Category: General Thoughts

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Oh Sleep, it is a gentle thing; beloved from pole to pole

I have given up sleeping, or put more correctly I don’t sleep much during the nights.   I still have not adjusted to the jet lag and the conditions.   I wake up during the night, impatient for the dawn.   Today I got up at yesterday I got up at 530 and went running.  Today I got up at 330 and wrote on the computer.   Actually, I went to the MWR where they have a wireless internet connection, which is why I can post this entry. 

This sleeping problem is unusual for me.   I am usually more adaptive.   But this is a weird place.  If I had to mention one problem it would be the air conditioning.   You cannot turn off the vent.  Cold air blows in unremittingly and there is a steady draft, more like a 5 mph wind, throughout the can.

Anyway, I have been sitting here for a couple of hours.  I have written some entries which I will post when I hitch them up with pictures.  

Later today I have to make a presentation.   Despite my fatigue, I am confident that it will go well. I am ready to go.   I feel tired all the time but not acutely so.  I can easily make it the next couple of days.   I will be glad to be out of here.  

I should leave the Middle East to those more in tune with its idiosyncracies.  I don’t understand its politics or habits.  Who builds a ski slope in one of the world’s hottest places?   It is unnatural in the most basic sense.  The pleasure palaces are like Las Vegas on steroids.  Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.  There is a problem of unearned wealth all over, but there is so much more of it around here.  It is the classic rent seeking behavior.   The locals provide little of the management and almost none of the labor or technology that produces the resource.     

Wealth w/o effort is a moral hazard and the easy flow of oil explains lots of the troubles.   This is the only region of the world w/o any real democracies.   If the rulers can live off revenue pumped out of the sand through the efforts of others, they don’t have to consult the people who might actually produce something.   The wealth can  be used to placate or out flank opposition.  Even more perniciously, such easy wealth destroys initiative and honest work.   Why should anybody work for chump change when he can jump on the oil bandwagon of at least live off its droppings?

There will be momentary pinch now that the price of oil is falling off from it unsustainable highs, but we will not learn the lesson.   The low prices drive out alternative fuels and bankrupt innovators.  Then the price of oil goes up again.   We need a carbon tax and now is the time to put it on.   We have to take the pain in the short term for a better future.  

Well these are the extent of my predawn thoughts after the days and nights of poor sleep.  I believe I will wander over to the chow hall.  It opens soon for breakfast.  My IPOD has just begun playing “Hotel California.”  Fitting.

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Flying to Doha

I am at home today getting ready to go to Doha tonight, where I will meet colleagues to work on our strategy paper.  I am unenthusiastic about the journey.    It is something like 16 hours on Qatar Airlines in an economy class middle seat.  It is officially a United flight, so I hoped that I could use my United miles to upgrade, but this is evidently not possible with a code share like this.

I don’t have many complaints about flying and I think that all that gnashing of teeth about passengers’ bills of rights is exaggerated.   Travel sucks by its very nature.  You just have to get used to it.  Most of us (me too) are unwilling to pay extra for business class seats, so we get stuck in the cattle car class.    In other words, we get what we pay for.    It will be an ordeal. 

Many people think diplomats travel first class. No, our government is not that generous. We fly economy unless we upgrade ourselves.  They used to have a rule that we could fly business class if we had to be on the plane for more than fourteen hours.  No more, except if you can claim that you have to go to work immediately on landing or you can assert a credible disability.   Being too tall to fit comfortably in the seats doesn’t qualify.   

I sat next to a fat guy on my last trip home.  He wanted to put up the arm rest so that he could flow into my seat too.   He complained about the injustice of air travel when I told him no.    Being fat is increasingly being classified as a disability.   A Canadian court has ruled that airlines have to give a free extra seat to the will-power challenged among us.   By that logic, they should have to give more leg room to anybody over 5’10” tall, maybe extra luggage space to those who just have to bring along more stuff than they can use.   Maybe a passenger bill of rights would handle all these permutations and produce a kind of Malthusian solution.  If we do it completely, it will drive the price of flying so high that almost nobody will be able to afford to fly anyway and it will be pleasant for the survivors. 

