Being alone with their thoughts is evidently a frightening concept for some people and they go to great pains to avoid it, filling any empty time with cell phone conversations, twitter (see below) and games. I have mixed feelings about games. As I wrote in a couple of earlier posts, games are ways we model and learn about the world, but as their portability and connectedness expands, they are pushing out the whole concept of introspection. That is just my own point of view.
But we have to meet the customers where they want to go. If they want games, then games are us. IIP has developed its own game called X-Life. It is an educational game that helps people from other places understand the U.S. through simulated experience. You get an avatar with which to explore America as a student or visitor. The current version is fairly primitive, but it has the advantage of being accessible and available. You have to start somewhere. The media is interested in this venture, and there have been articles in WSJ, CNN, ABC and UAE News. It is unusual for the media to take much interest in what we do. We should be flattered, I guess.
Games can be good, but I am never impressed by someone who is just too good at them. I had a colleague who was the best “Mine Sweeper” player I had ever seen or even heard about … and how she prioritized her time showed in her work.
I have been reading an annoying book called Tribes: We Need You to Lead US. It is typical of many such books about change, new technologies etc. in that it has that insufferable air of superiority and fawning homage to coolness. There are some good ideas; enough to fill an article or maybe a blog post, but not a book. But it wasn’t a waste. I thought about some of the reasons these books sell so well and how the faculties they employ sound so convincing … and why I probably cannot use much of the advice.
This book and others like them (some very good such as the Tipping Point) suffer from survivor bias. They talk about how little movements turn into big things. You get examples, like Google or Facebook, that seemed to come from nowhere to dominance. The examples are real, but the game is rigged. It is “survivor bias” & the teleology trap. It is when you assume that conditions you observe today were a natural or even an inevitable outcome. You infer a pattern or purpose where none is implied. It comes from a faulty perspective. A lottery winner asks, “What are the chances that I would win?” But the correct question is “What are the chances somebody will win?” Of course, the chances of that are 100%. If you bet on that, you are always right.
A simple illustration of survival bias is a game of Russian roulette. Survival is a random event, but at the end of the game, somebody will have survived. If a large enough group starts out, somebody will survive even repeated plays. You just don’t know who it will be. No doubt the “winner” will come to believe that he knows some secret of success. He may write books about it. But there is nothing to it.
Of course there is more involved in technology companies, celebrities or investing, but sometimes less than you would think. Let’s take the example of celebrities. All celebrities have talent. They are all attractive in some way. They are generally smart (or at least smarter than they seem). A celebrity needs these things. They are threshold requirements, the minimum you need them just to get through the gate, but they are not enough to provide success. Beyond that, the winning combination will not be known in advance. It looks very different depending on when you look.
If I know that a person is a celebrity, it is fairly easy to go back and explain why her ascent was inevitable. But if I substituted a non-celebrity, I might find much the same biography. When you listen to the winning Super Bowl team, they always say that they knew they were going to win and confidence is important, but the losers also knew they were going to win. They were just wrong.
Books like Tribes play on this bias. It is like naming the winner of the lottery AFTER the drawing. It is easy to be prescient about the past. The other thing I don’t like about this book is the appeal to coolness. They talk about the latest styles and sing paeans to change. People today demand the latest, they say. Once again, they are right, but so what. A lot of change is just froth. I have been reading these sorts of books for more than twenty years. They are always talking about the changes and the changes are always happening. But most of them don’t stick. In fact, the authors are usually self-contradictory. They seem to think radical change will happen and then it will be the change they want, but things keep on moving.
Another thing that annoys me about the cool change folks is that they don’t seem to understand cycles. The author of Tribes triumphantly states that smaller organizations are often growing faster than bigger ones. What a surprise! A young tree grows faster than an old one, but trends often do not continue. Beyond that , when praising the growth of the small, it is useful to do some simple math. Which would you rather have, 50% of $1 or 5% of $1000?
