes itself more to pay for the good things it wants its citizens to enjoy. Only the U.S. seems to have repealed Wagner's Law. We've grown richer, cut taxes--and still demanded more good things! Which is the real source of our massive deficit. Here's the money quote: "By any reasonable projection, we're on an utterly unsustainable path," Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, told me last week."

These are urgent matters. Urgent matters require serious responses.

We may all wish for contentment in our lives.

None of us can afford complacency.

Waving or Drowning?

2010-03-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you know the old conundrum: A man is standing on the beach. He hears a shout and looks out into the ocean. He sees an old friend far from shore and she's got a hand up over her head as she bobs in the ocean. The question is, is she waving hello? or calling for help? Waving? Or drowning?

Right now, America isn't waving hello.

Right now, America is calling for help. On all kinds of fronts. Health care is only one problem that weighs down millions of individual Americans, and--lest we forget it--also plagues the competitiveness of American companies. Starbucks, for one, spends more on health care than on coffee beans. Before it went bankrupt, GM used to joke (back when GM could joke, before it became a joke) that it only sold cars to be able to fund its health care costs.

America is calling for help on the energy front--we can't continue with a feel-good energy policy that under-prices the real cost of our fossil fuels and, at the same time, drives the red line of global warming closer and closer to the disaster mark.

Education, urban policy, transportation, jobs--you name it, America isn't waving hello. America is clearly calling for help.

It's time for urgent and positive responses to all of these calls.

Don't tell me what you're against; tell me what you're for.

Don't tell me who to blame; tell me what you're working on.

Don't tell me what's wrong with "them"; tell me what's going to work.

Tell me the kind of change you're championing and the commitment you're ready to make to make it happen.

That's America out there, bobbing in the ocean--and there's a good chance that unless we all start to work together she's going under for the third time.

The Three Best Answers, Ever

2010-03-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

These days everybody's looking for answers.

What's the right way to . . .?

How can I . . .?

What do I need to do to . . .?

When you get asked questions all the time (or even some of the time) it's awfully tempting to think you're supposed to know the answers! After all, people wouldn't be asking you these questions if they didn't think you knew the answers. And if you stop giving the answers, then they'll stop asking the questions, and then you no longer qualify as a full-fledged guru.

Lately I've found three answers that make the most sense to me. I try to remember to use them as often as I can, when I'm out giving a talk or just chatting with friends over dinner.

When the question comes your way ("What do you think we should do about . . .?" "Do you have a solution for . . .?), here are the three best answers, ever:

1. I don't really know.

2. What do you think?

3. I'm still thinking about that--I'll get back to you once I've done some more work on it.

Why are they the three best answers, ever? Because they're honest, humble, and hospitable. They invite discussion, they create dialog, and they open up discussion.

Try it next time: I don't really know; what do you think?; I'll get back to you on that.

What Does It Mean to "Win"?

2010-03-13T14:15:00.001-08:00

I was sitting at WeMedia in Miami last week, listening to an eloquent presentation by TCK TCK TCK.

TCK TCK TCK had just won a Game Changer award and its representative was explaining what the organization had done. Set up in advance of the Global Climate Change summit in Copenhagen, TCK TCK TCK created a giant tent under which all of the organizations in favor of a "fair, ambitious, and binding" agreement could gather.

TCK TCK TCK got more than 16 million people to put their names on a petition calling for a "fair, ambitious, and binding" agreement.

It got hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets to demonstrate. It did important work to change the conversation about climate change.

And in the end, it failed. There was no agreement worth talking about, much less one that was "fair, ambitious, and binding."

But did it fail? Or did it win--without winning everything.

We're living in times where political issues are rarely over, even when it looks like something's been decided.

Every issue, every problem, every cutting edge concern is in play, all the time. Yogi Berra had it wrong; it's never over, not even when you think it's over.

So I'd say TCK TCK TCK has a lot to teach us about getting into the game, about organizing and articulating for our causes, about building coalitions that cross conventional boundaries, about establishing goals, about measuring impact--and about keeping after it. They didn't fail. They're still out there arguing their case for what they believe in.

