Category: General Thoughts

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Espen’s Orientation at George Mason

We took Espen to his orientation at George Mason.   It is a fast growing up-and-coming place and the orientation reflected that.   Mariza’s orientation at the University of Virginia was all about tradition.  In case anybody didn’t know, they reminded us that Thomas Jefferson founded the place and we heard a lot about the famous things and people associated with the University of Virginia.  Not so George Mason.  It is a young institution with more future than past.

George Mason University was founded in 1957 as a branch of the University of Virginia, designed to soak up some of the students in growing Northern Virginia and was mostly a commuter and part timer school for a long time.   It became an independent institution in 1972 and was named after George Mason because he lived in the neighborhood a couple hundred years ago; there is no other connection besides the statue below and the name.   

It has improved a lot and benefits from its primo location in the Washington metro area. Today it is is strong in applied science, economics and law with more than 30,000 students.

Espen is majoring in computer engineering.  The dean made a very good presentation, but he had an easy hand to play.    Evidently the graduates of the engineering school don’t have very much trouble in the job market and there are lots of opportunities with local firms.   The current economic downturn will probably be over by the time Espen graduates.  

One of his colleagues in the department is called Phuc Dang. Tough name to have, but I suppose it is memorable and maybe useful for a guy who works with computers. You don’t have to tell people which technician to call.  When your computer crashes, just say “Phuc!” followed if you want by “Dang” and help is on the way. 

Above is one of the original boundary stones of the District of Columbia.    It is now well into Virginia.  I don’t know the exact sequence of events, but evidently the Feds weren’t using the land so Virginia got it back.  The City of Arlington more or less encompasses the old Federal district in Virginia.

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History Doesn’t Repeat, but it May Rhyme

I love my American heritage of freedom and I believe, maybe naively, that liberty is the natural state of humankind, even if most humans still do not enjoy it and we face real world constraints on our actions worldwide. 

In the 1980s, the communist empires were cracking.  President Reagan needed to negotiate with the regimes withholding freedom from the people of Eastern Europe, but he also never forgot whose side we were on.    We negotiated with the rulers, but stood with the people.  Many people in the U.S. questioned this stand.   They said it was empty rhetoric at best, or maybe even dangerous.  

What we say matters.  The people of Eastern Europe did not consider it empty rhetoric and it turned out that we achieved greater arms reductions and security than anybody imagined before, so it was neither empty nor dangerous.   President Reagan quoted a Russian proverb, “trust but verify.”   There could be a corollary, negotiate but don’t forget your values and remember that the ruling regime is not the people. 

Today the Iranian people are boldly standing up to the regime that has oppressed them for thirty years.   Some are dying at its hands, and yet they persist.   The rulers of Iraq are more ruthless than the Polish communists were in the 1980s, but the principle is the same.   Our place is with the people of Iran.  They are not asking that we intervene or meddle.  They just want us to state unequivocally where our own values and ideals stand.   If we didn’t do the right thing in 1953, maybe we can do the right thing now.

It was twenty years ago THIS MONTH that Poles elected a non-communist government.   Most pundits thought it was a silly dream that would just be crushed, as communist authorities had crushed these sorts of things before.   But it endured.   The crack in the communist wall that started in Poland spread throughout the whole benighted region.    Five months later the Berlin Wall, that horrible symbol of hate and oppression that had stood for almost thirty years, was torn down by the people.   Two years after that, the Soviet Union just dissolved and communism, which had ruled so ruthlessly for generations died with a whimper so small that we weren’t even sure it was dead.  

I know a lot less about Iran that I do about Poland and I don’t want to overdo the historical parallels.    But I do believe that if history does not repeat, it often rhymes.    The Iranians are heirs to the ancient Persian traditions of learning and tolerance.   In many ways the Mullahs are an alien anomaly that doesn’t fit the illustrious Iranian culture any more than communism fit Poland.   Stalin said that imposing communism on Poland as like trying to put a saddle on a cow.  He didn’t mean it as a compliment and he did indeed impose it anyway, but culture does matter and old habits have a way of reasserting themselves, especially habits of the heart.  Persian states, ancient, medieval and modern were often models of tolerance, learning and good government of their times.  It was Cyrus the Persian who ended the Babylonian captivity of the Jews.   Let’s hope the Persian habits of tolerance and openness are indeed habits of the heart.   And let’s make sure we know – and they know and the world knows – that we stand for their freedom and ours.  

