Month: September 2013

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Changing leadership

Ambassador Shannon is the best ambassador I worked with in my entire career since 1984.  I know that is a bold statement, but I think he is that good.  I have worked with some good ones before.  Ambassador Dan Fried in Poland was the right man at the right time.  I also thought that Ambassador Robert Stuart in Norway was great. I have been lucky to never have had any really bad ambassadors.  This makes my career unusually blessed.  I have had a few near misses. When they are good, they are very, very good but when they are bad they can be horrid.

Not all my bosses have been equally good.  I have developed a system to take advantage of the variation.  I have heroes, people I try to emulate.  Of course, my ideal is a composite, since no one person can do it all. But I do have individuals I admire.  Besides great ones like Ambassador Shannon, I have had some great bosses.  Brian Carlson, my boss in Norway had an early influence on my career.  When I see someone doing something well, I try to see how I can adapt it to my reality and capacities.  There are some good things that I just cannot do and some that I can do only with some changes, but the idea is good.

But you need to have anti-heroes too.  If you look at the requirements for FSO promotion, nobody in the world is worthy; certainly I am not.  The real world is different, however.  You don’t really need to achieve the level of excellence talked about in theory.  In fact, it is dangerous to be too much a perfectionist.  If you don’t act until you are perfect you will never act.  This has the really negative effect of letting the lesser folks take you job. You have  a DUTY to get ahead if you are qualified to get ahead. Don’t leave it to the dogs.  

So what about the anti-heroes.  I will not name names here, but there are successful FSOs who I think are horrible ; not many, but a not insignificant number have reached the highest levels w/o deserving.  You have to pick one of these guys as your anti-hero.  The idea is that “If that clown can make it, so can I.” 

You need both kinds of role models: the first one gives you and idea of what you should be and the second one gives you encouragement that it is possible for you to make it.   

Anyway, we have some really great role models.  One of them is leaving.

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A true stimulus

Unconventional oil and gas production added the equivalent of $1,200 to real household disposable income on in 2012. Since the poor spend relatively more on energy, this is clearly one of the best anti-poverty program going.  

The industry raised GDP by by $283 billion last year and was responsible for $74 billion in federal and state tax payments.

What a great program. It not only pays its own way but also pumps revenue into the treasury, more than $200 million a day. Revenue is expected to rise to $138 billion a year by 2025.

Fracking has been as close to a gift from God as I have ever seen. Imagine the trouble we would be in w/o it. It has been the single most important stimulus after what the Fed has been doing. And it keeps on coming, year after year.

I am not a big believer in one or two things “saving” the economy. But clearly the unexpected bonus from fracking helped lift us from recession and will do a lot to get the economy finally back on track. Revenue from fracking can pay for a lot of mistakes, such as Solyndra.

Let’s just not let them screw it up.

On a related item, I was learning from a UC Santa Barbara study that energy exploration has REDUCED natural oil seepage into the ocean by about half. An article starts, “Next time you step on a glob of tar on a beach in Santa Barbara County, you can thank the oil companies that it isn’t a bigger glob.”

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Londrina and the BNC

Londrina, a city of about a half a million with two million in the metro area, was founded by British settlers in 1934, so the city is not very old.  The region was settled primary by German, Italian and Japanese immigrants and this is reflected in the look of the city’s population today.  Brazil is a very diverse country.  This part of it could be Europe with some Japan.  There were lots of Japanese restaurants and the monument pictured along side commemorating the colonization. It was once the center of a near mono-culture coffee producing region.  This changed in 1975 when a devastating frost wiped out around 70% of the crop.  They have since diversified.

I got to experience a wider variety of weather here than I get to see in Brasília.   I arrived to a hot and dry day.  I was told that weather this year was variable and that it had been near zero degrees only a few days ago.  But this was a dry season.  It had not rained for more than a month and it was uncomfortably warm the next morning, but around noon the wind shifted.   A cooler wind blew and it rained by the end of the day.  Now it is a little cold and rainy. The impression of the city is very different.

I visited the Federal Institute of Technology and then spent most of the day at the BNC, talking to several classes of students.  It was interesting.  Talking to small groups used to be a big part of my work, but I don’t do them very much anymore and I miss them.  

In the evening, I made brief remarks at the opening of a new addition at the BNC and did an interview for local TV.  They had a jazz band you can see below. The BNC is above. A good time was had by all.

On Tuesday, I met with Dean of  the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL – pronounced well) the Paraná state university in Londrina, along with the person in charge of Science w/o Borders and a local journalist who interviewed me for the university newsletter. They were happy that we came to visit them in Londrina and that we were trying to get out of the Rio, São Paulo, Brasília triangle.

Science w/o Borders is working well for UEL. The students who came back from the U.S. were universally delighted with their experience. They came back changed for the better, the director said, and their impact on the university will be positive.

