I don’t really understand. I went to a census webpage today and got a message that it was suspended because of the shutdown. Why? If there is still electricity to run the site, and there is because I got the message, there is no additional cost to leaving the information accessible. In fact, it probably cost more to put up that message than it would to just leave it alone.
I am still working, since overseas diplomacy is considered crucial at least for now. My Brazilian colleagues cannot be furloughed because of Brazilian law, which applies to them. Since we are on the job, I think we should do our jobs to extent we can given that our resources have been cut.
We are shut down due to lack of appropriations. It isn’t like being on strike; it means that we still want to work but don’t have money and I cannot spend money on new things. But we still have a lot of not new things that we can use or do and we have our skills, talents and time. I don’t want to stand down until I have nothing left to stand with. The work we do is valuable. It was worth doing last week and is worth doing now. There are rules about these things, however, and perhaps protean interpretations. I just want to do the job that they are still paying me to do and I think most of my colleagues do too. We should do our best to minimize the pain and mitigate the damage. That is what I intend to do as far as I am allowed: maybe even a little bit farther.
I thought about keeping this in my private journal, but I think it is a problem common enough that maybe I should write something more public. It might be of interest to the FS community. IMO, this is a subject extremely interesting to many people, but one we talk about obliquely or not at all. Lots of my colleagues are in similar positions and more generally this applies to CS and all old guys. I also feel confident in writing since I feel generally successful and not aggrieved and I am looking at the development it with surprising indifference.
I didn’t get promoted this year. I figured my chances were 40-60 against and I lost the toss. At my rank, promotions don’t mean much more money and there are very few practical advantages other than the honor of it all. There are good things, as I will explain, but first a little background.
Our FS system gives us time limits within our grades. A “normal” career will last about 27 years and the person will honorably retire at the FS-01 level, a rank equivalent to an army colonel. To survive longer, you have to jump to the senior FS, which I did in 2007. After that, you get six years to make it to the next grade. I got a little extra time, since they gave me credit for the year I spent in Iraq and Congress didn’t get around to ratifying my promotion until 2008. Anyway, I can keep my job until January, 2016, when it is “hit the road Jack” and I have to retire.
This is not a bad thing. I will be sixty. I have been eligible to retire since 2005 and I have been “kinda meaning” to retire and do something else, but I hung on because the FS was fun and I felt like I was contributing. My finest hours were my service in Iraq and now doing extraordinary things in Brazil. These came after I could have retired and leaving those songs unsung would have been a shame. Of course, I would not have known what I didn’t achieve. Now, however, I don’t think there is much left for me. I think that the job I am doing in Brazil is the best I can do. Future assignments would be coming down from the peaks.
So how is the lack of promotion good news?
This was probably my last chance for promotion. As I said above, I did the best I could in Brazil and the reports that my Ambassador and DCM wrote reflected that. Ambassador Shannon wrote something so good for for me that I would certainly be too embarrassed to write for myself. It won’t get better. If that is not enough, I am out of luck. I don’t want to be a DCM or a DAS, so PAO Brazil is as good as it gets for me, but evidently not good enough. It is still a little ways off, but I now can see clearly the end of my FS road.
If I was not forced out, I would think of excellent reasons to hang around like a fart in a phone box. I would not leave, but my usefulness would have peaked. We have people like that at State. They are ghosts of their former glory. It is sad and not for me. You should always leave when they still want you to stay.
When I talk of retiring, I don’t mean to do nothing. I still feel energetic and will find a good job where I can still do something good. I will have the luxury of taking a job that means something to me w/o having to worry too much about the salary & benefits. My forestry enterprise could use some attention and I have lots of personal things to do before I take that final road to glory.
So life is good. I still feel little pangs of pain for not being on the promotion list. At this point in my career a promotion is a “positional good,” i.e. you want it because not everyone can have it and you have the “why not me?” question when you see people you think are less worthy. Having served on promotion panels myself, I can answer that question truthfully in ways that need not make me angry or sad. Some is just the luck of the draw. Promotions are statistically valid in that the better people tend to do better, but there are lots of anomalies in both directions, as well as more people who could be promoted than can be. I also admit that I have certain personality traits not immediately appreciated by the bureaucracy. I consider them mostly good and if I have not changed them up until now, I sure won’t be doing any major renovations at this late point.
