Below are griffins at the Federal Reserve building.
Washington is not very crowded the day before thanksgiving. I had some appointments at the Main State Building. I got there a little early so I went to visit Abe Lincoln. It is nice before the crowds arrive. I still take inspiration places like the Lincoln Memorial and I still get a bit of a thrill looking out over the reflecting pool toward the Washington Monument and the Capitol.
I make a point walking between Main State and SA 44 and I l get off/on the Metro a little ways away from work, so that I can walk across the Capital Mall. I think of it as my “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” trip, after that old Jimmy Stewart movie, because in one run you can see the Capitol and the memorials: Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington, Vietnam, Korea and WWII.
Below is Roslyn in Virginia across the Potomac. In DC buildings cannot be taller than the Capitol.
Some people ask me how I find the time. They tell me that they are too busy for these sorts of luxuries. It takes only around forty-five minutes to walk between the State annexes. When you add the waiting time to the shuttle drive time, you save only around ten minutes. If I get off the Metro a couple stops early, it just adds around fifteen minutes to the start or end of the day. In return I get a calming walk through one of the world’s most pleasant areas. It is also a great thinking opportunity. I think better when I walk or run. This is an old habit. When I wrote papers in college I used to read all the sources and then go running. During that time it would all come together and when I got back I could just produce the paper as fast as I could physically write it down. If I just stayed in my seat and “worked hard”, nothing would come. I still like the peripatetic decision making. Being literally in motion helps me make sense out of confusing situations.
Above is the front of the IRS building. I like the classical styles.
Below ice skating at the National Gallery Garden. It really isn’t that cold, but they have a refrigerated rink.
Besides, it is a real luxury to be able to walk around in Washington, something to be thankful for.
t was cold outside today so I spent the day productively watching TV. Of course, I grazed and in true omnivore fashion I didn’t stick with any one program for more than a few minutes and I took advantage TVio to time shift. It used to be that movies, televisions shows, plays, even books and music had their time and then fell into the memory hole. Some like Gilligan’s Island or Star Trek became ubiquitous in reruns, but most emerged rarely. Today everything is available in a vast chaotic mélange that defies time and genre, language and space. Too much choice dulls the senses, but who would want to let somebody else decide what to limit?
On the cerebral side, there are a lot of good programs on history and science. It has become a true marketplace of ideas, but there is significant chicanery and manipulation. A picture is worth a thousand words and a reenactment can do even better than that. The producer has the power to manipulate interpretations. Propagandists have known this ever since movies were invented and even before. Many theatrical productions were clearly meant to highlight versions of the past that supported the power of the present. Shakespeare’s history plays are prime examples. George Orwell famously warned that “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”
I don’t think that there is a conscious attempt at propaganda in the historical productions on cable TV, but they do exacerbate the historian’s tendency to attribute too much to conscious choices and plans. A half hour program contains fewer words than a short pamphlet. It must compress characters and events. It must also make sense and a story out of disordered events. Sometimes it is not a matter of conflicting plans but simply somebody forgot, didn’t know or didn’t care. The story we tell is usually more logical than the reality. The reality is that shit happens and sometimes there is no good explanation.
If you don’t find it on TV, you can always look on I tunes.
I don’t think that TV producers are (usually) trying to propagandize at least when you get more than a couple of decades before the present, but they do have proclivities that create a systematic bias. Producers like action, so there is a bias toward agency. They also like underdogs and rebels, so they tend to overemphasize pirates, bandits and small groups of dissidents. I have seen at least three separate documentary dramas on the Briton’s warrior queen Boudicca, for example. The British forces killed a lot of Roman civilians and did manage to ambush a Roman army, but the Romans cut them to pieces once they became fully aware of the situation and there was never any question of the final outcome. For the Romans it was just a local affair in a faraway place.
In the study of history it is always useful to see who is still standing at the end. It is easy to exaggerate power, numbers and importance in descriptions, but if at the end of the day one gives up and the other doesn’t, you can be pretty sure who really prevailed.