We talked about our visions for the future and they were very much shared. We all understand that SwB is a great thing, but that it will not last forever and that the sustainable future lies in connecting American with Brazilian institutions. The Dean said she was interesting in contact with all sorts of American universities, but thought that something with a public research land-grant institution would be the best fit for UEL, which is very much like a land-grant institution. She talked about an umbrella agreement that would cover lots of areas. UEL already has  many MOUs with universities on specific issues. She understood that the role of the Embassy and the USG is to facilitate relationships, not to create them, but also understood that because of our work and contacts with Brazilian and American institutions we could be very helpful in making that happen.

I was thinking about innovation.  What is innovation and where does it come from? It is far to complicated to discuss it well here, but an important part of innovation is the process of connecting, connecting people and ideas in novel ways that produce results better than the sum of the parts.  I don’t think you can create innovation, but you can create conditions that permit and courage innovation.  One of the ways this can be done is by getting around, meeting and connecting people.  That is a big part of our diplomacy, especially related to education.

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BNC in Londrina

I am down in Londrina in the State of Paraná to take part in the opening of a new addition to one of the Binational Centers here.  I like to take advantage of American holidays (in this case Labor Day) to travel. Brazilians are still at work, so I can make appointments, but Washington and the Embassy are closed so I don’t miss much of the office work.  

The BNCs are happy to see us.  One of their selling points is the connections with the U.S. Embassy and the occasional public presence of a diplomat reinforces that.  Beyond that, their new addition is made possible by a grant that they got through the Embassy and I have a fiduciary responsibility to check to see how it was done.   The director of the BNC told me that he is very careful to use all these assets strategically and attributes a 20% increase in students to improvements.

BNCs are living in the best of times and the worst of times.  English teaching is a real growth industry in Brazil and the BNCs provide the highest quality.  But they also face lots of competition from private firms that have bigger ad budgets and can promise (although not always deliver) faster results.  The reason we (USG) support BNCs is that they maintain connections with the U.S.  

We used to do a lot more with them in terms of cultural programs and outreach, but our capacity has declined with steady budget cuts and changing emphasis.   This is not the result of the current sequester.  Cultural programming has been declining since the end of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999 and even before. We used to have a much bigger staff, many of whom were involved with these sorts of programs but sponsoring culture was always controversial.  During the Cold War, we justified it on policy reasons.   Beyond that, in times past there was less available in terms of cultural programs.  Those conditions have all changed. 

Anyway, the bottom line is that we have less to offer BNCs in terms of cultural programs and I doubt that it will ever come back.  So we need to develop other sorts of relationships.  Nobody wants the BNCs to become mere English teaching institutions.  That would eliminate their unique contribution to their communities.  But English teaching pays the bills.  Other programs are cost centers.  One of the very valuable services BNCs provide right now is education advising.  As I mentioned in earlier posts, students going to the U.S. bring a lot of benefits to the U.S.   I don’t have an easy answer to how to continue to support the good things that don’t provide direct benefits to the providers.  This is a problem bigger than only our BNCs.  

Besides talking to the BNC director yesterday, I hosted some of our youth alumni for a pizza dinner.  We have sent lots of young people on programs like Youth Ambassadors and it is important, IMO, to maintain contact.  A network is only as useful as it is current.   One of my policies is to invite young alumni to pizza whenever I visit a Brazilian city.  I usually only get five or six actually show up (although in towns less visited I get bigger crowds), but many more are contacted, which helped keep the connection.   I learned a few interesting things at the pizza event yesterday.  The students complained that some of their professors just don’t show up to give classes regularly.  I was surprised, but they told me it was not uncommon.   Today I will visit some of the universities and see if I can get more information re.

My picture is Londrina skyline from my hotel room. 

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EducationUSA

I spoke at the opening of the EducationUSA fair on Saturday. I try to keep my remarks short, but I did take advantage of the captive audience of more than fifty recruiters from the U.S. to emphasize the fantastic opportunities Brazil offers.  Of course, I was preaching to the choir.  They came because they expect Brazil to give them great opportunities. But while you need not preach to the choir, you do sometimes need to lead and encourage them. I did that.

EducationUSA fairs are self supporting, i.e. the schools and others who take part pay the full cost. Presumably participants think that the return is worth it.  Each Brazilian student brings in around $55,000 in direct benefits into the American economy for each year they are there  (not counting all the intangibles and long term), so if a school attracts only one or two it more than pays for the effort. The USG outlay is only for some incidentals and my time, which is free to the USG in this case, since the event was on Saturday when I am not paid. 

My pictures are not from the EducationUSA fair.  Pictures of a crowd of people gathered around booths in a big hotel space are not remarkable.  But across the road from the   fair building was an exhibition for patriotic week.  Those were interesting pictures, so I include them. The top picture shows the gate to the park. Next is the Brazilian Marine band.  The picture below is the convention center where the EducationUSA event was held.