‘You know what gets me?’ says Chad. ‘I mean, about the whole Shackleton thing. It’s that those guys got away with it. They shouldn’t have. Twenty-eight went in and twenty-eight came out.’ I think about this for a bit. ‘No,’ I gently correct him, ‘not twenty-eight. There were twenty-seven of them, and Shackleton.’
One of the best things in life is to enjoy the respect of those whom you respect, so to be complimented in this manner by Knowledge, Freddie, John, Nico, JC and Chad means a great deal to me. So what now? We have found the
the star in our firmament is undoubtedly Nico Vincent. I think he might have saved the project. Back in Sweden, when he was taking charge of the Sabertooths, he spotted an old winch in storage and asked if he could also have that one for the project. Everybody was of the opinion that the two new ones would be entirely reliable, but Nico’s view was that they were not tried and tested, whereas the old one, despite its years, was. Both of the new winches have now failed and so Nico has switched to the 25-year-old winch, and it is working. It did not like the cold, but they constructed a tent over it and put a heater inside, and it has performed perfectly. The subsea team say that bringing the old winch was an act of whim, but to me it betokens the kind of wisdom that only comes with experience.
There were great bergs and floes all around. It was as if we were in a maze. I watched the mate as he wove the ship back and forth between channels. After a manoeuvre that reminded me of a racing car going through a chicane, I threw him a compliment. ‘Nifty,’ I said. He gave a rare smile. ‘I’ve got more moves than a fiddle player’s elbow.’ Good one, I thought; but Shackleton said it better when he compared it to ‘steering a bicycle through a graveyard’. This expression came to him at the end of the 1903 season when, on Scott’s orders and very much against his own wishes, he was being invalided out of Antarctica on a relief ship. As
The story of what happened to those men after they left England has been shaped almost entirely by South, which was presented as a factual record of their epic journey. The book appeared in 1919, three years after they got back from Antarctica, and (the ultimate accolade in publishing) has never been out of print since. Back in the ‘60s, when I first read South, I was happy to go along with its every word, but now I am not so naive – now I want to get closer to the truth of what happened. South was all about myth creation. Shackleton was hungry for fame and fortune and to be seen and adored as a hero. This he had achieved with the publication of The Heart of Antarctica, about the Nimrod expedition, in 1909; but that book was later knocked into the shadows by the 1913 publication of Scott’s harrowing diaries, which established him as the pre-eminent British explorer of the era. Scott might have been dead, but the bitter rivalry between the two continued. South was Shackleton’s last chance to carve his name in legend and, if not eclipse Scott, at least ensure his place beside him. For books of this type there was a template which, fortunately for Shackleton, perfectly matched the vision of himself that he wanted to project: the noble hero, the fearless leader of a loyal, selfless, body of men who, inspired by his example, worked seamlessly for the good of all. In other words, the perfect expression of the Imperial ideal. Certainly there was much to admire in those 28 who went into the Antarctic on the Endurance – they were a remarkable group, capable of great fortitude and generosity of spirit, and they were in large part loyal and brave. But, as the diaries reveal, they could also be snarky, nitpicking, jealous, self-serving and vindictive. They were not, every one of them, chin-up and valiant-all, and they were definitely no band of brothers. In short, they were – as my mother used to say when I was venting my frustration over some bonehead who was complicating my life – ‘people, dear. Just people
To mint an adage, normal people do not go to sea.
On the wall in my day room is a large hydrographic map of the Weddell Sea: the well-known Admiralty Chart Number 4024. The greatest danger to ships at sea, apart from fire, is land, and usually the nearest land is that which is under your keel. Knowing the depth of water beneath you is, therefore, fundamental to safe navigation. On a chart the depth is usually expressed in a series of contour lines, or isobaths, which give you not just the depth but the topography, or relief, of the ocean floor. And this is where my chart of the Weddell Sea becomes interesting. The contour lines are there and follow the normal conventions, but when you come to the sector which is permanently covered by pack – that is to say, the part of the Weddell Sea where we are now – there is nothing. The contour lines stop dead in their tracks. There aren’t even any conjectural dots. It’s just blank and void. Right now, we are, literally, off the map.
Every day I take out the triangles, parallel rulers and dividers and draw our course upon an Admiralty chart of the Weddell Sea. The route we have followed looks utterly erratic and whimsical. Anybody not familiar with these waters might think we’ve had a drunk at the helm, but every swerve, hard right and handbrake turn we have made has been in response to the ice. As Shackleton once said when they were in their boats and picking their way through densely noddled waters, ‘The old adage about a short cut being the longest way round is often as true in the Antarctic as it is in the peaceful countryside.’ I heard our mate put it more succinctly when one day he growled: ‘Down here we don’t do bloody beelines.
” QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “that which was to be demonstrated.” Sometimes translated or paraphrased by British scholars and students as “The Five Ws”: which was what we wanted.
We live by some bad ideas. The Seven Bad Ideas, the Four Cheaps, they all have to go. For a long time they’ve been squeezing the world. Now it’s been squeezed dry. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why the moon won’t serve as a new place to squeeze, being a stone already. So the dynasty of the cheaps is over, it’s done. Now we have to stop squeezing, and change.
An oracle answers questions. A genie obeys commands to the best of its abilities, and makes suggestions. An agent acts in the world.
“The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic leadership led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and farmers.
First oracle, then genie, then agent.
But someday the streets would fill with people. Young and old—the young without prospects, the old without the iron rice bowl—they would all take to the streets. Thirty million more young men than young women—that in itself was enough to fuel a revolution. He wondered when it would happen, and what would come of it. If he had believed in the people more, perhaps he could have helped them more. Worked from the inside to help the outside. That had been his intention all along, but now he saw that when you did it alone, in solitude, with only your AI for companionship, the dangers rose, also the possibilities for failure. The whole point of a collective national success was undercut when you tried to do it alone. He was surprised he had gone for so long without seeing that.
This was mass action, this was what mass action looked like, felt like. Despite his age, he himself had never seen it.
They had a project, a collective project, and maybe that’s what had caused this to happen, because people craved a project.
She nodded and studied her wristpad. She typed for a while, then read. If this was Lenin on the train to Russia, Fred thought, it was also much like everything else in the cloud: tapping on screens; things then appearing on other screens; then later, perhaps, things happening in the physical world. But what was the relationship between cloud and world, between tap and act? This was always the question no one could answer. Maybe, Fred thought, the two were the same now. Maybe the question itself was simply wrong. Maybe they had always been the same. Words were acts, words were always acts; that was why he was always so hesitant to speak. He remembered a phrase that someone trying to help him had once said: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. That was a thought that made him uneasy every time he remembered it, so mostly he didn’t; but it kept cropping up, usually at precisely those times when he saw he wasn’t going to act, even though he was feeling something pretty strongly
Go. Analyst removed by other people. Against his will. Will is the desire for one action rather than another. A desire is a hope for a new situation. A hope is a wish that we doubt will come true (Schopenhauer). A wish is a hope for some new thing. Tautology noted. Call will an input. Call it a clinamen, Greek for swerve. One must let them shine forth at the right time (Yijing).
Colleagues of mine are surveilling you and others organizing the three withouts
“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.” “What is this list?” “This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.” “Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?” “No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.” “Do they know they have this vocabulary?” “No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.”
Exposure, a climbers’ term, was a partial description; they didn’t say what the exposure was to, which turned out to be death by falling.
So now we’re all in danger, crushed under the weight of the elite’s ambitions just as thoroughly as I am now crushed by Earth’s inexorable pull.
“It is not the case that this is a total surveillance society. Citizens are only partially tracked in a discontinuous network of surveillance systems that is not well integrated at any level.”
Fred felt the Earth’s gravity bearing down on him. He was confused, he didn’t know what to think. His tendency to think of the world as a potentiality state awaiting the wave collapse of a decision now mocked him. Yes, the world was a fog of probabilities, yes, one could only learn partial truths by making decisions about what to do. Now it was time to make a decision.
It looks to me now as if I have gone mad or am suffering a seizure. But let’s agree to call this an exposure to reality. The sublime, in a certain strain of Western aesthetics, is said to be a fusion of beauty and terror. In China the Seven Feelings don’t mention this combination, but now I think I know what it is. It’s a true feeling, the sublime—it’s spirit confronted by sheer matter, as Hegel put it. Under
I have visited 232 countries on Earth, and now the moon too. One might say I have been everywhere. But no matter where I go, I can never escape myself, the country no one can ever really know. In that sense travel is useless. Maybe we look to the next step in order to avoid seeing ourselves. Not narcissism, then, but an attempt to forget.
her frown, an expression she could feel freezing
Any difference in feng shui terms?” “Or practical terms?” Ta Shu frowned. “Feng shui is practical.” “Really? It’s not just aesthetics?” “Just aesthetics? Aesthetics is very practical!” Fred nodded dubiously. “You’ll have to teach me more about that.” Ta Shu smiled. “I am a mere student myself. You work with computers, you must do mathematics, yes? Famous for its aesthetics, I’m told.” “Well, but it has to work too.
Women produce the lion’s share of exceptional national security journalism. This book is only possible because of pioneering, relentless journalists like Jane Mayer, Dana Priest, Laura Poitras, Carol Rosenberg, Sharon Weinberger, Marcy Wheeler, Muna Shikaki, Nancy Youssef, Kashmir Hill, Dara Lind—one of the foremost immigration journalists, who has been crucial in walking me through arcana I should have already understood—Aura Bogado, Alexa O’Brien, Emma Graham-Harrison, Janet Reitman, Raya Jalabi, Talia Lavin, Julia Angwin, Tram Nguyen, Kim Zetter, Hannah Allam, Betsy Woodruff Swan, Erin Banco, Kelly Weill, Laila al-Arian, Azmat Khan, Betty Medsger, and so many others. The foremost theorist of surveillance capitalism, the prophet who named it, is Shoshana Zuboff.
Jesse in particular has taught me a lifetime’s worth about the programmatic aspects of and discipline behind creativity.
Never would America acknowledge that the violent, reactionary dangers that it attributed to its enemies were also part of its own history. That was the meaning of Oklahoma City. It was the meaning of January 6. A white man with a flag and a gun, the man who had made America great, was not a terrorist. The 9/11 era said he was a counterterrorist. America had never been the sort of place that would tell him he was anything else. As the Forever War persisted, with Trump handing off to Biden a perpetual-motion engine of death powered by the worst of American history, its targets increasingly domestic and its final form still unachieved, it became increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.
Even after eighteen years of his ordeal, Hassoun thought he might be able to clear all this up if only Chad Wolf would talk with him. He had heard Wolf on the common-room radio talking about the injustice of George Floyd’s murder. Hassoun wrote him talking about the injustice that he was right now enduring, an injustice Wolf could end. Hadn’t Wolf been the one signing the six-month threat designations? Was it too much to expect he would read Hassoun’s letter? “Here people are slammed with stupid stuff for life and it’s a disgrace,” he reflected. “The greatest country in the world cannot reach a point where it can be a little bit civilized in its justice system.” And not only in its justice system. The War on Terror, not the nationalist fantasy Trump spun in his inaugural address, was the real American carnage. It turned foreigners into nonpersons—Anti-Iraqi Forces, Military-Aged Males, Detainees. When necessary, it could turn Americans into foreigners, all through turning citizenship into a border that it militarized. Those deemed no longer worthy of constitutional protections, like Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son Abdulrahman, could outrun the drones for only so long. The longer America viewed itself as under siege, the easier it became to see enemies everywhere. The longer America found itself unable to resolve its agonizing failure to achieve peace and victory, the easier it became to blame the vulnerable at home, to see Black liberation as terror, to see nonwhite immigration as terror, to see protesters as terror, to see liberalism as the handmaiden of terror, to see everything as terror except the apparatus it had constructed to inflict terror on men like Adham Hassoun. As the War on Terror became permanent, it was inevitable that those confronted with the agonizing refutation of American exceptionalism would look for a satisfying, violent resolution. The answers liberals offered were to call the War on Terror something else, reconcile themselves to a diminished “sustainable” version, and posture as if that was as good as ending the war. Liberalism, like the Security State, would always be shocked to discover that such permanence empowered those who wanted America not to be a global police force for undeserving foreigners, but a domestic one guarding the ramparts of American civilization
Trump, an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers—Outerborough White Racist, Wealth Vampire, Dignity-Free Media Striver, and Landlord—considered quarantining the entire tri-state area.
With the election looming, Osama bin Laden observed the American landscape he had reshaped. His plan had “exceeded all expectations,” he gloated, thanks to the indefinite, expanding war. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda,’ ” bin Laden marveled in a videotape he released October 30, “in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.” Bush was showing the Muslim world the America that bin Laden depicted: both a bloodthirsty oppresser and a vulnerable one. The United States looked like a rampaging tyrant, ruling through fear and coercion, yet one which Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan were demonstrating could be defeated. Bin Laden explained his strategy as simply provoking America into being itself. Much as the Soviet Union had collapsed after the Afghanistan insurgency—which he neglected to mention had aligned him with the CIA—bin Laden said, “We are continuing this policy, in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A strategically targeted, persistent resistance to the enemy would provoke a reaction the enemy could neither sustain nor end. And the enemy was every American, he reminded his audience, as he held all Americans collectively guilty for the violence U.S. policy inflicted upon Muslim countries. Their ability to “prevent another Manhattan” was in their own hands, “not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush.”
George Packer, a leading liberal invasion advocate, lamented in The New York Times Magazine that the protesters couldn’t imagine that “the Iraqi people, while not welcoming the threat of bombs, might be realistic enough to accept a war as their only hope of liberation from tyranny.
“the vast majority” opposed the fanatics. Hearkening to a condescending liberal tradition two centuries old, one that justified brute military force, and one that gained extensive purchase in liberal intellectual circles for years after 9/11, Lieberman urged the United States to act in the name of such threatened Muslims, “who are being besieged by isolation and intolerance.” The emerging quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which the senator supported, were the result of Bush’s botched execution, not any conceptual arrogance.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Democratic Party believed the substantial and unequally distributed wealth created during Bill Clinton’s presidency vindicated its decision to marginalize its left wing. Lacking firm ideological commitments after generations of loosening its ties to labor, increasingly divorced from the material conditions of the vast majority of Americans, and terrified of being on the wrong side of security issues, Democrats compensated with technocracy and institutionalism. No
Colin Powell would not be the last eminence of the Security State to convince himself that his complicity in a disaster was in fact internal resistance to it.
Hayden later observed, “We kill people based on metadata.”
Tenet told Bush and Cheney that Hayden would go to prison for what he had done. Cheney reportedly promised to post bail. In his memoir, Playing to the Edge, Hayden suggests that he owed his job to a stint in the White House alongside Tenet’s deputy. Now, he was the NSA’s director at perhaps the most important moment in its history. On authorization from Cheney, and armed with a legal memo from Cheney’s aide David Addington—with another from Yoo soon to follow—Hayden enlisted the major telecommunications companies and internet service providers to help the NSA collect Americans’ international communications data, from phone records to email and browser history, as well as domestic call records, in bulk. Doing so violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—a reformist 1978 law established to be the “exclusive means” for conducting foreign-intelligence interception within the United States—thereby rendering quaint Feingold’s fear that the FBI would overuse FISA. The program Hayden activated on October 6, STELLARWIND, was a secret for another four months even from the chief justice of the secret FISA Court. The other members of the court, save his successor as chief, would not learn about the existence of STELLARWIND until they read about it in The New York Times four years later.
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin warned that the FBI would now use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “as much as it can,” circumventing the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. On October 25 he was the only senator to vote against the bill, known as the PATRIOT Act.
Having abandoned the concept of a war against a specific terrorist organization, Americans would never be able to agree on when it could be won. If there was a moment the war was conceptually doomed, it was this. Opposing factions within American politics, as well as within the Security State, would never be willing to accept a rival’s definition. That would prevent the war from coming to an agreed-upon end. It would place an enormous burden on the military, especially, yet there is no record of any general or admiral significantly dissenting from this conceptual definition of the war.
California Democrat Barbara Lee, who called the AUMF a blank check, begged her colleagues to “think through the implications of [their] actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.” She was the only legislator to vote against it.
the Security State constructed what became known as the War on Terror. Its name reflected what both Sontag and Didion had diagnosed: exceptionalist euphemism that masked a boundless, direful ambition.
The Security State had succeeded so thoroughly that America exercised its strength abroad while taking its own domestic safety for granted. America acted. As the global hegemon, it was not acted upon. That assumption was part of a civic religion, as old as the country itself, known as American exceptionalism: the prerogative that America, by destiny as much as by right, set terms for the world that it was not itself bound by, a global policeman’s doctrine of qualified immunity.
During his early forties, while rapidly consuming the remnants of a trust fund, Carson’s interests were divided between his collection of antique space shuttles and a number of questionable, albeit visionary, experiments relating to increased camel-hump productivity
Their central blind spot emerged from the American exceptionalism at the heart of the War on Terror: the belief that the damage they inflicted abroad would not damage their own country.
They say that obsession is a young man’s game
What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words, to rediscover the meaning of our third basic freedom: the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality?
What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others
? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it? Perhaps
Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more ‘complex’ the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the ‘origins of the state’), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom – to refuse orders – and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don’t do as they’re told. As we’ve seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out. Carole Crumley, an anthropologist and expert on Iron Age Europe, has been pointing this out for years: complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world. That we tend to assume otherwise probably tells us more about ourselves than the people or phenomena that we’re studying.15 Neither is she alone in making this point. But more often than not, such observations have fallen on deaf ears.
It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.
the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’).3 Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones
Choosing to describe history the other way round, as a series of abrupt technological revolutions, each followed by long periods when we were prisoners of our own creations, has consequences. Ultimately it is a way of representing our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been. It means not describing history as a continual series of new ideas and innovations, technical or otherwise, during which different communities made collective decisions about which technologies they saw fit to apply to everyday purposes, and which to keep confined to the domain of experimentation or ritual play. What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity. One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities
Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely. This is one reason why most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology. Dividing up the human past according to the primary material from which tools and weapons were made (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) or else describing it as a series of revolutionary breakthroughs (Agricultural Revolution, Urban Revolution, Industrial Revolution), they then assume that the technologies themselves largely determine the shape that human societies will take for centuries to come – or at least until the next abrupt and unexpected breakthrough comes along to change everything again.
For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists tended to describe the societies they studied in ahistorical terms, as living in a kind of eternal present. Some of this was an effect of the colonial situation under which much ethnographic research was carried out. The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men’s houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change – forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement – was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison. This obviously made it easier to describe the people anthropologists studied as having a way of life that was timeless and unchanging.
The path from knowledge, as a general form of domination, to administrative power might seem more circuitous. Does the kind of esoteric knowledge we encounter at Chavín, often founded in hallucinogenic experience, really have anything in common with the accounting methods of the later Inca? It seems highly unlikely – until, that is, we recall that even in much more recent times, qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration. It’s only important because it’s obscure. Hence in tenth-century China or eighteenth-century Germany, aspiring civil servants had to pass exams on proficiency in literary classics, written in archaic or even dead languages, just as today they will have had to pass exams on rational choice theory or the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The arts of administration are really only learned later on and through more traditional means: by practice, apprenticeship or informal mentoring.
One problem is that we’ve come to assume that ‘civilization’ refers, in origin, simply to the habit of living in cities. Cities, in turn, were thought to imply states. But as we’ve seen, that is not the case historically, or even etymologically.139 The word ‘civilization’ derives from Latin civilis, which actually refers to those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition. In other words, it originally meant the type of qualities exhibited by Andean ayllu associations or Basque villages, rather than Inca courtiers or Shang dynasts. If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.
As we noted, there are now planetary bureaucracies (public and private, ranging from the IMF and WTO to J. P. Morgan Chase and various credit-rating agencies) without anything that resembles a corresponding principle of global sovereignty or global field of competitive politics; and everything from cryptocurrencies to private security agencies, undermining the sovereignty of states. If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.
To understand the realities of power, whether in modern or ancient societies, is to acknowledge this gap between what elites claim they can do and what they are actually able to do. As the sociologist Philip Abrams pointed out long ago, failure to make this distinction has led social scientists up countless blind alleys, because the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’ To understand the latter, he argued, we must attend to ‘the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does’.138 We can now see that these points apply just as forcefully to ancient political regimes as they do to modern ones – if not more so.
The ruler was the Sun, who gave both life and order to his people. He recreated the universe each day. In fact, most scholars nowadays insist this king wasn’t even a king, but merely the head of a ‘confederacy of chiefdoms’ who ruled over perhaps a few thousand people. Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do). If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.136
The fact that our planet is, at the present time, almost entirely covered by states obviously makes it easy to write as if such an outcome was inevitable. Yet our present situation regularly leads people to make ‘scientific’ assumptions about how we got here that have almost nothing to do with the actual data. Certain salient features of current arrangements are just projected backwards, presumed to exist once society has attained a certain degree of complexity – unless definitive evidence of their absence can be produced. For example, it is often simply
The first establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok.
Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It’s hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves
The Natchez case illustrates, with unusual clarity, a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by.62 Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that ‘High Gods’ are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings. People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. We might not fall on our knees before any thug or bully who manages to wreak havoc with impunity (at least, if he isn’t actually in the room), but insofar as such a figure does manage to establish themselves as genuinely standing above the law – in other words, as sacred or set apart – another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that same figure becomes surrounded with restrictions. Violent men generally insist on tokens of respect, but tokens of respect taken to the cosmological level – ‘not to touch the earth’, ‘not to see the sun’ – tend to become severe limits on one’s freedom to act, violently or indeed in most other ways.63 For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces – or even, as in some of the cases of ‘divine kingship’ first made famous by Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, facing ritual death themselves.
through the lens of our three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics –
We’ve already seen how this played out in Uruk, where at least seven centuries of collective self-rule (also termed ‘Predynastic’ in earlier scholarship) comes to be written off as a mere prelude to the ‘real’ history of Mesopotamia – which is then presented as a history of conquerors, dynasts, lawgivers and kings.
In his Configurations of Cultural Growth (1944) Kroeber examined the relation of the arts, philosophy, science and population across human history and found no evidence for any consistent pattern; nor has any such pattern been successfully discerned in those few more recent studies which continue to plough the same furrow.32 Despite this, when we write about the past today we almost invariably organize our thinking as if such patterns really did exist.
consider, for instance, how we currently have planetary bureaucracies, such as the WTO or IMF, with no corresponding principle of global sovereignty).
This definition held sway for a long time in Europe. It is why medieval England could begin holding elections to select parliamentary representatives as far back as the thirteenth century; but it never occurred to anyone that this had something to do with ‘democracy’ (a term which, at the time, was held in near-total disrepute). It was only much more recently, in the late nineteenth century, when men like Tom Paine came up with the idea of ‘representative democracy’ that the right to weigh in on spectacular competitions among the political elite came to be seen as the essence of political freedom, rather than its antithesis
We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?
Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics. On this latter point, it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery.
There is a subtle snobbery at play here. It’s not so much that anyone denies outright that accounts of deliberative politics reflect historical reality; it’s just that no one seems to find this fact particularly interesting. What seems interesting to historians is invariably the relation of these accounts to European textual traditions, or European expectations. Much the same occurs with the treatment of later texts from Tlaxcala: extant, detailed written records of the proceedings at its municipal council in the decades following the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcalan Actas, which affirm at length both the oratorical skills of indigenous politicians and their facility with principles of consensus decision-making and reasoned debate.58 You might think all this would be of interest to historians. Instead, what really seems to strike them as worthy of debate is the degree to which democratic mores displayed in the texts might be some sort of near-miraculous adaptation by ‘astute Indians’ to the political expectations of their European masters: effectively some kind of elaborate play-acting.59 Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in Europe was almost uniformly anti-democratic at the time. If anyone was learning something new from the encounter, it was surely the Spaniards. In the current intellectual climate, to suggest the Tlaxcalteca were anything but cynics or victims is considered just a tiny bit dangerous: one is opening oneself up to charges of naive romanticism.60 In fact, these days more or less any attempt to suggest that Europeans learned anything at all of moral or social value from Native American people is likely to be met with mild derision and accusations of indulging in ‘noble savage’ tropes, or occasionally almost hysterical condemnation.61 But a strong case can be made that the deliberations recorded in Spanish sources are exactly what they seem to be – a glimpse into the mechanics of collective indigenous government – and if these deliberations bear any superficial resemblance to debates recorded in Thucydides or Xenophon, this is because, well, there are really only so many ways to conduct a political debate.
It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.
Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square these two dimensions of our experience
You can’t simply jump from the beginning of the story to the end, and then just assume you know what happened in the middle. Well, you can, but then you are slipping back into the very fairy tales we’ve been dealing with throughout this book.
Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist’s fantasy of rational calculation. To be fair, they don’t deny that human beings are quirky and imaginative creatures – they just seem to reason that, in the long run, this fact makes very little difference.
If we accept that what we call ‘society’ refers to the mutual creation of human beings, and that ‘value’ refers to the most conscious aspects of that process, then it really is hard to see the Northwest Coast and California as anything but opposites
To be fair to the archaeologists, it’s an obvious comparison, since ecologically California – with its ‘Mediterranean’ climate, exceptionally fertile soils and tight juxtaposition of micro-environments (deserts, forests, valleys, coastlands and mountains) – is remarkably similar to the western flank of the Middle East (the area, say, from modern Gaza or Amman north to Beirut and Damascus). On the other hand, a comparison with the inventors of farming makes little sense from the perspective of indigenous Californians, who could hardly have failed to notice the nearby presence – particularly among their Southwest neighbours – of tropical crops, including maize corn, which first arrived there from Mesoamerica around 4,000 years ago.2 While the free peoples of North America’s eastern seaboard nearly all adopted at least some food crops, those of the West Coast uniformly rejected them. Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, they were anti-agricultural
What makes the Roman Law conception of property – the basis of almost all legal systems today – unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.
To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson meant by ‘possessive individualism’. Just as every man’s home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on.53 As we’ve seen, those who did not share this particular European conception of the sacred could indeed be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned – and, from Amazonia to Oceania, they often were.54
This is why, as MacPherson – our principal source here – notes in his Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), negative rights make so much better sense to us than positive rights – that is, despite the fact that the UN Human Rights Charter guarantees everyone jobs and livelihood as basic human rights, no government is ever accused of a human rights abuse for throwing people out of work or removing subsidies on basic foodstuffs, even if it causes widespread hunger; but only for ‘trespass’ on their persons. 54. Consider here the way that indigenous land claims almost invariably involve invoking some notion of the sacred: sacred mountains, sacred precincts, earth mothers, ancestral burial grounds and so forth. This is precisely by way of opposing the prevailing ideology, where what is ultimately sacred is the freedom afforded by being able to make absolute, exclusive property claims.
The way we are using the term here somewhat echoes Amartya Sen (2001) and Martha Nussbaum’s (2011) ‘Capability Approach’ to social welfare, which also speaks of ‘substantive freedoms’ as the ability to take part in economic or political activity, live to old age etc.; but we actually arrived at the term independently.
they remind us that human beings are far more interesting than (other) human beings are sometimes inclined to imagine
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing
rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.
Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested that precisely the opposite was the case. What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are? We find it difficult to picture what a truly free society would be like; perhaps they have no similar trouble picturing what arbitrary power and domination would be like. Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it. As we’ll see in the next chapter, Clastres’s argument has its limits. But by insisting that the people studied by anthropologists are just as self-conscious, just as imaginative, as the anthropologists themselves, he did more to reverse the damage than anyone before or since.
It may seem ironic that Rousseau, who began his career by taking what we would now consider an arch-conservative position – that seeming progress leads only to moral decay – would end up becoming the supreme bête noire of so many conservatives.55 But a special vitriol is always reserved for traitors. Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as having gone full circle from a promising start to creating what we now think of as the political left
To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man’s ‘living in the way of money’.38
In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.
there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend
this is how Rousseau puts things: ‘All ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers.
Some ICE staffers were growing frustrated with McKinsey’s presence inside their headquarters building. It wasn’t just that it was trying to gut carefully designed standards. The McKinsey team had such high turnover that career staffers were constantly having to explain the agency’s inner workings to wave after wave of twentysomething consultants. Worse yet, some ICE staffers had begun to question McKinsey’s competence.
To keep in step with the times, McKinsey steeped itself in the latest management theories, pleasing partners eager to move beyond simple market research into business strategy, organizational design, and difficult analytical problems. This recalibration displeased the McKinsey consultant Tom Peters, who believed that managers had forgotten the basics, such as customer service and recognizing the value of employees.
The lawsuit cited pressure the company placed on employees to keep rides in service, company incentive plans that rewarded money saved, and a “run to failure” philosophy
The company adopted a policy of “don’t buy, get by,” whereby managers bought items only when absolutely necessary, according to a former U.S. Steel purchasing specialist whose primary job was to order machine parts for the company’s American plants. Rather than make needed repairs, the official said, maintenance teams were asked to “jury-rig” failing machines to keep them operating.
We prefer a captain be more concerned for his dragon than for our bureaucracy.
“Fieldwork makes obvious the enormous variety in the economic world.”
Finally, one respondent wrote: “I think that the wages of those doing similar jobs should be played into it. I understand certain factors relating to performance and skill that may influence pay, but within reason for those that do a similar job at a similar level, the pay of one person should be similar to another’s.” By proposing “equal pay for equal work,” this worker was invoking a notion often heard in contemporary gender discrimination discussions. It is a principle that guides pay-setting at many organizations. What’s interesting is how rarely this standard emerges in academic or lay discussions about pay-setting, aside from debates about gender pay gaps. On a superficial level, it’s an idea consistent with the occupational model of pay determination. But that model ties pay to features inherent in the occupation itself, not to a notion that maintains, as the worker quoted above does, that paying people similarly for doing similar work is a fair way to distribute organizational resources
Finally, two workers hinted at a key theme of this book—namely, the importance of power when it comes to pay-setting. Asked about factors determining pay not already listed, they mentioned the role of the boss. “Our raises come out of the bonus our boss gets each year,” wrote one, “so he decides on how much of his bonus he wants to give up.” The other added the importance of “who you know,” succinctly noting the role of powerful actors within networks in structuring pay.
Moehringer-Welch Memoir Academy,
One test for passive voice is the “by zombies” test. Does the sentence still work with the undead in it? Rebecca Johnson, a professor of culture and ethics at the United States Marine Corps University, explained that “if you can insert ‘by zombies’ after the verb, you have passive voice.” So “I’m sorry a toaster was dropped on your foot by zombies” is a decent sentence with passive voice (but a bad apology). “I’m sorry I dropped the toaster on your foot by zombies” doesn’t make sense at all, because it’s not the passive voice. See
There’s a Talmudic term for repairing the world: tikkun olam. Good apologies can help repair a broken world. In the Jewish tradition, God contracted the divine self to make room for creation, and God’s light was placed in vessels, some of which shattered. Part of humans’ purpose on earth is to gather those broken shards and sparks of wonder and beauty by doing acts of repair and healing. Good apologies are a huge part of that process.
X had replied to her messages carefully, and gone back to his Heraclitus. The same road goes both up and down. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars. All things come in seasons. Character is fate.
He found that unlike a lot of sports, mountaineering was mostly a matter of walking. One only had to walk without falling and one was a successful mountaineer.
We redrew all our county lines to match the watershed boundaries, a long time ago.
The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—”
Each expedition has a different character, you see, fulfilling different karmic fates. In fact many expeditions encompass entire karmic lifetimes all in themselves. For karmic lives are shorter than human lives, and each of us passes through many different karmic existences during the course of a single biological span. This is a fact that is not well known in the West, I have found, even though the demonstration of it is there for all to see in the history of their own lives.
In English it is called something like The Ethical, Political, and Utopian Elements Embodied in the Structure of Modern Science. And this book is really having an impact, it is quite a revolution in scientific circles.
This had outraged Graham. A perversion of science! he cried. But his old professor had chided him. No no, he had said, it’s your own fault; you should have known better. Perhaps it’s even my fault; I should have taught you better than I did how science works, obviously. There was nothing particularly untoward in Martin’s response, Graham’s teacher explained to him, with no outrage or indignation whatsoever. Indeed, he said, if Graham had joined the program of one of the dynamicists, and begun to produce work indicating that the ice had lain heavy on Antarctica for millions and millions of years, he would not have prospered there either. It was not a matter of evil-doing either way; the simple truth was that science was a matter of making alliances to help you to show what you wanted to show, and to make clear also that what you were showing was important. And your own graduate students and post-docs were necessarily your closest allies in that struggle to pull together all the strings of an argument. All this became even more true when there was a controversy ongoing, when there were people on the other side publishing articles with titles like “Unstable Ice or Unstable Ideas?” and so on, so that the animus had grown a bit higher than normal.
Well, have you heard the three rules of mountain guiding?” “No.” “First rule is, the client is trying to kill you. Second rule, the client is trying to kill himself. Third rule, the client is trying to kill the rest of the clients.”
And now in Antarctica, he said, he had begun to put together his reading and his life in a way that made sense; he was beginning to see patterns. In all the evenings he had with nothing else to do, he had begun to travel backward in the history of philosophy, trying to track his analysis to its source. Everything that impressed him turned out to be based on something that had come earlier. So that he had read The Götterdämmerung and become a devotee of Frank Bailey, like any number of grad students around the world; then he had sought out Bailey’s roots in prepostcapitalist theory, and so had read Deleuze and Speier, and become a neoleftist; then gone further back and read Jameson and Williams and then Sartre, and found it had all come from Sartre, and so become a Sartrean; then a Nietzschean, for really it all came from Nietzsche; and then he had read Marx and Engels, and become a Marxist. At that point he had recognized the retrograde pattern of his intellectual movement, and rather than go to the trouble of traveling further backward in the history of Western philosophy, which was soon going to lead him into the monstrosities of Kant and Hegel, he had simply skipped them all and gone right back to Heraclitus, becoming a confirmed student of that most Zenlike of the Greeks, a man whose extant body of work could be read in ten minutes, but then pondered over for the rest of one’s life. Yes, now he planned to meditate on fragments of Heraclitus and never read philosophy again, but start paying attention to the world instead!
“But why hope for gridlock? No one likes to see it in traffic.” “They’re hoping that if the government can’t do anything, then history will stop happening and things will always stay just like they are right now.” “What’s so great about right now!” “Not much, but they figure it can only get worse. It’s a damage-control strategy. They can see just as clearly as anyone that the globalized economy means they’re all headed for the sweatshop.” “True, that’s what I say all the time, but there are better ways to deal with it than gridlock in Washington!” “Are you sure?” “Sure I’m sure! There sure as hell should be anyway.”
At least she was doing it on the basis of terrifying competence and not just the random chance of affinity.
There was a book in the Taliesin library called Evolving Hierarchical Systems by an Old Earth guy named Stanley Salthe. Did you see it?” “No, I must have missed it when I was reading those early twenty-first-century holoporn novels.” “Uh-huh,” said Aenea. “Well, Salthe put it sort of neatly–‘An indefinite number of unique individuals can exist in a finite material world if they are nested within each other and that world is expanding.’
I want to be safe, and I really wouldn’t mind a little bit of comfort, and even a taste of luxury now and then.
“One of the paradoxes of game design is that the creativity of play is made possible by play’s opposite, which are rules,” he says. “Rules are in essence constraints, but games don’t feel that way. Basketball is an amazing example of this. When the rules are activated, what follows is fluid, unpredictable magic. If you read the rules, you would never guess that’s what emerges.” But Naismith’s original rules resulted in clumsy, low scoring affairs. Where does the magic come in? Zimmerman gives his classes an assignment where they try to improve tic-tac-toe. He asks them to write out the game’s existing rules on the whiteboard and then has them brainstorm gameplay adjustments that will ideally create a totally new experience. “My favorite variation was when the students altered just one rule: If you get three in a row, you lose. It was a small tweak, but it completely changed everything. I just thought it was so elegant.” A game becomes exponentially more fun once its players learn to get creative within its boundaries. It’s less about following the rules and more about filling in the gaps that exist between them. Zimmerman uses poker as an example. “There’s nothing in the rules about bluffing,” he says. “There’s not a rule that says you can lie if you don’t have a good hand. It’s intrinsic to the system. Bluffing is an emergent property that appears out of the negative space of the rules.” For a game designer, this is everything. It’s how a snow-day diversion evolves into a global phenomenon. “I’m getting chills just talking about it,” he says.
‘Shame, for want of a better word, is good,’ said Finkle. ‘Shame is right, shame works. Shame is the gateway emotion to increased self-criticism, which leads to realisation, an apology, outrage and eventually meaningful action. We’re not holding our breaths that any appreciable numbers can be arsed to make the journey along that difficult chain of emotional honesty – many good people get past realisation, only to then get horribly stuck at apology – but we live in hope.’ ‘I understand,’ I said, having felt that I too had yet to make the jump to apology. ‘It’s further evidence of satire being the engine of the Event,’ said Connie, ‘although if that’s true, we’re not sure for whose benefit.’ ‘Certainly not humans’,’ said Finkle, ‘since satire is meant to highlight faults in a humorous way to achieve betterment, and if anything, the presence of rabbits has actually made humans worse.’ ‘Maybe it’s the default position of humans when they feel threatened,’ I ventured, ‘although if I’m honest, I know a lot of people who claim to have “nothing against rabbits” but tacitly do nothing against the overt leporiphobia that surrounds them.’ ‘Or maybe it’s just satire for comedy’s sake and nothing else,’ added Connie, ‘or even more useless, satire that provokes a few guffaws but only low to middling outrage – but is coupled with more talk and no action. A sort of . . . empty cleverness.’ ‘Maybe a small puff in the right moral direction is the best that could be hoped for,’ added Finkle thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps that’s what satire does – not change things wholesale but nudge the collective consciousness in a direction that favours justice and equality. Is there any more walnut cake?’
2014, OneWest’s commitment to Colony had grown
Praise to the Parents. Praise to Trikilli, of the Threads. Praise to Grylom, of the Inanimate. Praise to Bosh, of the Cycle. Praise to their Children. Praise to Chal, of Constructs. Praise to Samafar, of Mysteries. Praise to Allalae, of Small Comforts. They do not speak, yet we know them. They do not think, yet we mind them. They are not as we are. We are of them. We are the work of the Parents. We do the work of the Children. Without use of constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of mysteries, your constructs will fail. Find the strength to pursue both, for these are our prayers. And to that end, welcome comfort, for without it, you cannot stay strong. —From The Insights of the Six, West Buckland Edition
“We’re talking about alpha male land, where it’s not enough for you to succeed. Other people have to fail,” Cohan says. “If you understand that concept, then you understand Wall Street and you understand why Steve Mnuchin had to leave Goldman.”
Every month, when a homeowner makes a mortgage payment, she basically makes two payments. The first is a tax-deductible check to the bank that covers the interest, and the other is to herself, in the form of additional equity in her home.
looked no more than twenty-five.
In short, he makes other managers feel comfortable, the crucial virtue in an uncertain world, and establishes with others the easy predictable familiarity that comes from sharing taken for granted frameworks about how the world works.
when interpretive judgments or plain desires are involved, or when an issue spills out of smaller groups into the larger political structures of an organization, or when higher authorities get involved, a new dynamic takes over. What are “frank perspectives” in a strictly collegial context can get interpreted in the political or hierarchical arenas as “down-beat negativism” or even “disloyalty.” Wise and ambitious managers know that public faces of cheerful cooperativeness, which of course they generally require from their own subordinates, put superiors and important allies at ease. And, of course, the ability to put others at ease is an important skill in a world where one must be continually on guard against the eruption of usually suppressed conflict.
A middle-level manager in Alchemy Inc. puts a sharp edge on the same sentiment: Someone who is talking about team play is out to squash dissent. It’s the most effective way to tell people who have different perspectives to shut up. You say that you want a team effort…. You can and you have to learn to keep your mouth shut. My boss is like that. Everyone likes him because he is like that. It’s hurt me because I have spoken out. It might be that someone has formed the opinion that I have interesting things to say, but more likely, it gives you a troublemaker label and that’s one that is truly hard to get rid of. The troublemaker is often a creative person but truly creative people don’t get ahead; to get ahead you have to be dependable and a team player. You have to be steady…. When I hear the word, I immediately think it’s an effort to crush dissent…. [Bosses] say they don’t want a yes man, but, in fact, most bosses don’t want to hear the truth. And this is particularly true if it disagrees with what they want to do. Younger managers learn quickly that, whatever the public protestations to the contrary, bosses generally want pliable and agreeable subordinates, especially during periods of crisis. Clique leaders want dependable, loyal allies. Those who regularly raise objections to what a boss or a clique leader really desires run the risk of being considered problems themselves and of being labeled “outspoken,” or “nonconstructive,” or “doomsayers,” “naysayers,” or “crepehangers.”
4. Team play also means, as one manager in the chemical company puts it, “aligning oneself with the dominant ideology of the moment” or, as another says, “bowing to whichever god currently holds sway.” Such ideologies or gods may be thought of as official definitions of reality. As I suggested earlier, bureaucracies allow their employees a diverse range of private motives for action in return for assent to common rules and official versions of reality, that is, explanations or accounts that serve or at least do not injure the organization itself. Organizations always try, of course, to mobilize employees’ belief in manufactured realities; such efforts always meet with some success particularly at the middle levels among individuals who still labor under the notion that success depends on sincerity. However, the belief of insiders in abstract goals is not a prerequisite for personal success; belief in and subordination to individuals who articulate organizational goals is. One must, however, to be successful in a bureaucratic work situation, be able to act, at a moment’s notice, as if official reality is the only reality. The contexts for understanding this meaning of team play are the complicated levels of conflict within corporations and the probationary state of mind endemic to managerial work.
Despite their high positions, both men were after all still subordinates and subject to the judgments of higher-ups. The price of bureaucratic power is a relentlessly methodical subjection of one’s impulses, at least in public. To yield to one’s desires in a public setting in a way that others can use against one, whether by giving in to the wish for open sexual conquest or proprietary claim or by submitting to the temptation to show one’s anger, is seen as irrational, unbefitting men or women whose principal claim to social legitimacy is dispassionate rational calculation.
But managers both at the bank and in all the corporations I studied more recently see the matter of public faces differently. For them, the issue is not a reluctant donning of organizationally prescribed masks but rather a mastery of the social rules that prescribe which mask to wear on which occasion.
In any event, just as managers must continually please their boss, their boss’s boss, their patrons, their president, and their CEO, so must they prove themselves again and again to each other. Work becomes an endless round of what might be called probationary crucibles. Together with the uncertainty and sense of contingency that mark managerial work, this constant state of probation produces a profound anxiety in managers, perhaps the key experience of managerial work. It also breeds, selects, or elicits certain traits in ambitious managers that are crucial to getting ahead.
This was based on what both men took to be a demonstrated willingness and ability to be “flexible” and especially on their perception that I already grasped the most salient aspect of managerial morality as managers themselves see it—that is, how their values and ethics appear in the public eye.
Most of these refusals were based, of course, on wholly practical rationales, although, as I later recognized, these often contained clues to themes that proved important in my subsequent work. The most common rationales, often given in concert, were: that there were no tangible organizational benefits to be gained from a study of managerial ethics because the project lacked a specific practical focus, or that the timing for the study was inappropriate because of “transitions” in a particular organization. Taken together and translated in light of later understanding, these mean that managers can afford to give approbation only to studies that officially are on a short leash and that can be publicly defended with the vocabularies of justification normally at hand in the corporation. I came to understand that such wariness is warranted because corporate hierarchies are almost always in political turmoil. The endless search for an organizational handle on the market—that is, rational structures to deal with the irrational—coupled with managers’ ambitions and what I shall call their mobility panic, fuel a never-ending succession of personnel changes, marked by intense personal rivalries, in virtually all big corporations. Nosy outsiders can only complicate already troublesome, or potentially troublesome, situations. Some managers seemed sympathetic to the study, although they encouraged me to recast it as a technical issue, such as the “problem of executive succession in multinationals.” They objected in particular to those aspects of my brief written proposal that discussed the ethical dilemmas of managerial work. They urged me to avoid any mention of ethics or values altogether and concentrate instead on the “decision-making process” where I could talk about “trade-offs” and focus on the “hard decisions between competing interests” that mark managerial work. Taking these cues, I rewrote and rewrote the proposal couching my problem in the bland, euphemistic language that I was rapidly learning is the lingua franca of the corporate world. But such recasting eroded whatever was distinctive about the project and some managers dismissed the study as a reinvention of the wheel. Moreover, following managers’ advice led me into ambiguous moral terrain with some of my academic colleagues. For instance, at one point, I approached a prominent academic ethicist, who had expressed a willingness to help me, with the sanitized proposal. He was “uncomfortable” with the revised version, arguing that I was not following the norms of “full disclosure.” He preferred instead the earlier proposal with the more explicit references to managerial ethics and, with the agreement that I would use this version, put me in touch with a high-ranking executive in a major corporation. Unfortunately, this executive felt “uncomfortable” with the idea of suggesting to his colleagues that an outsider, untested in the corporate world, examine their ethics. In effect, I could not get access to study managers’ moral rules-in-use because I seemed unable to articulate the appropriate stance that would convince key managers that I already understood those rules and was thus a person with whom they could “feel comfortable” enough to trust. In the end, I gained access to several corporations through fortuitous circumstances and for reasons independent of any intrinsic merit that my proposed study of managerial ethics might have had. The
The moral dilemmas posed by bureaucratic work are, in fact, pervasive, taken for granted, and, at the same time, regularly denied. Managers do, however, continually assess their decisions, their organizational milieux, and especially each other to ascertain which moral rules-in-use apply in given situations. Such assessments are always complex and most often intuitive. Essentially, managers try to gauge whether they feel “comfortable” with proposed resolutions to specific problems, a task that always involves an assessment of others’ organizational morality and a reckoning of the practical organizational and market exigencies at hand. The notion of comfort has many meanings. When applied to other persons, the idea of comfort is an intuitive measure of trustworthiness, reliability, and predictability in a polycentric world that managers often find troubling, ambiguous, and anxiety-laden. Such assessment of others’ organizational morality is a crucial aspect of a more general set of probations that are intrinsic to managerial work. Getting into the corporations presented me with much of what I eventually learned, although I realized this only in retrospect.* When I approached my field study of managers, I had, for example, no firm grasp of the subtle, ambiguous process by which managers assess their colleagues’ moral fitness, so to speak, for managerial life. Moreover, I did not know, or at least did not consciously understand, that managers would subject me, an outsider desiring to study their occupational morality, to the same searching assessment that they continuously make of each other.
Whether they stay at the middle or reach the top, managers typically are not only in the big organization but, because their administrative expertise and knowledge of bureaucratic intricacies constitute their livelihood, they are also of the organization. Unlike public servants, they need not avow allegiance to civil service codes or to any ethic of public service. Their sole allegiances are to the very principle of organization, to the market which itself is bureaucratically organized, to the groups and individuals in their world who can demand and command their loyalties, and to themselves and their own careers. Managers are thus the paradigm of the white-collar salaried employee.12 Their conservative public style and conventional demeanor hide their transforming role in our society. In my view, they are the principal carriers of the bureaucratic ethic in our era.
bureaucracy is never simply a technical system of organization. It is also always a system of power, privilege, and domination. The bureaucratization of the occupational structure therefore profoundly affects the whole class and status structure, the whole tone and tempo of our society.
Bureaucratic work shapes people’s consciousness in decisive ways. Among other things, it regularizes people’s experiences of time and indeed routinizes their lives by engaging them on a daily basis in rational, socially approved, purposive action; it brings them into daily proximity with and subordination to authority, creating in the process upward-looking stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences; it places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals; and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides. In fact, bureaucratic contexts typically bring together men and women who initially have little in common with each other except the impersonal frameworks of their organizations. Indeed, the enduring genius of the organizational form is that it allows individuals to retain bewilderingly diverse private motives and meanings for action as long as they adhere publicly to agreed-upon rules. Even the personal relationships that men and women in bureaucracies do subsequently fashion together are, for the most part, governed by explicit or implicit organizational rules, procedures, and protocol. As a result, bureaucratic work causes people to bracket, while at work, the moralities that they might hold outside the workplace or that they might adhere to privately and to follow instead the prevailing morality of their particular organizational situation. As a former vice-president of a large firm says: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.”* Of course, since public legitimacy and respectability depend, in part, on perceptions of one’s moral probity, one cannot admit to such a bracketing of one’s conventional moralities except, usually indirectly, within one’s managerial circles where such verities are widely recognized to be inapplicable except as public relations stances. In fact, though managers usually think of it as separate from decision making, public relations is an extremely important facet of managerial work, one that often requires the employment of practitioners with special expertise. Managers do not generally discuss ethics, morality, or moral rules-in-use in a direct way with each other, except perhaps in seminars organized by ethicists. Such seminars, however, are unusual and, when they do occur, are often strained, artificial, and often confusing even to managers since they frequently become occasions for the solemn public invocation, particularly by high-ranking managers, of conventional moralities and traditional shibboleths. What matters on a day-to-day basis are the moral rules-in-use fashioned within the personal and structural constraints of one’s organization. As it happens, these rules may vary sharply depending on various factors, such as proximity to the market, line or staff responsibilities, or one’s position in a hierarchy. Actual organizational moralities are thus contextual, situational, highly specific, and, most often, unarticulated.
the emotional aridity caused by continually honing one’s self to make hard choices with ambiguous outcomes.
My argument for Luddism rests on the fact that Luddism is popular, and the principle that radical intellectuals are better off listening to what people are saying than attempting to lead their thoughts. Currently the people are practically unanimous: they want to decelerate. A Pew Research Center poll found that 85 percent of Americans favored the restriction of automation to only the most dangerous forms of work.8 Majorities oppose algorithmic automation of judgement in parole cases, job applications, and financial assessment, even when they acknowledge that such technologies might be effective.9 In spite of pop accelerationist efforts to reenchant us with technological progress, we do not live in techno-optimistic times.
Luddism, inspired as it is by workers’ struggles at the point of production, emphasizes autonomy: the freedom of conduct, ability to set standards, and the continuity and improvement of working conditions.
As I have documented in the preceding chapters, workers’ movements of the past two centuries often had a Luddish bent: they understood new machines as weapons wielded against them in their struggles for a better life, and treated them as such. Intellectuals on both sides of the class struggle often characterized this perspective as shortsightedness, or downright irrationality. In spite of their political commitments to the working class, Marxist theoreticians often saw the capitalist development of technology as the means for creating both abundance and leisure, which would be realized once the masses finally took the reins of government and industry. These arguments continue to be made today: to take two examples, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski’s People’s Republic of Walmart sees the discount retailer as the anticipation of socialist logistics, and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism devotes itself to speculative technologies like driverless cars and asteroid mining, with a “communist” coda at the end.1 Both works self-consciously pitch themselves as restoring faith in a progressive, but politically neutral, technological telos, against a left politics that is small scale and “primitivist.” It is my contention, supported by the history of thought and action in the preceding pages, that the radical left can and should put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy. Letting Walmart or Amazon swallow the globe not only entrenches exploitative models of production and distribution; it channels resources to reactionary billionaires who use their wealth to further undermine the relative position of workers by funding conservative causes like tax cuts, school privatization, and opposition to gay marriage.2 Letting technology take its course will lead not to egalitarian outcomes, but authoritarian ones, as the ultra-wealthy expend their resources on shielding themselves from any accountability to the rest of us: postapocalyptic bunkers, militarized yachts, private islands, and even escapes to outer space.3 Decelerationist politics is not the same as the “slow lifestyle” politics popular among segments of the better-off: “ways of being,” as Carl Honoré puts it in the movement’s manifesto, In Praise of Slowness, that emphasize “calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.”4 As pleasing as slow aesthetics might be, I am not content to ground my argument in claims that a particular pace of life is “a more natural, human” one,5 nor do I seek, as Honoré does, to give the capitalist system “a human face.”6 The argument for deceleration is not based on satisfying nature, human or otherwise, but in recognizing the challenges facing strategies for organizing the working class. The constant churn of recomposition and reorganization, what media scholar Nick Dyer-Witheford calls “the digital vortex” of contemporary capitalism, scarcely gives workers time to get back on their feet, let alone fight.7 Decelerationism is not a withdrawal to a slower pace of life, but the manifestation of an antagonism toward the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us. It is Walter Benjamin’s emergency brake. It is a wrench in the gears. This is to say, my argument is not based on lifestyle, or even ethics; it is based on politics.
Rather than revolutionize government bureaucracies, she observes, “automated decision-making in our current welfare system acts a lot like older, atavistic forms of punishment and containment. It filters and diverts. It is a gatekeeper, not a facilitator.”53 Even well-meaning government employees succumb to a system that fragments and rationalizes their labor process. Where social workers once tracked individual cases, familiarizing themselves with their charges and gaining valuable context for judging courses of action, automated systems fragment cases into tasks to be handled, bereft of history or context. The result is, as one caseworker puts it, dehumanizing: “If I wanted to work in a factory, I would have worked in a factory.”
but she’s also the kindest, most helpful person
While acknowledging positive aspects of computers, she argued that “the immediate results of widespread implementation of much of modern technology are disadvantageous to workers and others directly affected. I think it is important not to lose sight of the current reality of conditions created by these tools.”33 The role of Processed World was not to sketch utopias or possible futures. It was to document, and thereby coalesce, the actually existing struggles in the IT sector.
However, with the introduction of machines, and especially computer interfaces, to replace worker skill, jobs became a set of abstract instructions that workers had to cognitively interpret and understand, rather than a set of embodied tasks.
After all, as Denby himself put it, “there is an expression used by miners which is as old as mechanization in the mines. It is simply this: ‘A man has no business on a machine who can’t break it down any time he wants to.’”
Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, Wiener was concerned with domestic uses of cybernetics: industrial automation. Wiener thought this would be a catastrophe for workers, writing that automation “gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor … any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor, accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.”
Here Benjamin sounds similar notes as the Wobbly proponents of sabotage. Redemption from capitalism and its violence will not come from a simple appropriation of its devices. Instead, he suggests, it is borne on the backs of those sedimented experiences of the nameless people who fought against them, who broke, jammed, sabotaged—who grabbed for the emergency brake—in their circumstances. This is the raw material of future emancipation. 3 Against Automation What is automation?
Rather than a natural outgrowth of history’s progression, for Benjamin, a revolutionary class has to “explode the continuum of history.” Indeed, this history is not a tale of progress, or even a succession of events, but “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”73 Elsewhere, Benjamin is even more explicit on this point: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”74 Here an openly decelerationist Benjamin emerges. Technology does not lead toward a revolutionary break, nor does a revolution necessarily spur on new technological developments. Rather, Benjamin reconceives revolution as a cessation of catastrophe. It halts “progress” in its tracks.
There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide. Technical developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement.66 As Michael Löwy describes it in his study of the text, Benjamin attacks “the essential article of faith” of the Second International’s strategy: that victory for socialism amounted to a rapidly expanding balance sheet,
Legendary IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn attempted a more precise definition in her tract: “sabotage” referred to any effort “to limit his production in proportion to his remuneration,” or in other words, “the deliberate withdrawal of efficiency by a competent worker.” Rather than argue, as Smith did, for the salutary effects of sabotage for class consciousness, Flynn argued that workers already engaged in sabotage all the time, but without having a consistent name for what they were doing. Flynn quotes a worker at the Paterson silk mill in New Jersey, where organizers debated the efficacy of sabotage during the 1913 strike: I never heard of this thing called sabotage before Mr. Boyd spoke about it on the platform. I know once in a while when I want a half-day off and they won’t give it to me I slip the belt off the machine so it won’t run and I get my half day. I don’t know whether you call that sabotage, but that’s what I do.29 As Flynn noted, “one member of the executive committee after another admitted they had used this thing but they ‘didn’t know that was what you called it!’” Flynn’s analysis of sabotage was, in this sense, eminently Marxist: rather than dictate strategy in a top-down manner, she conceptualized the actually existing tactics of workers as a fundamental component of class struggle. “We are to see what the workers are doing,” she wrote, “and then try to understand why they do it; not tell them it’s right or it’s wrong, but analyze the condition.”
Anyone who takes up the name of Marx to describe their politics must take into account that Marxism is a theory of struggle. The goal of Marx’s critique of capitalism was not to provide a set of instructions for managing the economy, but to identify the contradictions and fissures, the places where social struggle would be likely to emerge. Technology is an important site of these struggles: not only is militant opposition to technology a historical fact, but it can suggest a more liberatory politics of work and technology—one that is more easily supported by Marx’s work than are contemporary post-work utopias.
Class composition, then, is a rebuke to the notion of class as a preexisting empirical category—an idea you might encounter in a basic sociology textbook, where you simply look at someone’s job or income and determine their class. Rather, class in the Marxist sense is forged through struggle itself. As the writers of 1970s journal Zerowork put it, “For us, as Marx long ago, the working class is defined by its struggle against capital and not [merely] by its productive function.”
Not all of our tech billionaires want to travel the space-ways, but they all share something in common (that is, aside from a propensity to dine with the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein). They believe that technology lays a path to a brighter future, that the progress of humanity is one and the same as the progress of machines and gizmos.
We always knew we were not at home we are visitors on this planet the Dalai Lama said on Earth we are here a century at most and during that time we must try to do something good something useful The way the Buddha did with our lives the way on Mars we always knew this always saw it in the bare face of the land under us the spur and gully shapes of our lives all bare of ornamentation red rock red dust the bare mineral here of now and we the animals standing in it
That they have known each other all their lives; that they have helped each other through hard times; that he got her out into the land in the first place, starting her on the trajectory of her whole life; all these would have made him a crucial figure to her. But everyone has many such figures. And over the years their divergent interests kept splitting them up; they could have lost touch entirely. But at one point Roger came to visit her in Burroughs, and she and her partner of that time had been growing distant for many years, and Roger said, I love you, Eileen. I love you. Remember what it was like on Olympus Mons, when we climbed it? Well now I think the whole world is like that. The escarpment goes on forever. We just keep climbing it until eventually we fall off. And I want to climb it with you. We keep getting together and then going our ways, and it’s too chancy, we might not cross paths again. Something might happen. I want more than that. I love you.
It was too loud to remember anything, but he wanted to remember to say to Ann, We ask Why all our lives and never get past Because. We stop after that word, in disarray. I wish I had spent more time with you.
Imbibition is the tendency of granular rock to imbibe a fluid under the force of capillary attraction, in the absence of any pressure. Sax became convinced that this was a quality of mind as well. He would say of someone, “She has great imbibition” and people would say, “Ambition?” and he would reply, “No, imbibition.” “Inhibition?” “No, imbibition.” And because of his stroke people would assume he was just having speech trouble again.
The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from diveorced backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren’t really many older poeple in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence protraction.
we toyed with the bioanimatronic singing vegetable booth at Molly Stone’s on California Street. Then we looked for an Italian restaurant so we could reenact the classic Lady and the Tramp spaghetti noodle/kiss scene. During dinner we discussed
Ethan is being “reactionary” (Todd told me the word). But, as with any recent conversions to any new belief, Todd does exude a righteousness that is a touch off-putting, if not boring.
Oh—Ethan is trying to wean himself off eel phones. Good luck!
Games are about providing control for nine year olds … “the bigger and neater the entity I can control, the better.”
Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do? We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn.
In the indigenous worldview, a healthy landscape is understood to be whole and generous enough to be able to sustain its partners. It engages land not as a machine but as a community of respected nonhuman persons to whom we humans have a responsibility. Restoration requires renewing the capacity not only for “ecosystem services” but for “cultural services” as well. Renewal of relationships includes water that you can swim in and not be afraid to touch. Restoring relationship means that when the eagles return, it will be safe for them to eat the fish. People want that for themselves, too. Biocultural restoration raises the bar for environmental quality of the reference ecosystem, so that as we care for the land, it can once again care for us. Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.
We give thanks to all the Waters of the world. We are grateful that the waters are still here and doing their duty of sustaining life on Mother Earth. Water is life, quenching our thirst and providing us with strength, making the plants grow and sustaining us all. Let us gather our minds together and with one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the Waters.
Thanksgiving Address
“Yeah, I already have one ex who stalks me, I’m good.” “I’ve found the professionally evil are much more reasonable,”
The gifts they might return to cattails are as diverse as those the cattails gave them. This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?
As a culture, though, we seem unable to extend these good manners to the natural world.
Much of who I am and what I do is wrapped up in my father’s offering by the lakeshore. Each day still begins with a version of “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus,” a thanksgiving for the day. My work as an ecologist, a writer, a mother, as a traveler between scientific and traditional ways of knowing, grows from the power of those words. It reminds me of who we are; it reminds me of our gifts and our responsibility to those gifts. Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land. At last, I thought that I understood the offering to the gods of Tahawus. It was, for me, the one thing that was not forgotten, that which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land, that we were the people who knew how to say thank you. It welled up from a deep blood memory that the land, the lakes, and the spirit had held for us. But years later, with my own answer already in place, I asked my father, “Where did the ceremony come from—did you learn it from your father, and he from his? Did it stretch all the way back to the time of the canoes?” He thought for a long time. “No, I don’t think so. It’s just what we did. It seemed right.” That was all. Some weeks went by, though, and when we spoke again he said, “I’ve been thinking about the coffee and how we started giving it to the ground. You know, it was boiled coffee. There’s no filter and if it boils too hard the grounds foam up and get stuck in the spout. So the first cup you pour would get that plug of grounds and be spoiled. I think we first did it to clear the spout.” It was as if he’d told me that the water didn’t change to wine—the whole web of gratitude, the whole story of remembrance, was nothing more than the dumping of the grounds? “But, you know,” he said, “there weren’t always grounds to clear. It started out that way, but it became something else. A thought. It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.” That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.
you with the work you love to do. Instead, a startup provides the ability to create a vision you love and to see it through to fulfillment. You get to say “today, the world works this way, but once the company I’ll build exists, and once it reaches the scale to fulfill its ongoing mission, the world will change to this.” If you can reset your passion from “I want to do *this* work” to “I want to see something I create change the world in *this* way,” your expectations will align with reality, and the cognitive dissonance and frustration of being torn away from the work you love can fade.
The climb can be finished another time.”
Surprising emotion in her voice; perhaps some accident has occurred under her leadership as well? Roger looks at her curiously. Odd to be a climbing guide and not be more stoic about such dangers. Then again, rockfall is the danger beyond expertise. She looks up: distress. “You know.” He nods. “No precautions to take.” “Exactly. Well, there are some. But they aren’t sufficient.”
She had always lived by Eulert’s saying: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.
“That ‘smoke’ would be sulfur dioxide,” Saskia said. “Yes, Your Majesty, and as I’m sure you know it loves to get together with water to make H2SO4.” “Sulfuric acid.” Bob shrugged. “So if there’s more rain—?” “Think lungs,” T.R. suggested. “There’s available water in your lungs,” Saskia explained, “so if you inhale sulfur dioxide, next thing you know you’ve got sulfuric acid in a place where you really don’t want it.”
For this was Laks’s one and only trick. He was not that fluent in Punjabi, no matter how much time he spent watching Punjabi soap operas on TV. He did not have an easy smile. And yet he found that if he just kept showing up, nothing bad would happen, and gradually people would stop noticing him. And that—the simple comfort of not being noticed—was all he wanted.
She’d told Ainsley, earlier, walking on the Embankment, how she sometimes worried that they weren’t really doing more than just building their own version of the klept. Which Ainsley had said was not just a good thing but an essential thing, for all of them to keep in mind. Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. And this was true, Ainsley had said, of the very worst monsters, among whom she herself had so long moved. Her job in London, she’d said, might seem to Flynne to be a patient caretaker amid large and specially venomous animals, but that wasn’t the case. “All too human, dear,” Ainsley had said, her blue old eyes looking at the Thames, “and the moment we forget it, we’re lost.”
the roof here might as well be cardboard. But
“Okay,” he said, and she wondered if what she was seeing in his eyes was the Corps’ speed, intensity, violence of action, or his right way of seeing. Because he just got it. Ignored the crazy, went tactically forward. And she saw how weird that was, and how much it was who he was, and for just that instant she wondered if she didn’t somehow have it too. “Follow the money,”
That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation in 1936. In the same speech he said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
“These are critical years,” Phil pointed out. “I know. But maybe they all are.”
Hope is a wish that we doubt will come true, she had once said to him, on a rare occasion when she had been willing to discuss it; she had been quoting some philosopher she had read in a class, maybe Spinoza, Charlie couldn’t remember, and wasn’t about to ask now. He found it a chilling definition.
In many senses NSF was the true government of Antarctica, and the relevant people at NSF were good to go. They saw the need. Saving the world so science could proceed: the Frank Principle was standard operating procedure at NSF. It went without saying.
One can always just walk away. The Dalai Lama had said that for sure. Things you don’t like, things you think are wrong, you can always just walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act.
