Looking back at my first job in Lafayette Indiana

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Starting our trip across the U.S. we made it to Lafayette, Indiana on the first day. Lafayette is where I had my first job after graduating with my MBA. I worked at a place called Microdatabasesystems (MDBS) . I was a market researcher and since I was the only one in the department, I was the director of marketing research (never trust a title.)
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I worked there only five weeks. I was working there two weeks when the owners/founders called me. They asked me what I thought of the product. I told them the truth. I told them that their software was wonderful, but it was too hard to use. One of the guys told me that if customers were too stupid to use the product, perhaps they should not buy it. That day I called the Foreign Service. I had taken and passed both written and oral tests and they were doing the security clearance. They told me that they had finished the clearance and offered me a job. I was supposed to have responded a week before. I guess that the notice went to my old address in Minneapolis. I asked for an extra day and they gave it to me. The next day, I put in my notice at MDBS and a couple weeks later went to Washington to start the career I have had ever since.
Sometimes I have wondered how life might have been had I not made the call. A few years after I was in the FS, I went back to Minneapolis to talk to MBA friends. Everybody made more money than I did. Even new MBA graduates made more on average. But the jobs were not as much fun. My most successful friend was a brand manager at Green Giant. He was in charge of frozen peas – not all peas, not all frozen products, just frozen peas. He seemed to like his job and he made the big bucks, but I thought the FS was perhaps a better choice for me.
Lafayette is a pleasant place, the home of Perdue University. But there is not much more. We went to the Tippecanoe Battlefield, where William Henry Harrison defeated the forces of Tecumseh’s alliance. It is interesting to see the old trees and the nature succession that happened since, more on that in the next post.
My picture up top is the gate to the Tippecanoe battlefield. Below it are some of the windmills in the farm fields north of Lafayette.

New old home

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It has not been hard to re-adapt.  I filled up my bike tires, tightened up all the bolts and I was good to go.  Yesterday, I went down to State Department to check in. I also talked to my predecessor about my Smithsonian job that I will start in September.  It will be fun.
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The biking is a little harder because I am doing the round trip of 34 miles.  When I get to my actual work, I will do as I did before, i.e. ride to work in the morning and take the Metro back in the evening.  It is mostly downhill on the way to Washington.  Coming back is not as much fun.  It gets a little worse now, since they have closed the gate at Fort Meyer and I have to go all the way around.
The weather has been very good, not too hot.  It seems like summer is cooler. I was thinking about whether this was really the weather or if it was just my perception, having spent some time in Iraq and Brazil, where it gets hot.  I think that might be true, but it is also true that summers have been a little cooler.  We bought the house in 1997.  It turns out that our first full summer in Washington, summer of 1998, was especially hot. That was my “base year” and since then conditions have been better, so it feels better to me.
http://johnsonmatel.com/2014/August/TNC.jpgToday I went over to the Nature Conservancy.  I have been a donor for more than twenty-five years and the person in charge of donor relations invited me over for coffee.  TNC is my favorite environmental organization because they are actually involved with improving nature instead of just complaining.   I hope to visit the TNC tallgrass prairie station in Oklahoma during out upcoming trip across the U.S.  The donor relations woman told me that she would make some calls and we could get a guided tour.  Hope it works out, so I can learn more.
The top picture is my new workplace.  Not bad.  I am way underground, but still in a nice place.  The middle picture is my bike trail and on the bottom is the Nature Conservancy headquarters.

Environmentally friendly FSI

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I went down to FSI today to do a couple of talks.  I spoke first at the Portuguese Department about Brazil.  This is probably that last time I will give a full-out lecture in Portuguese.  My audience was colleagues almost done with their Portuguese language studies and about to go on their assignments.  The other talk I gave was to PAOs headed out to their first posts as PAOs.  I tried to give realistic advice, with the caveat that my experience should be taken in the context of Brazil, which is special.
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FSI has changed and improved.  They have created nice environmental spots you can see in the photos with lots of tall grass and natural looking rain gardens. I liked the cedar meadow.  This would be typical of an old farm field in Northern or Central Virginia in the early stages of natural succession.  This is one of my favorite stages, so full of dynamism and potential.  I really don’t much like manicured lawns and I am pleased – maybe a little surprised that State Department has adopted the more raggedly natural approach.
I rode my old bike down to FSI. It feels off balance, but I will get used to it again.  It is faster than my bike in Brazil and comfortable.  In fact, of all the bikes I have ever owned, this one remains my favorite.  I bought it back in 1997 and put more miles on this bike than any other, mostly on the same W&OD bike trail.  I look forward to many more miles.
BTW – W&OD has also improved.  They now have signs on the road and cars are stopping at the crosswalks.

