Category: General Thoughts

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A Cherry Flavored Fleeting Beauty

The cherry trees are in full bloom. It is hard to recall that snow was on the ground just a few weeks ago. Some pictures are included with the post.  The picture at the side shows the bread line from the FDR Memorial. I went down to the cherry trees and visited Roosevelt on the way back.

Cherry blossoms are precious because they are ephemeral.  We know that they will not be there for a long time and we have to enjoy them while we can. We revel in the passing and should not wish the moment to linger beyond its time. They are beautiful precisely because they will not last.

We try to preserve too much. A report this morning on NPR talked about people worried that the world of the Mario Brothers (Donkey Kong) was disappearing. They want to preserve and protect the classic world of games. Just let it go.  We should let a lot of things go. Let them become stuff of memory and then let them slip quietly into oblivion. Nothing lasts forever.

I was reading a book called “False Economy.” The author talked about dead-end strategies and how some things just don’t make it. The example he used was the panda bear.  Besides being cute, they don’t have much going for them. They eat only low nutrition bamboo, which they evidently cannot properly digest, so they have to eat a lot but don’t get much bang for the bite.  Mating is a chore they don’t enjoy and on those rare occasions when they do muster up energy and the urge, there is a good chance nothing will come of it. What is amazing is not that they are endangered but that there are any of them still around at all. A less cute animal would have gone the way of the dodo a century ago.  But pandas have a constituency.  People cried a few weeks ago at the National Zoo when the Chinese took their panda back.

I remember seeing them at the zoo. Well actually, I am not sure I saw them at the zoo. They don’t  move very much. You could just put a fur there and claim it was a panda and nobody would know the difference. They are an evolutionary dead end. People have perhaps hastened their demise, but didn’t change the direction. I tried to think of why it wasn’t true, but I couldn’t. 

BTW – The pictures are much bigger scale. If you want to see more detail, you can go to the source and look at the bigger versions. 

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Decent Folks

 I don’t make a fetish of equality. In fact, I usually value diversity over equality and believe a good system is one that provides opportunities for most people to live meaningful lives in line with their aspirations and talents. This is along the lines enabling the pursuit of happiness, not actually providing happiness or even significantly facilitating it. One reason we cannot advocate ”providing” happiness is that we don’t know what happiness is. Nor can we know, since each person defines it somewhat differently. One thing we do know is that happiness comes from believing your life has some meaning and a meaningful life is often not an easy one. Meaning in life comes from making choices and living with the consequences of them. If you cannot or do not make choices, you are an object and most people don’t want that, no matter how comfortable they might be.

So a good government is one that enables most people to make meaningful choices and create meaningful places for themselves in society. A good society enables most people just to be decent folks. I think we are slipping up on this.

What I don’t like is an increasing tournament mentality, maybe even a lottery mentality. This is a specific type of completion, which is unusually pernicious since it not only features a winner take all (or almost all) finish, but also tolerates or even encourages sabotage and subterfuge.

Competition usually carries with it the notions of winners and losers, but in a broad society base with continuous diverse, you can have different sets of winners based on different skill sets, luck or time. If you find that your skills are not particularly suited to one field, you might go into another. It is possible to have whole different sets of criteria. In a balanced life you will win some and lose some and in a reasonably open opportunity society you can benefit from the innovation and techniques of the winners even when you don’t yourself win. The challenge and response are important. The “final” outcome is less crucial because there is not final outcome. (While competition underlies all human societies (and all animal and plant species as per Darwin) we have modified out some of the more destructive aspects.)

A tournament competition is not like that. In a tournament you go directly against other competitors. Your goal need not to be better in general, you just have to be better than the competition. This is great for games and game shows (like American Idol) but it is hell in real life. Most of us don’t like to be on our game all the time and few of us really like head to head competition. But society is becoming more like a tournament all the time. If I am right that most people don’t want to be involved in a constant tournament, why are we in them more often?

One reason is that some people really DO like the tournament model and they can sometimes force this kind of competition on others. But there have always been such people. Why do the dominate at some times and not others?

IMO they are enabled by several conditions. The first is technological. It is possible for a person to cast a much longer shadow. There is a program out now about life on earth. Oprah Winfield narrates. Why is she narrating this program? Because she can. Oprah does almost everything. She is an actress, a narrator, an editor, a commentator, a talk show host, and she also is just very-very rich. Oprah has beat out the competition in so many areas because technology allows her to be virtually in many places at the same time. She has displaced hundreds or thousands of other narrators, commentators etc in a way that would have not been possible a century ago, when such things usually required actual physical presence and time spent.

The “March King” John Phillip Sousa opposed the rapid spread of phonographs. He feared it would hurt live-performances and virtually kill the “production” of music in the home and he was right. In days past it was common for family members to perform musical programs for guests and each other. Probably most of them were “bad,” but if you rarely heard a “good” one, it was okay. Today your poor little sister has to compete with the world’s best musicians available on recordings that sound even better than the live show. It is no wonder we have all retreated becoming passive listeners, each of us equipped with our own I-Pods. Most of us have lost the tournament, AND we know it.

