Category: General Thoughts

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Too Much Health Care

I thought that I would need a root canal in at least one of my teeth.  I counted on that or some other health care disaster, so I put money into my FSA account, but no such luck.  My teeth stayed healthy and so did the family and we put too much into the health care savings account that I have to use or lose by March 15.  This has never happened before.  Maybe I should just get that root canal preemptively.  

Below is a decoration at the Air & Space Museum.

The FSA is one of those heath savings accounts.   They are great.  They deduct money from your paycheck each week.  It is tax free, with the caveat that it be used only for certified medical expenses and that it be used by March 15 of the year following when it was deducted, or else they just take it back, so you have to guess right.  You can use it to pay deductibles, medicines etc.   My insurance doesn’t cover most dental expenses, so I pay myself for all that Coke and Hershey cars I consumed in my misspent youth.    Tooth fillings don’t last forever, and the ones I got when I was young are breaking down.   I don’t fear the pain of the dentist, only the price.   FSA spreads that out over the year.

Below is the National War College, T. Roosevelt Hall.  The building was started in 1903 and finished in 1907. 

This is the first time I have put too much money into it.   Usually I don’t have enough and I get stuck with unexpected expenses, so this year I decided to be smarter.  It looks like smarter was dumber. I am sure that something will go seriously wrong on March 16 and I will be stuck again.  

I suppose I can stock up on aspirin, Pepto-Bismol and Nyquil, but you can only buy so much of that stuff before they suspect somebody is setting up a meth lab. It is odd to have this problem and it is better than the alternative, but I don’t want to throw away the money.   I will figure something out.  I suppose I can pay for something in advance.

The thing about health care is either you need it or not.   It is not discretionary.   I generally dislike going to doctors and avoid them if I can.   My father went to the doctor only once between when he was discharged for the Army Air Corps in 1945 and when he died more than fifty years later.   I am not trying to match his record but we have done all the routine checkups, even the colonoscopy I should have gotten three years ago.   If medical visits can make you healthy, I am there. 

As long as I am on the subject of forfeiting heath related stuff, let’s talk about sick leave.   The USG gives me four hours of sick leave every two weeks.   We can roll the hours over at the end of the year and I have been saving it up.   I now have 2275.50 hours of sick leave saved up.    If you count in paid holidays, I could be sick for around a year and a half before I ran out of sick leave.   This is good.  It provides a de-facto disability insurance and I don’t need Aflac.   But the government, in its wisdom, has decided that it will just zero out all those hours when I retire.    This is the “new” retirement system that came into force the year I joined the FS.   Unused sick leave was added to your retirement in the old system.  Some in Congress are talking about changing the rules for the new one, but given the hard economic circumstances I don’t suppose anything will come of it.   

Frankly, this doesn’t bother me too much.  They can have the sick time back; I am just glad I never was sick enough to use it up.   But a significant number of people evidently view sick leave as just another form of vacation day and giving sick leave days an expiration date doesn’t encourage thrift or conservation, especially as so many employees are approaching their own expiration dates.   The first generations of employees in the new system are approaching retirement and absenteeism will no doubt rise among those in the new system within a few years of retirement.    

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Recency and Availability Bias

Two of the most easily observed (in others) but difficult to counter biases are that we over-weight recent events and we rely too much on easily available information.  I thought about this when I saw the results of a recent poll re the best president.  Americans rate Reagan #1, according to Gallup, followed by Kennedy, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and then Washington. 

Humans are programmed to take shortcuts when trying to understand situations and some of these patterns go way back.  They work in simple situations with good and timely feedback – i.e. the kinds of situations our Pleistocene ancestors faced on the African plains trying to avoid becoming leopard food – but lead us astray on complex choices where the effects are separated from the causes in time and space – i.e. much of what we deal with in the modern world.  

I think all those presidents were okay, but no matter what you think of the actual merits of that presidential preference, what are the chances that the two best presidents would have been in office within living memory?   You get this same sort of bias when you ask about the greatest people in history in general.  There is a bias toward people of the late 20th Century.   What does this say about people taking the long view? And what does that mean for our practice of persuasion?

Below is the merry-go-round at the Smithsonian.

I bet Lincoln would have moved up in the standings if the poll had been taken yesterday or right after some kind of television special. 

