We are at “the Woods” near Hedgesville in West Virginia for our offsite. I have mixed feelings re offsites. On the one hand, you get to be away from the office and can concentrate on the work/learning at hand. On the other hand, most people have Blackberries so they don’t really get away. Anyway, I am here, so I will take advantage as I can.
The Woods is one of those communities that has a mix of condos/hotel it rents out, amenities such as pools and golf courses and then some residences. The community is 1980s vintage. You can see the picture of my room above.
I went for a short walk before supper. The land is covered with mixed forests. My picture doesn’t properly show it, but you can tell that these forests have been “high graded” for many years. High grading is sometimes misleadingly called selective cutting. It involves cutting the bigger trees out of the forest while leaving the rest. This sounds like a good idea, but there are problems. The biggest trees may not be the oldest trees, but they are usually the best. You are removing the fastest growing and healthiest trees. It is a type of negative selection. Many of the small trees are old. They are just stunted or runts which will never attain a good size. There are many possible reasons or combinations of reasons for this. Most trees will not grow to their potential size if they are too long deprived of sun and nutrients when they are young even after the larger trees are removed. In other words, if they miss the chance, they cannot make it up. There is also significant genetic variation. Beyond that, some soils do not support the growth of some trees and some just won’t get big no matter what. In any case, high grading results in an unhealthy and stunted forest. You can tell if the trees are young or just small by the bark. Young trees have relatively smooth bark. The bark on older trees is furrowed.
Also common in these forests is Virginia pine. Virginia pine is a kind of permanent brush species with poor growing habits and shallow roots. They tend to blow down in storms and even when they don’t, they never get very good. They more or less occupy the niche held by the jack pines in the Lake States and look a lot like them. Above is a thicket of them.
Above is a Virginia pine that grew in the open. They rarely get that big and even with all the sun it needs, it still doesn’t look good. They are almost incapable of growing straight and clean.
Above is one of the private houses in the Woods on a one acre lot. It is for sale. The brochure outside the house says that they are asking $199,000 fully furnished with what they say is quality furnishings.
Some of the same themes came up with today’s speakers. The big one might be taken from the “Wizard of Oz” – you are not in Kansas anymore. The things that got us to this position will not necessarily sustain us in our new jobs. In our old jobs, we avoided risks to get ahead and worked in a stable environment. In the new world, we have to produce positive change and be able to understand how our operations fit into the bigger world. My experience with big changes is that they usually are not … so big that is, but we will see.
Anyway, this is not new to me. I remember learning it way back in business school when we read Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker and Tom Peters on organizations. Most of my business literature I read since re leadership said the same sorts of things. It is good to see that this long-ago education still makes sense. We also heard the familiar ideas re management by walking around. I read that first in 1983 in “In Search of Excellence,” but it is always good to get confirmation.
We also got some State Department specific information, referencing a Mckinsey study on the “War for Talent,” which warned that State had to do more to recruit and hold top-quality employees. One finding was that junior officers didn’t trust or much respect high level officers. Maybe that was because high-level officers paid so little attention to them. According to the study, only 30% of high State officers considered developing talent a high priority, compared with 76% of the high executives in the private sector. One of the speakers commented that perhaps the private leader talked the talk but maybe didn’t walk the walk, but State leaders thought talent development had such low priority that they didn’t even bother to lie to pollsters about it. The School of Leadership & Management was created in 1999 to try to address some of the deficiencies, but it really got going a couple years later with Colin Powell’s diplomatic readiness initiative.
When we talked about Secretaries of State who were good for State, two names came up repeatedly: Colin Powell & George Schultz. I agree. I don’t have the high-level knowledge to back that up with statistics, but I know that morale was good during the Schultz times when I came into the FS. Conditions were abysmal during the 1990s and improve a lot when Colin Powell came in. Condoleezza Rice has valued the professional members of State in the practical area of jobs and there have been more career than political appointees in the higher levels. I hadn’t really paid attention to that, but now that I think about it when I was in Washington in the late 1990s there were a lot more political appointees hanging around. The guy leading IIP used to be a political appointee as were many of the regional guys. Now they are professional. Career appointees are a good thing from my point of view, although I have seen many good political appointees and some bad professional ones.