I have a special perspective on cool fads. As an FSO, I am away from America sometimes for years. Sometimes I miss entire fads. They come and go while I am away and there was no point in even thinking about them. Ephemera. Meanwhile, my bookshelf still has lots of classics that are never wildly popular but endure. The book that has been longest in my possession is a copy of Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire that my mother gave to my father the Christmas of 1954, the year before I was born. It was first published in 1776. I first read it in 1966 and it is still a joy today. Who could have predicted that the yet unborn baby would still be reading that book fifty-five years after my mother bought it?
Change is good & and so is continuity. A balanced person treasures both but is beguiled by neither.
BTW – Survivor bias is why we think stuff was better in the past. All the junk has long since gone in the garbage. What is left is better or at least by definition the longer lasting.
People are breaking down the doors trying to get jobs for the Federal government. In these inconsistent economic times, the promise of steady work and a good pension trump dreams of riches.
My original plan when I joined the FS was to stay in for about seven years and then start a different career. It didn’t work out that way. When my seventh anniversary came, I was in Norway in a great job. Then I was in Krakow. Who would ever want to leave a job in Krakow? Then Warsaw, Fletcher School, it was always something good. The only time I was really unhappy with the job was brief time when I was doing shift work in the Operations Center 1997-8, but I was only there for nine months and they sent me to Poland for three of those months to work on NATO expansion issues, so I never got around to sending my resume around.
You have to look at the totality of life that goes with a career, not just the job alone. As an FSO, I get to travel, meet interesting people, work with a variety of ideas and serve my country. I am not being facetious when I say that I had the opportunity to go to Iraq and the privilege to live with Marines. Few jobs offer that sort of adventure to a man north of fifty years old.
State Department has long been a popular place to work and the FS never has any trouble recruiting good people. BTW – it is a good time to be looking for a job as an FSO. They are hiring a lot this year. This year, however, people government jobs are popular across the board. I have mixed feelings about that. It depends on why you want to work for the USG. There is a special responsibly when you work for your Uncle Sam. Government jobs should be callings, not refuges.
I am glad that we have so many good people who want to work in the USG. I welcome them in the FS – follow this link. But we don’t want too much of a good thing. America has been an exceptional country ever since our revolution and even before. There are other models. France has followed a different, more directed, strategy since its revolution, for example. France is a great and beautiful country, but I prefer America.
In France, the best students dream of getting secure jobs in the government. Young Americans have always had visions of being entrepreneurs or running businesses. I am delighted to have enthusiastic and smart young people eager to work with us and they are coming at just the right time. We will face a wave of retirements in the next five years. We will need them in the FS to accomplish our mission. But I hope they are doing it for the right reasons (because they want to do good service not just for security) and I hope that soon young Americans will recover their confidence in the economy and themselves. I hope that some of them will still want to work with us, but maybe not so many.
An unforeseen outcome of my sojourn in the Iraqi desert was that I lost control of the television remote. Now I get to see American Idol, Hell’s Kitchen and others, but you do get a different perspective when you don’t choose all your own programs. If left alone, I would watch the variations of History Channel, Discovery and the News, along with reruns of “Bonanza” & “Star Trek”. I suppose some variety is okay and I can see what others are watching.
I really hate “Family Guy” and the boys know it, so they make a special point of coming up and turning it on. When I object, they claim that they are only seeking a family experience and something we can watch together. “Family Guy” is clever, but very hateful. It is an old comedy tradition to poke fun at society, but the writers of this show seem to hate everything about the way most people live. Still, it provides a type of entertainment. When the lead character, called Peter, does or says something particularly egregious, the boys look at me and wait for my ranting. I don’t disappoint them. It is a family social event.
“South Park” is a show I started off disliking, but now generally enjoy. It is very uneven. Parts are horrible, but it there is some legitimate social satire. The writers of this show don’t display the disgust I perceive in “Family Guy’s” treatment of our society. The one today parodied the economic mess. If you get a chance, watch it.