There are a lot of good books on these sorts of bias, BTW.  Most have some connection to prospect theory.  The easiest to understand book on the subject is called simply Decision Traps.  It is an old (1990) book.  A more recent one that covers some of the same ground is Nudge.  Nudge is more recent and more readily available, so I suppose it will be given more weight.

BTW (2) a few more of the pernicious rules of thumb include:

Confirmation bias – people search out and remember information that confirms rather than challenges their current beliefs.

Vividness – particularly vivid experiences or images interfere with judgment.

Anchors – people consciously or unconsciously set baselines and then have trouble adjusting.   This is why salesmen and lawyers try to get a big number mentioned up front.   That becomes the anchor from which all adjustments are made.

BTW (3) I think the greatness of presidents should be measured by how crucial they were to the development of our country. 

W/o Washington, there would be no U.S. as we know it, so I would rate him #1.  Lincoln saved the Union and made it what it became, so he is #2.   Other transformative presidents were F. Roosevelt, Reagan and Jackson.  In that order they were great.  

Kennedy was okay but not great, IMO.  T. Roosevelt was a great character, but at time that didn’t call for greatness.  Wilson had some great ideas, but he was unable to carry them through.   Jefferson was a great and crucial thinker, but not a great president.  Ditto the father of the Constitution James Madison.   Truman and Eisenhower were very good, but not great. 

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Making the World Safe for Auto Traffic

We create a lot of our own troubles by demanding standards that individually make sense but together make our world less pleasant.    Today I went to an urban forestry meeting where we discussed trees and roads.   It turns out that our policies are a big part of the reasons we do not have beautiful tree lined vistas, why it is scary to be pedestrians and why we don’t have the tree canopy in our cities and suburbs that could give us shade and help keep our water cleaner. 

Let’s start out with street trees.   I imagine the trees near the streets on that little belt of grass.  Today’s rules don’t permit that unless they can be several feet from the road.  Otherwise they are hazards to traffic. Usually there is not enough room on the grass strips, especially because our new roads tend to be way wider than they need to be. I understand why you don’t want obstacles (like trees) along high speed highways, but city streets are different.   On the city streets having trees on the grass next to the curb is not only more attractive; it is also safer … for pedestrians.   I would rather the car hit a tree than hit me.   Beyond that, the speed limit on city streets should preclude the trees being a real danger.   Only a drunk or a manic would veer off a straight city street and hit anything on the side.   But it is clear that road designers see everything from the car point of view.

The woman explaining the rules told us that anything near the road has to be “breakaway” so that it is not a danger to a car that hits it.  Trees cannot be made break away, which is why they cannot be close to the road.  The thing that surprised me is that bus stop shelters are designed to be “break away”.    I think they should make an exception for bus stop shelters.  If a car comes careening across the sidewalk, I would hope that the bus stop can at least slow it down before it hits the “break away” pedestrian sitting in the shelter.

The car point of view is also why they round the curves.   You can see an example above from  just outside my townhouse complex.  This very wide strip of pavement is supposedly a city street.    The speed limit is 25 and there are lots of pedestrians.   The cars should not be taking that corner fast enough to require the rounding.  Every time I cross that street at the place shown, I have to keep looking over my shoulder to watch for the idiot making a high speed turn while talking on his/her cell phone.  I would prefer that they have to slow down to make the squared corner.  Maybe put both hands on the steering wheel.

BTW – they are going to make the road above even wider.  It is one of those shovel ready projects that the bailout money will buy.  I am glad it will create a few jobs, but I don’t really welcome the prospect of having an even longer jeopardy zone to cross.  It is like that old video game “frogger.”

In a very good book about livable places, A Pattern Language, the authors studied patterns that people around the world like in the places they live.   People feel more comfortable with narrower roads with buildings and plants near the road.   Of course this is when they are walking or just living nearby.   Drivers like wide open roads with no obstacles.    We all impose suffering on each other by thinking like drivers when passing through somebody else’s neighborhood.    Our love of driving has destroyed the attractiveness of our cities. 

One reason our roads and the areas around them have to be so wide is that utilities are placed far from the actual road.   Suburban roads don’t have manholes and that is why.   The total road footprint is a couple of football fields wide.