We also talked about resources. State has been resource poor for as long as anybody can remember. It got worse during the early 1990s when we opened many posts in the former Soviet Union w/o getting more resources and worse still with the cuts and post closings of the middle 1990s. (State almost closed my post in Krakow at that time, and thye DID close Poznan & Porto Alegre). It looked like conditions might improve after 2000, but then our resources got sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan. I think State has lots of challenges and places where diplomacy can add value, but we really cannot do it on the cheap. I have no solution.
I also got back my 360 degree evaluations. There were no big surprises, but I wonder how valid it is. We name our own respondents. I tried to get a “random” sample, but it is not really possible. Most of the time you only get 7-10 people filling in the forms. There is no statistical validity. That is no problem IF we recognize that it is more of a guideline and ignore the precise looking statistics. The most useful parts of the survey are the open-ended comments. Some people make them; others don’t.
Below are trees at FSI. They are all sweet gums, all about the same age growing in almost the same spot, yet for some it is fall color time and for others it is still summer.
Today we did a simulation exercise on leadership. It was fun and useful but not realistic. Leaders were decided essentially by random chance and after that the game was specifically rigged to give the leaders continuing advantages in gaining points. I was lucky enough to be one of the three leaders and although I firmly believe the redistribution is a bad idea in most cases, in this artificial game with points distributed by random chance that is what I advocated and what we did.
I think the game was designed to show us how power and privileges can be distributed unfairly. I understand that and I got the point, but the game made me think about the real world versus the simplified and contrived one in the game. Luck plays a role in life’s outcomes, but so do things like hard work, expertise and smart decisions. In the case of leadership we could also add judgment, integrity and vision. Leadership opportunities and skills are NOT randomly distributed in real life. I think that is the real point about learning re leadership. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much use to study it or try to develop it. That certainly doesn’t mean that the same people should be in charge always and in every situation, but it should not be a random event.
“Asking ‘Who ought to be the boss’ is like asking ‘Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet’, obviously, the man who can sing tenor.” So said Henry Ford and he was right. Sometimes the situation determines who should do what. Games cannot really catch all that goes into a decision like that, which is probably why most people who can consistently win at Monopoly aren’t rich developers in real life and why you wouldn’t want your appendix removed by somebody who plays a doctor on TV. We all know that. The problem comes when people have a simplified game-like interpretation of things in real life w/o thinking about it. I think that is one big reason why socialism and its relatives still maintain their hold on minds of the credulous.
Another interesting take away for me was different attitudes toward leadership. One of my colleagues in the “leadership council” essentially wanted to abdicate the position and just let the group decide by consensus. Her rationale was that we got the jobs essentially by random chance and so did not deserve it. While she was right, I really disagree with her reaction. I know it was just a game, but in this game and I think in a real situation the leader has the responsibility to lead. Maybe you should lead to the group to another leader, but just letting the group drift is not an option, IMO. It is a problem with leadership in government that we too often do just that. I admired the Marines for their attitude, which is a different. If a Marine finds himself in a leadership role, he takes it and does his best. They have it right. Leadership is a duty, not a privilege or perk. If it falls to you, you have to do the best you can until there is an alternative. Capitulation is cowardly. Anyway, the day was useful and the game was useful because it stimulated a lot of thought and discussion. For we read an article re emotional intelligence of groups. It was a disappointment. I read the book “Emotional Intelligence” many years ago. It is an interesting concept, but it can easily be taken too far and applied to precisely. I think the useful aspects of article we read could have been summed up in a couple of paragraphs. It was a waste with all the pages.
Below – the same fall-summer thing goes for this maple branch.