Producers also suffer from a bias toward new and tenuous explanations. Both the scientific and the historical methods require hypotheses to be tested with evidence. Lots of hypotheses are not supported by the evidence and these tend to be the most interesting ones precisely because they are new and often weird. They also have the advantage of being perceived as insider or hidden information. I think that was one of the attractions of the “Da Vinci Code,” which didn’t actually purport to be anything but fiction, but was taken as factual by the credulous. I have seen a few of the documentaries on that subject. The same was true for myths like the Bermuda Triangle and Chariots of the Gods from my youth.
Below – picture from Old Tucson where they filmed many westerns. We visited in 2003, so this is an archival photo. The entry from that time is at this link.
Returning to my original subject of what’s on TV, there were lots of interesting things on. I used the remote a lot, so I watched none of these full time or to the end. It is a sort of TV multitasking. Sometimes you don’t have to watch the whole thing. There were some episodes of Iraq Diary on the Military Channel. It brought back some memories, good and bad. They talked about the heat and the dust and getting dusted by the helicopters. I remember. One of my favorite programs is “Modern Marvels”. I had a saved episode re superhighways. I watched the History Channel on the Spartans, the Battle for Rome and one about our Civil War. I got a few snippets of “The Longest Day” and “Highlander.” I don’t remember which channel they were on. “South Park” was funny. It was about the Goths. The eWest channel had John Wayne movies all day and I watched the end of “The Man from Utah” made in 1934. The interesting thing about old movies is that they were made with real sets and actors, not computer enhancement. I also watched part of “Rooster Cogburn,” the John Wayne movie made forty years after “The Man From Utah.” In between was “The Horse Soldiers.” I didn’t have to watch that, since I still recall it well. It was not a very good movie anyway. I still like to watch “Bonanza” Sundays on TVLand. It is not so much that I like the show itself anymore, but it gives me a kind of peaceful, easy, nostalgic feeling. Little Joe, Ben, Adam & Hoss seem like old friends when they ride up with Lake Tahoe in the background. Bonanza was on Sunday nights when I was growing up.
I remember the Cartwrights were on the night when the Beetles premiered on the Ed Sullivan Show. We were at a party at my Aunt Florence’s house. My cousins Mary and Barbie were very enthusiastic about watching the Beatles. I would have preferred to watch “the Scarecrow” on the Wonderful World of Disney, but I was outvoted. Just as well; the Beatles were historical. Funny how memory works. That was almost forty-five ago and I was only eight years old. I don’t remember what songs the Beatles sang. I wasn’t paying attention.
Military bases and battlefields are often located on beautiful natural locations. It makes sense when you think about it. They were looking for high ground that commanded some natural features. Such places have nice views. Below is the view of the Potomac from the Marine base at Quantico where I went to participate on a panel on civil military affairs at the Expeditionary Warfare School.
We had an interesting discussion about NGOs in battle spaces. The students were generally unsympathetic to the neutrality of NGOs and their arguments were cogent. What happens when an NGO learns about an imminent attack? On the other hand, it is important that we have NGOs maintain the ability to work with both sides, at least nominally. This is especially important for an organization like the Red Cross, which has real responsibility to minister to the victims of armed conflict on all sides. There will always be a dynamic tension. It takes physical courage to be on a battlefield and it takes moral courage to maintain neutrality in these tough conditions. The expedient thing to do in the short run is often not the right thing for the long run. I defended the NGOs, although I admitted that the actions of many also annoy me much of the time. We cannot always defend only those things we like.
Beyond that, NGOs are a key part of civil society. They usually help us with stability operations, whether or not they want to work toward “our” goals. They provide services that make life better for the local people. The bad guys tend to hate them for that. Their goal is to make life horrible for the average person in order to break down support for legitimate authority, create chaos and drum up recruits for their nefarious purposes. Of course, that does not include the politically motivated NGOs, and there are a few of them.
The military does tradition well. The building where we met was called Geiger Hall. Many buildings are named after famous people, or people who gave piles of money to whatever institution is naming the place. This is different. General Geiger earned the honor AND the building owners explained why. The constant exposure to the reminders of his successful and heroic life gives instruction and inspiration. These are things we need more in our lives. Below is the story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a truly remarkable man. If you don’t know the story, I suggest you google him.