Something we could use around here are traffic circles or roundabouts.  They work very well in UK.  Traffic moves through.  Drivers yield to the traffic already in the circle and enter and leave w/o the need of stop lights or stop signs.   We cannot seem to pull it off.  We don’t even try to put them in real streets anymore.  The original design of Washington included circles, which now just confuse and perplex drivers.  The one in the picture is mostly decorative.  It is the traffic circle at our complex.  Notice even in this simple case they have to have a sign telling people what to do.  They also have stop signs on the sides.  Ruins the advantage.

The tragedy is that all of us are making good decisions for ourselves but taken together they end up being bad decisions for all of us.    Most of us are drivers and we all like convenience, but we should consider how much it is really costing us.

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Propaganda

Below – the Holocaust Museum is designed to make inside space seem like outside space. You are not allowed to take pictures within the exhibits themselves.

The Holocaust Museum featured a well-done exhibit on Nazi propaganda.  I had seen many of the things in books, but I learned from walking through it. It is comforting to consign Nazis to the past, call them a discontinuity or an aberration, but that kind of thinking doesn’t help us understand.  In those days most of the world was run by some stripe of dictator.  Whether they called themselves communists, fascists, nationalists or something else, none of them believed that individuals could or should be allowed to make choices. They manipulated the masses with powerful and pervasive propaganda.  Regrettably, propaganda, braced by state coercive power, did the job.   

The old fashioned propaganda grates on our modern ears and eyes.  We have become largely immune to that presentation style.  Besides, Nazi propaganda was a vast web of deception inseparable from the coercive power of state and its time.  Posters, music and media were just the outward manifestations and today are just artifacts.  But remember the immense damage they did and take them seriously.

Nazism was based on big lies.   The one we often overlook is their claim of victimhood. Maybe the paradox of being simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator is too much for us to handle.  They claimed they were victims of Jews, the democratic great powers, plutocratic capitalists, traitorous socialists, just bad luck and the Treaty of Versailles.   

There was some truth.  The Treaty of Versailles ending WWI was unjust and unworkable.  John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1919 that it would result in economic collapse. Ten years later he was right. Germany in general and Hitler in particular played on latent feelings of guilt in the allied populations. Leaders who appeased Hitler in the 1930s did so both out of fecklessness and their own lack of confidence that they were right.  Hitler covered his aggression with the cloak of the victim.  It was a subtle but effective propaganda victory. The idea that they were just “getting back” what was theirs was strong and influenced decisions until 1939.  Truly effective propaganda sets the frame so that the players are not consciously aware of the manipulation. This is a lesson we can keep.  

Germany had valid complaints about the Versailles Treaty, but it was a non-sequitur to say that only they had a right to dictate the solution.   

The exhibition ends in the present with a picture of Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It is pretty hard to figure out what that guy is trying to say … or maybe not.  Hitler was clear about his plans, but ordinary people couldn’t believe that he really meant it.  They rationalized and made excuses.  Propaganda has modernized since then, but some things don’t change too much.

Some things are just beyond understanding but we still have to try because these things didn’t end in 1945.   Exhibits like this are good for focusing thought.      

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Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

I suppose the economy will continue to decline for some time, with or w/o the stimulus package.   But I prefer to look to the things that are looking up.  

Below are the new homes near my house.  Now sold out.

While we were at Sears yesterday to get a new dishwasher, making our small contribution to the recovery, we noticed the help wanted signs.  There was also a help wanted sign at Safeway.   Construction around Washington has slowed but not stopped.    The new complex near my house, the one that had sold no lots last summer, is now sold out and the houses are almost done.   I don’t like the houses, but the evidently are what some people want, people with the means to buy new houses.

Recessions aren’t all bad.   I read in the papers that people are saving more money, putting off purchases and being more careful about what they buy.   

Same place in July 2008 (six months ago)

This is the paradox of thrift.  Saving is a virtue, but if enough people save enough money during hard times, not enough money flows through the economy.

Below is condo construction near my house.

Still,  until recently we worried that people were not saving enough, that houses were getting too expensive and that people were becoming to extravagant in their purchases.   It is not what you make but what you keep.   Real disposable income rose every month of the last quarter and the savings rate spiked up too.   Read about it at this link.

I don’t want to minimize the problem.   I know people are suffering and I stipulate that I have a steady job so maybe I don’t feel the downturn as much as some others.  But I have lost money in the markets and my house is worth significantly less.  I would also point out that even with the recent jump in unemployment; almost 93% of Americans still have jobs too.  So my experience is not that special.  I think we are getting a little too worked up.  FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  Maybe we should recall his wise words, uttered in a much more difficult time.  I think some of this passion we hear on the news is hyperbole.    As Ben Franklin said, “passion governs and she never governs wisely.”