I will go gentle into that good night with no raging. It will be going on 32 years by the time it is done, hard to believe. I had a good run and I think things are better at least in a small way because of things I did. The FS treated me fairly and I was able to build a good life both in and outside work. There is no job I would rather have had.
P.S. – One of my favorite movies is “Groundhog Day.” I may take more lessons from simple comedy movie than it has to teach, but I see it as the story of the iterative pursuit of excellence. The main character, played by Bill Murray, repeats the same day, February 2, over and over again. He finally moves ahead only after he lives the day right in all its aspects. I think the FS is like that in many ways. We go from place to place doing similar jobs, trying to get better at doing them. Up until this tour in Brasília, I always tried hard but didn’t really get it right. I am not saying that my performance in Brasília is perfect, but I think it is right this time. I am entitled to move along now.
P.S.S. I have learned to love poetry in my later life. I only wish I had been able to appreciate it sooner. Maybe you have to be ready for it. Anyway, I am reminded of the Tennyson Poem, Ulysses, that I didn’t appreciate in HS. I don’t hold with the revisionists views of the work and take it for what it is, w/o irony. The relevant part is below.
…Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One of my favorite movies is “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray. It is an old movie now; maybe you could call it a classic. The lead character – Phil Connors – relives the same day – February 2 Groundhog Day, over and over thousands of time. No matter what he does during the day, he wakes up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania at 6:00 am on February 2 to a clock radio playing Sony and Cher “I got you babe” and nothing has changed. Nobody except Phil has any memory of the past experience. He gets to move to the next day only after he gets the endlessly repeating Groundhog Day just right. He starts making better connections among the people of the town fitting into their lives and helping them. Finally he feels he has done the best he can and the next time he wakes up it is February 3. I saw the movie dozens of times and probably read too much into it, but the reason I like it so much is that it made me think about pursuing excellence.
Way back in my classical education days, I was enamored with the Stoic philosophy. I read Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” in Greek class (although mostly on the English side of the Loeb Classic, I admit) and studied how Stoicism influenced Western thinking in general. What I took away was that you accept your task, do your duty, not expecting necessarily to get credit or even to succeed. You cannot control what happens to and around you, but you can control your response. It is more complicated than this but IMO “Groundhog Day” tends to follow the outlines of Stoicism.
In the end, it is not so much about what Phil does as what he becomes. He realizes that perhaps he cannot change the things that happen around him, but he can change and improve himself; control his own responses to the circumstances and in that way find his own place and control his own destiny. When he achieves excellence, and lives the perfect day, he can move to the next step.
Foreign Service life can be like “Groundhog Day.” We go to assignments in different places but lots of things are the same. I often had the feeling that I am reliving the same experience. I do the same things and apply similar strategies and sometimes I feel like I have not really made any progress. Things seem pretty much the same after I leave as they were before I arrived. Each time, however, I hope that I can learn something and do better next time. I always joke that it is better to be lucky than smart, but joke or not it is true that much depends on circumstances. You have to adjust to the environment and its particular opportunities and threats. Sublime plans executed by superb teams can fail in an unfavorable environment and poorly planned and executed plans can succeed when things are just right. You have some control in that you can sometimes choose the environment where you will act, but not always and things will change, often in unexpected ways. Today’s royal road to success may be tomorrow’s path to perdition. Brazil may be the last day in my “Groundhog Day” saga and I think this time it will be the perfect day, or at least as near perfect as possible in this imperfect world outside the world of movies. Circumstances are great. Our Brazilian friends want many of the same things we do in the key area of educational exchanges and they are willing to put resources behind their aspirations. This opportunity arrived almost exactly the same time I did and it made education and related institution linkages the theme of my time here. My team in Brazil is as good as I could get. I am halfway through my time here and things have worked out much better than I expected or predicted. My problem has been too many opportunities. I have had the luxury of taking choosing from among them. This is harder than it seems, since I have to turn down good proposals, but it is better than the alternative.
In fact, sometimes I am tempted to look for a reason to flee Brazil early so that I can quit while I am ahead, before my Royal Road turns into perdition’s highway. I am afraid my luck won’t hold. But then I think again about the Stoicism. My job is not done. I need to persist until the end, take the sweet with the bitter. Besides, sneaking out early is not a realistic option and I am reasonably certain I can hold it together.