You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead you’ve been the United Fruit Company.”
he always did in this situation, “LO AND
No matter what the product or service is, you get consumers who have a ‘notional demand,’ which is what they would buy if they could, and then ‘completely adjusted demand,’ which is what they really intend to buy knowing all the constraints, using what he calls ‘expectation theory.’ Between those you have ‘partially adjusted demand,’ where the consumer is in ignorance of what’s possible, or in denial about the situation, and still not completely adjusted. So the move from notional demand to completely adjusted demand is marked by failure, frustration, dire rumors, forced choices, and so on down his list. Finally the adjustment is complete, and the buyer has abandoned certain intentions, and might even forget them if asked. Kornai compares that moment to workers in capitalism who stop looking for work, and so aren’t counted as unemployed.” “I know some of those,” Frank said. He read aloud, “ ‘A curious state of equilibrium can arise,’ ” and laughed. “So you just give up on your desires! It’s almost Buddhist.”
And could these cognitive errors exist for society as a whole, as well as for an individual? Some spoke of “cognitive mapping” when they discussed taking social action—a concept that had been transferred from geography to politics, and even to epistemology, as far as Frank could tell. One mapped the unimaginable immensity of postmodern civilization (or, reality) not by knowing all of it, which was impossible, but by marking routes through it. So that one was not like the GPS or the radar system, but rather the traffic controller, or the pilot. At that point it became clear even mapping was an analogy. Anna would not think much of it. But everyone needed a set of operating procedures to navigate the day. A totalizing theory forming the justification for a rubric for the daily decisions. The science of that particular Wednesday. Using flawed equipment (the brain, civilization) to optimize results. Most adaptive practices. Robustness. Something from ecology, from Aldo Leopold: What’s good is what’s good for the land. Something from Rudra (although he said from the Dalai Lama, or the Buddha): Try to do good for other people. Your happiness lies there. Try it and see. Make the experiment and analyze it. Try again. Act on your desires. So what do you really want? And can you really decide?
One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our actions what we wish had already happened. We act, in short, by projecting our desires.
“Fellow Americans,” he said, pacing his speech to the reverb of the loudspeakers, “you have entrusted me with the job of president during a difficult time. The crisis we face now, of abrupt climate change and crippling damage to the biosphere, is a very dangerous one, to be sure. But we are not at war with anyone, and in fact we face a challenge that all humanity has to meet together. On this podium, Franklin Roosevelt said, ‘This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.’ Now it’s true again. We are the generation that has to deal with the profound destruction that will be caused by the global warming that has already been set in motion. The potential disruption of the natural order is so great that scientists warn of a mass extinction event. Losses on that scale would endanger all humanity, and so we cannot fail to address the threat. The lives of our children, and all their descendants, depend on us doing so. “So, like FDR and his generation, we have to face the great challenge of our time. We have to use our government to organize a total social response to the problem. That took courage then, and we will need courage now. In the years since we used our government to help get us out of the Great Depression, it has sometimes been fashionable to belittle the American government as some kind of foreign burden laid on us. That attitude is nothing more than an attack on American history, deliberately designed to shift power away from the American people. I want us to remember how Abraham Lincoln said it: ‘that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.’ This is the crucial concept of American democracy—that government expresses what the majority of us would like to do as a society. It’s us. We do it to us and for us. I believe this reminder is so important that I intend to add the defining phrase ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ every time I use the word ‘government,’ and I intend to do all I can to make that phrase be a true description. It will make me even more long-winded than I was before, but I am willing to pay that price, and you are going to have to pay it with me. “So, this winter, with your approval and support, I intend to instruct my team in the executive branch of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to initiate a series of federal actions and changes designed to meet the problem of global climate change head-on. We will deal with it as a society working together, and working with the rest of the world. It’s a global project, and so I will go to the United Nations and tell them that the United States is ready to join the international effort. We will also help the under-developed world to develop using clean technology, so that all the good aspects of development will not be drowned in its bad side effects—often literally drowned. In our own country, meanwhile, we will do all it takes to shift to clean technologies as quickly as possible.” Phil paused to survey the crowd. “My, it’s cold out here today! You can feel right now, right down to the bone, that what I am saying is true. We’re out in the cold, and we need to change the way we do things. And it’s not just a technological problem, having to do with our machinery alone. The devastation of the biosphere is also a result of there being too many human beings for the planet to support over the long haul. If the human population continues to increase as it has risen in the past, all progress we might make will be overwhelmed. “But what is very striking to observe is that everywhere on this Earth where good standards of justice prevail, the rate of reproduction is about at the replacement rate. While wherever justice, and the full array of rights as described in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, is somehow denied to some portion of the population, especially to women and children, the rate of reproduction either balloons to unsustainably rapid growth rates, or crashes outright. Now you can argue all you want about why this correlation exists, but the correlation itself is striking and undeniable. So this is one of those situations in which what we do for good in one area, helps us again in another. It is a positive feedback loop with the most profound implications. Consider: for the sake of climate stabilization, there must be population stabilization; and for there to be population stabilization, justice must prevail. Every person on the planet must live with the full array of human rights that all nations have already ascribed to when signing the UN Charter. When we achieve that, at that point, and at that point only, we will begin to reproduce at a sustainable rate. “To help that to happen, I intend to make sure that the United States joins the global justice project fully, unequivocally, and without any double standards. This means accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and the jurisdiction of the World Court in the Hague. It means abiding by all the clauses of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which after all we have already signed. It means supporting UN peacekeeping forces, and supporting the general concept of the UN as the body through which international conflicts get resolved. It means supporting the World Health Organization in all its reproductive rights and population reduction efforts. It means supporting women’s education and women’s rights everywhere, even in cultures where men’s tyrannies are claimed to be some sort of tradition. All these commitments on our part will be crucial if we are serious about building a sustainable world. There are three legs to this effort, folks: technology, environment, and social justice. None of the three can be neglected. “So, some of what we do may look a little unconventional at first. And it may look more than a little threatening to those few who have been trying, in effect, to buy our government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and use it to line their own pockets while the world goes smash. But you know what? Those people need to change too. They’re out in the cold the same as the rest of us. So we will proceed, and hope those opposed come to see the good in it. “Ultimately we will be exploring all peaceful means to initiate positive changes in our systems, in order to hand on to the generations to come a world that is as beautiful and bountiful as the one we were born into. We are only the temporary stewards of a mighty trust, which includes the lives of all the future generations to come. We are responsible to our children and theirs. What we do now will reveal much about our character and our values as a people. We have to rise to the occasion, and I think we can and will. I am going to throw myself into the effort wholeheartedly and with a feeling of high excitement, as if beginning a long journey over stormy seas.”
The taste of blood. Frank gestured at his cell phone, put his cold hand back under his thigh, rocked forward and back, forward and back. Warm up, warm up. Don’t bleed inside. “There’s too many . . . different things going on at once. I go from thing to thing, you know. Hour to hour. I see people, I do different things with them, and I’m not . . . I don’t feel like the same person with these different people. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what to do. If anyone were watching they’d think I had some kind of mental disorder. I don’t make any sense.” “But no one is watching.” “Except what if they are?” Rudra shook his head. “No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don’t know. Everyone only judges themself.” “That’s not good!” Frank said. “I need someone more generous than that!” “Ha ha. You are funny.” “I’m serious!” “A good thing to know, then. You are the judge. A place to start.” Frank shuddered, rubbed his face. Cold hands, cold face; and dead behind the nose. “I don’t see how I can. I’m so different in these different situations. It’s like living multiple lives. I mean I just act the parts. People believe me. But I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know what I mean.” “Of course. This is always true. To some you are like this, to others like that. Sometimes a spirit comes down. Voices take over inside you. People take away what they see, they think that is all there is. And sometimes you want to fool them in just that way. But want to or not, you fool them. And they fool you! And on it goes—everyone in their own life, everyone fooling all the others—No! It is easy to live multiple lives! What is hard is to be a whole person.”
“You know, this city and the Federal government are synonymous. They stand for each other, like when people call the administration ‘the White House.’ What is that, metonymy?” “Metonymy or synecdoche, I can never remember which.” “No one can.” Phil walked inside, stopped short at the sight of the stained inner walls. “Damn it. They are going to let this city sink back into the swamp it came out of.” “That’s synecdoche I think. Or the pathetic fallacy.” “Pathetic for sure, but how is it patriotic? How do they sell that?” “Please Phil, you’re gonna wake him up. They have it both ways, you know. They use code phrases that mean something different to the Christian right than to anyone else.” “Like the beast will be slain or whatnot?” “Yes, and sometimes even more subtle than that.” “Ha ha. Clerics, everywhere you look. Ours are as bad as the foreign ones. Make people hate their government at the same time you’re scaring them with terrorists, what kind of program is that?” Phil drifted through the subdued crowd toward the left wall, into which was incised the Gettysburg Address. The final lines were obscured by the flood’s high-water mark, a sight which made him scowl. “They had better clean this up.” “Oh they will. He was a Republican, after all.” “Abraham Lincoln was no Republican.” “Hello?”
Now he was considering acting in accordance with his beliefs. Something else he had heard the Khembalis say at the Quiblers, this time Drepung: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling.
Behaviour-Driven Development marries the technical process of Test-Driven Development with the design concept of the ubiquitous language, by encouraging developers to collaborate with the rest of their team on defining statements of desired behaviour in the ubiquitous language and using those to drive the design and implementation of the objects in the solution domain. In that way, the statement of what the Goal Donor needs is also the statement of sufficiency and correctness - i.e. the description of the problem that needs solving is also the description of a working solution. This ends up looking tautological enough not to be surprising. Constructing Independent Objects The theme running through the above is that sufficiency is sufficient. When an object has been identified as part of the solution to a problem, and contributes to that solution to the extent needed (even if for now that extent is “demonstrate that a solution is viable”), then it is ready to use. There is no need to situate the object in a taxonomy of inherited classes - but if that helps to solve the problem, then by all means do it. There is no need to show that various objects demonstrate a strict subtype relationship and can be used interchangeably, unless solving your problem requires that they be used interchangeably. There is no need for an object to make its data available to the rest of the program, unless the problem can be better solved (or cheaper solved, or some other desirable property) by doing so. I made quite a big deal above of the open-closed principle, and its suggestion that the objects we build be “open to modification”. Doesn’t that mean anticipating the ways in which a system will change and making it possible for the objects to flex in those ways? To some extent, yes, and indeed that consideration can be valuable. If your problem is working out how much to bill snooker players for their time on the tables in your local snooker hall, then it is indeed possible that your solution will be used in the same hall on the pool tables, or in a different snooker hall. But which of those will happen first, will either happen soon? Those are questions to work with the Goal Donor and the Gold Owner (the person paying for the solution) on answering. Is it worth paying to solve this related problem now, or not? Regardless of the answer, the fact is that the objects are still ready to go to work as soon as they address the problem you have now. And there are other ways to address related problems anyway, which don’t require “future-proofing” the object designs to anticipate the uses to which they may be put. Perhaps your SnookerTable isn’t open to the extension of representing a pool table too, but the rest of the objects in your solution can send messages to a PoolPlayer in its stead. As the variant on the Open-Closed Principle above showed, these other objects could be ignorant of the game played on the table. Some amount of planning is always helpful, whether or not the plan turns out to be. The goal at every turn should be to understand how we get to what we now want from what we have now, not to already have that which we will probably want sometime. Maybe the easiest thing to do is to start afresh: so do that.
A similar partial transfer of ideas can be seen in Test-Driven Development. A quick summary (obviously if you want the long version you could always buy my book) is
Bertrand Meyer’s principle of Command-Query Separation, in which a message either instructs an object to do something (like add an element to a list) or asks the object for information (like the number of elements in a list) but never does both.
This comes from a good intention - inheritance was long seen as the object-oriented way to achieve reuse - but promotes thinking about reuse over thinking about use.
It means relinquishing the traditional process-centered paradigm with the programmer-machine relationship at the center of the software universe in favor of a product-centered paradigm with the producer-consumer relationship at the center.
Organisation of this book There are three parts to this story. The first, and necessarily the longest, antithesis: a deconstruction of the state of OOP as it exists today. To get to the kernel of a good idea, you have to crack a few nuts. Part one is the agitation that necessarily precedes revolution. The second part, thesis: a reconstruction of OOP using only the parts that were left over after the antithesis. Part two is the manifesto: once we’ve seen that the last few decades of status quo haven’t been working for us, we can evaluate something that will. The third, synthesis: a discussion of the ideas from OOP that aren’t being provided by today’s object systems, and the ideas and problems that OOP doesn’t yet address at all. These are the next steps to take to pursue the ideas behind object thinking. Part three is the call to action. This is not a pure takedown, a suggestion that we have been monotonically doing it wrong for three decades: the antithesis part of this book questions, rejects and destroys a lot of built aspects of OOP, but by no means all of them. And by no means purely the later ones, either: the message is not that Smalltalk was created in some computational garden of Eden and that Sun tasted of the forbidden fruit which doomed us all to Java. Belief in a primaeval wisdom (urwissenheit) leads to an uncritical “tradition for tradition’s sake” in the same way that belief in primaeval stupidity (urdummheit) leads to an uncritical “novelty for novelty’s sake”. Rather this is an attempt to find a consistent philosophy, a way of thinking about software, and to find the threads in the narrative and dialectic history of the making of software that are supportive and unsupportive of that way of thinking. Because OOP is supposed to be a paradigm, a pattern of thought, and if we want to adopt that paradigm then we have to see how different tools or techniques support, damage, or modify our thoughts.
This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it’s the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don’t think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.
unlike actual BDSM play, where there’s always a safe-word, when “normal” people fall into the same dynamic, there’s never such an easy way out. “You can’t say ‘orange’ to your boss.” It’s always occurred to me this insight is important and could even become the basis for a theory of social liberation. I like to think that Michel Foucault, the French social philosopher, was moving in this direction before his tragic death in 1984. Foucault, according to people who knew him, underwent a remarkable personal transformation on discovering BDSM, turning from a notoriously cagey and standoffish personality to one suddenly warm, open, and friendly23—but his theoretical ideas also entered into a period of transformation that he was never able to fully bring to fruit. Foucault, of course, is famous mainly as a theorist of power, which he saw as flowing through all human relationships, even as the basic substance of human sociality, since he once defined it as simply a matter of “acting on another’s actions.”24 This always created a peculiar paradox because while he wrote in such a way as to suggest he was an antiauthoritarian opposed to power, he defined power in such a way that social life would impossible without it. At the very end of his career, he seems to have aimed to resolve the dilemma by introducing a distinction between what he called power and domination. The first, he said, was just a matter of “strategic games.” Everyone is playing power games all the time, we can hardly help it, but neither is there anything objectionable about our doing so. So in this, his very last interview:
Leslie: Whereas UBI . . . Didn’t Silvia [Federici] write or talk in an interview recently about how the UN and then all sorts of world bodies kind of glommed onto feminism as a way to resolve the capitalist crisis of the seventies? They said, sure, let’s bring women and carers into the paid workforce (most working-class women were already doing a “double day”), not to empower women but as a way of disciplining men. Because insofar as you see an equalization of wages since then, it’s mainly because in real terms, working-class men’s wages have gone down, not because women are necessarily getting that much more. They’re always trying to set us against each other. And that’s what all these mechanisms for assessing the relative value of different kinds of work are necessarily going to be about.
Another reason I hesitate to make policy suggestions is that I am suspicious of the very idea of policy. Policy implies the existence of an elite group—government officials, typically—that gets to decide on something (“a policy”) that they then arrange to be imposed on everybody else. There’s a little mental trick we often play on ourselves when discussing such matters. We say, for instance, “What are we going to do about the problem of X?” as if “we” were society as a whole, somehow acting on ourselves, but, in fact, unless we happen to be part of that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of the population whose views actually do affect policy makers, this is all a game of make-believe; we are identifying with our rulers when, in fact, we’re the ones being ruled. This is what happens when we watch a politician on television say “What shall we do about the less fortunate?” even though at least half of us would almost certainly fit that category ourselves. Myself, I find such games particularly pernicious because I’d prefer not to have policy elites around at all. I’m personally an anarchist, which means that, not only do I look forward to a day sometime in the future when governments, corporations, and the rest will be looked at as historical curiosities in the same way as we now look at the Spanish Inquisition or nomadic invasions, but I prefer solutions to immediate problems that do not give more power to governments or corporations, but rather, give people the means to manage their own affairs.
So the more automation proceeds, the more it should be obvious that actual value emerges from the caring element of work. Yet this leads to another problem. The caring value of work would appear to be precisely that element in labor that cannot be quantified.
After many years of research on the topic, Gini finally came to the conclusion that work was coming to be considered less and less a means to an end—that is, a way of obtaining resources and experiences that make it possible to pursue projects (as I’ve put it, values other than the economic: family, politics, community, culture, religion)—and more and more as an end in itself. Yet at the same time it was an end in itself that most people found harmful, degrading, and oppressive. How to reconcile these two observations? One way might be to return to the arguments I made in chapter 3 and to acknowledge that human beings essentially are a set of purposes, so that without any sense of purpose, we would barely be said to exist at all.
John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it’s really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn’t be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.
recognized as value-creating labor in itself. “Caring labor” is generally seen as work directed at other people, and it always involves a certain labor of interpretation, empathy, and understanding. To some degree, one might argue that this is not really work at all, it’s just life, or life lived properly—humans are naturally empathetic creatures, and to communicate with one another at all, we must constantly cast ourselves imaginatively into each other’s shoes and try to understand what others are thinking and feeling, which usually means caring about them at least a little—but it very much becomes work when all the empathy and imaginative identification is on one side. The key to caring labor as a commodity is not that some people care but that others don’t; that those paying for “services” (note how the old feudal term is still retained) feel no need to engage in interpretive labor themselves. This is even true of a bricklayer, if that bricklayer is working for someone else. Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking; the boss doesn’t have to care. That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people’s feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds.47 To some degree, the skill at reading others’ emotions is just an effect of what working-class work actually consists of: rich people don’t have to learn how to do interpretive labor nearly as well because they can hire other people to do it for them. Those hirelings, on the other hand, who have to develop a habit of understanding other’s points of view, will also tend to care about them.48 By this token, as many feminist economists have pointed out, all labor can be seen as caring labor, since—to turn to an example from the beginning of the chapter—even if one builds a bridge, it’s ultimately because one cares about people who might wish to cross the river. As the examples I cited at the time make clear, people do really think in these terms when they reflect on the “social value” of their jobs.49 To think of labor as valuable primarily because it is “productive,” and productive labor as typified by the factory worker, effecting that magic transformation by which cars or teabags or pharmaceutical products are “produced” out of factories through the same painful but ultimately mysterious “labor” by which women are seen to produce babies, allows one to make all this disappear. It also makes it maximally easy for the factory owner to insist that no, actually, workers are really no different from the machines they operate. Clearly, the growth of what came to be called “scientific management” made this easier; but it would never have been possible had the paradigmatic example of “worker” in the popular imagination been a cook, a gardener, or a masseuse.
I think the easiest way to understand how this happened is to consider how difficult it is to imagine an opinion writer for a major newspaper or magazine writing a piece saying that some class of people is working too hard and might do well to cut it out. It’s easy enough to find pieces complaining that certain classes of people (young people, poor people, recipients of various forms of public assistance, those of certain national or ethnic groups1) are work shy, entitled, lacking in drive or motivation, or unwilling to earn a living. The internet is littered with them.
“A good thought is one you can act on.” “That’s what mathematicians say.”
An excess of reason. Well, but he had always tried to be reasonable. He had tried very hard. That attempt was his mode of being. It had seemed to help him. Dispassionate; sensible; calm; reasonable. A thinking machine. He had loved those stories when he was a boy. That was what a scientist was, and that was why he was such a good scientist. That was the thing that had bothered him about Anna, that she was undeniably a good scientist but she was a passionate scientist too, she threw herself into her work and her ideas, had preferences and took positions and was completely engaged emotionally in her work. She cared which theory was true. That was all wrong, but she was so smart that it worked, for her anyway. If it did. But it wasn’t science.
“One of the scientific terms for compassion,” Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, “… you say, ‘altruism.’ This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of … admonishment. To practice compassion in order to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion.” This got a laugh, and Frank also chuckled. He started to think about it in terms of prisoners’ dilemma strategies; it was an invocation for all to make the always generous move, for maximum group return, indeed maximum individual return.… Thus he missed what Drepung said next, absorbed in something more like a feeling than a thought: If only I could believe in something, no doubt it would be a relief. All his rationality, all his acid skepticism; suddenly it was hard not to feel that it was really just some kind of disorder. And at that very moment Rudra Cakrin looked right at him, him alone in all the audience, and Drepung said, “An excess of reason is itself a form of madness.” Frank sat back in his seat. What had the question been? Rerunning his short-term memory, he could not find it. Now he was lost to the conversation again. His flesh was tingling, as if he were a bell that had been struck. “The experience of enlightenment can be sudden.” He didn’t hear that, not consciously. “The scattered parts of consciousness occasionally assemble at once into a whole pattern.” He didn’t hear that either, as he was lost in thought. All his certainties were trembling. He thought, an excess of reason itself a form of madness—it’s the story of my life. And the old man knew.
What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.
In all this, we are moving into somewhat different territory. Much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror when it comes to knowing you are involved in actively hurting others. Guilt, for obvious reasons. Terror, because in such environments, dark rumors will always tend to circulate about what is likely to happen to whistle-blowers. But on a day-to-day basis, all this simply deepens the texture and quality of the misery attendant on such jobs.
Psychologists sometimes refer to the kind of dilemmas described in this section as “scriptlessness.” Psychological studies, for instance, find that men or women who had experienced unrequited love during adolescence were in most cases eventually able to come to terms with the experience and showed few permanent emotional scars. But for those who had been the objects of unrequited love, it was quite another matter. Many still struggled with guilt and confusion. One major reason, researchers concluded, was precisely the lack of cultural models. Anyone who falls in love with someone who does not return their affections has thousands of years’ worth of romantic literature to tell them exactly how they are supposed to feel; however, while this literature provides detailed insight on the experience of being Cyrano, it generally tells you very little about how you are supposed to feel—let alone what you’re supposed to do—if you’re Roxane.7 Many, probably most, bullshit jobs involve a similar agonizing scriptlessness. Not only are the codes of behavior ambiguous, no one is even sure what they are supposed to say or how they are supposed to feel about their situation.
One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.
the foundational “pleasure at being the cause”
Western thought emphasizes and teaches analysis, sorting and categorizing from an early age. On Sesame Street they ask, “Which of these is not like the others?” It is easy to create categories and sort ideas into them, but no new knowledge or understanding is created, and “miscellaneous” categories are created, effectively marginalizing ideas that are different or outliers. In contrast, the consensus workshop method is best used to synthesize new ideas from a diversity of individual ideas. This approach completely sidesteps the question of agreeing or disagreeing with someone else’s idea; it asks how each unique idea can contribute to something the group has not seen before.
Gestalt in this context is about seeing “‘patterns of meaning” in a whole set of ideas given in relation to a specific question. The individual responses to the focus question will, if the focus question is well-designed, be comprehensive in addressing the question. The task is to discern the major themes of thought or distinct answers to the given question. There may be many connections and associations among the ideas. There may be causes and effects. There may be words that are similar or seem to have similar meanings. The key factor in distilling useful meaning from this process is the question used as the guide, the focus question. It focuses the generation of ideas and guides discernment of the thought patterns of the responses. The question becomes the fundamental reference point for a whole inquiry and all of its parts. The patterns are named as the group’s response to the focus question. It must be understood that this is a process of synthesis rather than analysis. One of the easy temptations in performing this process is the tendency to sort elements into categories that are already integrated into our understanding even if they are not consciously identified. It is, without question, much easier for both the participant and the facilitator to sort into known categories, but sorting only organizes previous ideas, and does not create new ideas. Analytical methodologies play a necessary role in processing ideas when an overall framework is already firmly in place.
Where the focused conversation method is intended to probe meaning and insight, the consensus workshop method looks for shared patterns behind diverse ideas and perspectives. One of the primary assumptions of this type of workshop is that each of the participants has wisdom to contribute.
In Western society, we struggle with articulating the reflective level. Reducing the reflective level questions to “How did this make you feel?” generates very little information, and many people avoid answering. More useful and appropriate information is elicited with several more specific questions, such as “What part of this made you uncomfortable, and which part were you pleased with?” Questions that elicit memories or past experiences can also be very helpful in allowing people to pay attention to their inner experience. The most successful interpretive questions are specifically crafted to explore insights in relation to the aim of the conversation. For example, if the aim is to understand a policy, one interpretive question may be “What implications might this policy have for our daily work?” Decisional level questions also work best when they are specific to the aim of the conversation. Sometimes a group decision is necessary, so articulating it is useful: “What have we decided to do?” Sometimes individual decisions are important: “What will you do next to apply what you’ve learned today?” Sometimes both are needed. Leaving the room without any decisional question will leave the group hanging and unsatisfied. If a decision is not possible, deciding not to decide and when to come back to the topic can be sufficient. After
The rational aim or product that the group needs at the end of the conversation, and the existential aim or how the group needs to be different at the end of the conversation guide what questions you choose to ask.
The process of development and the formation of developmental strategy is a complex, interrelated whole that contains specific and very real polarities. At the most general level, there is a tension between the group’s vision for the future and the complex of factors that negate the vision or hinder its fulfillment. Seeing the specific barriers in relation to a vision enables a group to see their whole strategic situation and identify key underlying contradictions that must be addressed if they are to realize their vision. Naming those contradictions provides a platform for strategic thinking. This analysis provides insight into steps and strategic directions that can be taken to address the group’s situation in an authentic, future-oriented way. When they have identified their strategies, the group can create specific, practical action plans to implement their chosen strategies. This process has become known as the ToP Strategic Planning Method. ToP action planning rounds out the basic suite of ToP applications. The core of this method includes identifying a desired future state, analyzing the hindering and supporting factors in the present situation, naming concrete commitments given the present reality, generating actions toward those commitments, and timelining the actions with assignments and estimated costs. The ToP journey wall applies the charting approach to time and historical events to enable a group to look at, discuss, create a story of their journey, and learn from their past experience.
The methodology itself, as medium, is the message. “Your ideas are relevant and valuable.” “The group needs the best wisdom available to make the wisest decisions.” “You can shape your situation and your world.” These ideas are integrated into ToP facilitation through a complex of values, practices and application of methodology. ToP facilitators often say these things directly because they are using a methodology that supports them. ToP methodology provides a process through which an individual or a group can pursue, in principle, any inquiry. It enables groups to examine their own images or pictures of a situation in relationship to a topic. Each participant contributes, from their own perspective, thoughts relevant to the question at hand. As the group reflects on the compilation of ideas, their picture of the situation grows, develops and changes. They make meaning together.
Three critical aspects form the foundations of ToP phenomenology as a discipline: intentional focus, radical openness and methods of inquiry, as discussed in Chapter 1.
Fred Gealy23, in an essay called “Encounter and Dialogue”, suggests we begin our dialogue with sacred literature by first asking what the writer actually says, allowing authors to speak for themselves rather than beginning with our beliefs, assumptions or someone else’s interpretation. We let them “have their say.” We look for the actual words and phrases themselves. He then says we need to ask what happened in the story, because much of the world’s sacred literature takes a narrative form. We break out the steps taken and find the elements of a given story or passage. What were the events? He calls them “happenednesses.” He asks us to look at the historical, economic, political, social and cultural context. What was really going on? We find the objective occurrences and set them in context. We isolate and identify the human dynamics in the story. His next step suggests that we ask our own questions. In light of what happened in the stories, we surface the questions that are raised in our own very real lives today, the “existential questions” that strike deep into the core of our beings and raise foundational questions about our very nature. These are the questions that do not go away. They trigger an inquiry or a search for the answers that will enable us to consciously shape our lives. We draw relationships between the happenednesses and our own situation. It is easy to see this as two distinct steps: 1) a reflective self-examination, followed by 2) relating our own life experience to the story. It is only then, Gealy says, that it is appropriate to ask about the message we take from the story or text. How does it impact me in my real situation? How do I come up with answers to the questions I face? How do I determine my sense of identity and purpose? It is these pressing questions that focus the message and make it personal. It is the answers that provide a framework for authentic meaning and significance for each person. Gealy’s insights into applied phenomenology gave rise to ICA’s methods, first as study and teaching methodologies and later as the ToP facilitation methodologies. As they evolved, they were applied to all kinds of challenges in organisations and communities. The technology in the Technology of Participation (ToP) is the phenomenological method. Phenomenology as method Combining the methods used in demythologizing with insights from Suzanne Langer24, Gealy and others led to the creation of a unique approach to phenomenological inquiry.
To lead an authentic life, a person must choose a life, not live a life merely shaped by the world. To be human is to participate intentionally in shaping one’s future.
If you're interested, Alan Wu wrote a blog post about a missing write barrier (now fixed) on Hash#transform_values! which elaborates on the necessity of write barriers.
Peter Zhu is writing a great series about C extensions: A Rubyist's Walk Along the C-Side. It is definitely worth a read if you're interested in learning more here.
Winer told me. “An amateur journalist simply doesn’t have a conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way.”
The twenty-first century could be different. This is the crucial point: It could be both read and write. Or at least reading and better understanding the craft of writing. Or best, reading and understanding the tools that enable the writing to lead or mislead. The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to “empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express.”13 It is to enable students “to communicate in the language of the twenty-first century.”
Richard Florida
We can glimpse a sense of this change by distinguishing between commercial and noncommercial culture, and by mapping the law’s regulation of each. By “commercial culture” I mean that part of our culture that is produced and sold or produced to be sold. By “noncommercial culture” I mean all the rest. When old men sat around parks or on street corners telling stories that kids and others consumed, that was noncommercial culture. When Noah Webster published his “Reader,” or Joel Barlow his poetry, that was commercial culture.
As Lawrence Lessing described it,
The Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool;
piecrust rim. Is it antique? Where did you find it?”
Small World, a hilarious book by David Lodge that comprised, in my opinion, the best possible introduction to the world of academia
friend of Bruno’s with the sheep farm on the hill
He recalled someone saying that history was a cruel goddess who drove her chariot over heaps of the dead. Justice could be cruel, too, in her own way.
To live humanly is to be in a crisis of decision at every moment. The always-present capacity for
He splashed olive oil into a saucepan, added the rice and stirred until all the grains were lightly coated. He added boiling water and put the lid on the pan. Then he took out the casserole, removed the chicken thighs to a warm plate and covered them with tinfoil to retain their heat. The rice water was boiling, so he turned the heat down to a low simmer. Then he strained the sauce from the casserole dish through a sieve, poured the sauce into a sauté pan, added a wineglass full of crème fraîche and some lemon zest and put it on the heat for about five minutes to reduce. He fluffed the rice with a fork, put it into one bowl and the chicken with tarragon sauce into another and took them to the table, where the baron was pouring the Verdots into fresh wineglasses.
In the kitchen, he chopped two shallots and three cloves of garlic. He seasoned the chicken thighs with salt and pepper and took some of his homemade duck stock from his fridge. In the garden, he picked a handful of fresh tarragon, put some to one side for garnish and chopped the remainder. In a casserole dish he began gently to sauté the shallots in butter. Once they were soft, he added the garlic and the chopped tarragon, a generous wineglass of the stock and a less generous glass of dry white wine and brought it to a low simmer. Then he put the lid onto the pot and put it into the oven on high heat for fifteen minutes, then lowered the heat to medium. Another forty minutes and the chicken would be just right.
When we are involved in an inquiry, assumptions, judgments, theories, presuppositions, beliefs, ready-made interpretations, and solutions are all set aside in order to focus on the object of the inquiry itself without interference. When we suspend our assumptions and judgments, we move closer to the reality itself and are able to make much more direct contact with our experience. When we objectify our feelings, preferences and expectations about something, we can observe our relationship to a concern as it is, rather than as we think it should be. We become open to our own reality.
Finally, the intent of ICA is to put the tools for participation in the hands of everyone, and enable anyone in any situation to be equipped to put on the mantle of leadership in order to lead a group to a new place, or an organization in a new direction. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that these methods are intended to put consultants out of a job.
The ToP methods are based on what can be called a trans-establishment stance. While acknowledging the necessity of both the establishment (the tradition) and disestablishment (loyal opposition) in society, and while participating in either of these dynamics from time to time, those who belong to the trans-establishment don’t identify with either one. They operate as if there were no enemies; they see everyone as potential allies in building the future.
ToP methods of facilitating participation are much more than a neat way to get meetings to go somewhere. They aim to build off the deep undercurrents of history, deal with some major contradictions of our day, create a new paradigm of participation, and bring about profound transformations in people and society.
And so César articulates for us that ACT UP and its relationships are, as Matt Brim notes, not just a model of activism but a model of making sense of the problem that activism is trying to address, and the problem that lingers in the lives of individuals, long after the activism creates some kind of positive permanent change. Activism is, consequentially, the process of making sense of one’s experience of the problem that collectively we have transformed. It creates order, demystifies, and allows an understanding of systems that otherwise feel overwhelming and unaddressable. “Spencer
She was noticing a drift in the organization to an Insider-Outsider fissure, which just struck her as very sad and tragic, because, Tracy thought, The reproductive rights movement doesn’t have a movement. They have a demonstration every two years that a million people come to, but what’s happening on the local level? Nothing. She felt that ACT UP needed to stay alive and lively on the local level, or everything was ruined.
Like Mark, most of the people I interviewed about the split mistakenly remembered “The Moratorium” as a halt on all meetings between ACT UP and the government. But, actually, by the time it came to the floor for a vote, it was a halt on all meetings about women without group approval. Technically, this would not have affected T&D because they were not meeting with the government about women, and in a sense, the proposal was a recognition of defeat by the people working on women-with-AIDS issues, trying to systematize some kind of control of their own territory. As often happens, reality is too complex, and a false but easier to remember version of a moratorium proposal as punitive and sprawling has substituted for the historical reality.
The Split: January 1992 In interviews, many people characterize the split as theoretical: between people who wanted to work inside and people who wanted to work outside. But the split could also be seen as experiential, between people who were allowed inside, and people who were kept outside. How deeply does experience impact ideology? As for me, I really did not participate in the split. I went to all the meetings and watched the confrontations between the most polarized personalities. But I never took a side. I stayed in ACT UP after the split in 1992 but soon moved on later that year, when I cofounded the Lesbian Avengers, a direct-action group for women.
“There were two groups of people in ACT UP. There were the groups of people who thought that until they had AIDS, they thought that the government was out there, and working for them. And I went to an affinity group meeting with this guy, I don’t remember his name; and he said it, quite clear. And he was really serious. He said, I can’t believe that my government let me down. I had a good job, I had plenty of money. But when I got sick, the government let me down. I wasn’t getting the services, I got treated like a pariah. Then there was the other group—and it wasn’t only people of color; but there’s another group, I think it’s more of a class thing—who knew that the system stunk, and the system had been letting them down, for years … People with insurance were definitely feeling something different than people going in with Medicaid … There were people that socialized in ACT UP who would never, ever, in a million years, if it wasn’t that situation, even talk to each other on the street. “But I think that’s the thing that held the group together so long, and made it work. Even people you didn’t like in ACT UP, right—you would support them in some way, because you had the same issues … People were dying, it was urgent; a lot of people in the group were dying; and this was it. There was nowhere else to go but ACT UP. And I think some people came to ACT UP or they would have jumped out windows if they didn’t come to ACT UP, because it was also, in a way, some kind of therapy for people coming there. Whether you were rich or poor, that was one of the only places you could talk about your condition, your friend’s condition, whoever you were taking care of. That was the only place to talk about it. And I think that made an alliance that would have never happened anywhere else … And the anger was there. Everybody was pissed. They weren’t getting the services; most people were still treated like pariahs, in the beginning.”
“The sex-positive, gay-affirmative, politically empowering force that was in that room and that [was] in the streets of New York or DC at ACT UP actions—I do feel it saved my life. And there was some great sex that came out of it, too. My roommate and I went to our first ACT UP meeting together, and the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen was standing across the room, on the third floor of the Center. So there’s that history at ACT UP, too … But there were any number of people—again, gay white men—who had been raised, before they knew they were gay, to this notion that they were where they were because of merit—that the world belonged to them. That the way things were was, basically, the way things ought to be. And then, they have the shock of being marked as queer and of being subjected to a politics of abjection, because people were dying. “So, people who had been able to live their lives in the closet as gay men were being outed by the fact that their bodies were giving out on them. And that sense of not being willing to acknowledge their investment in the structures of social and economic and gender and racial power—even though that very same structure was killing them—was one of the most painful things in the world for me to watch, because these were smart people. But this willful refusal to recognize that their investment in this world was also killing them, because it was occluding a vision of the only kind of politics that would be adequate to the crisis we were facing. That willful refusal, to this day, is, for me, one of the most powerful examples of the strength of white supremacy as an ideology and as an institution—the way it can make white people, effectively, commit suicide, in its name, and not even see it as such.”
Like many women in ACT UP, Anne-Christine came from the reproductive rights movement, which heavily influenced her perspective on AIDS activism. “I actually think it was the closest to the reproductive rights work, because it was the angriest. People in reproductive rights were really angry. I didn’t think the people in the peace movement were as angry at all. I thought that they were sort of morally high ground in the peace movement, but I don’t feel like there was the same direct stake. And I think with AIDS, it was such a direct thing, because people were terrified … Coming out of Haiti, where a lot of people had died and were dying, it felt much more urgent to me. And so it was compelling in that way
Communities inside ACT UP then saw values emerging from their practice. The world did not give us what we needed, so ACT UP was part of a nexus of people defiantly creating their own realities.
“We didn’t sit there and say … What would Kant say about this? What would be the Marxist theory of representation of people with AIDS? You wouldn’t necessarily do that kind of thing. It’s, Look, I’m really pissed off about this. I don’t think they’re showing what needs to be shown. Why don’t we go up there and confront them about it?”
And tell them not to dismiss you by saying “You have rights,” “You have privileges,” “You’re overreacting,” or “You have a victim’s mentality.” Tell them “GO AWAY FROM ME, until YOU can change.” Go away and try on a world without the brave, strong queers that are its backbone, that are its guts and brains and souls. Go tell them go away until they have spent a month walking hand in hand in public with someone of the same sex. After they survive that, then you’ll hear what they have to say about queer anger. Otherwise, tell them to shut up and listen. MEAT/
Personally, she was philosophically opposed to the idea of going to trial. She knew that for the defendants it felt like a powerful thing. But for her, as someone who was in the criminal justice system all the time, she knew trials didn’t slow down the system. They don’t throw wrenches in the system at all. If they do, it’s to the detriment of other people who are actually in jail, who really would like to be out of jail, and who need their trials faster. So anything that slows the system down hurts the people in jail rather than the system itself, which, Jill said, “is just not subject to that much influence.”
At CARASA, Maxine learned more about “looking at the world as it really is and organizing unorganized people.”
And one of her well-known insights is that you’re not talking to the media, you’re talking through the media.
The Media Committee’s job was to make sure the press covered the action. How do you get the press to pay attention? Ann laid out the fundamental points of doing media for a radical political movement: Well, first of all, you do plan an action that is interesting enough, that you think the press is going to care about it. But you have to woo the press. You have to find a way to get them there. Some of that is about writing a press release that you send to the press that’s interesting enough to make them look at it and say, Oh, I better go cover that—that’s going to be important or interesting or crazy, and will make good pictures and put wild people on television. But we also know that the press doesn’t generally read press releases, so don’t expect to get the press there, just by sending them a press release, because they’re going to throw it in the wastebasket, and you’re just going to have to do it all over again. So you have to call them. And you have to find the right person to speak to. So you have to know how to call a newspaper or television station and say—not ask to speak to a specific person, but say—I’m calling about this, who should I speak to? And let them tell you who to speak to. Then you have to know how to talk to that person, and how to present [the issue]. And you do it first by asking them questions, and saying, What do you know about this? What’s your opinion of such and such? Rather than just throwing something at them. And then, lead them into being interested about this, and say, Well, what you may not know is such and such. Or, We’re doing this, that you might find interesting, and sort of make them think it’s their idea to come do this, rather than haranguing them or lecturing them about—You should be there, and you should be covering this. That will make them sit home, guaranteed. Part of infiltrating the media’s messaging was through simple education, in the hopes of getting our message, and not the state’s, or the corporation’s, across. “The press was so stupid and so lazy, that they would come to every demonstration and ask one question: Why are you here? That was it. And they had no understanding of any issue, and no ability to ask questions about any issue. Ninety-five percent of any news story is what the reporter is saying. The sound bites are a very tiny part of any story. I would tell people, Watch the evening news, and time how much of a story is the reporter’s narration, and how much is the sound bite, and you’ll find that the sound bite is a very small portion of the story. So it’s far less important for you to come up with the right sound bite than it is for you to talk to the reporter before they do the story and educate them, so they will reflect your point of view in their narration.”
I think that gay white men thought they had privilege in this country and were shocked to find out they didn’t, and that people in power were prepared to let them die. And when they figured that out, they got very angry about it—a lot of them.”
“I remember having this kind of conscious realization that if you stood up and said exactly what you meant and didn’t trail off into some kind of rambling incoherence, which is often the style of many people in meetings, that actually your opinion would be respected or at least heard.”
Gregg got together with Charles Stimson and Ortez Alderson, an activist from Chicago who had moved to New York to become an actor and who was working in Black gay theater with Assotto Saint. They decided to get together to “do a kind of activism that was not necessarily authorized by the large group.” They were annoyed by what they felt was a slow pace as ACT UP grappled to develop their perspective. They called themselves “MHA,” which actually didn’t stand for anything, but had flexible uses. For example, they used “Metropolitan Health Association” in order to get a meeting with Stephen Joseph, the health commissioner of New York City. At that time, Joseph was talking about various kinds of punitive measures against prostitutes. He had engaged in some “very panic-causing kinds of rhetoric” about the threat that people with AIDS, for whom he was considering internment and other repressive measures, caused to the general public, particularly around tuberculosis. MHA showed up. “We said, ‘We’re the Metropolitan Health Association.’ They said, ‘Please come in.’” They were in a large conference room with Stephen Joseph. It quickly became apparent, though, that MHA was not any kind of interborough health consortium. They started asking Joseph about the slow pace in the city’s response to AIDS. When Joseph realized that they were AIDS activists, Gregg and company were arrested and the story appeared in the press. At the next ACT UP meeting, Gregg remembers rising and saying, “Look, you can just do this. You don’t have to go to the large group to get authorization. In fact, it’s better that the large group is not involved with these kinds of actions because they don’t have to be held accountable. So you can just do stuff. ACT UP is just this place we all meet on a weekly basis to talk about strategy and prioritize issues.” He remembered saying over and over again, You can just do this. Just go out and do this. And people were very enthusiastic. This happened at the same time that the concept of affinity groups, which were inherently autonomous from the larger body, was gaining more popularity in ACT UP.
“A lot of people in Treatment and Data … in some ways were more interested in the drug than in a lot of other things. For me, I was always interested in the community of ACT UP, because that was the only basis on which I felt I had a leg to stand on.”
“Everyone works from mixed motives, and they work from their own vantage point. What I do have to say about it was there was—in all of the bureaucracy—the major goal of any individual is usually to protect his or her ass, to advance his or her position, to preserve his or her legacy for those few, like Fauci, who do see themselves on a much larger scale. And so they all have little fiefdoms. And most of them are working in all their adult lives in a very specialized field. They see very little. None of them had much day-to-day contact with people with AIDS, although some people who were researchers had AIDS patients. But, up until ACT UP started speaking, they were just, Oh, those poor AIDS patients, or guinea pigs, in the worst scenario. One great thing that ACT UP accomplished was to give a face to AIDS.”
They couldn’t be too theoretical; they had to distill everything to a few points. “It had to do with the rapacity of capitalism, and the inability of this country to ever recognize how all of our services are being eaten away.” And, of course, the fact that we had a Reagan administration that simply would not begin to deal with AIDS.
Often the greatest obstacle to change is that people do not conceptualize beyond their understanding of their task. Being brave enough to learn enough to be able to create new paradigms was the first step toward real change in treatment development
The story of access in ACT UP is the story of a collective that intended to do good, and actually did in fact truly make the world a better place. Inside those accomplishments are realities of a human dimension: people who do great things also do bad things, sometimes out of bias and supremacy, and sometimes out of vulnerability, fear of demise, the desire to live, or all of the above. And when white people, and men, do things out of bias and vulnerability, people with less access pay a price. Sometimes that price is stress, or being forced to strategize, or being blindsided as a way of life. Sometimes that price is exclusion from treatments, from participation in decision-making, or from the machine of power. Sometimes that means death, and sometimes that means long-term and systemic deprivation for the collective as well as the individual. When we evaluate how we have spent our lives, we have to look at our cumulative impact, not at the moments of failure or bad faith. Assessing this history is not a game of call-out. Instead, it is an effort to really understand and make clear how the AIDS rebellion succeeded, and to face where it failed, in order to be more conscious and deliberate, and therefore effective, today.
The only requirement was that it was direct action, with a goal related to ending the AIDS crisis, and not provision of social services. The differentiation between direct action and social services was rooted in the understanding that activists created change that required policy, and social service providers, and later AIDS Incorporated professionals, institutionalized and carried out policy.
Direct action was a concept by which theoretical discussion was not separate from action. Of course, individual ACT UPers were influenced by theory. A number of young video activists had studied in the Whitney Museum Studio Program. Many older activists came from highly theorized earlier radical movements, and some members, like Douglas Crimp, wrote theory. But on the floor of the Monday-night meeting, theory was never debated unless it was tied to creating actions, or to setting active campaigns. As Maxine Wolfe, one of ACT UP’s most influential leaders, would say, when planning and carrying out an action, “theory emerges” as a concrete result of actual decisions that are being made for real-life application. Instead of the Gramscian concept of “praxis,” which is the application of theory into practice, ACT UP first chose a practice—an action—and then evolved a theory necessary to make it work toward our larger goal of “direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” In this way campaigns were structured as a series of interconnected actions, designed to produce a larger outcome. ACT UP would never just do a demonstration, zap, or action to stand on its own. These public expressions were designed to build to the next step. That’s why every event had a sign-up sheet, or leaflets announcing further actions, and participants were informed of the next step in the series on any specific issue. Every action included a component of giving participants and observers something else to do. In this way, energy was not wasted, and events had purpose, as part of a larger schema. Not wasting energy, effort, or goodwill was essential to being effective in a movement of people who literally did not have time.
A small, very crucial group of individuals had spent their time in ACT UP observing and analyzing the full range of meaning and impact of ACT UP as a whole, and developed organizational overviews, which permitted broad analysis, recognition of large tropes, and a grasp of strategic reach. But most often, ACT UP did not theorize itself.
Drive and commitment, invention and felicity, a focus on campaigns, and being effective are the components of movements that change the world.
When preparing the ACT UP Oral History Project, Jim and I looked at two Holocaust archives for guidance. The Shoah Foundation, organized by Steven Spielberg, had a structure that did not fit our needs. Designed to counter Holocaust revisionism, in which people who did not commit the Holocaust deny that it ever occurred, the project had hundreds of interviewers focused on a list of predetermined questions. We felt that the interviews were designed to emphasize the moments of trauma, of oppression and atrocity. As important as this was, we were more intrigued by a small archive financed by the Fortunoff department store family that investigated who each person was before the Holocaust, and then how they were impacted by the turn of events. This approach really appealed to us for a number of reasons. The primary purpose of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and of this book, is not to look back with nostalgia, but rather to help contemporary and future activists learn from the past so that they can do more effective organizing in the present. We wanted to show, clearly, what we had witnessed in ACT UP: that people from all walks of life, working together, can change the world.
The Zulu tribe in South Africa has a term that beautifully expresses a similar thought: Sawubona. It’s a common greeting that literally means, “I see you, you are important to me, and I value you.” It’s meant to encourage each individual to see and respect people as they are, and to pay attention to their virtues and needs, sorrows and desires. When someone says Sawubona to you, a typical response is Shikoba—I exist for you. I value you too.
Once you organize, you have to mobilize. You have to say: How are we going to actually get the change we really want?
I’ve always maintained that tennis players are entertainers, and, as such, we should be paid the same regardless of how many sets we play or what our gender is. We never claimed that we were better than men. What we said was that women put on just as good a show. Now we were proving it.
Even if you’re not a born activist, life can damn sure make you one.
To make lasting structural changes, you need to use technology to change politics. In other words: technology is a tool for social change because it can temporarily shelter you from the all-seeing eye of a corrupt state, and because it can temporarily give you a force multiplier to take on the powerful—and what you need to do during that temporary, technologically dependent window is reform your society so that your government is just and responsive and transparent. Technology cannot substitute for a just society, but it can help you create that society.
we weren’t trying to beat the system with superior technology, we were trying to use technology to open up a space to change the system. It didn’t have to be perfect, it didn’t have to keep everyone anonymous or impervious to snooping: it just had to work well enough to organize political change.
“Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.”
If all we have between us and tyranny is cryptography and the internet, we’re all dead. We should just surrender. “But that’s not all we have. Look, the cops have guns, and the way we keep them from shooting us isn’t by buying body armor or driving around in tanks. They have jails, and we don’t stop them from locking us up by stockpiling dynamite. “The way we stay free and safe and un-shot and all of that? Politics. Democracy. Holding them to account. It wasn’t so many years ago that Oakland was the first major city to pass a law forcing the city to put every new piece of surveillance, every new database, up for public debate. You saw how hard the surveillance tech companies fought that, how much money they poured into getting it killed. They were scared. Because you know what’s more powerful than all the crypto in the world? An accountable process. Politicians who answer to us, not the billion-dollar companies that hire them when they get out of office. “Technology has its place. We can organize, securely, to a degree that the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, the Yippies, the Wobblies, the Pink Panthers, the American Indian Movement, all those organizers and activists from this area, they couldn’t have even dreamed of. We’d be idiots not to use those tools. But we’d be bigger idiots to just use those tools. The most important tool we have for curbing official abuses of power is consensual, legitimate, democratic government. That’s what we have to use the tools for. “I’ve known Masha here for a decade, and I’ve never doubted that she was a brilliant technologist. I mean, she was definitely worth every penny Xoth and Zyz paid her. But Masha”—and she turned to me, a gentle smile on her face—“you’ve never been very smart about politics. You’ve got tunnel vision, you think that if the tech doesn’t solve the problem, it can’t be solved. “We can solve these problems, Masha. With your help, we can tool up to resist. When we resist we can organize. When we organize, we can win.”
in the minibar I hadn’t drunk the
So we say “security is a process and not a product”—meaning that we’re going to be discovering
every computer you use bugs you all the time to
There are, by various estimates, hundreds of thousands of programmers working today. If our experiences are any indication, each of them could be functioning more efficiently, with greater satisfaction, if he and his manager would only learn to look upon the programmer as a human being, rather than as another one of the machines.
But there is a world of difference between a wrong idea and a sterile one.
Being a husband or father mattered because enslaved men who wanted to live in a way defined by moral choice rather than fear had to turn to the long view, to thinking of the people who would one day be left behind them.
historians have repeatedly confused “manhood” and “resistance” when they have written about slavery.43 Joe Kilpatrick was no hero. He could not construct his life as he would have done in freedom. He was not willing to die just to show he had the freedom to die. Yet he did make choices, and the ones he made were important both for the beliefs about manhood they reveal and for what they did for George Jones, for Lettice, and for Nelly. Instead of honor, Kilpatrick chose what Todorov called “ordinary virtues.” Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings—even at the cost of lowering their own chances—they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.44 In the slave labor camps of the Southwest, an adult man’s commitment to ordinary as opposed to heroic virtues could mean the difference between life and death for children like George Jones. Such choices could have the same result for the men themselves. Rebuilt blood ties could provide a reason not to die fighting in one’s chains. Amid the disruptions and dangers of the 1830s, enslaved men frequently became caretakers of others. Caring is not central to most definitions of masculinity. But just as the kindness of enslaved men had breathed life back into Lucy Thurston’s soul when her spirit was as dead as a zombie in that Louisiana cotton field, the kindness of men like Joe Kilpatrick led them to create families of all sorts, and to care for them, feed them, and teach them. Because these choices placed them in relationships as husbands or lovers, fathers or brothers, these men often made ordinary virtues central to their own identities, despite all the cultural noise that told them that as men they had failed. And perhaps—perhaps—a man who lived in that way also undermined the white ideal of the man as vengeful hero.
local prime-age men and women available to meet
The way entrepreneurs assimilated that environment’s values and came to see those values as normal reveals much about why they devoted their lives to creating an “extended commerce” in the southwestern United States. They spoke as if their own bodies were doing the things that their deals—sales of cotton, purchases of land or slaves, payments of money on the other side of the ocean—made happen. Yet not their whole bodies. There was one specific part of the body they talked as if they were using. They wrote notes and letters that informed their correspondents that they held slaves “on hand” and money “in hand.” Important letters “came to hand.” They got cotton “off [their] hands” and into the market. In 1815, waiting for prices to rise, John Richards offered the Bank of the State of Mississippi a note to ensure that he would not yet have to sell “the cotton that I now have in hand.” Individual promises-to-pay that drew upon credit with other merchants were “notes of hand.”26 Few parts of the body have a more intimate and direct connection to the mind than the hands, and when entrepreneurs used words to grasp the control ropes of the new economy, they described the sensation as if the new world’s powers were held in their own like puppet strings. They produced concrete results at distance, using words that their hands wrote on pieces of paper. The fingers at the end of the writer’s arm might not actually hold the material thing—the bales of cotton, the stacks of coin, the ship whose captain and crew were directed to carry them—that the figurative language of trade said it grasped. But in a very real sense, the writer controlled these things, these people.
Stop spending your social capital repairing relationships frayed by conflict, and learn to collaborate with folks with different priorities and perspectives. This also comes with the added benefit of fewer folks complaining about you to your manager.
A Staff-plus title allows you to reinvest the energy you’ve previously spent on proving yourself into the core work you’re evaluated on.
remember that you’re representing the interests of all of engineering, not just your own.
The most effective Staff engineers pair a moderate amount of mentorship with considerably more sponsorship: putting your thumb directly on the scale to help advance and support those around you.
Much as the Lorax speaks for the trees in his popular children’s book, Staff engineers speak for their companies’ technology. Technology cannot speak for itself and requires effective advocates on its behalf. Folks who successfully advance technology are pragmatic, deliberate, and focus more on the long-term trend of progress than viewing each individual decision as a make-or-break crisis. It can be helpful to think of this as being a part-time product manager for technology.
Being a Staff-engineer is not just a role. It’s the intersection of the role, your behaviors, your impact, and the organization’s recognition of all those things.
Whatever their political differences, they shared a political style. In a time of accelerating change, both the Far Left and the Far Right came to understand history itself as a plot, an understanding advanced by the very formlessness of the Internet, anonymous and impatient. Online, the universe appeared to be nothing so much as an array of patterns in search of an explanation, provided to people unwilling to trust to any authority but that of their own fevered, reckless, and thrill-seeking political imaginations.
By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn’t describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men, feeding, in particular, both longstanding resentment of African Americans and newly repurposed resentment of immigrants. Together, both Left and Right adopted both a politics and a cultural style animated by indictment and indignation.
Personal computing enthusiasts liked to invoke “the power of the people,” but they meant the power of the individual person, fortified with a machine.
Johnson also persuaded Congress to pass a tax bill, a tax cut that had been introduced into Congress before Kennedy’s assassination, the largest tax cut in American history. He hoped it would relieve unemployment. Instead, it undermined his reform programs. It was as if he’d cut off one of his own feet. “I want to turn the poor from tax eaters to taxpayers,” Johnson said, selling his tax cut to Congress. In this formulation, recipients of social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), created in 1935, and Medicaid, created in 1965, were the tax eaters. Recipients of other kinds of federal assistance (Medicare, veterans’ benefits, farm subsidies) were the taxpayers. By making this distinction, 1960s liberals crippled liberalism. The architects of the War on Poverty, like the New Dealers before them, never defended a broad-based progressive income tax as a public good, in everyone’s interest; nor could they separate it from issues of race. They also never referred to Social Security, health care, and unemployment insurance as “welfare.” Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers told him that when explaining how the government might fight poverty, he ought to “avoid completely the use of the term ‘inequality’ or the term ‘redistribution.’” The poor were to be referred to as “targets of opportunity.”70 At first, the tax cut worked: people used the money they once used to pay taxes to buy goods. In 1965, Time put Keynes on the cover and announced, “We Are All Keynesians Now.”71 But, as with everything Johnson did, his economic reforms were demolished by his escalation of the war in Vietnam.
But, as Galbraith had pointed out in The Affluent Society, poverty hadn’t been eradicated; it had only been forgotten. “Few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue,” Galbraith wrote. “Inequality has ceased to preoccupy men’s minds.” Some of the poor were far away from the cities and the suburbs: one-fourth of those who lived below the “poverty line” worked on farms. In the Kennedy administration, the War on Poverty had its origins in January 1963, after Kennedy read a long essay by Dwight Macdonald in The New Yorker, “Our Invisible Poor.” No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Prosperity, Macdonald argued, had left the nation both blinded to the plight of the poor and indifferent to their suffering. “There is a monotony about the injustices suffered by the poor that perhaps accounts for the lack of interest the rest of society shows in them,” Macdonald wrote, in a scathing indictment of the attitude of the American middle class toward those less well off. “Everything seems to go wrong with them. They never win. It’s just boring.”50
Joining a tradition of American oratory that dated back to the day Frederick Douglass concluded that he could make a better argument against slavery if he decided the Constitution was on his side instead of against him, King called this protest an American protest. “If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a communistic nation—we couldn’t do this,” he said, pausing for the thunder of assent. “If we were trapped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime—we couldn’t do this.” It was as if the roof might fall. “But the great glory of American democracy,” his voice swelled, “is the right to protest for right.”
In this same spirit, MacLeish insisted that his office wouldn’t take positions but instead would give people the figures and facts: “The duty of government is to provide a basis for judgment; and when it goes beyond that, it goes beyond the prime scope of its duty.” Journalists were doubtful. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized: “OFF is just going to superimpose its own ‘well organized facts’ upon the splendid confusion, interpret the interpreters, redigest those who now digest the digesters, explain what those who explain what the explainers of the explanations mean, and co-ordinate the coordinators of those appointed to co-ordinate the co-ordinations of the co-ordinated.”
In directing the Office of Facts and Figures, MacLeish hoped not to produce propaganda but instead to educate the public about the danger of it. One of his office’s earliest pamphlets, Divide and Conquer, relied heavily on Taylor’s book to explain to Americans how the Nazi strategy of terror had worked in France. To illustrate, it quoted Mein Kampf. “At the bottom of their hearts the great masses of the people are more likely to be poisoned than to be consciously and deliberately bad,” Hitler had written. “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.” MacLeish’s pamphlet aimed to defeat Nazi propaganda: “The United States is now subject to a total barrage of the Nazi strategy of terror. Hitler thinks Americans are suckers. By the very vastness of his program of lies, he hopes to frighten us into believing that the Nazis are invincible.”54 Dorothy Thompson, who once described Mein Kampf as “eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction,” had long been making the same argument. “The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” she said. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a
“Democracy is never a thing done,” he said in 1939. “Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.”
In a 5–4 decision in Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a state law establishing that bakers could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week, on the ground that the law violated a business owner’s liberty of contract, the freedom to forge agreements with his workers, something the court’s majority said was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. The laissez-faire conservatism of the court was informed, in part, by social Darwinism, which suggested that the parties in disputes should be left to battle it out, and if one side had an advantage, even so great an advantage as a business owner has over its employees, then it should win. In a dissenting opinion in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of violating the will of the people. “This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,” he began. The court, he said, had also wildly overreached its authority and had carried social Darwinism into the Constitution. “A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” Holmes wrote. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”33
“I am not advocating anything revolutionary,” Roosevelt himself said. “I am advocating action to prevent anything revolutionary.”
Most of us—probably all of us—have times in our lives when we risk losing favor by standing up for someone who is the object of everyone else’s blame, whether it is people with HIV, the homeless person on the subway, or our friend’s ex-girlfriend. Those of us who present ourselves as “progressive,” who support others, or help out, or take stands, are the ones most responsible for bucking the trend of cruelty. When we don’t refuse cruelty, ultimately we stand for nothing; we are hypocrites, and our public selves are phony. Progressive people do not shun, and in fact they intervene when group shunning is being organized. Finally, ultimately, when groups bond over shunning or hurting or blaming another person, it is the state’s power that is enhanced. Because the state doesn’t want to understand causes, because the state doesn’t want things to get better, it doesn’t want people to understand each other. State apparatuses are there to maintain the power of those in control and punish those who contest that power; that is what bad families do, and that is what bad friends do. And nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening.
In fact, in my experience, it is the person who is suffering who wants things to get better, while the person who is repressing their own conflicts usually wants to be the one to feel better. So, it is the person with HIV, the Palestinian, the object of group shunning, who wants to talk, to be heard, and thereby to transform.
But I knew they had no self-reflexivity, so I took the initiating step.
There is also the adjacent idea, comforting but false, that the sons and daughters of lesbians are inherently feminist. Because they don’t have models of intimate male power at home, somehow they are supposed to extrapolate a connection about refusing male privilege in the world. But feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it. “On ne nait pas feminist, on le deviant” (one is not born a feminist, but becomes it), said Simone de Beauvoir. I know a man who advertises himself as an “eco-feminist,” but he expects his mother and her female partner to clean up after him. So actually he is neither eco nor a feminist. His mother thinks he is because in her birth family, women shopped, prepped, cooked, served, and cleaned up after men at every meal. Her son cooks his own eggs in the morning and sometimes makes them for her. So she believes he is a feminist, even though he often leaves the dirty pan in the sink. Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience. In that way, the son of a feminist is not a feminist. He may become one, but he would have to learn how not to exploit women, including his mother. And in this world, it is the responsibility of his peers to make sure he understands what that actually means. His friends have to parent him as well as his actual parents, because that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world. We have to be separate from our families in order to come to this evaluation, in which we build our own understandings and values, taken as much from critical understandings of what we have experienced as what we haven’t.
It is now time for an overt conversation about the responsibility of queer friends in response to family systems that are corrupt, or as we politely call it, “dysfunctional.”
I believe that a truly “good” family is one that is deeply and in fact primarily concerned with the behavior of its members towards other people. That instead of reinforcing indifference, exploitative behavior, arrogance about class, race or gender, blind allegiance to the state, and cruelty towards sexual partners, they systematize methods of accountability. In this way, each family member would grow up with a loving practice of opposition, with the commitment to psychological insight, individuation, and a means of discussion that emphasizes context, objective, and the order of events. Blind adherence would be the definition of “disloyalty,” as it is detrimental to peace and justice. Our model for relationships within groups can be transformed from obedience to biology, biological assumption, or simulacra of biology, emphasizing instead the ethics of each individual’s actions, cumulative consequence, and the necessity of self-criticism. In other words: accountability.
the theme of perfectionism as a tenet of both Supremacy and Traumatized behavior,
At their root is a refusal to alter one’s self-perception of a threatened perfectionism.
Shunning is not only a punitive silencing, but it is a removal from humanity, and therefore reliant on the Making of Monsters. After all, no one owns humanity and humans cannot be removed from themselves. It’s a delusion.
Because of the similarity between Supremacy and Traumatized behavior explored in Chapter Five, it may be unclear in which of these paradigms the overreaction is based. As we know, both can exist in the same body. And since these experiences are so connected to and reflective of the state apparatus, these emotional reactions can have geopolitical expressions. Shunning, interestingly, often accompanies the trigger reaction.
Unfortunately, groups that rely on perfection, the good/evil dichotomy, and are motivated by a paralyzing fear of ever being wrong, often deny that mental illness/distorted thinking is in play. Bad families, bad friends, negative communities, and supremacist identities hide and deny contradictions, and rely on the projection of blame onto others to maintain their cohesion as perfect. Pervasive depression gets called sadness. Anxiety that is so severe as to control one’s life gets called upset or difficult or sensitive. And no one is allowed to talk about why any of it is happening. I had a friend, C., with whom I was discussing someone we both love. I told her that I was concerned that our friend was suffering from an anxiety so severe that she could not think clearly enough to solve problems. C. rejected any explanation that implied a lack of access to the unconscious, saying that her own mother had been confined to a psychiatric hospital and that “there was nothing wrong with
As Sara Ahmed says, learning from Audre Lorde: while actually dealing with the substance of Conflict may initially feel more upsetting than repressing it, the response to high levels of distress should sometimes be to create even higher levels of distress. In this way, internal and external domination systems are revealed, and ultimately dismantled.
We know now that determining punishment by the feelings of one party is the essence of injustice.
Ideally, the people to call before are the healthy, fair, and self-critical group—family, friends, community—who have the love and awareness to see what the conflicted cannot see, and who can help the anxious calm down and seek communication and negotiation, and in this way create reconciliation. But because we misunderstand what real loyalty means, we often do the opposite within our groups: exacerbate escalation rather than relieve it.
We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I’ve never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, that gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change. But it never goes away. When we can’t move forward and the gap widens, many of us become paralyzed. The breach between the real self and the imagined self is unbearable, and the reality of our lives becomes unacceptable, undoable, and we become stuck: we can’t move out of our parents’ house, we can’t take a job that compromises our entitlement, we can’t actually fulfill our dreams and, finally, we can’t adjust those dreams.
As Bertolt Brecht said, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible.”
Creating HIV-negative people as a new class who can punish others by calling the police may reduce their ability to negotiate, nuance, problem-solve, communicate, and take responsibility for their own actions.