I have been reading a lot about the Great Depression and I got a second-hand feeling for those hard times from my parents.  During those years, unemployment reached almost 25% and that number understates the problem in comparison to today, since there were many more farmers back then as a % of the population and many of them suffered hard times or even lost their farms but were not immediately counted as unemployed.    Beyond that, back in the 1930s many more families had only one wage earner.     

Below – we still have vultures.

So let’s lay this out by the worst rates per decade.   According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rate in 1933 = 24.9%;  unemployment rate in 1949 = 7.9;  unemployment in 1958 = 7.5; unemployment in 1961 = 7.1%;  unemployment rate in 1975 = 9.0; unemployment rate in 1982 = 10.9%; unemployment in 1992 = 7.8%; unemployment in 2009 is 7.6%.   You might also take a look at the better times – 1948 3.4%; 1953 = 2.5%; 1969 =3.4%; 1970 3.9%; 1989 = 5.0%; 1999 = 4.2%;  and not long ago in 2006 = 4.4%.  (I graduated HS in 1973.  From 1973-1997, the unemployment rate never dropped below 5% and in many years it was above today’s level of 7.6%, BTW.) 

We have hard times periodically and we recover.   During the hard times, we think good times will never return; during good times we think we have reached a new age when hard times will come again no more.  We are always wrong.  Things decline after they reach a peak and the come up after they hit a bottom.  That is the way is was, is and always will be.  It is a simple tautology.

Now is the winter of our discontent about to turn to glorious summer?

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Internet Steals Memory

People in pre-literate societies had phenomenal memories.  Great epics like the Iliad & the Odyssey started off as oral stories.   While details were dropped or enhanced over time, storytellers could repeat from memory tales that cover hundreds of pages of modern print.  

Literacy is a foundation of civilization.  One of the reasons is that it enhances and replaces physical human memory.    It allows for accurate communication over distance and time and prevents the loss of knowledge and collective experience.  It also means that individuals no longer need to remember details when they can consult an easily available written source.  They no longer need to learn them at all when they can easily consult the collective memory. The analogy of memory to muscle is imperfect, but Hippocrates’ old dictum still applies, “That which is used develops; that which is not used wastes away.”   Everything else being equal, a man with a notebook and pencil is still better off than the man who has to rely only on his great memory, but we pay an atrophy price for leaning on the memory crutch.   

Computers and the Internet turbo-charge access to the collective memory. Much of the accumulated knowledge of humanity is available in seconds at the cost of a few key strokes.   That is why I love the Internet.   (I feel a tinge of regret that my treasured for reference sources have become mostly dusty decorations, and  I still appreciate the cultural and tactile pleasure of actually a book, but I fear that the last “people of the book” generation has already been born.)  Internet magnifies my memory, but it also changes it. 

My memory used to be better and I don’t chalk up the entire decline to the effects of age. Internet & computers are partly responsible.  That which is not used wastes away and if you know you don’t have to use it, you often don’t.  I don’t have to exercise memory as I used to because I know l I really need to remember only parts.  If I can remember part of a name and part of a story, that is good enough.  Internet will do the rest.   A good example is the quotation from Hippocrates above. I remembered that the quote existed. I thought it was from Hippocrates. Google found it.  

My memory used to be imperfect but it was organized mostly in complete stories associated with names, places and often dates in ways that made sense.  My computer assisted memory is unorganized and random.   I rely on external organization power of software to put what I know in order. Search engines assemble it for me, and I have mixed feelings about that. Computer power enhances but devalues intellectual muscle in the same way power equipment enhances but devalues physical muscle. It is an equalizer.  

Being a strong man used to be a determining advantage working on a farm or building a house.   I can still remember a time when truck drivers had powerful forearms from wrestling the wheels of the big rigs or when you knew that a man was a farmer by shaking hands with him.  Today just about anybody can aspire to these jobs. Lack of physical strength is no longer a barrier.   

Will the same thing happen with intelligence?  It is happening already. I am a beneficiary. I could handle the higher level math required for my MBA only because calculators and computers largely eliminated the need for actual calculation. My statistics professor was sad that all her years of training doing regression equations by hand had been made redundant by cheap calculators that could be wielded by anybody with a couple minutes instruction.

