The State Department is a unique organization with unique needs. It is tempting to emulate success management and media techniques of successful private firms (what would Google do?). We can and have learned much from them, but the USG is the only organization with the worldwide presence, reach and responsibilities. Who and what we are and the fact that we represent the United States of America enhances our opportunities and constrains them. We saw this at work in the Cairo speech PD effort.
All forms of traditional media carried President Obama’s Cairo speech and we in PD can no more take ownership for that than a rooster can claim credit for the sunrise. My organization – IIP – added an interactive twist of the new media with tools such as SMS messages to reach mobile users, IIP’s multimedia interactive platform, CO.NX, interactive blogs, live chats and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The Digital Outreach Team communicated with the blogosphere in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. We posted also contextual information and the speech translated into Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay, Pashtu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu. In addition to serving overseas posts, America.Gov also carried the speech in English and the languages mentioned above for readers worldwide.
I believe that this was the first time this robust mix of new media technologies in so many languages was applied for an event worldwide. Tell me if I am wrong. But I feel a bit like a guy who has just won the lottery. It makes me feel great, but don’t think that we can count on that particular strategy to produce similarly happy results regularly far into the future. Not every event will be a important as this one and the test of our online communities will be seeing how they do with less exciting things.
There is a grove of fragrant lindens around the Iwo Jima Marine Memorial. I passed them on my way to work this morning, so I stopped and got a few pictures.
This is the season for the smell of linden. It is a pleasant but elusive fragrance. The strange thing is that if you get really close to the blooms, you cannot smell them. The fragrance overwhelms the senses in such concentrations. That means that you can only catch a whiff on the breeze. It is a very Central European smell. I remember it from my first visit to Germany. The lindens are so prominent and pungent in Poland that they named their seventh month (our July) lipiec, which comes from their name for linden.
In Northern Virginia we have a variety of introduced European lindens. Fashion affects trees too and you could probably date neighborhoods by the mix of trees. Many of the lindens we see today were planted twenty or thirty years ago. Since then, zelkovas, pears and various kinds of cultivars I don’t even recognize have been more in style.
The American versions of lindens are basswoods. They are taller than their European cousins but the flowers are less conspicuous and the scent is there but a little less apparent. Basswoods don’t grow around here naturally; at least I have never seen one. We are just past the edge of their range. They are more common farther north and throughout the Midwest and they are very familiar in southern Wisconsin, where they tend to team up with sugar maples and – near lake Michigan but not inland – beech trees to form climax forests any place where the soil is deep enough.
Bees are fond of basswood flowers, which bloom in June and July. There is even a specific kind of honey made from basswood nectar.
Smell is persistent in memory and the linen smell brings back so many for me. I remember the lindens were blooming when I went to Minneapolis for my MBA in June 1983 and even today the smell brings back those memories. I bet I could do statistics better under a linden tree. There were a couple big basswood trees on the road from Chrissy’s family farm in Holmen and that image pops back too at the smell of the lindens. But the most interesting memory connection comes from my visit to Germany in 1979. When I smell the lindens, sometimes I can taste the beer. Sense memory is complex. Evidently the sense of smell is tied closely to the emotional memory in the amygdala. I am sure somebody has done scientific studies that explain it but I don’t feel like looking it up.
Someday I will plant a garden with lindens, lilacs, marigolds, hawthorn, honeysuckle, lavender & jasmine. Those produce the nicest smells.
My colleagues and I have been working hard to get the President’s speech in Cairo out on new media. We are breaking new ground. No private firm is as worldwide as the U.S. State Department. It is exciting. I don’t often write so directly about my work, but I think this time it might be appropriate, since even the NYT noticed us. This is what I have been doing all day.
Interacting with President Obama“Be among the first to get highlights of U.S. President Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo and tell us what you think. Go to http://www.america.gov/sms.html and be part of the action.” That is the tweetable text telling mobile users worldwide how they can be part of President Obama’s historic speech in Cairo.