Most other jobs I could get would be a letdown anyway. I cannot think of a better place to work as a public affairs officer, no place I would rather work and no time I would rather be doing it. In public affairs, this is the chance of a generation in Brazil. I always tell people that five years ago would have been too soon and five years from now might be too late and I believe it. The connections we help create between the American and the Brazilian people shape relations between our countries for the rest of my lifetime and beyond. It is too important to let it go before I have done everything that I can do.
My picture up top is a posed picture of us in front of a group of Brazilian English teachers who will go to a variety of U.S. universities to learn to teach English better. Two years ago, we sent twenty. Last year we sent fifty. This year we will send 1080. This is an example of the opportunities. Our Brazilian friends want to send them and pay for their tuition. U.S. institutions are happy to have them and we (the Mission) facilitate the connection. All of us “suits” look alike, don’t we?
I have not written much for a while. We have been unusually busy in the office. What have I been doing?
We have had visits by important people like the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. This sucks in more people and time than you might think. I remember when Secretary of State Eagleburger came to Norway back in the 1990s. This was my first SecState visit. He came with a few people. We didn’t have to spend a lot of time preparing for the visit. He knew his business and was not much interested in VIP treatment. I tried to give him some talking points. As near as I can recall his response he said, “I don’t need these things; I make them up.” Suffice to say that it is not like this anymore.
Of course Eagleburger is a special case. He is the only career FSO ever to be Secretary of State. If that is not enough reason to revere him, he was born in Milwaukee, went to school in Stevens Point and got his degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Another thing that has been taking time is writing fitness reports. I wrote my own (we write our own first page), those of my key staff and reviewed those from our consulates. Since I had experience on promotion panels, colleagues have asked me to help with theirs. I tried my best. I work with really great people and when I read their accomplishments I feel much honored to be in this group.
Writing the reports is one of the most important things I do. Good people should get what they deserve. But I really hate the software we have to use to file the reports. It is complicated and troublesome. I never met anybody who actually likes it. It is not intuitive. You spend several hours learning how to use it each April and then don’t use it for a year and have to relearn it next time. But we cannot seem to get beyond it. We used to have a simple Word document that you could fill in. It took a few minutes. But a couple years back, they started to make us use this thing called e-Performance. It transforms a few minutes of work into hours or even days of wresting with the kind of software everybody thought was obsolete in back in the 1990s.
I should not complain. I am very lucky to work in this place, at this time with these people. There is no place I would rather work. I don’t have any unfulfilled career ambitions. Promotion for me would be an honor, but it isn’t very important to me. I am not angling for any job beyond the one I have now. My goal in taking the job as PAO in Brazil was to pursue excellence. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I just wanted to get it really right before my time was done. This time I felt that I could really devote my full attention. I always thought that if conditions were right, I could produce excellence. Conditions are excellent; me … still not so much. It is humbling to come up against the limitations.
I would call it a public diplomacy triumph & I don’t think it is hyperbole to say so. We held “visa days” in Rio, São Paulo & Brasilia for student going to the U.S. on Science w/o Borders scholarships. There were about 600 served today. The Brazilian government estimates that they will have sent 1500 to the U.S. by summer and more from then on thousands more.
In Brasilia, we held a big event to talk to them about the U.S. and get them ready to go to the U.S. They will be spread out all over the U.S.
We called our event “Burgers w/o Borders.” The Ambassador and other American officers cooked and served hamburgers, American style, on a fried on a Webber grill. (I cooked too, as you can see in the picture.) Our goal was to create an American style cookout.
Always I try to learn from our successes as well as our failures and so I have been thinking about this. Getting this first wave of Brazilians to the U.S. only a few months after the Brazilian president announced the outlines of the program is a definite success. In the midst of such success, we need to determine the role of our team. How different would be the outcome if we did things differently? We don’t want to be like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise, but we also don’t want to attribute to luck what was influenced or even shaped by our efforts. You cannot learn from experience if you take credit for everything or take credit for nothing.