All things considered, the price is worth paying. You are reading something right now that could not exist ten years ago, and not only because of the obvious internet as a medium. I write something for my blog almost every day. Many of the entries are recounting of my experiences, but some are mini-essays.  I can write, edit and post an entry in less than an hour.  This is only possible because of technology.   My digital camera provides the illustrations.  Everything I do would have taken me a lot more time and probably required added help. Microsoft Word replaces someone who would read and correct my grammar and spelling.   The digital camera replaces the photo developer. Easy upload takes the place of printers.  The Internet delivers it and provides takes the place of researchers who would have to dig through card catalogues and dusty stacks to give me what Google does in seconds.  Ain’t technology wonderful?

Most things are better remembered than they were lived.  My memory probably was never as good as I remember it being anyway.

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Water, Water

I used to love the days in late winter when the warming sun would melt the ice and snow in the alley behind our house and send little rivers of water down the hill.  My friends and I would make ice dams.  They didn’t last long, but it was fun.  When I got a little older, I would go down to Lake Michigan.  My favorite places were the little beaches in Grant and Warnimont Parks.  I like the Lake in all its moods and majesty, but I was always attracted to the little rivulets the poured down the hills.   I can still sit for hours by a stream just watching and listening to the water flow.  

Below is Genito Creek, which runs through our land in Brunswick County.  Notice the river birch and the natural levies.  The river water naturally deposits soil along the river edge. Heavy rain will take it over the banks to flood the forests and the levies trap it on the inside making temporary ponds. This enriches soils, replenishes ground water and provides habitat for wildlife, especially amphibians.   Flooding is good.  It is only a problem when we develop and build on places best left to the natural riparian environment.  Flooding is predictable.  If you need expensive flood insurance, you probably should not have built your house where you did.

We camp near flowing streams and build our cities next to rivers.  Where we don’t have these things near enough, we construct fountains in urban squares.  Even people who don’t like to swim like to sit near a pool.  Love of flowing water is something primeval and instinctive in humans. 

Peter Glieck of the Pacific Institute gave me some interesting insights.   Here is the link to his talk at the Wilson Center.  He focused on the ecological disaster unfolding in China.  I will let you read about that at the link if you want.  It is scary.  They have destroyed 80% of their wetland in N. China, sucked dry many streams and rivers and exhausted or polluted most of the easy accessible groundwater.   But I want to concentrate on some of the general ideas.

We can never run out of water, but we can run out of water that you can afford to get or water we can get w/o destroying local ecosystems.  Dr. Glieck explained it that water uniquely exhibits characteristics of both a non-renewable stock resource and a renewable flow resource.   It is renewable, but can be used up locally. 

Regions can and do exhaust or destroy their accessible water supply and some stocks are essentially non-renewable.  We call them “fossil water.”  Examples include the Ogallala aquifer under the American Great Plains.  Water is not a global resource. It is too difficult and expensive to move worldwide in large enough quantities.  You can move bottles of drinking water over the oceans, but you cannot base your general water needs on sources that are too far away.   (BTW – tap water in most of the U.S. is excellent, often better than what you get in bottles.)  In fact, the story exhausted water often goes with the fall of civilizations.

Water and energy are connected.  Energy production uses and often pollutes water.  It takes water to grow biofuels, but that is only the tip of the iceberg.  Moving water consumes a great deal of energy.   The single biggest consumption of energy in California comes from pumping water from Northern to Southern parts of the state.   Water is reused an infinite number of times.  Cleaning it and pumping it around is what takes the resources. 

Below shallow temporary ponds are created at new construction sites to catch the runnoff and protect surface waters from silting.  If left alone, this would become a vernal pond and provide a home to amphibians, as well as all sorts of bugs – good and not.

Rain Gardens

There are lots of rain gardens popping up around Washington.  I found some up near the Capitol and there is a whole complex of them at the EPA.   I didn’t take a picture since there was little to see in the winter.    But I did read all about it on the placards nearby.   Please follow this link to the information about them.

Below is a vernal pond on our CP land.  You can see why people might call them unattractive.  It greens up by April and this part is mostly dry by August.

Below is what the same place looks like in October. You can hear the water, but cannot see it unless you push through the plants.