We need to think differently about winning--it's the only way we'll stick with the causes we believe in, and recognize that it's not even about winning. It's about caring enough to get into the game--and then staying in the game all the way.

How Many Times?

2010-03-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a new blog category: The How Many Times? category of catastrophe.
As in the old Bob Dylan lyric, "How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?"

Apparently the answer is: All the time.

Take today's NYT story on the decision by the Kansas City, Missouri school board to close 28 of its 61 schools, all at the same time.

According to the reporter, Susan Saulny, ". . . a closer look at the school board's history reveals a chaotic, almost nonfunctioning body that put off making tough choices and even routine improvements for generations. (my italics added) Experts said that in the board's years of inaction is a cautionary tale for school districts everywhere."

School districts? A cautionary tale for school districts!

How about for companies and countries?

How about the cautionary tale of GM that put off making necessary decisions for decades, until the nation's largest manufacturing giant woke up one day and found itself in Chapter 11?

How about the cautionary tale of Wall Street firms that put off making necessary decisions about the fundamental un-sustainability of their over-leveraged financial operations, until one day they woke up, well, dead.

How about the cautionary tale of the United States of America that continues to put off making necessary decisions about energy policy, our addiction to foreign oil, our un-sustainable transportation policies, our subsidies to the highway lobby--almost a guarantee that we'll wake up one morning wishing we'd had leaders with more courage and wisdom, who were willing to price oil at its actual replacement price (or closer to it) and invest ahead of time in mass transit and other alternative energy sources.

Choose the issue that keeps you up at night. Education reform and the sorry state of public schools in the US? The high school drop out rate? Obesity? Decaying infrastructure? A lack of jobs for kids coming out of colleges and universities?

There is much that needs doing today.

And in almost every case, the single greatest obstacle to getting after the work that needs doing is an institutional, systemic unwillingness to deal with the hard facts of life and make tough decisions that need to be made. The longer the situation festers, the worse it gets. Just ask the students and parents who depend on the Kansas City public schools.

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind--and not just in Kansas City, Missouri.

Go Tom Go!

2010-03-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

There is only one Tom Peters!
Actually, one is enough! As long as it is the original Tom! Accept no substitutes!
(Why all the exclamation points? Because that's how Tom talks! It's how he writes! It's how he lives! Show up full of energy! Give it your all! All the time!)
Just got my hands on Tom's new book: The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence.
I can't wait to dig in, to savor all that Tom Peters raw unadulterated smart-as-a-whip, I-wish-I'd-thought-of-that energy and insight.
For as long as I've known Tom (full disclosure: Tom was one of the first-round investors in Fast Company; in fact, it was his phone call to me, out of the blue, one Friday evening after a dis-spirited week of trying to get the magazine going, that lifted my weary spirit. The call went something like this: "Webber! It's Tom Peters! I've just read your business plan for Fast Company! We've got to do this! We absolutely have got to do this! The world needs this! I'm in!" Talk about getting a lift.) he has combined an insatiable appetite for information, insight, and innovation with a willingness to talk with everybody and anybody who's doing anything cool.
And then think about it with that amazing brain of his, and re-frame it in a way that brings it smack dab down to earth in a way that's useful and fundamentally human.
There is only one Tom Peters!
Here's to the one and only!
Keep on truckin' Tom!
We need you!

Oh, Canada!

2010-03-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to sit at dinner tonight with a group of Canadians, including a very talented woman who works in the Canadian health care system.
A few interesting questions and comments:
"Why do Americans think we don't have MRIs in Canada? We've got all the technology you have!"
"Why do Americans think we don't get to choose our own doctors in Canada? Who tells you this stuff?"
"Why do Americans think it's ok to be the richest country in the world and leave 30 or 40 million of your own people without health care or health insurance?"
The questions weren't antagonistic. Or hostile.
They were asked in the spirit of genuine concern. Concern for the mis-perceptions that continue to cloud the US understanding of how health care actually works in Canada, and concern for a system in the US that the Canadians genuinely think is, well, unthinkable.
Here's what we came to agree on.
Canada's system treats everyone equally. Rich and poor alike. This is, perhaps, fair, but only guarantees that wealthy Canadians game the system.
America's system has incredible highs--if you're wealthy--and incredible lows--if you're poor.
Both systems would benefit from meeting somewhere in the middle: letting wealthy people pay more for faster access to health care, or better quality health care, if they want it, while guaranteeing at least a standard of health care for all, even the poorest citizens.
Kind of like Germany, it turns out, where, once you reach a certain level of wealth, you have to move into a private system, and your higher costs go to subsidize the care of the poorest citizens. The wealthy get what they want, and they have to pay for it. The poor get what they need, and while it isn't as good or fast or accessible as what they wealthy get, it is provided to them as a public good.
Oh, Canada!
There's a lot to be learned on both sides when we sit down to talk as friends!