Chrissy likes the tournament style shows like “American Idol,” “Top Chef” and “Hell’s kitchen.” We also get to watch “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” I really cannot stand “Grey’s Anatomy.” The doctors are all ostensibly skilled, but rotten and selfish. They usually redeem themselves with an ostentatious show of some politically correct compassion or outrage. It actually drives me out of the room. I clean up the kitchen, which might indeed be its purpose. Chrissy likes “Ax Men,” which I also like and we watched DVDs of “The Wire,” which was a great show. We have now reached the end of it, however. I used to like “The Office” but that is also starting to get on my nerves.
I guess you have to have an English accent to be truthful. On “American Idol” only Simon Cowell tells the truth about the sometimes horrible performances. The audience boos him for it, but I think most people respect his integrity. Otherwise you just get that vapid praise. Paula Abdul praises everybody, but doesn’t seem to be sure where she is or who she is watching, so it is not much value. The terrible truth is that half of all people are below average and always will be, but that seems to be an unwelcome surprise. The other truthful guy is Chef Ramsey on “Hell’s Kitchen.” Actually, I am not sure if he is truthful or just plain mean. He is constantly out of control. Of course, they seem to pick a bunch of idiot savants as contestants. They seem to be able to cook, but lack all social skills and common sense.
Below – This happened near the Capitol. I don’t think anybody got hurt. You don’t have to hit a car very hard to do a lot of damage.
We now have TViO, which means we can record shows for later viewing. This is less useful that it might seem. We have lots of shows recorded but not enough time or inclination to watch them. The only show that I record and actually consistently watch is “Modern Marvels.” Recently they had episodes re how cheese and sausage were made, a history of pigs, oil refining, plastics and – my favorite – forestry technology. I like it because you get the story with all its parts but w/o the social commentary crap that seems to have accreted to most things today. For example, they talk about how pigs are raised and eventually turned into bacon and ham. That’s it. We don’t get the sad music or the criticism of modern eating habits. I just want to know how things work. I don’t need the help re how I should feel about it.
For all the criticism of TV, it really has improved and it is a great learning tool – if used properly. You could get a decent general education from watching things like “Modern Marvels.” “Nova,” or the various History Channel Shows. It also democratizes and fosters search for knowledge. There are now a lot of people trying things out. For example, there are whole cottage industries involved in figuring out how people in the past lived and built things by actually building them with the tools and techniques of the times.
Of course, you could just spend your time watching reality shows. They are popular, IMO, because all the losers watching can feel better than the even bigger losers on TV.
Everything must be produced before it is consumed but it is easy to forget the roots when you are enjoying the fruit. I fear this is happening in the media in regards to the “new media”. Pew recently issued a report on the media. It is rich in detail and hyperlinks. I recommend it. The new media is killing the old media, but may not provide a viable alternative.
I am an avid user and producer of the new media, but I recognize that the way the new media lives off the mainstream media is more parasitic than a symbiotic. Most of the reliable information gathering is still done by professionals and paid staff of traditional media. The new media repackages and reprocess it. In doing this, they sometimes add significant value. Maybe the resulting remix is objectively worth more than the raw material. But you still need the raw material. Everything must be produced before it can be redistributed or consumed.
The new media produces a lot of free riders. They consume the information products of the mainstream media (MSM) w/o paying for it. You can get away with this as long as there are strong institutions doing the grunt work. You can even disparage these plodding pedestrians. They denizens of the old media are not nearly as quick, cool or beautiful as those in the new media, but they do what needs to be done. Many people in the new media work for nothing. Some do this voluntarily and they know it; others think their big idea will catch on or they will someday figure out a way to make money off that blog. Just enough make the breakthrough to bucks and/or fame to keep the others running after the prize. It is a great way to have fun and foster innovation. It is not a very good way to produce a product day-in and day-out. For that you need the plodding pedestrians and you need an income stream.