President Obama’s June 4 speech will certainly be carried on traditional media all over the world and the U.S. State Department will add an interactive twist, using new media tools such as SMS messages to reach mobile users as well as interactive blogs, live chats and platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This is in addition to outreach efforts by a digital outreach team, communicating with the blogosphere in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and translations and more traditional webpage posting of the speech in Arabic, Bahasa-Indonesian, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay, Pashtu, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.
Interest so far is significant. The chat room, for example, already had more than a thousand participants signed up, some of them lurking inside a couple days in advance. The mobile/Clickatell experience will represent the first time a President has been fully interactive on a mobile platform from an international location. The new media allows a greater connection with people. I think we got it right this time. Gotta be here tomorrow at 5:30. Tomorrow will tell.
Crows get along well because of people. They like to live near where people live. We try to get rid of them, but can’t. They proliferate. The same goes for seagulls, coyotes, geese, deer, pigeons and lots of others. We also have the invasive plant species such as multiflora rose, dandelions, paradise trees and Japanese honeysuckle.
Below is Japanese honeysuckle growing up my pine trees. Above is paradise tree. We have been battling them since we got the farm.
Plastic Poles
I noticed that the light post was made of plastic. You cannot tell until you get close. They used to be concrete or metal. I suppose plastic has advantages. It doesn’t rust; it is easily molded and is light weight, so it is easy to move and work with. I vaguely object to the use of plastic, although I really cannot think of too many good reasons. Maybe they are made of recycled garbage bags and coke bottles.
Big Trees
I just like the nice big oak tree. You can tell it has grown out in the open. They planted oak trees in Arlington in fifty or sixty years ago. It was a good, forward looking policy.
John Ford
TCM is having a John Ford film festival. I am very fond of John Ford films. They can be corny but also inspiring. I like the use of traditional music and the way he paints scenes.
My favorite John Ford movies are “The Searchers,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” & “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” One of the things I like about his movies is perhaps what some others find tiresome. He goes with similar themes and the same teams of actors. John Wayne, Ward Bond, Maureen O’Hara, Ben Johnson as well as a passel of others whose faces I recognize but names I don’t know. It feels like meeting with old friends. He also films in iconic places, such as Monument Valley.
Above are some daisies on the farm. Below is a heavy rain storm outside my work.
Public affairs professionals rightly advise people in crisis to be open, honest and transparent. While honesty is the best policy most of the time, it seems that the dishonesty and dissembling works too.
I read a couple of articles recently that made me think about that. The first one was about a German police officer who shot a student protestor in the 1960s. The protestor was called the left wing’s first martyr and the story and famous photo that went with it was one of the sparks that set off the massive student protests and the terror movement that swept Europe during the late 1960s and 1970s. It turns out the cop was working for the East German communists. His action may have been provocation. Okay, it comes out, but it doesn’t change forty years of history. The bad guys got what they wanted. Another article talked about the Russians sanitizing the communist era. It may become a crime to equate Stalin with Hitler. I wrote my own article about Katyn a couple days ago. What is truth?We like to think the truth comes out, but sometimes it doesn’t or when it does it has lost its context or just doesn’t matter anymore. Once a story line is set, subsequent revelations might have little effect. The world has always been full of all sorts of horrible regimes and people. Many have diligently stonewalled on the historic record or manipulated it. Think of that horrible murder Che Guevara. People still wear his image on T-shirts. Historians know about his sadistic ways, but his image was protected long enough that now the general public no longer cares. The Soviet and the Chinese communists killed tens of millions of their own citizens. They denied it and made investigations difficult. Much of the detail is lost forever. Once again, historians know about mass terrors, but it often ignored in the general consciousness.
We in the West take the opposite tact. We sometimes seem to reveal in the revelation of our faults. Sure, we should hold ourselves to the very highest standard and you cannot learn from mistakes if you don’t identify them, but doing this w/o context can lead to the wrong conclusions and let some real bad guys off the hook. In geometry it takes two points to define a line. You need context.