Results are important, but the only way to improve is to study the process that went into the results. The challenge is when we study the process already knowing how the story ended. Knowing the outcome, we work backwards, emphasizing events that seem to have contributed to what we know happened, but may not have done so, may not be duplicable or may not be recognizable in advance. Some people say that hindsight is 20/20, but this overestimates our ability to understand the real processes and underestimates our tendencies to tell good stories and create narratives even where they don’t exist. Our stories usually overestimate deliberate actions of individuals involved, undervalue the importance of interactions among actors and neglect almost entirely the role of random events. We also tend to emphasize our own contributions. This is not only because we are egocentric, but also because information about our own actions is more readily available to us. With those caveats in mind, I am thinking through the process.
I have written earlier about the larger program, Science w/o Borders. You can read about it here. I won’t repeat. Let me talk here specifically about our visa days/Burgers w/o Borders, the reception we gave the students that made it an event, marked a transition, and created an impression.
First let me be open about what I think I can take credit for doing (caveats above applying). I take credit for taking this program seriously and conveying the urgency to colleagues around Brazil. I knew where we wanted to be. Leadership is intangible in many ways. Big successes or failures often look impossible before they happen, but then inevitable after the fact. By extension the person pushing it sometimes seems nuts before and irrelevant after. That was my role (yes – to seem nuts before & irrelevant after, and I did it well.) I didn’t let things slip, pushed for success and let everyone know that I would back them up. W/o this leadership, I am convinced we would not have achieved this result. In the bigger picture, w/o the Mission’s consistent, proactive support, I do not believe the students would have gone this semester. We would have had a trickle in the fall semester and it would have seemed to be the natural outcome.
“My” biggest contribution was putting the right people in the right places and letting them do what they were good at doing. I have been teaching my Brazilian colleagues the use of the word “honcho” both as a noun and a verb. I use it in a particular fashion. For me the honcho, or the person honchoing, does what is needed to make something work. He/she doesn’t always have specific power he/she is working with in other cases and has to enlist cooperation through a variety of persuasion and power methods.
I asked my colleague Lana to honcho the logistics of the program at the Embassy. She did a great job of coordinating the work of others. I think it is important that the big boss (i.e. me in this case) back the honcho, but not be in charge of details. This gives the actual honcho the ability to refer to higher authority and strengthens his/her ability to implement. You would think that having the ability to make the final decision would be strength, but it is often weakness. IMO, we in State often make decisions at too high a level and/or with too much consensus. My father told me that I should never spend a dollar to make a nickel decision. The honcho can make decisions with the cover of the big boss using the resort to higher authority if there are problems (i.e. can say “I would like to do it, but you know how the boss is.”)
(It is very important that if we delegate responsibility, we also need to delegate authority for most decisions and freedom to make them. I hate it when someone gives responsibility and then comes back to second-guess or revisit all the decisions. Good leaders, IMO, add value by asking good questions and sharing experience when appropriate. Bad leaders subtract value by “taking charge” of details or “holding people accountable” while not giving them enough freedom to be responsible. I am aware that I also suffer those faults and try tread lightly on working systems. I think of good leadership in forestry terms: know the environment; plant the right trees; thin and trim as appropriate; protect them from pests them; give them enough but not too much fertilizer to grow and let the system develop, all the time accepting that it is more complex in its details than you can understand.)
Another important “small” success was giving the program a catchy name. A project with a good name is almost always done better than one w/o one. We chose “Burgers w/o Borders” because it was a lighthearted parallel to “Science w/o Borders”. It also had the advantage of fitting the program and the beauty of alliteration. In other words, it is easy to say; appropriate and memorable in the sense that it evokes a concrete image.
My colleagues had lots of ideas about making the event memorable in other ways. We had T-shirts and umbrellas to make the pictures memorable. Look at the picture down of the crowd with the umbrellas. Now imagine it with just a couple people with ordinary clothes and no umbrellas. Look at my picture with the Burgers w/o Borders apron and the cowboy hat. Image makes a difference, doesn’t it?
On the day of the event, we put all hands on deck. There was some redundancy, but you need slack. Better to have someone standing around unneeded than have someone needed not standing by.
Media was willing to cover the event because it was an event. Our press section colleagues were able to sell the it using the hook of the cookout event. They could promise good visuals and interesting stories from the student. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Science w/o Borders had been in the news recently. A good PD rule of thumb is that you should not create your own wave when you can catch and ride higher on one that is already coming your way. People are interested in “their” events, not ours. We also encouraged the students to bring and use their cameras and cellular phones. Young people are natural creators on social media, but you need to create opportunities for them. Since Burgers w/o Borders was not in the Embassy proper, security let them keep their devices.