The business model that supported the old media is collapsing. I don’t know what will take its place. Newsweek featured a cover story where the author advocated a kind of iTunes business model. Others have talked re the problem of making this work. Micro payments might work, but probably will not.
One of the secrets to iTunes is the long tail. I mean the “tail” on a normal distribution curve. Most of the sales are made near the center, but iTunes has found that the tails, i.e. the less popular to obscure titles, go on forever. While they don’t sell many of any particular title, the non-mainstream titles are a group sells very well because there are so many of them. These titles are often practically free for iTunes and w/o iTunes they would be practically unattainable. Yet iTunes gets $.99 for each of them with almost zero transaction or inventory costs. The volume of the obscure is a major source of revenue. (Somebody still wants “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers.) I don’t think you will be able to do that with newspaper articles. Yesterday’s news is not very valuable to anybody. Nobody feels nostalgia for the news story their father read back in 1965, as they might for an old song. So who will buy it?
Most participants on the new media are self-taught, self-regulated and self-directed. We write about what we like and cover stories as we like to. The new media is more about opinions and personal viewpoints than it is about facts. Let me speak as a new media person. I try to be factual in my writing, but I don’t try to get all sides and I don’t pursue a story after I get sick of it. I hope what I write is interesting and it may be a supplement to the news, but it is not the news. All I know about what I don’t see myself comes from the media. W/o that, I would not know much.
Some people in the new media like to think of the old media as slow-witted dinosaurs, deserving of extinction. They see the new media as the quick-witted and adaptive and they are right. But the new media depends on the old media to an extent most don’t appreciate. When the dinosaurs die off, the lizards that live off their droppings soon follow.
The Economist magazine features an article about how much less women make. In the EU, men make still 17.4% more than women and this is after 50 years of strenuous social-democratic effort to equalize outcomes. There is always a lot of gnashing of teeth on this subject. The gap persists all around the world – America’s gap is above the EU average and about the same as Germany or UK – and everybody infers discrimination. I don’t know if that explains the difference.
Firms will move their operations to other cities, across state lines and even to foreign countries to save some money on labor costs. The cost of labor is usually the highest cost of doing business. Imagine if you can get the same amount of work for 10, 20 or even 30% less.
We have to assume that firms that have more women must be more profitable if women are indeed paid less for the same work.
In Estonia, they pay women more than 30% less. If firms in Estonia can get the same work done for 30% less, I wonder why they don’t hire only women and I wonder why companies from all over Europe don’t move to Estonia and hire these wonderfully economical Estonian women so that they too can profit from the low labor costs.
Could it really be that business owners all over the world are just too dumb to take advantage of this wage differential? Or maybe they are just not interested in making money or they are not greedy enough to pick up a 17.4% profit opportunity that is dropped in front of them.
Maybe the astonishing statistics are misleading.
Choice makes a difference. I read that men suffer 92% of the workplace fatalities. That is a frightening statistic, but it has little to do with discrimination and a lot to do with choice of jobs & lifestyles. Choice explains more things than we like to admit. (The most dangerous occupation, BTW, is good old forestry. Look on page 15 of that report linked just above.) Doing different things produces different outcomes. This simple self-evident truth seems to offend some people these days. Maybe it is too simple. They prefer complexity. It provides more places to hide, more excuses for screwing up, more opportunities to blame others.
Iraq, forestry and I ride my bike to work in Washington traffic. Maybe I should rethink my choices … naaah. Besides, office work is the safest of all occupations and that is what I do most. It evens out in the long run and in the long run we are all dead anyway.
Above is a tree cutting machine at work in the woods near Portland Oregon. I saw it when I was there for the foresty convention in October 2008. The machines make it safer for the workers. Few things are more dangerous than cutting in thick timber with a chain saw. The branches of the trees are laced together a long way up. The big danger comes from snagged branches falling down and landing on the poor guys down below. Even small branches fall hard when they fall 100 feet. They call them “widow makers.”