BTW – since this is so many a Internet-reported affair, you can support the people of Iran by asking Google to make their daily logo reflect the Iranian struggle. 

Also please check out these pictures.

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Twitter as a Broadcast Medium

Twitter all the rage today because of its ostensible (Twitter, BTW, is not available on mobile platforms in Iran) role in the Iranian political mess.  It is certainly helping keep the outside world informed and involved in events there and making it harder for the regime to engage in the bloody repression of earlier days.   A colleague told me that he was seeing hundreds of tweets a minute about Iran, many complaining bitterly that MSM such as CNN was not paying enough attention to the story.   Because of and through the new media, with Twitter in the lead, the whole world is watching as events unfold.  It is not doubt exciting, but let’s think about Twitter and how it works. According to an article I read recently, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is ONE.  What this means is that most people sign up for the service and then either don’t use it at all or use it passively.      Of course the median is not the average, which is much higher because it is driven up by big users.   (Remember that in a group of 99 individuals making $10,000 a year plus Bill Gates, the median income is still only $10,000, but the average man in the group has a net worth of around $400,000,000.)  This divergence suggests that Twitter is not really an interactive social media platform.   It is more correctly a species of broadcaster.   That is how it is being used in Iran, for example.   People inside are using Twitter to broadcast information out.   

So far Twitter’s main success has been as a marketing tool for firms and celebrities.   Ashton Kutcher is the record holder with more than two million followers on Twitter.  You can see why this is so attractive to celebrities.  Their goal is awareness.    Broadcast is unsurpassed at creating massive awareness.  This might make it a very useful tool for public affairs.  We need some kind of inexpensive broadcast tool and perhaps the constrained nature of the messages (140 characters) is not a significant problem for some sorts of messages.  It is a lot like a headline service. 

Public diplomacy, however, is not really in the headline business and our goal usually goes beyond awareness.   I argued, way back in 2001, that we are not really even in the information business anymore.    We are in the knowledge business (information is not knowledge) and we are in the relationship business (relationships are reciprocal).   Twitter can help us take care of business as long as we recognize what we are getting when we tweet on Twitter and recognize the natural power and limitations of what is today and likely will remain a short message broadcasting service.

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Espen Graduates

Espen graduated today.   Our last kid is now graduated.   He will study computer engineering at George Mason University this fall.   Espen has done well in school and I believe he will do well in life. He has an internship at Lockheed-Martin over the summer.  It will give him great experience. 

A graduation like this is bittersweet.   I am proud of my boy and glad that he is well on his way as an adult, but I miss the child and the baby I held.   Time flies.

I was happy with the public schools the kids attended.   George C Marshall is a good HS and the kids got a good education there. They held the graduation at the same place as Alex’s, at DAR Constitution Hall.  This is the link from Alex’s graduation.  Alex & Espen have been working out as you will see when you compare the pictures.

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Dealing with Domestic Extremists

I have noticed that sometimes when people who don’t like each other sit down together to talk about their differences, they like each other even less.   This is also a conclusion by Cass Sunstein, although he is a little more equivocal in his statement of the situation.   I recently finished his bestselling book called Nudge, so I respect his opinion, especially when it tracks with mine. 

Sunstein’s research finds that when extremists are in groups with each other, their opinions become even more extreme and moderates are drawn to more extreme positions.   He finds that when extremists are in groups with people from the other side, their opinions also become more extreme.    People come with their ideas ready and simply mine information to support them.  

Seems a pretty bleak situation, but it makes sense.   Dialogue doesn’t always or even usually lead to reconciliation.   Look at the various groups that have been engaged in dialogue for many years w/o result.    It is like Woody Allen going to the psychotherapist.   There is a lot of talk but no change.  And yet, change does happen.   People come together.   Why?  How?

I think we underestimate the value of avoidance and denial.    In negotiations, you never want to get down to only ONE sticking point because once you get there it is just a wrestling match to see who can win.   You are better off with a broad range of interests that can be traded and modified.    The goal is to avoid the really hard decision until so much else has been accomplished that it doesn’t matter as much.  Maybe it is possible to avoid it entirely.   