I had to rush back from Quantico to do a presentation on strategic communications for the JSAT at NDU. Our part of the task force is studying that and I will write more insights re public diplomacy when I have more of them. I will have to go to Doha to work on this in early December. Back to the Middle Eastern desert. Actually that area is pleasant in the winter, it is only for a couple weeks and I won’t be in the war zone, so I don’t mind.
I walked along the Potomac on the way from the Metro to NDU, where I met this guy. He told me that he was fishing for catfish and rockfish and catching some catfish. As a senior citizen, he says he doesn’t need a license to fish in the Potomac. He has been fishing there for more than a half century, back when this part of Washington was a poor semi-rural town.
Above – with all the oak trees, we have alot of squirrels, agile and graceful creatures. Three of them were burying acorns, but by the time I got my camera out, only one remained. This one reared up.
The post below is the core of my talk that I gave yesterday to a group of young engineers re infrastructure in Iraq. Chrissy came along and took the picture you see on the side. I think the talk went okay. I did not have too much to write today but I wanted to put up the picture of me at work. I enjoy public speaking as long as I don’t have to stick too closely to the text. I like the give-and-take, not the formal talking at the crowd.
I cannot decide what I like best. Speaking is one of my natural environments. I like to talk to groups of people, but then I really like to be in my woods by myself. I am lucky to have the lifestyle that lets me indulge many of my peculiar preferences. Forestry is not a common hobby among FSOs.
Espen and I were watching TV and on came a commercial for Bosley hair restoration. He asked me why I didn’t call. I told him that i not only don’t mind being bald, but I actually prefer it. It is much easier to take care of and I pity those hairy fools who have to waste their money and grooming products and throw away their time using them.
I also am happy with the beard. I can groom that once a week and otherwise not think about it. No more shampoo and shaving. Mornings are easy.
I figure this is probably my most inane post, but sometimes you have to be inane.
As I walked around tonight, I noticed the Capitol. It is pretty at night and – to my surprise – my camera got a decent picture. It is amazing what a cheap digital camera can do. Of course, I had to take five to get this one w/o too much shaking to make it blurry.
Below – Path to Potomac from NDU. Notice the red oaks on one side and the laurel oaks on the other.
I have to leave before 0700 to get to the task force by 0800. NDU is about a fifteen minute walk from the Waterside Mall stop or around a half hour from Federal Center. I prefer to walk to Federal Center. That way I don’t have to change trains. I like the walk, although according to the Washington Post the area near Waterside Mall is not a safe area. I don’t intend to change anyway, so I don’t suppose I need to look into it any further.
Below is the escalator to my Metro stop. The etiquette is that people stand to the left and walk to the right. I like to guess who will stand and who will walk. I believe my record is good. I admit that I might have confirmation bias, but you can often predict by body type. Tourists also tend not to walk, but I think they just don’t know the local custom.
Below is my Gold’s Gym. I used to go there three times a week, but I still have not renewed my membership. Tomorrow. Gold’s Gym is simpler and cheaper than some others. My kind of place.
The walk along the Potomac from the Metro to NDU is a little out of the way, but it is nice.
I came across this monument to the victims of the Titanic. It says it was commissioned by American women to thank the men of the Titanic for letting the women and children go first. This sounds crazy to people in our more cynical age, but that is evidently how it happened. The movie “Titanic” had to go against the historical record and show a more cynical picture. In a similar situation, when the Lusitania sunk Alfred Vanderbilt gave his life preserver to a young woman even though he couldn’t swim. His body was never recovered.
In the evening, Chrissy and I went to a zoning meeting. They are talking about raising the density of the lots on both sides of our townhouse complex. Some of the buildings could be as high as 115 feet. We will be like a canyon between all these buildings. But density makes sense near the Metro. It is good to see all the citizens involved in their communities. Although some of the same people make the same comments and complaints.
Below – Washington Metro has nice vaulted ceilings.
Below – School of Athens by Raphael, also vaulted ceilings. Both roads to learning (sorry for the hyperbole).
It has never been easier to learn but the options are daunting because there are so many of them. I recently completed the State Department’s leadership seminar, which left me a little disappointed. But my education is my responsibility and I will carry on. There were some lectures I wished to have heard and when I got home I got some of them – on my computer.