Of course, much of the success was created by others. Our Consular sections all over Brazil were keys to success. They were fantastically cooperative. After all, visa day required visas. As I alluded immediately above, our security folks were also very helpful and flexible. This was a case where we were lucky, lucky to have great colleagues. I really cannot “analyze” that, except to say that keeping colleagues in the loop, showing them respect and understanding their needs is essential in any cooperative endeavor, and this category includes almost all human activities.
Of course, our Brazilian friends will see it differently. From their point of view, WE are the support activity for their program and they are right. We are supporting their success. They are right too. It is a win all around, enough to go around.
P.S. Students arrived on buses and had to line up to get through security. A line is a great PR opportunity, as all politicians know. You have a captive audience eager for some diversion. I worked the line on the way in, stopping to talk to forty or fifty Brazilians on as individuals. I think this made a great impression on the students. We spoke in Portuguese outside the Embassy and then English inside to show the transition. We joked about the quality of my hamburgers and generally made the personal connection. I think this is something they will take with them and remember for a long time.
We have been getting lots of visitors in Brazil. They have to come now, since much activity shut down for the holidays a couple of weeks from now and will not really recommence until after Carnival.
The most interesting for me was a visit by a delegation from the State of Massachusetts led by Governor Deval Patrick. Most of the delegation consisted of business people representing high-tech and life-science firms, but there were also representatives of Massachusetts’ universities. We were happy to see them, since they fit in well with our support for the Ciência sem Fronteiras project. The universities reps said that they were interested in taking Brazilian students and the Brazilians are interested in going to Massachusetts, so it looks like we have the beginnings of a beautiful friendship.
Massachusetts is a case study in the value of education. The state has gone through good times and hard times, but it always adapts. The high levels of education make this much easier. I gave a short presentation to the group and they were pleased when I called their home a “state of brains” but I was not trying to flatter. Massachusetts has long been one of the case studies I use when talking about renewal, resilience and the crucial role that education plays in easing transitions.
Nobody can predict the future with any certainty. The best plans and most elegant adaptions to current conditions will someday become useless and maybe even dysfunctional when technologies, trade patterns or other relationships change. Education cannot protect you from change, but it can help you identify trends and develop options to deal with them.
The principals from each of the Brazilian states returning from their three-week programs in the U.S. come to one city on their ways home. They meet to share and report on their experiences and elect the Brazilian principal of the year. This year they went to Recife, so that is where I went too.
The principal of the year program is unbelievably good from my public diplomacy point of view. It is a Brazilian program that originated in part from a voluntary visitor tour in 1997. The principal of the year award for each Brazilian state and for Brazil as a whole was initiated in 1999. The Embassy sponsored exchanges with the U.S. in 2000 and the first group traveled in that year. It became a two-way exchange in 2004, when top American principals made return visits to Brazilian states. It is really a nation-to-nation (the American nation is greater than the American government) exchange. Principals from both sides see places that few ever visit.
The truly great PD aspect is that I – the PAO at the U.S. Embassy – get to moderate the debriefing and speak prominently at the award ceremony. It is a big Brazilian program. CONSED, the national Association of Secretaries of Education, owns it. Yet we are a big part of it. Also present at the events are state secretaries of education from around Brazil. So we are talking to the best principals plus the leaders who make educational policy around the country.
It doesn’t get any better than this in the Public Diplomacy world. And it has been going on for more than ten years.
The Brazilian principals divided into nine groups, clustered by where they went in the U.S. Each group reported on what they saw and their impressions. They went all over the place, from rural South Carolina or Virginia to urban Chicago and Brooklyn. American is a very diverse place and the challenges in Anoka, Minnesota or Poulsbo, Washington are not the same as in Chicago or Cleveland. But America, despite its size and diversity, shares many similarities, at least as seen by our Brazilian friends.
One of the things that impressed the Brazilians was the same thing Tocqueville saw. Americans are involved in ways beyond their government. Our Brazilian friends were impressed by the amount of parental involvement as well as how much community organizations contributed to schools.