Most of life’s achievements are graded on the curve because nothing can be properly defined except in relation to other things. We do not serve the cause of truth when we loudly confess and even exaggerate our own mistakes, while implicitly or sometimes explicitly allowing others to downplay or obscure theirs. Turn that around and consider what it would be like if we only bragged about our own achievements while denying the opportunity to others. We suffer from a massive availability bias, in that we overemphasize information that is nearby or easily obtained and overlook that which is hard to find or actively hidden. The commitment to truth requires that we seek it in ourselves and also demand truth from others. We should always ask the “compared to what?” question. In our personal life it is bad manners to put others on the spot or catch them in a lie, but in the public sphere the pursuit of truth requires occasional truculence.
About 10% of the Polish population was murdered by Nazis or Communists during the war. The Soviet’s massacred at least 22,436 Polish prisoners at Katyn forest in 1940. It was not a random selection. The Soviets were trying to wipe out Polish leadership. They chose the best and the brightest they could find. They turned others over others to the Nazis, with whom Stalin still had friendly relations. The Nazis themselves were working hard to wipe out the vestiges of Polish national feeling by wiping out the people most likely to be able to carry it on – teachers, professors, officers and civic leaders.
The Katyn massacre was particularly noteworthy to the extent that it was premeditated and personal. The Soviet questioned the Poles for months to determine who to kill. After Hitler attacked Stalin and the Nazis took over Katyn and discovered the crime, they publicized it. This put the allies in a tough position. Churchill suspected that Nazis were mostly telling the truth in this particular rare case, but chose plausible deniability. When you have to work with one horrible tyrant (Stalin) to defeat another horrible tyrant (Hitler) it inevitably entails some moral compromises.
The Soviets kept an official lid on the story until the fall of the Soviet Empire around fifty years after the event. Everybody knew about during that time, but there was no official record or confirmation. Worldwide lefties gave the Soviets the benefit of the doubt they didn’t deserve and it was convenient to blame the Nazis, who were responsible for so many other atrocities and were the default villians of the period. After the truth came out, there was lots of talk about it in Poland and memorials went up worldwide But the Katyn Memorial in Baltimore was a surprise. I just didn’t expect to find something like this here. I guess there is a large Polish-American community in Baltimore.
It is starting to look like the dot.com bubble. Nobody has really figured out how to monetize Web 2.0 and most of the current value of Web 2.0 companies comes from expectation of future value. There is great excitement about building online communities, but it is hard to get these communities to do very much except be communities. There is no doubt Web 2.0 has already changed how people communicate and how they do business. But how can we really use it?
There was a South Park episode last year where one of the kids became an internet sensation in hopes of making a pile of money. When he went to collect, he was told that his great fame had indeed earned him millions of internet bucks, but that they were not exchangeable into real money. In PD 2.0 we are not trying to earn money, but we are trying to achieve sustained changes in attitudes and behavior in fields important to U.S. policies. What if we reach millions of people only to find that our internet influence is not exchangeable into anything that matters to us?
What about the holy grail of Web 2.0, going viral? Some top viral videos are at this link. Many of the things that go viral are just silly, like a cat flushing a toilet. But I question the effectiveness even of the serious contenders. It is great to get exposure, but what is it good for? I remember a study of the “Clio Awards.” Those were the academy awards of commercials, where the funniest and most artistic commercials were chosen by the cognoscenti of commercials. The problem was that the winners were not particularly good at selling the products they represented. In fact, they were below average. People often loved the commercial, but didn’t care about the product and sometimes they couldn’t even tell what product was being advertised. Many of the viral videos are like the Clio award winners that get lots of attention and even critical acclaim, but don’t do the job.