Below – they are building a new apartment near my house. This thing takes wet concrete in the bottom and can distribute it way into the construction site. I am interested in this as part of my general theme re how much industry has changed and replaced people with machines. This thing does the job of dozens of workers. Jobs have not gone overseas; they are just gone. Industry will eventually be like agriculture, with few workers producing the products for everybody else.
Below is Ben Franklin on the NFATC campus. Franklin was our nation’s first diplomat.
I went back to work today. Well, actually I went to the three-week training seminar. It was good to have free time, but it is good to be back at official work. Life needs a good work/leisure balance.
The training started at our Foreign Service Institute (FSI) at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC) in Arlington, Virginia. Next week we will go to an offsite in West Virginia. They call NFATC the Schultz Center after former Secretary of State George Schultz.
Below is part of the FSI campus where I like to each lunch.
Things have improved for us. During the middle and late 1990s it wasn’t so good. Our budgets were slashed and a lot of officers were looking for jobs back then. Our diplomatic readiness was gutted, as the general consensus was that the world was a much more benign place and we were less needed. There were very few promotions and we lost about half of our public affairs officers to attrition and people being selected out. Colin Powell corrected the situation and immediately (the program started in FY 02, which was October 2001) started a diplomatic readiness initiative that brought in a lot of new officers. It takes years to “build” an FSO and we still weren’t ready when new demands were put on us after 9/11. I firmly believe that one reason why we lost ground diplomatically after 9/11 was the simple reason that we lacked the diplomatic infrastructure to properly do our jobs. During the 1990s we closed most of our libraries overseas, cut overseas staff and closed posts. We just didn’t have enough left. I hope that we don’t go back to those management conditions in the new administration. I don’t think we will. Both presidential candidate claim they want to strengthen our diplomacy and I am sure they understand that you cannot do that w/o diplomatic infrastructure.
Below – our classroom building
The leadership course was good the first day. We had sessions at NFATC/FSI (old guys like me tend to call it FSI) and at the Harry Truman Building. I cannot go into specifics about speakers etc. We have the rule that we can talk about what was said, but not who said it. It makes sense. Otherwise people would feel constrained. We talked about some interesting leadership issues, although we only began to scratch the surface. Below are a few of my take-away items, in no particular order. What you see in these notes is my take on the results of discussions among participants and are not any official points of view, BTW.
Below – we did the afternoon at Main State (Harry S. Truman Building) so I went for a walk on the Mall for lunch. This is Memorial Bridge on the Potomac.
Strategic Challenges for State Department
State, like all big-established organizations, may have trouble adapting to the new world of dispersed decision-making and diffuse power. For a couple hundred years, diplomats represented America and contacts among citizens were not very common or sustained. This began to change with faster communication, but we still had the power of official position and a control of information. Technologies such as radio or television required big investments and didn’t allow for much audience interactivity. They were ways for the leaders or elites to talk to the masses. Things are changed. Everybody has access to tools only high government officials had ten years ago. For example, I can use Google Earth to see details of almost any place on the planet. I remember how impressed I was twenty years ago to see satellite photos that the average teenager would scorn today as too grainy and primitive. Beyond that, many people now appoint themselves “represent” America. This can be good … or not. A year’s work to build America’s image and communicate with a foreign audience can be ruined when some celebrity shows up with a movie that trashes it.
Governments do well with communications where one can speak to many. It is a challenge with something like web 2.0 where many creators interact with each other. State, and the U.S. government in general can be one voice and a very important one, but no longer do we have the predominant position we had even ten years ago. We have been overtaken by technologies and we are not sure how to respond. We do not currently have the tools and will need to develop them. Success is not assured.
Below – Vietnam Memorial
On Being Promoted
Many of us were a little diffident about our promotions. We should get over it. As leaders, it is up to us to lead. We now have the responsibility to take a stand and be proactive. We cannot blame “them” anymore because they are us.