There are other differences. The Brazilians commented that American school days are “integral.” This could be a confusing concept unless you knew that Brazilian schools tend to run in shifts, with different grades rotating in and out from early morning to evening. Brazilian educators tend to believe that a whole day school is better. It makes sense to me too. The Brazilian school shifts seem a bit rushed. Nobody really has a home. The same goes for teachers. Our Brazilian principals expressed surprise that most American teachers have their own classrooms and the kids move. In Brazil the teachers are the ones who move. This leads to a kind of transience that hurts discipline.
There are lots of criticisms of American public schools, but to hear the Brazilian principals’ report, we are doing just fine. The schools the Brazilians visited are not chosen because they are “the best” and we do not try to sanitize their experience. But the schools are self-selecting – they have to apply – and have to possess conditions to host guests. I think this de-facto selects the best, or at least eliminates the worst. It is also likely that the better parts of the schools are those that interact the most with foreign guests.
Some American public schools are excellent; others are very good. Of course, some are bad and others are horrid. Often these diverse & contradictory conditions exist in the same district or even in the same school. Perhaps it is like the old story about the blind men and the elephant. Reality will vary.
I got to moderate the discussion by the principals, as I mentioned. I tried to say as little as possible, so as not to overtax my Portuguese but also to hear more of what they had to say. I was proud to hear report after report praising our American public schools, but a little conflicted, as mentioned above. Were the Brazilians just being nice or did they see something in American public schools that we missed?
Let’s think about it from the point of view of someone trying to improve. You certainly should try to avoid mistakes, but you can probably improve faster if you concentrate on the positives. So if I was a Brazilian principal, I would be looking for the good things that I could copy or adapt to my own conditions. The same goes for the American principals who will be paying a visit to Brazil in a couple of months. You don’t need to concentrate too much on the negatives, except to avoid them. And if you don’t have them in your own country anyway, what does it matter?
We had an evening program where the principals got their award certificates and recognize the Brazil-wide principal of the year. Principal Adriana Aguiar from Gurupi in Tocantins won. It was a real show of solidarity, with the Secretaries of Education giving the award (certificates of excellence in leadership and management) to those from their states. Some states had big cheering sections. I noticed particularly Amazonas, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul brought big teams. I got to give out the plaque that will go on the school. It was great seeing the excitement and enthusiasm and getting to be a big part of it.
Of course, I understand that I am just a symbol of the United States, but I can accept that. The real rock star is our Brazilian colleague Marcia, who is known and loved by the principals and the people at CONSED. She was doing this before I arrived and will (Ihope) continue after. Our local colleagues are the real source of public diplomacy success. They are a resource we often take for granted and sometimes fail to sufficiently appreciate. All public diplomacy, like all politics, is local and they are our local connection.
The pictures show the ceremonies and awards. The building is one of many tall skinny buildings I have seen around Recife. I guess the land is expensive. The area near the ocean is narrow. Sorry re the quality. I took them with my cellphone.
We announced this year’s winners for Youth Ambassadors in São Paulo on Friday last. This program keeps getting bigger and better. It attracts an ever larger pool of highly-qualified candidates (this year 7500); pulls in more cooperating institutions (now 64 partners in the recruitment and screening process}; and is acting like a magnet pulling in resources from the private sector.
This year firms like IBM, DOW and Bradesco promised tens of thousands of dollars more in support. In fact, we are quickly approaching the legal ceiling of PA Brazil’s authorized fundraising for a single project, which is $75,000. In addition, outside the actual project firms are providing things like mentoring programs, free software, internship and/or job opportunities, and scholarships to the winners and alumni. This is a program that has captured the imagination of aspiring students all over Brazil and all those who support them.
Some people say that success is achieved through resources and they are right, but theirs is not a dynamic perspective. It is clearly true that good ideas and well managed programs attract resources.
The ceremony of the announcement filled the auditorium at the Alumni BNC in São Paulo. But the crowd gathered to hear Ambassador Thomas Shannon announcing the forty-five winners from among around 150 finalists was only the tip of the iceberg. We live streamed the event to around 500 viewers, but even this doesn’t tell the whole story. We know that many BNCs were hosting events with the streaming featured. The State Secretary of Education in São Luís do Maranhão hosted an event in his auditorium which included eighty teachers, students and parents. But even this is not all. For weeks leading up to the big event, events were being held in all the states of Brazil to bring together students and talk about the program. This is a really big show for a really big project, the culmination of a great process but just the start of another.