I don’t think Doha will be much fun.  We have to stay in the camp the whole time.   They say that there is a running trail around the camp that is around 3.5 miles.  The nice thing re Al Asad was that the base was big.   There was not much variety, but it spread over twenty-two square mile and I had more space than I could run over.   3.5 miles is actually enough for most of my runs these days, but the idea that there is no more bothers me.  I like to know I could go farther if the spirit moved me.   I can take the limited horizons for two weeks.    I hear that they have a pool in Doha.   It is like a holiday camp.   That is the way I am taking it.   The weather should be nice this time of year. 

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Knowing Too Much

We found more than thirty official or authoritative studies of American public diplomacy compiled after 9/11.   This doesn’t even include the whole cottage industry producing popular speculation, magazine articles and general gnashing of teeth about “why they hate us.”    Maybe we know enough to draw conclusions.  Maybe we even know too much.   This is what I am thinking about as my group prepares to make our own contribution to this huge library. 

You have to be careful not to gather too much information.   Theoretically, the more information you have, the better decisions you could make.  Theoretically that is true.  In fact it is not. For that to be true, you would need to have near perfect recall, wonderful understanding and supernatural ability to assimilate the diverse data points.   The capacity of our computers to gather and store information leads us to a kind of hubris that we CAN use all of it.  We cannot.   And that also makes the erroneous assumption that the information is knowable. In the case of something like public diplomacy, we are dealing with conditional facts, a kind of game theory where any move we make provokes reaction which change the fundamental realities.  

 It is like one of those sci-fi movies where someone goes back into the past to correct some mistakes, right some injustice or just take advantage of his knowledge of the past to make money in the present.   It never works out because changing conditions in the past creates a different reality in the present.    This is no mere artifice.  We are doing it all the time.   Of course, we cannot change the past.  We can only make plans in the present to affect the future, but the real world principle is very similar.  Maybe that is why we like those fictional time paradoxes or the similar literature scenarios where trying to avoid the consequences of a prophecy create that outcome (e.g. Oedipus).     Our attempts to achieve a particular future alter the conditions we are studying.

Sci-fi scenarios aside, we still can be easily overwhelmed by information.    At some point, more information doesn’t improve conclusions.   In fact, it begins to create confusion.   This seems counter intuitive and people in the midst of information gathering are usually fooled.  Studies show that decision making does not improve and even gets worse, but the decision makers themselves have more confidence in themselves.   Bureaucrats also like to gather information perpetually in order to delay the moment where they have to take a risk and come to a conclusion and provide more cover if they make any mistakes.   This is a variation of the paralysis by analysis problem.  BTW – most people have the cognitive capacity to can juggle around seven chunks of information; really smart people can do maybe nine and the cognitively challenged can handle fewer, but at some point enough is enough and more is too much.

Next week we will be reading reports and talking to experts.   I believe in going through the process and that is what I am supposed to do, but we have to recognize when we are done and move along.   It will hard to let go.

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Using Time Wisely

Not many people are around here on the day after Thanksgiving.   I like to work on such days.  Volunteering for such duty makes me popular and the quiet time gives me a chance to think.  This is my most productive activity.

Below is the Commerce Building.  When it was finished in 1932 it was the largest office building in the world.

I read the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People almost twenty years ago.  It was one of the books that most influenced my life.   There is not very much really original in the book.  Stephen Covey’s contribution is that he manages to put things we know we should do into understandable chunks.  I won’t go further into detail.  Suffice it to say that it gives practical methods to live a principle centered life and puts character development above the tricks most self-help books teach you to get ahead. 

One of the parts I found most useful was the section on time management.   I am not talking about making lists and accomplishing goals.   Covey talks about doing the right things and taking control of the process.  He divides tasks on a four quadrant chart.   Some things are urgent and important.  Some are important but not urgent.   Others are urgent but not important and the last quadrant has things that are not urgent or important. 