A rain garden is sort of a fancy name for a vernal pond, which is itself a fancy name for a temporary pond, a fancy name for a big mud puddle.  You have to change some names.  Swamps become wetlands; jungles become rainforests.  The old names have developed negative connotations that stand in the way of understanding.  Vernal ponds are really important but under appreciated.  They used to be common, mostly because of neglect.  Water just pooled up and nobody did anything about it.  They form with the spring rains and/or melt water and disappear with the heat and dryness of summer and/or when growing vegetation sucks up the surface water.  But as our landscaping “improved,” people filled in or drained many of the ponds.  Who cares?  We should.

Below is one of our streams.  It flows and floods depending on recent weather conditions.  It always flows across the surface where I took the picture, but it goes underground and reemerges at other points.

Vernal ponds are important to water quality.  They allow water to soak into the ground and they slow the flow to allow nutrients and silt to settle out.   As importantly, vernal ponds provide places for amphibians to breed.    Key characteristics of vernal ponds are their impermanence and stagnancy, precisely the things that make them unpopular with grounds maintenance crews and home owners.   If the pond is permanent enough to support fish, they tend to eat the amphibian eggs and if the water flows it washes them down. 

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Learning From the Management Gurus

If I could read only one magazine a week, it would be “The Economist” because it has such a variety of topics written in a style I enjoy. I have subscribed to the Economist since I was in graduate school and it has contributed as much to my education as my grad school experience.  Actually, all education, formal and otherwise, builds what went before.   I was reminded of that today with this Economist article on Fredrick Taylor. 

I met Taylor (figuratively) in grad-school when I studied operations research.   He is the father of “scientific management” and while I think the strict application of his theory is probably a bad thing (Lenin was a Taylor fan), he did start the systematic study of management processes that has done a lot to create the modern prosperity we now enjoy.   Peter Drucker wrote that Taylor was, “the first man in history who did not take work for granted, but looked at it and studied it. His approach to work is still the basic foundation”.    That was worth something.  

I don’t like the practical and complete application of the theories.   Even if you don’t know Taylor, you know his work.  He is the time management guy, the one who set loose all those guys with clipboards and stopwatches to measure workers.   “In our scheme, we do not ask the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick.”  That assumes you don’t want innovation or initiative. This was the frightening world of “Modern Times” or “Metropolis” and in the early 20th Century the trends didn’t look good.  Fortunately trends never continue and we got back to a more human and humane system, at least in theory.  Humans don’t work like machines and everybody is better off if everybody is thinking.

That’s Taylor on the left. I will let those who care enough read re the other stars of management.  Here are the links:
Max Weber, Richard Rumelt, Warren Buffett,  Richard Pascale, Alfred Sloan, Peter Senge, Laurence Peter, Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker, Geert Hofstede, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, Gary Hamel, Michael Porter,  Dale Carnegie, Igor Ansoff, Warren Bennis, Frank and Lillin GilbrethC.K. Prahalad.

Of course every real-world leader needs to develop methods that fit with his own strengths, circumstances and proclivities. The management theorists can inform choices, but they cannot make them for you (anyway many of the gurus are sometimes a bit like Harold Hill in the “Music Man.”) I learned a lot from reading the theories and then trying them out in practice.  I read most of Peter Drucker’s books and I had several of Tom Peters’ books.  In Search of Excellence” had a lot of influence on me because I read that when I was in grad-school and it was one of my first books of that kind.  I must have spent thousands of dollars on leadership/management books. BTW – I also consider the reading of biographies as a type of leadership training.   You learn from the experience of others.

I found Maslow’s hierarchy of needs a very useful construct when I was in Iraq.  As Maslow points out, you can’t accomplish much until you meet basic safety and security needs.   All the other things were just not possible out of that sequence.  That insight alone was probably studying him.    I am not saying that we should apply these ideas w/o modification, but they are very useful.   Most of the Marine officers I talked with in Iraq were familiar with Maslow and they got it right too. “The Economist” reminded me of something I had forgotten.   I read Henry Mintzberg in grad-school, but not since.  But I had internalized something he wrote, and paraphrased it for many years, probably because it fit in well with my personal preferences.   Mintzberg was very different from Taylor’s machine like idea of focusing on task.  The good managers he studied jumped from topic to topic.   According to Mintzberg, good managers thrive “on interruptions and more often than not disposes of items in ten minutes or less. Though he may have 50 projects going, all are delegated.” In a study of British managers at the time, he found that they worked without interruption for more than half an hour only “about once every two days”. He also found that senior managers spent more than three-quarters of their time in oral communication. He concluded, “the job of managing is fundamentally one of processing information, notably by talking and especially by listening.” To be a good manager you have to be a good listener.”

