Month: May 2013

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Learn Latin

People overestimate ability to learn and maintain second languages. An interesting article explaining how American Hispanics are losing their Spanish tracks with my experience. Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit. People say we should learn foreign languages. Which one? Learn Latin.

I feel that I have something special to add to the language debate. I am a non-linguist with lots of language experience. At one time I SPOKE fluently four languages, although never at the same time. I know that most people who think they can speak more than one foreign language are fooling themselves. Such people exist, but they are rare. I don’t believe that average people can maintain practical professional level competence is even one foreign language unless they use it on a daily basis. Daily basis.

This presents Americans with a dilemma that people from non-English speaking countries do not face. People from other languages know that English is essential if they want careers in science or international business. It makes perfect sense to require English in primary or secondary schools. English is the world language; the only one that is universally useful. Even if individuals never leave their own countries, English will often still be an advantage for them. No other language is like that.

What does an American do? We say you should study Chinese. Fine. This works if you plan to go to China. If you plan to do business with Chinese businesspeople you encounter in Europe they and you will have to speak English. What about Spanish? North of the Pyrenees, it is not much use in Europe and almost no use at all anywhere else except in Latin America. Half of the South American population is Portuguese speaking. Portuguese speakers tend to understand lots of Spanish, but it is a one-way street. As a Spanish speaker, most Portuguese will go over your head. Arabic? Okay in the Middle East, but locals may not understand your dialect and will probably default into English.

I believe that you should learn the language of a country if you plan to live or do business there. I have done that myself. I also understand that learning another language is great intellectual exercise. We Americans should not remain stubbornly monolingual just because our language is the one used throughout the world. But what should be our FIRST language. If we are talking about an American kid with no plans to go to any particular place in the world, what language should he/she learn?

Latin. Kids should learn Latin first. It is true that nobody outside the Vatican actually speaks Latin, but Latin is the basis of all Romance languages. It is much easier to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and even Romansh and Romanian if you have a Latin base. Latin has had a big influence on our own English language and has infiltrated almost all the world’s major languages. But there are other reasons to learn the language of Caesar, Cicero, Augustine, Bacon and Spinoza.

Latin literature is unusually rich and varied. Many of the classics of Western Civilization were written originally in Latin, starting with the Romans and continuing on for more than a thousand years after the fall of the great Empire. Isaac Newton wrote in Latin, hence his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

The study of Latin implies the study of Latin literature and that is something of lasting value. I studied Latin many years ago. I can no longer read Latin w/o great difficulty. I cannot say I have any facility left at all. As I wrote up top, maintaining a language is very difficult. But my English vocabulary is superb, partly due to my Latin experience, and I still recall much of the literature I imbibed only semi-willingly when studying the ancient language.

I think we make a big mistake when we demand that everything we teach or learn should be relevant to our immediate needs. This almost guarantees that we are surrendering the bigger picture, the long term. IMO, we give in too readily to the auto-erotic impulse of letting students study themselves. A lot of this started in the 1960s. Schools gave up the classics to concentrate on various self-esteem studies. How did that work out? Instead of reaching toward things of lasting common value, we explored differences that didn’t make much difference then and today don’t make any difference at all.

I don’t expect a Latin Renaissance. Too bad.

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Dreaming of Spontaneity

It takes a lot of thought to be spontaneous, at least if you want to be effective.  I have been thinking about planning and achievement because it is EER season.  EERs are like some made for TV movies; they are inspired by a true story.  But a good story is not enough.  I am very interested in figuring out what exactly I had contributed to the significant success we achieved.  It is not only for personal aggrandizement.  I need an idea of what I contributed so that I can manage the process and improve it.  

If it is mostly just luck, I can do nothing except hope it continues.  If I just blundered into a good strategy, I need to know so that I can adapt it.   I think our success is a combination of luck, opportunity and a type of planning.  I say a type of planning because I don’t plan in the step-by-step way.  Actually, I sometimes do, but I don’t expect those exquisite but fragile plans to survive contact with reality.  

I plan less now than I did twenty years ago, but I think the planning is better. I don’t need to overt discipline I forced on myself earlier in my career for a few big reasons.  The first is that I can rely on my colleagues to protect me.  They do lots of the details and backstop for me.  Thanks.  Life has also become simpler because of technology.  Think of travel.  You don’t need to keep track of tickets anymore.  They are all online.  You can do your accounting online; actually the accounting is done for you online.  Many of the chores that were so hard for me are gone.  Life is easier.  But the big reason I don’t have to plan consciously is because I now have internalized the processes and I plan automatically in ways that I could not do before.  