It is easy to get stuck doing the things that are urgent, whether they are important or not.  Can you resist picking up a ringing phone, even when you are having an important talk with someone in person sitting in front of your desk?   But the urgent is often not important and the urgency of many important events results from lack of anticipation and planning.  The place where you should spend most of your time is among the tasks that are important but not urgent.  (Preventing the fire is more effective than the urgent need to put it out, but which seems more heroic?)  This will put you in charge of your life and help you avoid lurching from one urgent task to another w/o the time to do them well.  It will also help you avoid doing many “urgent” things altogether.

BTW – I am writing all this from memory.   If the details are not perfect, I don’t care.   I had a chance to meet Mr. Covey a few years ago.  He told me that the ideas were meant to be internalized and changed to fit particular circumstance and personalities.  Ideas are like virus that live & reproduce only in human hosts.  They mutate and adapt.  The ideas I was “infected” with twenty years ago are now uniquely mine.  My experience has customized them and these are the lessons I took.

Below is Dept of Agriculture building completed in 1930.

I rarely agonize about decisions.  People who like me say that is because I just know the right thing to do.  Detractors see me as shallow, flippant & insouciant.   I believe the truth is that I can make quicker decisions because I have thought through similar scenarios and tried to apply values & integrate experience and I did this BEFORE I was faced with the urgent decision currently at hand.  Contemplation is an activity that fits squarely into the important but not urgent category. That does not mean that I make the right decision, BTW, but I am neither flippant (usually) nor do I just know what to do by some mystical process.

Covey and many other leadership thinkers tell us that is what we are supposed to do, but they always warn that other people might not like it (hence the flippant moniker) and they will give us a hard time for “not doing real work.”  All of our great achievements are created twice: first and most importantly in our minds and then only later in the practical world.   The intellectual capital is usually the most valuable, but others can see only the practical creation or activity.

There is a story about a man who has a serious plumbing problem. He calls the plumber who tells him he can fix the problem and it will cost $100.  The plumber goes down and whacks one of the pipes and everything begins to move as it should.   When he asks for his $100, the customer is irate.  “All you did was whack the pipe and it took only a couple seconds,” he says.  “I want an itemized bill.”  The plumber gives him the bill which reads: whacking pipe – $.05; knowing where and how to whack pipe – $99.95. 

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Transitions

Below are grounds at NDU.

If you want to effectively be action oriented, you have to spend most of your time trying to figure things out.    You have to be reasonably certain that you are doing the right things and that you are doing the important things and not merely responding to the urgent ones.    If you don’t think about things in advance, you will get stuck responding to events and/or be captured by the passions or fears  of others.   All this makes perfect sense, but it is harder to do than to talk about.   It is hard to not get excited when things are moving fast and it is easy to get blamed for doing nothing or waiting even when those are the proper responses.   

I expect life will get interesting soon when the new political appointees come to take over.  IIP has been w/o political appointees for a couple of years, ever since Alex Feldman left.  This is very uncommon.  In times past, we had all sorts of political guys around and I am sure we will have them again in the new administration.  The new people always have lots of ideas and they often believe that they are the first to have thought of them.   This is my forth big transition.   When all the sound and fury is finished & the dust has settled the trajectories are fairly predictable.  Career people like me have to remember that the political leaders set policy and we have the duty to help those policies succeed for the good of the country.  The hard part is to give advice in a credible way w/o being either arrogant or sycophantic.  The best way to do prepare for this is to know the portfolio and have thought through the various scenarios.   In other words, to be action oriented you have to have spent the time figuring things out.

The thing I worry about in the transition is security policy.  (I am happy that I am not directly involved with too much of this, BTW, but I still think about it.  Transitions are seams and enemies can exploit seams.   The U.S. did a good job preventing new terror attacks after 9/11.  We also managed to turn around the situation in Iraq and achieve tentative success there.    I am afraid that there is a growing public perception that these outcomes were natural or resulted from luck.   As the memory of dangerous and uncertain events fades, complacency grows.   We were indeed lucky in that the bad guys did some really stupid things – they overreached – and we were lucky that in the last couple of years many things broke our way more often than not, but our success depended on a lot of things we did right.   I am personally familiar with only a small part, but I know enough to be sure of that.   We should be sure not to lose through apathy & unawareness what we have worked so hard to win with effort, bravery and blood.    