This goes for arts & performances. It goes for business too and it has gone way beyond mass production. Goods have become more ethereal and sometimes contain almost no physical component. Software is like that. It can be duplicated at almost no cost and sold for significant profits. Beyond that, it true tournament fashion, one software system will come to dominate. There is a “market” for pirated copies of successful software, but there really is no market for a myriad of alternatives. Many people dream of knocking off and replacing Google, but nobody thinks there will be thousands of little locally produced Googles. In the tag line from “Highlander”, there can be only one.

Another driver of this tournament is globalization. This is not the first time the world has seen his. The first globalization I know much about came at the end of the Greek dark ages, around 700BC. Of course, I am using the globalization term generically to say that beginning around that time the Greek world encompassed THE world as far as they cared. There problems were remarkably similar to ours.

One of the biggest problems was growing inequality. Great inequality is impossible as long as you live in a poor, localized environment. There just is not enough total wealth nor the means to accumulate or preserve it. In other words, even if the king owns everything, there is not that much available to own and his capacity to use it is limited. A human can only physically consume so much and it is not possible for the richest guy to eat or drink much more than the poorest ones (presuming they eat enough to stay alive) and besides fat, you really cannot accumulate eating. Globalization brought in luxury goods and changed the equation. Suddenly eating goat meat and drinking goat milk was no longer enough.

What globalization provides is scale. The big fish can grow bigger in a bigger pond. You can see this in the modern world in languages. English the most widespread language in the world, so an author who writes in English can access hundreds of millions of readers with not much variable cost. (More than half the world’s technical and scientific publications are in English, not because they are all written by native English speakers, but because it is the international language. If a Japanese scientist wants to communicate with a German scientist, he does it in English.) An author writing in a language like Norwegian is just out of luck. Even if he becomes “world famous” in Norway, he probably cannot sell more than a half a million copies of his book. The market is just too small. It is just not possible for a writer in Norwegian to become a mega-best seller. But if he taps into the global market, it is possible. That is one reason why so many people write in English. There is a significant network effect. But globalization also leads to the tournament effect.

I don’t think there is much we can do about those things I mentioned above. The ancient Greeks wrested with the problem. There was the example of the Spartans, who successfully localized themselves and kept the changes at bay for a couple of centuries, but while we can admire Spartan martial spirit and vigor, I don’t think we want to pay the price they did. We have to live with a world where Oprah can take the place of thousands of us. But there are things that are within our control.

Most of us are never going to do anything great and almost none of us will be famous for being great because greatness is a zero sum game. Technology and science can give us more stuff, but it cannot give us more greatness in the famous sense. There can be only a limited number of famous people. It is the nature of being famous that the club is very exclusive.

We can go back to the concept of “decent folks.” Being decent doesn’t imply anything extraordinary. It is possible for almost everybody to achieve “decent” status. And you don’t have to be famous, but you do have to have some standards and that requires some “judging.”

I think we have abandoned or even tried to destroy the idea of decency because we have been loath to judge those who didn’t live up to it and we have fallen into the perfection trap. A decent person is not a perfect person. I consider myself a decent person, yet I know I have done or sometimes failed to do some of the decent things. When I realized my error, I sometimes tried to make up for them, but I didn’t always succeed. Nevertheless, on balance I am decent.

Am I hypocritical? Sometimes I am. But I like it that we have hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue and being hypocritical implies that we do indeed have a standard that many of us do not attain, but believe is valuable.

If you apply a standard of decency to fallible humans, you will indeed have some hypocrisy. But consider the alternatives. Do we want the kind of world where a man can cheat on his wife while she is fighting cancer, lie about fathering a child, treat everybody he knows poorly AND not feel he should be ashamed to let people find out about all of this?

BTW – there is a hilarious South Park episode that addresses this kind of thing.

Most people can do the decent thing most of the time. AND most people know what that is most of the time, although there will be some variation among individuals and groups.

I think that happiness comes from self respect – not this self esteem thing we try to “build” among people who might not otherwise have earned it – and self respect comes from having choices and making the decent choices most of the time. Many of those star athletes and wacky celebrities we so often see on their way to detox or apologizing for their latest escapade are rich in self esteem, but lacking totally in self respect. The decent choice is the one you feel good about, even if other people don’t praise you for it. It often means doing the right thing that is hard, rather than the pleasurable thing that you can excuse later.

Unearned success is spiritually corrupting. Who among us would want to be Paris Hilton if you had to BE Paris Hilton in all her goofy glory? When people look back on the good times in their lives, they almost never reminisce about the fat times when somebody gave them something for nothing. It is rather the challenges met and mastered that make us happy. The actual rewards of the accomplishments are often secondary to the choices made. Happiness is earned, not given.

Few of us can be famous and most of us cannot be rich, but all of us have the choice to be decent folks … or not. All of us can pursue happiness and lots of us can catch it. But nobody else can do it for us.

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The Irrational World of Persuasion

I am making a presentation about public affairs at FSI in a few weeks.  It is a short presentation to mid-level officers. Below is some of the raw material thinking I have been doing about irrationality and reciprocity in persuasion. I figure that all of the stuff below will distill into one or two short paragraphs, but thinking it through is useful and I think better when I can write and ramble.  Since I have it written out, I figured I would post it.   