Aetna Welcomes You To The Grand Canyon!

2010-03-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

Last summer as my wife and I hiked from rim to rim in the Grand Canyon, I found myself thinking about the powerful experience of walking through mile after mile of natural history. It turns out, I should have been thinking about health insurance. Here's why.
In the early days the Grand Canyon was pretty much private property. If you wanted to go down into it you had to buy a ticket from a tour operator who controlled access to it. If you couldn't afford a ticket you couldn't go down. Kind of like a toll bridge. Or, come to think of it, health insurance.
Then along came Teddy Roosevelt and the whole notion of national parks and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today if you want to see the Grand Canyon you can even stay in an incredible structure on the north rim that was originally built as part of Franklin Roosevelt's program to put people back to work at the time of the Great Depression. The CCC, the WPA, and other projects created by FDR resulted in work for the unemployed--and also the creation of some spectacular structures and works of art.
I thought about that legacy as I drove home from the Grand Canyon--on a freeway that was built as part of the National Defense Highway Act, a measure created under President Eisenhower.
What if, instead of having a federal highway administration, we'd just let private companies build the roads? They could lay them out as they wanted, and then we'd pay for the privilege of driving on them? Of course, they might not all match up. And some might be more expensive than others. But, hey, that's capitalism!
There'd been a bunch of tourists from Germany, France, Japan, even the Middle East at the Grand Canyon. I was betting they'd flown there.
What if we had competing private sector airports, each with its own privately held control towers? I wonder how safe that would be? At least it would open things up to competition! And if there were accidents, well, isn't that how the free market works?
Apparently we want national parks, and we want one highway system that is uniform, and we'd just as soon have a coordinated system for air safety.
But not for health. Or health care.
That's why we've got large insurance companies, like, say, Aetna, whose CEO, Ronald A. Williams, made $24.3 million in compensation last year. And $23 million the year before. For selling insurance.
Or Cigna's H. Edward Hanway, who made $12.2 million last year, and $25.8 million the year before that. For selling insurance.
Can you imagine what Mr. Williams could have made if, say, he ran the Grand Canyon? Or administered the free market in freeways?
He could have pulled down some really big bucks!
So remind me again: Why is there no public option for health insurance? And why is this industry, which is so fundamental to each American's health and well-being, allowed to operate with this kind of impunity?
I guess it's time for another hike in the Grand Canyon, and a chance to think some of these things over.

What If The Pilgrims Had Landed in California?