Below – waterfall at American Indian Museum in Washington

It seems so long ago now.  In the years since 9/11/2001 many people have been trying to understand the motivations of terrorists and working to make profiles of the sorts of people who become violent extremists.    Not many people really have the mental profile of the violent extremist.   It takes a prodigious amount of hate, intolerance and determination to make a person want to be a terrorist.    Fortunately it also takes something else – opportunity, as well as a impetus. Beyond that, the link between attitude and behavior is tenuous.   

Links – Links are the keys.   There is a long chain between the conception of a terrorist desire and the successful completion of destruction & mass murder.   A chain is as strong only as its weakest link and each of the links in the chain can be attacked.   You attack the whole chain by identifying and attacking each of the links as well as the environments that help forge the chain.  That is what I hope and believe our information activities are helping and will help to do.    That is what we have to keep on working to do.

We have to be not like a chain, but like a cable, where each strand goes from start to finish, twined together seamlessly.   I hope this transition will be smooth and clean.

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Earth Day Park & L’Enfant Promenade

I usually get off the Metro at Smithsonian.   That is two stops before the one closest to my job at State Annex 44.  The walk takes around fifteen minutes and it is through some nice places around the Smithsonian. 

You probably would not make a special trip to see Earth Day Park, on Independence Avenue.   As the old saying goes, it is worth seeing but maybe not worth going to see.  It is one of those things  you notice and enjoy when you it becomes an ordinary part of life.   You enjoy it more when you know a little about it. 

Earth Day Park was dedicated on Earth Day in 1996.  It covers the top of Interstate 395 as it passes below the Mall.   This makes it remarkable.  This kind of thing is not usually attractive and I understand that this was no exception until the park was made. 

Everything in the park is low maintenance.     The lily turf requires no regular cutting.  It is enough to do it once a year and it survives even if you don’t.    The trees and bushes can live on the semi-rooftop environment, with its frequent lack of normal soil moisture. 

BTW – the path looks very inviting, but if you follow it you don’t get anywhere.  When I first saw it, I thought it might be a nice sideways to get to work.  Not. 

Above is L’Enfant Promenade.   I mentioned it in an earlier post.  I don’t like it.  It is ugly, almost Stalinist.  That boulevard goes nowhere.   You can kind of get down to the riverfront from there, but it is not easy.    The road ends at Benjamin Banneker Memorial, about a quarter mile from where the picture was taken, just over the rise at the horizon.    In typical 1960s style, L’Enfant Promenade manages to almost get it right, but ends up combining two things in a way that emphasizes the disadvantages of each.   You can see from the picture that the promenade looks like a boulevard for cars.  It is.   But since it goes nowhere there is not much point to drive along it.   It has become a long parking lot.   There was great potential as a walking street, as the name promenade implies.   The end of the street has a nice view of the river.  But there is enough traffic to make walking (or running) unpleasant.    The design exacerbates the problem, as the few cars that do use the road come around a circle at Bannecker Memorial in a way that keeps pedestrians looking over their shoulders.

So, to sum up:  Earth Day Park Good; L’Enfant Promenade bad.  Perhaps they should restructure L’Enfant to make it more pedestrian friendly and more like Earth Day Park. 

Above is one of the local attractions – Quiznos.  You can see all us bureaucrats lining up for the feed.  I get the small classic Italian on wheat bread.  When you get the combo (i.e. coke and chips) it costs $7.02 with taxes included.  Quiznos is my favorite sub, excepting Cousins from Milwuakee, which is unfortunately unavailable in Washington.

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Good Life in Washington

Above – ginko tree outside Smithsonian

The best things in life are free … especially if you live in Washington DC,  where you can go to all the museums and enjoy all the public space, think tanks and events at no or little cost.  Europeans justifiably boast of their cultural achievements, but everything costs money there.   You have to buy tickets to the museums in Rome, Paris or London and much of the public space is not really open to the public. 

Above is Sackler Gallery.  There are vast underground facilities.  The Mall gets to look untrampled.