We like to think the truth will always come out, but isn’t necessarily so. Similarly, people are often not persuaded by facts or even their own experience. Persuasion just is not logical in the way we want. 

If people do not always (or even usually) respond rationally to arguments and persuasion, they do tend to respond in recognizable patterns. Marketers and salesmen have known this intuitively – and used it effectively – for many years. Only recently has science or at least academics, recognized and tried to explain the phenomenon. Here are some of the books that talk about that. There is some overlap with a list I made earlier about decision making that you can see at this link. 

I won’t try to convey all the information in all those books on the lists above. Suffice to say that people respond differently to identical sets of propositions or incentives depending on how they are stated, framed or presented and that people’s preexisting predilections, prejudices and perceptions determine not only which arguments are most persuasive but also which facts are considered salient or even heard at all. That is why attempts to “set the record straight” usually only work with those already inclined to believe you. If the bad news is that people do not make decisions rationally, the good news is that they make their irrational* decisions in patterns that can be understood if not perfectly predicted. The bad news that comes after the good news is that these patterns can also be manipulated by those whose motives and goals we abhor, so the lesson is that we are playing this game, whether we like it or not. 

So if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to our success in the Cold War because accurate information was in very short supply. Today in all but the dwindling coterie dictatorships in the world’s most benighted places, information is already available.  It is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives – that counts. As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what even science is beginning to explain. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success. 

The first persuasion decision you have to make is whether or not to engage at all. No matter how urgent a problem, you should not engage unless you have a reasonable chance of success.   There are times for aggressive action, times for more passive approaches and times when you just have to hunker down until conditions improve. It is hard to know when the times or right and even harder to manage the transitions among them, which is why people who are good at knowing make the big bucks and are sought after or reviled (depending on which side they are on). 

There are some folks who say that you should be out there always and they are right that you should never fold entirely if it is something you care about and you have the capacity to stay.  But standing in front of an irresistible wave not only depletes your resources but also makes you less able to fight again another day. It is much better to let the wave expend its energy and then come back in.

Once you are engaged, think of it in a negotiation paradigm, not usually a negotiation between you and an adversary, but more of the win-win with you among a large number of participants.  Most people involved are not direct participants, but they are often the ones you want to persuade.   The committed radicals are not the targets of your persuasion.  There is no argument you can use and no concession you can make that will persuade them.  Your job is to talk over, around or through them.  Luckily, few people are really committed radicals and you can find some common ground with almost anybody.

Let’s talk about common ground. What if you have some monumental disagreement with somebody?  You might think that you cannot make any progress until the big thing is solved and then lament that the big thing is unsolvable. This is the wrong way of looking at it. In negotiations, it might be possible to set aside the big thing and work on a series of mutually beneficial smaller one.   Sometimes the momentum from successfully addressing the little issues makes solving the big one possible.  Just as often, it makes the big issue less relevant.  Most big problems are never “solved” in the context in which they were created. They are just overtaken by events. The situation might change so that it just doesn’t matter.    

Some families have a rule that you cannot discuss religion or politics. They know that agreement on these issues is nearly impossible, that a dialogue will just create more tension and that they can be safely avoided at family gatherings. 

Denial and avoidance are perfectly good tactics. Many things really do not need to be talked through and resolved and much diplomacy involved making sure sleeping dogs are not disturbed.  Not everybody likes this strategy and there will be persistent calls to “get it out in the open”.   There may be a time for this kind of frontal assault, but if dialogue will merely sharpen differences without resolving them and entrench individuals in their positions it is pernicious.  In the case of any contentious issue, there are also always a fair number of people who are professionally aggrieved.  Their goal is to keep the dialogue alive and fresh as long as possible.  In a rational world, dialogue would almost always produce better outcomes, but we don’t live in a perfectly rational world (see above).

If we are wise to avoid the frontal assault, what do we do about hard issues? When possible go around them, avoid the grievance professionals when possible and deny them a forum when you can. In public affairs, as in negotiation, you never want to be stuck on one issue where you cannot divert or make tradeoffs. One of the strengths of diversity is that it waters down grievances. If you have two opposing groups with one intransigent issue, you have a problem. But you have an interesting community if you have a dozen such groups.   

So in addition to denial, add dilution to your public affairs tool box.

Some people think it is naive to talk about win-win negotiation.  They say that somebody has got to come out on top. Avoid such people if possible because working with them will often lead to such an unhappy result. For most other things, however, we can all get more of what we want.  That is the whole basis of free exchange and cooperation in general. People all do not want the same things most things you get from a free exchange will be worth more to you than what you gave up.  The same goes for the guys on the other side and the same goes in persuasion as in negotiation.

The problem comes with the natural and good human desire to be generous. Win-win doesn’t mean giving away more than you should.  It doesn’t mean sacrifice. Those things are lose-win. It means that you get what you want AND I get what I want. Nobody should go into an engagement unless he/she believes that. But we do.

One of the dumbest things you can do is to make needless concessions.  It is not generous to give away your important positions. It is just dumb and it makes nobody really happy. Everybody will think that you are insincere. Either you didn’t really believe in your own position in the first place or you are lying about your concession, or –even worse – you are patronizing. There are to be a mutuality, a reciprocity.