I am not a tobacco person. My father could knock down three packs of unfiltered Pall Mall a day. I always disliked the smell but I didn’t know how bad it was until I went away to college. When I came home a few weeks later for my first visit, I couldn’t believe the smell. All those years I smelled like stale smoke and never knew. You get used to almost anything. I suppose most of the other kids in school smelled the same. Almost everybody smoked in those days. I was never tempted to try cigarettes. My generation came of age just as the dangers of smoking became clear. Besides, I was on the swim team. You cannot be a good swimmer if you smoke.
I am glad that smoking is no longer allowed in the office or on buses or airplanes. I remember how bad it used to be on long flights. But I do feel sorry for those suckers who have to stand outside in the cold to get in their smoke. We may have gone too far in the other direction. Smokers are one of the only groups left that can be disparaged with impunity in this PC world. Many of the farmers near my forests in Brunswick County still grow tobacco and it grows wild on my land. Tobacco was America’s first cash crop. The colonies around Chesapeake Bay probably would have failed if not for the noxious weed. Tobacco is hard on the soil, so its cultivation tended to push the colonists into exploring new land looking for new places to plant. Tobacco built Virginia, so its not all bad, but many of the soils still have not recovered.
I understand how much the troops in Iraq loved their cigars. I wrote a posting about the Marines’ love affair with the cigar. Somebody read that post just yesterday and told me about the way his company provided cigars to the troops. This is the link.
The ostensible arbiters of taste hate the suburbs. They critically acclaim crappy movies like “American Beauty” or “Revolutionary Row” that fit into cognoscenti stereotypes of life in the suburbs. Maybe these wise guys won’t understand, but suburbanites are the happier with their lives than those people who live in small towns or big cities, according to Pew Research.
I feel uniquely qualified to speak to this issue, since I work in the city, live in the suburbs and spend a lot of time on my farms in rural areas. Each has its attraction and I would not want to have to choose among them and I don’t have to, so in many ways it is a false choice. Let me address it anyway.
The key advantage of the city is that you can walk to the places you need to go, although this advantage is lost on many urban dwellers, since they don’t walk much anyway. Suburbs are a little too much car culture for me. Of course, I am a bit spoiled in Washington, which is one of the world’s most pleasant and walkable cities. Washington really isn’t a city. At least around the Capitol, it is more like a nice park with magnificent monuments and musuems. Who wouldn’t like that? In many cities these days you cannot really walk around much.
Diversity used to be an advantage of cities, but not anymore. Today that is an advantage of the near-in in suburbs. Fairfax County, where I live, is more diverse than Washington DC. My homeowners’ association has people from all over the world interacting and getting along, which is true diversity. People in cities tend to have more defined and sometimes antagonistic group identities. Group identify is not diversity; it is just a kind of standoff. The suburbs are now doing a better job of breaking down archaic group-think. I suppose that sort of homogenization is one of the things that offends some people, but I prefer to interact with people, not “representatives.” Rural areas tend to be less diverse, in my experience, because fewer people are moving in.
The advantage of the rural areas is space and I love to hike in the big natural areas and I really love MY forests, but absent those things, rural life holds few attractions for me. The countryside is a place to get away to … and then get away from. It is not a place I would like to live permanently. We lived in Londonderry in New Hampshire, which was an interesting exurb. It has the demographic characteristics of a suburb, but the density of a rural area along with a little bit of a small town. We lived in a kind of cluster development, which I found very pleasant.
Above was our home area in Londonderry, NH. It was both suburb and country. The picture below is about 200 yards away.