The irony – and this goes for lots of things besides museums – is that in America we have access to things in practice but not in theory, while in most other places you have access to things in theory but not in practice.  People are often beguiled by the promises.  They want to be granted the right to something in principle.   They forget what Otto von Bismarck, who originated the first social security program said, “When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

We get a lot in practice, even if we are not doing so well in theory.  Way back in 1827, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German man of letters, wrote it in a poem. “Amerika, Du hast es besser” (America, you have it better), he said –  and he was right. Life is good. 

The National Gallery of Art & Pompeii

I enjoy being in Washington.  It offers so much.   On my lunch break today I walked over the National Gallery of Art to see “Pompeii and the Roman Villa.”  I couldn’t take pictures inside, but you can see what it looks like at this link.    It is great just to drop in.  Because there is so much and it is freely available, you don’t feel like you have the chore of staying all day and making an ordeal out of the appreciation of art.  I stayed only around a half hour.  I did not “see everything” but I can come back.   IMO that is how culture should be, a part of life integrated into daily activities.  

Below – community garden near Capitol.  I think this is left over from the 1960s. 

I heard about the exhibit before, but I was motivated to go today by my Roman history lecture on my I-Pod.  They were talking about the Roman cities and used Pompeii as an example.   Pompeii was not the greatest of Roman cities, it was not even very important, but we have the unique frozen in time aspect.  Tragic as it was to the people at the time, the eruption of Vesuvius has made them the messengers of their culture to future generations.

Below is depression era artwork on a government building near the National Gallery.

The area around Naples for the Romans was something like the California coast is to us.  Life was pleasant and easy.  The rich and famous went there to live and vacation.   They build expensive houses and lived large.  According to what I learned at the exhibit, the very rich people lived in coastal villas.  Pompeii was sort of middle rich.  The district was called Campania.  It had a good climate and great soil, provided in part by the volcanic activity that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79.  Volcanic soil is very productive.   It is sort of a bargain.  You get live the good life on the volcanic minerals, but it is unpleasant to be there when the volcano spreads a little more ash.

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Starting the New Job(s)

Below is the Capitol & the Indian Museum on my way to work.

It is always confusing in the first days back on the job.  This time the feeling is exacerbated because I am trying to do several things at once.  I am assigned to work on a strategy group at NDU.  While I am sure it will be very rewarding, it created a whole new set of challenges I had not thought about.  This is nothing earthshaking.  They are things like getting my clearances passed so that I can get the proper ID, finding my role in the groups and just finding rooms and offices in a place I have never worked before.  This comes at the same time that I am checking into my new job and checking out of the old one.   I have to file travel vouchers, get the logon, get the Blackberry set up, do check in etc.  Again, this is nothing earth shaking, but it takes more time than it seems it should and generally throws sand in gears.  

Below – chin up bars etc near Air & Space Museum

I have to be careful with the adjustment.  I had thought through my first weeks at the new job and had a good idea of what to do.  I don’t “hit the ground running”.  Rather I try to learn the new organization, the people and my place among them.  This requires time and patience, since it has the element of relationship building and not mere knowledge acquisition.  First impressions are not sufficient and I don’t want to move before I know where I am going.   It is especially challenging at IIP because I was here before, doing a nearby job, and I think I know things. 

It is easy to be overconfident when you think you know something.  I learned my lesson in Warsaw.  I had been in nearby Krakow so I knew most of the Warsaw staff.  I had even served as acting press attaché up there for a couple months, so I thought I knew everything I needed to know.   When I got to post, I just started to do things and make decisions and waves.  A few months into the job, I realized that I would have been better doing some things differently.   I like to take quick action, but I have come to understand the advantages of patience and doing not much at first.  Better to seem a little dull at first than start climbing the wrong mountain.  I am not talking a long time, just enough to start out on the right foot.

Below – Natural History Museum.  Notice the Roman style.  The Romans invented the kind of cement that allowed them to make domes like that.  Egyptians, Babylonians & Classical Greeks didn’t use domes because they couldn’t make them w/o what we today call concrete.  Alex & I visited the Pantheon in Rome.  The dome is still standing 1800 years later.  Even more impressive is Hagia Sophia in Istanbul built by Justinian the Great from 532-7.