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. You want to be able to give to your fellow man and expect that he will do the same when you are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if you don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. You might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected.  At first they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor.  And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.

A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give.  Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. You notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts you can receive is advice and knowledge.  Let others share their culture and experience.

I have had my biggest successes in public affairs when I genuinely wanted to learn something. My first assignment when I got to Poland a few years back was to write a report on the Polish media. I interviewed dozens of reporters, editors and academics and they became my best contacts, often sending me updates or referring to my questions even months and years later. The most influential thing you can often do with an individual is listen carefully to what they tell you and come back a while later being honestly able to say, “I was thinking about what you said and you were right.” This interest cannot be easily faked.  I have been “played” by people who have taken the course and try to feign interest in my esoteric pursuits or ask my advice. When they praise the insights, but repeatedly fail to act on them, trust disappears. Of course, maybe I have run into people who are just so good at it that I couldn’t tell.  I suppose that would be successful persuasion.

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*   I use the term “irrational” cautiously. “Rational” decision making is overrated and under examined. We make decisions based on a variety of preferences and emotional factors, some of which we cannot state. When they are reduced to their “rational” components, they may no longer make sense. There are things that really cannot be reduced to rational parts. The lyrics to “Some Enchanted Evening” actually sum it up well, “Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” Or we can quote GK Chesterton “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” If we seek only rational decisions, a computer can do it for us much better than we can.

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Thoughts on Cars and Trucks

I was part of a new car design survey today. I think that they chose me as part of the control group that knew nothing about cars. I filled out a survey about the kinds of criteria I would use in buying a new car. 

Then I went in and saw about a dozen new car designs.   Evidently they were Volkswagens, Hondas, Toyotas and Chryslers.   We were asked to evaluate each car in terms of looks, interiors etc.   Most of the cars were too small inside, IMO.  I like the feeling of my Honda Civic.  Although the car is small, it has a lot of room in the driver’s seat.  A lot of the bigger cars don’t really have that feel.

I don’t really care much about cars.  I want one that is reasonably safe and comfortable and one that gets good mileage.   Other than that, I cannot tell much about them.   As part of the survey I had to guess what kind of car we were looking at.  I don’t think I did very well. 

I watched an old movie “Convoy” with Kris Kristofferson. It was made in 1978 when the price of gas had gone up and the 55 MPH speed limits were imposed.  There were a few movies like this that portrayed the anger associated with the perceived loss of the freedom of the open road.  “Smokey and the Bandit” was another one like this, a lot of law breaking and destruction of property. 

I wanted to be a long-distance truck driver once. I was an indifferent student when I started college and didn’t see much future in that.  When I worked a Medusa Cement, the truck drivers seemed to have it best.  They got out on the road, while we just loaded the bags of cement on their trucks. I would not have been a good truck driver. It is a subset of the general driving thing and my lack of love of cars (mentioned above) is probably an indicator that it is not one of my strengths.  

The 1970s were the tail end of the trucker golden age anyway.  Traffic was getting worse.  Speed limits were coming down and generally the open road was disappearing.  Everything is a lot more organized now and much less of an adventure.

The 1970s was also the time when containerized cargo changed shipping in general.  It put a lot of truckers and longshoremen out of jobs.   That really revolutionized commerce. 

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Like Riding a Bike

Today I got all the way to work w/o getting a flat tire or crashing into anything.   It was a great first (well second) day for my bike-to-work season.  It is true that you never forget how to ride a bike.  The old muscle memories jump back into line – just not as efficiently as the end of last season.  I expect to be a little stiff tomorrow because I am already a little stiff today.

Below is the almost done building at Waterfront Mall.

There have been suggestions at State Department that we should subsidize bike riding.  It is a silly idea. Frankly, I don’t want to share my bike path with anybody who has to be paid to be there.  It is a joy to bike.  You just need bike friendly facilities.  My building is very good.  We have a locker room with showers.   You really don’t want to sit all day at work after riding an hour on a bike w/o a shower, nor do you want to sit next to anybody else who has done it.  Modern technology has made looking neat easy.  I bring along a wrinkle free shirt.  These things are great.  100% cotton, comfortable and always pressed.  Even if you stuff it into a bag, and I literally stuff it into a Ziploc freezer bag, all you need do to make them look a pressed as the best iron could made them is to put them on while you are still damp. 

I cut through Fort Meyer and Arlington Cemetery. I also ride past the Lincoln Memorial, in sight of the Washington Memorial and the Capitol.  It is a very patriotic bike ride.

Our operation at work is in stand down mode.  President Obama has postponed his trip to Indonesia, originally scheduled for March 19, then March 21 and now sometime in June. (He has to stick around for the heath care final act.) There were lots of plans and preparations and people had cleared their calendars for the visit. Now, for a brief time, there will be … nothing. It is like the scene in the movie “Cool Hand Luke” where everybody works at top speed and then they get to the end of the road and there is nothing left to do.  I wasn’t much involved with it, actually, but my colleagues were working full-out. They deserve the rest.