Last time in Recife

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This is a little late. I did my last visit to my erstwhile post in Recife last week. I visited Recife only three times. It was not like São Paulo or Rio that constantly called for attention.
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One of my goals in Brazil was to get away from the big cities of Rio, São Paulo and Brasília into the rest of Brazil. I will not say the “real” Brazil, since there is no such thing. Each section is real in its own way. São Paulo probably has the biggest claim to be called “real,” since it has so many people and is so productive. But there is a lot more.
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And there are big changes. Brazil used to be the land of Samba and coastal cities; it is now more a country of sertaneja and interior growth.
Before going to Brazil, I wanted to see all that, put my feet on the ground. I succeeded to some extent. I visited a total of eighteen out of the twenty-six states, including the extreme ones like Acre, Rondônia and Roraima. The ones I missed were mostly near Recife. There are lots of smaller states up in the Northeast and I didn’t get there. I thought of making a last run in my last few weeks. I could have hit all of them by driving in a circle from Recife and then just setting a toe into Tocantins & Mato Grosso, the other two I managed to miss. But I thought that was just a false way to do it. So I did not succeed in visiting all the states of Brazil, but I got around a lot.
My picture up top is the beach in Recife.  It is nice that they have grass and trees near the water.  There is less a beach than Rio.  Maybe one of the reasons is those sharks.  Look at that sign. Recife has some kind of special conditions with the reef. Sharks evidently  are kind of herded toward the beach and they come very shallow. They eat a few people and it kind of puts a damper on people’s enthusiasm for swimming.

Planning in public diplomacy

A problem with public diplomacy is the illusion of planning and control. I was looking though my old documents and found an “aspirational statement” from my first month in Brazil. In that statement, I laid out things I wanted to accomplish and thought I could. I talked a little about who would help do it and conditions that would help or hinder. That was it. It was only a page long. I don’t recall ever referring to it again, but I am amazed to the extent that it came true. I acted on those aspirations for the next three years and expanded them. The result was the greatest success of my career.
Contrast that with detailed planning. It takes a lot more time to do than my one page. And it hinders innovation. You try to follow the path. Let me be clear. Engineers need to plan. You need to plan buildings and bridges. You need to make some plans for personnel and you have to plan budgets. But you should not really plan diplomacy in any detail because the challenges and opportunities are unknown and probably unknowable.
Maybe more importantly, good diplomacy requires that we work with partners, whose plans might not mesh with ours and who certainly will not be under our control. Synergy creates something better than just adding our plans together.
We have the QDDR. I am not sure what those initials stand for. I am vaguely aware of what is in the plan. I have never actually read it and don’t plan to read it ever. I had no need to know the detailed contents. I think I know the general aspirations because they are the simple ones we have worked with for many years. I am not saying that all the effort that went into making this document was wasted. Well, let me leave it at that.
We need to abandon the idea that we can plan in detail. It is not only useless; it is pernicious when it allows us to pretend to know more than we do and absolves us too often of the need to apply judgment to what happens.
When I arrived in Brazil, the plan was very different from what we did. Within a month of my arrival, the Brazilian government announced a “Science w/o Borders” program to send Brazilian students overseas to study in the STEM fields. We went all in. I neglected other priorities to take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity. Whatever plans existed were ignored and it was good. By the end of this year, more than 30,000 Brazilians will have studied in the U.S. on this program. We are sending (with Brazilians resources) 1080 secondary teachers of English to the U.S. to study how to teach. Up from 20 in 2011. We have a senior ELF in the ministry of education helping implement English w/o Borders complement to Science w/o Borders and 120 new ETAs deployed around the county. And there is much more. NONE of this was planned or could have been planned in 2011.
Makes you wonder about that planning stuff. I don’t think doing much better would have been possible, although worse was an option.
I had a discussion with a counterpart at another embassy about this. He was approached by the Brazilians about the same time we were asked about sending the 1080 teachers to the U.S. At the time of our discussion, we had already sent our first 540 and the next wave was leaving. He told me that his ministry was “thinking about it and planning.” They still got nothing and nothing is what they will get, but they will look better on paper.
Maybe better to aspire than to plan in detail.
What we need is process, not planning. We need to be ready to take what comes. We should be able to say that I don’t know (and won’t try to predict) exactly what challenges my colleagues and I will face, but I am reasonably sure that we are prepared to face them and can adapt to the changing circumstance. When asked about your plan, repeat the last sentence.
I ask all of you to think about you best tour, your best year, the one that really made your service worthwhile. Did it work out as you planned? Did you know going in what you were doing and who you were going to work with? If we think we control events, we have little chance of success. If we understand our own limitations, our chances improve greatly. Let’s learn to do less planning and more doing.