At my level, almost all my planning is contingent.  It is not step by step and it is full of feedback loops.  What I learned in business school just doesn’t work.  I know that I sometimes give the impression that I am a mystic and/or I am just not paying attention.  This is not my intention but it comes with some advantages.  After they get to know me, people come to trust me, which is an important prerequisite.  My vagueness gives them license to innovate but their faith that I know where I am going provides direction.  Almost all of what I accomplish is done through others and returning to my original question, where do I add value? 

I think my main contribution is as a connector and a facilitator or shared vision. I say facilitator because it would be an oxymoron to claim to be a creator of a shared vision. A shared vision requires that participants share in its creation and then in its flexible implementation.  The better the shared vision, the more people want to be part and contribute, the less you can tell where your ideas and skills stop and those of others begin.  The more successful you are in facilitating the success, the less you can identify the parts you “did” but the better the results.  I guess it is a sort of mysticism.  

None of my teams greatest accomplishments at the end of this year could have been predicted in detail at the beginning.  They resulted from opportunities offered, taken and expanded. We knew where we wanted to be and we developed a range of tools and skills and then waited for the chance to use them.  

All greatness is based on contradiction and we should not try to resolve all contradictions and tension. Contradiction and tension are the fonts of creativity.  But I will add that in addition to being creative, you really have to be excellent first in some basics. I worked hard to get my basic skills up to standard.  Without my capacity in Portuguese, I could not be successful here. My basic ability to understand accounting procedures made it possible to work with budgets. Things like this make a difference too.  The poetry of creativity needs to be based on a prosaic base, else it comes to nothing.  I suppose that is the difference between dreaming and making them happen.

Of course, in my EER I sound a bit less tentative and more take charge than I do above. As I said, it is inspired by a true story and reads a little more coherently than it was lived.

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Unseen São Paulo

It is a São Paulo few people see, quiet and pleasant. To get to a conference at the Meliá Hotel at 9 am on Sunday morning I walked the three miles from Renaissance Marriott (my favorite hotel in São Paulo) and left a little before 8 am. São Paulo is quiet early on Sunday morning. 

The streets were mostly free of cars. There was some pedestrian traffic and the quiet whoosh of gardeners sweeping or washing down walkways with water. It was very peaceful. I brought my I-Pad but didn’t use it. Sometimes you just want to be in the moment.

The walk took me through some very pleasant neighborhoods. On the negative side, sidewalks are uneven and hard to navigate, but on the plus side there are lots of trees.  São Paulo gets a bum rap.  It is known as a concrete jungle, but much of São Paulo is a green and pleasant place. Of course, I tend to see the best parts. I would not walk in the less pleasant and more dangerous places.

I will let the pictures illustrate. I would be happy to live in neighborhoods like this; I couldn’t afford it.

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A world undone

World War I may be the biggest tragedy in history. It destroyed a promising civilization and led to the evils of communism and Nazism. “A World Undone” is the best book I have read about this tragedy. The title is apt. A world was indeed undone. Meyer describes that world and how its faults AND its strengths led to the tragedy. For example, virtues such as courage, perseverance and planning many times made things worse.Author G.J. Meyer describes the privations on the home fronts. The situation in Germany is especially interesting, as we get little of that in most of the histories I have read.

I found most interesting descriptions of interactions among leaders, military and civilian. There was plenty of incompetence and short sightedness, but there were also rational and well-thought out plans that just didn’t work, perhaps because both sides were similarly matched and both sides were thinking of moves and counter moves. Meyer does a good job of talking about all sides. This is a useful antidote to one-sided accounts we often get. When I say “one-sided” I am not talking about only or even mostly patriotic accounts. Rather, it is a big mistake, often repeated, to treat the other side as an object on which we apply our best efforts. Enemies adapt. We learn from each other. It is easy to say “If we did…” This is naive and not pernicious. We and our adversaries share a system in which our common actions invariably produce results neither side could have foreseen.

Viewing all human interactions systemically is a good idea. War, especially a protracted and terrible war like World War I, brings this our in sharper detail, but the complexity and unpredictable nature of human interaction is true always and everywhere. It should be one of the lessons of history and it is what makes reading books like “A World Undone” more than an academic exercise.

Others have written if there is one book you read … I don’t think it is ever a good idea to read just one book about anything, but this one would be a good start. I have thought long about the question of whether historian create history or just report it. It is clear that some creation is going on, as authors must make sense of events and put them in a context that is the creation of the historian and his/her culture. A book like this is possible only in the post-Cold War environment, where we can better see the complexity of multiple relationships.

America has ordered the world as long as most of us have been alive. We have trouble understanding the world of 1914, when was no dominant power. Our world might be becoming more like that of 1914. I hope we do better this time.