Rumsfeld and McNamara

I am struck by the similarities as Secretary of Defense between Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara. Both believed that business principles could be applied to war fighting, and both were led by that belief into serious errors.

McNamara succumbed to the belief, common in business, that one ought to have objective measures to gauge progress. The measure he chose was the number of enemy killed, and so of course everyone under his command maximized body counts by whatever means they could, including double-counting and just plain invention. Unfortunately, he measured the wrong thing. What mattered was the level of determination of his opponents, not body count. But determination is hard to measure objectively, while things like body counts are easy to measure, so he picked something easy to count.

Rumsfeld succumbed to the belief, common in business, that one ought to minimize production resources – one ought to do the job with the minimum possible expenditure of resources. This led him to overrule his military commanders and fight the Iraq war with too few ground forces. Once again, his business focus led him to attend to the wrong thing – total resources invested. What military commanders know from long experience is that the way to shorten a war (reducing its cost) and minimize casualties is to attack with overwhelming force, so that the enemy quickly senses the futility of further resistance. Our failure to do that, and to have enough troops in place to provide adequate security for the average Iraqi immediately following the war, led to the long and expensive insurgency we now face. What Rumsfeld should have focused on was the state of mind of his opponents, not resources invested.

The lesson here is one of hubris. Just because one is an expert in one field doesn’t mean that expertise transfers wholesale into an entirely different field. If either of these men had valued the military expertise around them, they probably wouldn’t be remembered now as the architects of disaster.

Smart vs wise

There are lots of smart people in the world, but far less who are wise. Academia is full of extremely bright people who are world-class experts in this or that narrow subject, but amazingly naïve about the world as a whole. The upper ranks of business are full of smart people who understand complex management subjects, but who can’t even keep their own family relationships healthy. Politics, at least at the higher levels, has lots of people who are smart enough to survive in the complex and cutthroat world of national government, but not wise enough to be true statesmen.

People who are smart know a lot, and have the ability to do very complex things. But people who are wise know what is and isn’t worth doing. We have always had enough smart people in the population, but we have always been woefully short of the wise.

It’s a myth that teachers teach

I’ve been a teacher, on and off, most of my adult life. I have taught high school students, college undergraduates, and professionals in corporations. I have concluded from all of this experience that teachers don’t teach – students learn.

Teachers (including myself) like to think that they are teaching, that they are a necessary catalyst to the students’ learning process, and that their carefully constructed curriculum are what makes learning possible. I’m now convinced these are myths.

In fact we all learn things all the time without the help of teachers. If we get interested in something, and motivated, we teach ourselves. We find the necessary information ourselves, and even if it comes in a disorganized fashion, we manage to master it all the same. In fact, we may master it better for having to impose an order on it ourselves.

That’s not to say that teachers don’t have a vital function, just that teaching content isn’t that vital function. Think of the two or three outstanding teachers you have had. I’ll bet what you recall isn’t the content they taught. What you probably recall is that they made the subject interesting and exciting, and made you feel good about learning.

I now think the primary and single most important function of a teacher is to impart to students a passion for their field. And their second most important function is to provide steady encouragement to the students as they master the subject.

Way down the list in terms of importance is the organization of the curriculum. It certainly is true that a bad organization can make learning much more difficult – the terrible way the calculus was taught in college for years proves this. And a good curriculum organization can make learning easier. But none of this matters nearly as much as exciting and maintaining the interest and passion of the student for the subject.

Unfortunately, public education, and the massive bureaucracy that surrounds it is still guided by the myth that curriculum matters and teachers teach. And because of this our public schools are so ineffectual that many of our young people are turned off to learning.

Recommended: Charade or First Step? The United States-North Korea Agreement

I recommend Immanuel Wallerstein's essay "Charade or First Step? The United States-North Korea Agreement". Certainly it was useful to take a first step, but the history of our relations with North Korea suggests that taking the next step may be very difficult. Wallerstein's main point, though, is that this demonstrates again how much America's influence in the world has declined. His view of America's decline is not a popular one nor comfortable to contemplate, but worth considering nonetheless.