I am reminded that my plans never work anyway.  I find myself doing something completely different, which will make my entry on duty seem more tentative and ragged.   It is like making the grand entrance just as you notice that you forgot to put on your shoes.   I am not sure how to handle this.   On the one hand, I can do both jobs.  This is not as crazy as it sounds.   There is a lot in my IIP/P job that is directly applicable to my NDU job.  Both responsibilities are involved with strategy, information gathering & public affairs, sometimes about the very same things.  What my IIP colleagues have done and what I can share with my NDU colleagues will add value to both.   There is a real possibility for synergy that I hate to lose.   On the other hand, we have the problem of being half there.  I guess the choices are limited.  I already have made the half there entrance and may as well make the most of it.

I attended my first staff meeting at my new IIP/P job and got the run down of ongoing activities. We are doing some interesting things.  We are going to do focus groups in Tunisia and Jordan re the impact of our outreach programs.  Another colleague is working on a conference and publication on the problems of extremism.  This is a very intellectually satisfying venture, since it will involve lots of scholars and get to play with ideas.  Other colleagues edit and post issue briefs and run the information distribution that gives our public affairs professionals information they can use to help them do their jobs.   We also run the public affairs toolkit, a kind of best practices wiki.   The media hubs in London, Brussels and Dubai also have a place on our pages as do the research people, who post their public opinion assessments.   There are a lot of interesting things going on and a lot of things I want to get involved with doing.

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Office Space & Pleistocene Brains

Below is our new office building across from Main State (Harry Truman Building). It should be ready for us to move into by June. Construction is ahead of schedule, which is uncommon.

We are moving to a new building where space is at a premium & we had to assign offices.  I really cannot picture the layout by looking at the map of the offices.  Fortunately, my colleague Joel did the thinking for both of us.  He evidently understands blueprints and knows a lot of those arcane rules e.g. how much space a GS-12, 13,14s etc are suppose to get. Office space allocation is one of the thorniest issues you can think of.   It is not so much about comfort – more about status.  The problem is that there are natural work flows and work groups that do not follow rank.   For example, by the nature of the job a low ranking receptionist will almost always command more space, albeit not very private, than a higher ranking analyst.   It might also be useful to group people by their tasks, but that almost always means that you might crowd the higher ranking group members and give more space to the lower one.   I think the whole rank thing is a little silly.   Of course we all want a nice big place with a window, but you have to consider the job to be done.  I figure that I need a big space to accommodate my big ideas, but not everyone agrees.  Some tasks require space, others not so much.

There is also the bugaboo of privacy.  It makes logical sense that a private workspace would be smaller because there is no need to have group interactivity.   In fact, it usually works the other way around, with people demanding large private spaces and the loudest or highest ranking people getting them. 

My favorite office arrangement remains one I saw in Norway at one of the environmental organizations.   Everybody from the director to the newest hire had the same small sized office, but there were common spaces in the middle where people could meet.  There was not much privacy, but I think that is a good thing if you are trying to create teams and synergy.   It is better if people see what is going on.   You want to avoid providing covered places to hide  Unfortunately in our organizations somebody always wants to knock down walls and expand his/her office, then close it off from everybody else.  I suppose the desire for mark off defensible territory goes back to our Pleistocene ancestors, but you would think after all this time we would have gotten over it.

Below – rainy day at the shuttle bus stop.

There is another point of view on all this.  I understand that my insouciance on this matter leads to my getting rolled on space issues.  The Pleistocene warriors get to take over my hunting grounds and eat my lunch because they are so much more passionate.  Sometimes I suppose I should toss a few rocks and feign a scream.   But I am speculating way too much on way too small an issue in this situation. 

I don’t want to leave the false impression that I am having problems already.  The office space thing was just interesting, not a problem.  My new colleagues are great and I got no worries.  I am pleased to report that everyone seems reasonable.  Perhaps that is because they are mostly new in their jobs and in relatively new offices.  Nobody has developed an abiding attachment to their space.  I don’t suppose everyone will be as lucky as I am.   Some offices look like they have been occupied since Neolithic times and moving those offices may require an environmental impact statement to ensure that the ecological communities that have grown in and around them are not disturbed.  I pity the guys who have to make those choices.