Canadians often complain, rightfully, about US cultural domination, but are very thin-skinned about the kind of self-criticism that US leftists learn to integrate.
we are neoliberally headed. Gay rights produces new insiders,
From the most intimate realm of romance and desire to that of public policy: the state victimizes to avoid facing its own internal instabilities and contradictions. Instead of public health menaces, HIV-positive women are just people in need of services and care.
Lesson: never, ever decide that you know who someone is, what they did, their objective, context or goal, how they feel or what they know, until you ask them. And not asking means a direct investment in not understanding the truth.
Overreacting in the present is often a consequence of unresolved anxiety from the past.
Being reminded that one was once in danger has to be differentiated from whether or not one is currently in danger.
The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state. So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes.
know from my own experience as a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) worker in a feminist health center that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 quickly dismantled this twenty-year-old job-training program that had assisted many grassroots organizations. The search for new funding transformed politically motivated services into containment by municipal, state, and federal agencies. Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system.
“Mainstream Domestic Violence advocacy,” Hodes said in a correspondence later that year, “is committed to assuming that the victim is telling the truth, and any exploration around that trope is met with heavy resistance. Historically, that makes sense for a host of reasons. But this analysis is not about disbelieving, it’s about pinpointing where the problem lies.” One of Hodes’ many valuable suggestions is to lower the bar for what must happen in a person’s life for their suffering to be acknowledged. “The current paradigm is encouraging all of us to think we are in abusive relationships,” Hodes explained. “And if you are not in an abusive relationship, you don’t deserve help. Being ‘abused’ is what makes you ‘eligible.’ But everyone deserves help when they reach out for it.” This is a strikingly humane idea: that the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion. This is a non-cynical reading of a human condition in which people who have suffered in the past, or find themselves implicated in situations in which they are afraid to be accountable, fear that within their group acknowledging some responsibility will mean being denied their need to be heard and cared for. So they fall back on the accusation of Abuse to guarantee that they will not be questioned in a way that confirms these fears.
I discussed this with my therapist, now deceased, who had treated victims of McCarthyism later on in their lives. He told me that some of his patients had found themselves caught up in the whirlwind smoke of shunning and innuendo, whisper campaigns and exclusions. No one ever sat down and told them what they were being accused of, and they never had a chance to discuss or inform or respond. Instead, group pressures, intimidations, and false loyalties produced a climate of mysterious chill, in which they were denied jobs, kept out of social events, shunned by acquaintances. People were mean to them without ever saying why, and no opportunity for clarification or repair was ever presented. These people found both the material and emotional consequences overwhelming, but even more so they were hurt by the amorphous nature of the problem. Not being able to know exactly what they were charged with, not being able to talk through the accusations, never knowing where they would face these hostile expressions drove many people to extreme suffering. Even later when classic McCarthyism was dismantled and delegitimized, these unnecessarily broken relationships could not be healed. My therapist explained to me that taking extreme bullying actions, like signing a petition against a friend, or denouncing a colleague to others or to the state, as often happened under McCarthyism, was so extreme in its pathology that the participants could never repair. They were so defended against the reality of the injustice of their own action that they couldn’t reconcile it to their false image of themselves as righteous. In listening to him, I came to believe that the same personality type who would ice out or attack someone without talking to them first out of false “loyalty” would be the same person who would later be unable to apologize. It’s a character issue that becomes the building blocks of fascism or any supremacist construction. And for those people, a commonly held expectation or standard of asking targeted people what they feel or how they understand their experience could be a life-enhancing or even life-saving corrective.
Members have to actively take responsibility for the ethics and moral values that their small or large group claims to represent and actually enact this responsibility.
What we have instead is a devolved definition of personal responsibility, which constructs avoidance as a right regardless of the harm it does to others. This negative standard persuades some people to feel that being uncomfortable signals that they are being Abused, because they don’t have the option of describing themselves as Conflicted. So asking a distressed person if they are unsafe, or rather, uncomfortable, angry, or hurt provides them with an alternative idea that might fit better with their actual experience. It not only elicits helpful information, but encourages the individual to start to think about themselves in a more adult, complex, and responsible manner.
“Differentiating between Power Struggle and Power Over,” Hodes explained, “is the difference between Conflict and Abuse.” Abuse is Power Over and Conflict is Power Struggle.
People do not always know what they feel, nor do they acknowledge what they really know. Sometimes we say what we think we are supposed to say, or what we are used to saying; we don’t give the actual moment a chance. Sometimes we just try out saying certain things.
this power struggle over whether or not opposing parties will speak is an enormous smokescreen covering up the real issue, the substance of what they need to speak about: namely, the nature of and resolution to the conflict.
Nan Alamilla Boyd helped me to understand that my lack of academic training makes me literally “undisciplined.” This news was very freeing, and a gift I wish I had been handed decades before. I now am able to ask you to read this book the way you would watch a play: not to emerge saying, “The play is right!” but rather to observe that the play reveals human nuance, contradiction, limitation, joy, connection, and the tragedy of separation. That the playwright’s own humanity is also an example of these unavoidable flaws. These chapters are not homogenous. As a creative writer I have long understood that form should be an organic expression of the feelings at the core of the piece. Each chapter here serves a different function and that is represented in its tone, genre, style, and form. Some are journalistic, some analytical, some are speculative, others abstract, some are only feelings. As a novelist, I know that it is the cumulative juxtaposition that reveals the story. This is not a book to be agreed with, an exhibition of evidence or display of proof. It is instead designed for engaged and dynamic interactive collective thinking where some ideas will resonate, others will be rejected, and still others will provoke the readers to produce new knowledge themselves. Like authentic, conscious relationships, truly progressive communities, responsible citizenship, and real friendship, and like the peace-making that all these require, it asks you to be interactive.
Fortunately, she did not have to
The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, in which he insisted that any true representation of the American nation had to be honest, and that, as much as he wished he could tell the story of America as a story of progress, the truth was different. From slavery to Jim Crow, the history of the United States, he argued, “involves the necessity of plain speaking of wrongs and outrages endured, and of rights withheld, and withheld in flagrant contradiction to boasted American Republican liberty and civilization.”
In a Fourth of July oration in 1877, he declared, “No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”71
Douglass pressed. “The question now is,” he said, eyeing the crowd of rowdy delegates, silenced by his booming voice, “Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?”
In 1871 she announced, “We are plotting revolution.” Woodhull said she ran “mainly for the purpose of drawing attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man.”
“Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” “We hold these truths to be Self Evident; That All Men are Created Equal,” it began, proceeding to establish a right to revolution:
the flag of the Subterranean Pass-Way, his more militant version of the Underground Railroad.
the flag of the Underground Railroad
Lincoln bemoaned the suppression of plain talk about slavery, the endless avoidance of the question at hand. “You must not say anything about it in the free states because it is not here. You must not say anything about it in the slave states because it is there. You must not say anything about it in the pulpit, because that is religion and has nothing to do with it. You must not say anything about it in politics because that will disturb the security of ‘my place.’ There is no place to talk about it as being a wrong, although you say yourself it is a wrong.” And, as to the wrongness of slavery, he called it tyranny, and the idea of its naturalness as much an error as a belief in the divine right of kings.
Early in the year, Federalists and Republicans in Congress, keen to avoid a repetition of the confusion of 1796, held a meeting to decide on their party’s presidential nominee. They called this meeting a “caucus.” (The word is an Americanism; it comes from an Algonquian word for “adviser.”)
Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever
passionately stirred by the spirit of the times,
To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.
realization of the noise invading the kitchen. She raced to the oven and shut off the timer. “They are fine. Just fine. Just fine. Fine. They are
As Keith saw it, this violated the maxim he’d read in a book by Daniel Boorstin, the historian and former librarian of Congress: “Trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.”
Economists suspected “monopsony,” the effect of having just one buyer of a good, as opposed to just one seller, a monopoly. In this case, the good being labor: the bigger Amazon got and the more it dominated local labor markets, the less competition it faced for workers, and the less it needed to pay to hire them. As recently as 2012, the company had had only 88,000 employees worldwide. But over the rest of the decade, it would grow with astonishing speed, making it the second-largest private-sector employer in the country after Walmart, and making monopsony a real prospect. By late 2019, it had more than 750,000 employees worldwide and 400,000 employees in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them in the company’s more than two hundred fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and other delivery facilities. In 2017 alone, the company grew by 130,000 worldwide; in the summer of 2019, it hired 97,000, nearly the entire workforce of Google. And this was before the hiring spree that would arrive with the global pandemic of the spring of 2020. Warehousing and distribution used to be considered somewhat higher-skilled jobs: one could make over $20 per hour and stay years at a time. At Amazon, it was a more fleeting existence. Workers tended to be younger. Turnover was exceedingly high. And the seasonal workforce was often literally transient, in the form of the CamperForce
But the union gains went beyond that. With more worker input in plant management, the Point had gotten less catastrophically dangerous than it had been in the early days. And there was something less tangible, too. “What the men themselves wanted the union for,” one retiree told Reutter in the 1980s, “was to have everyone respect your seniority and your ability, and not have these here bosses’ pets and brown-nosers get the best jobs. We got more money, that was important, sure, but we got respect more, that was number one.”
For those on the Point, the war was giving new purpose to work that, for many, was already more rewarding than such arduous labor might seem. Here’s how Mike Howard described working in the open-hearth furnace to Mark Reutter: “I felt good. When you’re in your prime, physical work is a challenge, and if you’re working with other people, there is a certain pride in being on top of the job. The demands of the work bred a kind of man who was fiercely committed to this work.” Howard distinguished between “brutalizing work” and “challenging work”: “In the open hearth, you had to cope with problems that involved metallurgy, that involved blacksmithing, that involved judgment. These were not guys who were a bunch of punch-drunk wrestlers. They were bright. There were split-second decisions that had to be made. There were a lot of challenges that kept you on your toes.”
Asked about the meaning of the term competition for resources, he smiles broadly and says: “It’s there. What it really does, in a sense, is allows for the accomplishment of certain projects that some people would prefer not to do.”
We could use another computer, they said. But don’t bother to ask, they told each other; after all, we had to battle West just to get Trixie.
“There was no question of deadlines. You’d already missed it, whatever it was.”
“With Tom, it’s the last two percent that counts. What I now call ‘the ability to ship product’—to get it out the door.” Rasala looked at me squarely. “And I may not be the smartest designer in the world, a CPU giant, but I’m dumb enough to stick with it to the end.”
To Alsing, West still had that knack for making the ordinary seem special, and the way West said “Trust” made Alsing wonder whether either of them had ever heard the word before.
Later on, though, one Hardy Boy would concede that the managers had probably known something he hadn’t yet learned: that there’s no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice from the cave, supplying that information: “Okay. It’s right. Ship it.”
Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well. Asked for a translation, he smiled and said, “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.” Worry, in other words, about how Eagle will look to a prospective buyer; make it an inexpensive but powerful machine and don’t worry what it’ll look like to the technology bigots when they peek inside. West espoused these principles of computer design: “There’s a whole lot of things you’ve gotta do to make a successful product. The technological challenge is one thing, but you can win there and still have a disaster. You gotta give ’em guidelines so that if they follow them, they’re gonna be a success. ‘Do ABC and D without getting the color of the front bezel mixed up in it.’ ” Another precept was “No bells and whistles.” And a third: “You tell a guy to do this and fit it all on one board, and I don’t want to hear from him until he knows how to do it.”
They lived in a land of mists and mirrors. Mushroom management seemed to be practiced at all levels in their team. Or perhaps it was a version of Steve Wallach’s ring protection system made flesh: West feeling uncertain about the team’s real status upstairs; West’s own managers were never completely aware of all that their boss was up to; and the brand-new engineers kept almost completely ignorant of the real stakes, the politics, the intentions that lay behind what they were doing. But they proceeded headlong.
In the conversation around there you heard words and phrases such as these: A canard was anything false, usually a wrongheaded notion entertained by some other group or company; things could be done in ways that created no muss, no fuss, that were quick and dirty, that were clean. Fundamentals were the source of all right thinking, and weighty sentences often began with the adverb fundamentally, while realistically prefaced many flights of fancy. There was talk of wars, shootouts, hired guns and people who shot from the hip. The win was the object of all this sport and the big win was something that could be achieved by maximizing the smaller one. From the vocabulary alone, you could have guessed that West had been there, and that these engineers were up to something.
also remembered that before they entered into negotiations over their second public offering of stock, after the company had been making money for a while and the stock they’d already issued had done very well indeed, their lawyer insisted that each of the founders sell some of their holdings in the company and each “take down a million bucks.” This so that they could negotiate without the dread of losing everything (“Having to go back to your father’s gas station,” Richman called that nightmare). As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, “I don’t know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.” In the computer business, your market can be your fate. Although by the late 1970s it was hard to define a company’s place in the industry by the sorts of machines that it made, certain broad historic distinctions in ways of doing business still divided a large part of the industry into three segments. The differences showed up in the nature of a company’s expenditures. IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive. Minicomputer companies
radios, stereos, watches, and they made computers ubiquitous and varied. They did not eliminate the sizable, expensive computer; they made it possible for the likes of IBM to produce machines of increased speed and capability and still make handsome profits without raising prices much. At the same time, the development of chips fostered an immense and rapid growth of other kinds of computing machines. After mainframes, as the big computers were known, came the cheaper and less powerful minicomputers. Then the semiconductor firms contributed the microprocessor, the central works of a computer executed on a chip. For a while, the three classifications really did describe a company’s products and define its markets, but then mainframers and microcomputer companies started making minis and minicomputer companies added micros and things that looked like mainframes to their product lines. Meanwhile, a host of frankly imitative enterprises started making computers and gear for computers that could be plugged right into systems built around the wares of the big successful companies. These outfits went by the names of “plug compatibles” and “third-party peripheral manufacturers”; those who lost some business to them called them “knockoff companies.” Probably they helped maintain competition in prices. Many “software” houses sprang up, to write programs that would make all those computers actually do work. Many customers, such as the Department of Defense, wanted to buy complete systems, all put together and ready to run with the turn of a key; hence the rise of companies known as original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs—they’d buy gear from various companies and put it together in packages. Some firms made computer systems for hospitals; some specialized in graphics—computers that draw pictures—and others worked on making robots. It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing; IBM bought a share in a satellite, and that other nation-state, AT&T, the phone company, started making machines that looked suspiciously like computers. Conglomerates, of which Exxon was only the largest, seemed determined to buy up every small computer firm they could. As for those who observed the activity, they constituted an industry in themselves. Trade publications flourished; they bore names such as Datamation, Electronic News, Byte, Computermania. IBM, one executive of a mainframe company once said, represented not competition but “the environment,” and on Wall Street and elsewhere some people made a business solely out of attempting to predict what the environment would do next. I once asked a press agent for a computer company what was the reason for all this enthusiasm. He held a hand before my face and rubbed his thumb across his fingers. “Money,” he whispered solemnly. “There’s so goddamn much money to be made.” Examples of spectacular success abounded. The industry saw some classic dirty deals and some notable failures, too. RCA and Xerox lost about a billion dollars apiece and GE about half a billion making computers. It was a gold rush. IBM set up two main divisions, each one representing the other’s main competition. Other companies did not have to invent competitors and did somewhat more of their contending externally. Some did sometimes use illicit tools. Currying favor, seeking big orders for chips, some salesmen of semiconductors, for instance, were known for whispering to one computer maker news about another computer maker’s latest unannounced product. Firms fought over patents, marketing practices and employees, and once in a while someone would get caught stealing blueprints or other documents, and for these and other reasons computer companies often went to court. IBM virtually resided there. Everyone sued IBM, it seemed. The biggest suit, the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the industry, involved the Justice Department’s attempt to break up IBM. Virtually an entire large law firm was created to defend IBM in this case, which by 1980 had run ten years and had been in continuous trial for several. Data General took its place in this bellicose land of opportunity in 1968, as a “minicomputer company.” By the end of 1978 this increasingly undescriptive term could in some senses be applied to about fifty companies. Their principal but by no means their only business, the manufacture and sale of small computers, had grown spectacularly—from about $150 million worth of shipments in 1968, to about $3.5 billion worth by 1978—and it would continue to grow, most interested parties believed, at the rate of about 30 percent a year. By 1978 Data General ranked third in sales of minicomputers and stood among the powers in this segment of the industry. The leader was Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, as it is usually called. DEC produced some of the first minicomputers, back in the early sixties. Data General was the son, emphatically the son, of DEC. A chapter of DEC’s official history, a technical work that the company published, describes the making of a computer called the PDP-8. DEC sent this machine to market in 1965. It was a hit. It made DEC’s first fortune. The PDP-8, says the official history, “established the concept of minicomputers, leading the way to a multibillion dollar industry.” But the book doesn’t say that Edson de Castro, then an engineer in his twenties, led the team that designed the PDP-8. The technical history mentions de Castro only once, briefly, and in another context. They expunged de Castro. In 1968 de Castro and two other young engineers seceded from DEC. Several completely different versions of their flight exist and have by now acquired the impenetrable quality of myth. Did they quit because, after long and heartfelt labor on a new design, they found that DEC’s management would not build their new machine? DEC’s management did turn down a new design of de Castro’s, and afterward, along with a man from another company named Herb Richman, de Castro and the two other engineers from Digital incorporated Data General and started building their own minicomputer. But did they design this new machine after they seceded, or had they done that job in secret, using DEC’s facilities, while still on DEC’s payroll? One version of the story suggested the latter. More than ten years later, DEC’s founder and president would tell reporters from Fortune, “What they did was so bad we’re still upset about it.” But DEC never sued Data General’s founders, and clearly there were other reasons why Digital might have become upset. For within a year, de Castro and company had set up shop in DEC’s own territory and had started raking in the loot. They rented space in what had been a beauty parlor, in the former mill town of Hudson, Massachusetts. Practically all that remains of that time is a black-and-white photograph of this first headquarters. In the foreground stand four young men with short hair, wearing white shirts and skinny ties and the sort of plain black shoes that J. Edgar Hoover’s men favored. They are engaged in what is obviously meant to look like routine conversation. The linoleum floor, the metal furniture, evoke motor vehicle departments, and the youths in the picture could be members of some junior chamber of commerce, playing capitalists for a day. Not shown in this bemusing picture is the shrewd and somewhat older lawyer from a large New York firm who helped Data General’s founders raise their capital and who became a crucial member of their team. What also doesn’t show is the fact that some of these young men were already computer engineers of no mean repute—their age in this case was no impediment, for computer engineers like athletes often blossom early. They started Data General at an auspicious time. In the late 1960s, the period memorialized in John Brooks’s The Go-Go Years, venture capital (among other things) abounded, and although they started out with only $800,000, more lay in reserve. They also entered a good territory for fledglings. They could not have dreamed of moving in on IBM’s markets without truly vast amounts of capital. But the people who bought minicomputers—engineers, scientists, and, mainly, purchasing agents of OEMs—understood the machines. A new manufacturer could reach them through relatively inexpensive ads in the trade journals, and didn’t need to build a service organization right away, since these customers could take care of themselves. These were also the sorts of customers who could be expected to embrace a newcomer, if the price was right; they’d prefer a bargain to a brand name. But around the time when Data General established itself in the beauty parlor, other entrepreneurs were starting up minicomputer companies at the rate of about one every three days. Only a few of those other new outfits survived the decade, whereas Data General, before it had exhausted its first and fairly modest dose of capital, achieved and never fell from that state of grace, a positive cash flow.
Christians in Europe were taught to expound every sentence of the Bible in four ways: literally, morally, allegorically, and mystically. Indeed, as a Catholic child in the 1950s, this was how I was taught to read the Bible. For the Christians as for the rabbis, charity was the key to correct exegesis. Saint Augustine (354–430), one of the most formative theologians in the Western Christian tradition, insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.73
The Buddha (c. 470–390 BCE) would have agreed.6 He claimed to have discovered a realm of sacred peace within himself that he called nirvana (“blowing out”), because the passions, desires, and selfishness that had hitherto held him in thrall had been extinguished like a flame. Nirvana, he claimed, was an entirely natural state and could be achieved by anybody who put his regimen into practice. One of its central disciplines was a meditation on four elements of the “immeasurable” love that exists within everyone and everything: maitri (“loving kindness”), the desire to bring happiness to all sentient beings; karuna (“compassion”), the resolve to liberate all creatures from their pain; mudita (“sympathetic joy”), which takes delight in the happiness of others; and finally upeksha (“even-mindedness”), an equanimity that enables us to love all beings equally and impartially.
“Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.” “True.”
Expert, from the Latin experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters. Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical. Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them. Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter with Ann.
incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure,
considerations; the debates would go on forever.
There’s the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble.
(We will return throughout the book to this topic, and see that it is related to the issue of intrinsic and extrinsic values; and see also that theorists who mistake great span for great depth are always confusing more fundamental with more significant, and thus, once again, end up recommending regression as a direction for further growth; with a flatland ontology, the crucial depth dimension is missing.)
order of
However, when a holon’s self-transcendence approaches zero (when its creativity is utterly minimal), then the reconstructive sciences collapse into the predictive sciences.
the language of objective naturalism (“it”-language), and thus they fail miserably when applied to domains described only in I-language (aesthetics) and we-language (ethics).
In short, extreme cultural relativity and merely heterarchical value systems are no longer enjoying the vogue they once did. The word is out that qualitative distinctions are inescapable in the human condition, and further, that there are better and worse ways to make our qualitative distinctions.
He is absolutely correct, and so from now on I will often use “hierarchy” and “holarchy” interchangeably. Thus heterarchists, who claim that “heterarchy” and “holism” are the same thing (and that both are contrasted to the divisive and nasty “hierarchy”), have got it exactly backward: The only way to get a holism is via a holarchy. Heterarchy, in and by itself, is merely differentiation without integration, disjointed parts recognizing no common and deeper purpose or organization: heaps, not wholes.
Nowhere in the literature of modern social theory is there more acrimony expressed than over the topic of hierarchy/heterarchy.
“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked. “Yes,” the woman said. “Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing on Earth. “You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it will create all kinds of problems.” “Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give everyone the treatment and then figure out what to do.”
Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.
The goal of Martian economics is not ‘sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere.
Of course he had seen that human affairs were irrational and unexplainable. This no one could miss. But he realized now that he had been making the assumption that the people who involved themselves in governance were making a good-faith effort to run things in a rational manner, with a view to the long-term well-being of humanity and its biophysical support system. Desmond laughed at him as he tried to express this, and irritably he exclaimed, “But why else take on such compromised work, if not to that end?” “Power,” Desmond said. “Power and gain.” “Ah.” Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it. So that properly seen, the freedom of a scientist with a lab at his command was the highest freedom possible. Any more wealth and power only interfered with that. Desmond was shaking his head as Sax described this philosophy. “Some people like to tell others what to do. They like that more than freedom. Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it’s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It’s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.”
“You can’t make people do things,” Fort said. “It’s a matter of changing ourselves. Then people can see, and choose.
It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, cooperate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them. He left to cheers. Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head, the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.
“All these changes will happen inevitably,” Sax Russell said with a shrug. “Being on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way.” Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over the table. “No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!” A
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
Long ago, before the first civilization that I saw rise and fall in those shared visions, everyone lived in scattered burrows all over the night, with no more than a hundred people per burrow. They wove their tendrils together when anyone wanted to share information about what she had seen, or done. Or somebody might come up with a simple idea that she shared with everyone else, like a way to harvest more roots and grubs to feed into the web where their children were developing. Or how to strengthen their barriers against iceslides and avalanches. And that’s when their greatest love story took place. These two people, who had grown up in different burrows, came together after some brutal ice storms drove them away from their homes. The two refugees became inseparable, and their tendrils were intertwined whenever they weren’t working or eating. They slept with their pincers wrapped around each other, in their own mossy nook where the cool air ran over their carapaces. Their dreams flowed back and forth between them, and their memories of fleeing their homes blended together until they almost shared the same past. Everyone else recoiled, because this couldn’t be healthy for them, plus they were excluding the rest of the community, which was hurtful. People tried to pry the two of them apart, physically, or sent one or the other of them on long errands outside the burrow. At last one of the oldest and most patient of the burrow’s residents decided to talk to both of them together, and find out exactly what perversion they had been drawn into—and then there were three of them. Entangled, inextricable. People began talking about evicting all three of them. What had seduced them into this unnatural closeness? A set of designs for a water wheel, using the nearby underground river to operate a crude mill that would help them separate out the poisonous part of some mushrooms that grew in the caves. This was such a complex idea that one person couldn’t invent it alone and then share it with everyone else—the concept needed to be shaped among two or more people, working together. They couldn’t even share it with the others until they had the concept. And these lovers had discovered a powerful thrill, a joy that went all the way down to their stomachs, in weaving a big idea together. Like some wild rapture, the sensation of helping others to imagine something bigger than yourselves. Somehow, this weird love story is the foundation of this community’s politics, or religion. Rose lingers on the oddest parts, like when they finally reveal their invention to the rest of the community, or the tenderness when the couple becomes a trio. I sense the echoes from all the countless other times that people have passed this legend around, and the lesson that comes with it: to join with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community. Even the other communities that live apart from the midnight city, scattered all over the night in smaller cities or towns, share this origin story.
So what we have now, I would say, is not money (very short), nor freedom (we are still registered as Ausländer), but dignity. And this is what I think everyone needs. After the basics of food and shelter that we need just as animals, first thing after that: dignity. Everyone needs and deserves this, just as part of being human. And yet this is a very undignified world. And so we struggle. You see how it is. And yes, dignity is something you get from other people, it’s in their eyes, it’s a kind of regard. If you don’t get it, the anger rises in you. This I know very well. That anger can kill you. Those young men blowing things up, they’re angry because they don’t have dignity. Which is something other people give you, so it’s tricky. I mean you have to deserve it, but ultimately it’s something other people give you. So the angriest of our young men blow things up because they aren’t given it, and mostly they blow up their own people’s chances in this world.
They cross the river by feeling the stones.
But there is change and there is change. Looking through the fence at the mountains, hazy in the late morning light, I felt a deep stab of fear at the idea that my life might really and truly change. A big change. New people. Strangers. A new life in a new city. After such giant changes, would I still be me? Of course I recalled the poem about how you can never escape yourself, every place is the same because you are the one moving to that place. No doubt true. I recalled also the old notion from psychotherapy that people fear change because it can only be change for the worse, in that you turn into a different person and are therefore no longer yourself. Thus change as death. But death of habits. That’s all it is, I told myself. Remember the poem; you can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy. No: the fear I was feeling was perhaps the fear that even if things changed, I would still be just as unhappy as before. Ah yes, that was a real fear!
traffic, or walking past us on the sidewalks and metro platforms. We had to do that work like any other kind of work. It wasn’t a party, it wasn’t even a revolution. At least when we started. But soon we saw that people wanted to talk to us. They all knew they were being used, that they were just tools now. I myself was a kid, the main thing that got me out there was how much I hated school, where I had always been made to feel stupid. I was slotted into the bottom classes early on and my life was sealed at that point, on a track to servitude, even though I knew I had real thoughts, real feelings. So the main thing for me in that initial break was to get my ass out of school. Although parenthetically I have to admit that I later on became a teacher. Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go. No one had to direct us. It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse, and I think that’s what happened here,
Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.
All because of the discount rate. Dick: Yes. It’s a number put on an ethical decision. Mary: A number which can’t be justified on its merits. Dick: Right. This often gets admitted. No one denies future people are going to be just as real as us. So there isn’t any moral justification for the discounting, it’s just for our own convenience. Plenty of economists acknowledged this. Robert Solow said we ought to act as if the discount rate were zero. Roy Harrod said the discount rate was a polite expression for rapacity. Frank Ramsey called it ethically indefensible. He said it came about because of a weakness of the imagination.
So, is there energy enough for all? Yes. Is there food enough for all? Yes. Is there housing enough for all? There could be, there is no real problem there. Same for clothing. Is there health care enough for all? Not yet, but there could be; it’s a matter of training people and making small technological objects, there is no planetary constraint on that one. Same with education. So all the necessities for a good life are abundant enough that everyone alive could have them. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education. Is there enough security for all? Security is the feeling that results from being confident that you will have all the things listed above, and your children will have them too. So it is a derivative effect. There can be enough security for all; but only if all have security. If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying. To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is a good as a feast— or better. Arranging this situation is left as an exercise for the reader.
“But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.”
“After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.”
Someone brought up the old question of whether the “great man” or “mass movements” were the principal force for change, but Zhu immediately dismissed this as a false problem. “We are all great men, yes?” “Maybe you are,” muttered the person sitting next to Bao. “… what has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That’s when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. In that sense I suppose I come down on the side of the masses, in that it has been a collective process, whatever else it is. “Also, this formulation ‘the great man’ of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling microparasites and macroparasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?”
“You, a historian, say this? But the future can’t be known at all!” “Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. Ever since the Travancori enlightenment we have had a sense of the future as something we make. This new awareness of time to come is very important. It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We’re midway through the loom, that’s the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.”
“This is the world we want you to help us make,” he said. “We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”
He turned the skull to him and looked inside it. “He did this and no one knew,” he said. “No one knew who he was, no one remembers this act of mine, no record of it exists, except in my mind, intermittently, and in the existence of all the people here who would have died if I had not done it. This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.”
“Mowlana, he has been punished worse than he thought at first. He’s no longer the same man.” “He is the same soul,” said Ali. “You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can’t. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. ‘God loves you’ is the only possible sentence! So it’s love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave. Do you understand?” “I think so.” “You must be sincere and open, your love must be bright as the lightning flash itself! Then his inner consciousness might see it, and be snatched from itself in a twinkling. Go, feel the love course through you, and out to him.”
Angry ghosts needed to be defied as often as they needed to be placated.
You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact. We will trust in our fellow human beings, the backers said. It’s a risk, but it beats trusting that the laws of physics and probability will bend for you just because you want them to.
“It’s sometimes called avoiding acquiescence,” Badim said. “Acquiescence means accepting the framing of a problem, and working on it from within the terms of the frame. It’s a kind of mental economy, but also a kind of sloth. And Devi does not have that kind of sloth, as you know. She is always interrogating the framing of the problem. Acquiescence is definitely not her mode.” “No. Definitely not.” “But don’t ever call that thinking outside the box,” he warned Freya. “She hates that phrase, she snaps people’s heads off for saying it.” “Because we’re always inside the box,” Freya supposed. “Yes, exactly.” Badim laughed.
I didn’t have any illusions about my ability to take her in single combat. For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools. I belonged to a third group, equally useful: I was an engineer. For another thing, I was pretty confident
there’s asserting a reasonable individuality in the face of social norms, and then there’s piracy and murder as an economic model.
“I just don’t want to get personal about it,” Alfredo said. He leaned forward, and his voice took on a touch of pleading: “I’ve felt what it’s like when we take this kind of disagreement personally, and I don’t like it. I’d rather dispense with that, and just agree to disagree and get on with it, without any animosity. I … I don’t like being angry at you, Kevin. And I don’t like you being angry at me.” Kevin stared at him. He took a deep breath, let it out. “That may be part of the price you pay. I don’t like your plan, and I don’t like the way you’re keeping at it despite arguments against it that seem obvious to me. So, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have to do what we have to do, right?”
“There is not much worse,” Nadezhda said to Tom, rebuking him. Then to Kevin: “Time will make a difference. When enough time is passing—” “I won’t forget!” Kevin said. “No. You never forget. But you change. You change even if you try not to.” Tom laughed, tugged at the white hair over one ear. “It’s true. Time changes us in more ways than we can ever imagine. What happens in time … you become somebody else, do you understand?” His voice shook. “You don’t forget, but how you feel about what you remember … that changes.” He stood up suddenly, walked to Kevin and slapped him on the shoulder. “But it could be worse! You could forget! And that would be worse.” He stood by Kevin’s side. Nadezhda sat on the ground beyond them. For a long time the three of them rested there, silent, watching sunlight tumble down through clouds.
Awkwardly, hesitantly, Kevin found himself telling the story. The whole story. The childhood stuff, the softball game, the ultraflight, the night in the hills, the birthday party, the following morning. The little that had happened since. It felt good to tell it, in a way. Because it was his story, his and his alone, nobody else’s. And in telling it he gained a sort of control over it, a control he had never had when it happened. That was the value of telling one’s story, a value exactly the reverse of the value of the experience itself. What was valuable in the experience was that he had been out of control, living moment to moment with no plan, at the mercy of other people. What was valuable in the telling of the story was that he was in control, shaping the experience, deciding what it meant, putting other people in their proper place. The two values were complementary, they added up to something more than each alone could, something that … completed things. So he told them his story, and they listened.
It was clear she was a good teacher, and that was a pleasure to see. It was important for a teacher to have a certain distance, she should be liked and admired but also at a distance, a strong personality presenting a strong and coherent portrait of the world. This is the way the world is! the strong teacher says in every phrase and glance; not to downplay the complexity of the world, but to present a clear and distinct single view of it, which students could then work against in building their own views. It wasn’t so important that the teacher present all sides of a case, or pretend to neutrality in controversial issues. Over the years the multiplicity of teachers that every student got would take care of that. What was more important was that a teacher advocate a vivid, powerful set of ideas, to be a force, to make an impact.
Ramona turned them into this breeze with a gull’s swoop. The feel of it, the feel of flying! They relaxed the pace, settled into a long distance rhythm, swooped around the sky over Orange County. Hard work; it was one of the weird glories of their time, that the highest technologies were producing artifacts that demanded more intense physical labor than ever before—as in the case of human-powered flight, which required extreme effort from even the best endurance athletes. But once possible, who could resist it?
Patricia Hill Collins refers to ‘the outsider within’ positioning of research.
Mutt moves his lips when he reads. He’s not saying the words silently to himself, he’s doing a kind of Nero Wolfe stimulation of his brain. It’s his favorite neurobics exercise, of which he has many.
Fish don’t exist. A fish-shaped sledgehammer to split it down.
I do agree with his thesis: that swimming in that water are creatures with far more cognitive complexity than we typically think. That “fish,” in a certain sense, is a derogatory term. A word we use to hide that complexity, to keep ourselves comfortable, to feel further away from them than we actually are. The famous primatologist Frans de Waal, of Emory University, says this is something humans do all the time—downplay similarities between us and other animals, as a way of maintaining our spot at the top of our imaginary ladder. Scientists, de Waal points out, can be some of the worst offenders—employing technical language to distance the other animals from us. They call “kissing” in chimps “mouth-to-mouth contact”; they call “friends” between primates “favorite affiliation partners”; they interpret evidence showing that crows and chimps can make tools as being somehow qualitatively different from the kind of toolmaking said to define humanity. If an animal can beat us at a cognitive task—like how certain bird species can remember the precise locations of thousands of seeds—they write it off as instinct, not intelligence. This and so many more tricks of language are what de Waal has termed “linguistic castration.” The way we use our tongues to disempower animals, the way we invent words to maintain our spot at the top.
“These people see us as antagonists in the big character drama of their lives,” she wrote to me.
Maybe they hadn’t been the targets of the agent who’d followed them, but they’d been followed, and that might have kept the Sunlit from arresting them right then. She found herself in a state of simultaneous gratitude and fury. (She was getting used to the combination: that doubling, the strangeness of being grateful for something she should never have had to experience in the first place. Teixcalaan was full of it.)
Uber may be an extreme example, but it can help us understand tech’s insular culture much more clearly: if tech wants to be seen as special—and therefore able to operate outside the rules—then it helps to position the people working inside tech companies as special too. And the best way to ensure that happens is to build a monoculture, where insiders bond over a shared belief in their own brilliance. That’s also why you see so many ridiculous job titles floating around Silicon Valley and places like it: “rock-star” designers, “ninja” JavaScript developers, user-experience “unicorns” (yes, these are all real). Fantastical labels like these reinforce the idea that tech and design are magical: skill sets that those on the outside wouldn’t understand, and could never learn. The reality is a lot more mundane: design and programming are just professions—sets of skills and practices, just like any other field. Admitting that truth would make tech positions feel a lot more welcoming to diverse employees, but tech can’t tell that story to the masses. If it did, then the industry would seem normal, understandable, and accessible—and that would make everyday people more comfortable pushing back when its ideas are intrusive or unethical. So, tech has to maintain its insider-y, more-brilliant-than-thou feel—which affects who decides to enter that legendary “pipeline,” and whether they’ll stick around once they’ve arrived. Plus, there’s the pesky problem of how diverse teams challenge existing cultures. In all that research about the benefits of diversity, one finding sticks out: it can feel harder to work on a diverse team. “Dealing with outsiders causes friction, which feels counterproductive,” write researchers David Rock, Heidi Grant, and Jacqui Grey.35 But experiments have shown that this type of friction is actually helpful, because it leads teams to push past easy answers and think through solutions more carefully. “In fact, working on diverse teams produces better outcomes precisely because it’s harder,” they conclude. That’s a tough sell for tech companies, though. As soon as you invite in “outsiders” who question the status quo—people like Uber’s “Amy,” who ask whether the choices being made are ethical—it’s hard to skate by without scrutiny anymore. As a result, maintaining the monoculture becomes more important than improving products.
That’s why we all need to pay a lot closer attention to the minutiae we encounter online—the form fields and menus we tend to gloss over so quickly. Because if we want tech companies to be more accountable, we need to be able to identify and articulate what’s going wrong, and put pressure on them to change (or on government to regulate their actions). It’s never been more important that we demand this kind of accountability. Failing to design systems that reflect and represent diverse groups can alienate customers and make people feel marginalized on an individual level, and that would be reason enough for us to demand better. But there’s also a pressing societal concern here. When systems don’t allow users to express their identities, companies end up with data that doesn’t reflect the reality of their users. And as we’ll see in the coming chapters, when companies (and, increasingly, their artificial-intelligence systems) rely on that information to make choices about how their products work, they can wreak havoc—affecting everything from personal safety to political contests to prison sentences.
Their standards state: You shouldn’t ask users for their title. It’s extra work for users and you’re forcing them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do. . . . If you have to use a title field, make it an optional free-text field and not a drop-down list.
The only thing that’s normal is diversity.
Thankfully, our clients’ disagreement over the right way to present race turned into a rethinking of our whole approach. Pretty soon, we’d removed all the stock photos and replaced them with icons of people working—giving presentations, sitting nose-deep in research materials, that sort of thing. I haven’t attached a photo to a persona since. I’m not alone in this shift. User researcher Indi Young, author of Practical Empathy and Mental Models, also advocates for designers to get rid of the demographic data used to make personas “feel real.” She writes: To actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.16
We didn’t call these people’s identities and scenarios “edge cases,” though. We called them stress cases.
Comparable findings have appeared in studies of another arena of human judgment: personal warmth, where individuals who have held a warm object briefly—for example, a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee—immediately feel warmer toward, closer to, and more trusting of those around them. Hence, they become more giving and cooperative in the social interactions that follow shortly afterward. It’s evident, then,
They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology!
she mentioned a strategy of her own that I have used profitably ever since. She never lets herself finish a writing session at the end of a paragraph or even a thought. She assured me she knows precisely what she wants to say at the end of that last paragraph or thought; she just doesn’t allow herself to say it until the next time. Brilliant! By keeping the final feature of every writing session near-finished, she uses the motivating force of the drive for closure to get her back to her chair quickly, impatient to write again. So my colleague did have a writing secret after all. It was one that hadn’t occurred to me, although it should have because it was present—if I’d just thought about it—in the body of work on the Zeigarnik effect that I knew well. That was a type of lapse I’ve tried not to let recur, either in my writing or in another of my professional roles at the time: university teaching. I learned that I could increase my classroom effectiveness, pre-suasively, by beginning each lecture with a special kind of unfinished story: a mystery.
consider an exchange between the great British novelist Somerset Maugham and a young interviewer. “So, Mr. Maugham, do you enjoy writing?” “I enjoy having written.”44
best deploy truthful yet frightening facts: by waiting to convey those facts until information about accessible assistance systems—programs, workshops, websites, and help lines—can be incorporated into their communications.35
Because of all the publicity surrounding them, they had become focal in attention; and what is focal is seen to have causal properties—to have the ability to make events occur.
The obligation comes from the helping norm, which behavioral scientists sometimes call the norm of social responsibility. It states that we should aid those who need assistance in proportion to their need. Several decades’ worth of research shows that, in general, the more someone needs our help, the more obligated we feel to provide it, the more guilty we feel if we don’t provide it, and the more likely we are to provide it.
In the excitement of a looming opportunity, decision makers are infamous for concentrating on what a strategy could do for them if it succeeded and not enough, or at all, on what it could do to them if it failed. To combat this potentially ruinous overoptimism, time needs to be devoted, systematically, to addressing a pair of questions that often don’t arise by themselves: “What future events could make this plan go wrong?” and “What would happen to us if it did go wrong?” Decision scientists who have studied this consider-the-opposite tactic have found it both easy to implement and remarkably effective at debiasing judgments.
for any decision maker, a painstaking comparative assessment of multiple options is difficult and stressful, akin to the juggler’s task of trying to keep several objects in the air all at once. The resultant (and understandable) tendency is to avoid or abbreviate such an arduous process by selecting the first practicable candidate that presents itself. This tendency has a quirky name, “satisficing”—a term coined by economist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—to serve as a blend of the words satisfy and suffice. The combination reflects two simultaneous goals of a chooser when facing a decision—to make it good and to make it gone—which, according to Simon, usually means making it good enough. Although in an ideal world one would work and wait until the optimal solution emerged, in the real world of mental overload, limited resources, and deadlines, satisficing is the norm.
coincide
the guiding factor in a decision is often not the one that counsels most wisely; it’s one that has recently been brought to mind.
For instance, young women do better on science, math, and leadership tasks if assigned to rooms with cues (photos, for example) of women known to have mastered the tasks.
It wasn’t long after I began operating undercover in the training classes of influence practitioners that I encountered something curious: participants in the sessions were nearly always informed that persuasion had to be approached differently in their particular profession than in related professions. When it comes to swaying people, advertising works differently than marketing; marketing works differently than fund-raising; fund-raising works differently than public relations; public relations works differently than lobbying; lobbying works differently than recruitment. And so on. What’s more, distinctions were stressed even within professions. Selling whole life insurance is different from selling term insurance; selling trucks is different from selling cars; selling by mail or online is different from selling in stores; selling products is different from selling services; selling to an individual is different from selling to a business; selling wholesale is different from selling retail. It’s not that the trainers were wrong in distinguishing their own bailiwick from those of their professional neighbors. But this steady referencing of their uniqueness led to a pair of lapses in judgment. First, they often detoured into distinctions of little consequence. Worse, in their emphasis on what’s different among the successful persuasion professions, they didn’t focus enough on an extraordinarily useful other question: What’s the same?
An observation by the legal scholar James Boyle captures the main reason: “You have never heard true condescension until you have heard academics pronounce the word popularizer.”
Just as top surgery was about something more than merely removing part of my chest, sobriety required more than simply quitting drinking and carrying on otherwise as if nothing had changed. It required imagination, and imagination necessitates acknowledging that the future exists on its own terms and in its own right, and might even reach out and make demands of the present.
In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.… To be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. —G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy
I never know how to refer to previous incarnations of myself in a way that honestly acknowledges the present without sacrificing the past. There is truth, sometimes, in saying that
This fondness for disavowing old mission statements and replacing them with new ones was, in fact, the most characteristic habit of my drinking days, where every morning brought with it a fresh announcement, a new resolve, a declaration of profound and immediate change, even if the declaration was only broadcast inside my own head and crowded out by more pressing matters by the time I reached the front door. Now I know what I need to do to get out of this fix. Now I truly know myself, and in knowing myself I can master myself, and by mastering myself I can start building a brand-new future this instant. Getting sober had less to do with finding a better way to more effectively stick to a new resolve and more to do with permitting collapse and abandoning resistance.
The best reason for transition, as I understand it, is “because I particularly wish it.” I had not been in the habit of thinking very hard about my own feelings about my womanhood until the day I asked myself if I had any opinions about my gendered future. I was more than a little surprised to find that I did!
out a sigh of relief. “We can go and find him, finally.”
“That is pie in a sky,” the woman says. Bronca frowns a little at the odd phrasing. “Cruelty is human nature.” Bronca restrains the urge to laugh. She’s never liked that little bit of bullshit “wisdom.” “Nah. Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.
This calling is not unlike the traditional Christian concept of living in grace. In October I went to a panel discussion on the ascetic life at Loyola Marymount College led by a friend, author Kathleen Norris. She told a story about a monk in the Middle Ages who traveled to a nearby city to visit a famous ascetic who turned out to be a merchant living in a busy market district. That night, while they were praying, the monk was rattled by the noise some drunks and prostitutes were making in the street and asked the merchant “How on earth can you stand this every night?” The merchant replied, “I just say to myself, ‘They’re all going to the kingdom.’” Kathleen, who is a devout Christian, told this story because she often uses it in her own practice. Once when she was staying in a private club in Chicago, the man next door came back to his room with a call girl and they started making an unholy racket. “I had to make a choice between being disturbed or not disturbed,” she said. “Then I remembered this story and just said to myself, ‘We’re all going to the kingdom.’”
As a rule, players usually have an easier time dealing with loss than coaches. They can go in and take a shower, then come out and say, “I’m tired and hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.” But coaches don’t have the same kind of release that comes from playing a grueling physical game. Our nervous systems tend to keep firing long after the arena has cleared. For me, the nerves usually kick into high gear in the middle of the night. I’ll sleep for a few hours, then—bang!—my brain is up and spinning. “Should I have done this, should I have done that? God, what a terrible call in the fourth quarter. Maybe I should have called a different play?” And so on. Sometimes I have to sit and meditate for a long time before the noise settles down and I can go back to sleep.
Of course, when you’re a coach, you don’t have the same kind of apprehension you do as a player. When you’re a player, you obsess about not screwing up and making a mistake that will blow the game. But when you’re the coach, you think, how can I get these guys keyed up and on their game? What kind of insight can I offer them so that they can play more spontaneously? And what kind of coaching change can I make to give them an edge? My concern in game
In the past Kobe had led mostly by example. He’d worked harder than anyone else, rarely missed a game, and expected his teammates to play at his level. But he hadn’t been the sort of leader who could communicate effectively and get everyone on the same page. If he talked to his teammates, it was usually, “Give me the damn ball. I don’t care if I’m being double-teamed.” That approach usually backfired. As Luke describes it, “I’ve got Kobe on the floor yelling at me to give him the ball. And I’ve got Phil on the bench telling me to make the right pass no matter what. So instead of just seeing what’s happening on the court, I’m trying to take in Kobe yelling and Coach telling me not to pass to him. And it made my job a lot harder.” But then Kobe started to shift. He embraced the team and his teammates, calling them up when we were on the road and inviting them out to dinner. It was as if the other players were now his partners, not his personal spear-carriers. Luke noticed the change. Suddenly, Kobe was reaching out to him in a much more positive way than before. If Luke was bummed about missing three straight shots, Kobe would say, “C’mon, man, don’t worry about that shit. I miss three straight shots every fucking game. Just keep shooting. The next one’s going to go in.” Says Luke, “When your leader is telling you that, instead of giving you a death stare, it makes the next shot a lot easier to take.”
My biggest concern about recruiting players right out of high school has always been the temptations of the NBA life. Many young players get so seduced by the money and fame that they never develop into mature young men or live up to their promise as athletes. In my view, the key to becoming a successful NBA player is not learning the coolest highlight-reel moves. It’s learning how to control your emotions and keep your mind focused on the game, how to play through pain, how to carve out your role on the team and perform it consistently, how to stay cool under pressure and maintain your equanimity after crushing losses or ecstatic wins. In Chicago we had a phrase for this: going from a basketball player to a “professional” NBA player.
In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are. One moment, things may be going our way, and in the next moment they’re not. When we try to prolong pleasure or reject pain, we suffer. On the bright side, the Buddha also prescribed a practical way for eliminating craving and unhappiness by following what he called the Noble Eightfold Path. The steps were right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. I thought the teachings might help explain what we were trying to do as a basketball team. RIGHT VIEW—involves looking at the game as a whole and working together as a team, like five fingers on a hand. RIGHT THINKING—means seeing yourself as part of a system rather than as your own one-man band. It also implies going into each game with the intention of being intimately involved with what’s happening to the whole team because you’re integrally connected to everyone on it. RIGHT SPEECH—has two components. One is about talking positively to yourself throughout the game and not getting lost in aimless back talk (“I hate that ref,” “I’m going to get back at that bastard”). The second is about controlling what you say when you’re talking with others, especially your teammates, and focusing on giving them positive feedback. RIGHT ACTION—suggests making moves that are appropriate to what’s happening on the floor instead of repeatedly showboating or acting in ways that disrupt team harmony. RIGHT LIVELIHOOD—is about having respect for the work you do and using it to heal the community rather than simply to polish your ego. Be humble. You’re getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to do something that’s really simple. And fun. RIGHT EFFORT—means being unselfish and exerting the right amount of energy to get the job done. Tex Winter says that there’s no substitute for hustle, and my addendum is, if you don’t hustle, you’ll get benched. RIGHT MINDFULNESS—involves coming to every game with a clear understanding of our plan of attack, including what to expect from our opponents. It also implies playing with precision, making the right moves at the right times, and maintaining constant awareness throughout the game, whether you’re on the floor or on the bench. RIGHT CONCENTRATION—is about staying focused on what you’re doing at any given moment and not obsessing about mistakes you’ve made in the past or bad things that might happen in the future. What
I told Shaq he needed to find his own way to inspire the Lakers. He needed to express his confidence and natural joy for the game in such a way that his teammates—Kobe especially—felt that if they joined forces with him, nothing would be impossible. A team leader’s number one job, I explained, was to build up his teammates, not tear them down. Shaq had probably heard this kind of spiel before, but this time I think it clicked. With Kobe I
Greatness is a spiritual condition. MATTHEW ARNOLD
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Horry said the game reminded him of The Wizard of Oz because the team played with “no heart, no brain, no courage.” To which coach Del Harris added, “And no wizard.”
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing,” writes Chodron. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
Maslow describes the key steps to attaining self-actualization: experiencing life “vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption”; making choices from moment to moment that foster growth rather than fear; becoming more attuned to your inner nature and acting in concert with who you are; being honest with yourself and taking responsibility for what you say and do instead of playing games or posing; identifying your ego defenses and finding the courage to give them up; developing the ability to determine your own destiny and daring to be different and non-conformist; creating an ongoing process for reaching your potential and doing the work needed to realize your vision. fostering the conditions for having peak experiences, or what Maslow calls “moments of ecstasy” in which we think, act, and feel more clearly and are more loving and accepting of others.
UCLA head coach John Wooden used to say that “winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.” I didn’t really understand what he meant until we started our second run for the ring.
There’s a story I love to tell about how Napoléon Bonaparte picked his generals. After one of his great generals died, Napoléon reputedly sent one of his staff officers to search for a replacement. The officer returned several weeks later and described a man he thought would be the perfect candidate because of his knowledge of military tactics and brilliance as a manager. When the officer finished, Napoléon looked at him and said, “That’s all very good, but is he lucky?”
I don’t pretend to be a therapist. But the process Rogers describes is not unlike what I’ve tried to do as a coach. Rather than squeeze everybody into preordained roles, my goal has always been to foster an environment where the players can grow as individuals and express themselves creatively within a team structure. I wasn’t interested in becoming best friends with the players; in fact, I think it’s important to maintain a certain distance. But I tried to develop genuine, caring relationships with each player, based on mutual respect, compassion, and trust.
My favorite poem about the power of inclusion is Edwin Markham’s “Outwitted”: He drew the circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!
For the Sioux, freedom was not about being absent but about being present, adds Linden. It meant “freedom for, freedom for the realization of greater relationships.”
Pema Chodron contends that meditation practice blurs the traditional boundaries between self and others. “What you do for yourself—any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself—will affect how you experience the world,” she writes. “What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.” This idea would later become a key building block in my work as a coach. —
Shunryu Suzuki’s instructions on how to meditate are simple:
On another level, I always tried to give each player the freedom to carve out a role for himself within the team structure. I’ve seen dozens of players flame out and disappear not because they lacked talent but because they couldn’t figure out how to fit into the cookie-cutter model of basketball that pervades the NBA. My approach was always to relate to each player as a whole person, not just as a cog in the basketball machine. That meant pushing him to discover what distinct qualities he could bring to the game beyond taking shots and making passes. How much courage did he have? Or resilience? What about character under fire? Many players I’ve coached didn’t look special on paper, but in the process of creating a role for themselves they grew into formidable champions. Derek Fisher is a prime example. He began as a backup point guard for the Lakers with average foot speed and shooting skills. But he worked tirelessly and transformed himself into an invaluable clutch performer and one of the best leaders I’ve ever coached.
Teahupoo, with its timeless power, brought to mind the age-old philosophical quest to distinguish between beauty and its twisted cousin, the sublime: for the merely pretty to graduate to the sublime, terror was required in the mix. “The Alps fill the mind with a kind of agreeable horror,” wrote one seventeenth-century thinker, summing up the concept. And while humans were capable of creating the lovely, the dramatic, the sad, or the inspiring, only nature could produce the sublime. It was a concept both comforting and disturbing: there are many things out there more powerful than we are. No one was more aware of this than the men who’d ridden Teahupoo on this day (except, perhaps, the ones who had fallen on it).
One of the event’s guests was Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, who was already putting money in UberCab. Sacca considered himself a good judge of character, and had made a call to invest in Kalanick after inviting him for hours of hot-tubbing at his Lake Tahoe home. He recognized Systrom in the corner. They had overlapped at Google, briefly, before Sacca left to found Lowercase Capital. If Systrom was here, coding at night, he must be working on something new, Sacca thought.
And so I tell Katie that, yes, I think nature has more beauty in store for us. But beauty, like happiness, can’t be found by complaining about its absence.
“If the laws weren’t beautiful, we wouldn’t have found them,” Frank said. That’s exactly what worries me. I’d rather have an ugly explanation than no explanation at all, but if he’s correct, we might never find a more fundamental theory if it ain’t beautiful enough.
“It goes back to this book by Richard Dawid, who started his career in physics but then turned to philosophy.” According to Richard, I explain, it is rational of string theorists to take into account all available information, including mathematical properties, to evaluate their theory. “But what’s the point of such a theory if it doesn’t explain anything?” Frank asks. “Richard is silent on this issue.” “Well, let me put it this way. If there was any bit of experimental evidence that was decisive and in favor of the theory, you wouldn’t be hearing these arguments. You wouldn’t. Nobody would care. It’s just a fallback. It’s giving up and declaring victory. I don’t like that at all.” Yes, I think, the discussion about post-empirical arguments was brought on by lack of empirical arguments. But simply knowing that doesn’t move us forward.
Not only is quantum mechanics itself weird, the research area is too. In particle physics we have theory, experiment, and, in the middle between them, phenomenology. Phenomenologists are the ones who (like Gordy Kane) coax predictions out of theories, usually by simplifying the math and figuring out what can be measured, to which precision, and how (and, not rarely, also by whom). In other areas of physics, researchers don’t assort into these three categories as clearly as they do in particle physics. But
After the first days at the Munich workshop it has become clear to me that nobody here has practical advice for how to move on. Maybe I was expecting too much of the philosophers. What I learn, however, is that Karl Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used, other than as a rhetorical device. It is rarely possible to actually falsify an idea, since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence. Rather than falsifying theories, therefore, we “implausify” them: a continuously adapted theory becomes increasingly difficult and arcane—not to say ugly—and eventually practitioners lose interest. How much it takes to implausify an idea, however, depends on one’s tolerance for repeatedly making a theory fit conflicting evidence.
particularly rough days, I’d read quotations from Fred Rogers, whose gentleness was, at times, the only thing that made me feel like my life was going to be okay. The thing he wrote that gave me the most courage was this: “Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.” I made up my mind that even though goodness was considered a vice at Uber, and aggression considered its greatest virtue, I would still care about goodness, about kindness, about gentleness. I was determined to bring those virtues into work every single day, into every one of my meetings, into every moment of my life. I would be in the world, but I certainly wouldn’t be of it—just as my father had counseled, all those years ago. It wasn’t easy. Whenever people at work insulted me, I had to keep my cool; I’d take a deep breath and tell myself that they were merely ignorant of the fact that what they were doing was wrong. But my renewed Stoicism wasn’t just about turning the other cheek. It also came with responsibility: as someone who knew what was right and wrong, the Stoics taught, I was obligated to always do what was right. I began calling out sexism, racism, and bullying when they happened, just as I had back when I was a bar raiser. If I noticed someone being a bully toward others, I brought it up to management and insisted that they take action to stop it. Every time something ridiculous happened, every time a sexist email was sent, I’d send a short report to HR, just to keep a record going. When coworkers came to me for help, I tried my best to coach them on how to address the mistreatment they received from sexist and racist managers, how to document discrimination, how to escalate things to HR, how to escalate things to Uber’s executives, and—when that failed—how to escalate things to government and legal authorities (by contacting, for example, the EEOC). On days when I felt afraid, when I was worried for my coworkers or my job or my mental health, I would open my copy of Epictetus’s Enchiridion on the BART ride home. “When you have decided that a thing ought to be done, and are doing it, never avoid being seen doing it, though the many shall form an unfavorable opinion about it,” Epictetus said. “For if it is not right to do it, avoid doing the thing; but if it is right, why are you afraid of those who shall find fault wrongly?” His words gave me courage to stand up against the bullying from Uber’s management. On really bad days, I would pull the book out in between meetings, reading as I walked up and down the halls of Uber’s headquarters, sometimes walking past Travis Kalanick, who would be pacing around the building, talking on his phone. I started to feel that I had more control over my life. By defining myself in terms of my character—which was completely in my power—instead of letting my managers define me, I was able to slowly repair my sense of self-worth. Though the way I and others were being treated didn’t change, I was managing to weather the abuse better, to remain focused on my work, to begin planning for and dreaming of a life after Uber. As always, there was plenty to do: software architecture to review, microservices to fix, code to debug, new engineers to teach, colleagues to help. In the evenings, I worked on my microservices book, hoping I could put it all together in time for its scheduled Christmas publication date.
sabayon aux fraises. This last, a dish of strawberries in a creamy custard,
Loyalty misplaced is loyalty wasted.”
What we need is release, or emancipation. Emancipation is fundamentally different from empowerment. With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy, and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge. We realize that we don’t have the power to give these talents to others, or “empower” them to use them, only the power to prevent them from coming out.
Some people worry that having a fixed objective reduces the incentive for continuous improvement and breeds a mentality that “we just need to meet the goal.” In some cases, this is appropriate, but in other cases, relative grading is also appropriate. There’s no reason you can’t do both: assign the grade based on the fixed objective and provide data on how that team stacks up against all teams.
The most important change that happens, however, is that all teams (in our case, all submarines) are now collaborators working against a common external goal as opposed to competitors working against one another. One of the things I tried to change was the collaboration-competition boundary.
Guiding principles have to accurately represent the principles of the real organization, not the imagined organization. Falseness in what the organization is about results in problems. Since these are a set of criteria that employees will use when they make decisions, decisions won’t be aligned to the organization’s goals.
USE YOUR LEGACY FOR INSPIRATION is a mechanism for CLARITY.
Taking care of your people does not mean protecting them from the consequences of their own behavior. That’s the path to irresponsibility. What it does mean is giving them every available tool and advantage to achieve their aims in life, beyond the specifics of the job. In some cases that meant further education; in other cases crewmen’s goals were incompatible with Navy life and they separated on good terms.
The more I saw and heard, the more I became aware that we’d done a great disservice to our crew back in March regarding the advancement exams. I vowed to do something about it, but one thing that continued to trouble me was why I had to drive this from the top. Couldn’t we get the chiefs themselves involved in their own guys’ advancement prospects? After all, as chiefs they had somehow figured out how to get advanced, that’s why they were chiefs. I kept this gripe to myself and focused on understanding the problem. The first issue was that our crew—by which I mean the enlisted men who were not yet chiefs, and made up 80 percent of the ship’s company—did not thoroughly understand how the advancement system worked. The crew had heard so many myths and had been given so much misinformation, they had come to believe that the advancement system was a mystical process over which they had no control. It was this issue of control that we had to attack first. The
When it comes to processes, adherence to the process frequently becomes the objective, as opposed to achieving the objective that the process was put in place to achieve. The goal then becomes to avoid errors in the process, and when errors are made, additional overseers and inspectors are added. These overseers don’t do anything to actually achieve the objective. They only identify when the process has gone bad after the fact.
Thereafter, the goal for the officers would be to give me a sufficiently complete report so that all I had to say was a simple approval. Initially, they would provide some information, but not all. Most of the time, however, they had the answers; they just hadn’t vocalized them. Eventually, the officers outlined their complete thought processes and rationale for what they were about to do. The benefit from this simple extension was that it caused them to think at the next higher level. The OODs needed to think like the captain, and so on down the chain of command. In effect, by articulating their intentions, the officers and crew were acting their way into the next higher level of command. We had no need of leadership development programs; the way we ran the ship was the leadership development program. One of the mechanisms I credit for the significantly disproportionate number of promotions that have been issued among Santa Fe’s officers and crew in the past decade was our “I intend to . . .” procedure.
When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches to choose from: change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking. On board Santa Fe, the officers and I did the latter, acting our way to new thinking. We didn’t have time to change thinking and let that percolate and ultimately change people’s actions; we just needed to change the behavior.
Right or wrong, I was committed to doing whatever I thought was best for Santa Fe, the Navy, and the nation without worrying about the repercussions. I called this the paradox of “caring but not caring”—that is, caring intimately about your subordinates and the organization but caring little about the organizational consequences to yourself.
I learned that focusing on who was put in charge was more important than trying to evaluate all the ways the event could go wrong.
At the end, we were agreed: the sole output would be concrete mechanisms. I was thinking about Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’s book Built to Last and their discussion of how personalities come and go but institutional mechanisms endure and embed the change in the organization. I put this question to Santa Fe’s chiefs: “What can we do so that you actually run the ship?”
ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE, DON’T JUST AVOID ERRORS is a mechanism for CLARITY. (The book to read is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why.)
We talked about Santa Fe chiefs. Unempowered, uninspired. The twelve chiefs are the senior enlisted men. They are middle management. At our submarine schools, the instructors tell us that officers make sure we do the right things and chiefs make sure we do things right. Their technical expertise and leadership would be key, as would my ability to tap their expertise. Just
heads were too new to assess. “Look, you’ve got one hundred percent from me and my squadron staff,” Mark continued, “to help you get the ship ready. We aren’t going to walk down there and tell you what you need, but whatever you think you need, we’ll support.”
the real trick of athleisure is the way it can physically suggest that you were made to do this—that you’re the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is about as good a way to pass your time on earth as there is.
The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end. The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place.
In Vieques, without knowing it, I was learning that in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.
I’m on the train in New York, scrolling through Twitter, thinking, on the one hand: Where are we underneath all of this arbitrary self-importance? And on the other: Aren’t we all exactly as we seem?
wondering
under the tarpaulin, turned right, and opened a narrow iron door out to a terrace. She’d been here once before. Fully half of this terrace had crumbled off into the sea. The first time Gideon had seen it, the whole looked so precarious she had consequently gone
there’s only so many things you can make with them,
vin de noix
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity, to act on a model of actual selfhood, one that embraces culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance. We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first. The alternative is unspeakable. But you know that—it’s already here.
It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification.
Goffman observes the difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something, between feeling something and conveying a feeling. “The representation of an activity will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it,” Goffman writes. (Take the experience of enjoying a sunset versus the experience of communicating to an audience that you’re enjoying a sunset, for example.) The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so.
The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.
“They don’t hate us,” Bobbie said, her voice tired. “They’re afraid of us.” “Then why do they act like they hate us?” David’s father said with something like triumph. “Because that’s what fear looks like when it needs someplace to go.”
had taken everyone by surprise. A series of votes
It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel once said, “it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government, is corruption—that, and the use of force, which is always applied against those who have not been convinced or included. He was always talking about corruption: trying to prevent it, expose it, eradicate it. He was dedicated to the task of bringing the sin to the eye.
He introduced me to the word “praxis,” which I understood to mean “human action to change reality” making possible “the liberation of liberty.”
Matt’s experience proves that the hard work of building a company is far more important than the excitement of coming up with The Idea.
Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long before by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror—terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost. Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram’s desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized.
The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. I sat back in my seat and stared up at the ceiling, listening to my mother’s voice. You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all.