The involved leader

Last night I went to see a performance of an Irish Step Dance company of which one of my granddaughters is a member. During the course of the performance the group’s teacher and leader did a brilliant solo dance, and I recalled that the last time I had seen them she also danced, that time just as another member of the company in a set.

That made me recall reading some years ago the book Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy, then CEO of the famous and highly successful advertising agency of Ogilvy & Mather. David Ogilvy was a brilliant manager, known for such insightful quotations as “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it.”

In his book he recalls working as a youngster in the kitchen of the Majestic Hotel in Paris under a great chef, whose name escapes me. He recalled that although the great chef managed a huge kitchen staff from his office, once a day he always came out and made something himself – a sauce, a special dish, a dessert – just to keep his skills up and be a model for his staff. That impressed Ogilvy, and when he himself was the CEO of the mighty Ogilvy & Mather advertising firm, he too always had at least one account that he managed personally, down to the last detail, for the same reason.

I once attended a large-format photography workshop taught by Fred Picker, a bit of a curmudgeon but a brilliant and talented photographer and printer. I recall him telling us to distrust any photography teacher who wasn’t actively producing work, or as he put it, “hanging them on the wall”.

The lesson here, I think, is that it is all too easy to rise to become a teacher or manager or leader of one’s profession, and then lose touch with the skills and difficulties of those working under you, and what is worse, to be perceived by those subordinates as having lost touch.

There is a reason why good generals spend a lot of time visiting and eating with their troops in the front lines, instead of just living in comfort well away from danger. It’s not just that their troops respect them more for it, though that is certainly important. It is that by being in the front lines from time to time they get accurate first-hand information about how things are really going, and their decisions are better for it. That applies in just about any other field of endeavor as well.

Teachers who themselves practice daily what they are teaching are better teachers. Organizations in which managers wander around a lot and join in and get their hands dirty with real work from time to time have better odds of long-term success than those in which managers rule in distant and isolated splendor from large offices, and the morale of their people will be markedly better as well.

Here’s an attitude….

Here’s an attitude America might try on the Iraqis:

“You were ruled by a vicious dictator who killed a lot of you, terrified all of you, led you into a senseless decades-long war with Iran, and stole your country blind. Whatever our motives, we Americans spent a lot of money and a lot of American lives to give you back your country. Now that you have your country back, if all you can do is kill each other over sectarian differences, and kill Americans, that’s your own stupidity. We aren’t going to rescue you twice. It’s up to you now……..”

Great nations are never going to get thanked for rescuing other nations from the consequences of their own mistakes. Look at France – we pulled their chestnuts out of the fire not once but twice in the last century, and in a “postmodern” European Union they still rely on American power to quell their fears about a resurgent reunited Germany. And yet they are hardly a dependable friend these days.

That doesn’t mean we ought not to use our power sometimes to help other nations dig themselves out of bad situations, but it does mean that we can’t expect to be thanked much for it, and we ought to do the job and then get out of the way and let them carry on, for better or worse, on their own. In the case of Iraq, it is not clear to me that their culture is capable of anything we would recognize as a democratic government, no matter how much longer we stay there or how many more American lives we sacrifice to the cause.

We’ve done them a big favor, whether they can admit it or not. Now it’s time to get out as quickly and gracefully as we can manage. Staying longer isn’t going to help either them or us.

Godwin’s second law - Be careful what you measure….

A principle I developed some time ago is to always be very careful what one measures, because that is naturally what people will optimize, and if that isn’t what one wants optimized, then don’t measure it.

Measure writers by the volume of text they produce and soon they will get very wordy. Measure academics by how much they publish and the world will soon be awash in trivial and inconsequential papers (as in fact it is). Measure an airline by how often they leave the gate on time and they will cut all sorts of corners to optimize that measure. Rank employees by how much overtime they put in and soon overtime will go up, though productivity most likely will go down. Whatever the measure is, people will soon learn how to game it to their advantage.

