The search for good decisions continues

New York is a deeply ironic place.  Most of the state is rolling, rural, green, and beautiful.  The Adirondack State Park is massive, historic, rugged, and four-season stunning.  The Finger Lake region is a gem.  The Catskills and surrounding country are a sylvan paradise.

The state is also a financial basket case, and known around the world as the box that the Big Apple comes wrapped in.  In fact, most people in permanent residence think Upstate means Westchester County and think Rochester is in Ohio, if only they could find Ohio.

The New York State I grew up in had a vibrant and diverse economy.  The city was always a financial and corporate hub, but was also the largest small business economy in North America.  Albany was even then a political scorched earth, but much more entertaining than it is today thanks to Nelson Rockefeller.  The cities that stretched along the former Erie Canal were home to a pantheon of iconic American industry and enterprise.  GM, Kodak, Baush and Lomb, Sybron, Carrier, IBM, GE, Xerox, and Alcoa are just some of the names that come to mind. It was a proudly middle class state with a strong rural sub-economy that nicely counterbalanced the political craziness of Albany and the general lunacy that is NYC. [Read more →]

Recently I spent a couple of days in Washington, DC talking with some very connected people from both sides of the aisle.  Some observations.

The center of the world is most definitely DC.  All the money is there and everyone who wants some of it is as well.  More so than any other time I’ve been there (I went to school there and have spent a fair amount of time there). Those of us not there simply have no concept of how the center of power in the US has shifted even more profoundly to the federal government.

Team Obama is biting off more than it can chew by a lot. Like many people, I was stirred and thrilled by Obama’s run for the roses and continue to find him a compelling and interesting leader and politician (I use that latter word in a good way).  But, and it’s a big but, he and his team are displaying their egg-headed tendencies.  Politics is the art of the possible.  Without commenting on the quality of the ideas, the whole lot of them display an astonishing disregard for what it takes to make change happen.  Leaving aside the difficulty of getting the big egos to play nice, there simply aren’t enough staff people in DC to do all the analysis by a factor of two or three.  The machine is able to handle maybe one big piece of legislation a session, the rest of the time being spent on piddling around, doing earmarks, and the non-stop game of running for office.  It’s just too much.

All the real work in town is done by super smart, super committed 25 to 38 year olds who are working 18 hour days, 6 days a week.  Have you ever done that?  For longer than a couple of months?  Does it make you feel good knowing that’s the backbone of our government? Surrounding those eager beavers are the layers and layers of old guard.  Some of these people are truly salt of the earth.  The serve because they believe.  The work hard.  Some of them even have some life balance.  Others are deeply cynical and do all they can to gum up the works.  In all ways, it’s not unlike the private sector, except turnover is driven by a different dynamic and the stakes are so much higher.

I am sad to say this, but a lot of what’s getting jammed through Congress is bad policy and will surely be bad law.  This is a function of the previous points.  It’s also a function of the design of our government which is built to guard against too much movement in any one direction too quickly.  The ills that beset us have come as the result of an accumulation of bad policies, bad laws, and bad governance.  Or maybe it was all well intentioned but times changed.  Pick your poison, but the point is it didn’t all happen at once and it won’t unhappen at once.

Good, bad, or indifferent, the GOP is not interested in making good laws.  They are running for election.  The whole purpose of the party in opposition anymore is simply to oppose, not to help govern.

The lawmakers at the focal point of all these big laws are simply not up to the task.  Probably nobody is. Chris Dodd, just to pick one, a man deeply unpopular in his home state at this point, is at the center of the Financial Regulation and Health Care reform.  It’s just too much by half. And he’s not the only one.  The private sector is a bone yard littered with companies that augered in because of managerial hubris. Why do we think Washington is immune to the same thing?

Obama has now spent a grand total of 5.5 months in office. My good friends on the left point to that as a sort of blanket defense.  While it’s just a smidgen of time, particularly in comparison to what many hope will be an eight year run, it’s enough time to take the measure of the man.  He’s a very cool and inspiring leader with undeniable charisma and class. He clearly loves smart people and big ideas. He is operating with a mandate based on both a sense of crisis and a significant electoral win. He said he was going to take on pretty much everythign and he has. He runs a tighter operation than a lot of CEOs I can think of. He and his team seem to have done a good job of reaching out in many directions and listening to divergent points of view during the strategy forumulation phase.  None of these things will change.

On many issues, Obama is also far more conservative in many ways than the left thought he would be: Gay marraige and national security are just two places where he has dissappointed many and where conservatives with a mind to juge fairly would find much to like. He and his team are finding it difficult to pay off the promises without a lot of backroom deals and budget mangling numbers.  Those who thought it would work differently, perhaps including Obama, were high.  All of this to say that it seems certain that his wings will get clipped along the way, and he will either have to make some deeper accomodations to govern effectively.  Maybe that’s why he’s shot so high, so that when he is forced to aim lower, he’ll still have hit something.