This feels like it used to feel, she finally said. I stopped walking. I don’t understand, I told her. It’s like when you were on the border, she said. All those years I knew things were weighing on you, but you were so sensitive to my questions—I couldn’t ask about it, I couldn’t show concern, I could never reach you. I don’t want that again. I’m too tired for it now. I stood for a while at the side of the street, staring out at the houses of my neighbors. Finally, I sat down on the curb. When did you know? I asked. She paused. Something had gone away from our conversations, she said. I don’t know how to describe it. She searched for a better explanation. There’s a story I remember from Catholic school, she told me. There was this brilliant child, a music prodigy. He could play anything—he would hear birds sing and then turn it into music. At a very young age he was sent away to be trained by monks. When he arrived at the monastery they forbade him from hearing any music but his own, they forbade him from listening to any of the famous composers. They wanted him to write and create his own music, and for many years he did—he created the most phenomenal things. But as he got a bit older he became frustrated. He wanted to study, he wanted to hear other kinds of music. And so one day he snuck away from the monastery. He went to a nearby town and went into a concert hall, where he heard Mozart. When he came back, he didn’t tell anyone, he kept creating new music just like before. A few days after his return, the monks heard him playing and they told him to stop. You’ve broken the rule, they told him. He looked at them with panic and insisted, no I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t. They shook their heads and said, yes you have, you’ve discovered Mozart. No, he said, how could you know that? Because, they said, when you played without knowing, you played music from every composer—and now Mozart is missing. When she finished the story, my mother fell silent. I sat hunched on the curb, the phone pressed against my ear. My friend, I finally told her, he’s been deported. I felt unable to breathe. I fear for him, I said, I fear for his family. All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes.
He looked toward the ceiling, losing himself in a memory as I drew his blood. ‘I miss my father making it in the mornings when I lived at home. Everybody else drank it – my mother, my brothers. I don’t miss drinking it. I miss it being around. I miss the sorts of gatherings that call for coffee.’ He was quiet for a moment, then glanced at the monitor I’d plugged his sample into. ‘All good?’
How do they live with the fear, I wonder to myself, how do they survive? — Historian Timothy Snyder has spent much of his career examining the terror waged against the people of Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1945 in the borderlands between World War II–era Germany and the Soviet Union. His book Bloodlands chronicles the twin genocides perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin in modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Russia—campaigns of ethnically and politically motivated mass killing and starvation writ large. Snyder implores his readers to view the staggering number of deaths—fourteen million—as fourteen million times one. “Each record of death,” he writes, “suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.” Snyder explains that “to join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history.” Snyder ends his book with a plea to academics and fellow historians, to all those who grapple with death on a grand scale. “It is for us as scholars,” he urges, “to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”
I looked around in disbelief. This was the home base of the man who kept sending us those bills for $25 million? I looked now at him, this beady-eyed bureaucrat. What creature did he remind me of ? Not a worm. No, he was bigger than that. Not a snake. He was less simple than that. Then I had it. Johnson’s pet octopus. I recalled Stretch dragging the helpless crab back to its lair. Yes, this bureaucrat was a kraken. A micro-kraken. A bureau-kraken.
“There are worse things,” he said, “than ambition.”
Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.
I REMEMBER IT as the next day, or maybe sometime in the next few days or weeks, and yet all the documents contradict my memory. Letters, diaries, appointment books—they all definitively show it taking place much later. But I remember what I remember, and there must be a reason why I remember it the way I do.
When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary. I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea. And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis. Hours before boarding my flight at Heathrow, I meditated on that moment, looking up at those astonishing columns, experiencing that bracing shock, the kind you receive from all great beauty, but mixed with a powerful sense of—recognition? Was it only my imagination? After all, I was standing at the birthplace of Western civilization. Maybe I merely wanted it to be familiar. But I didn’t think so. I had the clearest thought: I’ve been here before. Then, walking up those bleached steps, another thought: This is where it all begins. On my left was the Parthenon, which Plato had watched the teams of architects and workmen build. On my right was the Temple of Athena Nike. Twenty-five centuries ago, per my guidebook, it had housed a beautiful frieze of the goddess Athena, thought to be the bringer of “nike,” or victory. It was one of many blessings Athena bestowed. She also rewarded the dealmakers. In the Oresteia she says: “I admire . . . the eyes of persuasion.” She was, in a sense, the patron saint of negotiators. I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbing the energy and power of that epochal place. An hour? Three? I don’t know how long after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift—a pair of new shoes. I don’t know when I figured out that the play was called Knights. I do know that as I turned to leave I noticed the temple’s marble façade. Greek artisans had decorated it with several haunting carvings, including the most famous, in which the goddess inexplicably leans down . . . to adjust the strap of her shoe.
And then, when you were nearly to the door of the tower, he asked, “How do you keep from crying?” He’d begun weeping again. “I don’t always,” you admitted. “Sometimes you can’t.” “Oh,” said the boy.
But then a sharp squeal penetrated the hate, and Tookie looked up. The monster had paid him no heed despite his shout, preoccupied as it was with the enemy before it: a sextet of tiny creatures that dipped and wheeled in aerobatic circles around its misshapen head as it turned to follow them. In profile it was even uglier, lumpen and raw, its lower jaw trailing spittle as it worked around a mouthful of something that wriggled and shrieked and beat at it with wings like rusted, ocher clouds—“No, goddamn it!” Tookie shouted. Suddenly his head was clear, the hate shattered by horror. He raised the gun, and something else rose in him: a great, huge feeling, as big as the monster and just as overwhelming, but cleaner. Familiar. It was the city beneath his feet, below the water, still patiently holding its breath. He felt the tension in his own lungs. He had played no music, faked no voodoo, paid no taxes and no court to the chattering throngs who came and spent themselves and left the city bruised and weary in their wake. But the city was his, low creature that he was, and it was his duty to defend it. It had spent years training him, honing him, making him ready to serve for its hour of need. He was a foot soldier, too, and in that breath of forever he heard the battle call of his home. So Tookie planted his feet on the rotting wood, and aimed for one bulbous eye with his dirty gun, and screamed with the pent breath of ten thousand waterlogged streets as he blew it away.
A man so neglectful of his livelihood was unlikely to be particularly careful of his heirs.
to dig into the topic as a sign of his earnest protectiveness
“Are you all right, Dad? Will you be all right tonight?” I asked. “You mean, am I afraid of dying?” This question, direct and unadorned, made me blush. My father had intuited that this was exactly what I’d meant. He looked away for a moment, as if considering, then fixed his eyes on me and said, “I don’t fear death, but I don’t welcome it, either.” The sheer simplicity and unexpectedness of this confession filled me with a sudden, terrible pride. It was a sensation that did not demand tears, or even recognition. In this moment, I loved my father intensely.
As an economic system, capitalism may entail restless dynamism and creative destruction, but its role in our polity is anything but creative or dynamic. The business of capitalism is to take the great questions of society—justice, equality, freedom, distribution—off the table of public deliberation. Capitalism’s most ardent proponents say that it functions best when it is untouched by democracy, when it is protected from the conscious and collective interference of citizens acting through their government. And while for a brief stretch of the twentieth century the Constitution was envisioned as a living experiment, a text to be revised and revisited through argument and amendment, its function today is the opposite. Through the Senate and the Electoral College, both of which privilege the interests of a numerical minority from mostly white states over the interests of democratic, multiracial majorities; through the elevation of the Supreme Court to the status of talisman, where the fate of the nation hinges on nine men and women educated at the most elite schools; and through the doctrine of originalism, the Constitution has reverted to what it has been throughout most of American history: a source of overwhelming, anti-democratic constraint.
Perhaps, then, this is the belief that underlies Thomas’s penal jurisprudence: no state, no matter how fervent its belief in the moral right to punish, would ever be willing to publicly and formally sentence a convicted criminal to the actual harms and abuses that are routinely meted out to inmates as they make their way through the nation’s prison archipelago.33 By delimiting the act of punishment to what happens in a court of law—and declaring that what happens in jail stays in jail—Thomas, so eager to rehabilitate the state’s moral right to punish, so eager to establish the “intimate connection between crime and punishment,” is able to have his cake and eat it too.
The individual’s right to bear arms is what Thomas sees as the black man’s main protection against a rampaging white supremacy, the critical right that the new constitutional order provides. There are no cooperative institutions of racial equality and democratic mutuality in Thomas’s political vision. There are no Union Leagues, no Freedmen’s Bureau, no interracial politics and parties. There is only the defiant black man, reliant upon his constitutional right to arm himself and to defend his family against white marauders. For Thomas, the broadened Second Amendment, with its attendant vision of a racialized society armed to the teeth, is the keystone of the constitutional transformation that emancipation has wrought. A
Seeking to empower the federal government to override state regulations, to bring together the separate and discrete economies of the states into a single, integrated national economy—much the way the European Union is now doing for the separate economies of the continent’s nation-states—Marshall argued for a broad interpretation of the Commerce Clause.48 Commerce should be understood not in limited terms, he said, as only the buying and selling of goods, but as a social activity that transcends simple business transactions. “Intercourse,” Marshall called it, invoking an eighteenth-century conception, popular among the Framers, of commerce as interactions between diverse people across the globe. Commerce was a way of being social, of living with others in a single civilization; it was a dialogue among strangers. Among the definitions of commerce cited in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary was “interchange of anything.”49 That “anything” could be commodities, texts, or opinions. Any proper reading of the term would include a great many activities beyond the buying and selling of goods.
THOMAS’S CLAIM THAT the state cannot do anything for African Americans seems at odds with his claim that the state will make things worse for African Americans. Such contradiction is not his alone. As Hirschman points out, conservatives often invoke two other theses, in addition to futility, against reformist or radical political action. One is the “perversity thesis,” which holds that “the attempt to push society in a certain direction will result in its moving … in the opposite direction”: “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.” The other is the “jeopardy thesis,” which holds that “the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.” Unlike the futility thesis, the theses of perversity and jeopardy assume that state action can have an impact, albeit a negative one. Though making a simultaneous case for futility and perversity, or futility and jeopardy, seems like a challenge—affirming the state’s potency and impotence in the same breath—an agonized conscience of consistency does not seem to trouble opponents of political transformation. Whenever futilitarians are not “quite comfortable with their own argument,” says Hirschman, “they look to the perverse effect for reinforcement, adornment, and closure.”30 That is certainly the case with Thomas’s dissent in Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which used arguments of both perversity and jeopardy to oppose state projects of social reform.
EVEN IF AFRICAN Americans achieve power in the electoral realm, Thomas says, the state cannot deliver the transformation they seek. The disparity between the extent of black problems and the paucity of liberal solutions is too great. This claim of Thomas’s follows the conservative logic of what social theorist Albert Hirschman calls “the futility thesis,” which holds that any political attempt to alter a specific social condition will be “largely surface, façade, cosmetic, hence illusory, as the ‘deep’ structures of society remain wholly untouched.” As Hirschman points out, futilitarian arguments on the right often resemble structural arguments on the left. The latter are meant to portray reformist efforts as insufficiently radical, mere salves to social wounds that cannot be healed without a revolutionary transformation. It’s no surprise, then, that Thomas’s critique on the Court sounds similar to the critiques he deployed as a younger man. The difference is that the claim from the right is made not on behalf of a change that has yet to occur but against a change that already has been tried.18 The futility thesis preys upon the disappointment that so often comes in the wake of a large effort, the feeling that the change is not great enough, the transformation not deep enough, to justify all the sacrifice that went into its making. As we’ve seen, Thomas’s conservative critique also speaks to the pervasive sense that nothing much was achieved through the black freedom struggle. The disrepair was—is—too great for the state to fix.
On the other hand, Thomas also argued, in an opinion on affirmative action, that “every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”55 How such an imperturbable self could be demeaned, have its dignity diminished or called into question by the actions of an unforgiving world, when the dignity of the slave remains untouched, is left unexplained.
On the one hand, in the context of the ban on gay marriage, Thomas has argued that dignity is “innate”—so innate that no act of humiliation, degradation, or oppression by the state could deprive a person of it. “Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved,” Thomas wrote in one opinion. “Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”52
words of Malcolm X, rather than as “an inherited
I reject virtually all of Thomas’s views. In presenting his vision, however, I’ve opted for interpretation and analysis rather than objection and critique. I’ve included dissenting voices—either my own or those of other justices or analysts in the media and academe—only when they amplify lines of argument or assumption in Thomas’s jurisprudence that might otherwise be inaudible. As a longtime reader of the right from the left, I know how tempting it is for people on one side of the spectrum to dismiss those on the other as unthinking defenders of partisan advantage. Because the temptation to dismiss is even greater in Thomas’s case—perversely mimicking the dismissal of Marshall—and because it’s sufficiently difficult to get people to believe that Thomas has a jurisprudence, much less to hear it, the imperative to let him speak without the interruption of easy criticisms is that much more acute. Thomas’s is a voice that unsettles. His beliefs are disturbing, even ugly; his style is brutal. I want to make us sit with that discomfort rather than swat it away. This is not so that we adopt Thomas’s views, but so we see the world through his eyes—and realize, perhaps to our surprise, that his vision is in some ways similar to our own. Which should unsettle us even more.
While Thomas insists that judging involves the impartial application of relevant principles, he’s quick to add that “reaching the correct decision itself is only half the battle. Having the courage of your convictions can be the harder part.”
In both black conservatism and black nationalism, there is a suspicion of white liberalism and its African American allies, skepticism of the state, pessimism about integration, a focus on the family, an emphasis on traditional morality, an appreciation of black business, and a belief in the saving power of black men. While the two traditions are by no means identical, they overlap in multiple respects.24 That is why Thomas has been able to forgo the left for the right without having to give up the black nationalism that can be found on either side of the spectrum.
Our research lends support to what is sometimes called the “inverse Conway Maneuver,”2 which states that organizations should evolve their team and organizational structure to achieve the desired architecture
John Shook, describing his experiences transforming the culture of the teams at the Fremont, California, car manufacturing plant that was the genesis of the Lean manufacturing movement in the US, wrote, “what my . . . experience taught me that was so powerful was that the way to change culture is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave—what they do” (Shook 2010).
Generative (performance-oriented) organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what we are supposed to do.
You can, of course, use these tools to model your own performance. Use Table 2.3 to discover where in our taxonomy you fall. Use our measures for lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change fail rate, and ask your teams to set targets for these measures. However, it is essential to use these tools carefully. In organizations with a learning culture, they are incredibly powerful. But “in pathological and bureaucratic organizational cultures, measurement is used as a form of control, and people hide information that challenges existing rules, strategies, and power structures. As Deming said, ’whenever there is fear, you get the wrong numbers’” (Humble et al. 2014, p. 56). Before you are ready to deploy a scientific approach to improving performance, you must first understand and develop your culture. It is to this topic we now turn.
The DevOps mantra of continuous improvement is both exciting and real, pushing companies to be their best, and leaving behind those who do not improve.
FOCUS ON CAPABILITIES, NOT MATURITY
It is based on a compelling curiosity for what makes high-performing technology organizations great, and how software makes organizations better.
And, if I’m not genuinely curious and only show up when there’s a failure, then I am failing as a senior leader.
Nothing about monopolization is inevitable. Our increasingly dystopian and corrupt corporate apparatus was brought to us by people selling a fantasy of inevitability. Some of them sold us a right-wing fantasy of corporate monopolies and bigness as a sign of progress. Some of them sold us a left-wing fantasy of corporate monopolies as an unstoppable feature of capitalism. But these fantasies are, in the end, the same. They both are designed to sell you on the idea that you have no power, that you are nothing but a consumer. And that is not true. It has never been true.
Fighting back also means not falling into the trap of elitism. The weakness of the technocrat is “imposter syndrome,” a feeling that he or she doesn’t belong in a position of power, that his or her expertise is a pretense. This insecurity is what Aaron Director identified as his key to power. “Beautiful smugness” is how John Kenneth Galbraith and Richard Hofstadter persuaded a generation to give up their liberties. These men, Director in particular, understood that powerful liberal lawyers, well-respected and arrogant, were susceptible to mockery by their colleagues. Director made fun of lawyers who subscribed to common sense, creating a social context where an embrace of complex-seeming models by credentialed experts who were working for oligarchs overrode respect for justice, democracy, or basic human decency. In doing this, Director reoriented the elitist liberal brain, rewiring it for plutocracy without liberals even knowing. The only immunization against this is a democratic form of populism. I do not mean the toxic fake version of populism, demagogues and frauds blaming ethnic groups. I mean old-school populism, the belief that citizens, educated and responsible, know what is best for themselves. And united they come together in a system of democracy and use the law to protect and develop themselves. This populism does not disdain expertise, but embraces it. But expertise must serve the people; it must not be oriented to confuse them, to erect a new aristocracy. And that means you must never be afraid to say “I don’t know,” and you must do your best to remember that men in suits with impressive credentials can and often do lie, cheat, and steal. It’s true that humanity has a remarkable amount of accumulated knowledge, but as individuals, we’re all making it up as we go along. To do the work of being a citizen, each of us has to work hard, learn, build up a working body of knowledge.
It isn’t just that we have to contend with plutocrats. It’s that we have divorced property ownership from caretaking itself.
The Watergate Babies rejected the lessons of Patman’s generation for many reasons, conflating economic populism with an antiquated vision of the economy. But there was wisdom in Patman’s lessons. In the 1930s, he said that restricting chain stores would prevent “Hitler’s methods of government and business in Europe” from coming to the United States. For decades after World War II, preventing economic concentration was understood as a bulwark against tyranny. From the 1970s until the financial crisis, this rhetoric seemed ridiculous. No longer. Financial crises occur regularly now, and prices for essential goods and services reflect monopoly power rather than free citizens buying and selling to each other. People worldwide, sullen and unmoored from community structures, are turning to rage, apathy, protest, and angry tribalism. The reason for this dissatisfaction, the anxiety, is clear. The institutions that touch our lives are unreachable. We organize our social networks through Facebook, our information through Google, our health care from complex bureaucracies, our seeds and chemicals through seed monopolists. We sell our grain through Cargill and watch movies, buy groceries, books, and clothing through Amazon. Open markets are gone, replaced by a handful of corporate giants. We are increasingly addicted to opioids, sugary processed foods, and alcohol. We have no faith in what was once the most democratically responsive part of government, Congress. We cannot begin to address perhaps the most important existential challenge humanity has ever faced, climate change. Steeped in centralized power and mistrust, people all over the world face demagogues selling blame and hatred. But even more profound than the anxiety is the confusion. Our policymakers, until recently, saw giants like Google, Amazon, and Goldman Sachs as exemplars of the American spirit, instead of the dangerous re-creation of trading corporations seeking to control and enslave us—like the East India Company—against which we rebelled. They confused charity for justice, meekly asking our munificent plutocrats to raise our wages or donate their ill-gotten gains to charitable foundations plastered with their names. We have asked for new laws to offer welfare to the poor, instead of seeing poverty itself as a lack of freedom, as a denial of the basic rights of citizenship. This is not democracy. This is servitude.
“A nation’s greatness can be measured by the happiness and prosperity of the people who produce the nation’s wealth.” —Wright Patman
by the end of the 1980s, Wall Street had permanently changed corporate America. A new type of business model existed. The leveraged buyout industry, stung with bad publicity, rebranded as “private equity.” While some PE firms made productive investments, they were largely pools of floating capital that sought to use the corporation for the purpose of the financier.50 Strategically, the only businesses that were sustainable in the new legal environment were those that could withstand the pressures of financial raiders. Large-scale monopolistic corporations such as General Electric and Walmart could use the new tools to their advantage. So could high-tech concerns such as Microsoft that had taken advantage of the technology revolution to acquire choke holds over new vital arteries of commerce. Private equity firms and financial intermediaries who could use the new capital market structure to their advantage increasingly controlled American business. In previous eras in American history, the wreckage caused by such widespread looting would have led to substantial legal reforms. And there were some. But the key innovation, that the corporate structure exists as a mechanism for the extraction of cash for insiders from either the company itself or from a market that company monopolized, was here to stay.
The concept of “deregulation” was naturally incoherent—there is no such thing as a market without regulation; the question had always been whether public institutions or financiers organize market rules.
Big business representatives had been attacking fair trade laws and the Robinson-Patman Act since the laws were passed. The laws aimed at two different price harms. The first was predation, where a corporation like Standard Oil or A&P could use discounting to drive competitors out of business. The second was price discrimination, where a railroad or corporation could charge different prices to favor bigger companies that did their bidding. Both predation and price discrimination helped companies with access to capital, which meant that these tactics placed control over commerce in the hands of the money trust of Wall Street. The antimonopoly laws were designed to block both harms, and thus, restrict Wall Street. But predatory practices and price discrimination can lower prices for consumers, at least on a temporary basis.
The overthrow of fair trade, which had been won with so much struggle fifty years earlier, was the culmination of a consistent push by Wall Street and the left to remove the citizen from having control over production.
“I suggest that a philosopher of many years ago pointed out this phenomenon, and said that there is something about the intellectual mind that induces it to focus on the obscure at the expense of the obvious. And this is why I am glad that no one has ever accused me of being intellectual.” —Thomas Rothwell, small business lobbyist, 1975
The upstarts viewed Penn Central as a symbol of a generalized stagnation, a moral curse, rather than a practical problem that could be addressed by reducing the size of business and constraining concentrations of power. “We’ve grown fat and sloppy,” Peters argued. “General Motors and the Post Office each have over 700,000 employees. One turns out lemons. The other loses packages.… The old organizations—public or private—simply aren’t doing the job.” In the 1970s, his writers were trying to find something new, something different, something interesting to address the congealed and increasingly ossified society. But oriented by the politics of affluence rather than the memory of Mellon, they ignored antimonopolist elders and did not fully understand the danger of concentrated financial power.
Hart- and Patman-style populists focused foremost on political economic structures; they saw corporate power, Wall Street, and financial corruption as foundational problems leading to not only inflation and high interest rates but an antidemocratic concentration of power. The newer generation diagnosed the crisis as generational, cultural, a lack of youthful vigor within American institutions.
Nader was close with Brandeis disciple Patman, working with Patman to oppose bailouts and supporting and advocating for the breakup of large firms such as General Motors.44 But unlike Brandeis, who had represented small firms and had experience in business, Nader’s career was not rooted in promoting fair commerce and protecting the citizen producer. Brandeis believed citizens needed control of production and commerce, so they could have the autonomy necessary to be citizens and protect their communities. Nader did not particularly care who had control of commerce as long as the consumer was protected.45 “People first had to get it that corporations were rapacious and government corrupt,” he said in 1975. The goal was to “replace corporations, break them up,” so they could be “owned by workers or better yet consumers.” In truth, Nader had not thought carefully about who would control commerce.46
Concentration: The New Learning.36 The Chicago Schoolers didn’t win the substantive argument against antimonopolist economists. Despite the language of science, little of what the Chicago School economists put forward was ever rooted in empirical proof. But they gained a marketing coup in the use of the term “The New Learning,” which persuaded much of the political world that there was no longer a consensus, or need, for strong antitrust enforcement.
Milton Shapp, a Pennsylvania entrepreneur running for governor, told members of the Banking Committee about pressure put on him by banks to buy alternative services when he needed financing. An Indianapolis travel agent, Othmar Grueninger, talked about how bank-owned travel agencies were driving independent agencies out of business because of their unparalleled access to data about who traveled and who was creditworthy. “Any time I deposited checks from my customers,” he said, “I was providing the banks with the names of my best clients.”
His endlessly loyal staff of banking radicals was used to being worked to the ground by Patman, who got to work by 6 a.m. And he still had that secret weapon that few in Congress or in business could tolerate: Patman was not afraid to lose.
These conglomerates were shaped by strict antitrust laws. There were strict restrictions on market shares in any one market, and strict limits on acquiring suppliers or customers in the same industrial supply chain. So one response by financiers was to buy totally unrelated lines of business so as to avoid scrutiny by antitrust agencies. The main point of the mergers was not to monopolize, but to create deal flow and profits for bankers, and to justify higher salaries and bonuses for executives, who now in theory had bigger portfolios of responsibilities.
McLean was an innovative manager, and later introduced important innovations in shipping containers, but the Waterman deal was the beginnings of the reconversion of the corporation, from a legal institution chartered to build a product or run a service for profit, to a financial asset meant solely to generate cash for its investors. McClean had bought a corporation by borrowing against that corporation’s own assets.
Director and his colleagues had a fundamentally nihilistic view of human nature, and introduced into political economics a language flowing from this conception. All humans sought to maximize their individual well-being. Legal systems should be modeled not on squishy notions such as justice, fairness, equity, or social stability, but on scientific measurements of individual welfare. In this brutal framework, those who succeeded were simply the most talented (a foreshadowing of the later fetishizing of meritocracy). Perhaps this reality might be sad, perhaps it might be unfair, but it was truth, and thus, scientific.
But Brandeis and Patman understood that political economy was about power structures. While Brandeis believed in science, he did not believe in overly applying technocratic tools to political decisions. Corporations and markets were engineered, and they could be structured to promote a free and self-governing people capable of making intelligent decisions about politics. But they could also become mechanisms of oppression. The forum for such discussions was that of law and politics, where human beings could use their liberties and free will to come together and make such decisions.
But now, a new language existed to shape liberalism. Whether through Hofstadter’s consensus history or Galbraith’s resurrection of Bull Moose–style technocratic governance, politics was no longer an avenue for structuring society but rather more a means of ratifying what technologically driven organizations already saw as an optimal governing arrangement.
With consensus history, Hofstadter had taken a bastardized clinical frame to airbrush the ideological importance of mass movements out of American history. He diagnosed groups as disparate as abolitionists, nativists, Greenbackers and populists, the popular left-wing press during World War I, white supremacists, and black Muslims as essentially suffering from mental disorders.89 And in an era increasingly characterized by the politics of affluence, Hofstadter and his ilk framed those with ideological goals outside that of consensus historians as mentally ill cranks.
In 1958, a new concept replaced industrial liberty: affluence. That year, John Kenneth Galbraith, already one of the most famous economists in America, published the best-selling book The Affluent Society, plucking the word “affluence” from the realm of the esoteric and turning it into a household phrase. For millions of Americans, Galbraith helped explain the exceptional increases in wealth they had experienced since the dark days of the depression. He explained it not as a triumph of policy, but as an inevitability of the munificent monopolies around them.
In time, Hofstadter’s work would help to all but erase the American historical tradition—tracing to the Revolution itself—that held that the great ideological conflict was between democracy and monopoly. “Americans may not have quarreled over profound ideological matters,” he wrote early in his career, “as these are formulated in the history of political thought, but they quarreled consistently enough over issues that had real pith and moment.” Pith and moment was a beautiful phrase, but what Hofstadter meant was that there were no conflicts in America in political economy, only social anxiety. It was too scary for Hofstadter to concede that democratic movements were anything but a rabid mob.57
“Liberalism” had been a word Roosevelt used to organize his political movement. In 1932, a reporter asked Roosevelt to describe his political philosophy. Roosevelt called himself “a liberal.” This did not mean, as classical liberalism had meant in much of the previous era, protecting the rights of industrial barons using the rhetoric of self-sufficiency. It meant moral leadership, the willingness to address a civilizational crisis by updating the machinery of governance. A liberal, Roosevelt said, broke from the past, but not too quickly to provoke violence.23 After the war, Berle would again redefine the term “liberal,” slowly changing it to mean a form of soft corporatism. He did this by using the Red Scare to centralize power over postwar policy development into a small network of planners and Ivy League intellectuals, what conservatives derisively called “eggheads.” Over the next twenty-five years, liberalism would come to mean a gentle form of elitism. And since Roosevelt had called himself a liberal, this became what Democratics increasingly believed the New Deal had been.
Years later, after IBM led the industry, Thomas Watson Jr. saw Morison at a Roper Conference. His father had died, and he was now head of IBM. “I’ve never forgotten what you told my father,” he said. “I know you did it gently, and he, of course, was emotionally upset, but you are absolutely right. And as his son, I couldn’t say it, but we were going to be passed by and just the pressure of this decree, because he dominated the company, was the only thing that saved us.”
Legislators sought to distinguish between the accomplishments of A&P in terms of building a better food distribution system, and the brute use of coercion to run rivals out of business.
After the Dr. Miles decision, chains could specifically pick well-known branded goods to discount at a loss to drive competitors out of business, and then use their purchasing volume to demand lower prices, and thus lower quality, from the maker. The court had removed power from the small producer, and placed power in the hands of the financial middlemen who controlled the chain stores.
In 1938, renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a private letter to Roosevelt about how to handle business leaders, saying, “You could do anything you liked with them if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”39 Roosevelt would seek to domesticate big business.
“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
“History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones.” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 19381
American intellectuals and businessmen began embracing increasingly autocratic ideas. A movement called “technocracy” became a fad; technocrats sought to replace elected politicians with engineers and scientists who could plan without the need to respond to voters. Liberty magazine published an essay, “Does America Need a Dictator?” written by Wilson advisor Colonel Edward House. Unless economic circumstances improved, House wrote, “we are almost certain to have trouble.”
could redeem their bonus, immediately, just like
Hoover seemed to be the best of America. Not a politician, but a successful businessman, a progressive forward-looking leader. He was the Great Engineer, the Great Humanitarian, the Great Idealist, the Great Administrator. And now he was president, with seemingly limitless potential. And yet behind the image, Hoover was deeply conservative, skeptical of federal action, paralyzed by his own brilliance, and a mean-spirited micromanager. It would be hard to find a worse leader for a crisis.
He contrasted American politics, where men were free to vote, and American commerce, where they were under the thumb of petty tyrants. These two systems were in conflict, a contrast “between our political liberty and industrial absolutism.”
The bailouts from 2008 to 2010 were not intended to stop a depression, they were intended to stop a New Deal. And so they did.
Jim Wright, later Speaker of the House, eulogized Patman’s life. “He often comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable,” talking of Patman’s fights against big business, banks, and the Klan. “Well done.”
The parents of high-reactive children are exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me. “The time and effort they invest will actually make a difference. Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, parents should see them as malleable—for worse, but also for better.” He describes eloquently a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.” This advice is terrific for all parents, of course, but it’s crucial for raising a high-reactive child.
They used a technique called Wardley Maps to better localize what parts of various value chains were commodities and should be outsourced, which should be purchased, and which should be kept in-house because they created durable, competitive advantage. They used this exercise to methodically disposition their technology stacks, given the business context.
“Our future depends on innovation,” he says. “That doesn’t come from process. It comes from people.”
“We’ll certainly be testing how much Steve really believes his schtick around how great customer satisfaction and employee engagement will lead to great cash flow.” “You know,
“Left unchecked, Horizon 1 leaders will consume all the resources of the company. They will note correctly that they are the lifeblood of the company, but that’s only true in the short term. There is an instinct to maximize profitability and take cash out of the business instead of reinvesting it. This is the ‘manage to value’ thesis and is the opposite of ‘manage to growth.’ If you want growth, Steve, you must protect Horizons 2 and 3, and any learnings generated there must be spread throughout the company.”
“Ma’am, you’re looking at a renegade group of engineers who want to solve big problems that actually matter to the business. Our attempts to go through the normal channels haven’t worked, so here’s our chance to work directly with the business instead of through technology middle managers. If we succeed, we get credibility. We’d love your endorsement supporting these new ways of working.” Kurt
That afternoon, Maggie comes up with an elegant solution. She decides to move the Data Hub product manager from the Marketing building to a desk right by Maxine starting Monday. In the conference room, Maggie tells him, “You’re the bottleneck. Your top priority now is to make sure any questions that the technology teams have are quickly answered. Nothing else takes priority over that.” He balks and then proceeds to describe all the other demands on his time. Talking with customers, helping sales with negotiations and trying to break them of bad habits, briefing internal executives, working with business operations, arguing with business stakeholders to agree on a product roadmap, escalating things up the chain to get approvals for urgent issues … And way down the list was answering questions from developers. Maxine listens with interest, realizing that no one can get anything done when you’re pulled in that many directions. Maggie also listens patiently, nodding and occasionally asking questions. When he’s done, she says, “If you’re too busy to work with the technology teams, I’ll move you into a pure product marketing role, and you don’t have to move your desk. Right now, I need product managers who are working side by side with the teams who are building what will achieve our most important business objectives. If you still want to be a product manager, I’ll figure out how to clear your plate and get those other responsibilities assigned to someone else. “Don’t give me an answer right now,” Maggie says. “Think about it and let me know first thing Monday morning.” Maxine is impressed. Maggie does not mess around, she thinks.
The last thing a QA person wants to hear from a developer they just met is their ideas on how to automate their job away.
‘If you can’t depend on the manufacturing workforce to not get hurt on the job, why should you believe anything we say about our quality goals? Or our ability to make you money? Safety is a precondition of work.’”
“Some think it’s about leaders being nice,” Erik guffaws. “Nonsense. It’s about excellence, the ruthless pursuit of perfection, the urgency to achieve the mission, a constant dissatisfaction with the status quo, and a zeal for helping those the organization serves.
As Sensei W. Edwards Deming once observed, ‘a bad system will beat a good person every time.’
They start making a list: Every developer uses a common build environment. Every developer is supported by a continuous build and integration system. Everyone can run their code in production-like environments. Automated test suites are built to replace manual testing, liberating QA people to do higher value work. Architecture is decoupled to liberate feature teams, so developers can deliver value independently. All the data that teams need is put in easily consumed APIs …
‘technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.’
“And when that happens,” he continues, “you’ve trapped yourself in a system of work where you can no longer solve real business problems easily anymore—instead, you’re forced to merely solve puzzles all day, trying to figure out how to make your small change, obstructed by your complected system every step of the way. You must schedule meetings with other teams, try to convince them to change something for you, escalate it to their managers, maybe all the way up the chain. “Everything you do becomes increasingly distant from the real business problem you’re trying to solve,”
Maxine knows that agility is never free. Over time, without this type of investment, software often becomes more and more difficult to change. There are exceptions, like floating-point math libraries that haven’t changed in forty years—they don’t need to change, because math doesn’t change. But in almost every other domain, especially when you have customers, change is a fact of life. A healthy software system is one that you can change at the speed you need, where people can contribute easily, without jumping through hoops. This is how you make a project that’s fun and worthwhile contributing to, and where you often find the most vibrant communities.
If the Phoenix development setup were a product, it would be the worst product ever.
Wherever the incarnation of Christ, His becoming man, is more intensely in the foreground of Christian consciousness, there one will seek for the reconciliation of antiquity with Christianity. And wherever the cross of Christ dominates the Christian message, there the breach between Christ and antiquity will be very greatly emphasized. But Christ is both the Incarnate and the Crucified, and He demands to be recognized as both of these alike.
The purpose of what follows is not indeed to develop a programme for shaping or formation of the western world. What is intended is rather a discussion of the way in which in this western world the form of Christ takes form.
For indeed it is not written that God became an idea, a principle, a programme, a universally valid proposition or a law, but that God became man. This means that though the form of Christ certainly is and remains one and the same, yet it is willing to take form in the real man, that is to say, in quite different guises. Christ does not dispense with human reality for the sake of an idea which demands realization at the expense of the real. What Christ does is precisely to give effect to reality. He affirms reality. And indeed He is Himself the real man and consequently the foundation of all human reality.
The real man is not an object either for contempt or for deification, but an object of the love of God. The rich and manifold variety of God’s creation suffers no violence here from false uniformity or from the forcing of men into the pattern of an ideal or a type or a definite picture of the human character. The real man is at liberty to be his Creator’s creature. To be conformed with the Incarnate is to have the right to be the man one really is. Now there is no more pretence, no more hypocrisy or self-violence, no more compulsion to be something other, better and more ideal than what one is. God loves the real man. God became a real man.
There is no clearer indication of the idolization of death than when a period claims to be building for eternity and yet life has no value in this period, or when big words are spoken of a new man, of a new world and of a new society which is to be ushered in, and yet all that is new is the destruction of life as we have it.
To probe the problem of ethics was not to indulge in the game of “dialectical” theology. The search had to lead to the goal, the quest demanded an answer.
He always cheered me up and comforted me, he never tired of repeating that the only fight which is lost is that which we give up.
“The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one’s life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.”
I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. . . . One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia;* and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf. Jer. 45!). How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind? I think you see what I mean, even though I put it so briefly, I’m glad to have been able to learn this, and I know I’ve been able to do so only along the road that I’ve travelled. So I’m grateful for the past and present, and content with them. . . . 485
the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual.
it can be seen, along with his Discipleship and Life Together, as essentially complete,* and as indisputably important in forming a full understanding of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book opens with these lines: “Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand—from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: ‘How can I be good?’ and ‘How can I do something good?’ Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: ‘What is the will of God?’”
It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. . . . The church stands not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village. That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes is something that I’m thinking about a great deal and I shall be writing to you again about it soon.
“I can’t read a book or write a paragraph,” he said to Bethge, “without talking to you about it or at least asking myself what you would say about it.”
Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin. One must sacrifice oneself utterly to God’s purposes, even to the point of possibly making moral mistakes.
This was how Bonhoeffer saw what he was doing. He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one’s whole life in obedience to God’s call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God’s call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny.
His role in the conspiracy was between him and God alone; that much he knew. And he knew that being chosen by God, as the Jews were chosen, and as the prophets were chosen, was something unfathomable. It was the highest honor, but a terrible one, one that none would ever seek.
He wrote of that in his Ethics too: It is only the cynic who claims “to speak the truth” at all times and in all places to all men in the same way, but who, in fact, displays nothing but a lifeless image of the truth. . . . He dons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for human weaknesses; but, in fact, he is destroying the living truth between men. He wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he lives, and laughs arrogantly at the devastation he has wrought and at the human weakness which “cannot bear the truth.”
The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.
And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God’s cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be “unsuccessful”: and yet be on the right road. But this is where we find out whether we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm.
Their methods were “not so much aimed at banning the Confessing Church directly,” Bethge said, “but gradually liquidating it through intimidation and the suppression of individual activities.”
As Bonhoeffer took great pains to make clear, the Barmen Declaration did not constitute a secession from the “official” German church because calling it a secession would give an appearance of legitimacy to that “official” German church. It was not the Confessing Church that had broken away, but the Reichskirche.
He was far ahead of the curve, as usual. Some wondered whether he was just kicking against the goads, but when someone asked Bonhoeffer whether he shouldn’t join the German Christians in order to work against them from within, he answered that he couldn’t. “If you board the wrong train,” he said, “it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.”
Bonhoeffer then famously enumerated “three possible ways in which the church can act towards the state.” The first, already mentioned, was for the church to question the state regarding its actions and their legitimacy—to help the state be the state as God has ordained. The second way—and here he took a bold leap—was “to aid the victims of state action.” He said that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society.” And before that sentence was over, he took another leap, far bolder than the first—in fact, some ministers walked out—by declaring that the church “has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”
It was as if he’d thrown a bucket of water on the congregation and had then thrown his shoes at them.
have long thought that sermons had a center that, if you hit it, would move anyone or confront them with a decision. I no longer believe that. First of all, a sermon can never grasp the center, but can only itself be grasped by it, by Christ. And then Christ becomes flesh as much in the word of the pietists as in that of the clerics or of the religious socialists, and these empirical connections actually pose difficulties for preaching that are absolute, not merely relative. This was a very radical and dramatic thing to say, but it is the perfectly logical conclusion to the idea that apart from God’s grace, one can do nothing worthwhile. Anything good must come from God, so even in a sermon that was poorly written and delivered, God might manifest himself and touch the congregation. Conversely in a sermon wonderfully written and delivered, God might refuse to manifest himself. The “success” of the sermon is utterly dependent on the God who breaks through and “grasps” us, or we cannot be “grasped.” There was a foreshadowing of Bonhoeffer’s famous “Jeremiah” sermon a few years hence, and of his attitude toward his fate under the Nazis. What did it mean to be “grasped” by God? And why did Bonhoeffer already begin to have a deep sense that God had “grasped him,” had chosen him for something?
“Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.” In another letter to her he wrote that “human beings were taken from the earth and don’t just consist of thin air and thoughts.”
On September 23 the parents heard their son preach on a theme central to him throughout his life, supporting the accurately earthly, incarnational aspect of the Christian faith against the Gnostic or dualistic idea that the body is inferior to the soul or spirit. “God wants to see human beings,” he said, “not ghosts who shun the world.” He said that in “the whole of world history there is always only one really significant hour—the present. . . . [I]f you want to find eternity, you must serve the times.”
Harnack’s theology was something like Archilochus’s proverbial fox, knowing many little things, while Barth’s theology was like a hedgehog, knowing one big thing. Bonhoeffer would side with the hedgehog, but he was in the fox’s seminar, and through his family and the Grunewald community, he had many ties with the fox. As a result of his intellectual openness, Bonhoeffer learned how to think like a fox and respect the way foxes thought, even though he was in the camp of the hedgehogs.
played, and the most draining. I tell myself
Few of us are granted the grace to know ourselves, and until we do, maybe the best we can do is be consistent. My father is nothing if not consistent.
It couldn’t work, no matter how long the match, because you can’t win the final of a slam by playing not to lose, or waiting for your opponent to lose
Andre, I won’t ever try to change you, because I’ve never tried to change anybody. If I could change somebody, I’d change myself. But I know I can give you structure and a blueprint to achieve what you want. There’s a difference between a plow horse and a racehorse. You don’t treat them the same. You hear all this talk about treating people equally, and I’m not sure equal means the same. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a racehorse, and I’ll always treat you accordingly. I’ll be firm, but fair. I’ll lead, never push. I’m not one of those people who expresses or articulates feelings very well, but from now on, just know this: It’s on, man. It is on. You know what I’m saying? We’re in a fight, and you can count on me until the last man is standing. Somewhere up there is a star with your name on it. I might not be able to help you find it, but I’ve got pretty strong shoulders, and you can stand on my shoulders while you’re looking for that star. You hear? For as long as you want. Stand on my shoulders and reach, man. Reach.
I talk about my father. I tell J.P. about the yelling, the pressure, the rage, the abandonment. J.P. gets a funny look on his face. You do realize, don’t you, that God isn’t anything like your father? You know that—don’t you? I almost drive the Corvette onto the shoulder. God, he says, is the opposite of your father. God isn’t mad at you all the time. God isn’t yelling in your ear, harping on your imperfections. That voice you hear all the time, that angry voice? That’s not God. That’s still your father. I turn to him: Do me a favor? Say that again. He does. Word for word. Say it once more. He does. I thank him. I ask about his own life.
But the good man too, no less than the wicked, succumbs to the same temptation to be a despiser of mankind if he sees through all this and withdraws in disgust, leaving his fellow-men to their own devices, and if he prefers to mind his own business rather than to debase himself in public life. Of course, his contempt for mankind is more respectable and upright, but it is also more barren and ineffectual
Fear he calls responsibility. Desire he calls keenness. Irresolution becomes solidarity. Brutality becomes masterfulness. Human weaknesses are played upon with unchaste seductiveness, so that meanness and baseness are reproduced and multiplied ever anew. The vilest contempt for mankind goes about its sinister business with the holiest of protestations of devotion to the human cause. And, as the base man grows baser, he becomes an ever more willing and adaptable tool in the hand of the tyrant. The small band of the upright are reviled. Their bravery is called insubordination; their self-control is called pharisaism; their independence arbitrariness and their masterfulness arrogance. For the tyrannical despiser of men popularity is the token of the highest love of mankind. His secret profound mistrust for all human beings he conceals behind words stolen from a true community.
He will easily consent to the bad, knowing full well that it is bad, in order to ward off what is worse, and in doing this he will no longer be able to see that precisely the worse which he is trying to avoid may still be the better. This is one of the underlying themes of tragedy.
The beatification of the doer includes his hearing, just as the beatification of the hearer includes his doing. One thing is needful: not to hear or to do, but to do both in one,
the law never confronts him otherwise than in summoning him personally to action.
The error of the Pharisees, therefore, did not lie in their extremely strict insistence on the necessity for action, but rather in their failure to act. “They say, and do not do it.”
If the Holy Scripture insists with such great urgency on doing, that is because it wishes to take away from man every possibility of self-justification before God on the basis of his own knowledge of good and evil.
No longer knowing good and evil, but knowing Christ as origin and as reconciliation, man will know all. For in knowing Christ man knows and acknowledges God’s choice which has fallen upon this man himself; he no longer stands as the chooser between good and evil, that is to say, in disunion; he is the chosen one, who can no longer choose, but has already made his choice in his being chosen in the freedom and unity of the deed and will of God.
But the good of which Jesus speaks consists entirely in action and not in judgement. Judging the other man always means a break in one’s own activity. The man who judges never acts himself; or, alternatively, whatever action of his own he may be able to show, and sometimes indeed there is plenty of it, is never more than judgement, condemnation, reproaches and accusations against other men.
Self-knowledge is man’s interminable striving to overcome his disunion with himself by thought; by unceasingly distinguishing himself from himself he endeavours to achieve unity with himself.
Freedom, we sought you long in discipline, action, suffering. Now as we die we see you and know you at last, face to face.
God’s command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you.
None learns the secret of freedom save only by way of control. Action
“Abandon all hope,” I’d written on a Post-it note, and I watched it move gently beneath the heat duct. I read it in some book. The idea was that hope misses the point: it’s either going to happen or not. You can’t make a new reality, only fashion something real from the one that you’ve got.
The twenty-first-century American church is a passion project of the creator.
Dear Church, truth that is not grounded in love is just brutality.
“Security should be a brand differentiator for us, not a minimum viable component,”
We were a team tonight trying to figure out how to play in all our new and ever-changing combinations, trying to ward off fatigue and trying to keep mentally focused among feelings of frustration and exhaustion.
was human nature. This game takes a lot out of you. And the idea that you might not be getting everything
See, any kind of greatness takes work. Everyone knows that. But what fewer people understand is that work itself takes faith. You have to have faith that the work you’re doing will bring about results, otherwise you’ll lose interest. Coaches like Brewer and Thomas made sure that I saw a direct relationship between my work and the results. That’s what their encouragement was. The fact that Coach Brewer took a moment to notice my grades and started treating me differently afterward, started investing time in me, made me feel like my work had value. The fact that Coach Thomas always had a kind word for me, always told me that he believed in me, made me feel like I was doing something right. That’s what I had a hard time explaining to my brother. It was true that you didn’t have to work to graduate or get by. But you had to work to see results. That was my theory, at least. But Coaches Brewer and Thomas made sure that theory was proven true.
Choose at most the three or four most probable contingencies for each phase, along with the worst-case scenario. This will prepare the team to execute and increase the chances of mission success.
“They have to understand why—but that why has to have a thread that ties back to them, to what is in it for them,” I told him. “And how do I do that?” he asked. “How can I make them care about the company’s profits?” “You have to think it through,” I said. “It’s like this. If you can capture this data that you want, you will be able to better arm both technicians in the field and your salespeople, right?” “Absolutely. That’s the whole point,” the ops manager agreed. “And once the technicians and salespeople are armed, they can do a better job, right?” I continued. “Definitely,” he answered. “Okay,” I said. “Now follow me: Armed with this data, the technicians will be able to provide better and faster customer service, and the salespeople will be able to sell more product to more customers. When we provide better service and sell more products, our business grows. When our business grows, we make more money—” “That’s what I said! But how does that help?” the ops manager interrupted. “Listen,” I told him. “When the company makes more money, we can invest more money in advertising and infrastructure. Once we put more money into advertising and infrastructure, we will gain even more customers and be able to support them even better. The better we perform as a company, the more customers we acquire. The more customers we acquire, the more work there is for technicians, which means overtime and overtime pay. And once the company maxes that out, we will need more technicians. The more technicians we need, the more we have to pay them to be here. So this means down the line, we will increase pay for technicians, especially experienced ones. And lastly, the more technicians and clients we have, the more team leaders and regional supervisors we will need. This opens up a pathway to advancement for every technician at this company. So profitability of the company not only puts money into the pockets of the owners—which the frontline technicians probably don’t care too much about—but more important, it impacts the technicians directly: it opens up opportunity for more pay, higher salaries, and a pathway for career advancement. That’s the thread that ties all of this together and aligns everyone at the company—the corporate leadership team right down to the field technicians. That’s leadership.” The operations manager nodded. The light had come on. It was clear.
As SEALs, we had SOPs for just about everything we did: the way we lined up and loaded our vehicles, our vehicle and foot patrol formations, the methodologies we used to clear buildings, the way we handled prisoners and dealt with wounded SEALs—the list goes on and on. But those SOPs didn’t constrain us on the battlefield. On the contrary, they gave us freedom. The disciplined SOPs were a line to deviate from, and we had the freedom to act quickly based on those procedures.
I explained that one of the things that makes it so hard to fire someone is the leader’s knowledge that they have not done everything to actually lead a poor performer. As leaders, we feel bad when we haven’t done enough: We haven’t trained. We haven’t mentored. We haven’t led. And that makes us feel guilty—and rightly so.
“Task saturated” was a term we used in the SEAL Teams to describe how an individual, or a team, would get overwhelmed when multiple problems were encountered simultaneously. They couldn’t properly Prioritize and Execute. Trying to process too much information at once, they broke down and either failed to take any action or made a bad decision that put them at risk, along with the team or the mission.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the term ‘leadership capital’ before,” I continued. “As a leader, you only have so much authority that you can spend, and you need to choose wisely where you apply it. It seems to me you are expending a great deal of your leadership capital on cell phones when it might be much better utilized elsewhere.
Good performance comes from rehearsal.
The CO grew more comfortable with our combat operations. He and his staff developed trust in us. As a result, all the combat missions we submitted received approval, which allowed Charlie Platoon and Task Unit Bruiser to deliver huge impact on the battlefield.
“The most important part of the brief,” said Jocko, “is to explain your Commander’s Intent.” When everyone participating in an operation knows and understands the purpose and end state of the mission, they can theoretically act without further guidance. This was a completely different mind-set for us, and we ran with it.
A broad and ambiguous mission results in lack of focus, ineffective execution, and mission creep. To prevent this, the mission must be carefully refined and simplified so that it is explicitly clear and specifically focused to achieve the greater strategic vision for which that mission is a part. The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result, or “end state,” of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission. While a simple statement, the Commander’s Intent is actually the most important part of the brief. When understood by everyone involved in the execution of the plan, it guides each decision and action on the ground.
In the SEAL Teams, we strive to be confident, but not cocky (see chapter 12). We take tremendous pride in the history and legacy of our organization. We are confident in our skills and are eager to take on challenging missions that others cannot or aren’t willing to execute. But we can’t ever think we are too good to fail or that our enemies are not capable, deadly, and eager to exploit our weaknesses. We must never get complacent. This is where controlling the ego is most important.
Continuing, I told the VP, “In those situations, you ended up with a unit that never felt they were to blame for anything. All they did was make excuses and ultimately never made the adjustments necessary to fix problems. Now, compare that to the commander who came in and took the blame. He said, ‘My subordinate leaders made bad calls; I must not have explained the overall intent well enough.’ Or, ‘The assault force didn’t execute the way I envisioned; I need to make sure they better understand my intent and rehearse more thoroughly.’ The good leaders took ownership of the mistakes and shortfalls. That’s the key difference. And how do you think their SEAL platoons and task units reacted to this type of leadership?” “They must have respected that,” the VP acknowledged.
Resist the idea that the ballot box or either party will save us. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Resist anything that doesn’t line up with the arc of the gospel; resist vehemently, as if our lives depended on it—because they do. Jesus is resistance. Dear Church, resist this corruption of life, and deny death.
Jesus Christ, by his very existence, asks of his followers to be seditious. That is the power of the gospel story: that Jesus resisted the fear-fueled instincts that led to the oppression of the marginalized. If you’re looking for revolutionary models that tackle external and internalized oppression, sit with the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts for a
The power of symbols cannot be underestimated, and the fact that we have tried to remove womanhood from the divine is more a reflection of the weakness of modern manhood than anything womanhood ever was or will be.
We ignore Scripture like Proverbs 9:1–6: Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls from the highest places in the town, “You that are simple, turn in here!” To those without sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”
We have reduced the opening of God’s kingdom on earth to LGBTQIA folks to a term that in ELCA vernacular is a dog whistle: “the 2009 decision.” (I cannot help but see the irony that a church whose entire theological framework is in direct opposition to “decision theology” describes the expanding of God’s grace as a “decision.”)
We can queer Advent by talking about how Jesus had two mothers, one being an unwed teenager and the other being Sophia, the Holy Spirit. We can create an anti-racist Advent by describing the slaughter of the innocents as exactly what it was: ethnic cleansing by a leader who wanted to ensure his genetic line continued to rule. But if we stick to the idea that Advent is a time of darkness, midnight, blackness when we await the dawn, light, and whiteness, we are conflating whiteness with holiness—a powerful symbol whose ill effects on our community we have yet to really explore.
This may mean that you are going to be really uncomfortable. But white discomfort is not worse than experiencing racism as a black person. This may mean that you will have to hold this church accountable to its own belief that racism is a sin.
White supremacy is the system that separates us. Take, for example, our readings of the parable of the Good Samaritan. I read it from the perspective of the one lying in the road, who has been waylaid by bandits. You see yourself as the good Samaritan. Or, best-case scenario, you wonder why you keep passing me by on the road.
My ordination is radical. I have a myriad of drug felonies; I spent years homeless; I received my GED in county prison. The church affirming me is a radical act. It is a way of saying that grace is real. That all of these intersecting and systemic conditions that conspired to squeeze the life out of me, combined with poor decision-making on my part, are nothing in light of God’s calling. That the Jesus we lynched rose in resurrection and redemption and offers that grace and love freely, liberally to anyone. My very existence, my next breath, my family, my freedom is proof that God is real. That grace is real. And it is also real for you.
I am often asked how the church can avoid the gravity well that is the political divide in this country. I think the real question is, Do we even have to? The church is political. Feeding the homeless is radical. Marriage is radical when it’s offered to everyone and blessed by clergy. God’s justice is radical. Centering the oppressed is radical. Our task is not so much to reject politicism as it is to reject evil. The message of Jesus is radical and political.
The fact that anyone among us feels like we should apologize is heartbreaking to me. Let me be clear, the church should be all about bringing people further and further along the arc toward justice. But the work of bringing congregations along this journey is difficult, and leadership isn’t about blindly walking into the future. An elder in the black Lutheran community once said, “If you are a leader in this church and no one is following, you are just out for a walk.” We must meet our communities where they are, but the God of Jesus of Nazareth has never shied away from the proclamation of truth. The gospel is always a call for liberation. It infects the hearts of those it has been presented to like wildfire that scorches away hatred. When did we become so damn afraid of it? Dear Church, we are cowards.
“You keep saying you’re the one who takes the hit and it wasn’t you. So where does it come from?” I asked finally. “My boss! Okay? I have a boss. I don’t run NBC News exclusively,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. “You know, everyone was involved in this decision. You can speculate what Kim Harris’s motives are, you can speculate what Andy’s motives are, you can speculate what my motives are. All I can tell you is at the end of the day, they felt like, you know, there was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward.” He reminded me, twice, that he’d revived my career after my show was canceled. That we’d been friends. He hoped we could get a beer and laugh about it all in a few months. I struggled to understand what he was asking for. Gradually, he let it out. “I’m just making a plea,” he said. “If the opportunity ever does present itself to you to say that maybe I’m not the villain in all this, I would be grateful.” And there it was, at the end of his arguments: an unwillingness not just to take responsibility but to admit that responsibility might, in some place, in someone’s hands, exist. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that stopped the reporting. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that bowed to lawyers and threats; that hemmed and hawed and parsed and shrugged; that sat on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt. That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld so much silence in so many places. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that protected Harvey Weinstein and men like him; that yawned and gaped and enveloped law firms and PR shops and executive suites and industries; that swallowed women whole. Noah Oppenheim was not the villain.
And I know with every fiber of my being that if my male makeup artist was not
Perez said that she urged Sciorra to speak by describing her own experience of going public about her assault. “I told her, ‘I used to tread water for years. It’s fucking exhausting, and maybe speaking out, that’s your lifeboat. Grab on and get out,’” Perez recalled. “I said, ‘Honey, the water never goes away. But, after I went public, it became a puddle and I built a bridge over it, and one day you’re gonna get there, too.’”
“What I'd like to see,” said Big Mac, “is the test of strength and grit called Hauling the Bucket, but it's probably been outlawed. A guy picks up two iron buckets weighing a couple of hundred pounds apiece, and he runs—or struggles—down the track until he's forced to drop them. The longest run wins. As the saying goes, if you don't drop dead, you haven't been trying hard enough.”
The protocols’ spread to social questions also gave elites a chance to limit the range of possible answers. “You absolutely constrain the solution set that you’re prepared to look at,” he said. “It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? If you only have English speakers in the car, then the solution is going to be done in English.” In Hinton’s view, it was not a matter of malice. “It’s the banality of inattentiveness,” he said. “It’s not wickedness. It’s not conscious self-censorship. It’s just habit.” He brought up that meeting of nonexpert experts he had hosted in that conference room above West 57th Street. “I’m guilty of that,” he said. “I’ve got a pretty broad Rolodex. But when you reach out, you reach out to smart, articulate people like yourself. I mean, we all do that. So it self-replicates.”
Porter was making clear that “business” is not a fixed quantity. It can be done in different ways, following different approaches. It happened in recent decades to have been taken over by protocols that, in the name of making everything optimal, granted a license to neglect and even hurt others. “We sort of created a cartoon,” Porter said, “which is this view of, if you can force your employee to work overtime without paying them, then you should do it—that’s free markets, and that’s profit maximization.”
As a response to the compliance model, I will seek to establish the following three claims: (1) Spaces of discretion at the street level are not simply “aberrations” that result from poor management (and that could, as such, be easily curtailed); (2) Such spaces of discretion necessarily involve normative judgment—by which I mean judgment that implicates questions of value—and not merely technical or “expert” rationality; (3) While spaces of discretion at the street level must be tightly controlled, we will often (though not always) have good reasons to preserve them.
The NCDI thus combines service and regulatory functions and, given the volume of clients who pass through it, it is also effectively a “people-processing” organization—one whose primary function is not to change the behavior of clients but to confer “public statuses” on them.
While the NCDI started with a militant community empowerment agenda, it gradually morphed into a human services organization that both administers and helps clients apply for a wide range of governmental programs.
This book draws on an eclectic array of sources. It engages with political theory in the Anglo-American and Continental traditions, with contemporary moral philosophy, and with social theory. But it also situates normative questions in a richly textured account of bureaucratic life that remains sensitive to institutional context and lived experience. This account builds on empirical research in anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology; on literary representations of bureaucracy; and on eight months of participant observation I conducted in an antipoverty agency.
By shedding light on how the bureaucratic encounter takes place in more traditional, face-to-face settings, the following pages will help us think more clearly about the proper role of technology in public service delivery.
Three commonalities are particularly noteworthy: street-level bureaucrats are at the bottom of organizational hierarchies; they interact with clients directly; and they are vested with a meaningful margin of discretion.
To use a distinction made famous by Pierre Bourdieu, these bureaucrats belong to both the “Left hand” of the state, the one that delivers social services, and to the “Right hand,” the one that enforces order and economic discipline.
When making discretionary decisions, street-level bureaucrats ought to remain sensitive to these plural considerations—of efficiency, fairness, and responsiveness, as well as to that of respect,
while public agencies rely, for their proper functioning, on the moral agency of street-level bureaucrats, they place these bureaucrats in a working environment that tends to undermine that very agency. This book explores how this predicament comes about and how we might respond to it. It seeks to address two questions: How do the pressures of everyday work gradually truncate the moral dispositions of street-level bureaucrats? And how can we equip such bureaucrats to respond to these pressures while remaining sensitive and balanced moral agents?
Pinker’s actual point was narrow, focused, and valid: Interpersonal violence as a mode of human problem-solving was in a long free fall. But for many who heard the talk, it offered a socially acceptable way to tell people seething over the inequities of the age to drop their complaining. “It has become an ideology of: The world today may be complex and complicated and confusing in many ways, but the reality is that if you take the long-term perspective you will realize how good we have it,” Giussani said. The ideology, he said, told people, “You’re being unrealistic, and you’re not looking at things in the right way. And if you think that you have problems, then, you know, your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are really not problems, because things are getting better.” Giussani had heard rich men do this kind of thing so often that he had invented a verb for the act: They were “Pinkering”—using the long-run direction of human history to minimize, to delegitimize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic Pinkering, which “is to tell people the global economy has been great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty to the middle class. And, of course, that’s true,” Giussani said. “But if you tell that to the guy who has been fired from a factory in Manchester because his job was taken to China, he may have a different reaction. But we don’t care about the guy in Manchester. So there are many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify the current situation.”
One means of enforcement is the preference these days for thinkers who remind winners of their victorious selves, Giussani said.
“Poverty is essentially a question that you can address via charity,” he said. A person of means, seeing poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. “But inequality,” Giussani said, “you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.” Inequality, he said, is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a privileged person, it means to look into one’s own privilege. And, he said, “you cannot change it by yourself. You can change the system only together. With charity, essentially, if you have money, you can do a lot of things alone.” This distinction ran parallel to Cuddy’s reframing of her antisexism message in her TED talk. What motivated her to study the topic was inequality—specifically, a lack of power in one set of students because of the power held by another set (and people like them). This was a crime with a victim and a perpetrator. By the time this idea made it to TED, the inequality, as we’ve seen, had been resculpted into poverty. “Women,” Cuddy said, “feel chronically less powerful than men.” The crime was still a crime, but now it wanted for suspects.
Sinek had initially set out to study law in Britain, but he realized not long after the course began that “it didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit it.” He quit in the middle of his first year, to his parents’ horror, and went into the world of advertising. There he “learned the importance of the role of emotions,” he said; “that it’s not just an argument but rather that you can make somebody feel a certain way or connect to them in a certain way.” He learned that “rather than just facts and figures, if you can get someone to associate their lives and themselves to whatever it is you’re doing, and assert whatever it is you’re doing into their lives, you’re more likely to create not only a saleable product but love.”
The irony of all this is dark: Scaling back her critique of the system had allowed her to be wildly popular with MarketWorld elites and more easily digested by the world at large; and so she became famous, which drew the system of sexism into her life as never before and heightened her awareness of it; and its ferocity convinced her not to take on that system but to conclude that it might never change; and this acquiescence made her turn from uprooting sexism to helping women survive it. She had been drafted into a growing brigade: the theorists of the kind of change that leaves the underlying issues untouched. “I might have a view that’s a little bit unorthodox,” said Cuddy, “which is that, actually, we have done a really good job of documenting the problems and the mechanisms underlying them,” she said. “We really fully understand all of the structural and psychological and neurological mechanisms that lead to prejudice. We get it.” This view of scholars’ work perhaps made it easier to justify the punch-pulling for MarketWorld, but it was also problematic. After all, her academic colleagues in other fields like race, gender, and sexuality—to cite just a few examples—worked, in a slow, winding, often unheralded way, producing tangible change in an entire culture’s way of talking. Sometimes even the most risk-averse politicians now casually voiced concepts coined at universities: “micro-aggressions” (Chester Pierce, psychiatry, Harvard, 1970); “white privilege” (Peggy McIntosh, women’s studies, Wellesley, 1988); “gender identity” (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); “intersectionality” (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, critical race theory, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989).
In the poem “Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet realizes that he has no chance of getting his way because the language in which he is forced to speak belongs to another domain. The businessperson’s amortization is factored into his tax bill, but what about the poet’s “amortization of the heart and soul”? The businessperson gets a break for his debts, but can the poet claim the same advantage for his indebtedness “to everything/about which/I have not yet written”?
Yet in Drezner’s view it is rising inequality that has most altered the sphere of ideas. It has had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, extreme inequality has created “a thirst for ideas to diagnose and treat the problems that seem to plague the United States.” On the other, it has spawned “a new class of benefactors to fund the generation and promotion of new ideas.” So America is more interested than ever in the problem of inequality and social fracture—and more dependent than ever on explainers who happen to be in good odor with billionaires.
“It is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times for public intellectuals,” declares Daniel Drezner, a foreign policy scholar, in his recent treatise The Ideas Industry, a part-academic, part-first-person account of how an age of inequality, among other things, has distorted the work of thinking.
Cohen began to worry that this idea of business training as a way station to world-changing was just a recruiter’s ruse, and one made easier to sell by the glow of MarketWorld’s seemingly noble intentions. What was the value in the problem-solving methods she had signed up to learn? Working on client projects, she began to run a parallel exercise in her own mind, ignoring the McKinsey toolkit and just asking herself what she thought the right answer was. “Very rarely, if ever, did the step-by-step, perfectly linear process of ‘here’s how we’re going to conduct this exploration’—very rarely did that actually surface the right answer,” she said. Often, that process—the thing for which McKinsey was famed—was “used primarily for communicating the answer, rather than generating it,” she said. The answers were derived through intelligence and common sense, and then the team would make them look more like trademark McKinsey answers: “We would backfill them into the template,” Cohen said.
“Does its introduction lessen the pressure for collective action, either private collective action like unions or public collective action like social movements?” he asked. “It would be a sad irony if a great new Band-Aid headed off the major surgery—expanded unemployment insurance, paid family leave, unions and new union alternatives, and so on—that an insecure citizenry so desperately needs.” Hacker was referring back to groups of individually powerless citizens potentially banding together to gain strength in numbers and stand up to powerful interests—the idea, in short, of political action.
Carson made clear that he did not believe they were right in their sense of victimhood. But in order to get his job done, he decided to honor the feeling.
The promotional materials put out by the new Beeck Center illustrated, for example, how business language has conquered the sphere of social change and pushed out an older language of power, justice, and rights.
people that they can “do well by doing good.” Thus when Cohen and her friends sought to make a difference, their approaches were less about what they wanted to take down or challenge and more about the ventures they wanted to start up, she said. Many of them believed there was more power in building up what was good than in challenging what was bad.
There’s only so much time in your life.”