I like to see my neighbors, but be able to leave them behind when I want to be alone. This may be the blueprint for the community of the future. You can have fairly dense development amid green fields connected to urban amenities. The old suburbs, where everybody has a rambler or ranch style house set on a half acre lot are soooo 1950s. The gritty urban environment is too unpleasant and the countryside is too vast. Put the three together, and you have something nice. I guess that is why I am happy where I am now in Fairfax. Of course, I will be keeping my eyes open for something better. That is the American way.
Above – people like old fashioned small towns … in theory, but they demand the larger floorplans and conveniences available only in modern suburbs. Below is a little too empty. Some people think they want to “get away” but few really do. They are nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Speaking of that, Pew has an article about the middle class (available here) and I read the Economist special report on the growing global middle class (here). The middle class is also much maligned by the cool ones. The cone headed intellectuals used to call us bourgeois. But when you think about it, most of the good values come from the middle class. The poor are too screwed and screwed up to think about the better things in life and the rich are too spoiled and effete to care. Read the articles, and I bet you will agree.
Above – Old buildings are very popular with a small, but vocal, part of the population. They have lots of nice nooks and great lines, but the plumbing tends to be bad. Open markets (below) are another “must have” ammenity. Unfortunately, they are often not economically viable, as the people who claim to love them shop elsewhere.
All things considered, we have lots of options and this middle class guy is feeling okay in the new and improved suburbs.
The nicest places, IMO, are the garden cities that were popular in the early 20th Century. This is a bit older, but has the open feel and modest opulence. Below – good mass transit is a necessity to a nice city or suburb. They have to be more convenient than driving for many people. You can do this only by making it more difficult and expensive to drive. If you provide enough parking and prevent traffic jams, most people who can will choose to drive and doom mass transit to a poor transport method for the poor. It is a tragedy of the commons. Everyone benefits if more people take mass transit, but each individual can make himself relatively better off if he can get himself into the car.
Below is that bad part of the suburbs – parking lots. Cars are overused. We have too many impervious surfaces, too many roads, too much traffic and too many fat people because of our love affair with the automobile.
A lot depends on not on the location or the life station but on the person. No matter what how much you make or where you go, you have to live with yourself. If you don’t like the company, you are out of luck.
Below is a sculture at the Hirschorn. I don’t know what it is supposed to be. Maybe nothing – i.e. non-representative. It looks to me like a little fat devil. Or it could be a cow up on its hind legs. One advantage to cities is you get to look at these things and be amazed.
I am still trying to understand the new communication technologies. As I look back and forward, I come again to the constant in all communication. Technologies don’t talk. All communication happens between humans and humans. It is like the old philosophical conundrum: If a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? The conundrum is easily solved if you define what you mean by sound. It certainly creates vibration. So it makes a sound in that sense. But these vibrations only become meaningful as sound when somebody’s brain interprets it.
When you add the human factor, you see that we are dealing with methods, not techie magic. The technologies are just facilitators. Anyway, I noticed a couple of good articles to supplement my understanding expressed in my first Facebook posting. The Economist had a short but good article called Primates on Facebook that said some of the same things as my post re the limited of human cognition. I didn’t know the source, but the limit of human interaction is called a Dunbar number, after an anthropologist who postulated that human face to face interaction can only go to around 150. Somebody wrote a blog post about that. It is more interesting than its title Extending Dunbar’s Number with the social web suggests.
But there is good news for geezers as I read in Older People on the Internet. It makes sense. Old people have time on their hands, are unenthusiastic about strenuous exercise and often no place to go, so they already have the prime characteristics of Internet nerds. Large sections of the web will soon be big electronic geriatric wards. That brave old geezer world will be well developed just about the time I get there, how convenient. I also got my Twitter account. I like Twitter less, but I have been studying up on it. Pew Research has a good summary of Twiterati demographics and habits.
In a classic episode of M*A*S*H, Father Mulcahy grows some sweet corn. After a summer of hard work and anticipation, he harvests the crop, turns it over to the chow hall cook and everybody looks forward to the hometown taste of fresh roasted corn. But the cook has removed the corn from the cob and creamed it into the kind of slop he usually dispenses. Insulted by the complaints, he replies indignantly, “I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.”