Below – oak tree in fall colors
For example, I wished we had talked a little about prospect theory and its effects on decision making. Prospect theory explains a lot re why we make what seem like illogical decisions even when we have the needful information. So when I got home I listened to Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who along with Amos Tversky originated the theory. You can watch it too at this link. At the same place, you will find a talk by Peter Bernstein re risk analysis. Bernstein wrote one of my favorite books, “Against the Gods” the story of risk.
You could always just read to all the books, but it is more effective to learn on a variety of fronts. Reading reinforced by the visual or audio of a lecture is great and online even allows for interaction. There are situations where audio works best. I have regularly listened to audio programs for more than twenty years. A long drive can almost be like a college course. My sloppy way of listening enhances learning. I tend to let them play again or pop in repeats. Leadership and management programs are particularly appropriate for audio programs, IMO.
Online education opens many more possibilities and variety. What it lacks is the social aspect of education. Discussing ideas with others helps fix them in the mind, sort out the pluses and minuses and make the learners see the bigger picture. You cannot replace that. I think that is why self educated people often have an uneven knowledge base. The autodidact chooses what he wants to emphasize and will inevitably introduce bias. Online learning exacerbates this, since you can find what you want very precisely and not come into even superficial contact with anything else. The advantages outweigh the costs, IMO, but it is something to be aware of.
Other great sources of education in the Washington area are think tanks and the Smithsonian. Most sponsor regular lectures and seminars on a variety of topics and they are usually not only free but you often get a free lunch. These have the advantage of being in a social setting. You can talk to people before and after the lecture and just being there in person adds something to the educational experience. I took advantage of these things when I was last in Washington & will do it again.
Most learning isn’t done in formal settings and FS provides more opportunities than most jobs. You learn most from your colleagues and fellow citizens and just by observing events and things. In other words, you learn from experience, but learning is not automatic. It is great to notice the trees and take time to smell the roses, but it is important actively to seek out and think about information and lessons from experience otherwise it just washes over you, runs into the mental sewers and is lost. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I think we could extend that to say that an unexamined experience is not worth having.
Below – I drove Espen over to Falls Church HS to take his SAT test. Sorry for the dim. It was just before sunrise.
The SAT test is an annual ritual for HS seniors. College admissions have gotten harder and more complicated over the years. Some families are hiring consultants to get them through the experience and many kids take various SAT course to improve their scored. I have very little confidence that the process has gotten better for its new intricacy. In our quest to make everything fair & equal (often mutually exclusive goals), we have mostly made it capricious.
Standardized tests were designed more than fifty years ago in to create fairness and give poor but smart kids a chance to compete with the sons and daughters of the rich and well connected. They worked. That is one reason I like them. In interests of full disclosure, these sorts of tests revealed my hidden talents and abilities and helped me jump the socio-economic divide. W/o the Foreign Service written test, I never could have gotten a job like the one I have. The rich and privileged can help their kids by massaging their resumes and using their contact networks. Working class kids don’t even know they are playing that game until they have already lost. Standardized tests are less subject to manipulation. They level the playing field.
I am convinced that many educators and politicians dislike standardized test because they actually do work to differentiate fairly among applicants, and fair doesn’t mean equal – something they really don’t want. Standardized tests are also difficult to influence politically and they stubbornly fail to produce politically correct results. No test is perfect and opponents attack from that angle. They abuse the reasonable argument that we should not overemphasize one measure and try to devalue to whole judgment process. They point to the exceptions that prove the rule.
We should use multiple criteria, but let’s not pretend there are no valid criteria or that some criteria are not better than others. If a kid has high grades and high test scores, he/she is almost certain to have the ability to do well in college. If a kid has bad grades and bad test scores, he will certainly be challenged in school. That does not mean he/she cannot eventually excel at school. It just means it will be a stretch and the odds are long. It definitely does not mean he/she will not be a success in life. Success in school and success in life are not the same. It is possible to be an educated fool and not everybody finds his best self at university. But among those who are college-bound, the kids we should find most interesting and give more consideration are those who have poor grades and high test scores or the reverse. This is where the testing has value.