For Osborn, the solution was not to have his employees work alone, but rather to remove the threat of criticism from group work. He invented the concept of brainstorming, a process in which group members generate ideas in a nonjudgmental atmosphere. Brainstorming had four rules: 1. Don’t judge or criticize ideas. 2. Be freewheeling. The wilder the idea, the better. 3. Go for quantity. The more ideas you have, the better. 4. Build on the ideas of fellow group members.
She realizes she must dedicate this book to her father. And to her husband. And all the people who will, in time, turn into other things.
And even if the question of whether or not you could become the world’s greatest white rapper hadn’t just been answered, it would be completely beside the point. Continuing to look at rap as an example of cultural appropriation verses cultural appreciation: if you really love rap, you love more than just the beats. You love the artists, the pioneers, the science, the history of it all. You love the meaning and the significance of rap—not only what it has meant to you, but what it has meant to the artists and its fans. If you love rap you love the strength it has provided black people. If you love rap you understand that it is an art form that has been lovingly grown and nurtured in a hostile world. You also understand that the pain and adversity that helped shape rap is not something you’ve had to face. When you look at the history of rap, the heritage of rap, the struggle of rap, the triumph of rap—it may inspire you to want to rap yourself. But when all you can take is the art, and you can take the enjoyment and the profit and the recognition—and you can’t take any of the pain or the history or the struggle, can you do so and honestly call it rap if you love it at all?
The real unfairness lies in the oppression and inequality that these words helped create and maintain.
A lot of people want to skip ahead to the finish line of racial harmony. Past all this unpleasantness to a place where all wounds are healed and the past is laid to rest. I believe that this is where some of the desire (excluding openly racist assholes who just want to make people of color feel unsafe) to use racially taboo language comes from. But words only lose their power when first the impact of those words are no longer felt, not the other way around. We live in a world where the impacts of systemic racism are still threatening the lives of countless people of color today.
On Monday morning Qwilleran faxed his theater review for that day’s edition and the “Qwill Pen” for Tuesday, and he started thinking about the “Qwill Pen” for Friday. For him the treadmill effect was the challenge and fascination of journalism. The job was never finished. There was always another deadline. He remembered the newsdesks in metropolitan papers Down Below, where there was always another scandal, another war, another ball-game, another fire, another murder, another election, another court trial, another hero, another obituary, another Fourth of July.
Finally, I suggest setting a maximum average response time, or MART, for your site. The great thing about performance is that it's usually quite measurable - and what gets measured, gets managed! You may need two MART numbers - one that is achievable in development, with your developer hardware, and one that you use in production, with production hardware.
“I understand,” she lied. “I do.”
brain cancer is not erased by talking about breast cancer. They are two different issues with two different treatments, and they require two different conversations.
Note, if you are a white person in this situation, do not think that just because you may not be aware of your racial identity at the time that you did not bring race to your experience of the situation as well. We are all products of a racialized society, and it affects everything we bring to our interactions.
1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race. 2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. 3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.
Laypeople didn’t understand how much scientific literature was about nuance and shared understanding.
When two people get in a fight, and only one has a gun and the will to use it? That’s a short damned fight. Only it wasn’t Bobbie’s voice that said it this time. It was Amos’. A few decades flying the same ship together had built little versions of her family in her head. Made some part of them a part of her, even when she didn’t particularly want them to be. Even when the little mirrors of them only told her that their conversation wasn’t finished.
I’ve read stories in which people argue that AIs deserve legal rights, but in focusing on the big philosophical question, there’s a mundane reality that these stories gloss over. It’s similar to the way movies always depict love in terms of grand romantic gestures when, over the long term, love also means working through money problems and picking dirty laundry off the floor. So while achieving legal rights for AIs would be a major step, another milestone that would be just as important is people putting real effort into their individual relationships with AIs. And even if we don’t care about them having legal rights, there’s still good reason to treat conscious machines with respect. You don’t have to believe that bomb-sniffing dogs deserve the right to vote to recognize that abusing them is a bad idea. Even if all you care about is how well they can detect bombs, it’s in your best interest that they be treated well. No matter whether we want AIs to fill the role of employees, lovers, or pets, I suspect they will do a better job if, during their development, there were people who cared about them.
“That sounds good, but—” Nat thought about how years of acting a certain way could wear ruts in a person’s brain, so that you would keep slipping into the same habits without trying to. “But it’s not easy,” said Nat.
As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.
was no expert on marriage, but I knew what marriage counselors said: pinpointing blame wasn’t the answer. Instead, couples needed to acknowledge each other’s feelings and address their problems as a team.
of combing through the CSS, I decided to approach the problem from first principles - what was the intent of the design? Why was Rubygems.org using WebFonts? Deciding on Design Intent Now, I am not a designer, and I don't pretend to be one on the internet. As developers, our job isn't to tell the designers "Hey, you're dumb for including over 500KB of WebFonts in your design!". That's not their job. As performance-minded web developers, our job is to deliver the designer's vision in the most performant way possible.
As performance-minded web developers, our job is to deliver the designer's vision in the most performant way possible. This is a screenshot of Rubygems.org's homepage.
I’m going to summarize the existing research/literature on performance and business performance, but you can find a huge repository of these studies at wpostats.com.
Little Xu Mei, who worked in the university president’s office, had a single pearl-headed pin that she wore on the lapel of every shirt and dress. Barbra had been passing by the office when the pin broke loose and the pearl rolled into some unseen crack, never to be found again. She still remembered the tears and the consolation, the way that Xu Mei never stopped searching for that one tiny pearl. The Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.
The U.S. Army has a name for a similar phenomenon: “the Bus to Abilene.” “Any army officer can tell you what that means,” Colonel (Ret.) Stephen J. Gerras, a professor of behavioral sciences at the U.S. Army War College, told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2008. “It’s about a family sitting on a porch in Texas on a hot summer day, and somebody says, ‘I’m bored. Why don’t we go to Abilene?’ When they get to Abilene, somebody says, ‘You know, I didn’t really want to go.’ And the next person says, ‘I didn’t want to go—I thought you wanted to go,’ and so on. Whenever you’re in an army group and somebody says, ‘I think we’re all getting on the bus to Abilene here,’ that is a red flag. You can stop a conversation with it. It is a very powerful artifact of our culture.”
All three of them could reenact the licorice gun scene in Adam’s Rib, knew every insult in Woman of the Year, and used the research questions in Desk Set as passwords. The films had been stacked in the dusty crawl space under the stairs and were marked PROPERTY OF BREEZY MANOR. Andrew pictured Breezy as a sexy sixties dollybird sort of lady until Saina told him that a manor was a house and that it was probably what the last owners had called their house.
For example, adherents of the Big Five school of personality psychology (which argues that human personality can be boiled down to five primary traits) define introversion not in terms of a rich inner life but as a lack of qualities such as assertiveness and sociability.
The introductory topic taught in any modern course on business strategy is the connection between industry structure and profit. This topic is usually called the “Five Forces,” following Michael Porter’s pioneering analysis of industry structure, published in 1980. A quick summary is that a terrible industry looks like this: the product is an undifferentiated commodity; everyone has the same costs and access to the same technology; and buyers are price sensitive, knowledgeable, and willing to switch suppliers at a moment’s notice to get a better deal.
Being independent without being eccentric and doubting without being a curmudgeon are some of the most difficult things a person can do.
John Bushland was a talented young photographer who was losing his hair early; hence his affectionate nickname. On several occasions he had tried to shoot the Siamese for an annual cat calendar, but they had been pointedly uncooperative. No matter how cautiously he raised his camera, they instantly rolled from a lyrical pose into a grotesque muddle of hind legs and nether parts. After every disappointing effort he said, “I’m not licked yet!”
Overcoming quick closure is simple in principle: you look for additional insights and strategies. But, most of the time, when asked to generate more alternatives, people simply add one or two shallow alternatives to their initial insight. Consciously or unconsciously, they seem to resist developing several robust strategies. Instead, most people take their initial insight and tweak it slightly, adding a straw-man alternative, or including options such as “walk away,” or “more study,” that are generic to any situation rather than being responsive to the special circumstances at hand. A new alternative should flow from a reconsideration of the facts of the situation, and it should also address the weaknesses of any already developed alternatives. The creation of new higher-quality alternatives requires that one try hard to “destroy” any existing alternatives, exposing their fault lines and internal contradictions. I call this discipline create-destroy. Trying to destroy your own ideas is not easy or pleasant. It takes mental toughness to pick apart one’s own insights. In my own case, I rely on outside help—I invoke a virtual panel of experts that I carry around in my mind. This panel of experts is a collection of people whose judgments I value. I use an internal mental dialogue with them to both critique my own ideas and stimulate new ones. I try to do this before putting my ideas before others. The panel of experts trick works because we are adept at recognizing and comprehending well-integrated human personalities. Thinking through how a particular well-remembered expert might respond to a problem can be a richer source of criticism and advice than abstract theories or frameworks. My own personal virtual panel of experts contains respected executives I have known and worked with, people who educated and trained me, colleagues I have worked with over the years, and certain people whose points of view emerge clearly from their own written work or from biography. When I face a problem, or have generated a first hunch, I turn to this panel and ask, “What is wrong with this approach to the situation? What would you do in this case?” Professor Bruce Scott, who chaired my dissertation committee long ago in 1971, sits on my panel of experts. In my imagination, I can see him, leaning back in his chair and asking me to explain why anyone should listen to me and to tell him what the action implication is … and there had better be one. Also present is Professor Alfred D. Chandler Jr., who passed away in 2007 but
When engineers use a nice clean deductive system to solve a problem, they call it winding the crank. By this they mean that it may be hard work, but that the nature and quality of the output depends on the machine (the chosen system of deduction), not on the skill of the crank winder.
the 1980s, Sloan’s design had faded away—a vivid illustration of the power of entropy. General Motors not only had blurred its brands and divisions, it engaged in badge engineering, offering essentially the same vehicle under several model and brand names.
you cannot fully understand the value of the daily work of managers unless one accepts the general tendency of unmanaged human structures to become less ordered, less focused, and more blurred around the edges.
“Oh, Qwill! I hope you’re joking and not just being cynical,” Polly protested.
In seeing what is happening during a change it is helpful to understand that you will be surrounded by predictable biases in forecasting. For instance, people rarely predict that a business or economic trend will peak and then decline. If sales of a product are growing rapidly, the forecast will be for continued growth, with the rate of growth gradually declining to “normal” levels. Such a prediction may be valid for a frequently purchased product, but it can be far off for a durable good. For durable products—such as flat-screen televisions, fax machines, and power mowers—there is an initial rapid expansion of sales when the product is first offered, but after a period of time everyone who is interested has acquired one, and sales can suffer a sharp drop. After that, sales track population growth and replacement demand. Predicting the existence of such peaks is not difficult, although the timing cannot be pinned down until the growth rate begins to slow.
In the words of my UC Berkeley junior-year physics professor, Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, “This course is labeled ‘advanced’ because we don’t understand it very well.” He explained, “If there were a clear and consistent theory about what is going on here, we would call this course ‘elementary’ physics.”
Whatever it is called, the underlying principle is that improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.
The proposition that growth itself creates value is so deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of business that it has become an article of almost unquestioned faith that growth is a good thing. CEO Avery’s description of his problem (“The company’s growth had slowed down in the 1980s”) and his goals (“We want to grow bigger … a worldwide foundation for continued international growth”) are little more than the repetition of the word “growth”—magical invocations of the name of the object of desire.
is basic industry analysis and could have been easily predicted by the use of the popular Five Forces framework developed by
It is also human nature to associate current profit with recent actions, even though it should be evident that current plenty is the harvest of planting seasons long past.
There are little or no payoffs to incremental improvements in chain-link systems, but Marco avoided this problem by shutting down the normal system of local measurement and reward, refocusing on change itself as the objective.
Many writers on strategy seem to suggest that the more dynamic the situation, the farther ahead a leader must look. This is illogical. The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be. The proximate objective is guided by forecasts of the future, but the more uncertain the future, the more its essential logic is that of “taking a strong position and creating options,” not of looking far ahead.
Phyllis’s insight that “the engineers can’t work without a specification” applies to most organized human effort. Like the Surveyor design teams, every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem—one that is solvable. Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of ambiguity about the specific obstacles to be overcome. To take responsibility is more than a willingness to accept the blame. It is setting proximate objectives and handing the organization a problem it can actually solve.
One of the main projects at JPL was Surveyor, an unmanned machine that would soft-land on the moon, take measurements and photographs, and, in later missions, deploy a small roving vehicle. The most vexing problem for the Surveyor design team had been that no one knew what the moon’s surface was like.2 Scientists had worked up three or four theories about how the moon was formed. The lunar surface might be soft, the powdery residue of eons of meteoric bombardment. It might be a nest of needle-sharp crystals. It might be a jumble of large boulders, like a glacial moraine. Would a vehicle sink into powder? Would it be speared on needlelike crystals? Would it wedge between giant boulders? Given this ambiguity about the lunar surface, engineers had a difficult time creating designs for Surveyor. It wasn’t that you couldn’t design a vehicle; it was that you couldn’t defend any one design against someone else’s story about the possible horrors of the lunar surface. At that time, I worked for Phyllis Buwalda, who directed Future Mission Studies at JPL. Homeschooled on a ranch in Colorado, Phyllis had a tough, practical intellect that could see to the root of a problem. She was best known for her work on a model of the lunar surface.3 With this specification in place, JPL engineers and subcontractors were able to stop guessing and get to work. The lunar surface Phyllis described was hard and grainy, with slopes of no more than about fifteen degrees, scattered small stones, and boulders no larger than about two feet across spaced here and there. Looking at this specification for the first time, I was amazed. “Phyllis,” I said, “this looks a lot like the Southwestern desert.” “Yes, doesn’t it?” she said with a smile. “But,” I complained, “you really don’t know what the moon is like. Why write a spec saying it is like the local desert?” “This is what the smoother parts of the earth are like, so it is probably a pretty good guess as to what we’ll find on the moon if we stay away from the mountains.” “But, you really have no idea what the surface of the moon is like! It could be powder, or jagged needles.…” “Look,” she said, “the engineers can’t work without a specification. If it turns out to be a lot more difficult than this, we aren’t going to be spending much time on the moon anyway.”
Thus, we should seek coordinated policies only when the gains are very large
As is clear to anyone who has belonged to a coordinating committee, coordination interrupts and de-specializes people.
But decentralized decision making cannot do everything. In particular, it may fail when either the costs or benefits of actions are not borne by the decentralized actors. The split between the costs and benefits may occur across organizational units or between the present and the future.
Decentralized schools, he argues, perform better. Now, whether the organization of a school system explains most of the variations in school performance is not actually critical. What is critical, and what makes his diagnosis useful to policy makers, is that organization explains some part of school performance and that, unlike culture or social class, organization is something that can be addressed with policy.
The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects. This simplified model of reality allows one to make sense of the situation and engage in further problem solving. Furthermore, a good strategic diagnosis does more than explain a situation—it also defines a domain of action.
The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.
The amazing thing about New Thought is that it is always presented as if it were new! And no matter how many times the same ideas are repeated, they are received by many listeners with fresh nods of affirmation. These ritual recitations obviously tap into a deep human capacity to believe that intensely focused desire is magically rewarded.
Ascribing the success of Ford and Apple to a vision, shared at all levels, rather than pockets of outstanding competence mixed with luck, is a radical distortion of history.
As in many other official visions, the standard of excellence set is the People magazine measure of success: “being known.”
Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.
There has been a lot of ink spilled on the inner logic of competitive strategy and on the mechanics of advantage. But the essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself. Strategy does not eliminate scarcity and its consequence—the necessity of choice. Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
As in the law, disciplined conflict calls forth stronger evidence and reasoning.
A good strategy defines a critical challenge. What is more, it builds a bridge between that challenge and action, between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp.
One form of bad strategic objectives occurs when there is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish—a “dog’s dinner” of strategic objectives. A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done. Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into the “strategic plan.” Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long-term” is added so that none of them need be done today.
If you are a midlevel manager, your boss sets your goals. Or, if you work in an enlightened company, you and your boss negotiate over your goals. In either setting, it is natural to think of strategies as actions designed to accomplish specific goals. However, taking this way of thinking into a top-level position is a mistake. Being a general manager, CEO, president, or other top-level leader means having more power and being less constrained. Effective senior leaders don’t chase arbitrary goals. Rather, they decide which general goals should be pursued. And they design the subgoals that various pieces of the organization work toward. Indeed, the cutting edge of any strategy is the set of strategic objectives (subgoals) it lays out. One of the challenges of being a leader is mastering this shift from having others define your goals to being the architect of the organization’s purposes and objectives. To help clarify this distinction it is helpful to use the word “goal” to express overall values and desires and to use the word “objective” to denote specific operational targets. Thus, the United States may have “goals” of freedom, justice, peace, security, and happiness. It is strategy which transforms these vague overall goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives—defeat the Taliban and rebuild a decaying infrastructure. A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.
To obtain higher performance, leaders must identify the critical obstacles to forward progress and then develop a coherent approach to overcoming them.
Business leaders know their organizations should have a strategy. Yet many express frustration with the whole process of strategic planning. The reason for this dissatisfaction is that most corporate strategic plans are simply three-year or five-year rolling budgets combined with market share projections. Calling a rolling budget of this type a “strategic plan” gives people false expectations that the exercise will somehow result in a coherent strategy.
In the several years since that seminar, I have had the opportunity to discuss the bad strategy concept with a number of senior executives. In the process, I have condensed my list of its key hallmarks to the four listed in the beginning of this chapter: fluff, the failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives.
But the power of that strategy derived from their discovery of a different way of viewing competitive advantage—a shift from thinking about pure military capability to one of looking for ways to impose asymmetric costs on an opponent.
Half of what alert participants learn in a strategy exercise is to consider the competition even when no one tells you to do it in advance.
Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.
The best answer to this puzzle is that the real surprise was that such a pure and focused strategy was actually implemented. Most complex organizations spread rather than concentrate resources, acting to placate and pay off internal and external interests. Thus, we are surprised when a complex organization, such as Apple or the U.S. Army, actually focuses its actions. Not because of secrecy, but because good strategy itself is unexpected.
A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. The guiding policy specifies the approach to dealing with the obstacles called out in the diagnosis. It is like a signpost, marking the direction forward but not defining the details of the trip. Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments, and actions designed to carry out the guiding policy.
A word that can mean anything has lost its bite. To give content to a concept one has to draw lines, marking off what it denotes and what it does not.
Nothing degraded morale like the sense that the potential for excellence was being denied.
The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting. Thus were the great decisions of history made.
Steller’s sea lions, of which there were only a handful here, were meaty-looking big boys that you wouldn’t want to mess with, though the sharks occasionally did. A Steller’s bull was holding court near the Tit; his size, I thought, would daunt even a Sister.
Rest assured that this gull asks only two questions of any living thing: First, “Am I hungry?” (Answer: yes.) Second, “Can I get away with it?” (Answer: I’ll try.) —WILLIAM LEON DAWSON, BIRDS OF CALIFORNIA, 1923
And when I write it all down will I say that my mother is clearing away the memories that fill up the small rooms where she needs to live, making way for the self, the self that not religion or motherhood, not communes or communists could contain? In that version I am—still—too small to compete with my mother’s beliefs, but big enough to be in the way. Or will I say that my mother is not clearing out boxes but offering me pieces of the postmarked truth, evidence for the stories she knows I need to tell? These are some of the things I think about on the drive home.
Never get good at something you don’t want to do, my mother taught me. It was a lesson she said she learned from my father.
Human knowledge is not … a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire … VLADIMIR LENIN
After the revolution, my mother told me, things were going to get better. She meant that the workers would own the factories, that the wealth would be evenly distributed, but she meant something else too. That we’d understand that it wasn’t only our fault; that the powerlessness that had dogged us, generation upon working-class generation, wasn’t only because of our failures, but the result of having the weight of a whole system upon us. Someday that weight would be gone.
The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks than on flows. On top of that, when we do focus on flows, we tend to focus on inflows more easily than on outflows. Therefore, we sometimes miss seeing that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate. Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil-based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it.
The word function is generally used for a nonhuman system, the word purpose for a human one, but the distinction is not absolute, since so many systems have both human and nonhuman elements.
Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, others through the lens of a telescope, and still others through the lens of systems theory. Everything seen through each kind of lens is actually there. Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete.
I have made liberal use of diagrams and time graphs in this book because there is a problem in discussing systems only with words. Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously. To discuss them properly, it is necessary somehow to use a language that shares some of the same properties as the phenomena under discussion. Pictures work for this language better than words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once. I will build up systems pictures gradually, starting with very simple ones. I think you’ll find that you can understand this graphical language easily.
Once you do that, you’ll learn whether your excitement and interest is real or just a passing phase. If it doesn’t pan out, you just keep going to work every day like you’ve been doing all along. You didn’t risk or lose anything, other than a bit of time, so it’s no big deal.
French Blonde cocktails
One powerful indication that they all require mētis is that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in the activity itself.
“The approach to the problems of farming must be made from the field, not from the laboratory. The discovery of the things that matter is three quarters of the battle. In this the observant farmer and labourer, who have spent their lives in close contact with nature, can be of greatest help to the investigator. The views of the peasantry in all countries are worthy of respect; there is always good reason for their practices; in matters like the cultivation of mixed crops they themselves are still the pioneers.”109 Howard credits most of his own findings about soil, humus, and root action to a careful observation of indigenous farming practice. And he is rather disdainful of agricultural specialists who “do not have to take their own advice”—that is, who have never had to see their own crop through from planting to harvest.
You’re most likely to reach the right decision if you welcome what others have to say, while simultaneously remembering that it may be your job to make the final call. What’s more, your staff members are most likely to support decisions where they feel the decision-making process was fair. In this context, fairness means that when decisions affect them, staff members have a chance to be engaged by giving meaningful input on the issues. Fairness also means that staff members not only hear about the outcome of a decision, but about the rationale behind it in much the same way that judges often issue written opinions explaining the reasoning behind their decisions.
way. Comfortable in charge. The best managers see their authority as simply one more tool for getting things done. It’s neither something that makes them nervous nor something that they lord over others.
PROGRESS: THE STRONGEST MOTIVATOR One multiyear study found that progress is the strongest motivator of performance. The authors, Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, wrote in “What Really Motivates Workers” (Harvard Business Review, January-February 2010, pp. 44–45, “On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest. . . . Making progress in one’s work—even incremental progress—is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.” Growth Don’t let your best employees get bored, and don’t make them go elsewhere to continue to grow in
WHAT ABOUT DEVELOPMENT PLANS? Opinions vary on this, but we’ve grown skeptical about the value of separate development plans, in part because those plans can distract staff members’ attention from pursuit of their substantive goals. When a staff member does have specific development goals, though, one option is to include them in a “key development areas” section at the end of her annual goals. This will remind both of you to revisit her progress in these areas while keeping the onus on the employee to drive herself forward. Here’s an example: Goal 4: Key Development Areas 1. Refine my meeting-running skills. 2. Learn our database software thoroughly so I can better spot opportunities for using its features. 3. Improve my ability to advise activists on strategy, incorporating more nuance and less one-size-fits-all advice.
larger “extra-firm” consequences of their logic. The pattern in agriculture in the United States was clearly outlined by a rogue economist testifying to Congress in 1972. Only in the past decade has serious attention been given to the fact that the large agricultural firm is … able to achieve benefits by externalizing certain costs. The disadvantages of large scale operation fall largely outside the decision-making framework of the large farm firm. Problems of waste disposal, pollution control, added burdens on public service, deterioration of rural social structures, impairment of the tax base, and the political consequences of a concentration of economic power have typically not been considered as costs of large scale, by the firm. They are unquestionably costs to the larger community. In theory, large scale operation should enable the firm to bring a wide range of both costs and benefits within its internal decision-making framework. In practice the economic and political power that accompanies large scale provides constant temptation to the large firm to take the benefits and pass on the costs.87 In other words, although the business analysts of the agricultural firms have weak peripheral vision, the political clout that such firms possess both individually and collectively can help them avoid being blindsided.
A progressive loss of experimental control occurs when one moves from the laboratory to the research plot on an experimental station and then to field trials on actual farms. Richards notes the unease such a move aroused among researchers in West Africa, who were anxious about making their research more practical yet concerned about any relaxing of experimental conditions. After discussing how the farms selected for trials ought to be relatively homogeneous so that they would respond in uniform ways to the experimental results, the researchers went on to lament the experimental control that they they lost by leaving the research station. “It may be difficult,” they wrote, “to plant at all locations within a few days and almost impossible to find farm plots of uniform soil.” They continued, “Other types of interference, such as pest attacks or bad weather, may affect some treatments and not others.”79 This is, Richards explains, a “salutary reminder of one of the reasons why ‘formal’ scientific research procedures on experimental stations, with the stress on controlling all variables except the one or two under direct investigation, ‘miss the point’ as far as many small-holders are concerned. The main concern of farmers is how to cope with these complex interactions and unscheduled events. From the scientist’s point of view (particularly in relation to the need to secure clear-cut results for publication), on-farm experimentation poses a tough challenge.”80
The image of coordination and authority aspired to here recalls that of mass exercises—thousands of bodies moving in perfect unison according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and participants with its display of powerful cohesion. The awe is enhanced by the fact that, as in the Taylorist factory, only someone outside and above the display can fully appreciate it as a totality; the individual participants at ground level are small molecules within an organism whose brain is elsewhere. The image of a nation that might operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the apex—and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus reduce to that of ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and self-confidence of the elites.
Thus the 1964 plan declares: “How to overcome the destructive conservatism of the people, and generate the drastic agrarian reforms which must be effected if the country is to survive is one of the most difficult problems the political leaders of Tanzania have to face.”69
The assembled villagers were expected to be what Sally Falk Moore has appropriately called “ratifying bodies public,” giving populist legitimacy to decisions made elsewhere.46 Far from achieving this populist legitimacy, the villagization campaign created only an alienated, skeptical, demoralized, and uncooperative peasantry for which Tanzania would pay a huge price, both financially and politically.47
They had also forgotten the most important fact about social engineering: its efficiency depends on the response and cooperation of real human subjects. If people find the new arrangement, however efficient in principle, to be hostile to their dignity, their plans, and their tastes, they can make it an inefficient arrangement.
context, are detached from their initial moorings. High-modernist plans tend to “travel” as an abbreviated visual image of efficiency that is less a scientific proposition to be tested than a quasi-religious faith in a visual sign or representation of order. As Jacobs suggested, they may substitute an apparent visual order for the real thing. The fact that they look right becomes more important than whether they work; or, better put, the assumption is that if the arrangement looks right, it will also, ipso facto, function well. The importance of such representations is manifested in a tendency to miniaturize, to create such microenvironments of apparent order as model villages, demonstration projects, new capitals, and so on.
Legibility of Social Groups, Institutions, and Practices The Limits of Authoritarian High Modernism
Although the corporation struggled on until Campbell’s death in 1966, it provided no evidence that industrial farms were superior to family farms in efficiency and profitability. The advantages industrial farms did have over smaller producers were of another kind. Their very size gave them an edge in access to credit, political influence (relevant to taxes, support payments, and the avoidance of foreclosure), and marketing muscle. What they gave away in agility and quality labor they often made up for in their considerable political and economic clout.
The professional instincts of the agricultural engineers led them to try to replicate as much as possible the features of the modern factory. This impelled them to insist on enlarging the scale of the typical small farm so that it could mass-produce standard agricultural commodities, mechanize its operation, and thereby, it was thought, greatly reduce the unit cost of production.
Stites suggests that there is some inverse relation between this public face of order and purpose and the near anarchy that reigned in society at large: “As in the case of all such utopias, its organizers described it in rational, symmetrical terms, in the mathematical language of planning, control figures, statistics, projections and precise commands. As in the vision of military colonies, which the utopian plan faintly resembled, its rational facade barely obscured the oceans of misery, disorder, chaos, corruption and whimsicality that went with it.”13
Kollontay’s point of departure, like Luxemburg’s, is an assumption about what kinds of tasks are the making of revolutions and the creating of new forms of production. For both of them, such tasks are voyages in uncharted waters. There may be some rules of thumb, but there can be no blueprints or battle plans drawn up in advance; the numerous unknowns in the equation make a one-step solution inconceivable. In more technical language, such goals can be approached only by a stochastic process of successive approximations, trial and error, experiment, and learning through experience. The kind of knowledge required in such endeavors is not deductive knowledge from first principles but rather what Greeks of the classical period called métis, a concept to which we shall return. Usually translated, inadequately, as “cunning,” métis is better understood as the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances. It is to this kind of knowledge that Luxemburg appealed when she characterized the building of socialism as “new territory” demanding “improvisation” and “creativity.” It is to this kind of knowledge that Kollontay appealed when she insisted that the party leaders were not infallible, that they needed the “everyday experience” and “practical work of the basic class collectives” of those “who actually produce and organize production at the same time.”87 In an analogy that any Marxist would recognize, Kollontay asked whether it was conceivable that the cleverest feudal estate managers could have invented early capitalism by themselves. Of course not, she answered, because their knowledge and skills were directly tied to feudal production, just as the technical specialists of her day had learned their lessons within a capitalist framework. There was simply no precedent for the future now being forged. Echoing, for rhetorical effect, a sentiment that both Luxemburg and Lenin had uttered, Kollontay claimed that “it is impossible to decree communism. It can be created only in the process of practical research, through mistakes, perhaps, but only by the creative powers of the working class itself.” While specialists and officials had a collaborative role of vital importance, “only those who are directly bound to industry can introduce into it animating innovations.”88
The experts would serve the producers rather than dictating to them.
Thus she attacked both the German and Russian revolutionists for substituting the ego of the vanguard party for the ego of the proletariat—a substitution that ignored the fact that the objective was to create a self-conscious workers’ movement, not just to use the proletariat as instruments.
Her description, which I quote at length, invokes metaphors from nature to convey her conviction that centralized control is an illusion. As the Russian Revolution [1905] shows to us, the mass strike is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects in itself all phases of political and economic struggle, all stages and moments of the revolution. Its applicability, its effectiveness, and the moments of its origin change continually. It suddenly opens new, broad perspectives of revolution just where it seemed to have come to a narrow pass; and it disappoints where one thought he could reckon on it in full certitude. Now it flows like a broad billow over the whole land, now it divides itself into a gigantic net of thin streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring, now it trickles flat along the ground. … All [forms of popular struggle] run through one another, next to each other, across one another, flow in and over one another; it is an eternal, moving, changing sea of appearances.71
When victors such as Lenin get to impose their theories of revolution, not so much on the revolutionary events themselves, but on the postrevolutionary official story, the narrative typically stresses the agency, purpose, and genius of the revolutionary leadership and minimizes contingency.38 The final irony, then, was that the official story of the Bolshevik Revolution was made, for more than sixty years, to conform closely to the utopian directions outlined in What Is to Be Done?
“The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish.”105
Okay, so they don’t like the current system. Got it. But you always wonder what they’re proposing in its place. Would they rather there be no police at all? What an interesting society that would be. If a law enforcement–free culture does become the norm, you’re going to visit all of their homes and ring their doorbells, and when they answer, you’re going to punch them square in the nose. You won’t have to worry. Because there will be no police, there will be no consequences for your actions.
housemates. “What’s that tree on your file cabinet?” “It was Wilfred’s idea,” Riker said almost apologetically. “He made the ornaments with newsprint and gold spray.” Wilfred Sugbury was secretary to the executives—a quiet, hardworking young man who had not only amazed the staff by winning a seventy-mile bike race but was now taking an origami course at the community college. Qwilleran, on his way out, complimented Wilfred on his handiwork. “I’d be glad to make one for you, Mr. Q,” he said. “It wouldn’t last five minutes, Wilfred. The cats would reduce it to confetti. They have no appreciation of art. Thanks just the same.” To fortify himself for the task of gift-shopping, Qwilleran drove to Lois’s Luncheonette, a primitive side-street hole-in-the-wall that had been serving comfort food to downtown workers and shoppers for thirty years. Lois Inchpot was an imposing woman, who dispensed pancakes and opinions with the authority of a celebrity. Indeed, the city had recently celebrated Lois Inchpot Day, by mayoral proclamation. When Qwilleran entered, she was banging the old-fashioned cash register and holding forth in a throaty voice: “If we have a mild winter, like the caterpillars said, we’ll
Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute
It is not, however, the excess of pride that concerns us here but the sort of implacable authority Le Corbusier feels entitled to claim on behalf of universal scientific truths. His high-modernist faith is nowhere so starkly—or so ominously—expressed as in the following, which I quote at length: The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.31 The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery.
Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechanical order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands an architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its esthetic backbone. —Lewis Mumford, The City in History
The second, closely related factor is the private sector in liberal political economy. As Foucault put it: unlike absolutism and mercantilism, “political economy announces the unknowability for the sovereign of the totality of economic processes and, as a consequence, the impossibility of an economic sovereignty.”50 The point of liberal political economy was not only that a free market protected property and ereated wealth but also that the economy was far too complex for it ever to be managed in detail by a hierarchical administration.
One might in fact speculate that the more intractable and resistant the real world faced by the planner, the greater the need for utopian plans to fill, as it were, the void that would otherwise invite despair.
That such plans have often had to be adjusted or abandoned is an indication of just how heroic are the assumptions behind them.
A map is an instrument designed for a purpose.
What evidence we have suggests that second names of any kind became rarer as distance from the state’s fiscal reach increased. Whereas one-third of the households in Florence declared a second name, the proportion dropped to one-fifth for secondary towns and to one-tenth in the countryside. It was not until the seventeenth century that family names crystallized in the most remote and poorest areas of Tuscany— the areas that would have had the least contact with officialdom.
“You ungrateful snobs!” he scolded. “There are disadvantaged cats out there who don’t know where their next mouse is coming from!”
for the central market, the Bois de Bologne, and
The completeness of the cadastral map depends, in a curious way, on its abstract sketchiness, its lack of detail—its thinness. Taken alone, it is essentially a geometric representation of the borders or frontiers between parcels of land. What lies inside the parcel is left blank—unspecified—since it is not germane to the map plotting itself.
Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability.
am, however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.
“I don't even understand why seven-times-nine
During tactical staff meetings, agendas are set only after the team has reviewed its progress against goals. Noncritical administrative topics are easily discarded.
The truth is, if executives are having the right kind of meetings, if they’re driving issues to closure and holding one another accountable, then there is much less to do outside meetings, including managing their direct reports.
What leadership teams need to do—and this may be the single most important piece of advice for them when it comes to meetings—is separate their tactical conversations from their strategic ones. Combining the two just doesn’t work and leaves both sets of issues inadequately addressed.
The fact is that the best human systems are often the simplest and least sophisticated ones. Their primary purpose is not to avoid lawsuits or emulate what other companies are doing but rather to keep managers and employees focused on what the organization believes is important. That’s why a one-page, customized performance review form that managers embrace and take seriously is always better than a seven-page, sophisticated one designed by an organizational psychologist from the National Institute for Human Transformation and Bureaucracy (there is no such thing). This point cannot be overstated. Human systems are tools for reinforcement of clarity. They give an organization a structure for tying its operations, culture, and management together, even when leaders aren’t around to remind people. And because each company is different, there are no generic systems that can be downloaded from the Internet. Let’s take a quick look at the most important human systems that an organization needs, according to the logical life cycle of an employee. RECRUITING AND HIRING Bringing the right people into an organization, and keeping the wrong ones out, is as important as any activity that a leadership team must oversee. Though few leaders will dispute this, not many organizations are good at doing it, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, too many organizations have not defined exactly what the right and wrong people look like; that is, they haven’t clarified a meaningful set of behavioral values that they can use to screen potential employees. I addressed this when I discussed core values, but it’s worth repeating. Hiring without clear and strict criteria for cultural fit greatly hampers the potential for success of any organization. And even for organizations that have identified the right set of behavioral values, a host of other problems keep many of them from hiring well. For all the talk about hiring for fit, there is still too much emphasis on technical skills and experience when it comes to interviewing and selection. And this happens at all levels. When push comes to shove, most executives get enamored with what candidates know and have done in their careers and allow those things to overshadow more important behavioral issues. They don’t seem to buy into the notion that you can teach skill but not attitude. And even organizations that have defined their core values and really do believe that those values should trump everything else sometimes lose their way when it comes to ensuring cultural fit because they don’t have the right kind of process for hiring. I’ve found that most companies fall into one of two categories on opposite sides of the structural scale for hiring.
There are three keys to cascading communication: message consistency from one leader to another, timeliness of delivery, and live, real-time communication. This starts toward the end of leadership team meetings, a time when executives are usually trying their best to get out the door. That’s when someone needs to ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: “Hey, what are we going to go back and tell our people?”
I’ve come to learn over the years, with the encouragement of clients and consultants who found it to be true, that there should be three anchors.
Those are a start, but they’re certainly not lofty enough. As Porras and Collins say, the next question that needs to be asked, and asked again and again until it leads to the highest purpose or reason for existence, is Why? Why do we do that? Why do we help companies use technology to do more business with their partners? Why do we pave driveways? Why do we teach kids how to do their homework better? Eventually, by answering that question again and again, a leadership team will get to a point where they’ve identified the most idealistic reason for their business. That point will be somewhere just shy of to make the world a better place. That’s how they’ll know they’re done.
kids how to do their homework better. Those are a start, but they’re certainly not lofty enough. As Porras and Collins say, the next question that needs to be asked, and asked again and again until it leads to the highest purpose or reason for existence, is Why? Why do we do that? Why do we help companies use technology to do more business with their partners? Why do we pave driveways? Why do we teach kids how to do their homework better? Eventually, by answering that question again and again, a leadership team will get to a point where they’ve identified the most idealistic reason for their business. That point will be somewhere just shy of to make the world a better
But a real danger, and a common one, occurs when leaders confuse their motivation for identifying their purpose with trying to come up with something that will sound impressive on a billboard, in an annual report, or on an employee sweatshirt.
There is a darn good chance that your company—in fact, any given company—has not yet identified its purpose. I’ve found that most have not, at least not adequately. And I’ve come to realize that even organizations that think they have usually haven’t done so with the degree of rigor and specificity that is necessary. This leads to two problems. First, those teams don’t achieve a real sense of collective commitment from their members. Too often busy executives who want nothing to do with what they see as ethereal, metaphysical conversations simply nod their heads and agree with whatever the team comes up with for a statement of purpose. This is a recipe for jargony, empty declarations. Second, and this is certainly related, those executives don’t see the company’s reason for existing as having any practical implications for the way they make decisions and run the organization. As a result of having no real idealistic boundaries, they operate in a largely reactive, shortsighted way, being overly tactical and opportunistic. And they often lose their way by getting involved in a variety of random pursuits and projects that might be financially justifiable in the short term but don’t really fit together. This tends to dilute the focus and passion that employees look for when they’re coming to work. Some executives, especially those who are a little cynical about all this purpose stuff, will say that their company exists simply to make money for owners or shareholders. That is almost never a purpose, but rather an important indicator of success. It’s how an organization knows that it is effectively fulfilling its purpose, but it falls far short of providing the organization with a guide to what ultimately matters most. In those rare companies where business owners really do believe that the organization’s underlying purpose is to provide themselves with financial windfalls, it is best that leaders are up front about that purpose. Otherwise they’ll create confusion, cynicism, and a sense of betrayal among employees who almost always prefer a more idealistic reason for coming to work.
More than getting the right answer, it is important to simply have an answer—one that is directionally correct and around which all team members can commit.
What leaders must do to give employees the clarity they need is agree on the answers to six simple but critical questions and thereby eliminate even small discrepancies in their thinking. None of these questions is novel per se. What is new is the realization that none of them can be addressed in isolation; they must be answered together. Failing to achieve alignment around any one of them can prevent an organization from attaining the level of clarity necessary to become healthy. These are the six questions: 1. Why do we exist? 2. How do we behave? 3. What do we do? 4. How will we succeed? 5. What is most important, right now? 6. Who must do what?
There is probably no greater frustration for employees than having to constantly navigate the politics and confusion caused by leaders who are misaligned. That’s because just a little daylight between members of a leadership team becomes blinding and overwhelming to employees one or two levels below. I’ve heard this referred to as the “vortex effect.” Whatever you call it, it’s real, it’s a big problem, and it makes deep organizational alignment impossible.
Thinking they’re being mature, leaders often agree to disagree with one another around seemingly minor issues, thereby avoiding what they see as unnecessary contentiousness and conflict. After all, from their vantage point, the gaps in their opinions and decisions seem small and innocuous. What they don’t understand is that by failing to eliminate even those small gaps, they are leaving employees below them to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with their peers in other departments. This leads to the antithesis of (oh, I hate to use this word) empowerment.
most of the leaders I’ve worked with who complain about a lack of alignment mistakenly see it primarily as a behavioral or attitudinal problem. In their minds, it’s a function of the fact that employees below them do not want to work together. What those executives don’t realize is that there cannot be alignment deeper in the organization, even when employees want to cooperate, if the leaders at the top aren’t in lockstep with one another around a few very specific things.
The only way for a leader to establish this collective mentality on a team is by ensuring that all members place a higher priority on the team they’re a member of than the team they lead in their departments.
All too often they embrace the attitude embodied by the fisherman who looks at the guy sitting at the other end of the boat and announces, “Hey, your side of the boat is sinking.”
First, when accountability is handled during a meeting, every member of the team receives the message simultaneously and doesn’t have to make the same mistakes in order to learn the lesson of the person being held accountable. Second, they know that the leader is holding their colleague accountable, which avoids their wondering whether the boss is doing his job. Finally, it serves to reinforce the culture of accountability, which increases the likelihood that team members will do the same for one another. When leaders—and peers—limit their accountability discussions to private conversations, they leave people wondering whether those discussions are happening. This often leads to unproductive hallway conversations and conjecture about who knows what about whom. Having said all that, when it comes to addressing relatively serious issues, or matters of corrective action in which a leader is wondering whether a member of the team might not be worthy to be on the team anymore, then everything changes. These are best handled privately, in a one-on-one situation, to respect the dignity of the person being held accountable. However, and this can be dicey, the leader is often well advised to let her people know that she is addressing the situation to avoid unproductive and dangerous speculation.
A good way to ensure that people take this process seriously is to demand that they go back to their teams after the meeting and communicate exactly what was agreed on.
See, it’s only when colleagues speak up and put their opinions on the table, without holding back, that the leader can confidently fulfill one of his most important responsibilities: breaking ties. When a leader knows that everyone on the team has weighed in and provided every possible perspective needed for a fully informed decision, he can then bring a discussion to a clear and unambiguous close and expect team members to rally around the final decision even if they initially disagreed with it.
One of our consultants worked with the leadership team of a division within a large beverage company. He convinced the VP of that division that more conflict was necessary on the team. Unfortunately, they were having a hard time getting people to engage in it. This is typical. So the VP put in place two formal rules. First, if people remained silent during discussions, he would interpret that as disagreement. People quickly realized that if they didn’t weigh in, a decision could not be made. Second, at the end of every discussion, the VP would go around the room and ask every member of his team for a formal commitment to the decision. These simple rules changed the nature of their meetings and increased healthy conflict almost immediately. This would not have happened had the VP simply told his team that they should engage in more conflict.
It amazes me that intelligent people will sacrifice the effectiveness and manageability of their team for a tactical victory. This is undeniable evidence that many executives, in spite of what they might say, don’t really understand the importance of leadership team cohesiveness.
A good way to understand a working group is to think of it like a golf team, where players go off and play on their own and then get together and add up their scores at the end of the day. A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way. Most working groups reflexively call themselves teams because that’s the word society uses to describe any group of people who are affiliated in their work.
First he gave the cats their breakfast and their daily grooming. Waving the walnut-handled brush that Polly had given them for Christmas, he announced, “Brush! Brush! Who wants to go first?” Koko always went first, despite efforts to introduce him to precepts of chivalry. Both of them had their ideas about the grooming process. Koko liked to be brushed while walking away, forcing his human valet to follow on his knees. Yum Yum missed the point entirely; she fought the brush, grabbing it, biting the bristles, and kicking the handle. The daily ritual was a farce, but it was an expected prelude to their morning nap.
For novice programmers, self-taught, apprenticed and educated50 alike, the course from hobbyism to professional software making - whatever the context in which that software is made, and whatever the specific definition of “professional” we choose - starts with awareness of software as a means to solve problems, not as an end in itself. The next step is awareness of the gap between their novice competence and the current state of the art. How they choose to close that gap is less important than awareness of the gap’s existence.
I have evaluated my own knowledge of computer science against the Programmer Competency Matrix for the last few years, and in the course of writing this text created the Programmer Courtesy Matrix to summarise the material here.
and error. The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge can be thought of as a guide to what to learn from the published literature on software engineering. When
I’ll start with a hypothesis: that what’s being traded is not the software itself, but capability first, and time second. Given the desire, but inability, to do something as a problem, anything that solves the problem by enabling that thing is valued. This is what economist Herbert Simon described as bounded rationality, or satisficing. So a first solution discovered, whether ideal or not, is still valued. This already explains why the infinite supply “problem” is not real: on discovering that a product can be purchased that meets their needs, a consumer is likely to settle for making the purchase as a satisficing solution—many will not spend the extra time on researching a pirated version of the app.
hair. There was no sound from the loft, where the Siamese had
Are new features always bigger and more expensive than bug fixes? No. Do bug fixes always cost us money, and never attract or protect income? No. Are new features sometimes snuck into maintenance? Yes. Are bug fixes sometimes held off until new project releases? Yes. Then why aren’t they budgeted together? It could be for ethical reasons: perhaps programmers feel that maintenance problems are mistakes they should own up to and correct free of charge. But remember that one of Lehman’s Laws says that the satisfaction derived from software will decay as the social environment involves. Not all bugs were bugs at the time of writing! You cannot be apologetic for work you did correctly before a change in the environment. To me, this suggests a need for a more nimble economic model, one that treats any change equally regardless of whether it’s a bug fix, feature addition or internal quality clean-up. Forget what we’ve already spent and made on this product (for that way lies the sunk cost fallacy), what will the proposed change cost? What will it get us? How risky is it? What else could we be doing instead? What alternatives do we have?
Advanced project funders will consider protected revenue (how many customers will not jump to a competing product if this feature is added) and opportunity cost (what work could we be doing if we decline this work), factoring those into the decisions about the project.
As the manuscript for this book came together, I realised that a lot of the content was based on a limited and naive philosophy of software creation. I was outlining this philosophy as it applied to each chapter, then explaining what the various relevant tasks were and how they fit into that philosophy. Here it is, written explicitly and separately from other considerations in the book: Our role as people who make software is to solve problems, and only incidentally to make software. Making software for its own sake is at best a benign waste of time and money, or at worst detrimental to those exposed to it. Our leading considerations at all times must be the people whose problems we are solving, and the problems themselves.
I have certainly never been asked in an interview whether I’ve ever acted unethically. I’ve been asked what I know of Perl, and how I interact with other people on a team, but never whether I’ve failed to respect the privacy of others.
The Association of Computing Machinery’s code of ethics and professional conduct is a short document, comprising 24 ethical imperatives members are expected to follow: one of which is that membership of the Association is contingent on abiding by the other imperatives.
In a column called “Mood” in Communications of the ACM, Peter J. Denning investigates the ways that moods can affect our interactions with each other, even transmitting the moods socially between members of a team. He notes that when everybody is positive, collaboration is easy; when everybody is negative, the outcome is likely to be bad so it’s best to avoid what will most likely become confrontational.
Whereas other forms of direct social provision tend to be underutilized, EITC now has a high take-up rate ranging between 77 and 81 percent, presumably for reasons related to its design and delivery.90
The procedures and rules the states adopt vary in harshness, and the frontline caseworkers implementing those rules and procedures vary in how they use their discretion to decide when and how severely to impose sanctions. Proponents of the approach claim that it advances the civic incorporation of the poor, but Soss, Fording, and Schram find that experiences of the stricter versions significantly deter such engagement.
The impact of these factors pales, furthermore, compared to the role of individuals’ views about welfare. Antipathy to welfare policy derails many from adopting more salutary views about government; indeed, although “welfare as we know it” was eradicated two decades ago and fewer than 1 percent of Americans now benefit from this program, its image lives on and continues to operate as a major force in driving hostility not only toward social provision but also toward government generally.
These results, drawn from survey data during the final months of the George W. Bush presidency, might be attributable to a phenomenon that Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph have observed: that as partisan polarization has increased, trust in government has vacillated with the party in power.
Ironically, the policies associated with some impact on broader views about government are those that tend to be the most stigmatized and in which government’s role as a provider may be most evident—the visible means-tested policies. Repeated usage of these policies conveyed to recipients that government made a positive difference in their lives. Yet, beyond that, multiple uses of neither visible nor submerged policies appeared to have any bearing on enhanced attitudes about government. In the case of the means-tested variant of submerged policies, moreover, accumulated usage failed to mitigate more negative views of government, leaving recipients more resentful than others and assured only that they pay a fair amount of taxes. In sum, despite the considerable resources committed to each of these policy types, with modest exceptions, the impact of policy usage on citizens’ perceptions appears to evaporate, at least over the long term. Specific policies may make a difference in attitudes, as some studies have shown, but accumulated memories of policy usage seem to exert little bearing on broad attitudes about government.
repeated usage of visible policies was not associated with any other enhanced views of government among the seven indicators probed here. Extensive usage of non-means-tested visible policies shows no relationship to any broader evaluations of government.
At each income level, whites are significantly more likely to disapprove of welfare than African Americans as well as Asians and Pacific Islanders.32 The long legacy of racial politics triggered by debates over social provision, particularly in distinctions about the deserving versus the undeserving poor, appears to be manifest in this result, channeling racial resentment.33
These results suggest that it is not only the working poor, those just above the “fiscal cliff,” who harbor antipathy toward welfare; rather, this hostility pervades the middle class generally—people who may feel that life has been difficult in recent decades, as their incomes have stagnated or grown only a little, even while their families have increased their participation in the labor market.
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, in their book Democracy for Realists, argue that group affiliations play a powerful role in motivating political viewpoints, often greater than that of rational deliberation. They explain that people may share with others of the same race, gender, religion, or place a sense of “linked fate,” viewing themselves as faring similarly in society and having common interests or a similar role.19 Accordingly citizens formulate their political perspectives in the context of such groups.
The most consistent influence on citizens’ assessments of government emanates from their unfavorable perceptions of welfare, views which are themselves shaped by social identities. As a result, in spite of the frequency and near ubiquity of citizens’ policy experiences, the government-citizen disconnect prevails.
Scholars have argued that eligibility rules featuring income ceilings, otherwise known as “means-testing,” treat individuals in a manner that is demeaning and stigmatizing and therefore are likely to foster social stratification or “second-class citizenship.” By contrast, policies that encompass broad swathes of the population through more universalistic eligibility criteria may bestow dignity and respect on beneficiaries, incorporating them as honored members of the political community.
The rhetoric of recent years that has divided Americans into “makers” and “takers” misses the mark: it is more appropriate to say that Americans of all income groups have relied on social provision at various points in their lives.
Nearly all Americans—all but 4 percent—report having benefited from at least one of the twenty-one social policies, a grouping that includes both direct payments and services from government as well as social benefits administered through the tax code.
husband’s overcoat and a large tortoiseshell cat.” “A touching
Until recently, we assumed that for machines to understand the physical world, the world would have to volunteer its information. We’d need both human mapmakers – information architects and other masters of taxonomy and labelling – and a range of self-describing, self-reporting objects (‘spimes’) that continually broadcast their status. That no longer seems necessary.
“What do you want the pinnacle of your career to look like?”
your job as the boss is to help them think about how they can acquire those skills: what are the projects you can put them on, whom can you introduce them to, what are the options for education?
I left some of my old sweaters lying around, so they can sit on them and not feel abandoned.”
the most important parts of ethics: dialogue, consensus, resolve.
The Time Well Spent movement29 asks how tech would look if it were designed to respect human values rather than capture attention. The movement taps into theories of calm technology and mindfulness to inspire designers to protect users’ time and agency, and argues for new business models that subvert the attention economy.
Kant also posed another useful deontological question: am I treating people as ends or means?27 This deserves some explanation. For our purposes, the question asks whether we’re using people – users, stakeholders, wider society – for our own success, or treating them as autonomous individuals with their own goals. Designers usually don’t struggle with the ends-or-means question, since they tend to believe deeply in the importance of users’ goals. The question tends to be more difficult when we ask it about company-wide decisions, particularly those that affect millions of people.
Social design researcher Nynke Tromp suggests we classify persuasion by strength and visibility, creating four types of influence: decisive, coercive, persuasive, and seductive.
the average American spends 3.1 hours on a mobile device each day, compared to just eighteen minutes in 2008, with no corresponding drop in desktop use.
helping people ascend the face of Mt. Maslow and reach an enlightened summit.
Every business textbook offers a step-by-step guide to stakeholder analysis, but most only cover teammates or suspiciously homogenous groups like ‘users’ or ‘residents’. This perspective, reinforced by the individualist focus of user-centred design, means we often overlook important groups. Stakeholders aren’t just the people who can affect a project; they’re also the people the project might affect. To force ourselves to consider the right people, try using a prompt list (see appendix) to capture a wider range of potential stakeholders, and use this as an input to futuring exercises and the design process. Not all stakeholders will be welcome. In some cases, it might be worth including, say, a criminal, terrorist, or troll as a negative stakeholder – a persona non grata25 – so the team can discuss how to actively reduce the harm this person can do. He may even deserve full persona treatment, with a name, an abusive scenario, and listed motivations to increase his profile within the team. Stakeholders could even include social concepts: things we value in society but rarely consider within our influence, such as democracy, justice, or freedom of the press. As we now know, technology has the power to damage these ideas; explicitly listing them as stakeholders, or at least acknowledging their potential vulnerability, might help us protect them.
Some academics choose to explicitly list their potential biases – a process known as bracketing – before starting a piece of research, and take note whenever they sense bias could be influencing their work.
Bias is an umbrella term for several types of imbalance: are we talking about sampling bias, innate structural bias, or explicit prejudice?
Resolving externalities means we first have to recognise them, but often they lie in the shadows, falling on ignored minorities or existing only in a hazy future.
academics complain about practitioners’ hubristic ability to run repeatedly into the same old walls, while being paid handsomely to do so.
Technologists are rightly starting to question their influence on a world spiralling off its expected course, and as the industry matures, it’s natural to pay attention to deeper questions of impact and justice. As sociologist Richard Sennett points out, ‘It is at the level of mastery […] that ethical problems of craft appear.’
America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes. And now I was at Harper, listening to children talking about how to stay alive. I admired their resilience, and I wished desperately that they didn’t need it so much. One of them then gave me a candid look. “It’s nice that you’re here and all,” he said with a shrug. “But what’re you actually going to do about any of this?” To them, I represented Washington, D.C., as much as I did the South Side. And when it came to Washington, I felt I owed them the truth. “Honestly,” I began, “I know you’re dealing with a lot here, but no one’s going to save you anytime soon. Most people in Washington aren’t even trying. A lot of them don’t even know you exist.” I explained to those students that progress is slow, that they couldn’t afford to simply sit and wait for change to come. Many Americans didn’t want their taxes raised, and Congress couldn’t even pass a budget let alone rise above petty partisan bickering, so there weren’t going to be billion-dollar investments in education or magical turnarounds for their community. Even after the horror of Newtown, Congress appeared determined to block any measure that could help keep guns out of the wrong hands, with legislators more interested in collecting campaign donations from the National Rifle Association than they were in protecting kids. Politics was a mess, I said. On this front, I had nothing terribly uplifting or encouraging to say. I went on, though, to make a different pitch, one that came directly from my South Side self. Use school, I said. These kids had just spent an hour telling me stories that were tragic and unsettling, but I reminded them that those same stories also showed their persistence, self-reliance, and ability to overcome. I assured them that they already had what it would take to succeed. Here they were, sitting in a school that was offering them a free education, I said, and there were a whole lot of committed and caring adults inside that school who thought they mattered. About six weeks later, thanks to donations from local businesspeople, a group of Harper students would come to the White House, to visit with me and Barack personally, and also spend time at Howard University, learning what college was about. I hoped that they could see themselves getting there.
Regardless of what I chose to do, I knew I was bound to disappoint someone. The campaign had taught me that my every move and facial expression would be read a dozen different ways. I was either hard-driving and angry or, with my garden and messages about healthy eating, I was a disappointment to feminists, lacking a certain stridency.
drawn to it because it was a diverse school with limited
If I’d learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void. If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
I understood already that I’d be measured by a different yardstick. As the only African American First Lady to set foot in the White House, I was “other” almost by default. If there was a presumed grace assigned to my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same for me. I’d learned through the campaign stumbles that I had to be better, faster, smarter, and stronger than ever. My grace would need to be earned. I worried that many Americans wouldn’t see themselves reflected in me, or that they wouldn’t relate to my journey. I wouldn’t have the luxury of settling into my new role slowly before being judged. And when it came to judgment, I was as vulnerable as ever to the unfounded fears and racial stereotypes that lay just beneath the surface of the public consciousness, ready to be stirred up by rumor and innuendo. I was humbled and excited to be First Lady, but not for one second did I think I’d be sliding into some glamorous, easy role. Nobody who has the words “first” and “black” attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I’d need to climb my way into favor. For me, it revived an old internal call-and-response, one that tracked all the way back to high school, when I’d shown up at Whitney Young and found myself suddenly gripped by doubt. Confidence, I’d learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within. I’ve repeated the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs. Am I good enough? Yes I am. The seventy-six days between election and inauguration felt like a critical time to start setting the tone for the kind of First Lady I wanted to be.
In my experience, most bosses fear being jerks but employees fear their bosses are not shooting straight.
The phrase “don’t take it personally” is worse than useless.
Making a fundamental attribution error is using perceived personality attributes—“You’re stupid, lazy, greedy, hypocritical, an asshole,” etc.—to explain someone else’s behavior rather than considering one’s own behavior and/or the situational factors that were probably the real cause of the other person’s behavior. It’s a problem because 1) it’s generally inaccurate and 2) it renders an otherwise solvable problem really hard to fix since changing core personality attributes is so very difficult and time-consuming.
If you are in a remote office, or if you are managing people in remote offices, it’s really important to have quick, frequent interactions. This will allow you to pick up on people’s most subtle emotional cues. I learned this from Maurice Tempelsman, my boss when I lived in Russia. He made a point of calling me every day from New York, if only for a three-minute check-in call. He had operations in Africa in the 1970s and had learned the importance of frequent communication to pick up on emotional cues from people in far-flung locations.
Keep slack time in your calendar, or be willing to be late. Prioritizing something generally means making time in your calendar for it. But how do you make time in your calendar for something that is “impromptu”? You can’t. Better to talk to the person right away. But in order for that to happen, you must do one of two things. One, keep slack time in your calendar, either by not scheduling back-to-back meetings or by having twenty-five- and fifty-minute meetings with hard stops, not thirty- and sixty-minute meetings. Or, simply be willing to be late to your next meeting.
Situation, behavior, and impact applies to praise as well as to criticism.
The idea is that when you are mindful that your subjective experience is not objective truth, it can help you challenge others in a way that invites a reciprocal challenge.
led to a second revelation about certain nonprofits, especially young-person-driven start-ups like Public Allies, and many of the bighearted, tirelessly passionate people who work in them: Unlike me, it seemed they could actually afford to be there, their virtue discreetly underwritten by privilege, whether it was that they didn’t have student loans to pay off or perhaps had an inheritance to someday look forward to and thus weren’t worried about saving for the future.
She described feeling supported by Daley and knowing that she was being useful to the city. Her loyalty, she said, had been to Harold Washington’s principles more than to the man himself. Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work. This idea resonated with both me and Barack, and inside that one dinner I felt as if something had been cemented: Valerie Jarrett was now a part of our lives. Without our ever discussing it, it seemed almost as if the three of us had somehow agreed to carry one another a good long way.
Valerie was the right person to address any concerns. She’d rearranged her entire life in order to work for Washington and then lost him almost immediately. The void that followed Washington’s death offered a kind of cautionary tale for the future, one I’d eventually find myself trying to explain to people across America: In Chicago, we’d made the mistake of putting all our hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political apparatus to support his vision. Voters, especially liberal and black voters, viewed Washington as a kind of golden savior, a symbol, the man who could change everything. He’d carried the load admirably, inspiring people like Barack and Valerie to move out of the private sector and into community work and public service. But when Harold Washington died, most of the energy he’d generated did, too.
JOHNSON & JOHNSON’S ORIGINAL credo had an interesting line: “Employees should have an organized system for suggestions and complaints.” When it got rewritten, this intention got watered down into a much vaguer and less useful statement: “Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints.” If you’re the boss, you have to do much better than announce how employees “must” feel. Employees won’t feel free if you don’t take specific actions to ensure that it’s not just safe but expected to make suggestions and complaints. You have to organize a system. But it needn’t be elaborate.
Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
We weren’t so much convinced we’d have a fire as we were fixated on being ready for one.
hearing it elsewhere as well. Consulting giant McKinsey
Taking a page from the “Private Entity with Public Pretensions” playbook used so effectively by HBS throughout the years, Senator Flanders told Doriot about how he responded to questions about the entity’s small staff—by suggesting that ARD was not, in fact a private company, but a social movement:
implementing long-term policies. In Chester Barnard, the folks at HBS found the exact thing they’d been looking for: a real-life executive who validated their ideas about enlightened management. But in the wrong hands—which included, it would seem, his own—all Barnard’s particular approach to human relations did was replace autocracy with paternalism. And in doing so, he helped lay the foundations of an insidious cult of moral leadership that we are still grappling with today. By making the case that success is a result of moral purity—and that corporate leadership is intrinsically moral—he left us not just with the dangers of false pride but with something worse, which James Hoopes refers to as the paradox of moral leadership. “Only those who recognize that they may be or become morally unfit to lead are morally worthy to do so,” writes Hoopes in Hail to the CEO: The Failure of George W. Bush and the Cult of Moral Leadership. “People confident of their purity are morally unqualified to lead.” HBS only compounds the issue by insisting to new students that they are already America’s future leaders simply by virtue of having enrolled.
To Barnard, an order given by a manager was not an exercise of power, but simply the manager’s acceptance of responsibility for an action that the employee had the power to initiate but not the courage to take. (Read that again. It’s quite the remarkable feat of sociolinguistic gymnastics.) And here’s the crux: That lack of courage was a moral weakness, even moral cowardice, and the situation salvaged only by the manager’s display of moral strength in accepting the responsibility for telling his underling what to do. Fashionable managers took note: Power was out; empowerment was in.
Barnard’s theories also echoed Mayo in their rejection of the idea of workplace democracy in favor of psychological manipulation. And, it should be noted, in their rejection of reality for fantasy: Considered both a “chilly” and “aristocratic” leader by those who had worked for him, Barnard instead saw himself as the object of their admiration. He even saw sound managerial technique where others might see outright discrimination: “Personal aversions based upon racial, national, color, and class differences often seem distinctly pernicious; but on the whole they are, in the immediate sense, I believe, based upon a sound feeling of organization necessities.”
In one sense, Chester Barnard was Vilfredo Pareto dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit. Like Pareto, Barnard saw organizations as “systems” analogous to the human bodies seeking equilibrium. To get there, an organization needed both effectiveness (the ability to meet goals) and efficiency (the ability to satisfy the individuals who worked for it). And the task fell to management—the corporate incarnation of Pareto’s elite—to formulate those goals and decide how to meet them.4
The next year, on the urging of Donham, Cabot, Henderson, and Mayo, he published the material from the talks in The Functions of the Executive, still widely regarded as one of the most influential management books of the twentieth century.
Why punish them, the logic went, if the real source of the problem was in the nation’s soul? That line of thinking—a recurring one out of HBS—is both tiresome and obtuse, as if a nation cannot pursue both things at once, to punish malefactors and to question its priorities. It need not choose between the two.
There were dissenting opinions, of course. In The Higher Learning in America, Thorstein Veblen ventured the opinion that the speed of one’s climb was irrelevant, because the learning curve was actually a road to nowhere: “No gain comes to the community at large from increasing the business proficiency of any number of its young men. There are already much too many of these businessmen, much too astute and proficient in their calling, for the common good. A higher average business efficiency simply raises activity and avidity in business to a higher average pitch of skill and fervor, with very little other material result than a redistribution of ownership; since business is occupied with the competitive acquisition of wealth, not with its production.”4
John Van Maanen, a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains: “What could be more attractive to owners and managers than to be repeatedly told that one’s employees . . . are really irrational and illogical . . . that their lack of cooperation is but a frustrated urge to cooperate; that their economic wants mask a need to be consulted and listened to in the workplace; that these needs are best met by a more or less therapeutic regime that plays close attention to the social and emotional needs of employees; and that you—as owner or manager—are charged with a historical mandate (or destiny) to bring social harmony to the workplace?”
By insisting that group performance was more a function of social cohesion than of monetary incentive, Mayo was implicitly arguing in favor of substituting the spiritual rewards of work for higher pay.