Management is not the same as other sorts of work.  That is why when the guy who seems to be the most serious worker in the place is put in charge, things often go wrong and why self-described hard workers often think their boss isn’t doing anything.    Making connections and understanding the whole becomes more and more important as you get farther along and the value of actual “work” declines.  It becomes more important to know what to do and work through others.

The management gurus tend to put leadership and managment in the same boat.  There are differences.  I think it is easier to study and define management.  In Taylor’s world, leadership is only management and even that is essentially surrendered to the system.  In a really well designed scientific management system managers are more like administrators.  Leadership is needed to set new courses and create change.  If you are not going anywhere, you don’t need leadership to get you there.

It is almost impossible to describe precisely what a good leader does that makes him/her a good leader, or when you describe it, it sounds trivial.  He just knows what to do.  Things just work better and more smoothly when some people are around.  And of course there are some leaders who are just creators of useless effort.  Life doesn’t have to be that hard. Maybe the management gurus can put it in better words than I can.

The lesson I took was that leaders working ostensibly hard behind their desks are not really working very effectively and if things are going wrong, it is more likely BECAUSE of rather than in spite of their best efforts.  Working hard on the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing at all.  Leadership above all means making the right choices.   Besides, as RR said, it is true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?   Maybe they should waste a little time walking around and talking to the people doing the work, and read “The Economist” every Saturday.         

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Do Words Count More Than Deeds?

Ford Edsel and New Coke are spectacular examples of how even the most sophisticated marketing and biggest bucks cannot sell a product people don’t want.  But we are talking about tangible products in these cases.   Each time you tasted New Coke, you were given another chance to test for yourself.   Everybody who saw or drove an Edsel could make his/her own judgment.   Imagine if you had ONLY the advertisements about these products and/or you had to depend on what others said about them.  Go one further. Imagine that much of what you had almost no opportunity to make independent verifications and that almost everybody involved in explaining to you had a vested interest in misleading you, or at least spinning the facts.  Now you are in the world of public affairs.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  This sentence is designed with the encouraging part as the punch line, but it not really very encouraging.    Phase it just a little differently.  Some of the people are always fooled.  Some of the people are sometimes not fooled, but all of the people are fooled some of the time.  Mr. Lincoln wisely didn’t speculate about how many people would sometimes not be fooled or the amount of influence they might exert on the benighted majority.

We can recognize mass deception epidemics in retrospect.  We know how they turned out so we can see the errors. But what do we learn?  By the time the facts are known, we have moved on to other things and with the wisdom of hindsight people convince themselves that they were not really fooled at all.  As someone who loves ancient history, I can think of widely believed hoaxes that persisted for thousands of years.  But let’s limit ourselves to recent ones that we can all recall w/o too much effort from our own lifetimes.  We had the missile gap, the population bomb, global cooling, nuclear winter, imminent collapse of the global financial system (about once every ten years), WMD, diet coke, breast implants, power lines etc causing cancer, and the biggest of all – communism.   This last one was interesting to me professionally, since my dislike for communism was the big reason I joined the then USIA.  Until 1989 most experts predicted the continued health and expansion of communism.   In fact, I was in Vienna on the very day the Berlin Wall came down listening to experts tell me that the East German government was fundamentally sound and enjoyed the grudging support of its people.  It was naive, they said, to expect any real change.  By 1995, you almost couldn’t find an expert who didn’t claim to have known that the communism was about to collapse. 

Self-deception is the most effective kind.

Communism didn’t work, plain and simple, and it was horribly oppressive to boot, but for a bankrupt ideology, communism enjoyed a remarkably popular life. At least fifty million people died as a result of communism, making it the biggest killer in history.  You can understand how people living under those ghastly systems attenuated their criticism, hoping to avoid joining those millions already moldering mass graves, but communism was also widely accepted among intelligencia in the free nations, where people with the freedom to speak and inquire should have known better.   Even today pictures of Che Guevara adorn dorm rooms and t-shirts on college campuses.  And they are not usually adjacent to picture of Charles Manson or similarly murderous cult leaders.