I object to the “whole person” concept in college admissions. It is in fact a way for admissions to introduce bias into to process. The combination of grades and test scores provide the necessary useful information. When dealing with eighteen-year-old applicants, with virtually no work history, additional information will not provide valid basis for decision. There are some exceptions, but they would be rare. The only case I can think of off-hand is when a kid has a unique talent that shines through an otherwise mediocre record.
IMO the rejection – proponents would say the broadening – of criteria is just a way to cheat. The rich and privileged are unhappy that objective criteria weaken their influence, so they make a tacit alliance with “the underprivileged.” That helps account for the statistical anomaly that elite universities have lots of rich kids and a good representation of poor kids but not so many middle-working class kids, relative to their representation in the actual population. These are the ones who would provide the real completion to the privileged.
At my first post in Porto Alegre I met a woman who hated me. She was the American wife of an expatriate banker. I couldn’t figure out how I had provoked such a strong reaction in someone I hardly knew. Finally, I asked her. It turned out that she didn’t like me, or my colleague the Consul, because of what we were. Both of us were from working-class backgrounds and both of us had gotten ahead through the standardized Foreign Service test. As it turned out, her brother wanted to be a diplomat. He had taken the test on several occasions, but was unable to pass.
She explained to me that her ancestors had come to America on the boat right after the Mayflower and that her family had been leaders and diplomats ever since. It was only in the most recent generation that they were pushed out of their ancient redoubts by upstarts like me and those darned standardized tests that breached the walls. People like me, she said, didn’t really deserve or appreciate the exalted jobs we had. I am not saying her argument was completely w/o merit. I am sure her brother came with all those social graces that I had painful and imperfectly to learn. He knew what jacket to wear and what fork to use, but we were smarter, or at least had a better memory for tests. It depends on what traits you value most. The “whole person” approach to recruitment would have preferred him.
Above is Bay View HS where I went to school in Milwaukee. I got a good education there, but as far as I recall nobody ever mentioned FS as a career option. I think if someone had asked me if I was interested in a career at State Department, I would have asked “State department of what? Roads? Parks?” BTW – the school was badly damaged by another “fairness” social engineering – bussing. That was one of the dumbest ideas ever, unless the goal was to destroy neigborhood schools, but that is another story.
I think that it is cute when little kids come around in costumes and it is a community building ritual when we give them treats. Most of the kids this year visiting my house were Asians with a mix of East and South Asians. Our neighborhood is in constant ethnic transition. A couple years ago there were a lot more Hispanic kids. Not many of the kids ringing my doorbell look like mine. Those neighborhoods are a little farther out into the single family home suburbs. Our town-house complex has very few kids in general. Most of the kids we see around here come from the garden-apartment complex next door. It is evidently a first-stop for ambitious immigrants, who seem to move out to homes as soon as they can, hence the transition. That was the experience with the friends my kids knew from there when they were smaller.
When college kids celebrate Halloween it is usually a fun party. I remember the big parties on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. The one that made the biggest impression on my memory was a guy who dressed up like a man taking a shower. He carried with him the whole apparatus, the shower and model of a bathtub. It was hard for him to move through the crowds.
However, this holiday has become way too big in the last couple decades. It is, after all, a kids’ holiday, unless you really believe in it, in which case it is a vestige of dark-age superstition.
When people well-past college age take Halloween too seriously it is a little pathetic, but I heard on the radio that the slightly past prime crowd is where the growth comes in the sales for costumes. People who evidently have too much money and no kids through whom they can have the vicarious Halloween fun are the biggest holiday revelers. It is maybe not that there are so many participants but they spend bigger bucks on costumes, sometimes hundreds of dollars to dress up for one night like ghosts, goblins etc, according to news reports. A fool and his money are soon parted. With the economic downturn I suppose many of these guys will be dressing up like bums next year.
Explanations of pictures are below. Mixing the captions in the text was too confusing.
I am not very happy with this offsite part of the leadership seminar. IMO this week has been not about leadership as much as about negotiation 101 or inclusiveness 102. These are very good things in and of themselves, but much of what has been presented is the kind of things I have heard in my self-improvement and management tapes I listened to in my car years ago. And they are things we all have practiced for 20+ years. The review is okay, but we don’t need too much of it.
On the plus side, I am learning a lot from my colleagues and have benefited by sharing their experiences. But I have to say that my high hopes for the seminar itself have not been met.