My friends, the truth is that business is not a profession; and no amount of rhetoric and no expenditure in circulars can make it into a profession. This fact stands like a sharp-pointed, deep-seated rock in mid-channel, and against this rock Harvard is steering her craft—or raft. . . . I can imagine a man practicing medicine or law or architecture or engineering out of sheer love for the thing. But I cannot imagine a man’s running a business at a loss. It wouldn’t be business. A School of Business means a school where you learn to make money.
Donham knew that the whole “science of business” was a feint, and that the real point was rhetoric, the purpose of a business school to produce people who could walk the walk and talk the talk of management in an exploding economic situation. The essence of rhetoric is to mess with people’s heads—that’s why we’ve been interested in it for three thousand years, and it’s also why it was such a natural fit with business. (Of course, the majority of modern business school professors are nowhere near reflexive enough to realize that they work for schools of rhetoric.) When it adopted the Socratic method as its primary form of teaching, one can only hope that HBS was aware of—and perhaps even extra-sensitive to—Socrates’s warning that unless it is accompanied by a guiding moral philosophy, rhetoric is mere flattery used to persuade for personal gain. Or maybe they weren’t. In any case, the rhetoric has been there from the very start. The moral philosophy? Not so much. Management historian J.-C.
The professional manager was the human manifestation of a seismic shift in the nexus of power in modern business, during which ownership became separated from control.
His insistence that knowledge was power reinforced Americans’ notion of their meritocracy, even if the dictates of Taylorism actually required industrial aristocracy. In doing so, it promised, somewhere, somehow, to get to the heart of the riddle of how to have a Jeffersonian democracy and a Hamiltonian economy at once. It never did.
Taylor’s most important contributions to management, though, weren’t about how much pig iron a man can carry in a day. Rather, his techniques of managerial accounting helped shift the discipline away from a backward-looking summary of accounts to a forward-looking tool of managerial control, and served as the foundation of modern management information systems. Via Taylor, accounting became accountability. The legacy of these insights, which include capital budgets, financial controls, planning, and scheduling, far outweighs that of his stopwatch studies.
It also led to the self-serving conclusion that the only people capable of solving management problems are management itself.
Today’s even more pernicious version of such: shareholder value. Writes Stewart: “The modern-day CEOs who sacrifice the long-term viability of their corporations for the sake of short-term boosts in their quarterly earnings reports are direct descendants of the pig-iron managers who undermined their work team’s morale in order to achieve temporary productivity targets.”
At Harvard Law School, Christopher Columbus Langdell put the modern spin on the approach, pioneering the now-ubiquitous notion that the best way to learn American law was to study actual judicial opinions rather than the more abstract content of legal rules themselves.
But even Harvard is vulnerable to the wish’s predilection to be father to the thought, and it saw professionalism where it did not yet exist, confident that it could fill in the blanks.
Along with other trailblazers, HBS dragged business training out of the vocational realm and into the professional one—and in doing so, helped cement the foundation of managerial authority in America and beyond.
As it had done with the founding of its schools of law and medicine, the School made the argument that classroom teaching was superior to apprenticeship, and that “commercial practices, and the philosophies that underpinned them, [could be] elevated to the same sort of level as other academic disciplines.”25 Just what those practices and philosophies were was a question as yet unanswered, but the feeling was that they could be, and that elevation would follow. This was Harvard, after all. Everything about the place was elevated.
In his opus Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, Chandler documents the three-part evolution of large firms into multinational giants that was taking place as Harvard argued with itself over whether true change was truly afoot. Part one: an investment in production facilities large enough to exploit a new technology’s potential economies of scale or scope. Part two: an investment in a national and international marketing and distribution network so that sales could keep pace with production. Part three: an investment in management. That’s where HBS came in. Companies suddenly needed managers not just to run the production and distribution mechanisms, but also to monitor and coordinate the two, planning and allocating resources for future production. The larger the firm, the more operating units, and the more managerial oversight required.
Business has lost sight of its true function in society, which is to provide a mechanism by which we can work together and with our environment to achieve our common goals. It is not, and never has been, to simply make a profit.
Consider the school’s approach to the concept of “social enterprise”: It misses the point entirely by treating it as a distinct field of study. That’s absurd. Every business is a social enterprise—there has never been a socially neutral business in the history of the world. And every single business “makes a difference”—the only question is whether they’re making a positive or a negative one.
Credibility is one of those things that is hard to articulate
To help you be more persuasive, and to teach the “deciders” on your team to be more persuasive, the rest of this section will cover, briefly, Aristotle’s elements of rhetoric—pathos, logos, and ethos, which I’ll translate loosely as emotion, logic, and credibility.
That is why kick-ass bosses often do not decide themselves, but rather create a clear decision-making process that empowers people closest to the facts to make as many decisions as possible. Not only does that result in better decisions, it results in better morale. The decider should get facts, not recommendations When collecting information for a decision, we are often tempted to ask people for their recommendations—“What do you think we should do?”—but as one executive I worked with at Apple explained to me, people tend to put their egos into recommendations in a way that can lead to politics, and thus worse decisions. So she recommended seeking “facts, not recommendations.” Of course “facts” come inflected with each person’s particular perspective or point of view, but they are less likely to become a line in the sand than a recommendation is.
From then on, my colleague argued longer and more loudly, and he kept arguing until either he convinced Steve he was right or Steve convinced him he was wrong.
For example, after asking a bunch of questions, I realized we weren’t doing any real account management (i.e., we weren’t working with our biggest customers to help them improve in ways that would make them, and Google, more money.) When I asked why, the answer was “That wouldn’t be Googley! We treat all our customers exactly the same, no matter how big or small they are.” My suggestion that we prioritize was met with looks that made it clear my very morality was suspect.
If you believe America should be a multiracial, multiethnic society, if you believe in welcoming immigrants, if you believe in peace, and if you believe that we as a people should be able to deliberately improve our economic situation—then you need to get involved in the project of presenting the American people with solutions to the problems that are tearing Americans’ lives to shreds. If you don’t, then the fascists are going to win.
When he stretched out on the sofa, she leaped lightly to his chest and uttered the seductive wail that meant she wanted to be petted.
Finally, imagine you decide not to say anything because you’re thinking about your own feelings and reputation. You’re silent not because you’re concerned for Alex, but because you want to spare yourself. You care deeply about being liked, and you’re worried Alex won’t like you if you say something. You’re also worried if people overhear you saying something to Alex, they will judge you. So you walk on by and say nothing. If you’re really shameless, you might whisper to the next person who comes along to go check out Alex’s fly. Congratulations—your behavior is in the worst quadrant: Manipulative Insincerity!
JOBS: You need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities but leaves not too much room for interpretation … and that’s a hard thing to do. [My italics.]
how things worked yet. Why did I behave this way? Partly because I believe there’s a special place in hell for those who “kick down and kiss up.” At least I wasn’t making that mistake. And yet my mistake was simply the other side of the same coin. I wasn’t really thinking of Larry as a human being. I saw him as a kind of demigod whom I could attack with impunity. Fundamental human decency is something every person owes every other, regardless of position. And it wasn’t as though Larry was shut down to criticism, as I had seen in his conversation with Matt Cutts. He’d given me no reason to be so strident.
What I did know was that Google’s culture struck me as the resurrection of my dream about creating an environment where people loved their work and one another, and that Sheryl struck me as a great boss. As a friend of mine later joked, “In Silicon Valley, you don’t fall down; you fall up.” (Rest assured, Bob has also landed on his feet.)
“Mostly he’s too busy being a cat—laundering his tail, chattering at squirrels, eating spiders—all that kind of stuff.
you could say “here’s the problem as I see it, this is what we want to get out of solving it, and here is the solution”. Now your colleagues and partners are left in no doubt as to why you believe in the approach you present, and you’ve set a precedent for how they should present their views if they still disagree. The conversation can focus on the problems facing the project, not the imbeciles around the table. An aside on persuasion Framing an argument in this way is a well-known rhetorical technique. First people identify themselves as facing the problem you describe, so that when you describe the benefits of a solution your audience agrees that it would help. When you finally present your proposed solution, people already know that they want it. Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDxEast goes into more depth on this theme.
According to some researchers in the field of disaster response, there are five considerations in risk estimation, leading to five different ways to get risk management wrong: incorrect evaluation of probability (usually presented as optimism bias, the false belief that nothing can go wrong); incorrect evaluation of impact (again, usually assuming optimistically that the damage won’t be too great); statistical neglect (ignoring existing real data in forecasting future outcomes, usually in favour of folklore or other questionable heuristics); solution neglect (not considering all options for risk reduction, thus failing to identify the optimal solution); and external risk neglect, in which you fail to consider factors outside the direct scope of the project that could nonetheless have an impact.
You could imagine an interpretation in the form
hard to sell you on their way of thinking.
don’t necessarily have to write your reflections down, although I find that keeping a journal or a blog does make me structure my thoughts more than entirely internal reflection does. In a way, this very book is a reflective learning exercise for me. I’m thinking about what I’ve had to do in my programming life that isn’t directly about writing code, and documenting that. Along the way I’m deciding that some things warrant further investigation, discovering more about them, and writing about those discoveries.
What all of this means is that there is still, despite 45 years of systematic computer science education, room for multiple curricula on the teaching of making software. That the possibility to help the next generation of programmers avoid the minefields that we (and the people before us, and the people before them) blundered into is open. That the “heroic effort” of rediscovery described at the beginning of this section need be done, but only a small number of times.
There’s a lot of good material out there on these other aspects of coding. When it comes to organisation, for example, even back when I was teaching myself programming there were books out there that explained this stuff and made a good job of it: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; Object-Oriented Programming: an evolutionary approach; Object-Oriented Software Construction. The
This section really reiterates what came before; you should be building software that your users need in preference to what they want. That’s the ideology, anyway. Reality has this annoying habit of chipping in with a “well, actually” at this point.
Satisfying human needs is what Herzberg deems a hygiene factor: people must have their basic needs met before they can be motivated to pursue other goals.
As with pair coaching, this is a situation where acting like a petulant toddler can be to your advantage. The domain experts are likely to have particular ways of doing things; finding out why is what’s going to uncover the stuff they didn’t think to tell you. It’ll be frustrating. Some things we don’t have real reasons for doing; they’re just “best” practice or the way it gets done. Probing on these things will set up a cognitive dissonance which can lead people to get defensive; it’s important to let them know that you’re asking because you’re aware how much of an expert they are at this stuff and that you just need to understand the basics in order to do a good job by them.
You need to know what you’re building for, so you need to have some understanding of the problem domain. Yes, this is asymmetric. That’s because the situation is asymmetric; you’re building the software to solve a problem, the problem hasn’t been created so that you can write some software. That’s just the way it is, and compromises must come more from the software makers than from the people we’re working for. The better you understand the problem you’re trying to solve, the more you can synthesise ideas from that domain and the software domain to create interesting solutions. In other words, you can write better software if you understand what it is that software will do. That’s hopefully not a controversial idea.
The article Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture explores the effects of these boundaries on considering the systems involved.
User personas give the impression of designing for users, when in fact the product team has merely externalised their impression of what they want the software to be. It’s easy to go from “I want this feature” to “Bob would want this feature” when Bob is a stock photo pinned to a whiteboard; Bob won’t join in with the discussion so he won’t tell you otherwise. The key thing is to get inside the fictitious Bob’s head and ask “why” he’d want that feature. Sometimes teams that I’ve been on where personas are used nominate someone to be their advocate during discussions. This gives that person licence to challenge attempts to put words in the persona’s mouth; not quite the same as having a real customer involved but still useful.
What does a software architect do? A software architect is there to identify risks that affect the technical implementation of the software product, and address those risks. Preferably before they stop or impede the development of the product.
Sensoy, Özlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Critical Social Justice Education, 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 2017.
But the objective that guides me is my own need to break with white solidarity, even when it’s uncomfortable, which it almost always is. In the end, my actions are driven by my own need for integrity, not a need to correct or change someone else.
For example, I might say, “I can understand why you feel that way. I have felt that way myself. However, because of my opportunity to work with people of color and hear their perspectives, I have come to understand . . . ” I then share what I have come to understand with the emphasis on how this understanding relates to me. While this strategy is not guaranteed to lower defensiveness, it’s difficult to argue with someone who has framed a response as her or his own personal insight.
Ultimately, I strive for a less white identity for my own liberation and sense of justice, not to save people of color.
To be less white is to be less racially oppressive.
Consequently, if we whites want to interrupt this system, we have to get racially uncomfortable and be willing to examine the effects of our racial engagement. This includes not indulging in whatever reactions we have—anger, defensiveness, self-pity, and so forth—in a given cross-racial encounter without first reflecting on what is driving our reactions and how they will affect other people.
white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.
The above guidelines rest on the understanding that there is no face to save and the game is up; I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism. My investments are reinforced every day in mainstream society. I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it. I need to work hard to change my role in this system, but I can’t do it alone. This understanding leads me to gratitude when others help me.
Feedback is key to our ability to recognize and repair our inevitable and often unaware collusion. In recognition of this, I try to follow these guidelines: 1. How, where, and when you give me feedback is irrelevant—it is the feedback I want and need. Understanding that it is hard to give, I will take it any way I can get it. From my position of social, cultural, and institutional white power and privilege, I am perfectly safe and I can handle it. If I cannot handle it, it’s on me to build my racial stamina. 2. Thank you.
ASSUMPTIONS • Racism is simply personal prejudice. • I am free of racism. • I will be the judge of whether racism has occurred. • My learning is finished; I know all I need to know. • Racism can only be intentional; my not having intended racism cancels out the impact of my behavior. • My suffering relieves me of racism or racial privilege. • White people who experience another form of oppression cannot experience racial privilege. • If I am a good person, I can’t be racist. • I am entitled to remain comfortable/have this conversation the way I want to. • How I am perceived by others is the most important issue. • As a white person, I know the best way to challenge racism. • If I am feeling challenged, you are doing this wrong. • It’s unkind to point out racism. • Racism is conscious bias. I have none, so I am not racist. • Racists are bad individuals, so you are saying that I am a bad person. • If you knew me or understood me, you would know I can’t be racist. • I have friends of color, so I can’t be racist. • There is no problem; society is fine the way it is. • Racism is a simple problem. People just need to . . . • My worldview is objective and the only one operating. • If I can’t see it, it isn’t legitimate. • If you have more knowledge on the subject than I do, you think you’re better than me.
“What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?”
“If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenges to this entitlement.”8
themselves. A racism-free upbringing is not possible, because racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions.
Most whites who recall having a friend of color in childhood rarely keep these friendships into adulthood. Yet if my parents had thought it was valuable to have cross-racial relationships, they would have ensured that I had them, even if it took effort—the same effort so many white parents expend to send their children across town so they can attend a better (whiter) school.
Readers may be asking themselves, “But if the neighborhood is really dangerous, why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?” Research in implicit bias has shown that perceptions of criminal activity are influenced by race. White people will perceive danger simply by the presence of black people; we cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crime.7 But regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more or less dangerous than other neighborhoods, what is salient about this exchange is how it functions racially and what that means for the white people engaged in it. For my friend and me, this conversation did not increase our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood. Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs about black people. Toni Morrison uses the term race talk to capture “the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than positioning African Americans into the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.”8 Casual race talk is a key component of white racial framing because it accomplishes the interconnected goals of elevating whites while demeaning people of color; race talk always implies a racial “us” and “them.”
Avoiding direct racial language and using racially coded terms such as urban, underprivileged, diverse, sketchy, and good neighborhoods
When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.
People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.
People who do not identify as white may also find this book helpful for understanding why it is so often difficult to talk to white people about racism. People of color cannot avoid understanding white consciousness to some degree if they are to be successful in this society, yet nothing in dominant culture affirms their understanding or validates their frustrations when they interact with white people. I hope that this exploration affirms the cross-racial experiences of people of color and provides some useful insight. This book
Eddington looked guilty. “I haven’t done much reading,” he confessed. “I took Winston Churchill’s advice. He said: ‘It’s a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.’
Hurriedly Qwilleran pulled on some clothes, ran a wet comb through his hair, collected the newspapers cluttering the living room floor, slammed the bedroom door on his unmade bed, and looked out the window in time to see Brodie’s police car pulling into the driveway.
The sky was overcast, and the wind whistled, but his heart was light and his mind was fired with ambition.
Testing software and writing software share the following property in common: it’s not doing them that’s beneficial, it’s having done them.
Remember that the tester is trying to find differences between expected and actual behaviour: discovering their causes is something that only needs to be done once the team has decided a code fix is appropriate.
The goal of testing is to identify opportunities for the project team to exploit.
I’d recommend that even readers who consider themselves experienced object-oriented programmers read Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach and Object-Oriented Software Construction.
You see, a team is a relatively small number of people (anywhere from three to twelve) that shares common goals as well as the rewards and responsibilities for achieving them.
But perhaps most important of all, having too many people on a team makes team dynamics during meetings and other decision-making events almost impossible. That’s because a good team has to engage in two types of communication in order to optimize decision making, but only one of these is practical in a large group. According to Harvard’s Chris Argyris, those two types of communication are advocacy and inquiry. Basically, advocacy is the statement of ideas and opinions; inquiry is the asking of questions for clarity and understanding. When a group gets too large, people realize they are not going to get the floor back any time soon, so they resort almost exclusively to advocacy. It becomes like Congress (which is not designed to be a team) or the United Nations (ditto). One member says, “I think we should pursue proposal A,” provoking another member to say, “Well, I think we should pursue proposal B.” Someone else lobbies for C, yet another person wants A with a slight modification, and before you know it, everyone is trying to get their opinion heard. Inquiry, on the other hand, would entail one of the members saying, “Wait a minute. I’d like to hear you explain why you support proposal A, because I want to understand your rationale. After all, if it makes sense, I could go along with it.” Okay, that might be just a little too idealistic, but you get the point.
The point of these stories is that human beings are naturally self-interested. Only by ensuring that the people on your team are committed to collective results ahead of their own needs, and by keeping them focused on those results, can you avoid the kind of individualization that breaks teams apart.
Another Lack of Accountability Story I once attended a staff meeting where one of the executives had his laptop open and was intermittently typing away during discussions. After the meeting I asked the CEO, “Does that bother you when he does that?” He told me, “Yeah, I find it distracting.” So I asked the obvious question: “Why don’t you tell him to stop?” A pained look came across the CEO’s face as he answered, “I don’t know. I’m not his parent. Who am I to tell him how to act . . .” I wanted to interrupt him and scream, “You’re the friggin’ CEO! That’s who you are!” But I didn’t. That’s because I too sometimes struggle with accountability.
Because most human beings are drastically more reasonable than we think they are. In my work with teams, I’ve come to understand that most people don’t really need to have their ideas adopted (a.k.a. “get their way”) in order to buy in to a decision. They just want to have their ideas heard, understood, considered, and explained within the context of the ultimate decision.
“Koko is less emotional and more cerebral,” Qwilleran explained. “He has his own attributes and personality, and we have to understand him and accept him for what he is. He may not make a fuss over you, but he respects you and appreciates the wonderful food you prepare.”
Being able to compare estimated time versus actual time can be useful. I’m not sure that “velocity” - the ratio between estimated and actual time spent on tasks - is particularly helpful, because in my experience estimates are not consistently wrong by a constant factor. It’s knowing what work you’re bad at estimating that’s helpful. Do you fail to appreciate the risks involved in adding new features, or do you tend to assume all bug fixes are trivially simple?
“He wasn’t lost,” Melinda said with a smug smile. “It’s simply that you couldn’t find him.”
The lack of conflict is precisely the cause of one of the biggest problems that meetings have: they are boring.
Because when a team recovers from an incident of destructive conflict, it builds confidence that it can survive such an event, which in turn builds trust.
If team members are never pushing one another outside of their emotional comfort zones during discussions, then it is extremely likely that they’re not making the best decisions for the organization.
Team members readily set aside their individual or personal needs for the greater good of the group.
And remember, it’s okay to decide that your group isn’t a team. In a world where teamwork is rarer than we might think, plenty of non-teams succeed. In fact, if your group is not meant to be a team, it’s far better to be clear about that than to waste time and energy pretending you’re something you’re not. Because that only creates false expectations, which leads to frustration and resentment.
driveway, Qwilleran thought he saw the enormous tail fins of William’s limousine
Not surprisingly, organizations that are in serious trouble tend to be the most difficult clients. They need to change the most and are least able to do it. For low-performing organizations, the tension of failure is so high that they are unable to take one more risk, and so instead they hold on to their unsatisfactory performance. In these extreme cases, there is probably not much consultants can do to surface the resistance to change. We may just have to accept it. OGRES AND ANGELS In any organization, there are certain managers who are well known for their disdain for support groups and internal consultants.
The reason consultants feel as if they are the victim of the resistance is that the client’s discomfort is being expressed indirectly. If the client were able to be authentic and put the concern directly into words by saying—”I am concerned I am losing control of this group,” or “I feel I am ill equipped to handle this particular situation,” or “People expect things from me that I just can’t deliver”—we consultants would not feel attacked. We would feel very supportive toward the manager. The manager’s direct expression of underlying concerns is not resistance. Resistance occurs only when the concerns about facing the difficult realities and the choice not to deal with them are expressed indirectly. They are expressed indirectly by blaming lack of detailed data, not enough time, impracticality, not enough budget, lack of understanding by “those people,” and so on, as the reasons not to proceed with a project or implement some recommendations.
‘Your ancestors thought they would answer the big question in space. Now here you are, out where they longed to go, looking back at the planets, trying to answer the same damn thing. You won’t. You need to reframe this frustration you’re feeling. If what you’re saying is that you don’t see a life for yourself here, that the kind of work you want to do or the experiences you want to have aren’t available in the Fleet, then by all means, go. But if the only reason you want to do it is because you’re looking for a point, you’re going to end up miserable. You’ll float around forever trying to make peace with that.’
Make sure people remember that a closed system is a closed system even when you can’t see the edges.’ Tessa said nothing
You may be wondering, dear guest, as I did, how labour is compensated if your base needs are met. This is the part that’s hard for many – non-Exodan Humans included – to understand: it’s not. Nor do some professions receive more resources than others, or finer housing, or any such tangible benefits. You become a doctor because you want to help people. You become a pilot because you want to fly. You become a farmer because you want to work with growing things, or because you want to feed others. To an Exodan, the question of choosing a profession is not one of what do I need? but rather what am I good at? What good can I do?
Eyas sighed and ran her hand through her hair. He thought this was a matter of bigotry. ‘No, you still don’t get it. They tried to give you a sanitation job because everybody has to do sanitation. Everybody. Me, merchants, teachers, doctors, council members, the admiral – every healthy Exodan fourteen and over gets their ID put in a computer, and that computer randomly pulls names for temporary, mandatory, no-getting-out-of-it work crews to sort recycling and wash greasy throw-cloths and unclog the sewage lines. All the awful jobs nobody wants to do. That way, nothing is out of sight or out of mind. Nothing is left to lesser people, because there’s no such thing. So you, coming in here at – how old are you?’ ‘Twenty-four.’ ‘Right. You’ve got ten years of potential sanitation shifts to make up for. You’re here eating the food we grow, sleeping inside a home somebody worked hard to maintain, drinking water that is carefully, carefully managed. The people at the job office knew that. They wanted to see if you were actually willing to live like us. If you were more than just a tourist. They wanted to know if you were serious.’ The man straightened up. ‘I’m serious.’ ‘Well, then, go muck out a sewer like the rest of us have to. Do that, and they might let you put some code to use.’ Eyas was sure they would. There was need for that kind of skillset, no question. It just needed to be in the hands of someone with the right principles.
bottle of kick sitting on the shelf, a gift from her
When People Mean They Express It by Saying I don’t like it. “I don’t understand it.” I don’t want to do it. “Let’s get more data.” or “I’ll get back to you.” or “Let me talk it over with my staff.” I don’t understand a word you are saying. Nothing Do as I say, dammit! “Why don’t you think it over and get back to me?” I wouldn’t let your group even get close to my organization. “We want to talk to some other people about alternative approaches to this problem and we’ll let you know.”
Come close, but not too close. Despite what the line manager says to you, there is always some desire for confirmation that the organization is doing the best that can be done under the circumstances. This desire at times can be stronger than the desire to solve the problem.
The rationalization is, “Well, I’ll deal with these areas if it becomes necessary.” It is always necessary to talk about control, vulnerability, your wants, and chances of success.
Before getting into the actual steps in a contracting meeting, here is a list of the consulting competencies required to complete the business of contracting. You should be able to Ask direct questions about who the client is and who the less visible parties to the contract are. Elicit the client’s expectations of you. Clearly and simply state what you want from the client. Say no or postpone a project that in your judgment has less than a 50/50 chance of success. Probe directly for the client’s underlying concerns about losing control. Probe directly for the client’s underlying concerns about exposure and vulnerability. Give direct verbal support and affirmation to the client. When the contracting meeting is not going well, discuss directly with the client why it is not. More detailed competencies will surface as we work through a contracting meeting in the next chapter. This list, however, contains the crucial ones, which many of us have a hard time doing. The hard time we have is not really with the action itself, but with valuing the importance of these actions. Having direct discussions with the client—about control, vulnerability, your wants, the chance of success, and how the discussion is going—makes the difference between an average contracting meeting and an excellent one. The problem is that it is possible to have a contracting meeting in which none of these subjects are
The mistake we can make is to take on the rehabilitation of that division as a personal objective. The manager of that division, not the consultant, is responsible for its rehabilitation. Taking over the manager’s rights, including the right to fail, leads to consulting errors. It can also lead to frustration and despair, for you may be taking on a task that you are not positioned to accomplish. Your own responsibility as a consultant is to present information as simply, directly, and assertively as possible and to complete the tasks of each phase of the consultation. That’s all there is to do, and it’s within each of us to do that perfectly.
Both client overdependence and client disdain are bad for the consultant.
In the final analysis, you are not responsible for the use of your expertise and recommendations. If consultants really believe that they should be responsible for implementing their recommendations, they should immediately get jobs as line managers and stop calling themselves consultants.
Change the conversation to change the culture. Encourage dialogue that is void of blame, history, attention to who is not in the room, and too quick to action. Structure the conversation toward personal responsibility, questions of purpose and meaning, and what will be unique and new about the proposed changes.
Don’t take it personally. This is the toughest to do. The reaction of the client to your work is more a response to the process of dependency and receiving help than it is resistance to your own personal style. You do have your own peculiarities; so does everyone else. If, however, you start agonizing about them during the feedback process, even to yourself, you’re in big trouble. The resistance you encounter during the process is resistance to the prospect of having to act on difficult organizational issues. Don’t be seduced into taking it personally. Engagement and
The confusion is between collaborating on the technical aspects of the problem (which I don’t mean) and collaborating on how the stages of the consultation will be carried out (which I do mean). Here’s an example of where you draw the line between them: Areas of Collaboration Areas of Expertise Expressing the wants of the client Circuit design Planning how to inform the organization of the study Training design Deciding who is involved in the discovery phase Questionnaire design Generating the right kind of data Package design Interpreting the results of discovery Systems analysis Deciding how to make a change Pricing strategy Regardless of the area of expertise, the way the consultation process itself is managed (the left side of this list) will greatly affect the client’s use of even the most technical expertise. The more the consultative process can be collaborative, the better the odds for success are after the consultant has left.
The consultant needs to constantly keep in mind how much the client is owning feelings versus talking as if he or she is just an observer of the organization.
My use of the term flawless consulting may sound presumptuous, but it is not accidental. A basic value underlying this book is that there is in each of us the possibility of perfection. There is a consulting professional inside each of us, and our task is to allow that flawless consultant to emerge. On its surface, this book is about methods and techniques. But each technique carries a consistent message more important than any method: that each act that expresses trust in ourselves and belief in the validity of our own experience is always the right path to follow. Each act that is manipulative or filled with pretense is always self-destructive.
What needs reaffirmation in this edition of the book is that teams and personal relationships are still critical to technical and business success. The value of teams and relationships is now more widely accepted than it was in the past, at least intellectually. We may not be any better at working together, but at least we know it matters and want to create more cooperative workplaces, whether virtual or in person. One reason the ideas in this book have endured is not so much that specific consulting skills are presented in such overconfident specificity; it is more because of the attention the book gives to the emotional and personal dimensions of our workplaces. Even now, with all the rhetoric given to relationships, personal development, and even spirituality, our institutions still operate as if strategy, structure, and technology are what really matter. Relationships continue to be treated as a necessary inconvenience—as if they have to be endured and wherever there is an opportunity to automate a transaction or communicate electronically, we take it. In 2000 most telephone conversations involved a machine on one end; now it is text messages, e-mail, and, if I want to look personal, Facebook, LinkedIn, and their successors. These are often the media of choice. Even more, we encourage people to work at home, where human interaction is minimized in the name of serenity and a more balanced life. What is difficult about managing relationships is that something is demanded of us that technology and automated routines do not require: the need to know ourselves and be authentic. Authenticity is simply being honest with ourselves and being direct and honest with others. For whatever the reason, authenticity continues to be rare in our workplaces. Most interactions carry an element of role play, positioning, and strategy. All are reflections of our wish to control our environment and the people in it. In some ways, this book is a long and detailed description of the landscape of authenticity. What has stood the test of time is that this rare act is not only good for the soul but also works very well. “Authentic consultant” is not an oxymoron but a compelling competitive advantage, if, unfortunately, a rare one. What is still difficult about authenticity is that it is a high-risk strategy. It swims upstream in a culture of control, which is where most of our organizations remain. It also demands some faith in ourselves: we have to be tuned into the feeling dimension of our connection with others. Most of us have spent our days developing our brain and have left our body and its feeling parts behind, to be reclaimed after work hours. So even when we decide to risk being authentic, we might not know how. Valuing the relationship between consultant and client, or teacher and student, or service provider and customer, and defining how to manage that relationship is where this book has found its niche. The intent of this revision is to deepen and expand that white space between strategy, structure, and technology that we label relationship.
I have picked two sectors of society where the call for change and reform has been shouting in our ears for decades with little to show for it: health care and education. These are also service industries, which is where most of us work these days. Both of these fields are in the throes of the language of reform. But most reform efforts are more about improvement rather than rethinking something more fundamental. The health care “reform” is mostly about cost control, who pays, and increasing the pressure on standardization. There is no reform in that conversation, just better or different management. Real reform in health care will come from changing our relationship with our service provider and having service providers change their relationship with each other. In consulting terms, we need more balanced contracting, more joint discovery, and a new dialogue. This is starting to occur, and Chapter Twelve presents a great example from a very special surgeon, Paul Uhlig. Like health care, the current conversation about education reform is also not reform; it is just more controls and imposed standards masquerading as reform. True reform will shift our thinking about the culture of the classroom, accountability of the learner, and the relationship between teacher and student. An example of this from an amazing high school teacher, Ward Mailliard, is in Chapter Eighteen.
It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.
“Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”
In undoing some event, the mind tended to remove whatever felt surprising or unexpected—which was different from saying that it was obeying the rules of probability.
“The availability of the alternative appears to be controlled by a relation of similarity between oneself and the target of envy. To experience envy, it is sufficient to have a vivid image of oneself in another person’s shoes; it is not necessary to have a plausible scenario of how one came to occupy those shoes.” Envy, in some strange way, required no imagination.
“The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds,” Danny wrote. “We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.”
Amos and Danny had a thought: People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. “The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo,” Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. “When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.”
It was as if Danny thought that by anticipating his feelings he might dull the pain they would inevitably bring. By the end of
Happy people did not dwell on some imagined unhappiness the way unhappy people imagined what they might have done differently so that they might be happy. People did not seek to avoid other emotions with the same energy they sought to avoid regret.
“What might have been is an essential component of misery,’” he wrote to Amos. “There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.”
So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative.
particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in
Danny was a pessimist. Amos was not merely an optimist; Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
But to Danny, useful advice, however obvious, was better than no advice at all. He asked his students to figure out what advice they would give to an Egyptologist who was having difficulty deciphering a hieroglyph. “He tells us that the guy is going slower and slower and getting more and more stuck,” recalled Daniela Gordon, a student who became a researcher in the Israeli army. “Then Danny asks, ‘What should he do?’ No one could think of anything. And Danny says; ‘He should take a nap!’”
“Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,” said one of his students. “Danny took that idea and ran with it.”
The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tension. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.” Danny was also
Scott began to sour on AA in general. This post-honeymoon sensation was so common that AA had a phrase for it: “falling off your pink cloud.”
Amos liked to say that stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones. He paid attention to what Edwards was up to without paying a lot of attention to Edwards himself.
Occasionally, people who watched Amos in action sensed that he was more afraid of being thought unmanly than he was actually brave. “He was always very gung ho,” recalled Uri Shamir. “I thought it was maybe compensation for being thin and weak and pale.” At some point it didn’t matter: He compelled himself to be brave until bravery became a habit.
Like they say, all’s fair in love and war. Except this isn’t love, and it isn’t war. It’s business.
He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.
Later, when basketball scouts came to him looking for jobs, the trait he looked for was some awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers—that they were inherently fallible. “I always ask them, ‘Who did you miss?’” he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? “If they don’t give me a good one, I’m like, ‘Fuck ’em.’”
From his stint as a consultant he learned something valuable, however. It seemed to him that a big part of a consultant’s job was to feign total certainty about uncertain things. In a job interview with McKinsey, they told him that he was not certain enough in his opinions. “And I said it was because I wasn’t certain. And they said, ‘We’re billing clients five hundred grand a year, so you have to be sure of what you are saying.’” The consulting firm that eventually hired him was forever asking him to exhibit confidence when, in his view, confidence was a sign of fraudulence. They’d asked him to forecast the price of oil for clients, for instance. “And then we would go to our clients and tell them we could predict the price of oil. No one can predict the price of oil. It was basically nonsense.”
It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if those people were sitting next to us. It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and who is personally affected by what you say. Even if you remember it right now, will you remember it next time you’re overwhelmed, or perhaps never forget it again?
When you’ve asked your customers what would improve your service, has anyone said,
the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.5
Still, I know I missed a lot, especially in the beginning, not only because I was an outsider but also because I was constantly overanalyzing things. A buzzing inner monologue would often draw me inward, hindering my ability to remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of me. It’s safer that way. Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories. As Susan Sontag has warned, this comfort can “deplete the world” and get in the way of seeing.
Why, I wondered, have we documented how the poor make ends meet without asking why their bills are so high or where their money is flowing?
“The business of housing the poor,” Jacob Riis wrote 125 years ago, “if it is to amount to anything, must be a business, as it was business with our fathers to put them where they are. As charity, pastime, or fad, it will miserably fail, always and everywhere.”53 And yet, housing is too fundamental a human need, too central to children’s health and development, too important to expanding economic opportunities and stabilizing communities to be treated as simply a business, a crude investment vehicle, something that just “cashes out.”
Emphasizing the importance of exploitation does not mean haranguing landlords as greedy or heartless. It means uncovering the ironies and inefficiencies that arise when policymakers try to help poor families without addressing the root causes of their poverty. It means trying to understand landlords’ and tenants’ acceptance of extreme inequality—and our own.
In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack—good jobs, a strong safety net, role models—we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor.45 The ’hood is good.
Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people’s incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more—and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate.43 Poverty is two-faced—a matter of income and expenses, input and output—and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact.
Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, “not to destroy individualism,” in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, “but to protect it.”
Imagine if we didn’t provide unemployment insurance or Social Security to most families who needed these benefits. Imagine if the vast majority of families who applied for food stamps were turned away hungry. And yet this is exactly how we treat most poor families seeking shelter.
The pursuit of happiness undeniably includes the pursuit of material well-being: minimally, being able to secure basic necessities. It can be overwhelming to consider how much happiness has been lost, how many capabilities snuffed out, by the swell of poverty in this land and our collective decision not to provide all our citizens with a stable and decent place to live.
People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.
In NA, Scott had learned that addiction tightened its grip when you were hungry, angry, lonely, or tired—“HALT”—and Scott was all four.
When people began to view their neighborhood as brimming with deprivation and vice, full of “all sorts of shipwrecked humanity,” they lost confidence in its political capacity.8 Milwaukee renters who perceived higher levels of neighborhood trauma—believing that their neighbors had experienced incarceration, abuse, addiction, and other harrowing events—were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.9 This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.
Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.”4
Pastor Daryl felt torn. On the one hand, he thought it was the job of the church, not the government, to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was “pure Christianity.” When it came to Larraine, though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. “She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly….Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, ‘Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.’ ” It was easy to go on about helping “the poor.” Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded—that was a more trying matter.
Evaluate the last performance review you received and also the last set of reviews you gave to your subordinates as a means of delivering task-relevant feedback. How well did the reviews do to improve performance? What was the nature of the communication process during the delivery of each? 20 Redo one of these reviews as it should have been done.
Classify the task-relevant maturity of each of your subordinates as low, medium, or high. Evaluate the management style that would be most appropriate for each. Compare what your own style is with what it should be.
Usually the person who was promoted beyond his capability is forced to leave the company rather than encouraged to take a step back. This is often rationalized by the notion that “It is better that we let him go, for his own sake.” I think it is dead wrong to force someone in such circumstances out of the company. Instead, I think management ought to face up to its own error in judgment and take forthright and deliberate steps to place the person into a job he can do. Management should also support the employee in the face of the embarrassment that he is likely to feel. If recycling is done openly, all will be pleasantly surprised how short-lived that embarrassment will be.
“The public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.” So wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs believed that a prerequisite for this type of healthy and engaged community was the presence of people who simply were present, who looked after the neighborhood. She has been proved right: disadvantaged neighborhoods with higher levels of “collective efficacy”—the stuff of loosely linked neighbors who trust one another and share expectations about how to make their community better—have lower crime rates.3 A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it begrudgingly relocated. In this way, displacement contributed directly to what Jacobs called “perpetual slums,” churning environments with high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.”4 With Doreen’s eviction, Thirty-Second Street lost a steadying presence—someone who loved and invested in the neighborhood, who contributed to making the block safer—but Wright Street didn’t gain one.
Over the bathroom door, she affixed a sign that she had found at a drugstore: TODAY WORRIED YOU YESTERDAY AND ALL IS WELL. In the basement Arleen had
Moreover, this double dilution lowered the concentration of the analytes in the blood samples to levels that were below the ADVIA’s FDA-sanctioned analytic measurement range. In other words, it meant using the machine in a way that neither the manufacturer nor its regulator approved of. To get the final patient result, one had to multiply the diluted result by the same factor the blood had been diluted by, not knowing whether the diluted result was even reliable. Daniel and Sam were nonetheless proud of what they’d accomplished. At heart, both were engineers for whom patient care was an abstract concept. If their tinkering turned out to have adverse consequences, they weren’t the ones who would be held personally responsible. It was Alan’s name, not theirs, that was on the CLIA certificate.
The four best strategies for building shame-resilient organizations are: Supporting leaders who are willing to dare greatly and facilitate honest conversations about shame and cultivate shame-resilient cultures. Facilitating a conscientious effort to see where shame might be functioning in the organization and how it might even be creeping into the way we engage with our co-workers and students. Normalizing is a critical shame-resilience strategy. Leaders and managers can cultivate engagement by helping people know what to expect. What are common struggles? How have other people dealt with them? What have your experiences been? Training all employees on the differences between shame and guilt, and teaching them how to give and receive feedback in a way that fosters growth and engagement.
The opening shot usually occurs when you are on the run. On your way to what you consider an important meeting, your subordinate timidly stops you and mutters under his breath, “Do you have a minute?” He then mutters further that he has decided to leave the company. You look at him wide-eyed. Your initial reaction to his announcement is absolutely crucial. If you’re human, you’ll probably want to escape to your meeting, and you mumble something back about talking things over later. But in almost all such cases, the employee is quitting because he feels he is not important to you. If you do not deal with the situation right at the first mention, you’ll confirm his feelings and the outcome is inevitable.
The information to be gained here tends to fall into four distinct categories. First, you’re after an understanding of the candidate’s technical knowledge: not engineering or scientific knowledge, but what he knows about performing the job he wants—his skill level. For an accountant, technical skill means an understanding of accounting; for a tax lawyer, tax laws; for an actuary, statistics and the use of actuarial tables; and so on. Second, you’re trying to assess how this person performed in an earlier job using his skills and technical knowledge; in short, not just what the candidate knows, but also what he did with what he knows. Third, you are after the reasons why there may be any discrepancy between what he knew and what he did, between his capabilities and his performance. And finally, you are trying to get a feel for his set of operational values, those that would guide him on the job.
Describe some projects that were highly regarded by your management, especially by the levels above your immediate supervisor. — What are your weaknesses? How are you working to eliminate them? — Convince me why my company should hire you. — What are some of the problems you are encountering in your current position? How are you going about solving them? What could you have done to prevent them from cropping up? — Why do you think you’re ready for this new job? — What do you consider your most significant achievements? Why were they important to you? — What do you consider your most significant failures? What did you learn from them? — Why do you think an engineer should be chosen for a marketing position? (Vary this one according to the situation.) — What was the most important course or project you completed in your college career? Why was it so important?
I learned the distinction between the two during one of the first reviews I had to give. I was trying very hard to persuade my subordinate to see things my way. He simply would not go along with me and finally said to me, “Andy, you will never convince me, but why do you insist on wanting to convince me? I’ve already said I will do what you say.”
I feel very strongly that any outcome that includes a commitment to action is acceptable.
Once responsibility has been assumed, however, finding the solution is relatively easy. This is because the move from blaming others to assuming responsibility constitutes an emotional step, while the move from assuming responsibility to finding the solution is an intellectual one, and the latter is easier.
One big pitfall to be avoided is the “potential trap.” At all times you should force yourself to assess performance, not potential. By “potential” I mean form rather than substance. I
Trusting the internal measures, I should have had the judgment and courage to give the manager a much lower rating than I did in spite of the excellent output indicators that did not reflect the year under review.
It is also how we allocate the rewards—promotions, dollars, stock options, or whatever we may use.
nearest em. “Did you kill the Omkem Excellency Zat?” Garal ignored
Checkout time for the Presidential Penthouse is four o’clock, so the previous guests have not yet vacated the room. But
Once I jokingly asked a doctor friend of mine from Lake Merced Golf Club if he was a good hand surgeon. He replied, “No, but I’m a lucky one,” so I called Gordon “Lucky” after that. That may sound droll, but you have to have a certain amount of luck piloting ships, just as you do in golf, or life for that matter, because not everything works out the way you planned it. Like Gordon, I’d rather be a lucky pilot than a good one. Andy Ugarte, a dear Peruvian friend of mine, was very successful. He thought success was achieved by being smart, but you also needed luck. You needed to be in the right place at the right time, which is what happened with Captain Sever. I was surprised how many pilots agreed on one thing; we all used body English to help move ships out of harm’s way. This is the equivalent of golfers talking to their balls. I caught myself moving my hips a few times, hoping to shove a huge ship sideways to avoid trouble. I mumbled a few prayers when ships got too damn close to something. Considering how shallow San Francisco Bay is, it must have helped, because I was only aground three times, and twice it wasn’t my fault.
Captain Sever warned me, “Never think about a job before you get on the pilot ladder and forget about it once you let go of it.” He was so right.
President Lincoln once told this anecdote in regards to politics, but it can be applied to going aboard naval ships as a civilian pilot. One day a man was riding a horse when it started bucking so violently that he could hardly control it. His horse finally leapt so high, it put one hoof into a stirrup. The startled rider, seeing his dilemma, indignantly said, “If you want to get on, I’d better get off!” This relates to piloting because only one person should be in control of the ship. Piloting by committee doesn’t work.
Felix Riesenberg, Jr., mariner, author, and 1897 graduate of my college, wrote, “The sea is slow at recognition of effort and aptitude, but fast at sinking the unfit.” As cadets, we had to memorize this. It’s as true today as it was when he wrote it.
When I started piloting, Captain Sever told me, “Don’t think about a ship before you get on the pilot ladder and forget about her once you get off.” This makes a lot of sense, but it’s harder to do than you think, especially when your life is on the line.
“There are times when you can ask questions or challenge ideas, but if you’ve got a teacher that doesn’t like that or the kids in the class make fun of people who do that, it’s bad. I think most of us learn that it’s best to just keep your head down, your mouth shut, and your grades high.” As I reread this passage in my notes and thought about my conversation with Kevin, I was overwhelmed. As a teacher I felt heartbreak—we can’t learn when our heads are down and our mouths are shut.
Last year I gave a talk on vulnerability to 350 SWAT team officers, parole officers, and jailers. (Yes, it was as intimidating as it sounds.) A SWAT officer walked up to me after the talk and said, “The only reason we listened to you is because you’re just as bad at being open as we are. If you didn’t wrestle with being vulnerable, we wouldn’t trust you one bit.”
We live in a society, Sidra. Societies have rules.’ ‘You break rules all the time.’ ‘I break laws. That’s different. Social rules have their place. It’s how we all get along. It’s how we trust each other and work together. And yeah, there is a big stupid law that keeps you from getting the same deal as everybody else. That’s bullshit, and if I could change it, I would’ve done so a long time ago.
1. Aspirational values: Honesty and Integrity
What would I want, if I could be free? Safety for Darr. My mother’s death given meaning. Change, for the world. And for myself… I understand now. I have chosen who will shape me.
Since narrative is what this is all about, try to make each exercise not a static scene but the account of an act or action, something happening. It doesn’t have to be bang-pow “action”; it might be a journey down a supermarket aisle or some thoughts going on inside a head. What it has to do is move—end up in a different place from where it started. That’s what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.
Internet. You might form a Virtual Mutinous Crew using this book together via e-mail. But if it doesn’t work out, don’t feel cheated or defeated. You can attend many writing workshops led by famous writers or be a member of many peer groups and yet get no closer to finding your own voice as a writer than you might do working alone in silence. Ultimately
Such privatization of common wealth might characterize all entrepreneurs.
Mutual learning is also an important goal. Groups are candid about making mistakes—and learning from them. One report about satoyama work by a group of volunteers includes all the problems and mistakes of their efforts. Without coordination, they cut down too many trees. Some of the areas they cleared grew back even thicker with undesirable species. In the end, the report’s authors argue, the group developed a “do, think, observe, and do again” principle, elevating collective trial and error to an art. Since one of their goals was participatory learning, allowing themselves to make and observe mistakes was an important part of the process. The authors conclude, “To be successful, volunteers have to participate in the program at all levels and stages.”
working knowledge. Mutual learning is also an important goal. Groups are candid about making mistakes—and learning from them. One report about satoyama work by a group of volunteers includes all the problems and mistakes of their efforts. Without coordination, they cut down too many trees. Some of the areas they cleared grew back even thicker with undesirable species. In the end, the report’s authors argue, the group developed a “do, think,
“When people say ‘Things were better in the old days,’ what they have in mind, I believe, is the joy of doing things together with many people. We have lost that joy.”3 Pines as well as farmers no longer
In this last mushroom flush, a final upsurge in the face of varied coming droughts and winters, I search for fugitive moments of entanglement in the midst of institutionalized alienation. These are sites in which to seek allies. One might think of them as latent commons. They are latent in two senses: first, while ubiquitous, we rarely notice them, and, second, they are undeveloped. They bubble with unrealized possibilities; they are elusive. They are what we hear in Brown’s political listening and related arts of noticing. They require stretching concepts of the commons. Thus, I characterize them in the negative: Latent commons are not exclusive human enclaves. Opening the commons to other beings shifts everything. Once we include pests and diseases, we can’t hope for harmony; the lion will not lie down with the lamb. And organisms don’t just eat each other; they also make divergent ecologies. Latent commons are those mutualist and nonantagonistic entanglements found within the play of this confusion. Latent commons are not good for everyone. Every instance of collaboration makes room for some and leaves out others. Whole species lose out in some collaborations. The best we can do is to aim for “good-enough” worlds, where “good-enough” is always imperfect and under revision. Latent comments don’t institutionalize well. Attempts to turn the commons into policy are commendably brave, but they do not capture the effervescence of the latent commons. The latent commons moves in law’s interstices; it is catalyzed by infraction, infection, inattention—and poaching. Latent commons cannot redeem us. Some radical thinkers hope that progress will lead us to a redemptive and utopian commons. In contrast, the latent commons is here and now, amidst the trouble. And humans are never fully in control. Given this negative character, it makes no sense to crystallize first principles or seek natural laws that generate best cases. Instead, I practice arts of noticing. I comb through the mess of existing worlds-in-the-making, looking for treasures—each distinctive and unlikely to be found again, at least in that form.
“You start getting these groupings that you can only name relative to each other. You can’t call them a species…. In the old taxonomic approach you say, ‘this is my ideal’—it’s completely Platonic—and everything is going to compare as a missed approximation to that ideal. Nobody will be the same as this, but you compare and see how close they are to this ideal…. If it becomes too different—by whatever measure, and the measures are completely arbitrary—you say, ‘oh this must be a different species.’”
In postcolonial theory, translation shows us misfits as well as joins.
be left alone,” someone explained.2 Resource management
Peasant landscapes, he explained, are the proving grounds for remaking sustainable relations between humans and nature.
future sustainability is best modeled with the help of nostalgia.
Perhaps one skill for the Zen arts of managed nonmanagement will be to watch pine’s partners rather than pine.
At the heart of the practices I am advocating are arts of ethnography and natural history. The new alliance I propose is based on commitments to observation and fieldwork—and what I call noticing.13 Human-disturbed landscapes are ideal spaces for humanist and naturalist noticing. We need to know the histories humans have made in these places and the histories of nonhuman participants. Satoyama restoration advocates were exceptional teachers here; they revitalized my understanding of “disturbance” as both coordination and history. They showed me how disturbance might initiate a story of the life of the forest.14
This is a performance of competition—not a necessity of business.
“Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works.3
Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such
No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical. —Physicist Niels Bohr defending “spooky action at a distance”
Worse yet, contaminated diversity is recalcitrant to the kind of “summing up” that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge. Contaminated diversity is not only particular and historical, ever changing, but also relational. It has no self-contained units; its units are encounter-based collaborations. Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any “one” involved. No self-contained individuals or groups assure their self-interests oblivious to the encounter. Without algorithms based on self-containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake. That takes time, and too much time, perhaps, for those who dream of grasping the whole in an equation. But who put them in charge? If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell about contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices. Perhaps, like the war survivors themselves, we need to tell and tell until all our stories of death and near-death and gratuitous life are standing with us to face the challenges of the present. It is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.
“I believe it lures people on to acts of terrible evil by whispering to them that they will do good. That they’ll make things not just a little better but all better.”
Will you open to us, if we open to you? Do you see us for what we are, and accept us for what we do?
We may be cast on but no man may cast us back.
None of them are angry at Gallat for being too dangerous to have a simple conversation with, though. There’s something very wrong with that.
“This is the task of the Guardians, little one. We prevent orogeny from disappearing—because in truth, the people of the world would not survive without it. Orogenes are essential. And yet because you are essential, you cannot be permitted to have a choice in the matter. You must be tools—and tools cannot be people. Guardians keep the tool … and to the degree possible, while still retaining the tool’s usefulness, kill the person.”
and eight people stared at you as if you had just bitten the head off a chicken. But then the meeting ended. What you don’t realize is that two of your friends are
And it is only sensible that you would put those people to work, too. Guarding your walls. Tending
things contain. Richness. Strangeness. Darker colors
of whom I speak?” “Marten Broadcloak,”
at each one as he passes. And stand back a little,
Still, it’s pretty hard to come up with ideas for articles. So we’ve come up with some “hacks” or tricks for coming up with and implementing good ideas. As we’ve mentioned before, there are three nodes of information we like to focus on: data, industries, and people
lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into making a really good blog post. So, here’s a tip: when you first start, don’t write every day. Spend 40 hours on your first post, and then make it succeed. Do whatever it takes to find the story that’s in the data to make it genuinely interesting. The returns on writing something great are enormous; the returns on writing something average are zero
Our goal with a title is twofold: it should honestly convey what the article is about, and it should emphasis the point that we think the reader will share
Then, that story gets shared with the “editor”, the person who will tear the first draft to shreds. First drafts are never great. The editor needs to help improve the organization of the article, offer suggestions for making the writing clear, and, most importantly, aggressively push back on whether everything in the article is correct.
There is a secret to minimizing your chances of making a catastrophic mistake: keep the scope of your argument narrow. In every post, we try to make just one really good point, and make sure that we are right about that point. If we write about San Francisco rent prices, we don’t also talk about rent control, the impact of the tech industry, or the city government’s zoning regulations. We just focus on one thing: what’s happening to the price
Most leaders get it wrong. They think that organizational productivity and performance are simply about policies, processes, structures, or systems. So when their software product doesn’t ship on time, they benchmark others’ development processes. Or when productivity flags, they tweak their performance management system. When teams aren’t cooperating, they restructure. Our research shows that these types of nonhuman changes fail more often than they succeed. That’s because the real problem never was in the process, system, or structure—it was in employee behavior. The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process. And that requires Crucial Conversations skills. In the worst companies, poor performers are first ignored and then transferred. In good companies, bosses eventually deal with problems. In the best companies, everyone holds everyone else accountable—regardless of level or position. The path to high productivity passes not through a static system, but through face-to-face conversations
More broadly, recent events confirm a central theme of Travels of a T-Shirt: The most vulnerable have more to fear from power imbalances and weak institutions than from competitive markets, and, indeed, markets depend for their survival on a set of basic institutions and values that protect the most vulnerable. The
In 2013, Richard Locke published a path-breaking book in which he analyzed nearly 30 years of efforts by Western companies to promote labor standards among their suppliers in developing countries.38
Yet, as we have seen, the hardest work of this generation of activists is finished now. Not all of the work is finished, but the hard work of shifting the very paradigm by which the global apparel industry operates is finished. The work that remains is important, but it is work at ground level—factory-by-factory work related to how, not whether, large multinationals should be responsible for conditions in their far-flung supply chains. The current generation of campus activists continues to make progress on these issues. This progress reminds us that globalization is not a faceless monster over which we have no control. Human beings write the rules of the game, and the rules are changing every day.
So, what do I say to the young woman on the steps at Georgetown University who was so concerned about the evils of the race to the bottom, so concerned about where and how her T-shirt was produced? I would tell her to appreciate what markets and trade have accomplished for all of the sisters in time who have been liberated by life in a sweatshop, and that she should be careful about dooming anyone to life on the farm. I would tell her that the poor suffer more from exclusion from politics than from the perils of the market, and that if she has activist energy left over it should be focused on including people in politics rather than shielding them from markets. And I would tell her about the shoulders she stands on, about her own sisters and brothers in time and the noble family tree of activists, and the difference they have made in a day's life at work all over the world. I would tell her that, in just a few short years, I have seen the difference her own generation has made, and that someday people will stand on her shoulders, too. I would tell her that Nike, Adidas, and GAP need her to keep watching, and so do Wal-Mart and the Chinese government. I would tell her that I have met dozens of seamstresses in Chinese factories who need her, and that future generations of sweatshop workers and cotton farmers need her as well. I would tell her to look both ways, but to march on.
My T-shirt's story, then, is not a tale of Adam Smith's market forces, but is instead a tale of Karl Polanyi's double movement, in which market forces on the one hand meet demands for protection on the other.
Bernie Brill, former executive director of the Secondary Materials and Recycling Textiles (SMART) Association, told me that used T-shirts are contained in, for example, automobile doors and roofs, carpet pads, mattresses, cushions, insulation, and caskets.
The repeated heartbreak of having a great post flop has taught us to ask the question “Why will someone share this?” before we start writing. Very often, we can’t come up with an answer, so we’ll refine the idea until we do.
We knew the report had a good chance of going viral because, before we even started gathering the data, we considered: (1) What is a person expressing by sharing this?, and (2) What can they say about it?
The entirety of Facebook’s motivation can be decoded from this 2011 quote (http://robhof.com/2011/04/20/1014/) by the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg: “[Facebookisthe]demandgeneration.We’renotreallydemandfulfillment,whenyou’ve alreadyfigureditoutwhatyou’regoingtobuy–that’ssearch.We’redemandgeneration, beforeyouknowyouwantsomething,beforeyouknowyou’reinterestedinsomething
Information, on the other hand, will. It can be data that your company produces, insights you have because of your industry experience, or stories about the people you have access to.
your focus should be on making interesting things that also have some benefit for your company
In organizational theory, there is something called the Effort-Performance-Outcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy_theory) theory: you will only put forth the effort necessary to succeed if you reasonably expect that effort will pay off. This explains why workers slack off once they believe that their output won’t be used for anything important. It also helps explain lots of social phenomena, like why the cycle of poverty is so difficult to escape: if you grow up somewhere where there are no examples of hard work leading to success, there is no case to be made for hard work
work. There is nothing less motivating than writing blog posts on the Internet for most corporate blogs, because no one ever reads those blog posts. We imagine that the people who work at those blogs start off earnest and chipper. Then they work really hard on posts like “10 Reasons You Should Give Enterprise Software Licenses as Christmas Presents,” only to hear crickets when they hit the publish button. Write multiple posts like this -- posts that don’t influence your company’s sales, exposure, or leads -- and you’ll quickly lose motivation. The default state of the internet is that noonecares. So many articles, videos, and blog posts compete for people’s attention that average work often goes unrecognized. It’s pointless to publish anything that isn’t fantastic, because it will certainly be ignored. We got lucky on two dimensions -- and without this luck, it’s unlikely that the Priceonomics Blog
Everything in this book works. You can put it to work, you can hire us to put it to work, and you can use our software for to measure if it’s working
The Pool of Shared Meaning is the birthplace of synergy.
She was asked to imagine the “career woman” voice taking an “NVC pill” in order to restate its message in the following form: “When a, I feel b, because I am needing c. Therefore I now would like d.”
I believe it is critical to be aware of the importance of people’s reasons for behaving as we request. For example, blaming or punishing would obviously not be effective strategies if we want children to clean their rooms out of either a desire for order or a desire to contribute to their parents’ enjoyment of order.
What do I want this person’s reasons to be for doing what I’m asking?
We refrain, however, from mentioning our own needs regarding the person’s behavior until it is clear to them that we understand and care about his or her needs.
—the first thing we do is to empathize with the needs of the person who is behaving in the way we dislike. In the first situation, if we wanted to see more violence directed at the toddler, we could, instead of offering empathy to the mother, say something to imply that she was wrong to hit the child.
we ask the person to take an action that we ourselves can see or hear.
If we really want to be of assistance to others, the first thing to learn is to translate any message into an expression of a need.
Intellectual analysis is often received as criticism.
we work to create that quality of mutual concern and respect where each party thinks their own needs matter and they are conscious that their needs and the other person’s well-being are interdependent.
The parties also need to know from the start that the objective is not to get the other side to do what they want them to do.
All it takes is a lot of patience, the willingness to establish a human connection, the intention to follow NVC principles until you reach a resolution, and trust that the process will work.
piece of paper? Three men who practically forced their way into this
Or, as Jock Nash, perhaps the American textile industry's most colorful voice in Washington, reportedly advises, when a pack of dogs snarl together, people have to listen. The extent to which the industry can speak with one voice—or snarl together—goes a long way toward explaining its political influence.
I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait. I care for them more than some white people do, just as some white people care more for aspects of African art than I do. I can oppose white supremacy and still rejoice in Gothic architecture. In this, I stand with Ralph Ellison: “The values of my own people are neither ‘white’ nor ‘black,’ they are American. Nor can I see how they could be anything else, since we are people who are involved in the texture of the American experience.”
For example, if someone arrives late for an appointment and we need reassurance that she cares about us, we may feel hurt. If, instead, our need is to spend time purposefully and constructively, we may feel frustrated. But if our need is for thirty minutes of quiet solitude, we may be grateful for her tardiness and feel pleased. Thus, it is not the behavior of the other person but our own need that causes our feeling.
Probably the most important part of learning how to live the process we have been discussing is to take our time. We may feel awkward deviating from the habitual behaviors that our conditioning has rendered automatic, but if our intention is to consciously live life in harmony with our values, then we’ll want to take our time.
Money is not a “need” as we define it in NVC; it is one of countless strategies that may be selected to address a need.
An important aspect of self-compassion is to be able to empathically hold both parts of ourselves—the self that regrets a past action and the self that took the action in the first place.
People are not aware that empathy is often what they are needing. Neither do they realize that they are more likely to receive that empathy by expressing the feelings and needs that are alive in them than by recounting tales of past injustice and hardship.
When we work in a hierarchically structured institution, there is a tendency to hear commands and judgments from those higher up in the hierarchy. While we may easily empathize with our peers and with those in less powerful positions, we may find ourselves being defensive or apologetic, instead of empathic, in the presence of those we identify as our “superiors.” This is why I was particularly pleased that these faculty members had remembered to empathize with their dean as well as with their students.
Paraphrasing tends to save, rather than waste, time. Studies in labor-management negotiations demonstrate that the time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees, before responding, to accurately repeat what the previous speaker had said.
up in the mountains. And so Baldwin, who was
Mrs. Ramsay’s words in To the Lighthouse: “Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right….Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”
NVC suggests that our paraphrasing take the form of questions that reveal our understanding while eliciting any necessary corrections from the speaker. Questions may focus on these components: what others are observing: “Are you reacting to how many evenings I was gone last week?” how others are feeling and the needs generating their feelings: “Are you feeling hurt because you would have liked more appreciation of your efforts than you received?” what others are requesting: “Are you wanting me to tell you my reasons for saying what I did?”
they’ve said and an opportunity
No matter what others say, we only hear what they are (1) observing, (2) feeling, (3) needing, and (4) requesting.
My friend Holley Humphrey identified some common behaviors that prevent us from being sufficiently present to connect empathically with others. The following are examples: Advising: “I think you should … ” “How come you didn’t … ?” One-upping: “That’s nothing; wait’ll you hear what happened to me.” Educating: “This could turn into a very positive experience for you if you just … ” Consoling: “It wasn’t your fault; you did the best you could.” Story-telling: “That reminds me of the time … ” Shutting down: “Cheer up. Don’t feel so bad.” Sympathizing: “Oh, you poor thing … ” Interrogating: “When did this begin?” Explaining: “I would have called but … ” Correcting: “That’s not how it happened.”
Expressing genuine requests also requires an awareness of our objective. If our objective is only to change people and their behavior or to get our way, then NVC is not an appropriate tool. The process is designed for those of us who would like others to change and respond, but only if they choose to do so willingly and compassionately. The objective of NVC is to establish a relationship based on honesty and empathy. When others trust that our primary commitment is to the quality of the relationship, and that we expect this process to fulfill everyone’s needs, then they can trust that our requests are true requests and not camouflaged demands.
mean we give up when someone says no to our request. It does mean that we don’t engage in persuasion until we have empathized with what’s preventing the other person from saying yes.
My belief is that, whenever we say something to another person, we are requesting something in return.
On the surface, taking responsibility for the feelings of others can easily be mistaken for positive caring. It may appear that the child cares for the parent and feels bad because the parent is suffering. However, if children who assume this kind of responsibility change their behavior in accordance with parental wishes, they are not acting from the heart, but acting to avoid guilt.
father’s shoebag from its nail beside the stable door,
Conversely, in the English language, it is not necessary to use the word feel at all when we are actually expressing a feeling: we can say, “I’m feeling irritated,” or simply, “I’m irritated.”
Yes, this process is often difficult for me. As we continue with the workshop, you’ll probably hear me describe several incidents where I’ve struggled … or completely lost touch … with this process, this consciousness, that I am presenting here to you. But what keeps me in the struggle are the close connections to other people that happen when I do stay with the process.
NVC is a process language that discourages static generalizations. Instead, observations are to be made specific to time and context, for example, “Hank Smith has not scored a goal in twenty games,” rather than “Hank Smith is a poor soccer player.”
NVC does not mandate that we remain completely objective and refrain from evaluating. It only requires that we maintain a separation between our observations and our evaluations. NVC is a process language that discourages static generalizations; instead, evaluations are to be based on observations specific to time and context. Semanticist Wendell Johnson pointed out that we create many problems for ourselves by using static language to express or capture a reality that is ever changing: “Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.”
Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting.
Kate Elliott (another acknowledgment, for being a perpetual mentor and friend) calls moments like this the “Chasm of Doubt” that every writer hits at some point during a major project.
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It is partially because justices have busy, full-time jobs they like (hearing and deciding cases), and regulating lawyers is tangential to their primary work.
The people who are in court every day are used to a system that funnels every litigant into hiring a lawyer. The rest of us do not have to face the problem because we appear in court pretty rarely.
In 1836, the first written statement of an American lawyer’s professional obligations provided: “I shall never close my ear or heart because my client’s means are low.
Procedural and substantive complexity also plays a part. Lawyers are trained in complexity for a reason: American law is extraordinarily complex at all levels. Legal forms and in-court checklists will naturally fail to cover every applicable statute, case, or regulation, let alone the various procedures available. Consciously or unconsciously, American law and courts seem to have been designed to require an excellent lawyer to operate.
If you can think of something which you think should be explored here, please get in touch with me at tom@thomasleecopeland.com, on Twitters at @tcopeland, or just give me a call at 703-403-3842. There might be many other people who have the same questions, and if I can add a section that keeps people from stumbling over a common issue, I’m happy to do it.
From the perspective of Frederick Brooks’ classic “No Silver Bullet” paper, this is essential complexity, not accidental complexity.
It’s better to tolerate duplication than to anticipate the wrong abstraction.