Our business is like that.  We spend a lot of our time in frenetic activity that is overtaken by later events. I guess life is like that sometimes in general, a tale, told by an idiot, fully of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But who cares if you can bike to work in the pleasant warm air and sunshine, preferably with a little tail wind. This is going to be a glorious spring. Spring is always nice around there, but usually we get a few flowers at a time. They kind of ration their beauty.  But atypical cold and snowy winter has held back the flowers, which will now burst forth at once in a rare display of unity.

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Stuck in a Dead End

I tried to start my bike season today and ended up with a flat tire. It was my own fault.  After many years of riding my bike, I still cannot properly change a tire. I “fixed” my bike yesterday and I think I just got the inner tube caught on the rim. It just needed a little pressure to blow out. I wasn’t too far from home, so I could walk back in around a half hour. It was not a complete loss. The walk was really nice and I had a chance to think about a few things.

What I thought about was Nash equilibrium. I can’t say I am an expert on the details, but as I understand the simple version, Nash proved mathematically what we perceive intuitively but imperfectly. It is possible to have stability at a situation that is bad and everyone agrees is bad.  However, each person makes perfectly logical choices that lead to this outcome.    

The way that it works is that if almost everybody makes the “good” choice (call it choice A), they are all better off.   But if not enough people make that choice (they choose choice B), those that choose A suffer more than those who make the bad choice (B).  So everybody tries to figure out what the majority will do, while complaining about the stupidity of the herd. These sorts of equilibria have tipping points.  If enough people come to think others will choose outcome A, they all will pile on. The same goes for the other option.

Nash, BTW, is the guy played by Russell Crowe in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” The real Nash won the Noble Prize for his work in mathematical economics. If you study game theory, you have to study Nash.

The example of a Nash equilibrium I thought about on my morning walk was traffic and blocked roads.  Northern Virginia has horrible traffic problems. Many of them result from the stupid way streets are laid out.  Unlike a logical grid layout you find in many cities, Northern Virginia’s road system looks more like a river drainage basin, with dead end tributaries flowing into larger and larger streets. There might be only one – usually winding – road that you can use to get where you want to go. Parallel streets, if they exist at all, are blocked or dead ended.

I think that the original road system was based on cow paths and Indian trails. We have Braddock Road, which is the course that General Braddock took to Pennsylvania during the French and Indian wars. Since he insisted on building a road, the French and Indians saw him coming and wiped him out.  George Washington saved some of the troops and it was the start of his good reputation.

Onto the cow path system was appended a system of cul-de-sacs and dead end streets.  This is where the Nash equilibrium starts to play. People prefer to live on quiet streets and the best way to ensure a quiet street it to make sure that it doesn’t go anywhere. So builders and planners create neighborhoods with no-through streets. This means that you might have to drive ten miles to travel one mile if you could go straight. It also throws all the traffic onto a few overcrowded roads.  

I walked home along Sandburg Street. It parallels Gallows Road, which is gridlocked at the time I was walking.But there were no cars on Sandburg. That is because you cannot get there from here in a car.  Sandburg has a dead end right in the middle. This is what you see on the picture. The wide and well paved road comes to an end in a patch of grass around five yards wide. It has been this way a long time, because some trees have grown in. Then it starts again. I am sure this was originally a real dead end.  Now they cannot make it grow through because the local residents will complain. There are lots of place like this in Northern Virginia.  Everybody agrees that we would all be better off if we could spread the traffic and drive the shorter distances. But nobody wants to give up his own quiet street.

BTW – Did you hear the story about the guy asking for directions? He asked an old man, “Does this road go to Chicago?” They old man replied, “No. I have lived here all my life and I have never seen it go anywhere.”

So the State keeps on widening the roads. The irony is that they widen the empty roads too.  As you can see in the picture, Sandburg is a fairly wide road, considering it doesn’t really go anyplace.  At least this road has a place where pedestrians and bikes can get through. Most don’t even do that because everybody wants privacy.

There is no way out of this equilibrium. You might say that we have reached a dead end.

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Work-Life Balance

Balancing work and the rest of your life is never easy. An NPR story on results-only work environments reminded of that.  I once ran a unit with around forty-five professionals, most of whom telecommuted a couple days a week and since my current staff and I enjoy flexible work arrangements, I think I can add something to the debate.  

Telecommuting and flexible hours can work well and increase productivity and morale at the same time, always a plus, but whether or not you can have flexible hours or work at home first of all depends on what you do.  Of course, if you work in a factory or a construction site, if you are a farmer or a fireman, you have to go to a specific work site.  We are mainly talking about jobs connected using Internet. 

One of my challenges in managing ROWE (I will call it by NPR’s term, which is better and more inclusive) was perceived fairness.  Jobs where people can work by themselves or collaborate online are easy candidates for ROWE.  But some jobs require actual physical presence.  In most offices, those jobs tend to fall near the top and the bottom of the organizational chart.  Let’s start near the top.