This logic goes against the naive intuition expressed more or less in the statement, “If we cannot agree on the important points, what is the point of doing anything else.”   Experience, however, indicates that this is often the only way to make progress.   People become more reasonably when they have more at stake and when they are engaged over a broader, if shallower, front.

Getting to a happy result is actually hampered by too much care and respect and it can be hard to get to the broader definition w/o seeming to trivialize the “big issue.”   (Sure we disagree about religion, but can’t we agree that we both like Coca-Cola?)  Of course, one reason it is hard not to seem to be trivializing the big issue is because we are indeed trying to trivialize the big issue or at least shunt it to the margins where it won’t cause so much trouble.   You really don’t have to bring it out.

A couple decades ago, human relations were damaged by the idea of catharsis – that you had to expose and express your feelings of fear, anger or hate.   Recent studies have indicated that those who express these sorts of negative emotions just feel them stronger.   In other words, the more you express your anger the angrier you get as a person.    You are better off derailing it to the extent possible.   The same goes for a lot of problems.

I saw a documentary about the late Bart the bear.  Bart was the grizzly bear you saw in movies.  He was usually roaring.   They said that in real life he just opened his mouth.   They dubbed in the sound later, because if he really roared in anger he REALLY got angry and that is not a good thing when you are talking about a grizzly bear.   We are not so far removed from this kind of feeling ourselves.

When someone engages in actual violence and breaks the law, we have to come down on them hard and not ask about the “root cause.”   Some people just have to be removed.  But everything short of that maybe we should just lighten up.   Confront extremism with tolerance and humor, but with as little respect as possible.    Try to shunt it aside, obfuscate and dilute.   Toleration and avoidance is NOT acceptance.  The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference.   The best way to neutralize extremism is not to defeat it head on but to make it irrelevant. 

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Arlington Courthouse

These are a few pictures from the Courthouse-Clarendon area of Arlington.     When I first came into the FS, I used to walk through this area.   There were a lot of little restaurants, some pawn shops and a lot of construction.    It is very nice now.   They made a lot of progress in twenty years and Arlington has done a very good job of transit oriented development.  

This is the memorial tree to the boys of Arlington killed in World War I.  Of course, back then they only had one world war so it didn’t have a number.  It says the tree was planted in 1923.  It doesn’t seem old enough.  I wonder if it was replaced.

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ONE Common Man v THE Common Man

The interactive or social media is the future of public diplomacy, but it has the capacity to lead us down lots of blind alleys.  Much of this aimless wandering can be avoided if we just don’t make the error of mistaking ONE common person for THE common person.  Let me explain.

We group things and people in order to simplify and understand our world and we use shorthand phrases, such as the people of country X to describe very large groups that may have little in common with each other.    Marketers, politicians and public diplomacy professional want to reach THE people. The trouble is there is no such thing.  No matter the rhetoric, smart marketers, politician & PD practitioners know this.  That is why we study polling and demographic data.  We try to segment the audience in terms that make sense for our persuasion job. 

We know that in any given population, only a small percentage of the people really care about any particular issue enough to get the facts or develop opinions about it and an even smaller number will leverage the opinions of the larger population.  These influential people are NOT a random sample of the population.  They are people with specific interests, communications skills and access to persuasion methods.  The problem is finding them, especially because you have to find different ones for different occasions.    

The advent of interactive social media does not solve this problem.  Although it empowers us to move much faster, sometimes we might just be moving faster down the path to nowhere and the fastest way to go nowhere in PD is to wrongly identify a representative audience as an influential audience.   A representative sample of 1000 people might be sufficient to accurately measure the attitudes of a millions, but it won’t suffice to influence a change in those attitudes.   On the other hand, 1000 influentials could indeed affect the course of the nation. 

Social media at once reveal and obscure this reality.    We can graphically watch the spread of information on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and see the power of opinion leaders.  We knew they were out there but to a long time public diplomacy guy, actually seeing them is as amazing as really seeing gravity or magnetic waves would be for a physicist.  But it is more complicated.   Physical forces don’t exercise options or free will; people do.  Physical particles always react the same way; people don’t.   A physical object cannot just lose interest in gravity and stop exerting influence.   People … you get the picture. 