What is the future cost of doing nothing now? Some changes cost the same regardless of whether you make them now or delay them until later. If it doesn’t increase your costs, delay making changes. The day may never come when you’re forced to make the change, or time may provide better information about what the change should be. Either way, waiting saves you money.
(For a number of years, California has had emissions standards for automobiles that were the strictest in the United States. Companies exporting cars to the U.S. market must therefore ‘‘race to the top,’’ i.e., produce to meet the strict California standards.)
With a long historical perspective, it seems clear that when the meetings get boring, we have taken a step forward. Boring meetings mean that the radical has become mainstream, and that the establishment has changed its mind about the very nature of right and wrong. The struggles for bans on child labor, or for fire exits or minimum wage or factory codes of conduct, are never boring. But when the fight is won, the meetings get boring. While the battle rages for and against, it is interesting. But when the battle is over and the fight is no longer about whether to have fire exits but where to put them, not whether to have a minimum wage, but how to administer it, not whether to disclose factory locations but by what means and how often—when the establishment has changed its mind and we are just working out the details in (yet another) early morning committee meeting—it gets boring.
As was the case for slaves, sharecroppers, and Bracero workers, it is not the perils of the labor market that block the path for Chinese textile and apparel workers. Instead, as was the case for these prior generations as well, it is a state-engineered system that limits the ability of these workers to participate in the market as full citizens.
But courts are poorly equipped to manage tax revenues, other funding sources, and budget tradeoffs in a world of scarcity.
“So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s angst,”
F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still maintain the ability to function.”
Managers were encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics. The stages on the mountain reveal that if the employee doesn’t know what is expected of him as an individual (Base Camp), then you shouldn’t ask him to get excited about playing on a team (Camp 2). If he feels as though he is in the wrong role (Camp 1), don’t pander to him by telling him how important his innovative ideas are to the company’s reengineering efforts (Camp 3). If he doesn’t know what his manager thinks of him as an individual (Camp 1), don’t confuse him by challenging him to become part of the new “learning organization” (Camp 3). Don’t helicopter in at seventeen thousand feet, because sooner or later you and your people will die on the mountain.
The predictable result? Defendants have a right to a lawyer but no particular level of service.
I’ve never felt that I was making any of this up—not the name, Earthseed, not any of it. I mean, I’ve never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. I wish I could believe it was all supernatural, and that I’m getting messages from God. But then, I don’t believe in that kind of God. All I do is observe and take notes, trying to put things down in ways that are as powerful, as simple, and as direct as I feel them. I can never do that. I keep trying, but I can’t. I’m not good enough as a writer or poet or whatever it is I need to be. I don’t know what to do about that. It drives me frantic sometimes. I’m getting better, but so slowly.
Since each of these four business outcomes — productivity, profit, retention, and customer service — is vitally important to every company, and since the easiest lever for a manager to pull is the employee lever, you would have thought the air would be thick with research examining the links between employee opinion and these four business outcomes. It isn’t.
Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Do I have a best friend at work? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it, sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect performance. So never forget you are on that stage.
when someone has let me down, I don’t think it is right to punish those who haven’t by creating some new rule or policy.
The one important thing that PMs need to do, though, is provide a clear vision. “When there isn’t a clear vision, that’s a problem,” Irene explained. “When PMs are doing wireframes and tactics but not explaining the big picture, that’s a big problem.” It’s not that PMs shouldn’t do wireframes and operate tactically. It’s that vision and leadership are a huge part of their role that often won’t get done if they’re not doing it.
you don’t want a product team. You want a heist team (see Figure 12.5
Each cluster has its own metrics that you want to measure in order to judge whether your efforts to reach people are working: • See Metrics: Conversation rate (how much people are talking about you), amplification rate, applause rate, and subscribers. Watch social media to see who’s talking about your product and whether people are sharing the content you’re putting out. • Think Metrics: Click-through rate, page depth, and percent assisted. These are metrics for your marketing website or blog or newsletter—however you’re delivering content—that show how deeply people are engaging with the information you’re delivering them and whether that outreach is eventually leading to a purchase. • Do Metrics: Visitor loyalty, checkout/abandonment rate, conversion, and profit. Again, the Do cluster is all about purchasing, so the metrics you care about will be those dealing with whether visitors make it all the way through the purchase process. • Care Metrics: Repeat purchases, likelihood to recommend, and lifetime value. For this cluster, you care about keeping users around for the long haul and getting them excited enough to turn them into brand advocates so that their value to you increases over time.
To frame intent, Avinash divides customer behavior into four clusters: See, Think, Do, and Care: • See: These are people who have no current intent to purchase a product like yours, but they could still be in your market. They’re probably interested in the space your product inhabits. • Think: These are people who are thinking about products in your category, but they’re not actively considering buying right now. • Do: These are people who are actively in purchase mode or have just purchased your product. • Care: These are your current most valuable, loyal users. Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you own a gym, and you’re wondering whom to reach in order to make more revenue. Here are your intent clusters: • See: These are folks who are likely to care about their health and well being. • Think: These are the people who have noticed that they’re putting on a little weight and are thinking about ways to take it off. • Do: People in this cluster are actively looking for a gym and may have even come in to check out your facilities or have used a guest pass to try out some classes. • Care: These people already belong to your gym, come regularly, and tell their friends all about their personal trainers.
“Data is less of a problem than we think it is,” Avinash said. “We have more data than God wants anybody to have. The problem is the way people think.” It may seem odd that a digital marketing evangelist is saying that we have more data than we need, but it makes sense. We don’t need more data. We need to use the data we have more wisely by picking the right metrics for the right audience. That’s where Avinash’s See, Think, Do, Care business framework comes into play. It replaces the traditional market segments with clusters of audiences based on their intent, commercial or otherwise.
Whenever you do have to report data, try answering these questions in this order: • What question were you asking that you felt these data would answer? • What did the data tell you? • Why do you believe the data looks the way it does? • What decisions or changes are you making based on this data? • How will you know if you’re right? By doing this, you’re providing not just a report, but also an understanding of the metrics and a plan for using them. The best part about it is, if you can’t answer these questions, you probably shouldn’t be bothering with reporting on the data.
products—it’s called the empty room problem.
The important thing to remember here is that you get to decide what’s important to you. Once you’ve decided that, you have to devise experiments that will help you understand whether or not you’re making progress toward your goals. Nobody’s telling you what those goals should be.
I’ve been in two-hour meetings where people shouted variations of “This will be completely useless!” and “This will save our company!” over and over and over. Neither was correct, but by the time the feature shipped, everybody had forgotten which side of the argument they’d been on. The hypothesis tracker is a great way of defusing that argument by simply recording the positions of the various people and getting on with your day.
If you’re not measuring the outcomes of your experiments, you’ll never know whether you’re getting better or worse. If you’re not talking to users, you’ll never know why you’re getting better or worse.
“People of the settlement!” he cried. “Do you think all power is of the devil? What we have just seen is the wrath of God!”
An assumption stack accumulates when companies build products or features built on layers of assumptions, none of which has been validated. In January of 2016, a social ecommerce company called Getwear closed down. They published an article in Smashing Magazine later in the year detailing some of the assumptions they’d made early on that had turned out not to be true. (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/lessons-learned-shutting-startup/)
One of the most difficult things about testing assumptions is understanding which sorts of things you’re taking for granted. After seeing dozens of teams of all sizes make all sorts of mistaken assumptions, I’ve noticed that they tend to fall into three categories: problem, solution, and implementation.
Once you’ve built that core, habit-building loop, then you start to focus on the supporting systems. But you still can’t do everything all at once. Prioritization is key. Amy Jo offered the Game Thinking Roadmap that shows where you should be focused at different points of your product development cycle (see Figure 8.13). FIGURE 8.13 The Game Thinking Roadmap from the marvelous Amy Jo Kim. You can see from the line that you start at habit building, move to working on onboarding, then discovery, and finally mastery. Amy Jo said, “You work backward from that core nugget of everyday value.” Once you know what your core loop is, you refine your onboarding, and then you figure out how to create messaging for discovery that conveys the value to your ideal customer. Finally, you’re going to make sure that the product stays compelling for retained users, but not until you’ve been around for long enough to have some retained users.
To write a job story, fill in the blanks: When trigger I want to goal + activity so I can outcome
Discovery • Onboarding • Habit Building • Mastery
“Unicorns find it embarrassing to be thanked. Please desist.”
Your goal is not to ship features. It’s to create value.
When you’re creating principles for your product, you need to limit yourself. Chris suggests you choose somewhere between five and eight,
A good design principle is: • Descriptive enough that people understand it immediately • Pithy and shareable • Actionable
There are dozens of lovely journey map styles available online, and you can feel free to use one of those. There’s an especially nice one created by Chris Risdon when he was at Adaptive Path.
While people are terrible at telling the future, they’re reasonably good at telling you stories about their past and present.
Seeing Feedback in the System One Step Back: In what ways does the feedback reflect differences in preferences, assumptions, styles, or implicit rules between us? Two Steps Back: Do our roles make it more or less likely that we might bump into each other? Three Steps Back: What other players influence our behavior and choices? Are physical setups, processes, or structures also contributing to the problem? Circling Back to Me: What am I doing (or failing to do) that is contributing to the dynamic between us?
Accidental adversaries are created by two things: role confusion and role clarity.
In U.S. cotton farming, because of the variety of protections in place, disasters happen to cotton but not to people.
It was not the perils of the labor market but the absence of the market that doomed these generations of workers.
In his 87 years, Nelson has missed four cotton harvests, all of them during his Navy service in World War II. Nelson and Ruth are happy enough (or perhaps just polite enough) to talk about the past if that is what their guests want to hear about. But they wallow not one bit in ‘‘the good old days,’’ and their minds are opening rather than closing as they approach the ends of their lives. The world is still very interesting to Nelson and Ruth Reinsch.
So when you receive coaching, a question to ask yourself is this: Is this about helping me grow and improve, or is this the giver’s way of raising an important relationship issue that has been upsetting them?
The template for signposting is this: “I see two related but separate topics for us to discuss. They are both important. Let’s discuss each topic fully but separately, giving each topic its own track. After we’ve finished discussing the first topic, we’ll swing back around and discuss the second one.”
There are three moves that can help us manage relationship triggers and avoid switchtracking. First, we need to be able to spot the two topics on the table (the original feedback and the relationship concern). Next, we need to give each topic its own conversation track (and get both people on the same track at the same time). Third, we need to help givers be clearer about their original feedback, especially when the feedback itself relates to the relationship.
David finds Cheng’s reaction puzzling. In his mind, he is suggesting a small adjustment to Cheng’s behavior that would pay big dividends. It has nothing to do with “who Cheng really is.” What he’s recommending is superficial—that’s the point. David wonders whether Cheng’s “this is who I am” mantra is really just a way to insulate himself from criticism.
simply realizing that we’re triggered not by the advice itself but by being told what to do will help us address the correct topic. We can have an explicit conversation about the appropriate boundaries of autonomy instead of a pointless argument about whether your suggested grammatical changes to my e-mail make sense.
My autonomy map and your autonomy map will occasionally clash, raising questions about who gets to decide. That’s a negotiation, and an important set of conversations to have, clearly and explicitly.
switchtrack conversation.
Annabelle should assume that people will ultimately read her true attitude and feelings, whatever they are. So she has two choices. She can either (1) discuss her true feelings—explain why she is frustrated with her colleagues, where her expectations come from, and what would help; or (2) work hard to change her feelings—not how she comes across, but her genuine underlying feelings.
ask (the feedback giver, not your nine-year-old): “What do you see me doing, or failing to do, that is getting in my own way?”
The “fix” is to separate intentions from impacts when feedback is discussed. When Annabelle gets the feedback that she’s difficult, she insists that she’s not difficult, saying in essence, “I have positive intentions and therefore positive impacts.” But she doesn’t actually realize what impacts she’s having. Instead, she should talk about intentions and impacts separately: “I’ve been working hard to be more patient [arrow 2, my intentions]. And yet it sounds like that’s not the impact I’m having [arrow 4]. That’s upsetting. Let’s figure out why.” Feedback givers also confuse impacts and intentions.
Mavis won’t make progress in deciphering the feedback until she asks this: “Why do we see this differently? What data do you have that I don’t?” Davis and Mavis each have pieces of the puzzle the other doesn’t and they can’t put the puzzle together until all the pieces are laid out on the table.
In some cases, they have access to the information but no interest. In most cases, they don’t even have access:
“Ananda,” Mrs. Murry said thoughtfully. “That rings some kind of bell.” “It’s Sanskrit,” Charles Wallace said. Meg asked, “Does it mean anything?” “That joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.” “That’s a mighty big name for one dog to carry,” Mrs. Murry said. “She’s a large dog, and it’s her name,” Charles Wallace responded.
Liz also tells Tom about a new policy she has adopted: “I don’t say yes or no to a request in the moment. Instead, I ask some sorting questions.” The questions she finds most helpful are these: “Is this more or less urgent than what you needed yesterday?” and “Are there pieces of this that are more important than other pieces, and why?” She then tells the requester: “I want to take a careful look at what’s on my plate before I get back to you.” This helps her override her impulse to say yes automatically, and helps make the workload and priorities a shared problem.
So to clarify the feedback under the label we need to “be specific” about two things: (1) where the feedback is coming from, and (2) where the feedback is going.
“Let me describe what I mean and you can ask me questions to see if I’m making sense.”
Explicit disagreement is better than implicit misunderstanding.
Before I can take in coaching or appreciation, I need to know that I’m where I need to be, that this relationship is going to last. When evaluation is absent, we use coaching and appreciation to try to figure out where we stand.
feedback comes in three forms: appreciation (thanks), coaching (here’s a better way to do it), and evaluation (here’s where you stand).
There is an old joke about a happy young optimist whose parents are trying to teach him to see the world more realistically. To that end, they decide to give him a large sack of horse dung for his birthday. “What did you get?” asks his grandmother, wrinkling her nose at the smell. “I don’t know,” cries the boy with delight as he excitedly digs through the dung. “But I think there’s a pony in here somewhere!” Receiving feedback can be like that. It’s not always pleasant. But there just might be a pony in there somewhere
Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.
back, because people like Henry did know how to use. First they changed trust into need, then they changed need into a drug, and once that was done, they—what was Eddie’s word for it?—push. Yes. They pushed it.
To be a radical was to lead others, surely, to change their ideas, to persuade them to follow you; to go neither too far or too fast, nor to lag behind. ‘To patiently explain.’ How easy to forget that people do not need or await permission to move.
• Tell me about your morning routine. • How often do you travel to visit family? But don’t always use these. Pick questions that will give you helpful information about who the person is and whether they’re likely to use your product. These questions should be factual, easy for the participant to answer, and not personal enough to make them uncomfortable.
if you have a landing page with a new tagline and image, you would take that landing page and show it to someone for five seconds, and then take it away (see Figure 3.8). You would then ask the following questions: • What does that product do? • Who is that product for? • What would you do next?
If you’ve decided you need to learn about your users, you will need a qualitative, open-ended type of research. Some of my favorites are: • Contextual inquiry • Observational research • Customer development interviews
So, return to your sticky notes and put a What or a Why on the appropriate research topics, as shown in Figure 3.6.
You need to know whether you want to learn what is happening or learn why it is happening. This is important, because it’s the number one factor in deciding what sort of research you’re going to be doing.
Now that you understand the difference, go through your topics and put a G or V on each sticky note, depending on whether the topic is meant to generate ideas or validate them, as shown in Figure 3.5.
can change course. Now that you understand the difference, go through your topics and put a G or V on each sticky note, depending on whether the topic is meant to generate ideas or validate them, as shown in Figure
For more advice on getting to know your customers, read Cindy’s book, Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy, and check out her blog at cindyalvarez.com, which has fantastic posts on customer development, building a culture of research, and product management.
Now that you have the answer to your quick question, you need to follow up with qualitative interviews of as many of the people who answered “Extremely” as you can. Do whatever it is you need to do to get them on the phone or to meet them in person. The question was merely a screening device to find people who feel like your product provides a huge benefit to them. This is where you’ll really start learning. Your goal in these interviews is to understand why your product is making their lives easier. Learn what they’re trying to do, and figure out what challenges they still face. These are your ideal, current user, and you need to truly understand the value you’re delivering to them in order to develop some ideas for how you could do better. But don’t stop there. You also want to talk to some of the folks who are using your product but don’t feel it makes their lives easier. These are the people who answered “No” to your question, but for some reason continue to use your product.
‘If Lenin were to talk about a meeting at which he, Zinoviev, Kamenev and five horses were present, he would say: “There were eight of us”’
Before I close, I should say a word about the younger man who dared to write this book. That young man had been exposed to far too many writing seminars, and had grown far too used to the ideas those seminars promulgate: that one is writing for other people rather than one’s self; that language is more important than story; that ambiguity is to be preferred over clarity and simplicity, which are usually signs of a thick and literal mind.
My approach to revision hasn’t changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist’s most insidious enemy, which is doubt. Looking back prompts too many questions: How believable are my characters? How interesting is my story? How good is this, really? Will anyone care? Do I care myself?
What will be different about the user in the next few months? The next few years?
How will their usage change over the next few months? The next few years?
Why will they keep using it over the course of the next few years?
When and how often will they use the product?
Where will they use the product?
With whom will they use the product? Virtually/in-person/combo?
How does this product make the user better?
How does this product meet the need?
What behaviors/needs/goals predict usage?
Do they have special requirements or needs for adopting the product?
Are they currently looking for a solution to meet this need?
How much time do they spend meeting this need?
What do they currently do to meet this need?
What need are they trying to meet?
Who are their influencers or approvers for selecting and buying products like this?
What sorts of messages do they respond to?
Where does your user learn about products like this?
“It doesn’t matter where he is, Meg. You’ve got to get it through your head that where doesn’t make any difference in a mitochondrion. It’s why. And how. And who.”
“Time isn’t any more important than size. All that is required of you is to be in the Now, in this moment which has been given us.”
we’ve been brought here to help him, not just to find him.”
we can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.
Euripides. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.” “Where are we now, and how did we get here?”
“I’m not talking about my mother’s feelings about my father,” Charles Wallace scolded. “I’m talking about Mrs. Buncombe’s sheets.”
History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream.
“Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”
Even if it didn’t work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe those saved someone, and if they did, that’s more important than making sure you get to know about it.”
It was a bad move, and I expect we’ll pay for it. But since we’ve done it, we should do the hell out of it. Better to be decisive and wrong than to let them see us wobble.”
Many aspiring product managers work multiple generalist roles before eventually ending in a PM role. For a more in-depth analysis of each role, I recommend Jeff Bussgang’s new book, Entering Startupland . There are also practical
If I was doing a project for work, I’d end up typing this into one document: Why are we doing it? (high level goals, user scenarios). What are we doing? (feature list) What are any other lasting concerns? Details — mockups, explanations of what to do in error cases, etc.
The feature list, user flow, and mockups all go hand in hand.
printed volume of Marcus Aurelius that had belonged to his grandmother. The Meditations were the private thoughts of a person with terrible power—an
“When the crisis comes, we all pull together naturally. It’s easy then. It’s when things drag on too long that we have to make the effort. We need to make sure everyone sees we’re all in this together.”
“Don’t think about the odds,” Bobbie said. “Think about the stakes. Think how much we lose if we take the risk and it goes wrong.”
“‘Be angry at the sun for setting if these things anger you.’ A poet named Jeffers said that.”
It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions. Going through endless lists looking for one thing that doesn’t fit.
“I think less about why and more about if.
and my door is always open to anyone with questions
“I’ve never met anyone else in my life who cared more about other people’s welfare, and less about their feelings,” she said. “But at least he’ll make sure everyone is well fed before he tells them all the many things they did wrong.”
Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that.
the core PM disciplines: Business - “how do we evaluate which opportunities propel the business forward?” Design - “how do we think about our users?” Engineering - “how do we build things?”
Process-tracing methods are part of a larger family of cognitive task analysis, but aim specifically to analyze how people’s understanding evolved in parallel with the situation unfolding around them during a particular problem-solving episode.
The idea that we should be looking at safety as the presence of positive capacities rather than the absence of negative events, has recently been taken up by a number of authors and groups of thinkers. Resilience—as the ability of a system or team or individual to recognize, adapt to, and absorb disruptions that fall outside the design or preparation base, and to sustain or even improve its functioning—is one example of this.
Steven Mandis’ recent book What Happened to Goldman Sachs is an insider account of organizational drift and its unintended consequences.
Safety actions taken in ultra-safe (near-zero) organizations are often repetitions or retreads of those taken in a less safe organization. They miss the point and do not help in creating additional safety.
You want to peg your investments in safety to the level of safety the particular activity has already attained. That way, it will not be either unattainable or irrelevant.
The risk of having an accident is a fixed, structural property of the complexity of the systems we choose to build and operate.
High-reliability organization (HRO) theory is generally known as a more optimistic way of looking at your organization’s capacity to prevent accidents.
cultures of production where problem-solving under pressure and constraints is highly valued; • structural secrecy associated with bureaucratic organization, where information does not cross the boundaries of the various silos in which work is done and administered; • gradual acceptance of more risk as bad consequences are kept at bay. The potential for an accident can actually grow underneath the very activities that your organization undertakes in order to tell itself and others that risk is under control (for example, measuring and tabulating injury numbers).
The target for intervention is the behavior and attitudes of managers in the organization. They need to be told to try harder, to not make such errors. They need to be reminded to pay more attention, to not get distracted, to not lose awareness of what really matters. But on closer inspection, these things are the normal by-product of humans bureaucratically organizing their work.13
zero vision has got things upside-down. It tells managers to manipulate a dependent variable.
To take responsibility for safety on the line, you should first and foremost look at people’s work, more than (just) at people’s safety. • What does it take to get the job done on a daily basis? What are the “workarounds,” innovations or improvisations that people have to engage in in order to meet the various demands imposed on them? • What are the daily “frustrations” that people encounter in getting a piece of machinery, or technology, or even a team of people (for example, contractors), to work the way they expect? • What do your people believe is “dodgy” about the operation? Ask them that question directly, and you may get some surprising results. • What do your people have to do to “finish the design” of the tools and technologies that the organization has given them to work with? Finishing the design may be obvious from little post-it notes with reminders for particular switches or settings, or more “advanced” jury-rigged solutions (like an upside-down paper coffee cup on the flap handle of the 60-million dollar jet I flew, so as to not forget to set the flaps under certain circumstances). Such finishing the design can be a marker of resilience: people adapt their tools and technologies to forestall or contain the risks they know about. But it can also be a pointer to places where your system may be more brittle than you think. • How often do your people have to say to each other: “here’s how to make it work” when they discuss a particular technology or portion of your operation? What is the informal teaching and “coaching” that is going on in order to make that happen?
• building trust, with a comfort about being vulnerable and honest with each other when it comes to weaknesses or mistakes; • comfortable with what is known as constructive conflict, a willingness to engage in passionate dialogue about what matters to the team. There is no hesitation to disagree, challenge and question—all in the spirit of finding the best answer or solution for that context; • a decision process where people can participate and which they feel is something they have contributed to. Even if the outcome is not what they might have wanted, they still agreed to the process, and so will be more ready to offer the buy-in that the team needs; • shared accountability after having committed to decisions and standards of performance. The team leader does not have to be the primary source of such accountability, peers do it instead. Such accountability is typically forward-looking, not backward-looking; • a focus on results that allows individual agendas and needs to be set aside.
creating safety is about giving people who do safety-critical work the room and possibility to do the right thing. This means giving them not only the discretionary space for decision making, but also providing them with error-tolerant and error-resistant designs, workable procedures and the possibility to focus on the job rather than on bureaucratic accountabilities;
But safety management systems can sometimes become liability management systems if their chief role is to prove that management did something about a safety problem.
Figure 5.5 Murphy’s law is wrong. What can go wrong usually goes right, and then we draw the wrong conclusion: that it will go right again and again, even if we borrow a little more from our safety margins
Accidents, in other words, are typically the by-product of the normal functioning of the system, not the result of
Production pressure and goal conflicts are the essence of most operational systems. Though safety is a (stated) priority, these systems do not exist to be safe. They exist to provide a service or product, to achieve economic gain, to maximize capacity utilization. But still they have to be safe. One starting point, then, for understanding a driver behind routine deviations, is to look deeper into these goal interactions, these basic incompatibilities in what people need to strive for in their work. If you want to understand ‘human error,’ you need to find out how people themselves view these conflicts from inside their operational reality, and how this contrasts with other views of the same activities (for example, management, regulator, public).
As the designers of the Mig-29 (an awesome fighter aircraft) said: “The safest part is the one we could leave off.”
“Loss of situation awareness” is the difference between what you know now, and what other people knew back then. And then you call it their loss.
A major driver behind routine divergence from written guidance is the need to pursue multiple goals simultaneously. Multiple goals mean goal conflicts. In most work, contradictory goals are the rule, not the exception. Any human factors investigation that does not take goal conflicts seriously, does not take human work seriously.
Larry Hirschorn talks about a law of systems development, which is that every system always operates at its capacity.
Even when people can be shown to possess the knowledge necessary for solving a problem (in a classroom where they are dealing with a textbook problem), but that same knowledge won’t “come to mind” when needed in the real world; it remains inert. If material is learned in neat chunks and static ways (books, most computer-based training) but needs to be applied in dynamic situations that call for novel and intricate combinations of those knowledge chunks, then inert knowledge is a risk. In other words, when you suspect inert knowledge, look for mismatches between how knowledge is acquired and how it is (to be) applied.
Another aspect of managing such problems is that people have to commit cognitive resources to solving them while maintaining process integrity. This is called dynamic fault management, and is typical for event-driven domains.
Instead, it is about a cognitive balancing act. Imagine trying to understand and simultaneously manage a dynamic, uncertain situation: • Should you change your explanation of what is going on with every new piece of data that comes in? This is called “thematic vagabonding,” a jumping around from explanation to explanation, driven by the loudest or latest indication or alarm. No coherent picture of what is going on can emerge. • Or should you keep your explanation stable despite newly emerging data that could suggest other plausible scenarios? Not revising your assessment (cognitive fixation) can lead to an obsolete understanding.
The focus is often on explanation, not change. And that misses the point of an investigation. So let’s make a difference between:12 • explanatory factors which explain the data from one particular sequence of events; • change factors that are levers for improvement or prevention. The thing that explains a particular instance of failure does not need to be the same thing that allows your managers to do something about its potential recurrence. Working up from explanation to recommendation can sometimes be very empowering if you are open-minded and creative about
what to recommend in terms of improvement depends on how safe that particular activity already is; • there is a difference between explanatory and change factors; • make your recommendations smart (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic and time-bound—see below). Explanatory
Make sure, through what you find, that you identify the organization’s model(s) of risk, and how the organization thought it could control that risk or those risks. It is, after all, the organization’s model of risk that made them invest in certain things (for example, automation or standardized procedures to control unreliable operators and ‘human error’) and ignore others (for example, how production pressures affected people’s trade-offs at the sharp end).
For now, let’s look at two different operationalizations of “loss of effective CRM” as an example. Judith Orasanu at NASA has done research to find out what effective CRM is about.8 • shared understanding of the situation, the nature of the problem, the cause of the problem, the meaning of available cues, and what is likely to happen in the future, with or without action by the team members; • shared understanding of the goal or desired outcome; • shared understanding of the solution strategy: what will be done, by whom, when, and why?
The question, for understanding ‘human error,’ is not why people could have been so unmotivated or unwise not to pick up the things that you can decide were critical in hindsight. The question—and your job—is to find out what was important to them, and why.
Debriefings need not follow such a scripted set of questions, of course, as the relevance of questions depends on the event.
Here are some questions Gary Klein and his researchers typically ask to find out how the situation looked to people on the inside at each of the critical junctures:
Put second victim support in place. Second victims are practitioners who have been involved in an incident that (potentially) hurt or killed someone else (for example, passengers, bystanders) and for which they feel personally responsible. Strong social and organizational support systems for second victims (psychological first aid, debriefings, follow-up), have proven critical to contain the negative consequences (particularly post-traumatic stress in all its forms). Implementing and maintaining support systems takes resources, but it is an investment not only in worker health and retention—it is an investment in justice and safety too. Justice can come from acknowledging that the practitioner is a victim too—a second victim. For some it can be empowering to be part of an investigation process. The opportunity to recount experiences first-hand can be healing—if these are taken seriously and do not expose the second victim to potential retribution or other forms of jeopardy. Such involvement of second victims is an important organizational investment in safety and learning. The resilience of second victims and the organization are intricately intertwined, after all. The lived experience of a second victim represents a rich trove of data for how safety is made and broken at the very heart of the organization. Those accounts can be integrated in how an individual and an organization handle their risk and safety.
Explore the potential for restorative justice. Retributive justice focuses on the errors or violations of individuals. It suggests that if the error or violation (potentially) hurt someone, then the response should hurt as well. Others in the organization might have a desire to deny systemic causes, they might even fear being implicated in creating the conditions for the incident. Restorative justice, on the other hand, suggests that if the error or violation (potentially) hurt, then the response should heal. Restorative justice acknowledges the existence of multiple stories and points of view about how things could have gone wrong (and how they normally go right).
If you truly want to create accountability and a “just culture” in your organization, forget buying it off the shelf. It won’t work, independent of how much you pay for it. You need to realize that it is going to cost you in different ways than dollars. It is going to cost you in the cognitive and moral effort you need to put in. It is going to cost you when you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see. Sure, you can try to create a “just culture” program based on categories. But sooner or later you will run into all the problems describe above. If you truly want to create accountability and a “just culture” in your organization, forget buying it off the shelf. It won’t work, independent of how much you pay for it. You need to realize that it is going to cost you in different ways than dollars. Instead, think about creating justice in your responses to incidents or failures. Begin by addressing the points below.
The move away from punishing good technicians for maintenance errors began about two decades ago as leaders began to understand the downside of disciplining to ‘fix’ errors—and the upside of instead conducting a thorough evaluation of the ‘why’ behind those errors. Even repetitive errors are usually the result of something other than a technician’s negligence. A striking example of this occurred when, over a six-year period, ‘hundreds of mechanics were cited for logbook violations. People working the aircraft on the gate were under pressure and they’d screw up the paperwork.’ Violations meant suspensions or a fine. Then the airline wanted to print 50,000 new logbooks. Starting with the station that had most problems, it asked the mechanics to design the pages. They did. Another station made a few tweaks, and when the new logbooks were introduced, violations dropped to zero. The problem wasn’t negligent mechanics, it was a poorly designed logbook.
If you hold somebody accountable, that does not have to mean exposing that person to liability or punishment. • You can hold people accountable by letting them tell their story, literally “giving their account.” • Storytelling is a powerful mechanism for others to learn vicariously from trouble.
• holding people accountable is fine; • but you need to be able to show that people had the authority to live up to the responsibility that you are now asking of them; • if you can’t do that, your calls for accountability have no merit, and you’d better start looking at yourself.
Blaming the individual for a mismatch short-circuits a number of things. It goes against the very principle of the New View, which is that “error” is not a cause of trouble but a symptom of trouble.
Remember that the shortcuts and adaptations people have introduced into their work often do not serve their own goals, but yours or those of your organization!
Because understanding and working on your ‘human error’ problem is very much about understanding your own reactions to failure; about recognizing and influencing your own organization’s tendencies to blame and simplify. This
‘Human error’ requires a standard. For the attribution to make any sense at all, it requires the possibility of actions or assessments that are not, or would not have been, erroneous. That standard often becomes visible only with knowledge of outcome, in hindsight. It is the outcome that allows us to say that other ways of working would have been smarter or better. If that outcome would have been different, the assessments and actions that are now deemed erroneous would likely have remained invisible (as normal work) or might even have been deemed constructive, heroic, resilient, innovative.
The focus on ‘human error’ very quickly becomes a focus on humans as the cause of safety trouble, and on humans as the targets for intervention. But this has long been shown to be a limited safety endeavor, as getting rid of one person does not remove the conditions that gave rise to the trouble they got into.
“Old” versus “new” is perhaps a rather binary or simplistic way to think about such a complex problem as ‘human error.’ But, it might stretch the space of your thinking about that problem. It shows what is on either end of that space. And it provides you with a language, or concepts, to verbalize what is going on at those ends and in between. Don’t allow yourself to be persuaded too easily by any view or perspective. You probably have a lot of experiences and stories that suggest your view may have been correct all along.
The New View assumes that people do not come to work to do a bad job.
“The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.” “All right.” “Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.”
The infinite scroll13 pattern harnesses the user’s scroll behavior to automatically load new content at the point
“If you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics and behaviour you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so.”
Give users choice. 2. Put users in control. 3. Design with familiarity in mind. 4. Prioritize features that add value.
‘Had a friend once, tried warning an eager little boy away from the soldier’s life.’ ‘And did your friend succeed?’ ‘Doesn’t matter if he did or didn’t. That’s not the point.’ ‘So, what is the point, then?’ ‘You can’t steer anyone away from the path they’re going to take. You can show ’em that there’s plenty of other paths – you can do that much – but past that? They’ll go where they go.’
‘Bonecaster Bitterspring, of the Second Ritual, do you hear me?’ ‘I do, First Sword.’ ‘You are named a seer. Can you see what awaits us?’ ‘I have no true gift of prophecy, First Sword. My talent was in reading people. That and nothing more. I have been an impostor for so long I know no other way of being.’ ‘Bitterspring, we are all impostors. What awaits us?’ ‘What has always awaited us,’ she replied. ‘Blood and tears.’
Because so many accessibility errors relating to assistive technologies are markup errors, and because markup errors are so easy to identify, we’ve grown up in an accessibility remediation culture that is assistive technology obsessed and focused on discrete code errors. Inclusive design has a different take. It acknowledges the importance of markup in making semantic, robust interfaces, but it is the user’s ability to actually get things done that it makes the object. The quality of the markup is measured by what it can offer in terms of UX.
(Refer to the responses of my screen reader survey21 to gain an impression of the diversity.)
Contradiction. In the rational realm, the word was a blistering condemnation. Proof of flawed logic. To expose it in an adversary’s position was akin to delivering a deathblow, and she well recalled the triumphant gleam in his eyes in the instant he struck. But, she wondered now, where was the crime in that most human of capacities: to carry in one’s heart a contradiction, to leave it unchallenged, immune to reconciliation; indeed, to be two people at once, each true to herself, and neither denying the presence of the other? What vast laws of cosmology were broken by this human talent? Did the universe split asunder? Did reality lose its way? No. In fact, it seemed that the only realm wherein contradiction had any power at all was the realm of rational argument. And, Krughava admitted, she had begun to doubt that realm’s self-proclaimed virtue.
To help me stay focused on the true task at hand, I have a points system. In all cases, whether I’m applying visual design, writing JavaScript behavior or structuring content, I ask who benefits from the way I’m approaching it. •1 point: it benefits me •10 points: it benefits a user/reader like me and with my setup •100 points: it benefits me, people like me, and users/readers unlike me, with differing setups One hundred points is what we’re aiming for here.
The fact is, that tale’s moral is “don’t trust horses”.
horses”. Sometimes
I am the Mistress of Thieves, Lord. I know every path. I have walked them all. And I have seen what there is to be seen. If you and your people hide here, Lord, you will all die. And so will Mother Dark. Be her breath. Be cast out.’
Guilt is the first weed we pluck, to keep the garden pretty and smelling sweet.
“The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world. “This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don’t understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has. “With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”
Get it in writing, but depend on trust.
This principle applies just as well to perfectly honest acts: A service once given is a service promised for the future.
There's no better way to lose trust than to show you can only be trusted when nothing important is at stake.
In disagreeing with clients, however, I must make it clear that I trust their integrity, even though I must reserve judgment on their ability to get the facts straight. I can get facts wrong myself, so it's reasonable to expect that other people can, too. Most people can accept the idea that even though they are sure of some fact, you, as a consultant and an outsider, need to find out for yourself. If they strongly resist this perfectly reasonable idea, then their resistance itself is an important fact that you should examine before going further. Why? Because they might be lying? But isn't that mistrusting their integrity?
case. I can agree that "if that is the case, I can see why you feel that way,"
The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.
First, I have worked on my listening skills, both verbal and nonverbal. Second, whenever possible, I work with a partner so at least one of us can pay full attention to the listening problem. And third, I always contract in advance for a follow-up interview in which the client is expected to give me information about my performance.
Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.
Here, then, is a review of the first nine laws of marketing: 1. A consultant can exist in one of two states: State I (idle) or State B (busy). 2. The best way to get clients is to have clients. 3. Spend at least one day a week getting exposure. 4. Clients are more important to you than you can ever be to them. 5. Never let a single client have more than one-fourth of your business. 6. The best marketing tool is a satisfied client. 7. Give away your best ideas. 8. It tastes better when you add your own egg. 9. Spend at least one-fourth of your time doing nothing.
"To be able to say yes to yourself as a consultant, be able to say no to any of your clients."
Any time you're afraid to say no to your client, you lose your effectiveness as a consultant. You also lose the client's respect, which increases the chance that you'll eventually lose the business.
When you create an illusion, to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely—and harder to take.
the end of an illusion." So that was Rhonda's First Revelation about change through crisis: It may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion.
The essential element of The Weinberg Test is the requirement that the claimant risk something personal, rather than simply blabber some empty abstractions. As consultants, we're trying to apply Ford's Fundamental Feedback Formula to ourselves, at least conceptually. In street language, The Weinberg Test is called "putting your money where your mouth is."
The Weinberg Test asks, Would you place your own life in the hands of this system?
Insensitive bureaucrats are generally found in places where they never use the services they are supposed to provide, such as welfare and unemployment offices. Hard-hearted surgeons often soften the first time they undergo real surgery themselves.
Consultants seeking to preserve quality should first verify that the people responsible for quality are, in fact, downstream from that quality.
According to legend, Henry Ford was once interviewed by Congress on the question of how to prevent river pollution caused by industrial plants. Ford pooh-poohed all the complex legislation that Congress was considering, proposing instead a single law that would "end river pollution once and for all." Congress didn't pass the law, but its two parts are worth remembering: 1. People can take any amount of water from any stream to use for any purpose desired. 2. People must return an equal amount of water upstream from the point from which they took it. In other words, people can do what they want with water, as long as they themselves have to live with the consequences.
The Corporal MacAndrews of the world are exceptional, and most people, like Prescott, are too weak to resist the blandishments of cost-accounting logic.
Romer's Rule says that the biggest and longest lasting changes usually originate in attempts to preserve the very thing that ultimately changes most.
Romer's Rule The principle was clear enough: The best way to lose something is to struggle to keep it.
Roamer's Rule: Struggling to stay at home can make you a wanderer.
I'm a small person with big clients. And so are many other consultants, which explains why so many of them get pickled. Anthropologists go native. Psychiatrists go crazy. People who worked in the Bell System, once the world's largest company, used to say that they became "Bell-shaped," a condition that befell external consultants as well as internal staffers.
Your consulting style will reflect an increasingly complex understanding of your task and will have the following characteristics: • Your task is to influence people, but only at their request. • You strive to make people less dependent on you, rather than more dependent. • You try to obey The Law of the Jiggle: The less you actually intervene, the better you feel about your work. • If your clients want help in solving problems, you are able to say no. • If you say yes but fail, you can live with that. If you succeed, the least satisfying approach is when you solve the problem for them. • More satisfying is to help them solve their problems in such a way that they will be more likely to solve the next problem without help. • Most satisfying is to help them learn how to prevent problems in the first place. • You can be satisfied with your accomplishments, even if clients don't give you credit. • Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next. • Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients. • Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.
the best way to speed a meeting's progress is simply to keep quiet.
of meeting. If I can improve a client's meeting-effectiveness, my consulting task is simplified, and the client retains the benefits long after I've gone. The Hidden Agenda is one of the techniques I use to train people to "see" inside others. I use the following technique. Before a meeting begins, I give each participant a sheet of paper on which is written a secret personal assignment for that meeting. Here are some examples of such secret assignments: • Try to see to it that every decision the meeting takes is written down and displayed so all can view it. • Make sure that every person gets a chance to talk on every topic. • Do not let any single person or clique dominate the meeting. • Pretend that you have not prepared for this meeting, and try to conceal that fact from everyone else throughout the entire meeting. • If at all possible, see that the meeting comes to decision X without letting yourself be identified with that decision. The typical secret assignment describes something that people normally do in meetings, with some assignments having a positive effect, some negative, and some neutral. By playing the role explicitly, the actor learns to "see" behavior that was previously invisible, or to see alternative interpretations for behavior that was previously visible. This new vision inevitably affects a person's future understanding of meetings. Two secret assignments I frequently use are these: • Pretend you have another meeting to attend following this one. You very much want to attend that meeting, so do everything you can to make this meeting end as quickly as possible. • Pretend you have another meeting to attend following this one. You very much want to miss that meeting, which you can do if this one runs overtime. Do everything you can to make this meeting last as long as possible. By using both of these secret assignments in the same meeting, I make it possible for everyone to see how the conflict works out. At the end of the meeting, I post a list of the secret assignments, and ask the observers to guess who had which. Without fail, the person assigned the "quick meeting" agenda is misidentified as the "prolonged meeting" person!
try to make my clients understand that their system is likely to be jiggled by my presence. If they find that prospect too frightening, then my consulting probably won't be effective, and so I usually turn down the job.
Our best shot at getting the initiative passed is to take advantage of the anger against advertisers. The social equality will follow afterwards.
Calli doesn’t blind you to anything; beauty is what blinds you. Calli lets you see.
You know that saying, that after a certain age, you’re responsible for your face?
their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.
Simply say “I realize I’m not well yet, but I do feel better,” and you’d be considered almost ready for release.
as it became clear to us many, many years later, we had completely misunderstood the motivations and psychology of these people. You see, we had then sincerely assumed that our editors were simply afraid of the higher-ups and didn’t want to make themselves vulnerable by publishing yet another dubious work by extremely dubious authors. And the entire time, in all our letters and applications, we took great pains to emphasize that which to us seemed completely obvious: the novel contained nothing criminal; it was quite ideologically appropriate and certainly not dangerous in that sense. And the fact that the world depicted in it was coarse, cruel, and hopeless, well, that was how it had to be—it was the world of “decaying capitalism and triumphant bourgeois ideology.” It didn’t even cross our minds that the issue had nothing to do with ideology. They, those quintessential “bloody fools,” actually did think this way: that language must be as colorless, smooth, and glossy as possible and certainly shouldn’t be at all coarse; that science fiction necessarily has to be fantastic and on no account should have anything to do with crude, observable, and brutal reality; that the reader must in general be protected from reality—let him live by daydreams, reveries, and beautiful incorporeal ideas. The heroes of a novel shouldn’t “walk,” they should “advance”; not talk but “utter”; on no account “yell” but only “exclaim.” This was a certain peculiar aesthetic, a reasonably self-contained notion of literature in general and of science fiction in particular—a peculiar worldview, if you like. One that’s rather widespread, by the way, and relatively harmless, but only under the condition that the holder of this worldview isn’t given the chance to influence the literary process.
One reason was that the trigger came too late, because once he actually saw the food, Sid had a much more difficult time applying his knowledge. For a trigger to be effective, the timing must be perfect: Too late means you're already committed to the troublesome action, while too early means you may forget again betwixt the cup and the lip. (Another reason might have been the derogatory nature of calling Sid "fatso." Virtually any reminder would have sufficed. "Hello again," would have been quite adequate.)
As an amateur smoking consultant, I've managed to help dozens of people reduce their daily consumption just by having them write down the time when they take a cigarette. These people enjoyed smoking, and didn't want to give it up, but they knew they didn't enjoy every single cigarette and needed a trigger to remind them that they might be taking a cigarette unconsciously. I generally advise them to get a special cigarette case in which they can keep a tally card for writing the times. After keeping the tally for a week, they have not only reduced their smoking, but are enjoying it more when they do smoke. They've also transferred the trigger to the case itself and can dispense with keeping the tally. We've used the tally card with similar success on many other habitual problems. To alter the habit of interrupting other people, I advise clients to keep a record of the time of each interruption and whom they are interrupting. To reduce the tendency to waste time on the telephone, I have them keep a list of whom they spoke to, what time they started, and what time they finished. In each of these cases, there's no requirement to do anything about the habit, except to gather information. Some people find that the habit isn't as bad as they feared: Their trouble wasn't the habit, but how they felt about it.
A note to yourself makes a good trigger if you can attach it to an event that's related to the behavior you want to catch. I recently got a fortune cookie reading "Resist impulses to change your plans." That's good advice for me, but I need it more when I'm about to accept a client's dinner invitation than when I'm in a Chinese restaurant. So I clipped the note to my appointment calendar, where it gives me a chance of staying out of serious trouble.
One of the books advised me that the next time I pigged out, I should think the following thoughts: 1. Remember that a lapse does not have to mean a relapse. 2. Resist negative thoughts. 3. Ask yourself what happened; then plan your strategy for next time. 4. Return to controlled eating immediately. 5. Talk to someone supportive. 6. Remember that you are making lifelong changes. You are not on a diet. Look at the progress you've made, and go to it.
The White Bread Warning puts me on the alert: If you use the same recipe, you get the same bread.
The Titanic Effect admonishes me: The thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster.
The Main Maxim cautions me: What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.
If you know your audience, it's easy to set triggers.
The Main Maxim, with the pun on "main" intended: What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.
Words are often useful, but it always pays to listen to the music (especially your own internal music).
If you can't think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there's something wrong with your thinking.
Sometimes farfetched is only shortsighted.
A laundry list reminds you of the different items that you might have forgotten, but that just might need cleaning up. A checklist is similar, but says these are items that must be present. The list of ideas you're now reading is a laundry list, not a checklist. You don't have to do every one of these things, but you might want to consider them.
Pose the question "What am I missing?" to as many people as you can find.
Find out what you usually miss and design a tool to ensure that you don't miss it again.
It's one of the ironies of our business that consultants rarely get asked for help by the people who need help the most. That sometimes makes it tempting to jump in without being asked when you happen to be in the neighborhood. Don't! When the request is missing, chances are you can't help.
That's why The Level Law holds: Effective problem-solvers may have many problems, but rarely have a single, dominant problem.
Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell the solution in the first five minutes.
When you point a finger at someone, notice where the other three fingers are pointing.
Most of us buy the label, not the merchandise. Linguists and philosophers put this in a different way: The name of a thing is not the thing.
We may run out of energy, or air, or water, or food, but we'll never run out of reasons.
The people who know the history are your best source of information. Rather than shut them up with criticism, try opening them up: Look for what you like in the present situation, and comment on it. The bad will come to the fore soon enough. If you don't mention it, other people surely will. Even the perpetrators themselves. Mrs. Oldenhauser knows how bad her white bread is today. After all, she's had her own history to study all these years. Just as your clients have. Just as you have. Haven't you?
Study for understanding, not for criticism.
Keep it simple and not too detailed; you're a consultant, not a district attorney.
The chances of solving a problem decline the closer you get to finding out who was the cause of the problem.
In short, the consultant studies history because, as the economist Kenneth Boulding says, Things are the way they are because they got that way.
If something's faked, it must need fixing.
gilded language used to describe the problems. Clients who use euphemisms are hiding something—even from themselves. For example, most of the time, cost-benefit analysis means cost analysis, and no attention is paid to benefits. In plain language, this means "we're going to list every expense we can possibly associate with this plan, to make sure it's smothered."
Should consultants ever use The Gilded Rule? Should you do unto others before they do unto you? Whenever I'm tempted to do so, I think of Abraham Lincoln. Although a politician, Abe was famous for his honesty, which was characterized by his favorite riddle: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" After his guests had variously guessed one or five, Lincoln would proclaim, "No. The answer is four. Calling it a leg doesn't make it a leg."
If you can't feature it, fake it.
The purpose of consulting is not to make me look smart, but it's not to make me look dumb either. Consulting is not a test for the consultant, it's a service to the client.
In Wonderland, whenever Alice found something topsy-turvy, she tended to blame herself, as any proper young lady has been taught to do. But in the wonderland of computers, where so much goes topsy-turvy, programmers need a less threatening strategy. That's why they adore Levine. Levine couldn't sew a straight seam, but rather than try to fix it, or learn to do better, he adopted The Bolden Rule: If you can't fix it, feature it.
Know-how pays much less than know-when.
Make sure they pay you enough so they'll do what you say. Another way to state this is The most important act in consulting is setting the right fee.
If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.
Every prescription has two parts: the medicine and the method of ensuring correct use.
Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.
Deal gently with systems that should be able to cure themselves.
If the system has a long history of practice in curing itself, then the consultant should lean toward the "do no harm" approach.
We can do it—and this is how much it will cost.
"You said, 'That's a real problem. I can help you with it, ... and this is how much it will cost.' So you passed The Orange Juice Test."
By working with a client for an extended period of time, it's possible to establish trust by recommending only low-risk alternatives. This strategy is another now/then tradeoff: small results now for the possibility of bigger results later. But later, the consultant will be better adapted to the situation, and thus less likely to provide a truly big idea. These consulting tradeoffs may explain something I've observed in myself and other consultants: Consultants tend to be most effective on the third problem you give them.
When working on training policies, I find the same tradeoff. People want training that makes them better adapted to the present task, rather than training that makes them more adaptable to future tasks. Perhaps their experience has told them that training that claims to be future-oriented is merely a different sort of specialized training, rather than training in adaptability. If you can't relate your training to anything, it's tempting to claim that it's training for everything. Perhaps it is a problem of risk: We just don't know what the future will bring.
In effect, I was presenting the time tradeoff as a problem for all in the meeting to solve, which ran the risk of using even more time now. I tend to do that because I've learned that people underestimate future time when it's something that might be unpleasant, like dealing with an angry person. "Maybe it will go away" is the attitude, and, of course, sometimes it does. But on the average, it seems to pay to invest a little more time now at least to find out how much time it will take later. By making the time tradeoff explicit and by indicating a willingness to contribute time now, I make it clear that it is a problem of limited time, not a problem of limited respect for the other person.
"I'm aware that something I said doesn't agree with you. I don't want to ignore that, but we all have business to attend to in this meeting. Can you and I discuss this over lunch, or do you think it will interfere with the business of the meeting if we don't resolve it first?"
As with all now/later tradeoffs, there is the problem of balancing certainty now versus uncertainty in the future. If I knew for sure what I would need later, there would be no tradeoff problem.
The business of life is too important to be taken seriously.
Don't be rational; be reasonable.
Helping myself is even harder than helping others.
People who can solve problems do lead better lives. But people who can ignore problems, when they choose to, live the best lives. If you can't do both, stay out of consulting.
Once you eliminate your number one problem, YOU promote number two.
Some people do succeed as consultants, so it must be possible to deal with failure.
If you can't accept failure, you'll never succeed as a consultant.
Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion.
After Rutabagas, Then What?
Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens.
The Psychology of Computer Programming.
Influence or affluence; take your choice.
The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets.
As compensation for losing the intimacy of dishwashing, the consultant gains the satisfaction of a much wider effect on the world's gunk, grease, and grime. In the time it would take to wash a hundred mugs, I can advise two other people on how to do the job in my absence. What I lose in quality, I gain in quantity. As a dishwashing trainer, I intensify the quality/quantity tradeoff, because training is merely a cheaper form of consulting. Instead of giving one client my undivided attention, I design a workshop that can handle fifteen or twenty. Each participant gets a little less, but the cost goes down, so the market for my message expands. Sure, a couple will miss some essential point, and may leave their dishes actually grungier than before. But isn't it worth it to spread the word? As a dishwashing lecturer, I can spread my consulting advice even further, reaching several hundred avid clients at one time. True, some of them may be sleeping with their eyes open, and a few might even think I said to rub peanut butter on, rather than off. But shouldn't I think of the greater good for the greater number? But why stop there? Through the twin miracles of the printing press and internet, I can reach hundreds of thousands of clients with my sterling advice. If my book on dishwashing is a bestseller, I might even reach millions! And earn millions!
If they didn't hire you, don't solve their problem.
When the clients don't show their appreciation, pretend that they're stunned by your performance—but never forget that it's your fantasy, not theirs.
Whether these consultants actually do accomplish anything is an unanswerable question. Whichever way it was answered, it would leave the consultant out of a job, so effective consultants make sure it is never asked. Unfortunately, so do ineffective consultants. The difference, however, is that when an effective consultant is present, the client solves problems.
The Credit Rule In short, managers may not be buying solutions, but alibis to give their management. A corollary of The Third Law of Consulting is The Credit Rule: You'll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit.
At the very least, the people problem is either lack of imagination or lack of perspective.
Whatever the client is doing, advise something else.
If you happen to achieve more than ten percent improvement, make sure it isn't noticed.
Never promise more than ten percent improvement.
One way around the problem is to agree that the client is competent, and then ask if there are any areas that need improvement. Few people are willing to admit that they're sick, but most of us are willing to admit that we could use improvement. Unless we're really sick.
The First Law of Consulting: In spite of what your client may tell you, there's always a problem. The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem. The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.
‘Which is why,’ Boholt said, looking up at the sky, ‘we will kill the dragon, by ourselves, without spells and without your help.’ ‘Are you certain about that? Just remember there are limits to what is possible, Boholt.’ ‘Perhaps there are, but I’ve never come across them. No, m’lady. I repeat, we’ll kill the dragon ourselves, without any spells.’ ‘Particularly,’ Yarpen Zigrin added, ‘since spells surely have their
To identify opportunities for product innovation, the Bosch team targeted professional tradesmen (the job executors) who were responsible for cutting wood in a straight line (the Job-to-be-Done). They targeted roofers, framers, contractors, finish carpenters, plumbers and electricians. Through interviews with the professional tradesmen, the ODI practitioner dissected the Job-to-be-Done into its component parts through the use of a job map and worked to capture a complete set of approximately 85 desired outcome statements. Next, ODI-based quantitative research methods were employed. Through a controlled online survey, approximately 270 professional tradesmen rated each desired outcome statement for (i) its level of importance, and (ii) the degree to which it was satisfied, given the circular saws they were currently using. This data was used to run a variety of data analyses (Outcome-Based Segmentation, competitive analysis, etc.).
the thing that I would share is, once you get involved and you start to think about a market through this lens, the notion of defining your customer as a job executor, and then asking customers what job they are trying to get done instead of asking them what solutions they want is such a basic, simple, and obvious way to approach product development. It’s
most rewarding part of my journey has resulted from being a hands-on ODI practitioner. That is my passion. I have led and continue to lead hundreds of innovation engagements with inspiring people in the world’s most admired companies. Every
Outcome-Based Segmentation gave us a more realistic way to look at the market. Over time we had confused sales prioritization with real customer market segmentation. At the end of the day, we only have a certain number of salespeople, so we tend to want to call on the larger dairies, because if you get one of them, they have a measurable impact on your business. We just assumed that all those large dairies share certain needs, and that small dairies have completely different needs. The data showed that was not the case, so that absolutely was surprising.
the normal demographic methods for segmenting customers, while helpful for sales resource prioritization, are not helpful for opportunity identification, and hence solution identification.
Once the underserved outcome-based segments are uncovered and prioritized, the company can take the seven courses of action shown in the figure below for each segment: (1) Borrow features from other company offerings. (2) Accelerate offerings in the pipeline and R&D. (3) Partner with or license from other firms. (4) Acquire another firm to fill a gap. (5) Devise a new feature set. (6) Devise new subsystems and/or ancillary services. (7) Conceptualize the ultimate solution. Let’s look at how each activity is enhanced when it is informed by outcome-based market research.
unmet. With this information in hand, a company has the customer-centric, data-driven inputs it needs to formulate a market strategy. An effective market strategy should align the strengths of a company’s product offerings with the customer’s unmet needs. This is best accomplished through the marketing activities shown in the figure below. We recommend the following steps: (1) Decide which offerings to target at each outcome-based segment. (2) Communicate the strengths of those offerings to customers in the target segment. (3) Include an outcome-based value proposition in communications. (4) Build a digital marketing strategy around unmet outcomes. (5) Assign leads to ODI-based segments. (6) Arm the sales team with effective sales tools.
Opportunity score = outcome importance + (outcome importance – outcome satisfaction)
Our Outcome-Based Segmentation methodology is executed in four steps: First we analyze the Job-to-be-Done and capture all the customers’ needs in the form of desired outcome statements. (The special syntax of these outcome statements guarantees precision and comparability). Next, we field a survey that is administered to a statistically valid representative sample of customers (usually between 180 and 3,000 customers). Their answers reveal how important it is that they achieve each outcome and how well the solution they use today satisfies each outcome. With this data we determine which outcomes are most under-and overserved. Under-and overserved outcomes represent innovation opportunities. Third, we use factor analysis and cluster analysis to segment the market into groups of customers with unique sets of unmet desired outcomes. Lastly, we use profiling questions we include in the survey to understand what factors cause complexity and make some customers struggle more than others to get the job done. The survey also collects information that reveals the degree to which the different segments we uncovered are underserved.
nearly all segmentation methods, whether qualitative or quantitative, fail to distinguish between customers with different unmet needs, which is the only form of segmentation that will deliver real value.
The only way to discover segments of customers with unique sets of unmet needs is to segment the market around unmet needs.
Desired outcome statements can be uncovered using any of the popular interviewing methods, such as personal interviews, focus groups, or observational or ethnographic interviews.
Outcome statement = direction of improvement + performance metric + object of control + contextual clarifier
Job statement = verb + object of the verb (noun) + contextual clarifier III. UNCOVER CUSTOMER DESIRED
While defining the functional job correctly is important, uncovering the customer’s desired outcomes (the metrics they use to measure success when get the job done) is the real key to success at innovation.
While a job describes the overall task the customer is trying to execute, an outcome is a metric the customer uses to measure success and value while executing a job. For every functional and consumption chain job there exists a set of up to 50 or more desired outcome statements.
As a result of this ideas-first thinking, an entire ideation industry has evolved to compete on developing ways to generate and evaluate more and more ideas, faster and faster.
An effective innovation process must produce answers to the following questions: Who is the customer? What job is the customer trying to get done? What are the customer’s desired outcomes? How do they measure value? Do segments of customers exist that have different unmet outcomes? What unmet outcomes exist in each segment? What segments and unmet outcomes should we target for growth? How should we define our value proposition? How should we position our existing and pipeline products? What new products must we create?
Outcome-Driven Innovation
The most rewarding part of my journey has resulted from being a hands-on ODI practitioner. That is my passion. I have led and continue to lead hundreds of innovation engagements with inspiring people in the world’s most admired companies.
Six Sigma thinking seeks to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, statistical methods, to address process deficiencies. It occurred to me that we could apply Six Sigma and process control principles to innovation if we studied the process that people were trying to execute when they were using a product or service, rather than studying the product itself. Once we made the process the subject of our investigation, we’d be able to break it down into process steps, study each step in detail, and attach metrics to each step that we could measure and control in the design of a product.
ToP practitioners are biased toward implementation,
There are many examples of organizations that espouse particular values because they look good in their promotional material. When there is a gap, it is not because the organization does not believe that their stated values are important. More likely, they just don’t know how to make them real and alive.
A mission does not have to be practical; it only has to be important.
write, rehearse, re-examine, and sometimes revise their mission and philosophy.
Stating the purpose of an organization clarifies its reason for being. It answers the question, “Why are we in existence?” Stating the organization’s mission clarifies its role or task. It answers the question, “What do we do to fulfill our purpose?” Stating the philosophy of an organization articulates the values it holds in carrying out its mission and purpose. This answers the question, “How do we do things here?”
If a SWOT analysis is being done immediately before a strategies session, or immediately before determining measurable accomplishments, it is helpful to do the SWOT in the order of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and only then opportunities—which will lead directly into a form of positive strategic or tactical thinking.
For clients who equate strategic planning with a SWOT analysis, the facilitator must spend time getting further clarity on the client’s real motivation for doing a strategic plan.
Five key questions the facilitator can ask in reflecting on a past plan are: 1. What actually happened that was supposed to happen? 2. What did not happen, even though it was supposed to happen? 3. What else happened that was not intended? 4. What did we learn about how to do things? 5. What did we learn about how not to do things? A previous
Trends always raise the question of values: which side do you want to be on? This is a valuable clue in participatory strategic planning.
The biggest problem with projecting data to analyze trends is that every trend has a countervailing force. Sometimes that countervailing force can be just as visible as the trend itself, causing confusion in the data. For example, there seems to have been an inescapable trend toward global trade over the past 30 years. At the same time, there seems to be a countervailing force toward trade protectionism. Numbers will prove both.
Use of the ToP framework-building tool is a best practice for participative stakeholder analysis and helps determine core, involved, supportive, and peripheral stakeholders in each sector. See page 206.
One reason often mentioned for doing participatory strategic planning is to “get buy-in from staff on a predetermined outcome.” The president of a food processing company and two vice presidents were very enthusiastic about widespread participation throughout the plant. The president was delighted and said, “This is really great! Once we get their buy-in on managing the plant floor more efficiently, we can turn our attention to our real priority, which is selling the company.” It was easy for me to turn down this exercise in token participation.
the leadership team has to decide how much time and emphasis to put here, and whether stage II work is really needed to enhance participation in stage III, the spiral process.
The overall framework for participation that supports ToP strategic planning unfolds in four “stages”: I. Preparing for strategic planning II. Developing the planning context III. Creating the strategies (using the spiral process) IV. Implementing the plans
Mountains held a spell over Humboldt. It wasn’t just the physical demands or the promise of new knowledge. There was also something more transcendental. Whenever he stood on a summit or a high ridge, he felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher. This imagination, he said, soothed the ‘deep wounds’ that pure ‘reason’ sometimes created.
Humboldt had long believed in the importance of close observation and of rigorous measurements – firmly embracing Enlightenment methods – but now he also began to appreciate individual perception and subjectivity. Only a few years previously, he had admitted that ‘vivid phantasy confuses me’, but now he came to believe that imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt wrote to Goethe, insisting that those who wanted to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks ‘will never get close to it’.
The dualism between the external and the internal world had preoccupied philosophers for millennia. It was a question that asks: Is the tree that I’m seeing in my garden the idea of that tree or the real tree? For a scientist such as Humboldt who was trying to understand nature, this was the most important question. Humans were like citizens of two worlds, occupying both the world of the Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself) which was the external world, and the internal world of one’s perception (how things ‘appeared’ to individuals). According to Kant, the ‘thing-in-itself’ could never be truly known, while the internal world was always subjective. What Kant brought to the table was the so-called transcendental level: the concept that when we experience an object, it becomes a ‘thing-as-it-appears-to-us’. Our senses as much as our reason are like tinted spectacles through which we perceive the world.
Whereas Blumenbach and other scientists applied the idea of forces to organisms, Humboldt applied them to nature on a much broader level – interpreting the natural world as a unified whole that is animated by interactive forces. This new way of thinking changed his approach. If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the differences and similarities without ever losing sight of the whole. Comparison became Humboldt’s primary means of understanding nature, not abstract mathematics or numbers.
At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws, Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings.
“Look here! I’ve an idea we’ve been working this thing from the wrong end.” Lord Peter Wimsey
“. . . there is no more admirably educational experience for a young fellow starting out in life than going to stay at a country house under a false name. . . .” P. G. Wodehouse
He nodded without slackening his pace. “And we’ll find them and get the boat back. Tossie and I are meant to be together, and no obstacle can keep us apart. It’s fated, like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Héloïse and Abelard.” I didn’t point out that all of the aforementioned had ended up dead or severely handicapped, because it was all I could do to keep up.
The ToP practitioner needs to find out the type and scope of change the client has in mind for the strategic planning exercise. For instance: a) Is the purpose of the planning related primarily to enhancing operations and prioritizing initiatives, so that everyone can “work from the same page or sing from the same song sheet?” b) Is there an intention that some major new initiatives will be created or launched from this planning? If so, what level of commitment exists to direct resources to the new initiative? c) Is the leadership team expecting that some structural changes will be needed to implement the strategic plan? Do they want to formalize some structural changes during the planning itself, especially changes to the organization chart? d) Is the external environment putting large new demands and pressures on the organization, so that major systems change is needed? Is the organizational leadership prepared to undergo a systems change? e) Is the purpose of this strategic plan to get the staff and leadership to create and operate out of a joint set of new values, and embed behavioral changes throughout the organization? Is the leadership conscious of the size and scope of these shifts?
In many situations participation and involvement is an assumption, not a choice. The issue is how to structure the involvement. Without structure, involvement and participation remain tough routes to increased ownership and better decisions. —Linda Alton, ToP practitioner, Minneapolis,
The organizational journey map is a tool developed by ICA to help people in an organization gain quick insight into their own journey of transformation and to develop strategies to guide that transformation. The map incorporates the spiral process without explicitly referring to it or using its language.
Variants have emerged, such as the Corporate Process Triangles that use language more familiar to the private sector. The dynamics screen triangles, in Priscilla Wilson’s book The Facilitative Way, have further descriptions that make them even more useful in general organizational settings.
The triangular form models a recursive pattern of the drives operating within any social system: foundational or sustaining drives (economic), ordering or organizing drives (political), and meaning-giving or significating drives (cultural).