A big part of management and leadership is just being there and being seen.  Another is making personal connections, sometimes through the simple serendipity of being there. The now classic business book, “In Search of Excellence,” talked about management by walking around.   All great leaders know this intuitively and most good managers want to do it. Leaders also know that if they are not seen, they may not be heard from again. But sometimes when you promote an excellent worker to a management position he/she thinks it is unfair to ask him/her give up the ROWE.  Actually, leaders are always living in a ROWE and their results generally are produced in person. On the other end, you have people who must do actually physical work.  Most obvious are people who clean things or set things up.  In my case, I had people who had to physically assemble outreach packets etc.  They complained that they could not telecommute, mentioning the injustice of it all.  You can see the problem from their point of view.  They are often paid less than average and have difficult time juggling work and family responsibilities. But there is nothing you can do for them except encourage them to try to get one of the jobs that has ROWE.   I found, however, that some don’t want those jobs either, because of the added responsibility, which leads me to the next aspect – responsibly.

ROWE requires greater self discipline on the part of the worker.  There are some people who just cannot handle it and I had to suspend some privileges.  But perhaps the trickier problem comes from those who work TOO hard.  They never really clock off.  For a while, I used to check my blackberry before bed and send off a few messages.  I was often surprised to get immediate responses from people still working.  Maybe they were just doing what I was doing, but I suspect not, since my inquiries were unusually one line reminders, while the responses I got for them took real work.  I used to have to tell them to stop working to avoid burn out.  AND I had to stop sending messages after 7pm or before 7am and tell others to do the same.  If people think the boss is working, some of them will work too, no matter what you tell them. 

The irony is that you have to lead by lazy example.  I “work” around ten hours a day, but in the middle of that day, I usually find time to run or take a walk. I find that it actually increases my effectiveness and not only because it makes me feel better. So much of our work is now online collaboration. It makes sense to send something out and then get lost so that others can do their parts in peace.  You often don’t add value by hanging around and can actually subtract some. ROWE has some interesting social and organizational implications. I am not sure if it strengthens or weakens the power of the employee or the power of the organization. A bad boss can become a tyrant by demanding 24/7 responses. On the other hand, employees can more easily ignore him. I suppose a lot depends on the relative power of each going in. 

It will save companies some money. I thought of using “hotelling” where ROWE employees share office space on the assumption that everybody won’t be there at any one time. I didn’t get very far with this and had to back off.  But it will come. It doesn’t make sense to have a whole suite of empty offices. Future office buildings will feature more open and common space to handle the surges, but less daily personal space. I believe in ROWE for myself and others.   

But not all mangers like ROWE.  Some personality types just like to have people around to boss. I have to admit that I sometimes feel a little lonely when I walk past empty offices, but it is the way more and more firms will be organized in future.

People will do things in a decentralized way.  In fact, we have already outsourced many of our routine tasks, such as most copying and compiling.  FedEx, UPS or the Post Office can now do most of your logistics. Cloud computing will take care of your data processing and there are firms that will handle all your HR functions.  Maybe we will all become firms of one or two people, teaming up with others on an ad-hoc basis and cooperating and connecting via communications technologies.

I remember more than twenty-five years ago I heard a motivational speaker say that everybody was in business for himself.   He explained that nobody takes care of you as well as you take care of yourself.  You had the responsibility to keep yourself current and trained by seeking education.  You had to make sure your skills were up to date and that you have access to everything you need.  You couldn’t count on your employer to do that, he said.  We were effectively our own company that sold our serviced to our employer(s).  I thought he meant it metaphorically, but he was right in very concrete ways.  We should all think of ourselves as a company that we own and manage and ask whether we would buy stock in ourselves and whether our work-life balance makes it the kind of place we want to live and work. 

If not, maybe a little R&D is in order.

BTW – the picture on top shows the first magnolias blooming near the Red Cross. 

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We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

We cannot patent ideas. Patents can protect only the physical manifestations of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This makes sense from a practical legal point of view. But we think of technology too narrowly when we concentrate on equipment and machines that make our world so different from that of our parents. A technology also refers to the human skills, habits and even cultures that help us solve problems and achieve our goals. These broader aspects of technology often explain why physical technologies sometimes fail to transfer or fail to flower outside their places of origin.  When we sell somebody a computer, we just are not transferring the whole technology, even if we have included the latest software. 

Misunderstanding of the breadth of technologies is an important reason why we fail to understand other contemporary cultures or people of other ages.  We tend to think that they are just like us only wearing funny clothes or that they are so different as to be almost a different type of human. Both these formulations are wrong.  Human nature remains similar, but it is amplified, altered or attenuated by technologies available and used. 

Physical technologies are easy to see.  An ordinary person in a culture that has developed automobiles can move many times faster than the fastest runner of one that has not. Intellectual technologies are harder to see, but can convey similar advantages. For example, the greatest mathematician of 1000 years ago could not pass a high school math course. Many of the quantitative techniques we use were just not invented. There was no calculus back then.  Statistics were in the alchemy stage. Even those calculation tables were not around.  Would it be possible to think as clearly about physics or engineering if you just didn’t have those mathematical and calculation tools? 

If I can indulge a little with my own experience (since this is my blog post), I can explain a growth of technologies and how it affects skills. I graduated with my MBA in 1984.  I am certain that I could not have gotten an MBA at all in 1974 and I believe that by 1994 (or today) I would have an easier time in school.  The reason is the presence and removal of limiting factors.  I cannot do arithmetic.  Arithmetic is not the same as math, but until calculators became common nobody could handle higher math unless he was also passably good at the simple skill of “ciphering.”  In 1974 sophisticated calculators were not available or affordable. Ten years later they were. Calculators are good; computers are better. By 1994, computer programs were commonly available that easily could do regression comparisons and multivariate analysis.   