You can fool some of the people all of the time and sometimes for many years. We Americans are a pragmatic people and we have grown up in a country with long traditions of democracy, free flow of information, free media, free markets, free inquiry and a lot of choices in general.  We have trouble understanding how uncommon our happy situation is, both historically and geographically. This gives us an exaggerated confidence that the truth will come out and that it will be accepted by most reasonable people.   But remember in closed countries they sold products a lot worse than Edsels or New Coke and people were content to get them.  They still do.

As pragmatic people, we also believe that what we do makes a difference and we take responsibility for our actions.  We appropriately hold ourselves to higher standards.   But that should not prevent us from making objective comparisons and should not lead to assumptions of moral equivalency with nasty enemies … or worse. We suffer from the effects analogous to excellent students from very stringent grading system competing with mediocre or poor students from a lax one for admission to an engineering program.  If administrators consider a B in highly competitive course in advanced calculus less than an A in the everybody-passes basic arithmetic curriculum, you better drive carefully over the bridges designed by their graduates. 

Or if you permit, let me provide another analogy.   The couch potato can easily criticize the players in the Super Bowl, but we all know he could not have leap high enough to catch that pass in the end zone nor kept both his feet in bounds when he came down. Deeds count more than words only when people have the independent ability to judge, effects are reasonably close to actions in time and space and when feedback is available and reliable.   Otherwise they are like the tree that falls in the wood with nobody around to hear it.    

So, what do we do?  I certainly don’t advocate lowering our high standards or hiding our mistakes, but we should raise our expectations of others & don’t overlook their shortcomings either.  After the President’s SOTU speech, some leaders in countries where democracy is viewed with limited enthusiasm said that they would wait to judge his deeds.  Judge his deeds – great!  That goes both ways.   Let’s see how the couch potatoes do on game day or the wizards of basic arithmetic perform on the practical exam.  AND we always ask the “compared to what?” question.  You don’t win respect by lying down in the face of criticism and the truth will come out only if it has some sturdy and persistent advocates.   

And as Lincoln understood, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, some of the people will be fooled all of the time.

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Walking to Wilson

Below is the Monument to the Second Army Division. It stands near the White House. It was originally set up in memory of WWI dead, but later added battles from WWII and Korea. I walked past this many times, but this is the first time I stopped to look closely.

I started at my normal office and then took the shuttle to HST and transferred to go to NFATC, where I talked to the group going to Iraq.   I wonder how much my advice is worth.  Things change so quickly in Iraq and our footprint is so different now.   But I told them what I knew.    I caught the shuttle back to HST in time just to miss the shuttle to SA44.   Just as well.  I wanted to go to the Wilson Center to see a speaker on worldwide water resources, so I walked over to the Ronald Reagan Building, where Wilson Center is located.  It seems to me that water resources and environment will be big issues in the next few years.   One of the things I like most about Washington is that there are so many opportunities to learn new things.  I will write some notes about what I learned when I get a little more information and context.

Below is an exhibit re Woodrow Wilson at the Wilson Center.  Wilson was our only president with a PhD.  He valued study and the development of ideas.  The Wilson Center for scholars is his living legacy.  Scholars there share their ideas with each other and the public (like me).  They also publish “The Wilson Quarterly”.

The Wilson Center is almost midway between State and SA 44, so after the lecture I walked back to my office.  It was cold and I had to stay late to finish the day’s work, but I liked the lecture, the walk gave me time to think and I got some pictures.  

Above is the inside atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building.  Below workmen are putting up a profile of President Reagan. 

Below is a statue of Simon Bolivar near the Mall and near the OAS.  

Below is Nathan Hale.  He scouted British positions for General Washington and was executed by the British after they captured him.  They didn’t have the ACLU in those days.  His last words were “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” 

Below is salt on the street.  It seem like when it snows in Washington, it rains salt.  You can see how much this salt was not needed.  They are too quick with the salt around here and the effort is not a virtue. All that salt eventually finds its way into the Potomac and then pollutes the Chesapeake Bay.  The lecture I listened to on water made me notice this. The costs of doing these things is high, but environmental costs are hard to quantify, while people sliding on the streets are easy to see.  Too bad.  Many people claim to be concerned about the environment, but then they complain or sue when they are inconvenienced or slip on the pavement.   The Chesapeake is worth a few bent fenders, maybe even some broken bones or at least the risk of these mishaps.