We learned a lot of management techniques, but as I mentioned above they were usually ones I had learned before. I would like the course to be more about leadership. Leaders are what we are supposed to be. We were told that we were supposed to transition from management to leadership. I think the best way to learn about leadership would be by using experience of our State colleagues and case study method using examples from successful, and unsuccessful, leadership from history.
I would also like more State Department specific information. Surely we could do that. Maybe we will get that next week back at FSI. We have some good speakers on the schedule. Here in WVA we are assembling puzzles and practicing techniques of mediation or empathic listening. I don’t find much use in practicing these techniques w/o context or value content. It is great to be open, but I think we have to be more judgmental. Leadership means making judgments & choices and setting priorities. It is not merely employing Dale Carnegie techniques to win friends and influence people. We need to persuade and change minds, not just take opinion polls. Sometimes – often – the needful choices will be unpopular. We need to talk more about that aspect of leadership.
Don’t get me wrong. My experience with participatory leadership has been good. I believe in it and truly practice it. Working with others and having them support me has been the key to my success. Lord knows I could never have done anything by myself. But sometimes the buck stops with the person in charge and it is our job to take the responsibility when it falls to us, not spread it out as far as possible.
I have the opportunity to walk around during lunch breaks and listen to a Roman history course on my I-Pod. You can learn from history and I enjoy examples of leadership – good and bad – and the consequences. It is interesting when you study history and look at leaders to see that it is very rare for a leader to be well thought of and/or remain in power for a long time. It says something about the episodic nature of leadership opportunities. Solon left town after he made his laws. Themistocles was exiled soon after the victory over the Persians. In more modern times, Churchill was tossed out of office after WWII and Harry Truman left office with an abysmally low approval rating. Of course these are much bigger deals than our small leadership challenges, but I think we little guys can learn a lot by looking at the big challenges, choices and their consequences.
We had modules on coaching. I think it is a good idea to coach employees and I recognize that I do it very often. But the coaching we learned about in class was (my complaint again) very non-confrontational and value free. I remember reading a biography of Vince Lombardi. I think it was called “When Pride Still Mattered.” Vince Lombardi was a pretty good coach, but I never got the impression he engaged in much of this touchy-feely stuff we are learning. The Lombardi quote I recall is “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.” I didn’t hear anything like that in our coaching session.
Anyway, I ranted a little about these sorts of things in class, just like I am ranting a little here. I am not sure the instructors liked me very much by the end of the day and I don’t think it did any good. Once again I get to be the skunk at the barbeque. I don’t like to do it, but I guess I don’t mind either.
About the Pictures
1 – clouds over the conference site.
2 – You can see that there is no shortage of whitetail deer. I saw nine at this one time. That is the most I have ever seen. Deer numbers have risen significantly in recent years all over the eastern U.S.
3 – I don’t think “the Woods” community is doing very well. I saw dozens of for sale signs. This part of West Virginia was especially hard hit by the housing downturn because high gas prices made commuting out here to/from the population centers around Washington very expensive. But that affects mostly the older, cheaper cabins build in the 1980s. While they are up for sale w/o lots of offers, people are building new and improved cabins, presumably with the intention of using them.
4 & 5 – These two are forestry pictures. What you see in the first one are wind throws of Virginia pine. The Virginia pine is easily pushed over. They are transition trees and not long-lasting. I did, however, count the stump rings of a Virginia pine that was at least 47 years old. The ones standing nearby with similar stem sizes were about as big as a twenty year old loblolly in Brunswick. The second picture shows loblolly. I don’t know how old these are. They don’t grow very fast around here. The soil is not good and this is the northern edge of the loblolly range. This stand is no longer under real management, as you can see by the dead heads.
Below – still no pictures from today, so I used some old ones. The first is Vienna from my 2006 visit there and the second is London Bridge, moved some years ago to Lake Havasu, Arizona from 2005.