2010-03-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

I know. It sounds like a frivolous question. Like trying to imagine the Salem Witch Trials as a giant LA surfing party. Or the first Thanksgiving as a celebration at the Ferry Building one Saturday morning in San Francisco, with 20 varieties of lettuces and artisanal cheeses.
But there's a serious side to my question. Because I have the deep and disturbing feeling that many of the attitudes one group of Americans have toward their fellow Americans is some kind of a nasty carry over of those dark, cold, depressing New England winters, a cultural vestigial remain of a period of hard scrabble times and close brushes with societal extinction.
How else to explain the data on American attitudes on poverty and the poor as reported by William Julius Williams in "More Than Just Race"?
What Wilson says is deeply disturbing; it's fundamentally a "blame the victim" national mindset: ". . . the popular view is that people are poor or on welfare because of their own personal shortcomings."
Wilson cites three different surveys conducted in 1969, 1980, and 1990. Analysts looking at the first two surveys found that most Americans believe that ". . . in general economic inequality is fair." That's right. Economic inequality is fair.
In all three surveys, Wilson reports, ". . . more than nine out of ten American adults felt that lack of effort was either very or somewhat important in terms of causing poverty."
In 2007 the Pew Research Center did another survey. That one revealed that "fully two-thirds of all Americans believe that personal factors, rather than racial discrimination, explain sy many African Americans have difficulty getting ahead in life. . ."
The kicker comes when Wilson compares these results to a 2007 survey of the EU. Only 20% of EU respondents agreed that poverty is a result of "laziness and lack of will power." 37% attributed poverty to "injustice in society."
No wonder Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning said, "Tough shit" when confronted with the impact his filibuster had on poor people. After all, it's their own fault!
No wonder there's even a debate about whether it's alright for America to be a nation where 40 million people don't have health insurance. If they'd go out and work their way out of poverty, they'd have the same lousy health insurance the rest of us have! It's their own fault!
Of course, if there were a terrible earthquake, or a natural disaster--something outside the control of each of us as individuals--and 40 million of our fellow citizens were suddenly homeless, needing medical attention, shelter, food, clothes, and a fair shot at a job, I'd like to think Americans would grab their cell phones and text millions of dollars of emergency aid to those in need. I'd like to think we wouldn't shrug and say, "Tough shit." Or blame those who got hit worst for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or deserving it.
At times like that, I like to think that if the Pilgrims had only landed in California, we might all be a little more generous of spirit, a little less morally judgmental, a little less likely to blame the victim, a little more likely to see that we're all in this together.

The Two Adam Smiths

2010-03-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

Most people who even know who Adam Smith was tend to associate him with The Wealth of Nations. In it Smith described the evolution of capitalism and the power of the invisible hand of the market to take self-interest in business and convert it into something that served the common interest.
Few people associate Smith with his other great book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this book Smith asserts that no matter how self-interested even the hardest person is, there is something within all of us, something in human nature, that feels sorrow at the sorrow of others and sympathy for those who are suffering or in pain.
What Smith was trying to figure out was how capitalism worked (of course the word "capitalism" hadn't been invented yet, but even though the word didn't exist, that's the problem Smith set his mind to.)
It clearly wasn't as simple as today's free-marketeers would like to believe. Smith wrestled with the power of the invisible hand and with the deep-seated psychological force of sympathetic human nature encountering a moral dilemma.
Which is exactly where we are in the US in the debate over health care.
Think of it at first as a four box matrix--the kind they teach at the Harvard Business School.
Let's use Smith's two books to frame the matrix.
On one axis we've got the invisible hand of the free market at one end, government control at the other.
On the second axis we've got human compassion, empathy, moral right at one end, pure self-interest, cold-hearted Scrooge-ism.
The Obama administration is trying to convince us all that the administration has a solution that's win-win! It works in economic terms, cuts back on the rising costs of health care, preserves the insurance industry's right to make money, helps with the federal deficit--all terrific economic outcomes!--and offers health care coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who can't get it or can't afford it. It's economic and moral!
The Republicans tend to see the world more in terms of the Wealth of Nations, and less in terms of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. They want the government out of health care--it should be about the free market. Beyond that, their view of moral sentiments was best expressed by Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning who, when informed that his filibuster would cut off COBRA benefits for millions of poor and unemployed Americans said, "Tough shit."
So in a four box matrix formed by the two Adam Smiths, we know where the Obama administration would put itself and where the Republicans would wind up.
Now let's make it more interesting.
What if the economic promises of the Obama adminstration were shown to be flat out wrong.
What if the Obama plan won't curb rising medical costs, won't benefit the federal budget deficit, and actually will represent a government intrusion into the operation of the free market in a significant way?
What if it comes down to a fundamental choice between a strict interpretation of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the matter of health care?
Here's what Smith wrote: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."
When it comes to health care for our fellow Americans, what could be clearly a matter of moral sentiment?
Ultimately it turns on an argument that is less about the kind of economics we want to practice, and more about the kind of country we want to be.
In a balancing of the Two Adam Smiths, when it comes to a matter as fundamentally human as health care, the moral sentiment has to be the book that offers the right instruction, for the right reason.