Below – heaven & earth in the reflecting pool near the Korean Memorial
There will be some difficult transitions. Most of us made our careers by becoming masters of detail. Higher leadership requires a clear, simple vision that cuts through complexity. Some of us will suffer withdrawal and miss doing things with our own hands. In our new roles productivity comes through other people. We rarely will be able to point to something we can unambiguously take credit for doing. We all need to network more with peers, mentor those below us and know when to stand aside and let them get on with the work.
Below – Korean Memorial
On Leadership
One of the speakers quoted Colin Powell who said the secrets of leadership success were simple. You just had to represent U.S. values, build trust and take care of your people. Simple is not always easy.
Below – Vietnam Women’s Memorial
Other speakers commented that their biggest regrets came when they did not show courage and do what they thought was right at difficult times. Everybody thought trust, candor and integrity were important to leadership.
We have a lot more to do. I think we made a good start.
Homework
For homework I read an article by Peter Drucker. I read most of what Peter Drucker wrote years ago. I even had a Peter Drucker daybook with quotes, but I had forgotten a lot. This article reminded me and I was surprised at how much of his advice I had internalized.
Below – last roses of summer near Dunn Loring Metro
For example, Drucker advises people to work on their strengths instead of their weaknesses. Successful people are generally NOT well rounded. Do you know or care if Albert Einstein could fix a car or if Henry Ford knew anything about advanced physics? Of course you should get your weaknesses above the threshold point where they prevent success, but after that you are probably going to get more mileage out of building on what you are good at doing. The implication for leadership is that you should ask what a person can do well and let others compensate for the downsides. That is the strength of a team. This idea is counterintuitive. In school we are tested on the whole course and usually being really good at one chapter won’t make up for knowing nothing about the other ten. In life it does.
Anyway, Drucker has lots of good advice, but I will let you all read Drucker if you are interested. I look forward to the rest of the course.
It is a sweet deal, IMO. I enjoy this sort of thing. They pay me to do what I would pay to do.
Above is a street scene in Arlington, VA. They planted those oak trees years ago and it makes a big difference.
The Pacific Northwest is blessed by nature with great fisheries, fertile soils, ample resources and a moderate climate. People are drawn by that and by the natural beauty you see everywhere you look. Living is good in the Northwest and it has been that way for a long time. The Indians of the region were prosperous. It didn’t take much effort to gather nuts & berries, hunt or fish in such a rich place and the inhabitants developed a fascinating custom called the potlatch. The potlatch was a big feast where the host gave away, wasted or destroyed his possessions.
Anthropologists have studied the phenomenon. I first heard about it when I studied Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.” He used it as an example of a wasteful custom practiced by rich people to show their status. According to the theory, the rich demonstrated their status by wasting what others don’t have.
They are actually doing more. The individual consistently doing the giving uses his ostensible generosity to establish dominance over the habitual recipient. That is one reason why chronic recipients are often not very grateful for the largess they receive. The potlatch demonstrates this too. The rich chiefs made great public shows of generosity but they kept control of the productive assets. The potlatch was a perverse variation of the old saying “give a man to fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for life.” The fat-cats gave away fish but carefully kept the fishing grounds. In a society w/o good storage facilities, giving away nature’s surplus bounty was about as generous as a tree shedding its leaves in fall.
We find the same thing in today’s society. Rich celebrities make big deals of their generosity, but they usually don’t change the equation. There are exceptions. The late Paul Newman was clearly a good man and it seems to me that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are really trying to do the right thing, but very often the rich assuage their consciences and demonstrate their status by holding high powered fund raisers and concerts for politically correct good causes. It is more than ironic when they hold a million dollar gala to fight world poverty.
Useful Idiots
Back when some people still thought communism was a viable alternative to the free market, Kremlin leaders used to call them useful idiots. They were people in the West who went along with their communist aims w/o really understanding them . In the current American context you have people who act as foot soldiers in the various anti-whatever demonstrations set up by radicals.