There is also no reliable way to predict if something will go viral. Studying successful viral videos is not much use. We can identify – in retrospect – what they did right, but when we compare this to the millions of others that didn’t make it, we find that they also did many of the same things. It is a type of survivor bias, like attributing special skills to the winner of a very long and multi-round game of Russian roulette. The guy would probably write a book. He and all of us would think that his astonishing success must be due to something other than random chance, but we would all be wrong and we should not be enticed into the playing the game with his “proven” method.
The lesson is NOT that we stop exploring new media. Rather it is that we should not fall in love with it or with any particular aspect, platform or technology. It is easy to be beguiled by large numbers and exponential growth rates but we should be persistent in questioning HOW we can use it in PD. Some things will be very useful, but maybe not always or everywhere and others might just be exciting w/o payback. It is good to think about the differences.
Remember pets.com during the dot.com bubble with that sock puppet? Everybody loved the marketing. They even bought a super bowl add featuring the sock puppet. They were defunct less than a year later. I could never figure out how most of those companies could make any money; after a while, neither could anybody else.
I have been talking to leaders of technology firms in Brazil and it has been very interesting. While it is not appropriate to post details, some of the general thoughts are applicable across a wide spectrum of endeavors and I will share them here.
One of the problems I have wrestled with has to do with the nature of knowledge and how to pass it within groups and organizations. I find that this is a common problem and nobody seems to have developed a really robust solution. I don’t think there is one; at least we cannot create a system that will take care of it. Knowledge cannot be separated from its human carriers. We like to use the term “viral” and it really fits here. Passing knowledge just takes commitment and work by smart people. Too often, organizations try to outsource their brains by giving the job of thinking and analyzing to consultants or computers. Well, the buck stops with the decision maker. He/she certainly doesn’t need to be an expert on all things. Those consultants and computers can help inform decisions, but they cannot make them. I was thinking about these things during our discussions.
Let me start by making a distinction between information and knowledge. The two are synonyms and often used interchangeable, but in the deeper meaning information is the raw material that becomes knowledge when it is when it is understood and integrated into thinking.
Many management challenges are common to both public and private business and one of the most persistent is the difficulty of passing reliable knowledge and experience within an organization. One of the most confusing circumstances is when information passes w/o the knowledge to make it meaningful or put it in proper context. It is confusing because the recipients of the information may not perceive the problem. They may feel satisfied that they are “informed” but remain misled.
This is an age old problem. As any organization grows beyond the size where frequent face-to-face contacts are common and easy, information sharing and knowledge production become an acute challenge. It is especially true today in the fast changing and multifaceted environment created by the new media. Information is held by specific individuals who may have very deep knowledge in a particular specialty, but not know how it fits into the bigger picture and may be unaware of the significance of what they know in other contexts. In an information rich environment, the problem is how to arrange it to make it useful and how to tap into tacit knowledge that people may possess but be unable to properly express. A learning organization is one where the total knowledge and expertise available to the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This condition is easier to aspire than achieve.
Technology provides some help. One way to address the challenge is through a wiki where everyone can contribute as well as see, consider and enhance what others have contributed. In theory, a wiki can tap into the wisdom of the group. It can be made available only to particular groups, to the entire organization or even to a more general public. A larger group will create greater management problems, but will likely tap into a more diverse set of talent and knowledge. Remember that no matter how good you and your colleagues are, the smartest people on any particular subject probably don’t work for you. Your decisions will be better if you can think of a way to bring them in.
The amount of openness is a management decision. However management cannot really decide if individuals in the organization will enthusiastically contribute. Enthusiasm cannot be mandated, but it can be incentivized and those incentives must come from a true commitment at the top. Good contributions must be recognized and the inevitable good-faith errors must be corrected but not punished.
The new media allows and requires many choices. The mix of tools changes depending on the situation and they change over time. Yesterday’s solution is often today’s problem, but that does not necessarily imply that any mistakes were made. Employees have to be confident that their good solutions that solve today’s problems will not be held against them when the situation changes tomorrow. It takes a long time to build the kind of trust that lets people stick their necks out and months or years of work can be dissipated by one serious breach. Leadership cannot indulge its emotions or look for people to blame when sound decisions are overtaken by events. These are pernicious breaches of trust.