The No Child Left Behind initiative is an excellent example of this principle. Schools are measured on the performance of their students on tests, and so not surprisingly most of the school year is now focused on teaching to the tests. But of course only simple facts and skills can be measured on the sorts of standardized tests that can be given to masses of students, so the more important aspects of education – creativity and curiosity and logical thinking skills and passion for the subjects – are neglected in favor of cramming facts into the students.

The problem is that it is usually hard to find a way to accurately measure the things that really matter - product quality, productivity, creativity, innovation. But increasingly bureaucracies are looking for “objective” measurements, so they turn to things they can measure or count or rank easily. And usually these are not really the things one wants to optimize.

So if you want something optimized, measure it. If that isn’t what you intend to optimize, then don’t measure it.

(In some future post I will reveal Godwin’s first law, proposed years ago by my father)

Statesman vs politicians

Here are six current serious issues, if not pressing crises, that confront America today:

Global warming – the scientific evidence is overwhelming that human activity is producing a massive and rapid worldwide climate change that will in the next few decades displace hundreds of millions of people and probably eventually starve billions.

Medicare/Social Security – the actuarial evidence is overwhelming that these two programs, as currently constituted, will in the next few decades cost more than our economy and tax structure can possibly bear, so that we will eventually have to massively reduce benefits to our older citizens.

Nuclear proliferation – the world, and particularly parts of the old Soviet empire, is awash in poorly protected nuclear materials that can be used by any of the thousands of terrorist or nationalist groups to assemble an unsophisticated yet still devastating nuclear weapon and detonate it in any major city of the world.

Petroleum products – the evidence strongly suggests that we are currently pumping about as much oil and natural gas worldwide as we ever will, even though demand will continue to increase massively over the next few decades. As a result the price of oil and natural gas, upon which the first world economy and food supply depends, will almost certainly continue to rise steadily over the next few decades.

Pandemics – Although avian flu is getting most of the current attention here, the problem is wider than that. Modern high speed worldwide transportation has made it possible for any new highly infection disease (and new ones will appear from time to time) to spread globally within days, far faster than our current medical infrastructure can adapt to it.

Demographics – many of the European and Asian developed and developing nations now have reproductive rates that have dropped below replacement level, so that some countries, like Russia and Japan, will be heavily depopulated in the next few decades, disrupting their economies and societies and therefore probably ours as well.

Now think about your favorite political office holders or candidates for Congress or the presidency, of either party. How many of these issues do they even mention in their speeches? How many do they take seriously enough to sponsor legislation about them? For how many of them do they seem to have any effective suggestions, as opposed to vague promises?

Politicians attend to what gets votes. Statesmen attend to what needs to be done for their country. Have you seen any statesmen lately in either political party?

The death penalty in America

The interesting issues are the hard ones, such as whether or not America should have the death penalty. And what makes such issues hard is that there are so many intersecting and conflicting aspects that it is difficult to decide which ones should be the basis for a decision – at the core it is the task of deciding which of all these many aspects ought to be the overriding ones that shapes the decisions, and also what makes the whole issue so difficult.

No matter what anyone may say, vengeance is certainly one of the aspects to this decision. It is all very well to pontificate from a distance about the immorality of putting a murderer to death so long as it was not our own dear ones who were murdered. But I will readily admit that if someone raped and murdered my spouse or one of my children or grandchildren, a large part of me would ache to see them very, very slowly and painfully put to death, and I suspect I am not alone in this feeling. Polls have consistently shown a substantial majority of Americans in favor of the death penalty, at least for the most inhuman and vicious crimes.

Nor is religious morality really any help here, since despite their words and writings (or perhaps because of them) the world’s major religions have shown no hesitation through history to putting to the sword or rack unbelievers and heretics and anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Indeed the nightly news overflows with people killing other people in the name of religion.