After the announcement came the media in proud hometowns all over Brazil. Headlines like “Londrina terá representante no Jovens Embaixadores de 2012” (a Londrina girl will represent the Youth Ambassadors) “Estudante cuiabano representa MT” (A student from Cuiaba will represent Mato Grosso.) or “Estudante de Araguaina é a nova Jovem Embaixadora 2012” (A student from Araguaina is the new Youth Ambassador 2012) set the tone.
A good measurement must be appropriate to the things being measured, stable and easy to understand. Public Diplomacy really doesn’t have such a measure. Even in much more concrete marketing of goods or services, there is significant disagreement about the extent that advertising drives sales. There are often rises or drops in sales that have nothing to do with the promotion. For example, many firms did very well in the late 1990s when the economy was strong. Many have seen sales drop after the economy went south in 2008. Is advertising to blame?
They tell us that we need to have a culture of measurement & that should measure all our programs against objective criteria. I agree. My problem is with the proxies we must use in PD and the time periods we assess. By proxies, I mean things we can measure that we think reflect the real thing we want to measure, that is changes in attitudes that lead to changes in behaviors. At best, we can do opinion research, but such surveys are often poorly designed (what real use is the question about whether or not you approve of the U.S., for example?). Besides, people often do not tell the truth to pollsters or even know themselves what they really think.
But the bigger challenge is time-frame. We want to know within days if our exchange program or outreach effort was successful. That is a little worse than planting an acorn and asking a day later about the size of the tree.
I talked to a lot of people during my recent trip to São Paulo. I did not have a representative sample, since I talking only to those who had been affected by our PD programs. I also am unable to factor out my own bias. I asked the questions based not only on what people were telling me but also on my own ideas about what was important. Nevertheless, I believe that my visit provided insights that, added to my extensive experience in diplomacy, produce a useful narrative.
My narrative starts not with a contact but with a creator. I went to São Paulo a day early so that I could meet Ambassador Donna Hrinak and watch the taping of her telling the story of Youth Ambassadors. You can follow this link for more information about the program in general. I was impressed by how well the program had grown and progressed since it originated in Brazil ten years ago. This primed me to look for other signs of achievement.
I didn’t have to look far. I didn’t have to look at all. The experience found me in the person of one of the former Youth Ambassadors, now an intern at DOW Chemical in São Paulo. Wesley told me how the Youth Ambassador program had changed his life and that he viewed his life history divided into before and after the program. Wesley came from a slum in São Paulo so nasty that taxi drivers refused to enter. He was poor in the existential sense but he lived hopefully in a hopeless place.
The Youth Ambassador program was his way out. But he didn’t leave physically. He still goes back home to work on helping others improve and volunteers at an orphanage there. His presence alone is a continual example that challenges can be met and overcome. Our public diplomacy helped achieve this, but it is not mere social work and not limited to Wesley. I have heard similar stories over and over from people who will be future leaders of Brazil. They say they will never forget the generosity of the United States and I don’t think they will. But Wesley told me something else more poignant.
He said that before being chosen as a youth ambassador, he thought he was a limited person. He now understands that he has no limits. America is like that, he said, and it helps create this in others. Can we have a better advocate carrying a better message? You can see Wesley alongside this article, speaking at our youth ambassador event. And there are scores of others like him. Thanks Donna.
Then I went over to SESC. We don’t have anything exactly like SESC in the U.S. It is a corporatist institution created by Getúlio Vargas that receives mandatory contributions from commercial firms. In return it runs social centers that feature gyms, arts exhibits, plays, swimming pools and even a dental clinic. I was impressed but with somewhat mixed feelings. It was a lot like things I had seen built by the communists in Poland or by authoritarians in other parts of Europe, a paternalist network. But nice; undeniably something that worked.
I met the directors, who were honest, earnest and dedicated. I started to praise their operation, mentioning that we don’t have similar networks in the U.S. This they knew, because many of their number had been to the U.S. on our voluntary visitor program. The VV program is, IMO, a highly leveraged PD tool. The visitors pay their own way and so are highly motivated – at least they have some skin in the game. My colleagues in the U.S. help set up a program of study. In the case of SESC, they studied how charitable organizations and NGOs work in the U.S.