I have noticed a hazardous trend in public diplomacy.   We have started to become much more interested in numbers counted than in influence achieved.   Maybe that is because we can so easily generate numbers with our new technologies, while influence is nearly impossible to quantify.   Numbers can talk, but they don’t always tell the truth and they never tell the truth unless surrounded by an explanatory context.   For example, is it better to reach 1000 people or 100,000 people?  You really cannot answer that question until you know the context. 

Let me illustrate with my own number fallacy.   I fell into it when I started to use Facebook.  It is an embarrassingly simple error, but I have since seen it widely.   Social media is about friends.    The average Facebook user may have 500 friends.  So if my Facebook message reaches 500 people, can’t I just multiply by 500 and claim that my audience was 250,000?   And by that logic, I would only need 2000 people to reach a million.  My job just got a lot easier.  Of course, friends’ networks overlap.   In some communities, the overlap might be 90%+. 

In other words, by reaching one or two, you have already bumped up against boundary of your influence.   Adding hundreds or thousands more from the same group may not add any value at all.  The total number is meaningless. It is like saying that you want infinity and being disappointed that you had to settle for half of it.

BTW – Business Week has a very good article about what an online friend is worth. 

We used to call them boutique programs.  They are the kinds of things you set up for an ambassador or a VIP to give him/her the flavor of an issue or area.    For example, the VIP talks to a youth audience and leaves with the impression that he/she has met THE youth.  He/she has, in fact, spoken maybe sixty people, most of whom know each other (i.e. their communities overlap).  It is a very useful exercise, as long as you know what you are getting into and when you leave the boutique you go to talk to opinion leaders and people who can make connections.  Then maybe look carefully at some polling data.   

You should stay out of the boutique if you think you are getting anything more scientific than a personal impression.  Boutique programs are easier to do online and easier to fall into than they are in non-virtual life.  So remember whether online or in person, meeting ONE common person, or even fifty or a hundred of them, is not the same as meeting THE common person.

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Working Hard/Hardly Working

I admit that I have a pretty sweet deal.  I like most of the things I do at work.  In fact, I would pay to go to many of the meetings and conferences they pay me to attend.  I am not saying it is all great, but the good things far outweigh the negatives.   I think about my job a lot, but that is hard to place in the “work” category, since if I didn’t have this job I would probably be studying many of the same things re new media, persuasion and knowledge management. 

I purport to put in long hours. I rarely get home before 7 or 8 pm, which means that I spend around 10 hours at work, but what is work?  And I can usually carve out time during the day for exercise etc.  I have only recently come to terms with this.  I used to feel guilty and lazy.  I couldn’t understand how I could be doing okay w/o working very hard. But after almost than twenty-five years of decent progress, I had to rethink this. Something seemed to be working.

Most people think or at least say that they are busy.   Much of this is self inflicted work.   Every day I see people doing things that need not be done or doing things in such a way that they actually create more work for themselves and others.   But the biggest reason people think they are busy is that they are fooling themselves. 

WSJ had an article about that, giving some scientific backing to my observation.   When people are asked how much they work, they invariably come up with significant higher hours than when they follow it closely with a diary.   Some of this comes from the definition of work, as I mentioned above.   I read the WSJ, Economist and many other such publications.  I could not do my job if I didn’t keep up with the latest news and innovations.  But what % of that can I call work?  Most our high estimates of work hours comes from giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We might think that we usually work ten hour days and count the times when we work less as unusual exceptions.    But maybe there are more “exceptional” than “normal” days.

We have to remember that “normal” doesn’t mean typical or average.   It means the way something would be under good conditions.   A normal man would be healthy, not overweight and not deformed in any significant way.  This is not a typical or average man.   (BTW – an “average” man has less than two legs.  Think about it.  Nobody has more than two legs and some people have less, so the average is less than two.  Statistics can be interesting.)  IN that respect a normal day might be one where you worked through the day w/o important interruptions arriving and leaving on time.  There are not many normal days.