The good thing about Portland is that it is tolerant and easy, but that also means that it has more than its share of listless young people with no visible means of support or obvious places to be. They hang around the center of town and beg for money. They even do this listlessly. One woman complained to Mariza that she would be working but was being prevented by the Republicans. I saw a lot of these sorts of young people gathering to protest against the war in Iraq. I started to talk to a few of them but soon gave up. They just don’t have the capacity to understand the nuances. I felt like the character in the movie “the Time Machine,” the original one from the 1960s. In one frustrating scene the guy tries to ask some questions and talk about serious issues but the vapid people of the distant future are just interested in their hedonistic pursuits. Everything is provided to them and they have no idea where it comes from.
Most of the kids (a few of these “kids” BTW are still left over from the 1960s) hanging around the streets are probably harmless most of the time. It is sort of like a “big Lebowski” club. They don’t really do much of anything that smacks of effort besides Frisbee and hacky sack. Mariza and I got a cup of hot chocolate at a local Starbucks and as we drank it watched a couple guys play hacky sack. They were good. You know that skill at hacky sack is inversely related to success in life. Think about the time it takes to get good at something like that. The same thing goes for lots of those sorts of things. I had a colleague once who was the best player of minesweeper that I had ever seen. She was not promoted.
My cousin Ray Jr and his wife Carol live simply amid the eskers and moraines of Wisconsin in a place they call simply paradise. They are farming around twenty acres and using about twenty acres of woodland to provide forest products and fuel for their stoves. Ray told me that the detritus of the forest provides all the fuel he needs to keep his home warm all winter long. He has yet to cut a live tree for fuel.
Below are raspberries
They are organic farmers growing thing like garlic, peppers, tomatoes, raspberries, corn and pumpkins for sale at local markets. The garden crops such as garlic and raspberries are the most profitable, but also (perhaps because) most labor intensive. Tomatoes are very much in demand early in the season, but as the bounty comes in it becomes almost difficult to give them away. Anybody who has grown tomatoes in a home garden is aware of this phenomenon.
Below – Ray & his bushhog
Ray follows a kind of three field system, like those used in the Middle Ages. Crops are rotated and one field is always resting, fallow or with cover crops that will be plowed under to restore the soil. Ray says that the chief activity of an organic farmer is keeping the weeds down all summer long.
Below is a game animal exhibit at Cabella’s
In winter he works in the woods. There are two reasons for this. The most obvious is that other work on the farm is diminished during the non-growing season. But another reason is lack of mosquitoes and biting flies that make the woods miserable when they are around. (A silly, but true story about my running comes from the same motivation. I liked to walk in the woods, but the mosquitoes made life unpleasant for me walking so I started to run. The mosquitoes find you by zeroing in on the CO2 you exhale. Running leaves it well behind you and the little nasties are chasing smoke.)
I enjoyed driving to his house up HWY 41. I used to go this way to get to Stevens Point and I have a history with the Kettle Moraine area. I had a camp nearby when I was ten years old. We learned all about the local glacier landforms, such as kettles, moraines, eskers and drumlins. I also used to ride my bike here a lot. It is hard on the legs. The moraines make it a roller coaster ride.
The moraines are the places where glaciers stopped. They come in series, like ripples, as the ice advanced or retreated. They call the most recent ice age the Wisconsin and you can see the most interesting landforms from that period right here north and west of Milwaukee. Most of Wisconsin was under glaciers until around 10,000 – 15,000 years ago, when global warming (it happened then too) melted them, but not all. Chrissy’s parents’ farm near Lacrosse is in what they call the driftless or the coolie region. That region was not glaciated in the last ice age, so it is rougher, but it was not spared the ice age experience. Coolies are long narrow valleys formed by the flow of glacial melt water. Fall is a beautiful time in all parts of Wisconsin.