What the SESC people explained to me, I could not have said better myself, although I have on many occasions tried to explain it. They saw that in the U.S. we indeed did not have public funded organizations like SESC. Our public-funded institutions were often more literally public funded – and staff. The U.S., they understood, was exceptional in the way that voluntary contributions of time and money ran many of the things that governments need to do in other places. This goes back at least to the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, I added. They approved of the way things were done in the U.S. They understood the subtlety that the U.S. Federal government does not much sponsor culture, but that the America nation does in spades. Again, imparting this understanding of the U.S. is an important PD objective. I could have brought down an expert on NGOs or maybe given a lecture on Tocqueville. As a matter of fact, I have done both those things more than once. How much better is it for intelligence and involved Brazilians to do the explaining for us?
In the cases I mentioned above, how would we measure? I suppose the people involved would have expressed satisfaction when they were debriefed. But the understanding and appreciation developed over time. I understood from the SESC people that they had shared their experience all around their organization, even published a book about it. As the experience in America mixed with experiences of their own in running their operation in São Paulo, it became something different, something their own, something sui generis the offspring of Brazil and America shaped by its own environment. They also have maintained contact with Americans they met on the trip, forming with them an engaged and interactive community. This is the kind of thing that public diplomacy can foster but not create. We can create only the conditions for others to prosper. We did.
I had supper with a couple of people from the arts community. As a talent-free individual myself, I don’t really do art, but I understand that others do and the value it has for the community. One of my meal-mates we the culture director at a local TV station. When I mentioned that I had been in Brazil in the 1980s, she explained how an IVLP grant they received during that time had changed her career path and not incidentally her views of the U.S. Back in her youth, she recounted, she had been influenced by European artists and intellectuals in ways not generally favorable to the U.S. The master narrative was that Americans were a materialistic bunch who didn’t really have much use for the higher things in life. Her visit to the U.S. showed her that this was not true.
She learned that the American system was simply different. It was much more flexible, less dependent on centralized or bureaucratic planning but as or more effective as other systems in “delivering” arts and culture to people all over the vast country. In many ways, she said, this system was more appropriate for Brazil, which like the United States is a vast and diverse country. Since the time of her visit, now a quarter of a century ago, the insights she got on the IVLP tour have been developing and evolving. Of course, the way she thinks today is not based on what she “learned” in America during her first brief visit, but the visit was instrumental in setting her thoughts in a new direction. This is what she told me.
Our other meal-mate was headed to New York the next day and from there to Washington to meet contacts at the Kennedy Center. His ties to the U.S. were greatly enhanced by a voluntary visitor program (the one where the visitors pay for the trip and we help arrange meetings) three years ago. Among the places he went was Julliard in New York, where he met with Americans eager for exchanges of talent and experience with Brazil. This led to a robust series of privately funded and run exchanges. It is not enormous. We are talking about five people a year, but this is exactly the kind of individual networks that hold society together and help bring communities together, in this case artistic communities in São Paulo and New York. The American nation is greater than the American government. In this case, like in others, activities of diplomats and bureaucrats like us helped bring together Americans and Brazilians in sustainable ways that is leading to cross fertilization and enrichment on all sides.
Let me get back to my original question. How do I – how do we – measure these things?
We have lots of friends in influential places. They are in constant contact with Americans influential in their fields. They actively seek contacts with us and with American counterparts; they talk to their fellow Brazilians about the U.S., sponsor programs and even publish books about their experiences or the outgrowths from them months and years later. This didn’t happen in a few days. We would have been able to boast about media coverage, but even the most widespread television or newspaper coverage would pale in comparison to what that slow building of friendship achieved.
I used to think we were in the information business years ago when I was a young officer. I measured my success mostly by media coverage and “buzz”. Now I understand that we are in the relationship business and relationships take time to grow. To illustrate, I suppose we could say that relationships are the orchards and the day-to-day information is the fruit, or maybe it is the urgent versus the important. We have to do the fast-media. Not paying attention to this can be hazardous. But, we should go for the high value-long term results whenever possible.
Yesterday’s newspaper is old tomorrow; Homer is new forever.
My top picture shows Brasilia roads, with the green of the recent rains and the shining sky. Below is Ambassador Donna Hrinak being interviewed about Youth Ambassadors. Down one more in Wesley, one of our most successful YA. Below that is a pool at SESC followed by a Sao Paulo business center.