Nor is killing humans really the issue, since in other contexts we do it all the time. Every country trains its soldiers to kill, and whatever the morality of the political decision to go to war, for the soldier in the front line killing the enemy is the only way to survive. Nor do we expect our police to face armed killers unarmed. And of course we condemn humans to death all the time when we make the political or economic decision not to intervene in an ethnic cleansing or not to attend to a famine somewhere in the world or not to make a medicine available to the ill in some poor nation. These are pragmatic decisions – we couldn’t solve all the world’s problems even if we tried – but nevertheless these decisions doom some people to their deaths just as surely as if we put the noose around their neck or gave them the lethal injection.

The argument that the death penalty deters others from committing murder has no convincing support. Indeed, it would appear that most people who commit murder do so either from passion (in which case the death penalty is no deterrent) or because they are sociopaths with no empathy for their victims (in which case the death penalty is no deterrent).

In the end, and after years of thinking about the issue, I think I am against the death penalty for two primary reasons:

1) It is not reversible, and there have been too many innocent people executed because of failures in the judicial systems – ambitious prosecuting attorneys, poor representation, prejudice, unfair media coverage, sloppy forensic work, and the like. If the accused is still alive and in jail when these failures are finally uncovered, there is a chance to make at least some amends.

2) A friend of mine gave me the second convincing argument: if the perpetrator is really guilty of a heinous crime, such as cold-blooded premeditated murder or distributing drugs to masses of people and ruining their lives, then a quick, fairly painless death isn’t nearly enough punishment – spending the rest of their lives in a dreary prison cell seems far more fitting.

No Child Left Behind - Football Version

Re the No Child Left Behind initiative, one of my daughters just sent me this, and I thought it was too good not to share

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NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND---THE FOOTBALL VERSION

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If, after two years, they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents.

ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. It will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.

Change and lifecycles

Humans seem to like to think in terms of static, unchanging situations. That’s too bad, because in nature (which certainly includes everything humans do and build) nothing is static. Everything is always in flux, moving through a lifecycle from birth to maturity to death. Stars, human institutions, relationships, living creatures, empires, galaxies, religions, planets, philosophies -- they all have births, they all grow to maturity, age, and eventually die away. None of them is ever static – all are always changing, maturing, aging, whether their lifecycle is measures in microseconds, millennia, or billions of years.

When we humans succumb to the temptation to see things as static and unchanging, we blind ourselves to the most important aspects of what is going on around us. It’s like trying to understand a two hour movie from a single random frame of the picture. To really understand anything around us, we have to understand the movement of events – what they are coming from and what they are evolving toward. We have to try to discern the whole lifecycle, rather than the single moment we happen to be seeing.

Most people find it easier, and certainly more comfortable, to think of the world around them as essentially unchanging. But it isn’t, and those who blind themselves to the dynamic nature of events miss most of what is really happening.

More No Child Left Unharmed

Others have thought of the "No Child Left Unharmed" name too. See the wonderful and thoughtful No Child Left Unharmed post by special education teacher Linda Schrock.

No Child Left Unharmed

As is so often the case with government, the No Child Left Behind initiative started from a perfectly reasonable concern that there ought to be more accountability in the public schools. But at least in our state it has morphed into an unreasonable monster.

This week my grade-school grandchildren are supposed to spend four hours a day all week long in intensive testing. The testing is not designed in any way to help the individual students, but simply to help the school administration meet bureaucratic guidelines. And in preparation for these tests, their teachers have been forced to spend most of the year to this point cramming into them the narrow field of facts covered on the tests, instead of nurturing their curiosity and creativity and problem-solving skills and writing skills and the other things which really matter in education.

Proponents in Washington may delude themselves that these tests are for the benefit of the students. A friend of mine who is a teacher told me how the teachers in her school just got back the test results for the children in their class, so that they could use the results to guide remedial work with those students --- except that the results were for LAST YEAR’S class, students who have already moved on to another school.