On the way home I stopped at Cabela’s at the junction of 41 and 43. Cabela’s is a more authentic store than LL Bean or Eddie Bauer, which have repositioned themselves as yuppie heavens these days. Cabela’s still celebrates the actual hunting, shooting, eating and stuffing of game animals. They sell everything from the cloths you need to be outside, to the rifles and bows to the meat processing equipment. Beyond that, the prices are very reasonable. I have shopped the catalogue but this is the first time I have been in one of the stores. It is almost like a vacation destination.
Above is Leon’s Custard. Milwaukee makes the best custard. It is better than ice cream and is made with cream and eggs. Leon’s was used in the movie “American Graffiti” and some outside views of Arnold’s in “Happy Days”. It is on 27th St (old Hwy 41) in Milwaukee.
On the side is a sugar maple tree. I just cannot get enough of that beautiful color.
I went with my sister to the Miller brewery and then around the old neighborhood. Below are the boiler vats. They are eighteen feet deep.
Miller Genuine Draft is good beer. Miller Highlife & Miller Lite are not. Miller also has a partnership with Leinenkugel, which is very good and it distributes Pilsner Urquell and Fosters, both of which are among my favorite beers. It was fun to see where they were made.
This is King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer. This statue is in the “cave”, caverns dug into the hill where they used to keep beer cold before refrigeration. They used to gather ice from the local lakes during the winter and pack it around in the caverns. This cooled the temperature during the summers. Evidently the ice would last until the next winter. People lived closer to their environment in those days. You have to be more innovative if you have to do more than flick a switch to get air conditioning.
The plant in Milwaukee makes a half million cases of beer a day and all this beer moves out EACH day. This plant serves the upper Midwest and around 40% of the beer goes to Chicago. Five other plants around the country serve other regions.
BTW – According to the Bier Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law) issued by Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1516 all beer sold can be made of only malted barley, hops, water, and yeast. This rule still applies on Germany. Beer can be made from any grain. Miller mixes in some corn with the other ingredients and Budweiser uses rice. That means by German rules these are not really beers.
Only 1600 people work at the plant and half of them are corporate staff. That means that around 800 workers make all that beer. The plant is mostly automated. I was thinking again re the loss of jobs. Those jobs have not gone to China; they have just gone away. below is the Miller warehouse, clean, tidy and almost w/o workers. A half million cases will move through it today. You can easily see the jobs that automation takes.
On the other hand, other jobs are created but hard to see. My cousin Tony works for a company that runs webpages called www.officefurniture2go.com and www.homefurniture2go.com. The firm was founded in 2006, has about a dozen employees and distributes furniture around the country – w/o a significant bricks and mortar operation. We still think in the old industrial model where lots of people come together in one place. The new model has people distributed thinly and in small groups. It is hard to get used to it.
Anyway, we had another beautiful fall day. Milwaukee has nice parks as you can see from the pictures. Above and below is Humboldt Park. Pictures cannot capture such a glorious day. Even if the visuals could be perfect, you would not have the smell, sound and feel of the day.
I also drove down to Franksville. It is not a major tourist spot. It used to be where they made Franks Kraut. I don’t know if they still do, but I did see lots of cabbage fields. The brand is actually owned by the Ohio based Fremont Company, makers of all sorts of Kraut and catsup. Franksville is interesting for me because it was for a long time the edge of my biking world, as far south as I could reasonably ride and return in one day. It is still familiar. below is a cabbage patch.
Below a pumpkin patch near Franksville in Racine County.
Below is Lake Michigan looking south from Warnimont Park.
Indian summer is always a bittersweet time. The warm sun shining through colorful leaves is delightful, especially mixed with the smell of the new fallen leaves and the sound of their rustling underfoot. But this is also an ending. The last flowers of summer are on hanging lonely on their stalks. The falling leaves will soon leave branches bare. Pleasant October will yield to rainy and bleak November and we will have to wait several months for exuberant life to return to the forests and field.