Conservatives love to harp on Obama’s choreography. Like Bush wasn’t. Of course team Obama is choreographing everything. Other than Mark Sanford, who isn’t?   Where’s the news?  I remember after the GOP stole the 2000 election, and let’s just not even debate that one, those in the know said basically, “Grow up, so what, get over it.”  So my conservative friends, on this and all the other nanny nanny billy goat “if George Bush did this . . .” bones you want to pick, “Grow up, so what, get over it.”  The whole Claude Raines, “I’m shocked there’s gambling going on here” wasn’t becoming when the Dems did it and it’s not when the GOP does it.

The Sanford debacle hit while I was in DC.  The smart one in that family is his wife.  That was true before Sanford’s “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” aria, and it’s even more true not.  It’s not that the Dems don’t have their share of dopes and scandals, but the GOP leadership, and I use that term really loosely, appears to compromised beyond hope.  The right wing blogs are all excited thinking that Obama will be a one term President.  I keep wondering who they have in mind because the whole lot of them seem to self-destruct in the light of day.

Tags: Obama, Governor Sanford, GOP, George Bush, Democrats, Republicans, Decision Making

A very interesting talk by Barry Schwartz, who provocatively raises the question, is choice good? He thinks not. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

Here’s the book.

The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz. Harper Perennial 2005, Paperback, 304 pages, $6.94

It’s all good theater but raises really profound questions, particularly as we enter the big national debate about rethinking health care (are we really ready, willing, and able to make choices beyond what day to go see the doc?)

Tags: BarrySchwartz, Paradox of Choice, Decision Making, Decision Quality

I am sure there will be lots for everyone to hate in the soon to be revealed Obama plan to regulate financial markets.  But an article in the WSJ is intriguing for what it reveals about the mechanics of decision making. 

One heartening clue is that apparent search for alternatives before a final plan came forward.

“We identified lots of options and we approached some of them with presumptive answers, but in a way nothing was nailed down until it was all nailed down because so much of this is interconnected and interrelated,” said Treasury Department Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin.

Note the obvious nod to the fact that the plan has lots of moving parts, one of the hallmarks of complex decisions.

Another interesting insight was the apparent attention paid to seeking “disconfirming points of view.”  One of the big decision traps we fall into is some combination of talking to the same people we always do, or seeking out people we think are “just like us” as a way of confirming what we already think we want to do, vs. argue strongly for an alternative point of view. 

The team was built to have contrasting views so officials could debate a wide range of alternatives. Key players included Treasury Assistant Secretary Michael Barr, an expert on financial institutions and consumer protection; Cass Sunstein, a constitutional-law expert who joined the White House from Harvard Law School; and Patrick Parkinson, a markets expert who took a leave from the Federal Reserve to join the Treasury Department.

Larry Summers is a controversial figure at the best of times, known for a towering intellect and the fact that he knows it. Love him or not, his role of critic in chief is another example of good decision hygiene (even though it’s incredibly painful, and yes, destructive if it comes at the wrong point in the process).

Roughly once a week, sometimes more, the team met with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner or National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers to run through ideas. Mr. Summers became known for his ability to shred and discredit any idea presented, forcing aides to scramble to defend their proposals.

“The challenge for many people…is that he can argue both sides of an argument better than anyone,” said Diana Farrell, deputy director of the NEC.

Officials now feel that this exercise with Mr. Summers, which left some red-faced at the time, will make it much easier to defend their ideas on Capitol Hill.

In the end, there will be massive criticism because the plan was hatched as a complete piece of work, done away from Congress (unlike the current attempts at Health Care overhaul).  As an exercise in dealing with complexity, reducing inclusion is a classic strategy.  As an exercise in dealing with political reality, it’s not a recipe for success.  The long knives are out.  Let the games begin.

Tags: financialmarkets, decision making, decision quality, Obama, Neal Wolin, Larry Summers, Diana Farrell, Michael Barr, Cass Sunstein, Patrick Parkinson

This is almost too good to be true.  The comments are over 350 years old and pretty much settle the bill: Politicians have changed hardly at all.

Tags: OlverCromwell, Long Parliament, politicians, corruption

This will make you nuts.   Click on the image to get the latest figures (they just keep spinning).

Tags: USDebt, Financial Meltdown

I have a good friend who gets after me for bringing up Bush/Cheney, and probably for good reason.  It’s the new guy’s show and he and we need to get on with things.  And big credit to Bush 43 for resolutely declining the opportunity to take shots at Obama despite the fact that Obama and crew are not nearly done taking shots at him.  I believe that 43 will yet burnish his legacy, as so many have, by what he does and doesn’t say and do post-Presidency. But I digress.

Dick Cheney is another matter.  I keep trying to ignore him but he’s in the news yet again today.  In what must be a bitter pill, he now says that there is no connection between Iraq and 911, blaming George Tennant for that one . . .

Please note . . .

1. He conflates al Qaeda with terrorism, as if all terrorism = al Qaeda
2. Despite saying there is no link to 911, he says there is a link because, at least according to him, Iraq=terrorism=al Qaeda=911.
3. He never offers a shred of evidence.
4. All the evidence that has been made public says the link isn’t there.

Frank Rich  points out in his latest editorial that the real crime here is that Dick Cheney bulldozed the media for the past 8 years, and he continues to do the same now that he’s out of office.  He bends and tortures the truth and the mainstream media gives him the win over Obama by TKO.  The problem is, he’s lying and he’s not being held to account.