These improvements in technology removed the tedium and routine repetitive work and allowed us to use our brains in more innovative ways. We used to think of intelligence in terms of ability to remember a lot of facts and do quick calculations. (I call it the Spock trap.)  These are things that machines now do for us most of the time.  In humans we now treasure the kind of intelligence that can make intuitive and creative leaps. Technology removes a limiting factor and makes the next step possible.

There are less obvious advances. One of the most important is in the realm of organization.  The Framers of our constitution studied political systems ancient and (to them) modern, but they found no example of a successful large republic or one with consistently peaceful transitions of executive power over long periods. That is because there weren’t any. Humans had not yet created that experience.  Our Constitution is based on Greek and Roman models leavened by the practical experience of British practices supplemented by examples from elsewhere.  (A big failing of the Romans is that they never solved the chief executive succession problem. We were forewarned and did a good job with that.)

James Madison’s or Alexander Hamilton’s reading list was impressive, but all the experience of the 19th and 20th Centuries, when many new forms of governance were tested in real world situations was unavailable to them since it still was in the future. (A good book about the thinking that went into the U.S. Constitution is Novus Ordo Seclorum by Forest MacDonald) Imagine trying to explain political theory w/o being able to reference anything that happened after 1787 and you will begin to understand their handicap.

How about economics?  The guys who wrote the Constitution could have read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but all the economic theory and experience with markets on which we now depend were still in the future.  It is amazing how well Hamilton did w/o those things or examples. In my own lifetime, we have seen a revolution in our understanding of economics, with various intellectual technologies, such as behavior economics and new means of measurement.  It is now much easier to understand what and why people are acting in the economic realm.  

We all stand on the shoulders of giants of the past and it is no disrespect to them or foolish pride on our parts to acknowledge that our position gives us greater vision than they enjoyed.  I am always struck by the incongruous combination of sophistication and short-sightedness among the masters of the past.  Plato and Aristotle struggled with concepts that we can easily address because they and others have shown us the way.  It is churlish of us to look down on their mistakes but silly to ignore them.  No intelligent modern man could base his philosophy on Plato any more than a modern doctor could stop his study with Hippocrates or a physicist could understand the universe by studying Thales. But we owe much of our modern understanding to the starts they gave us.

So,  we can talk about physical, intellectual, scientific, cultural and organizational technologies. But I think there have also been improvements in moral technology. I know this is controversial and I am not saying that most people have become morality better; I am saying that ordinary people have access to a better “moral technology,” which give even ordinary people access to moral power that only the most fortunate had in the past.  That is not to say they use the power wisely any more than a driver of a fast car necessarily puts all the horsepower to good use. 

As somebody who loves the classics, I treasure the ancient texts. I know that people will remind me that Aristotle addressed ethics, almost 2400 years ago and we have had access to the Bible for nearly 2000 years.  What has improved?   Most important, IMO, is that more people can think about these issues.  We have greater literacy and much greater access to the great books. We have also expanded our experience to include the wisdom of a greater variety of cultures. We also have the benefit of thousands of years of experience. We could claim that the clash of cultures in the Roman world was every bit as real as we face today, but never before has the contact been so rapid or intimate. In times before significantly before our own, news and people moved only as fast as a horse could walk or at best a ship could sail with a good wind. Most people lived their entire lives within a few miles of the places they were born. People simply did not have the diversity of experiences we do today.  

It is a lot easier to believe a set of morals is THE only truth if you never meet any good or intelligent person with a conflicting or contrary opinion. Moral or ethical awareness improves and develops when challenged to address new experiences, different ideas and diverse people. 

There is also the accumulated effect of experience. The knowledge of the Holocaust and a visit to Auschwitz will certainly affect a moral calculation. Some of the ends justifying the political means or “collective” will so completely overriding the priorities of individuals makes much less moral sense if you know about the Gulags.  

So we have to be realistic. We don’t expect that a man with a hammer and chisel can beat a steam drill (remember the John Henry story). Technology multiplies the power of human muscle. It also can multiply the power of human intelligence and improve human thinking and judgment. This is hard to believe. We like to think that the great thinkers of the past, or of other cultures w/o some of our technologies of thought, would be able to fit right into our intellectual context, but it is unlikely. Besides to obvious historical excitement, I think it an able modern scholar would be disappointed with a technical discussion with Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Pythagoras or Leonardo da Vinci. We have “conversed” with them already through their writings and have developed further their best ideas in light of knowledge and experience they could not have.

I have had this disappointing experience on a smaller and modern scale on several occasions when I have met authors whose work I admire.  Many times, their knowledge of their topic peaked on the day they finished the book I read and loved. It makes sense. They poured themselves into what they wrote and after that forgot some of the details, maybe they moved on to something else.  Of course, it is often very interesting to learn about their subsequent ideas, but that is another story.