Indian Summer is often a metaphor for life with its last vigorous but perhaps futile & melancholy gesture. It essentially one of the characters in John Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist”. The poem “the Last Rose of Summer” sums it up. (I put the full text at the bottom of this post.)
Below is Austin Street where I grew up looking north. Those beautiful yellow trees are ash trees planted after the death of our elms. They were planted in the middle of the 1970s. The one on the right I repaired after a wind storm broke its branches. It was smaller then.
Metaphor aside, October is my favorite month and Milwaukee’s October did not disappoint. I visited some of my old haunts. Many things have changed; most things have remained the same or similar.
Below is a statue of Patrick Cudahy in Sheraton Park. Cudahy founded the city that bears his name when the opened a meat packing operation south of Milwaukee.
Below is Tadesuz Kosciuszko the Polish American hero in the park that bears his name. The Polish epic Pan Tadeusz is based on him. Interestingly, it starts “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie.” Lithuania my country, you are like good health. Of course nationality is always complicated. The most famous Polish epic, written in Polish about a Pole can talk about Lithuania because they were part of the same commonwealth, which was lost, swallowed by its more agressive neighbors in 1795. It was gone for 123 years. That means that most Poles who came to the U.S. were not technically coming from Poland; they came from Russia, Austria or Germany, the countries that had annexed Poland and controlled its parts. Pan Tadeusz goes on with some poingancy, ” I never knew till now how precious, till I lost thee. Now I see thy beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.” Poles didn’t get their country back until 1918. The Lithuanians lost theirs again in 1940 and didn’t get it back until the fall of the Soviet Union. When I see the statue, I am reminded of the struggle. This was a Polish neighborhood and people knew the story back then. Today most people probably just see a man on a horse and think it is George Washington.
Speaking of a Polish neighborhood, this is Saint Josaphat’s Basilica, built by Polish immigrants. Milwaukee has lots of churches near each other. Each immigrant group built its own. We used to see it in the distance from our house. It was lit up at nights and my sister and I thought it looked kind of like some kind of giant monster. It was scary. You can see how this might be the case. Look at the “eyes”.
Below are geese flying into the pond in Kosciuszko Park. The geese chase away the ducks. In this goose-duck war, the ducks are completely outclassed. Geese used to be rare, but now they are all over the place. They are bigger and more aggressive than the ducks and they crap all over the place. Eventually, I suppose they will come to replace the ducks in the local ecology. They also used to migrate, but now many stick around all year living off the fat of the land (and the local gardens)
Don’t forget the poem
Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone; No flower of her kindred, No rosebud is nigh, To reflect back her blushes, To give sigh for sigh.
I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one! To pine on the stem; Since the lovely are sleeping, Go, sleep thou with them. Thus kindly I scatter, Thy leaves o’er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden Lie scentless and dead.So soon may I follow, When friendships decay, From Love’s shining circle The gems drop away.
The sun is lower in the sky in October and it enhances colors in the evening. You don’t have to be at some beautiful outlook to see it. I was just sitting on my couch at home when I was struck by the beauty of the light playing on the leaves outside. I watched it for a little while and then I thought I would take a picture to share it. Beauty really is everywhere. It is enhanced by the soundtrack of the birds singing and the crickets chirping as night falls.
My New Truck
I just got a new truck. Speaking of colors, it is a very bright red. I wanted to get an off-white one that would reflect the heat in July and would not show scratches and dents so much, but everybody else wanted the red one. I need a truck for the tree farm. The new farm is off the paved road and the small, low-clearance Civic Hybrid just can’t make it over the dirt road.
This is a Ford Ranger. It is the smallest truck you can get and the mileage is not so bad. This one is supposed to get 19 MPG in the city and 24 on the highway.
On the side is Taddeusz Kosciuszko in Layfayette Park across from the White House.