Since 2002, the only folks who have consistently done any meaningful digging on Iraq are Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel in the McClatchy’s Washington Bureau (one of the few remaining and a testimony to why we need a vibrant free press).  They have consistently gotten the story and gotten it right.  So if you care, here’s a link to their analysis of Cheney’s rant on how Obama has made America safe for terrorists.  Some of this you may decide to interpret as “reasonable people disagree.”  But at least consider the possibility that there are a bunch of people with serious credentials and direct knowledge of the issues that Cheney is banging on about who say he is flat out wrong.

What I find particularly dispicable is that having blown 9/11, the intel was there they just didn’t want to listen to anything that the Clinton team had ever done or thought, having botched Afghanistan, butchered Iraq, and helped the bad guys recruit thousands more jihadis, he’s now going to play Casandra and do everything he can to shift the blame forward so that when something bad happens, and let’s be clear something will, he can shout I told you so.

This much I know

Dick Cheney will die.  I just don’t know when, where, or how.  But if I keep saying it, I’ll be right someday.  But that doesn’t make me right to say it all the time.

Tags: DickCheney, al Qaeda, Warren Srobel, Jonathan Landay, Frank Rich, torture

I’ve been following the “torture debate” for some time.   In many ways the most interesting insight, and this first came out about two weeks back, is the extent to which people how describe themselves as Christians are in favor of torture.  A snip . . .

I have a King James Bible right in front of me.  I hope that Kuykendall has been quoted out of context because Romans 13:1 – 7 has absolutely nothing to do with his assertion that the New Testament grants the state the right of the Sword. Quite the opposite.  During the period in history in which the events of the NT occurred, the state was Rome, and from Jesus on down, the whole lot of them were virulently apocalyptic with the specific understanding that the state and the sword would be eliminated, to be replaced by heaven on earth.

As to Colson’s comments, again, point to me a single passage in the Gospels that supports his point of view. I would challenge him or anyone to find that meaning in the New Testament.  Just keep reading Romans 13:8.  “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.” That hardly sounds like a rationale for torture (though it would be a good justification for trespassing to save a drowning person, a particularly lame analogy).

To Colson’s point about “a competent authority” . . . again, what Biblical authority does he have in mind to support this assertion?  Where in either Testament do we find an example where tossing the law, by which was always meant God’s Law, in favor of a “competent authority” was the recommended way to go?  Quite the opposite, I recall a story about some guy getting thrown into a pit with a bunch of Lions because he thought that idea daft (just to pick one of many stories).

I can think of lots of reasons why people might find “enhanced interrogation” techniques acceptable, but I think the idea does violence to any fair reading of the Gospels or even a passing understanding of what Jesus taught.  How you get from “Render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s” to “God granting the right of the sword to the State” or “a competent authority” is creating meaning where it isn’t.  So I find it interesting that so many people who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians, presumably the most Christian among us, find torturing anyone such an easy leap.

Tags: Torture, Chenny, Evangelicals, Chuck Colson, Rev. Ronald Kuykendall

A friend sent me a something by thinking/computer/pattern language heavyweight Richard P. Gabriel, The Nature of Order: The Post-Pattern World.  Some wonderful thoughts.

Drive on (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series)

Richard P. Gabriel. Hollyridge Press 2005, Paperback, 48 pages, $8.99

Writers’ Workshops & the Work of Making Things

Richard P. Gabriel. Pearson Education 2002, Paperback, 288 pages, $8.47

Roughness

Things which have real life always have a certain ease, a morphological roughness. It is not a residue of technically inferior culture, or the result of handcraft or inaccuracy. It is an essential structural feature which they have and without which a things cannot be whole.

Often the border of an ancient carpet is “irregular” where it goes round the corner—that is, the design breaks, the corner seems “patched together.” This does not happen through carelessness or inaccuracy. On the contrary, it happens because the weaver is paying close attention to the positive and negative, to the alternating repetition of the border, to the good shape of each compartment of the wave and each bit of open space—and makes an effort all along the border to be sure these are “just right.” To keep all of them just right along the length of the border, some loose and makeshift composition must be done at the corner. [Read more →]

These are my run notes from an address by James Andrew, Sr. Partner, MD BCG, Head of Global Innovation Practice, to the 2009 SAMA annual meeting.

Payback

James P. Andrew. Harvard Business School Press 2007, Hardcover, 228 pages, $3.50

I learned about strategic accounts from an early age.  My father sold grease and oil for forty years.  I remember my introduction to big accounts and how not all accounts are created equal and what it takes to serve them.

I remember sitting at dinner one night.  My father had this territory that was the greater Chicago area and the phone rang.  It was US Steel in Gary.  His largest account.

If you know Chicago and what it took to get from the north of town to Gary, it’s not a pleasurable trip.  This meant he was going to be gone well past my bed time.  I made some remark like a ten hear old would do.

He pointed to my plate and said, “Do you like what’s on my plate?”

“Yes”

“Do you like your room?”

“Yes”

“Who do you think pays for that?”

[Read more →]