In respect to work, you have to consider both typical and normal. My first job in the FS was as public affairs officer in Porto Alegre. I was ambitious and worked hard, but I was distressed when I talked to colleagues who seemed a lot smarter and harder working.   My results were usually better than typical, but never up to what I considered normal. Life was too easy and I was sure I was just not doing something everybody else was doing.  I worried about this through my next posts, until I figured out that most people just think they are busier than they are and all the talk about constant work is just people talking. Pointing this out to people does not make me universally popular and I have to qualify the statement.  There are some times when you are truly busy, but most of the time not. Beyond that, if you are consistently working more than nine hours a day, and I am not talking about just being there but really working, you are burning out.  It is like trying to sprint through a Marathon. The results matter and sometimes LESS “work” will produce better results. 

I am not making a plea for indolence but I am very suspicious of people who claim to work 70 hour weeks all the time. I think there is a lot of useless energy spent and probably a lot less time on task than they say and probably than they think.

There is some virtue in doing less, especially if you find the points of maximum leverage and then use them. It is often better to clear obstacles than to push harder.   All good leaders should be a little lazy, create the proper conditions for the success of others and then get out of the way.   People need to be free to innovate and do things their way.  Constant hectoring will just give you a sore throat, make everybody less productive and create a lot of work for everybody.

Anyway, I put my time in at work and try to earn my salary, but I know that sometimes it is best to do less but do the right thing.

This story is tangential but it applies.  This guy has a clogged pipe. He called the plumber who says that he can fix the problem, but it will cost fifty dollars.  The guy agrees.   The plumber takes out a little hammer, walks to a place along the pipes and taps it a couple of times.    Everything is fixed.   The guy is outraged.  “Fifty dollars,” he says, “for a few taps?  I want an itemized bill.”   The plumber writes out a receipt.   “Tapping the pipe – $.05.  Knowing how and where to tap – $49.95.”

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Another Day’s Useless Energy Spent

IMO at least half the time people spend working is wasted.   Of the remaining half, about a quarter is actually counterproductive and only the remaining three eighth is usefully employed.    This is not scientific and it varies from time to time and person to person.  But this accounts for how people can be busy all the time and yet produce so little.

This fact came to me when I was walking up my street and saw the pruning job on the tree across from my house.    This tree needed to be pruned.    There was a crack in one of the big side branches.  But as a casual glance at this picture shows, much of the pruning effort was wasted and some actually is damage.   You can see this clearly in something like this tree, but you know this is happening all the time in other walks of life.

The tree will recover and after some years it will look good again.    People will say that the effort was worth it.    But it won’t be true.   It will have recovered from damage done.    Just because the damage is not permanent doesn’t mean it was a good thing.  It is too easy to take credit for something that would have happened naturally, even sometimes for things that would have happened naturally sooner if somebody had not messed with it.

I had an argument with a computer technician a few years back.  He “fixed” my computer and it was slower.   He patiently explained to me that I just didn’t understand the usefulness of his efforts.  Maybe he was right.   But I told him that my philosophy was simple.   If it made it easier and better to use my computer, it was good.  If it made it harder or worse to use my computer, it was bad.  If it did neither of these things, it was a waste of time.    I don’t think this guy really knew what he was doing and tried to hide his incompetence behind a wall of ostensible effort.   It happens a lot.

How much of our daily work could we just not do w/o any negative outcome?   We should just stop doing it.  How much is actually creating more useless work for ourselves and others?   There is a line in the ancient Book of the Tao, “In the pursuit of success, something is added every day; in the practice of Tao every day something is dropped.”  Sometimes it makes more sense to do less or maybe do nothing.    

It is hard to do that in today’s world where we can often not measure outputs or outcomes and so we give credit to inputs or what looks like activity.  But look again at the two trees. I prune the one on the left, but I only prune what I can do with my hand tools and I don’t do much. I look at it for a long time and then I cut as little as I think I can.  I also cut early.  I got the lower limbs when I could still do it with a hand trimmer. Total inputs are low because I am lazy.  Isn’t lazy sometimes better? 

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Folk Life

We have had torrential rains in the past month.   It makes the grass grow and everything green but it is a little gloomy.

I passed these guys at work with a portable saw mill in front of the Smithsonian.    The tree was damaged in storms.  They cut it down but instead of taking it away, they piled the logs in the middle of the lawn.   Now I see why.   They told me that they will use the boards to make benches for the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival later this month. 

This year’s festival is going to feature South American music and Wales.   They have lots of good festivals on the Mall and later in the summer they hold a farmer’s market near the Dept of Agriculture.