Above is General Grant in front of the Capitol. Grant was an unassuming man. He could easily pass unnoticed. They said that the only way you could tell if Grant was around was that things started to happen. Grant was a great general, but he failed at everything else. Is it enough to be really good at one thing?
Leadership can be like that. Sometimes it takes more time and effort to make a mush than to do the effective thing. It is usually a good idea to lighten up and consider whether your problems are because of instead of in spite of your best efforts, but often the hardest thing to do is nothing. Most of us have a kind of piece-work mentality. We think we earn our money by how much we do. Leadership often means that we add the most value by what we choose to leave undone.
A leadership technique that seems to work is to “get lost,” just be inaccessible. I know that this goes against every fiber of the stay-connected zeitgeist, but sometimes you add no value and generally when you add no value in an organization, you are sucking up value by getting in the way. At times when the problem is best solved by someone else, but you know that others may want to consult or defer to your judgment, the best response is to get lost. Doing nothing, BTW, is a very proactive strategy and is the appropriate one only in some situations. It doesn’t mean you just sneak off to play golf, although in some cases that works by chance. There are some places where things progress a lot better when the boss is not around and I am not talking about prescribed non-action here.
Of course, the whole technique presupposes that you have already built an environment of trust and autonomy, so that colleagues and subordinates will not merely cower in fear and indecision until your triumphant return. And that is the big caveat. You are not allowed to reverse the decision for trivial causes and you can never get angry that it was made w/o you. If you are prone to the character flaws that lead to these behaviors, you need to stay away from this technique, but recognize that your organization will never work at top performance because you won’t allow it. And stop complaining about all the work you have to do or about your incompetent subordinates. That is the world you created by making yourself indispensable. Live with it or change it, but in either case shut up about it.
And as the great Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
I liked the “Book of the Tao” since I first discovered it when I was around twenty. I bought a book at a used book shop for $0.25 called “The Wisdom of China and India.” It was published in 1943. They would never publish such a book today, since it lumped together these two great but very disparate cultures and presumed to aggregate the collected wisdom of most of Asia in one volume. But it was a great book and I still have it. The binding disintegrated when I gave it to Alex to read last week, but a little duct tape postponed its day of reckoning.
The philosopher Lao Tzu has some sage (really) advice on leadership and since this wisdom has persisted through various iterations and hundreds of generations, maybe there is something to it. For example:
“The Tao abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone. If kings and lords observed this, the ten thousand things would develop naturally.”
or
“Nothing is softer than water, yet nothing can be better at overcoming the hard.”
and
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
If you translated this wisdom into more modern terms, you would say that this sort of leadership taps into the intelligence and imagination of the people. It makes them partners. This is especially valuable when innovations are needed. (Please refer to my posting re management gurus.) Centralized, directive leadership can almost never identify and develop innovation because whether they mean to or not, they bring the power of the organizing to bear to defend the status quo or permit only incremental and usually ineffective change. That is the paradox that when you abide in non-action, you leave nothing undone. I would refine it a little. Leadership’s task is to create conditions favorable for progress and innovation, but it does not directly create anything. To employ my favorite analogy, it is like when I use proper silviculture on my forests. The thinning, fertilizing, planning etc allow the trees to grow better, but I cannot micromanage wood or leaf production. BTW – Below is the exchange from M*A*S*H:
Father Mulcahy: Don’t I know it. All week I’ve been dreaming of getting butter on my cheeks, juice on my shirt, and a niblet wedged between two molars. [walks up to the table] Father Mulcahy: Where is the corn? Cpl. Igor Straminsky: You’re looking at it. The mushy stuff. Father Mulcahy: You… You creamed it! [on the verge of tears] Father Mulcahy: You… you ninny! Cpl. Igor Straminsky: [everybody yells at Igor] I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.