On Icebergs and Ducks

2010-03-03T08:11:00.000-08:00

It sounds like a bad riddle: What do icebergs and ducks have in common?
But it's a serious question--or, maybe more accurately, a serious answer to a serious question.
The question is: How does change happen? And I find myself asking it at a time when more and more people are holding out less and less hope for the prospect of meaningful change coming from the political leaders in Washington, DC. We can argue about who's fault it is; or whether it's worse than it used to be; or if it's simply the case that Washington, DC is "broken." There's lots to be said about the influence of money on politics, and the role of the media in promoting a sound-bite culture with the attention span of a tweet. Lots of ways to get worked up and bummed out.
So let me instead offer the notion of the iceberg and the duck.
And let me use it to suggest that we're looking for change in all the wrong places.
So: what do icebergs and ducks have in common?
Ever since the sinking of the Titanic, we've all been taught that you only see the tip of the iceberg above the surface of the water; 80% or more of the iceberg is below the surface, so if you want to see the true shape of the thing, you've got to look beneath the surface.
And ducks? Well, coaches and cheerleaders have long used the swimming duck as a source of encouragement for scrappy athletes: be calm on the surface and paddle like hell with your feet under water!
Here's what I'm concluding about change in America.
It's all going on under the surface--and there's a lot of it happening.
If you put down the daily newspapers, stop surfing the web, step away from cable TV news, give talk radio a rest, and just go out into your own community--and I mean any community in any city in any country any where in the world--you will be thrilled, delighted, amazed, and profoundly moved at the kinds of changes going on all around us.
Below the surface, like icebergs and ducks, out of sight of the traditional media and traditional politics, there is a movement gaining force.
It is micro-change. It is entrepreneurial and vibrant. The projects are often small. Think of them as Petri-dish size experiments.
They involve small groups of like-minded individuals who want to make a difference, have some impact.
I'm not talking about angry shouters. I'm talking about do-something-abouters.
This is how change happens. Far from the corridors of power.
It happens when the people who decide they want to contribute start paddling like hell below the surface.
When I find myself troubled about political gridlock, narcissism, and posturing, I change where I'm looking.
Instead of paying attention to what's above the surface, what gets all the coverage, I look under the surface, at all the great work that's being ignored by the media but embraced by real people making real change happen.
It's not grass roots change.
It's under the water change. And if we keep it up, it's going to make all the difference in the world.