As Brian Stanfield puts it, “One lives in that nether-world between the no-longer and the not-yet.” However, with the knowledge, and indeed the certainty, that the group has everything it needs to be able to plan for the future and move into it, you can operate out of a courageous style that generates courage for transformation in others.
When person A advises person B, “You should try this approach,” you might ground the point of responsibility by asking person A, “Excellent. Now what specific part of that approach would fall within your range of responsibilities or would you be free to work on?” This dialogue strikes a balance in the creation of strategy, which needs to be rooted in responsibility or nothing will come of it.
A ToP practitioner ensures that the participants have looked at their obligations, alternatives, and implications, and that they have freely chosen the course of action, knowing who is responsible for implementation and who is empowered to do each part. While a consultant might recommend a course of action, a ToP practitioner guides the group to decide a course of action that they themselves will follow through on. This tension between freedom and obedience creates the energy to move implementation forward immediately.
The recognition of the tension between freedom and obligation is an important stance of ToP practitioners.
you may have to check with the client in advance to find out exactly how far that inherent freedom to think can honestly become freedom to act.
As Brian Stanfield describes it, responsibility is a “tension between being 100% free and 100% obligated.”
you cannot practice continual affirmation, you may have difficulty remaining a practitioner.
What you are affirming is that those behaviours, sometimes obvious and sometimes secretive, that no one is proud of and that are now roadblocks to moving ahead, were once the very behaviours that served the group and got them this far.
ToP methods not only transform the situations where they are used, they also help the people who use them to grow. There are four such life stances. They are: • Disciplined lucidity and being comprehensive. • Continual affirmation. • Inclusive responsibility, being ethical: freedom and obedience. • Courageous style: pro-, dis- and trans-establishment style.
The most useful description of contradiction for understanding ToP methods is the conscious naming of the tension between current reality and the desired future state. Conscious awareness is paramount: you must be conscious of the actual details of your current reality and how those details differ from those envisioned in the future state. You must be especially conscious of the tension that exists between the present and future, especially of the drives that are pulling you toward the future state, and of the opposite drives that are maintaining the inertia of the current reality. Then, to ensure that you understand the real contradiction, you must consciously put a name on that tension.
Early connections found in the philosophy explore the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, and the transformations that exist between them. Another early foundation is the nature of unlimited human potential found in the existential philosophy foreshadowed by Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, establishing the basis for willing transformation. Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology includes important contributions on personal transformation. Ethics, contextual ethics, and indicative ethics are all rich grounds where Kant and Bonhoeffer describe the tensions between the internal world of the individual and the world of external relationships, and between freedom and obligation. The Courage to Lead, by Brian Stanfield, describes these in detail.
This mental model of vision, contradiction, strategy and action plan describes how people often make everyday decisions, especially when they are being deliberate about it.
“People who thought they wouldn’t like the use of facilitation sometimes suddenly discover they didn’t realize it was in use in situations where they were participating, and since it worked, they now see its usefulness.”
• Everyone knows something that the group needs; everyone has a piece of the puzzle. • The members of the group or organization have something in common, a purpose for being, perhaps a mission, some objectives, individual beliefs, or some operational values. • People who have a hand in the implementation are well suited to participate in the planning. • Decision-makers will be involved in, or at least aware of, the planning so that it has a genuine possibility of implementation.
Participants quickly realize that the ToP approach comes from a different paradigm from many other planning methods—one where everyone is assumed to have wisdom to communicate, where everyone is responsible for the outcome, and where the empowerment they experience during the process models the empowerment to implement the final results. From this perspective, what happens to a group while doing the planning is just as important as what the group produces.
“You want an exorcism,” ibn Malik said. His voice was startling: deep and full, it seemed to come from somewhere other than his body. “Yes,” said Abu Yusuf, uneasily. “If you think there’s hope.” Ibn Malik laughed. “There is never hope, Jalal ibn Karim,” he said. “There’s only what can be done, and what cannot.”
From the business world, Michael Porter has written a number of classic books on business strategy, including The Competitive Advantage of Nations and Competitive Strategy. He stresses the importance of three different strategies, especially segmentation, cost leadership, and differentiation. Countering this approach, C. K. Prahalad, and Gary Hamel have noted how quickly competitive positions can be overturned, requiring all businesses to focus on their core competencies. ToP practitioners have paid heed to all these warnings, and generally avoid the traps of developing certain “types” of strategies as does, for instance, the Balanced Scorecard. ToP methods place energy and priority on developing “insight” and “breakthrough,” in the areas that are determined by the analysis.
process. Strategy development From
Having survived the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp, Frankl wrote: Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning… Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values.
ToP methods fit totally with my own personal philosophy of profound respect and inclusive participation. I am always inspired by what a group of people can accomplish when they are working together effectively, and my work allows me to feel I am contributing positively to the world. Each group that I work with is trying to do something positive. I contribute a little piece to their success, and that is what keeps me going and loving what I do. —Penny McDaniel, ToP practitioner, Denver, USA
The point of making decisions is to get them implemented. Some decisions will have broad implications for a large number of the people who will have to implement them. However, when people have participated in the decision making, they have already started to consider the implications for themselves and for the potential implementation.
When people participate in decision making, they gain a better understanding of the forces at play and who will be affected in various ways. With this enhanced understanding, they are able to suggest better ways of implementing their plans.
Some make the argument that if people are given information and choices, they will react emotionally or illogically to the information and arrive at ill-considered decisions. One hears about this in relation to emergency planning, to disaster situations, and in some political affairs. However, this reasoning is somewhat of a smoke-screen because it works both ways. If one fears people will act emotionally and irresponsibly when they are informed of any given detail, the same fear exists when people find out that they have not been properly informed.
A reasonable question for every ToP practitioner is “When do I want to facilitate just what the client wants, and when do I want to ask about transforming their situation?”
On-the-ground evidence from 35 years of practice by hundreds of master ToP practitioners shows that the methods are indeed transformational—as they were designed to be. Therefore, the ToP practitioner can remain simply a professional facilitator, and use the methods as neutral planning and productivity tools—just as many clients want. On the other hand, the facilitator can admit to a transformational intent, use the methods at their full power … and take the consequences. Typically, the consequence is that the client is happier afterwards. However, if you talk about the potential for transformation beforehand, it can cause a degree of nervousness in clients. As
Contradiction is derived from a synthesis between a positive image of an intended future (which is one’s mission, purpose, values and vision), and an analysis of the real and complex current situation that one finds oneself in.
“Strategic planning is not strategic thinking.”
It happens first at a very personal level. Participants say their voices are heard and their ideas treated with respect. They understand how their practical decisions affect the direction of the organization or community. They know how to have a positive effect on their own future. They have deeper respect for others in the organization. They understand their situation better, because they have integrated the perspectives of others with their own. They talk about assuming greater responsibility for the whole organization, because they have participated in determining what is necessary. They want to expand their personal capacities in ways they have not used before. Second, they see a change in other people. They notice people listening more carefully, being less fearful of new situations, and building up the confidence that comes with accomplishing goals as a team. They notice colleagues trying out creative, innovative solutions to previously insoluble problems. They recognize that the group as a whole is demonstrating values, exhibiting behaviors, and generating results. Everyone is taking more interest in their work. Third, they talk about the positive impact that the organization is having on its intended stakeholders or on society. They mention how the organization has a new story about its role, and how that story is being acted upon. They refer to a new courage in the organization’s ability to act, and how this courage is not simply vested in the leadership at the top, but is imbedded throughout the organization. It seems that the old riddle of “What comes first … personal transformation? Or social transformation?” has been solved. They occur simultaneously, with a feedback loop from one to the other.
In facilitator training, my context is: Prepare for every step; write every procedure; then when you walk into the group, be present and love them as they are. The process will flow from that marriage of deep preparation and deep presence.
Men need no reason to cause mischief, only an excuse!
“A man might desire something for a moment, while a larger part of him rejects it. You’ll need to learn to judge people by their actions, not their thoughts.”
We should reflect on the possibility that technology that produces pseudorealities of ephemeral images and eliminates reciprocity also diminishes the sense of common humanity.
I’d like to stress that reciprocity is not feedback.
If I want to promote change I need to understand and appreciate the structuring of the images, even if I don’t trust their content. Opting out by individuals really doesn’t change the agenda of what is urgent and what is not, unless there is a collective effort to supplement and substitute the images with genuine experience. Just because the imaging technology has emphasized the far over the near, the near doesn’t go away. Even though the abnormal is given a great deal more play than the normal, the normal still exists and, with it, all its problems and challenges. But somehow observing a homeless person sleeping in the park around the corner doesn’t seem to register as an event when it’s crowded out in the observer’s mind by images from far-away places.
The scientific method works best in circumstances in which the system studied can be truly isolated from its general context. This is why its first triumphs came in the study of astronomy. On the other hand, the application of the general to the specific has been much less successful in situations where generalization was achieved only by omitting essential considerations of context. These questions of reductionism, of loss of context, and of cultural biases are cited quite frequently by critics of the scientific method.4 We hear much less about the human and social effects of the separation of knowledge from experience that is inherent in any scientific approach. These effects are quite widespread and I think they can be serious and debilitating from a human point of view.
We cannot walk before we toddle, but we may toddle much too long if we embrace a lovely Model that’s consistent, clear and wrong.17
The real world of technology seems to involve an inherent trust in machines and devices (“production is under control“) and a basic apprehension of people (“growth is chancy, one can never be sure of the outcome“). If we do not wish to visualize people as sources of problems and machines and devices as sources of solutions, then we need to consider machines and devices as cohabitants of this earth within the limiting parameters applied to human populations.
birth control for cars and trucks is not an urgent agenda item in any public discussion.
even though today production models are almost the only guides for public and private discussions. It
Processes that are cheap in the marketplace are often wasteful and harmful in the larger context, and production models make it quite easy to consider contextual factors as irrelevant.
prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgement in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.
The ordering that prescriptive technologies has caused has now moved from ordering at work and the ordering of work, to the prescriptive ordering of people in a wide variety of social situations.
The distinction we need to make is between holistic technologies and prescriptive technologies.6 Again, we are considering technology as practice, but now we are looking at what is actually happening on the level of work. The
the difference between control- and work-related technologies,
I think it’s important to realize that technology defined as practice shows us the deep cultural link of technology, and it saves us from thinking that technology is the icing on the cake. Technology is part of the cake itself.
Looking at technology as practice, indeed as formalized practice, has some quite interesting consequences. One is that it links technology directly to culture, because culture, after all, is a set of socially accepted practices and values. Well laid down and agreed upon practices also define the practitioners as a group of people who have something in common because of the way they are doing things. Out of this notion of unifying practice springs the historical definition of “us” and “them.” I think it is important to realize that the experience of common practice is one of the ways in which people define themselves as groups and set themselves apart from others. “Around here, that’s how we do things,” a group will say, and this is their way of self-identification, because “others” may do the same thing differently. A different way of doing something, a different tool for the same task, separates the outsider from the insider.
Our language itself is poorly suited to describe the complexity of technological interactions. The interconnectedness of many of those processes, the fact that they are so complexly interrelated, defies our normal push-me-pullyou, cause-and-consequence metaphors. How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end? That’s
In this lecture, I would like to talk about technology as practice, about the organization of work and of people, and I would like to look at some models that underlie our thinking and discussions about technology. Before going any further, I should like to say what, in my approach, technology is not. Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.
I will continue to define “technology” as “practice” — as the way things are done around here — and will emphasize how the practices and their contexts have changed.
“‘Make time for civilization, for civilization won’t make time,’”
Zhang Beihai gently shook his head. “No. He’s just holding
no amount of clever marketing tricks, product design patterns or UI trends will ever outperform leveraging the basic knowledge of how your audience perceives their current situation
helicopter came to replenish the supply of liquid helium. The reception system was thus capable of picking up very faint signals. Ye couldn’t help but imagine how wonderful it would be to use the equipment for radio astronomy research. The Monitoring Department’s
Endings don’t have to be emotionally wrenching if you believe you did a good job and you’re prepared to let go.
The whole process of becoming an astronaut helped me understand that what really matters is not the value someone else assigns to a task but how I personally feel while performing it. That’s why, during the 11 years I was grounded, I loved my life.
Still, I also know that most people, including me, tend to applaud the wrong things: the showy, dramatic record-setting sprint rather than the years of dogged preparation or the unwavering grace displayed during a string of losses. Applause, then, never bore much relation to the reality of my life as an astronaut, which was not all about, or even mostly about, flying around in space. It was really about making the most of my time here on Earth.
I feel a sense of mission about this that I didn’t have before I went to space, and people who know me sometimes find it exasperating. Recently a friend got frustrated with me because while we were out for a walk, I kept stopping to pick up trash, which slowed our progress considerably. This turns out to be one of the little-known aftereffects of space flight: I now pick gum wrappers up off the street.
one more amazing event to revel in now and try to figure out later.
If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you’re setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time. Personally, I’d rather feel good most of the time, so to me everything counts: the small moments, the medium ones, the successes that make the papers and also the ones that no one knows about but me. The challenge is avoiding being derailed by the big, shiny moments that turn other people’s heads. You have to figure out for yourself how to enjoy and celebrate them, and then move on.
An estimate of the dollar cost of a manager’s time, including overhead, is about $100 per hour. So a meeting involving ten managers for two hours costs the company $2,000. Most expenditures of $2,000 have to be approved in advance by senior people—like buying a copying machine or making a transatlantic trip—yet a manager can call a meeting and commit $2,000 worth of managerial resources at a whim.
But if you are confident in your abilities and sense of self, it’s not nearly as important to you whether you’re steering the ship or pulling on an oar. Your ego isn’t threatened because you’ve been asked to clean out a closet or unpack someone else’s socks. In fact, you might actually enjoy doing it if you believe that everything you’re doing contributes to the mission in some way. Still, I’m
nothing went as we’d planned, but everything was within the scope of what we prepared for.
One benefit of aiming to be a zero: it’s an attainable goal. Plus, it’s often a good way to get to plus one. If you’re really observing and trying to learn rather than seeking to impress, you may actually get the chance to do something useful.
“There’s nothing more important than what you’re doing right now” is a standard astronaut adage that’s never more true than when an engine is firing.
Tristan was the first close pilot friend of mine who died doing his job; after that, however, I lost a pilot friend almost every year. It’s a part of flying fighters, we all know that going in, but you never get used to it. Each loss is a sharp shock, followed by a wave of grief. I never felt that an airplane had snuffed out a friend’s life, though; rather, a set of unusual circumstances was to blame. So the cumulative impact was not to make me afraid to fly, but to make me even more determined to understand what could be done to enable me and other pilots to work tough problems.
“Boldface” is a pilot term, a magic word to describe the procedures that could, in a crisis, save your life. We say that “boldface is written in blood” because often it’s created in response to an accident investigation. It highlights the series of steps that should have been taken to avoid a fatal crash, but weren’t.
I didn’t waste a second thinking about why I’d passed out. In a crisis, the “why” is irrelevant. I needed to accept where I found myself and prioritize what mattered right that minute,
My dad could be a stern taskmaster and on principle didn’t believe children should complain, but he also disapproved of whining because he understood that it is contagious and destructive. Comparing notes on how unfair or difficult or ridiculous something is does promote bonding—and sometimes that’s why griping continues, because it’s reinforcing an us-against-the-world feeling. Very quickly, though, the warmth of unity morphs to the sourness of resentment, which makes hardships seem even more intolerable and doesn’t help get the job done. Whining is the antithesis of expeditionary behavior, which is all about rallying the troops around a common goal. It’s easy to do
I hit on something during that Quebec expedition that I’ve used subsequently as a distraction when the going gets tough: suggesting that one by one, we each describe how we got engaged to our spouses. Everyone liked telling his or her own version. I liked hearing other people’s stories, too, because most of the other astronauts were older than I was when they got engaged, and their proposals were considerably better orchestrated than my own.
For me, the takeaway from all my survival training is that the key question to ask when you’re part of a team, whether on Earth or in space, is, “How can I help us get where we need to go?”
The lesson: good leadership means leading the way, not hectoring other people to do things your way. Bullying, bickering and competing for dominance are, even in a low-risk situation, excellent ways to destroy morale and diminish productivity.
To instill and reinforce expeditionary behavior—essentially, the ability to work in a team productively and cheerfully in tough conditions—astronauts do survival training, on water and on land.
Even the most gifted person in the world will, at some point during astronaut training, cross a threshold where it’s no longer possible to wing it. The volume of complex information and skills to be mastered is simply too great to be able to figure it all out on the fly. Some get to this break point and realize they can’t continue to rely on raw talent—they need to buckle down and study. Others never quite seem to figure that out and, in true tortoise-and-hare fashion, find themselves in a place they never expected to be: the back of the pack. They don’t know how to push themselves to the point of discomfort and beyond. Typically, they also don’t recognize their own weaknesses and are therefore reluctant to accept responsibility when things don’t turn out well. They’re not people you want on your crew when you’re laboring in wicked environmental conditions with very specialized equipment and a long list of goals to accomplish in a short period of time. They go from being considered rock stars to having a reputation as people you can’t count on when things are going badly.
the organizational culture focuses so explicitly on education, not just achievement, it’s even easier to frame individual mistakes as teachable moments rather than career-ending blunders.
Occasionally the criticism is personal, though, and even when it’s constructive, it can sting. Prior to my last mission, my American crewmate Tom Marshburn and I were in the pool for a six-hour EVA evaluation, practicing spacewalking in front of a group of senior trainers and senior astronauts. Tom and I have both done EVAs in space and I thought we did really well in the pool. But in the debrief, after I’d explained my rationale for tethering my body in a particular way so I’d be stable enough to perform a repair, one of our instructors announced to the room, “When Chris talks, he has a very clear and authoritative manner—but don’t let yourself be lulled into a feeling of complete confidence that he’s right. Yes, he used to be a spacewalking instructor and evaluator and he’s Mr. EVA, but he hasn’t done a walk since 2001. There have been a lot of changes since then. I don’t want the junior trainers to ignore that little voice inside and not question something just because it’s being said with authority by someone who’s been here a long time.” At first that struck me as a little insulting, because the message boiled down to this: “Mr. EVA” sounds like he knows what he’s doing, but really, he may not have a clue. Then I stopped to ask myself, “Why is the instructor saying that?” Pretty quickly I had to concede that the point was valid. I don’t come off as wishy-washy and I’m used to teaching others how to do things, so I can sound very sure of myself. That doesn’t mean I think I know everything there is to know; I’d always assumed that people understood that perfectly well and felt free to jump in and question my judgment. But maybe my demeanor was making that difficult. I decided to test that proposition: instead of waiting for feedback, I’d invite it and see what happened. After a sim, I began asking my trainers and crewmates, “How did I fall short, technically, and what changes could I make next time?” Not surprisingly, the answer was rarely, “Don’t change a thing, Chris—everything you do is perfect!” So the debrief did what it was supposed to: it alerted me to a subtle but important issue I was able to address in a way that ultimately improved our crew’s chances of success.
A lot of people talk about expecting the best but preparing for the worst, but I think that’s a seductively misleading concept. There’s never just one “worst.” Almost always there’s a whole spectrum of bad possibilities. The only thing that would really qualify as the worst would be not having a plan for how to cope.
Preparation is not only about managing external risks, but about limiting the likelihood that you’ll unwittingly add to them.
We go from wanting to bolt for the exit to wanting to engage and understand what’s going wrong, then fix it.
Feeling ready to do something doesn’t mean feeling certain you’ll succeed, though of course that’s what you’re hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong—and having a plan to deal with it.
A certain personality type that was perfectly acceptable, even stereotypical, in the past—the real hard-ass, say—is not wanted on the voyage when it is going to be a long one.
Competence means keeping your head in a crisis, sticking with a task even when it seems hopeless, and improvising good solutions to tough problems when every second counts. It encompasses ingenuity, determination and being prepared for anything.
See, a funny thing happened on the way to space: I learned how to live better and more happily here on Earth. Over time, I learned how to anticipate problems in order to prevent them, and how to respond effectively in critical situations. I learned how to neutralize fear, how to stay focused and how to succeed.
If one of the experts at Mission Control suggested the crew do X, I would be aware of some of the logistical difficulties that someone who’d never been up there might not consider; similarly, the crew knew I could empathize with and understand their needs and challenges because I’d been to space myself. The capcom is less a middleman, though, than an interpreter who is constantly analyzing all changing inputs and factors, making countless quick small judgments and decisions, then passing them on to the crew and the ground team in Houston. It’s like being coach, quarterback, water boy and cheerleader, all in one.
‘Highness. There is one way, but it risks much.’ ‘Who will bear that risk?’ ‘Everyone aboard this ship.’
side. To witness is to approach comprehension,
One of the distinguishing marks of a good meeting is that the audience participates by asking questions and making comments. If you avoid the presenter’s eyes, yawn, or read the newspaper it’s worse than not being there at all. Lack of interest undermines the confidence of the presenter. Remember that you are spending a big part of your working day at the review. Make that time as valuable for yourself and your organization as you can.
One-on-ones should be scheduled on a rolling basis—setting up the next one as the meeting taking place ends.
Exchanging notes after the meeting is a way to make sure each knows what the other committed himself to do.
real time-saver is using a “hold” file where both the supervisor and subordinate accumulate important but not altogether urgent issues for discussion at the next meeting.
First, both the supervisor and subordinate should have a copy of the outline and both should take notes on it, which serves a number of purposes. I
“The good time users among managers do not talk to their subordinates about their problems but they know how to make the subordinates talk about theirs.” How is this done? By applying Grove’s Principle of Didactic Management, “Ask one more question!” When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all he wants to about a subject, he should ask another question. He should try to keep the flow of thoughts coming by prompting the subordinate with queries until both feel satisfied that they have gotten to the bottom of a problem.
The answer is the job- or task-relevant maturity of each of your subordinates. In other words, how much experience does a given subordinate have with the specific task at hand?
In fact, anyone who spends about a half day per week as a member of a planning, advisory, or coordinating group has the equivalent of a subordinate. So as a rule of thumb, if a manager is both a hierarchical supervisor and a supplier of know-how, he should try to have a total of six to eight subordinates or their equivalent.
As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates. (Two days a week per subordinate would probably lead to meddling; an hour a week does not provide enough opportunity for monitoring.)
Another production principle is very nearly the opposite. A manager should carry a raw material inventory in terms of projects. This is not to be confused with his work-in-process inventory, because that, like eggs in a continuous boiler, tends to spoil or become obsolete over time. Instead this inventory should consist of things you need to do but don’t need to finish right away—discretionary projects, the kind the manager can work on to increase his group’s productivity over the long term. Without such an inventory of projects, a manager will most probably use his free time meddling in his subordinates’ work.
To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle. It is important to say “no” earlier rather than later because we’ve learned that to wait until something reaches a higher value stage and then abort due to lack of capacity means losing more money and time.
The “delegator” and “delegatee” must share a common information base and a common set of operational ideas or notions on how to go about solving problems, a requirement that is frequently not met. Unless both parties share the relevant common base, the delegatee can become an effective proxy only with specific instructions. As in meddling, where specific activities are prescribed in detail, this produces low managerial leverage.
The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them. For me, paying close attention to customer complaints constitutes a high-leverage activity. Aside from making a customer happy, the pursuit tends to produce important insights into the workings of my own operation. Such complaints may be numerous, and though all of them need to be followed up by someone, they don’t all require or wouldn’t all benefit from my personal attention. Which one out of ten or twenty complaints to dig into, analyze, and follow up is where art comes into the work of a manager. The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.
There are many parallels to this. As we will see later, the preparation of an annual plan is in itself the end, not the resulting bound volume. Similarly, our capital authorization process itself is important, not the authorization itself. To prepare and justify a capital spending request, people go through a lot of soul-searching analysis and juggling, and it is this mental exercise that is valuable. The formal authorization is useful only because it enforces the discipline of the process.
So why are written reports necessary at all? They obviously can’t provide timely information. What they do is constitute an archive of data, help to validate ad hoc inputs, and catch, in safety-net fashion, anything you may have missed. But reports also have another totally different function. As they are formulated and written, the author is forced to be more precise than he might be verbally. Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in his presentation. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence
Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction.
I have found the “stagger chart” the best means of getting a feel for future business trends.
Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems. Of course, for leading indicators to do you any good, you must believe in their validity. While this may seem obvious, in practice, confidence is not as easy to come by as it sounds. To take big, costly, or worrisome steps when you are not yet sure you have a problem is hard. But unless you are prepared to act on what your leading indicators are telling you, all you will get from monitoring them is anxiety.
The second criterion for a good indicator is that what you measure should be a physical, countable thing.
The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).
quality
manpower.
equipment.
raw material inventory.
sales forecast
The number of possible indicators you can choose is virtually limitless, but for any set of them to be useful, you have to focus each indicator on a specific operational goal.
A great example of this is the section on task-relevant maturity. This part of the book became very personal for me as it taught me how to formulate the most useful management question that I use in interviews: “Is it better to be a hands-on or hands-off manager?” It seems like a simple enough question, but it sorts out the 95 percent of managers who never think deeply about their craft from the 5 percent who do.
A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.
Finally, while most management books attempt to teach basic competency, High Output Management teaches the reader how to be great.
As a general rule, you have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee—you are in a business with one employee: yourself.
As a middle manager, of any sort, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself. Don’t wait for the principles and practices you find appealing to be imposed from the top. As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.
Another group should also be included among middle managers—people who may not supervise anyone directly but who even without strict organizational authority affect and influence the work of others. These know-how managers are sources of knowledge, skills, and understanding to people around them in an organization. They are specialists and experts of some sort who act as consultants to other members of the organization; they are, in effect, nodes in a loosely defined network of information.
The key thing to realize is that the speed of change, rather than the magnitude of change, is what motivates today’s young sales professionals.
Last, Millennials are often called impatient. Or distracted. “A-D-D!” screams your VP of Sales when describing your incoming class and their short attention spans. The truth is rather more uncomfortable and hard to face: these young people have no patience for YOU. For your lecturing, for how long it takes you to get to the point, for your bullshit. They will listen for as long as you are conveying something useful, and no longer. What this means is you have get very efficient at conveying information and get rid of hierarchy. In practice that means moving to standing meetings with a maximum length of 15 minutes in which everyone is given equal time. What it also means is that you have to structure learning so that your teams are teaching each other, rather than getting lectured at by a trainer or an executive. You may feel like this will take an inordinate amount of work. Of course it will! Changing the way you do things always takes work. But you adapt to changes in your customers, so you should adapt equally well to changes in your workforce.
A second distinctly Millennial characteristic is the need for a mission, a bigger picture that drives personal fulfillment as much as, or more than, just a salary.
What we have found is that laying out a very clear progression path marked by 3 month intervals is absolutely crucial to keeping entry level sales personnel motivated, possibly even more important than their commission structure. So our blueprint lays out a series of steps that can be made clear to entry level salespeople. The message on the first day of training needs to be that if they succeed as an MDR, in a matter of months they will be able to graduate to a different role, building skills as they go. And as they rapidly move through the progression above, they acquire skills that are valuable across the entire organization, giving you a perfect talent development pool with inbuilt high turnover and the ability to move stars elsewhere in your organization.
The fact is that this generation wants to see immediate progress. And THAT is the key. It is not that they want to run the office. It is that they want to have measurable results from measurable actions.
The new model requires staffing multiple customer-facing roles, into a single team, also called a POD. What all PODs have in common is that they have a focus on a specific market with a group goal they are evaluated against. Most importantly, they share the same physical space.
Because true worship was, in its very essence, a game. “ ‘There is no bargain when only one side pays attention.’
We put a rocket on the cover of our book for a reason, and that reason is that a rocket represents the culmination of what is possible when you carefully design a system of trial and error to improve incrementally. We know, sales is not rocket science. As sales professionals we have heard that way too often in fact. But we believe deeply that sales is not an art. It is a science, and it is becoming more of a science each day. And just like astronauts are no longer balls-to-the-wall test pilots but instead trained engineers, the men and women who practice sales today are highly trained, data driven professionals who rely on process to gain incremental improvements. So what is it that sets apart your rocket science sales organization? Process. Documented process that results in controlled experimentation and deliberate learning which leads to success at scale. So when we hear about sales organizations that lack the ability to forecast accurately how the month will end, or when only 60% of sales professionals hit quota, we ask is that a problem of bad performers? Bad sales leadership? A bad service? The wrong clients? We say no ... we say you simply lack the process to learn and improve on. Or to nicely close out our analogy - you are trying to launch a rocket to Mars without having built a process that results in a Mars landing as the inevitable culmination of a process.
DO NOT BLEND TIERS TO CALCULATE PROFITABILITY You must calculate the time to profitability - and this is important - separately per each tier of your business, and sometimes even per vertical. For example it may take a lot longer to make a profit selling into a medical vertical based on the compliance that is needed.
When your service is continuously increasing value, it is in your best interest to avoid multi-year contracts in order to extract more profits via price increases.
We commonly see that the companies who are successful in SaaS are successful in the SMB space, and it is these companies that also obtain high valuation. We have seen first hand how companies who achieve success early-on with large Enterprise deals, find themselves circling the drain a few years later. The success with enterprise deals, required these companies to focus on integration instead of innovation. On the other hand clients that enter the market from a freemium/prosumer model are able to adopt quickly. Although many are prematurely stamped “successfull” by industry pundits, experienced VCs will tell you that they only warrant the valuation once success is achieved in the SMB space.
While the specific numbers in your business will vary, we have found that once you take into account both the cost and revenue side of the equation, almost all SaaS businesses have 3 tiers. Even if you offer a $100,000 monthly recurring service, your clients are likely to first check-out your self-serve tier, and there will always be a distinction between a 2nd and 3rd tier - because the 2nd tier sells to single decision makers, whereas the 3rd tier sells to multiple stakeholders in the company.
It is all too common to see sales teams in which directors are doing high volume prospecting for low value customers. Believe us - while this sounds stupid and you are probably telling yourself that you would never make that mistake, in practice it happens all the time to perfectly smart people. To counteract this default behavior, you must go through a deliberate exercise in which you segment your customers by how much revenue they can produce, how many potential customers exist in each segment, and what it costs to service those customers. You can then implement the following common sense strategy: “use low cost, online sales teams to process high volume, low value segments.”
Success in SaaS depends on having a carefully designed customer centric sales organization that balances skills, processes, and tools. For this we need to evolve sales.
Recommended reading: Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling by Frank V. Cespedes
Unearth the main decision maker behind buying software by asking questions like: What year did
The ReWired Group have identified four forces pushing and pulling customers away from making a purchase.
These factors can be used in your interviews. Involve functional aspects from within a company, along with emotional triggers from that time.
British people, I’ve observed, are quite proud that they are not especially skilled at bureaucracy; Americans, in contrast, seem embarrassed by the fact that on the whole, they’re really quite good at it.
‘Bless you, that you not be taken. Bless you, that you begin in your time and that you end in its fullness. Bless you, in the name of the Redeemer, in my name, against the cruel harvesters of the soul, the takers of life. Bless you, that your life and each life shall be as it is written, for peace is born of completion.’
It is the curse of believers that they seek to second-guess the one they claim to worship.’ ‘In your silence what choice do they have?’ The Redeemer’s smile broadened. ‘Every choice in the world, my friend.’
‘If all who worship did so without need. If all came to their saviour unmindful of that title and its burden, if they came as friends—’ she glanced back at him, ‘what would happen then, do you think? I wonder…’
“For base men,” Empedocles warns us, “it is indeed possible to withhold belief from strong proofs” (fragment 55), but baseness, like beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. When scientists across the way refuse to grant the force of an argument that its sponsor finds compelling, they are base by definition, which is why the most common accusations in science are forms of ad hominems—implications of personal failings, like stupidity, sloppy scholarship, and often, dishonesty. Personal attacks are far more common in science than is generally thought (suggesting, among other things, that thin veils such as x is confused, or y fails to understand the issue, or z misrepresents my position actually work). Even the parched and stolid pages of professional journals are full of them, and they cluster fructiferously around paradigm disputes. It isn’t difficult to see why. Most immediately, mudslinging is easy. If you find an observation disagreeable, says Hawking, “you can always question the competence of the person who carried the observation out” (1988:10).
I will not consider Reichling’s criticisms of generative grammar here. The cited remark is just one illustration of his complete lack of comprehension of the goals, concerns, and specific content of the work he was discussing, and his discussion is based on such gross misrepresentations of this work that comment is hardly called for. (1966b [1964]:9)
This attitude is enshrined in the design principle of “Priority of constituencies,” which states, “In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over theoretical purity.”
Beliefs are most clearly and systematically articulated when they are formed via negativa. The boundaries of what is true and acceptable are marked through a systematic identification of what is false and unacceptable…. It is through battles with heresies and heretics that orthodoxy is most sharply delineated. Lester Kurz
That is, they would all involve the primitive definition for dead (something like NOT ALIVE), but die would additionally be marked to undergo the transformation, Inchoative, and kill would be further marked to undergo Causative, capturing rather smoothly that dead means not alive, that die means become not alive, and kill means cause to become not alive. Among
The rub, then: while following on some of Chomsky’s general comments, abstract syntax was forced to reject or modify many of his specific analyses. Where there is a rub, there is friction.
(Harris, always a little extreme, defined langue as “merely the scientific arrangement of [parole]”—1941:345.)
the people involved in our story, probably Halle is the only one who knows where Chomsky’s heart is.
Empiricism: most knowledge is acquired through the senses. Rationalism: most knowledge is not acquired through the senses.
Empiricism: all knowledge is acquired through the senses. Rationalism: no knowledge is acquired through the senses.
Negative arguments have a very short shelf-life, and, regardless of conviction and oratorical prowess, if they don’t come with a positive program, there is little hope for widespread assent.
Bloomfield, like most scientists of the period who concerned themselves with philosophy, attended much more to the predicate of the verification principle than its subject, and one word was particularly eye-catching.
Udinaas had known many for whom certainty was a god, the only god, no matter the cast of its features. And he had seen the manner in which such belief made the world simple, where all was divisible by the sharp cleaving of cold judgement, after which no mending was possible. He had seen such certainty, yet had never shared it. But he had always believed the world itself was…unquestionable. Not static—never static—but capable of being understood. It was undoubtedly cruel at times, and deadly…but you could almost always see it coming. Creatures
INVEST criteria: Independent. The story must be actionable and “completable” on its own. It shouldn’t be inherently dependent on another story. Negotiable. Until it’s actually being done, it needs to be able to be rewritten. Allowance for change is built in. Valuable. It actually delivers value to a customer or user or stakeholder. Estimable. You have to be able to size it. Small. The story needs to be small enough to be able to estimate and plan for easily. If it is too big, rewrite it or break it down into smaller stories. Testable. The story must have a test it is supposed to pass in order to be complete. Write the test before you do the story.
The early step-by-step plans, laid out in comforting detail in Gantt charts, reassured management that we were in control of the development process—but
David Sanbonmatsu, told the NPR blog Shots in January of 2013, “People don’t multitask because they’re good at it. They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity.” In other words, the people who multitask the most just can’t focus. They can’t help themselves.
Ohno talked about three different types of waste. He used the Japanese words: Muri, waste through unreasonableness; Mura, waste through inconsistency; and Muda, waste through outcomes.
An intuitive physicist might explain why a rock falls by saying the rock itself has the intrinsic quality of gravity, rather than saying that gravity is part of a system of forces acting on the rock. In the same way, when we talk about others, we talk about their inherent properties, rather than see those properties in relation to the external environment. In fact, it’s those interactions with our environment that drive our behavior. It’s the system that surrounds us, rather than any intrinsic quality, that accounts for the vast majority of our behavior. What Scrum is designed to do is change that system. Instead of looking for blame and fault, it rewards positive behavior by focusing people on working together and getting things done.
In the martial arts you learn a concept called Shu Ha Ri, which points to different levels of mastery. In the Shu state you know all the rules and the forms. You repeat them, like the steps in a dance, so your body absorbs them. You don’t deviate at all. In the Ha state, once you’ve mastered the forms, you can make innovations. Put an extra swing in your step down the dance floor. In the Ri state you’re able to discard the forms, you’ve truly mastered the practice, and you’re able to be creative in an unhindered way, because the knowledge of the meaning of aikido or the tango is so deeply embedded in you, your every step expresses its essence.
Management didn’t dictate. Instead, executives were servant-leaders and facilitators focused on getting obstacles out of their teams’ way rather than telling them what and how to do product development.
Life is like a space elevator. What life self-sustains is not energy, but organization. Once you have a system that is so highly organized that it can reliably make copies of itself, that degree of organization is no longer ‘expensive’. The initial investment may have been huge, as for a space elevator, but once the investment has been made, everything else is free.
Clutter is caused by a failure to return things to where they belong. Therefore, storage should reduce the effort needed to put things away, not the effort needed to get them out.
she could see the sun rise, and set, and the moon dance through its guises—the magic of everyday that was no less magic for that.
The basic order for sorting komono is as follows: 1. CDs, DVDs 2. Skin care products 3. Makeup 4. Accessories 5. Valuables (passports, credit cards, etc.) 6. Electrical equipment and appliances (digital cameras, electric cords, anything that seems vaguely “electric”) 7. Household equipment (stationary and writing materials, sewing kits, etc.) 8. Household supplies (expendables like medicine, detergents, tissues, etc.) 9. Kitchen goods/food supplies (spatulas, pots, blenders, etc.) 10. Other (spare change, figurines, etc.)
Arrange your clothes so that they rise to the right.
For the first category, clothing, I recommend dividing further into the following subcategories to increase efficiency: Tops (shirts, sweaters, etc.) Bottoms (pants, skirts, etc.) Clothes that should be hung (jackets, coats, suits, etc.) Socks Underwear Bags (handbags, messenger bags, etc.) Accessories (scarves, belts, hats, etc.) Clothes for specific events (swimsuits, kimonos, uniforms, etc.) Shoes And, yes, I include handbags and shoes as clothing.
The best time to start is early morning. The fresh morning air keeps your mind clear and your power of discernment sharp. For this reason, most of my lessons commence in the morning.
The best sequence is this: clothes first, then books, papers, komono (miscellany), and lastly, mementos. This order has also proven to be the most efficient in terms of the level of difficulty for the subsequent task of storing. Finally, sticking to this sequence sharpens our intuitive sense of what items spark joy inside us. If you can dramatically accelerate the speed of the decision-making process just by changing the order in which you discard, don’t you think it’s worth a try?
The process of deciding what to keep and what to discard will go much more smoothly if you begin with items that are easier to make decisions about.
People have trouble discarding things that they could still use (functional value), that contain helpful information (informational value), and that have sentimental ties (emotional value). When these things are hard to obtain or replace (rarity), they become even harder to part with.
Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.
The catalyst was a book called The Art of Discarding by Nagisa Tatsumi (Takarajimasha, Inc.), which explained the importance of getting rid of unnecessary things.
"Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction".
"Nothing." Then, as an afterthought, he adds, "But you have to realize that the whole attitude has changed. As I already stressed, there are no more false alarms. People don't put pressure on others just because their people do not have enough to do."
"It's a simple fact that they try to cut the budget by a few percent and cause the payback period to double."
“I smile and start to count on my fingers: One, people are good. Two, every conflict can be removed. Three, every situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, is exceedingly simple. Four, every situation can be substantially improved; even the sky is not the limit. Five, every person can reach a full life. Six, there is always a win-win solution. Shall I continue to count?”
The bottleneck becomes the ‘drum beat’ for the orders, the ‘time buffer’ translates due-dates into release dates and the action of choking the release becomes the ‘rope’ that ties the order to the release of work. That is the reason this time-based application of the Theory of Constraints became known as the Drum-Buffer-Rope system or in short DBR.
Ohno’s approach in developing Lean demonstrates an important idea: there is a difference between an application and the fundamental concepts on which the application is based. The fundamental concepts are generic; the application is the translation of the concepts for a specific environment. As we have already seen, the translation is not trivial and necessitates a number of solution elements.
What is obliterating the picture is that the end result of focusing on flow and ignoring local cost considerations is a much lower cost per unit.
The rocks and water analogy of Lean is useful for understanding how this is done. The water level corresponds to the inventory level, while the rocks are the problems disturbing the flow. There are many rocks at the bottom of the river and it takes time and effort to remove them. The question is which rocks are important to remove. The answer is given by reducing the water level; those rocks which emerge above the water are the ones that should be removed.
stop and look at him. “What are we asking for? For the ability to answer three simple questions: ‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause the change?’ Basically what we are asking for is the most fundamental abilities one would expect from a manager. Think about it. If a manager doesn’t know how to answer those three questions, is he or she entitled to be called manager?”
“Alex, I have come to the conclusion that productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive. Do you follow me?” “Yeah, but … really, Jonah, that’s just simple common sense,” I say to him. “It’s simple logic is what it is,” he says. We stop. I watch him hand his ticket across the counter. “But it’s too simplified,” I tell him. “It doesn’t tell me anything. I mean, if I’m moving toward my goal I’m productive and if I’m not, then I’m not productive—so what?” “What I’m telling you is, productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is,” he says.
believe with utter certainty that whatever we’re trying to figure out is critical to the First Way. He talked about the need to understand the true business context that IT resides in.
“Properly elevating preventive work is at the heart of programs like Total Productive Maintenance, which has been embraced by the Lean Community. TPM insists that we do whatever it takes to assure machine availability by elevating maintenance. As one of my senseis would say, ‘Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.’ The Third Way is all about ensuring that we’re continually putting tension into the system, so that we’re continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.
“One of my favorite books about team dynamics is Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni. He writes that in order to have mutual trust, you need to be vulnerable. So,
Fred Astaire is my hero. He used to report to his movies six weeks before filming started and practice his dance routines, wearing out a couple of pairs of tap shoes (and Hermes Pan, who claimed he could only dance backwards the rest of his life), all so he could stand there and look like he had just made it up. In the words of almost everyone who ever saw him dance, “He makes it look easy.” That’s what I want to do, even though it looks like I’m going to wear out dozens of pairs of shoes before I even come close: make it look easy.
During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day, the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine would be going. It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned down for reasons that had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private armageddons to be faced.
Polly had asked Mr. Goode to do the eulogy, remembering his sermon that day in Backbury. He spoke of Mike and his bravery at Dunkirk and then said, “We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings—” And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought. “—and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances”—here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs—“and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a soldier, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith. “But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, though hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do ‘our bit.’ For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long. “So it is with heaven,” the vicar said. “By our deeds here on earth, in this world so far from the one we long for, we make heaven possible. We not only live in the hope of heaven but, by each doing our bit, we bring it to pass.”
“501” or “scl.” “I can’t decipher this,” he said,
Before the incident, Corporal Dunham had debated the strength of the Kevlar helmet with some squadmates and his platoon commander. Dunham theorized that even if the Kevlar might not protect the Marine holding it down from the blast of a grenade, it would definitely save the other Marines around him. His squadmates doubted that somebody could get their helmet off in time to get it on top of the grenade and hold it down with their body. Corporal Dunham practiced this maneuver. He would unfasten his helmet, throw it down and jump on top of it. There was no way he could have known he would later use this same technique to save the lives of his fellow Marines in Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. While attempting to detain an insurgent in Al-Karabilah, Iraq, a hand- to-hand struggle ensued. The insurgent pulled out a grenade intending to kill himself, Corporal Dunham, and two other Marines. Corporal Dunham disengaged from fighting the man, unclipped his chin strap, covered the grenade with his helmet and pressed his body atop it. He saved the lives of his two comrades, but was mortally wounded in the process. It was a sacrifice he made without hesitation, and for this he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Major Gibson told this story with tears in his eyes. “Ownership,” he said, “is the touchstone of leadership. There are three rules of leadership that I have learned over the years, and Corporal Dunham exemplified all three with this one act. First, leadership by example. “Second, self-sacrifice for the greater good. Be willing to do anything for your Marines. Give everything you have, and then give some more. Tear yourself to the ground. “Lastly, one man can make a difference.”
“Sir, this ain’t about rank. This is logistics!”
I threatened, to the best of my ability, to make public a strategy that our democratic system was not likely to permit him to pursue freely, if it was correctly understood.
The freedom of the President to pursue his chosen foreign policy was seen as the essence of national security.
It was a surreal experience, after a morning of mobile tactics on Fourteenth Street, to be sitting in a room surrounded by my fellow war criminals, listening to Johnson’s assistant for national security tell lies about the war.
The president was part of the problem. This was clearly a matter of his role, not of his personality or party. As I was beginning to see it, the concentration of power within the executive branch since World War II had focused nearly all responsibility for policy “failure” upon one man, the president. At the same time, it gave him enormous capability to avert or postpone or conceal such personal failure by means of force and fraud. Confronted by resolute external resistance, as in Vietnam, that power could not fail to corrupt the human who held it. The only way to change
“Inside” consulting and advice, as in the Rand mode, or the normal practices of the broader “establishment” withheld from Congress and the public the facts and authoritative judgments needed for the self-confident exercise of such a power. By that very silence—no matter how frank or wise the “private” counsel—it supported and participated in the structure of inordinate, unchallenged executive power that led directly in circumstances like Vietnam to its rigid, desperate, outlaw behavior.
He talked about nonviolence as a way of life, about hope, about two worlds both existing just now, a waning world dominated by fear, an emerging world becoming more and more like a family. What I remember most vividly is not the content of what he had said so far but the impression he made on me as he spoke without preparation from the platform. Listening to him was like looking into clear water. I was experiencing a feeling I don’t remember having had in any other circumstances. I was feeling proud of him as an American. I was proud, at the end of this conference, that this man on the platform was American.
Cast your whole vote…your whole influence.
This was a time when I, like others, couldn’t act on what I didn’t know. In
“You Americans feel you have been fighting this war for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.”
“Yes, let’s. Of course, this is always assuming that none of your ship Minds were lying.” “Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”
“I think that is a little like criticizing somebody for owning both an umbrella and a shower,” Kabe said. “It is the choice that is important.”
“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.” Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of traveling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled”. Kabe watched a springleg
A proper searching, like so many things, was best done on foot, from the ground. Hurling oneself grandly across the sky was all very well and certainly gave the impression of lordly oversight and superiority, but what it really did was give you the opportunity to miss all details at once, rather than one at a time, which was the ration for decent folk.
It was a long time later he found out he’d taken the Chosen to the Palace only because the brat was to be the last of the line. Not merely stupid, but also impotent, the Chosen fathered no strong sons and no cunning daughters (as the Culture had known all along), and the fractious desert tribes swept in a de-cade later led by a Matriarch who had guided most of the warriors under her command through the dream-leaf time, and had seen one stronger and stranger than all of them suffer its effects and come through unscathed but still unfulfilled, and known through that very experience that there was more to their desert existence than had been guessed at by the myths and elders of her nomad tribe.
Then the boat split apart, and he dropped through it, through the water underneath, then splashed out of the underside of the water, into air again, and saw the ocean beneath him, and a tiny speck of its surface, which he was falling toward. It was another small boat; he crashed through it, through more water, through more air, through the wreckage of a boat, through another layer of water and another level of air . . . -Hey — one part of his mind thought as he fell — this is like how Sma described the Reality. . . . splashed through more waves, through the water, out into air, heading for more waves . . . This wasn’t going to stop. He remembered that the Reality Sma had described was expanding all the time; you could fall through forever; really forever, not until the end of the universe; literally forever. That won’t do, he thought to himself. He’d have to face the ship. He landed in a little creaking, leaking boat.
When the future cost of doing nothing is the same as the current cost, postpone the decision. Make the decision only when you must with the information you have at that time.
The future is uncertain and you will never know less than you know right now. The most cost-effective course of action may be to wait for more information.
Do not feel compelled to make design decisions prematurely. Resist, even if you fear your code would dismay the design gurus. When faced with an imperfect and muddled class like Gear, ask yourself: “What is the future cost of doing nothing today?”
The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) has its roots in Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Brian Wilkerson’s idea of Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD). They say “A class has responsibilities that fulfill its purpose.” SRP doesn’t require that a class do only one very narrow thing or that it change for only a single nitpicky reason, instead SRP requires that a class be cohesive—that everything the class does be highly related to its purpose.
Your applications will not be perfect but do not be discouraged. Perfection is elusive, perhaps even unreachable; this should not impede your desire to achieve it. Persist. Practice. Experiment. Imagine. Do your best work, and all else will follow.
The tenets of design are tools and with practice they will come naturally into your hand, allowing you to create changeable applications that serve their purpose and bring you joy.
This book is full of rules about how to write code—rules for managing dependencies and creating interfaces. Now that you know these rules you can bend them to your own purposes. The tensions inherent in design mean that these rules are meant to be broken; learning to break them well is a designer’s greatest strength.
Well-designed applications are highly abstract and under constant pressure to evolve; without tests these applications can neither be understood nor safely changed. The
Design is more the art of preserving changeability than it is the act of achieving perfection. Organizing Code to Allow for Easy
You will never know less than you know right now.
Creating an easy-to-change application, however, is a different matter. Your application needs to work right now just once; it must be easy to change forever. This quality of easy changeability reveals the craft of programming. Achieving it takes knowledge, skill, and a bit of artistic creativity.
The rules-of-thumb for testing private methods are thus: Never write them, and if you do, never ever test them, unless of course it makes sense to do so. Therefore, be biased against writing these tests but do not fear to do so if this would improve your lot.
The solution to the problem of costly tests, however, is not to stop testing but instead to get better at it.
It is common for programmers who are new to testing to find themselves in the unhappy state where the tests they write do cost more than the value those tests provide, and who therefore want to argue about the worth of tests. These are programmers who believed themselves highly productive in their former test-not lives but who have crashed into the test-first wall and stumbled to a halt. Their attempts at test-first programming result in less output, and their desire to regain productivity drives them to revert to old habits and forgo writing tests.
To name common problems and to solve the problems in common ways brings the fuzzy into focus. Design Patterns gave an entire generation of programmers the means to communicate and collaborate.
Designs that anticipate specific future requirements almost always end badly. Practical design does not anticipate what will happen to your application, it merely accepts that something will and that, in the present, you cannot know what. It doesn’t guess the future; it preserves your options for accommodating the future. It doesn’t choose; it leaves you room to move.
Explicitly stating that subclasses are required to implement a message provides useful documentation for those who can be relied upon to read it and useful error messages for those who cannot.
The general rule for refactoring into a new inheritance hierarchy is to arrange code so that you can promote abstractions rather than demote concretions.
The ability to tolerate ambiguity about the class of an object is the hallmark of a confident designer. Once you begin to treat your objects as if they are defined by their behavior rather than by their class, you enter into a new realm of expressive flexible design.
This tension between the costs of concretion and the costs of abstraction is fundamental to object-oriented design. Concrete code is easy to understand but costly to extend. Abstract code may initially seem more obscure but, once understood, is far easier to change.
Methods in the public interface should • Be explicitly identified as such • Be more about what than how • Have names that, insofar as you can anticipate, will not change • Take a hash as an options parameter
Think about interfaces. Create them intentionally. It is your interfaces, more than all of your tests and any of your code, that define your application and determine its future.
“I know what I want and I trust you to do your part.”
You don’t send messages because you have objects, you have objects because you send messages.
Changing the fundamental design question from “I know I need this class, what should it do?” to “I need to send this message, who should respond to it?” is the first step in that direction.
Domain objects are easy to find but they are not at the design center of your application. Instead, they are a trap for the unwary. If you fixate on domain objects you will tend to coerce behavior into them. Design experts notice domain objects without concentrating on them; they focus not on these objects but on the messages that pass between them. These messages are guides that lead you to discover other objects, ones that are just as necessary but far less obvious.
The reason that test-first gurus can easily start writing tests is that they have so much design experience. At this stage, they have already constructed a mental map of possibilities for objects and interactions in this application. They are not attached to any specific idea and plan to use tests to discover alternatives, but they know so much about design that they have already formed an intention about the application. It is this intention that allows them to specify the first test.
Design, therefore, must be concerned with the messages that pass between objects. It deals not only with what objects know (their responsibilities) and who they know (their dependencies), but how they talk to one another. The conversation between objects takes place using their interfaces; this chapter explores creating flexible interfaces that allow applications to grow and to change.
Pretend for a moment that your classes are people. If you were to give them advice about how to behave you would tell them to depend on things that change less often than you do.
Dependencies are foreign invaders that represent vulnerabilities, and they should be concise, explicit, and isolated.
Therefore, if you cannot remove unnecessary dependencies, you should isolate them within your class.
If prevented from achieving perfection, your goals should switch to improving the overall situation by leaving the code better than you found it.
It is not the class of the object that’s important, it’s the message you plan to send to it.
Left unchecked, unmanaged dependencies cause an entire application to become an entangled mess. A day will come when it’s easier to rewrite everything than to change anything.
Because you are writing changeable code, you are best served by postponing decisions until you are absolutely forced to make them. Any decision you make in advance of an explicit requirement is just a guess. Don’t decide; preserve your ability to make a decision later.
design choice in either/or terms is shortsighted. There are other choices. Your goal is to preserve single responsibility in Gear while making the fewest design commitments possible.
You do not have to know where you’re going to use good design practices to get there. Good practices reveal design.
Direct references into complicated structures are confusing, because they obscure what the data really is, and they are a maintenance nightmare, because every reference will need to be changed when the structure of the array changes.
‘Simply go on climbing. It’s like writing a novel. Everything’s quite straightforward at first - the early chapters go with a tremendous swing, but sooner or later you begin to tire. You look back and see you’re only halfway through. You look ahead and see you still have as much again to write. If you lose heart at that stage, you’ve had it. It’s easy enough to start something. Finishing it is the hard part.’
People have always had a tendency to divide everything into two categories: above and below, light and dark, good and evil. Scientists, on the other hand, strive to illuminate and define the areas between them.
“How Complex Systems Fail,” an eighteen-bullet-point summary by Richard I. Cook,
Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi.
behaved more like free agents than employees of a big corporation. In their LinkedIn profiles, for instance, they revealed all sorts of information that their employers almost certainly would not want revealed. Here Schwall stumbled upon the predator’s weakness: The employees of the big Wall Street banks felt no more loyalty toward the banks than the banks felt toward them.
The new players in the financial markets, the kingpins of the future who had the capacity to reshape those markets, were a different breed: the Chinese guy who had spent the previous ten years in American universities; the French particle physicist from FERMAT lab; the Russian aerospace engineer; the Indian PhD in electrical engineering. “There were just thousands of these people,” said Schwall. “Basically all of them with advanced degrees. I remember thinking to myself how unfortunate it was that so many engineers were joining these firms to exploit investors rather than solving public problems.” These highly trained scientists and technicians tended to be pulled onto Wall Street by the big banks and then, after they’d learned the ropes, to move on to smaller high-frequency trading shops. They
“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “Except for Granny, of course.”
good workman also learns from the past. All too often when a new technology comes along—Ruby, for example—we tend to toss out the hard-won lessons of experience along with the old code. Take the time to learn from the smart people who came before you. You might start with Paul Graham’s 1993 book, On LISP. The entire text of this book is available at www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html. It is worth reading even if you never type a single parenthesis of LISP. In many ways this book, especially the chapter on object equality, was inspired by: Bloch, J. Effective Java, Second Edition. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2008.
Fixing this kind of location independence problem is cheap; knowing that you have the problem in the first place is priceless.
If you feel like this technique has left you in a confusing maze of twisty passages,3 here are some signposts that can help. First, keep your goal firmly in mind. In our example, we wanted to make it easy to add paragraph-generating methods to StructuredDocument subclasses. Second, know when things happen. For example, when you load the StructuredDocument code, perhaps with this: require 'structured_document' You end up with the generic StructuredDocument class, which has the paragraph_type class method on it. A bit later (perhaps even on the very next line of code) you load the Instructions class: require 'instructions' As the Instructions class definition is getting executed, it will fire off calls to the paragraph_type method up in the StructuredDocument class. This will add methods with names like introduction, warning, and step to the Instructions class. Only when all of this defining is over do you make an instance of Instructions and call the generated methods. The third thing to know is that the value of self is at every stage of this process. This starts out relatively straightforward but gets a little hairy as you go along. The straightforward bit is in the superclass:
Now, a skeptic might observe that neither replace_firstname nor replace_lastcarmodelbought have added any particularly new capability to the FormLetter class.1 These two methods, however they are implemented, simply expose an existing feature of the FormLetter class in a slightly different package. So why should we bother? We bother because our users asked us to bother. If you reread my tale of intrigue and junk mail, you’ll see that it was the coders who were using the FormLetter class that asked for the convenience methods. Those methods make the code generating the form letters cleaner and easier for the people who count—the programmers who need to deal with it. One of the key values of the Ruby programming culture is that the look of the code matters. It matters because the people who use the code, read the code, and maintain the code matter. Good software engineering is all about making everyone’s job easier, not just because we want to go home on time but because we all want to turn out the best possible end product. So we add convenience methods, build method_missing methods, and go to enormous lengths to make our APIs easy to use because programmers with easy-to-use APIs tend to have the time to craft easy-to-use—and working—systems.
Engineering is all about trade-offs. Just about every engineering decision involves getting something, but at a price,
The code that you never write will work forever.
Sham saw the old halls his crewmates said were the guildbuildings of spies & ne’er-do-wells, where rumourmarkets were held. “A few coppers’ll get you a questionable assertion from someone drunk & past it.” So Fremlo said. “A handful of dollars, something said with a straight face by one whose information has panned out more than once in the past. More than that, you’re into the realm of the tempting secret.
Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives. Some bemoan this fact: “Why does everything have to be put into boxes?” they say. & fair enough, up to a point. But this vigorous drive to divide, subdivide & label has been rather maligned. Such conceptual shuffling is inevitable, & a reasonable defence against what would otherwise face us as thoroughgoing chaos. The germane issue is not whether, but how, to divide. Certain types of events are particularly carefully delineated. Such as fights. What ran towards Sham, announcing its presence with throaty jeers, was incipient fightness, carried in the vectors of eight or nine aggressive young men & women. But what kind of fight?
“ ‘If it’s nearly right, but it isn’t quite, better to have none, than make do with one,’ ”
Nowadays, however, nobody bothered to remember many facts. That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for: they stored data. Living men memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary. When they needed facts, they asked the machines.
When you look into the abyss, it’s not supposed to wave back.
“
thtill
There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What’s up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don’t think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who’s been pinching my beer? And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass), or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman’s eye. William was one of the glassless. And this was odd, because he’d been born into a family that not only had a very large glass indeed but could afford to have people discreetly standing around with bottles to keep it filled up. It was self-imposed glasslessness, and it had started at a fairly early age when he’d been sent away to school. William’s brother, Rupert, being the elder, had gone to the Assassins’ School in Ankh-Morpork, widely regarded as being the best school in the world for the full-glass class. William, as the less important son, had been sent to Hugglestones, a boarding school so bleak and spartan that only the upper glasses would send their sons there.
The problem with the reformers’ approach was that they didn’t have the intelligence network necessary to truly understand the city and bureaucracy they were trying to control: Tammany had legions of ward bosses, precinct captains, street organizers, and civil servants collecting stories from their constituents and reporting back to the higher-ups. Reformers couldn’t hope to build such a machine without becoming a “machine” themselves, but by the early twentieth century, a few new developments gave them the chance to build an information-gathering apparatus of a whole different sort, one based not on individually collected stories but mass-aggregated numbers.
But the divide between reformers and the machine went beyond the simple question of which social classes and ethnic groups would be in charge to a deeper disagreement over the basic philosophy of government. At its best, Tammany was an exemplar of what political scientist Charles Lindblom would call the “branch” approach to decision-making: an incremental, usually decentralized and bottom-up process of “continually building out from the current situation, step-by-step and by small degrees.” Nearly every major aspect of New York City—its economy, population, ethnic mix, real estate market, transportation, and public health system—was in a constant state of flux, and Tammany’s job was to stay out of the way when possible, provide services and deal with crises when needed, and remain flexible and responsive enough to keep the votes coming, practitioners of what Lindblom called “the science of muddling through.” Educated reformers, on the other hand, tended to favor what Lindblom called the “root” approach to decision-making: comprehensively analyzing a situation, determining the ideal course of action, and then charging forward with it, a generally centralized, top-down process of “starting from fundamentals anew each time, building on the past only as experience is embodied in a theory, and always prepared to start completely from the ground up.” There are merits to both approaches, but the two sides were rarely comprehensible to one another, root-approach reformers seeing the machine’s branch approach as cynical, plodding, and wasteful (not to mention corrupt) and the pragmatic Tammany chieftains writing the good-government types off as starry-eyed dilettantes too concerned with simplistic theories of what government and society should be to deal with the complicated realities of what the city itself actually was.
One of the great ironies of the anti-root-approach rallying cries of Reagan- and Thatcher-era conservatism and its rejection of big government is that conservative politicians were forced to look to the private sector (where the high-handed root approach flourished) for new ways of running the government.
It’s no wonder that Roger Starr was so shocked at the acrimonious reception of his calls for planned shrinkage and his assertions that “American communities can be disassembled and reconstituted about as readily as freight trains.” He was just giving voice to the conventional wisdom of his field.
Tammany chieftains and ward bosses didn’t pretend to know what was best for individual precincts or neighborhoods on the basis of some statistical measurement. They were more ploddingly reactive, letting constituents come to them with new ideas for improving things and backing the ideas that seemed most credible or were the easiest to drum up support for. Intrinsically connected to the street, machine bosses had no time for abstract notions of how impoverished immigrants should be housed or fed or educated; they were forced to contend with the problems of the slums as they were. After all, stray too far from reality and someone with a better sense of what voters wanted would up and take your place.
tradition and intuition. The old ways of doing business certainly had their irrationalities and shortcomings. But in the quest to rationalize and centralize from the top down, to focus on the big picture and the comprehensive plan, the realities of a bottom-up jury-rigged city had fallen through the cracks. Just as neighborhoods consumed by flame were pushed to the side by the city and the department responsible for protecting them, so too were the lessons to be learned in those neighborhoods. Like the War Years themselves, the Waldbaum’s collapse was a presumed act of arson that turned out to be caused by big ideas, misaligned priorities, and the lost lessons of the Bronx.
To err is human—and to blame it on a computer is even more so.
Had the analysts taken a step back from the models, perhaps they would have thought there was something fishy about closing companies in the most fire-prone neighborhoods in the country and opening them in Staten Island. But lost in a modeler’s world that was increasingly divorced from reality, the fire project had “stepped through the looking glass,” as RAND physicist Sam Cohen once said of his colleagues who worked on systems analysis, “where people did the weirdest things and [used] the most perverse kind of logic imaginable and yet claimed to have the most precise understanding of everything . . . because it all sounded so damn rational and so damn reasonable as to be unassailable.”
Within the broader field of systems analysis, this weakness—having to ignore certain realities because they are too complex to quantify—is so common that it even has a philosophical justification. Simple models, the conventional wisdom of the field holds, are better than complex models, because it’s harder to keep track of all the moving parts in a complex model. This is true enough, but it raises the question: If modeling can’t handle complexity, why bother with it in the first place?
In the “old days” of Tammany-style governance, O’Hagan and RAND’s big ideas and ambitious reform agenda wouldn’t have mattered much. Local ward bosses, irate at watching their constituents being burned out of their homes, would have drawn together the relevant authorities and cobbled together a plan. In all likelihood, fire patrols and building inspections would have been increased, negligent landlords brought into line, redlining dogmas put aside to make loans available, renovation and poverty programs put in place, fire-awareness campaigns begun—in other words, exactly the kinds of things Chief Kirby was recommending. Such plans would have been classic Tammany pluralism—true branch-approach problem-solving. The programs would be hastily assembled and muddled through by trial and error. Some would succeed, others fail, and most would be rife with backdoor politicking and corruption. It wouldn’t have been particularly analytic, scientific, transparent, or progressive, but something would have been done, and done quickly. There were too many buildings, votes, and dollars being lost.
The root approach is, of course, necessary for the kinds of large-scale projects that big cities often need—no one was going to take part in a decentralized, uncoordinated effort to dig the Erie Canal or fill in the marsh that is now Boston’s Back Bay. The trouble with the root approach is that it’s extremely vulnerable to bad ideas. Given the hasty, often unexamined nature of the branch approach, bad ideas are perhaps more common than with the comprehensive planning of the root approach—just think of the number of businesses that open on the wrong block, only to close up shop shortly thereafter. But there’s a safety mechanism in that failure: the shop owner sees the error of his ways and closes before he wastes even more time and money. Because the root approach presumes to have considered all possible options before proceeding, there is no equivalent rethinking, and bad ideas are given a much longer life-span.
making public-policy decisions was almost a foregone conclusion in many government circles. President Johnson was deploying PPBS modelers throughout the federal government. McNamara’s Whiz Kids were using computers to predict Vietcong attacks and decide where to move troops and drop bombs. In a speech before the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, influential defense intellectual C. West Churchman predicted that by 1990, decision-making technology would outstrip the minds of high-level thinkers and policy-makers, and presidents would consult computers for advice on how to fight wars and manage the economy.
It may sound a bit Panglossian in hindsight, but the notion that advanced computer models—freed from partisan concerns and able to process enormous quantities of data instantaneously—would soon be
Some departments seemed too busy reforming themselves to actually reap any of the productivity gains that were the whole point of the reform in the first place.
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is. —JOHN VON NEUMANN
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
somewhere
with extensions
other people
there
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