Another important aspect of knowledge sharing is to have the knowledge available to share in the first place. Diverse and dispersed world-wide organizations tend to have information but it is often not translated into useful knowledge. One tech fix is to make everything is available online in “the cloud.” Groups working on particular tasks may not be near each other geographically or even in the same time zones, but they can be virtually side by side. We have talked about this for many years, but technology has only recently made it practical, since real collaboration requires good connections and a lot of bandwidth.
We have a great opportunity. There is a lot of low hanging fruit and that we should take advantage of new technologies and interested participants right away. Opportunities are out there. It is there for us. The most important obstacle is our own inability to take them and make them work. We have to work to create learning organizations. It is a steep hill to climb, but not beyond our ability.
Evaluate AND Take Action
They also emphasized the need to evaluate AND prune dead wood. Sections are evaluated every six months to see what is working and what is not. An organization in this competitive world cannot allow itself to hold on to programs and platforms that are not performing, no matter how many people work there or love them. The less performing sections are cannibalized to support the ones that are doing better. This creative destruction is a challenge in government. Private firms are not really better at anticipating the future than we are, but they are a lot more effective at getting rid of things that are not performing. They just cannot afford to keep or pour more resources into the programs that are losing money.
The title of this post is a paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Let me end with another one that applies. “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads to fortune.”
Chrissy’s father died today. He was ninety-three and had a full life.
A lot happens during a life that spans almost a century. It is hard to imagine life on a farm in the hills of western Wisconsin in 1915. The work was still done mostly by muscle – human and horse – and the world after dusk was lit only by fire. Electricity wouldn’t come out to the farm until the rural electrification program during the depression.
Arnold Johnson served in Patton’s army in World War II. He was injured in battle and spent time in a hospital in Britain. After the war he returned to the farm that had been in his father’s family since they immigrated from Norway in the middle of the 19th Century. He married Pearl Olson and they built a life together. Seven children followed. Chrissy was number six, born when Arnold was already forty-five.
Pearl and Arnold enjoyed the kind of life you cannot have anymore. They grew up in the green valleys (coulees formed by glacial melt waters in an area not glaciated) of western Wisconsin among generations of friends and family. People didn’t move as much back then. They didn’t have the kinds of opportunities we have now, but there were compensations. They were held in place long enough to create multigenerational communities.
I was always impressed by how many people they knew and how many people knew them. Into his eighties Arnold would do “meals on wheels” to help the “old” members of the community. He helped mow their lawns and make their lives easier. Community was important.
You should not mourn for the life well led and Arnold Johnson led a good life. He did his duty to defend his country in its time of need. He raised cows and crops that helped feed our people and lived his long life in a green, peaceful and pleasant corner of the world. He and Pearl raised a family of seven children. Their hard work provided enough to launch all of them into successful adulthood. There are now fifteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren so far. And when he died in old age, he was loved and missed by many.
We should all wish to accomplish so much.
After they are gone, we always regret not paying closer attention to what the old folks tried to tell us. We lament that we didn’t listen as well as we should have or get to know them as well as we could have. I talked to Arnold about the history of his farm and about his experience in the war, but not enough. There are things I would like to know that are now unknowable. Young people don’t usually ask. It is difficult for them to appreciate the experience of the older generation until they have reached an age where they have experienced some of the same sorts of life changes. By then it is too late. Memories fade or are lost entirely.
Arnold was the last of his generation in our family. The “greatest generation” – the one that survived the Great Depression, fought World War II and rebuilt the country after those challenges – is passing away. We shall not soon see their like again. Now we are the old folks.
We may never again visit Holmen or the old farm. That part of our lives is finished. The kids have vague memories of Wisconsin and the memory will disappear entirely in the next generation. Young people have a hard time understanding that old people were not always old. They also won’t listen until it is too late. That is just the way it goes. Old men forget and yet all shall be forgot.