Our leadership seminar continued along the lines of process, not content. We learn that we should have vision and that we should be collaborative with others. I am not sure that is always the best idea. IMO the most important thing about a vision is that it be right and that is not always what most people see clearly. Good leaders can often see that better than most others. That is one of the traits of good leadership. I don’t think you can assess leadership properly if you accept that it could be content neutral. We have to judge by where leadership is leading and how it is working. I am learning more from my colleagues than from the course. This is the way it often works. One of my colleagues gave the example of the “Music Man.” The guy in the movie (Robert Preston) has vision, but in order to get buy in from the satisfied citizens of River City he has to create an artificial problem that only he can solve. Con-men can create compelling visions. In fact that is one of their peculiar talents. Many “leaders” paint an inaccurately depressing picture of current events so that they can create support for their proposed solutions. Honest decision makers know that it is very important accurately to assess where you are before you decide where you want to go. The saying is “describe before you prescribe.”
If you can make a bad vision popular with scam tactics (as in the “Music Man,”) it is also true that good leadership and vision may be unpopular. Even the best plans don’t sell themselves and you may not get “buy in” from majorities or even large numbers of people despite the fact that the end result may be good or necessary. Change is usually perceived as risky and often painful. It may make people openly hostile, but that is why we need leadership. Leadership means setting priorities and making the tough choices. Leadership is not required if conditions are stable and decisions are trivial or within routine norms; that is just administration. You cannot be a leader by merely following the long-stated preferences and routine procedures of the groups you ostensibly lead and you cannot lead from behind. My criticism of the leadership course is that the instructors seem uncomfortable with the harder, less popular and maybe the tough parts of leadership.
I agree with the emphasis of the instructors of putting people first and trying to get cooperation, but that good bias can be taken too far. As one of my colleagues pointed out, leadership must sometimes put the mission before particular people. People are willing to sacrifice for a good cause and sometimes they have to do that. I don’t think we talked enough about those situations and we don’t talk enough about the sometimes scary and lonely decisions leaders must make.
All the people of the past who we consider great leaders took decisions that were deeply unpopular at the time. It is only with the fullness of time that we have come around to seeing the wisdom of their choices. As someone who is interested in history, I wish we had more historical examples in the course. Our course is being held not far from Antietam that back in September 1862 saw the bloodiest single day in American history. That is a classic case study in the results of poor and timid decisions contrasted with bold ones. McClellan had twice as many men as Lee and he had captured Lee’s battle plan, yet he still managed to produce only an inconclusive stalemate. I think it would be useful to consider that George McClellan was very popular with both his troops and the public. His decisions were broadly popular and particularly wrong. On the other hand, Lincoln’s decisions almost cost him the election in 1864 AND that was considering votes only with the half of the country that had not taken up arms against his leadership (a fairly good measure of disagreement). An opinion poll that included the whole country certainly would have given him a very low approval rating.
One highlight of the day was when three of my colleagues formed a panel to discuss transformational diplomacy. They had been talking about it in a side discussion and shared it because it was of general interest. (Such things excite us. I guess we are indeed a pack of nerds.) Most of us agreed that the ideas behind transformational diplomacy were good, but our class was divided about the efficacy of the program. Some of the places that got resources had trouble absorbing them and the places that lost them suffered painful cuts. It would have been better to ask for additional resources rather than just move priorities. We all agreed that places like India, Brazil & China deserved more resources and diplomatic attention, but it was not a good idea to take them away from places like Germany, Spain or France, which are still very important places that matter to us even if they are pleasant, peaceful and familiar.
One of my colleagues speculated about how the events around the Iraq war might have unfolded differently if we had sufficient diplomatic infrastructure on the ground in Germany & France to carry out strong public relations and diplomatic programs. This was BEFORE the diplomatic transformation, but we had already lost a lot to the cuts of the 1990s and the movement of resources to the new states of the former Soviet Union. You can only do so much with less. We opened and staffed post in places like Kazakhstan, Latvia, Armenia and Azerbaijan w/o a bump up in resources. I am convinced that we had significant problems with public diplomacy after 9/11 because our public diplomacy infrastructure was so decimated in the 1990s and spread too thin. I wrote re that in an earlier post and won’t repeat it here. Anyway, it was an interesting discussion.
My colleagues made some comments worth writing down. One said that vision means a leap beyond where you are – a leap of faith because it usually represents discontinuous change, not very catchy, but true. The best line of the day was, “if you ask for infinity, you can easily settle for half of infinity.”