Think of it this way. Most of us try to improve ourselves and learn new things. If you take a rigorous course of study, are you better before or after … or are you just the same? If you don’t feel you can improve, you would be foolish to spent the effort. And if you believe you are better after the learning (internalizing the new intellectual technology) you must also understand that someone w/o access to what you learned would be in the same situation you were before you became more enlightened.

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Where No Man Has Gone Before

There are 120+ little boys for every 100 little girls in China & Northern India. This is because baby girl fetuses are aborted and newborn baby girls are killed in the quest for sons. When the boys get old enough to care, they will find a female shortage. The world has never experienced anything like this before. What will be the social ramifications? Imbalances in the other direction are common. Men have been killed disproportionately in hazardous occupations and in wars. After a big conflict or in some particularly warlike societies, there might be two or three times as many women as men. This was one of the justifications for polygamy and that adaption meant that within very broad boundaries the smaller number of males made no difference in the reproductive success of the population. In these situations, one man is able and usually willing to do the work or three or five. It doesn’t work like that for women. Young men are responsible for most of the violence in any given society and they don’t settle down until they have established themselves in relationships with females. Evolutionary theory explains this very well. They are wild and crazy because they are competing for reproductive success, even if our modern societies sublimate and mask what is going on. Even if we forget about the Darwinian aspects of this situation, the social ramifications are significant.

In 2020, there will be 30-40 million more Chinese men than women in the age groups when they care about those things. For comparison, there are only 23 million boys below the age of twenty in Germany, France and UK combined. That means that essentially China will have more than the whole young male population of these countries w/o girlfriends. Worldwide the estimate is that there will be something like 90 million more men at the key reproductive ages by 2020.

What happens when there are lots of men and not many women? In Roman history, we have the rape of the Sabine women, where young men of Rome just went out and kidnapped women from neighboring tribes. This, in fact, is the way the problem has been handled until modern times. But in these cases they were talking about local shortages.

There is some hope that this will be a passing trend and in the long run relative scarcity will improve the status of women. Already in India dowry prices are falling. Women may be able to get a better deal if there are many more men available.

In the classic movie, “Casablanca”, the French Captain Louis Renault chides Rick Blaine (the Humphrey Bogart character) for not paying proper attention to a female admirer. “How extravagant you are throwing away women like that. Someday they may be scarce,” Louis says. Maybe he was right, just a little ahead of the time.

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Energy: Cheaper in the Long Run

Technology is amazing. In the last few years, new technologies have vastly increased American reserves of natural gas and are making North Dakota a leading oil producer, so much for peak oil. The term “game changers” is thrown around in both these cases. I might paraphrase the Godfather about fossil fuel, “Just when we think we’re out, technology pulls us back in.”

Environmentalists have been predicting the end of the age of hydrocarbons ever since I was a kid. Their predictions have a kind of plaintive, even pathetic tone, sometimes a hopeful one. Actually, the resource depletion prediction is a lot like the old Malthusian predictions and wrong for the same reasons. They have consistently made their predictions by simply projecting past trends forward and assuming limited technological progress. In other words, they underestimated the power of human intelligence, innovation and imagination. As Yogi Berra used to say, “Predicting is hard, especially about the future.” It is just impossible to predict discontinuous changes but we are usually aware of things that could go wrong with what we already have.

Back in the 1970s experts predicted that by now, or more commonly by around 1980 or 1990. Yet we persist. Usually such successes would be all to the good. We really don’t have to worry about running out of energy and we can probably expect real energy prices to drop in the next decade. What is not to like? Nothing, except the potential problems of global warming. The problem with switching to alternative energy is price. It has always been price and will always be price. Until people talk about price, it’s only some people talking. As long as fossil fuels are cheaper, they will be preferred. Why would a rational person choose to pay more to get less convenience? Petroleum based fuels such as diesel and gasoline, for example, are nearly perfect fuels for a car. They are very dense (i.e. a lot of energy per gallon. Hydrogen has more energy per pound, but it has such low density that takes up more than three times the space; ethanol is much denser than hydrogen, but not as dense as gasoline and less efficient). Natural gas is great for stationary energy production. It is very clean burning, easily distributed via underground pipes & remarkably efficient.

So let’s be clear. The reason we rely so much on fossil fuels is that they are generally cheaper than the alternatives, convenient to use, easily produced and readily available. When you pit low price, convenience and availability against something that cost more & is harder to use, which do you think wins most of the time? This is the place for some government intervention in the form of a carbon tax . Prices of carbon based fuels will naturally DECLINE as technology increases exploitable reserves. As the prices of carbon based fuels declines in real dollar terms relative to other products, we should tax them back up. The ratchet is a relatively painless way to phase the tax in.

Lest this become merely another source of tax and government waste, we should make this a revenue neutral venture. A good idea here is tax plus dividend. Whereby ALL of the new taxes collected on carbon would be paid out the individual Americans as dividends. To make it simple, every American man, woman or child alive on Dec 31 would get a check for whatever the tax revenue divided by the population. I would make this clean and honest. Everybody gets an equal piece of the action.  I  don’t think politicians will go for it, since it cuts out their opportunities to turn the money to their own purposes, but it is a good idea and if we are serious about addressing climate change, raising the price is one of the only things that really work.