Just today I heard about a local mother whose third grade daughter is home ill with anxiety. It seems she is an outstanding student who dearly loves her teacher, and that teacher has made it plain to this little third grade girl that her job depends on the girl doing well in the tests, since her results improve the class’s standing. THIS IS SICK!!!

The politicians in Washington may think this program is doing great things. Maybe it is somewhere in the nation, but not anywhere I have heard of, and certainly not here. This is a classic case of a government agency undertaking a perfectly reasonable initiative, and then botching it thoroughly in the execution. It’s also another classic demonstration that government bureaucracies – local, state and federal – will always, by their very nature, care more about their own internal politics than the public – in this case our children – that they are supposed to serve.

Parents who are paying attention and who care about their children ought to be up in arms about this. I’m proud to say one of my daughters is rebelling, and has been holding her children out of school during the testing periods so they can do something more productive and educational. I suggest more parents need to be proactive in defense of their children.

Why government can’t get it right

There are those who think the answer to many social questions is government intervention and government control. There certainly are things which seem to be appropriate for governments to do – maintain the streets and provide police and run the criminal justice system and maintain armed forces, among other things.

However, I am not convinced that government is the answer to all ills. I’ve worked with government agencies, and in general I’m not impressed with either their efficiency or their effectiveness. I was not particularly surprised at the poor state and federal response to hurricane Katrina. I’m not surprised at the inevitable cost overruns on government programs, not at the proportion of them that are abandoned as hopeless after spending millions or even billions. I’m not surprised that the No Child Left Behind bureaucracy has produced such absurd requirements. I’m not surprised at the constant turf battles between the FBI and the CIA, nor at the number of times both agencies have fumbled their tasks. I’m not surprised the effort to “nation build” in Iraq has gone so poorly. And I expect most future government programs to be equally ineffective and overpriced.

Government agencies are institutions with a dynamic all their own. All large institutions have inefficiencies and incompetent members and meaningless activities, but business institutions have at least some level of restraint because they have a bottom line – at the end of the day they have to produce a profit for their shareholders or owners. At the end of the day they have to satisfy their customers or those customers will go elsewhere. So for businesses there is some forcing function, though not always as much as one would like, to fire the incompetent and eliminate useless work and improve processes and products.

Government agencies don’t work like that. There are indeed forces in a government agency that produce winners and losers in the organization, but these are far more often political forces or office politics forces. At the end of the day, government agencies don’t have a bottom line; they don’t have to show a profit. At the end of the day, government agencies really don’t have to satisfy their customers to stay in business, only their Congressional sponsors. When they make mistakes, generally they don’t suffer serious consequences because it is in the interests of their political sponsors not to impose consequences. If they overrun a budget, Congress gives them more money. If they make a really bad mistake, a few lower-level scapegoats are found but the upper management generally escapes the scandal undamaged. If an agency launches a program, as often as not it takes on a life of its own and runs for decades on inertia, whether or not it is effective.

Thus far we have been a rich enough country that we can afford the vast wealth government agencies waste, and the additional costs they impose on everyone – individuals and businesses alike – with their interference and regulations. And they do get some things done, if inefficiently and at enormous cost. But the European Union model, with a massive bureaucracy in Brussels trying to regulate the tiniest details all across the EU is, not surprisingly, proving cumbersome, expensive and ill-equipped to handle many of the member country’s individual and unique problems. One size does not fit all. I don’t think we want to follow that model.

Government agencies by their very nature are not very flexible, not very efficient, and not very effective, and they are always very expensive for the services they offer. Government agencies by their very nature will always be more responsive to the political masters who fund them then to the public they are supposed to serve. There certainly are a core set of services that are appropriate for government agencies to deliver, but for anything beyond that small core set of services, we ought always to look first for other, more responsive and efficient ways of obtaining those services outside of government, ones which will be properly accountable for the money spent and the results received.