I am still thinking about leadership for my upcoming seminar and working through the discussion questions. The seminar is for guys like me recently promoted into the senior FS. Part of it is held at the Foreign Service Institute. We have a really nice campus in Arlington. The other part is a week-long offsite in West Virginia. I have great expectations for the seminar. I figure that the best part will be the cross discussion with all the others with such broad international experience. It is not the ordinary academic seminar.
My experience in Iraq sharpened my view on leadership. I learned a lot from the Marines. They do leadership very well. The thing l liked about their style was the way that everybody took a responsible role. It was a truly participatory management with a strong leadership component. It seems paradoxical to have both, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
Competent subordinates demand good leaders and good leaders value (and do not fear) competent subordinates. The leader who trusts his subordinates is showing his strength and understanding that sharing responsibility does not mean diminishing it. Bad leaders often actually prefer bad subordinates that they can complain about and blame for failures.
In Iraq I observed and had to practice a assertive leadership style that you don’t always see in bureaucracies. My toughest realization was that others were looking to me to take the lead and that I deserved to do it. I have been in charge of organizations before, but in the bureaucracy you can lean on rules and spread decision making. We work with committees. It is rarely any individual’s responsibility. That is why thing don’t happen very fast.
One of the hurdles I had to jump in my leadership learning in Iraq was very prosaic. It may sound comical in its simplicity, but I had to learn to lead physically. When the helicopter or convoy arrived, I had to get in first or walk over to the landing zone first. As a passenger, I had always been accustomed to milling around and then following the crowd.
This is a small example, but illustrative of how people look to the leader and the leader has the responsibly to decide. I also realized how the leader’s options are very much limited by the responsibilities of the position and the expectations of the subordinates. The leader has to fill the position. He cannot just do what he wants; he has to do what he should. You have the responsibility to make decisions AND the responsibility to be able to make decisions. That means you have to think problems through in advance, do your homework and keep up with events. It is a lot harder to be the leader than the follower. Followers can complain and remain passive. Leaders have to do something. No excuses.
Consistently good leadership is rare. Most bosses are not leaders. They duck or postpone the hard decisions. They literally boss people around, which is not leadership. A good leader motivates and sets up structures that make subordinate do their jobs “on their own.” When you have to boss somebody around – use your power directly and overtly – you have already failed in that respect. Bad leaders also tolerate underperforming people too long. (I think, BTW, that this is one of my weaknesses as a leader. I also hide behind the “you cannot get rid of anybody in government” excuse too much.) When the boss fails to control bad performers, he is failing in his responsibility to his team.
Good leadership is also episodic. I can think of times when I have been a good leader and many times where I have failed. When I look back on successes, I find that they were often the result of circumstances that played to my personal strengths. Which points me to another trait of good leaders. They know their strengths and weaknesses and work to ensure that they are shaping circumstances to their strengths to the maximum extent possible. This often involves sharing leadership with someone who has complementary skills. That is why when you look closely you are often seeing good leadership teams in action, and not so much just a good leader.
My friend Jeff Thomas told me a story about a great building contractor he knew in N. Carolina. Seems this guy was an absolute artist. Then suddenly his work went bad. Everybody blamed his divorce and they were evidently right, but not for the reasons they thought. This guy’s wife was his detail manager. He was wonderful at managing his workers and his projects, but he couldn’t manage himself. She made sure he was where he was supposed to be and crafted the situations to emphasize his strengths. Nobody understood this until the relationship ended. Then it was clear to everybody.
I think this silent partnership happens a lot more than we realize. In the non-personal example it is often possible to good leaders to replace their complementary team members, but not always. Many declines in leadership are attributable to the loss of a key subordinate or partner.
Anyway, I am going to post this and go run. It is a beautiful October day. I am supposed to think about the characteristics of good leadership. I will do that while I am running. The thing that I am considering is whether I should consider good leaders who did bad things. Leadership is like fire. It is a dangerous thing that can be used for good or bad purposes.