The Age of Innovation

2010-03-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

When this period we're in right now passes and whatever comes next arrives, we'll look back fondly on this current time and call it, quite rightly The Age of Innovation. Beset as we are by serious and pressing problems, we run the risk of failing to appreciate one of the most incredible periods of creative output in world history. Take a look around you and make your own list of the remarkable stream of innovation that is going on all around us.
It's been almost a decade since "innovation" became a business buzz word. Frankly I thought it was just the flavor of the month; I suspected we'd see companies trumpet their "innovative spirit" and then move on to something else when the marketing message got old.
Instead, innovation has become a sustained business element. It's not a fad, it's a requirement, a new component in every company's way of doing business. It's become an accepted part of "what we do here," in company's around the world in every industry.
Why?
Here's a partial list--feel free to add to it or make your own!
1. Global competition. The heat is on. If you want to compete, you've simply got to innovate. There are too many new entrants, too many rivals popping up all over the world. Years ago Ted Levitt wrote that "you can de-commoditize anything." Global competition has become the powerful prod to drive constant de-commoditization--which is all about innovation.
2. The web. The web does, in fact, change everything. It's part of the global economy, but it's also part of economic transparency. No more secrets--everyone can know what everyone else is doing. When that happens, when we shift to a knowledge economy, then innovation is the only way to stay ahead of the game. Innovate or die. Even for slow companies, that's an easy choice.
3. Technology. Computing power makes it faster, cheaper, and easier to test out new ideas. The mantra of "fail faster to succeed sooner" is all about the speed with which new ideas can be tried and tried again, before being brought to market. Modeling, sampling, revising--all are staples of the innovation economy.
4. Science. Think of all the innovations that are a direct product of science--from new construction techniques to food, health care, clothing, medicine, furniture, you name it. Materials science, chemistry, biology, earth sciences are only some of the categories where new discoveries are driving new innovations. Science is undergoing its own innovative revolution; new fields are being created at the intersections of what used to be compartmentalized categories. Out of those new fields we're seeing brilliant new insights leading to amazing new innovations.
5. Business model innovation. The mandate to compete is driving companies to go beyond product and service innovation to meta-innovation--competing on new business models. If you want to challenge your rivals, you don't simply out-produce them, you out-think them with a business model that undercuts their whole way of doing business. Innovation has gone meta.
6. Education. The spread of learning makes innovation a global phenomenon; at the same time, young, bright, technologically-savvy students are able to test their ideas and creativity without waiting for traditional jobs in traditional companies to give them permission to innovate. Education not only makes people smarter; it makes them eager to use what they've learned to do new things.
7. Design thinking. We've got new tools and new disciplines that are teaching us how to apply all those right-brain notions. Design gives shape to instinct; technology makes it possible to model design; the need for differentiation in the market provides big rewards for outstanding design. It's a system that works, producing design-driven innovation, differentiated products and services, and competitive rewards.
8. Natural imperatives. We're waking up to the idea that if we don't make major changes in how we produce, what we produce, and how we consume what we produce, we may not have the luxury to keep doing all this stuff. Sustainability is a powerful driver for innovation; the need for companies to do a better job of greening their operations is more than a temporary marketing ploy. Economics are changing, requirements are changing, and process and product innovations are resulting.
9. Social innovation. A lot of our social habits, structures, and behaviors are reaching the end of their shelf lives; people all over the world who've been overlooked are demanding new practices that take their needs into account. As we try to balance the needs and rights of a global population, social innovation is becoming the most rapidly evolving field for new ideas, business models, practices, and developments.

Take a look around you.
What are the shapes, forms, and practices that tell you we're living through the Age of Innovation?
What are you doing to be part of it?
One thing's sure: You don't want to miss it--you don't want to fail to appreciate it or fail to participate. Years from now we'll look back and think, for innovators and for innovation, this was the golden age.

Thinking the Unthinkable

2010-02-27T20:51:00.000-08:00

It may be the hardest thing in the world to make yourself do.
It may also be the one thing that saves your project, rescues your company, lifts your career, changes the trajectory of your community.
Try thinking the unthinkable.
What if?
What if the web were to completely undermine your industry's business model?
What if a massive natural disaster were to level your city?
What if a foreign competitor were suddenly to obsolete your product line?
What if your company were acquired and your job became redundant?
What's the most unthinkable thing you can force yourself to consider? Now go beyond that one thing to something more unthinkable.
Can't think of anything?
That's what books are for.
Pick up Seth Godin's "Linchpin." Take notes.
Read Dan Pink's "Drive." Do his exercises.
Get out of your comfort zone. Volunteer at a food bank, a homeless shelter, a hospice.
What we don't let ourselves think is the one thing that can cause a catastrophe. So make yourself think the unthinkable.

Mindset, Game, & Match

2010-02-24T22:50:00.000-08:00

If you look up the word "mindset" in the dictionary, here's what you get: "a fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person's responses to and interpretations of situations" and "habits of mind formed by previous experience."
I looked it up for two reasons.
First, because Jared Diamond's explanation for how societies collapse includes a healthy does of "mindset myopia." Societies vanish because their mindsets preclude them from seeing reality as it is.
Second, because I just got back from Detroit, where I saw mindset myopia first hand, up close and personal.
It's hard to imagine a high-ranking official of what they still call "The Big 3" in Detroit standing up in front of a crowd of intelligent, well-informed business people and telling them with a straight face that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that the worst is behind us, and that the economy--and the auto industry--will all go back to the way things were before the Great Recession. It's hard to imagine such an executive making fun of sustainable energy, mocking it really, as a false direction to pursue. It's hard to image such an executive suggesting that the U.S. auto industry is poised for a great year, a big rebound, a return to the glory days.
But that's what I heard with my own ears.
Now I didn't do a survey of the people in the audience. But if any of them were buying what he was selling, well, I would consider that prima facie evidence of mindset myopia.
You can't make people see what they assiduously want to avoid. You can't make them see what their mindsets rule out as possible.
The story is told that when the first Black Ships approached Japan, the Japanese announced that dragons were off shore. Their mindsets allowed for the existence of dragons, but not of Black Ships.
Michigan has many great strengths, although at the moment its economy is in dire distress.
For 30 years, it's ridden the ups and downs of the auto industry, its suppliers hanging on for dear life, like a friend or lover who's got a drunk in the family. The old saying goes, the drunk clutches the bottle, and the friend clutches the drunk.
A little more than 30 years ago the US Department of Justice was seriously thinking about an anti-trust suit to break up GM, carve off Chevy, because GM had too much market share.
Globalization took care of that problem, with GM as an incompetent accomplice.
But you'd think that after the last 30 years, the Big 3 and the suppliers and the people of Michigan would have had enough of the roller-coaster ride.
That everyone would realize that it's time to take the state's considerable strengths, and the supplier base's great talent pool, and even the auto maker's remaining capabilities, and look at the world with fresh eyes.
To become entrepreneurs. To compete on talent, creativity, innovation, and imagination.
To use the opportunity afforded by near collapse to avert total collapse.
To face the brutal facts of life, as Jim Collins says, and to construct a new mindset.
Otherwise, it's game, set, match.

Munger to Friedman to Diamond!

2010-02-21T20:03:00.000-08:00

When it rains it pours.
Yesterday I read Charlie Munger's parable about "Basicland"--called depressingly enough, "Basically, It's Over." Here's the gist of it: America has squandered its birthright, walked away from its core values of hard work, thrift, and pay-as-you go, and embraced casino capitalism. Now the game is over; we've crapped out.
Today it was Tom Friedman's turn: "The Fat Lady Has Sung." Friedman isn't quite sure who to blame. Maybe it's the Boomers for eating the nation's seed corn; or Obama for not presenting a coherently integrated set of policies to rebuild America; or the Republicans for not having anything they're for. But he's pretty sure, like Charlie, that the game is over, and we lost.
Which takes me back to Jared Diamond's book "Collapse." Today I got to the end, where Diamond asks, in effect, how could all these societies have gone so wrong? How did they end up as historical footnotes, each an Ozymandias of its own?
He offers 4 explanations:
1. The fail because they don't anticipate a problem before it arrives--they either don't recognize it or, even though they've seen it before, they've forgotten what it looks like.
2. They fail because they don't perceive the problem, even after it arrives--the leaders are too far from the field to see the evidence, or they suffer from "landscape amnesia"--they don't recognize the slow pace of change that leads to disaster.
3. They fail because they don't attempt to solve the problem--either because a group of people are unwilling to change, because the status quo still serves their needs; or because of the "tragedy of the commons" leads all people to continue with the status quo behavior, unwilling to be left out of their share of the (admittedly self-destructive) use of the resources; or the power elite simply continues to rule badly over the masses; or they continue to cling to values and behaviors that no longer work, but that have defined them for years; or because group think and denial keep them from embracing change.
4. They fail because, by the time they might try to do something, it's too little too late, or too expensive, or simply beyond their capacity to solve the problem.
Of Diamond's list, I find myself drawn to Point #3: why do people fail to act, even after they see the problem?
My own view is that we're all captives of the models in our heads; of how we've done things in the past; of the values and behaviors that "got us this far." In the face of criticism from the Munger's and Friedman's of the world, we tend to resort to group think and denial. "They can't be right, we've always gotten through in the past using this approach, nothing's really different this time."
But the hard truth is, America is still an experiment.
That's the way the Founding Fathers felt about; it's a Republic--if we can keep it.
I'm with Munger and Friedman on this one: it's up to us to see the problem, look the brutal facts of life in the eye, and change our behavior--and question values that we've either adopted in place of our original ones or that no longer work in an economy that's global--and get back to work.
The other option is to turn into a chapter in Diamond's book, joining the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, and a litany of societies that disappeared, clinging to their habits and behaviors, all the way to oblivion.