Miscellaneous and Fast

Ann Althouse on a new survey on bullying in the workplace.


Eclecticity has a profile of a father of the year.

Hawaii has a pro-smoking ad to reassure Japanese puffers.

Citizen Brand recalls time well spent with Gordon Lightfoot, who may be 70 but we don't have to believe it.

Cory Doctorow on what not to wear to your next job interview.

On the Latest in Sociopathic Behavior

Writing at the CSO site, Joe Basirico examines a new twist in identity theft. An excerpt:

I was just interviewed by a local news station about a story they were doing on daring hackers that have started advertising their abilities to destroy a person’s life for as little as $20 per month. Apparently the deal goes something like this: you make a deal with a hacker to destroy somebody’s life by signing them up online and the hacker will ensure the target can’t get a good job, can’t apply for credit cards, will be denied for loans, etc. The interviewer wanted to know if I thought that this was really happening or if it was some kind of joke and was really that easy.

I’m not in the revenge business myself, but I suspect that this is a great way for the hacker to get a little extra money for something they do anyway. Last time I checked, the going rate on the black for a “full identity” (enough information to become another person) is up to $5 in some countries. If we apply the supply and demand model that seems to mean there is a wealth of supply but lagging demand.

Beyond Blundering

This book by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson on the Duke LaCrosse rape case should be fascinating.

I'll be reviewing it after a few management books.

Pin-Striped Bloc

Which of the possible U.S. presidential nominees would be the best and the worst for business?

A survey of executives by Chief Executive magazine concluded:

Republican Best: Mitt Romney

Republican Worst: John McCain



Democratic Best: Barack Obama

Democratic Worst: Hillary Clinton

Crowning King Weasel

Okay, take a break and read this brilliant and invaluable post by Rowan Manahan on an old game that relies upon human nature. Prepare to sob or smirk.

The Blame List: 30 Culprits

The following is a quick listing of people and institutions that may be frequent objects of blame in your life. Feel free to contribute additions or amendments.

1. Your parents
2. Your children
3. Your spouse
4. Your third grade teacher
5. Your prom date or lack thereof
6. Your neighbors
7. Your co-workers
8. Your boss
9. Your computer
10. Your hair or lack thereof
11. Your weight
12. Your car
13. Global warming
14. City Hall
15. The president, prime minister, or chancellor
16. The Saudis
17. The church
18. The Bossa Nova
19. Lawyers
20. Congress
21. Judges
22. Kids these days
23. Detroit
24. Washington, DC
25. Hollywood
26. Talk radio
27. The Internet
28. Carbs
29. The infrastructure
30. Steroids

Another Whiner

I'm encountering gremlins in posting today.

Please bear with me. Wizards are working on it.

Quote of the Day

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

- Norman Cousins

Music Break

Michael at 2Blowhards has assembled a great collection of music links from Van Morrison to the Everly Brothers.

Street Justice

Bravo for Lord Phillips of Sudbury.

It's a bit disappointing that a thrashing was not administered but one can't have everything. An excerpt:

It seems that, if any adult wants to dispute the right of young thugs to misbehave, then not only does he or she do so at considerable personal risk, but with the express disapproval of the forces of law and order.

The implication is that there can only be two figures of authority on the streets - the thugs and the cops. Everyone else must creep around, averting their eyes, hoping that someone will call the police: which might be all right if we could really hope that the police will come, and if there were really enough police to deal with all the forms of anti-social behaviour.

Just The Place For Financial Advice

Wall Street executives at Burning Man? You bet. Though there’s nothing farther from the cutthroat, moneymaking world of Wall Street than the anticapitalist, anticorporate festival of radical self-expression known as Burning Man, we found several New York business executives and Wall Street types who are heading out West this week and staying through Labor Day. In the dusty, storm-ridden desert flatlands north of Reno, Nevada, is a place dubbed Black Rock City, home of the biggest little countercultural festival in the world.

“I first went out there in 2003 because a classmate from the Stanford Business School had an art project on the playa,” says a senior executive for a major Wall Street company, who asked not to be named. One of the main draws for him and most of the other 50,000 participants expected this year are the massive collaborative art projects, like last year’s giant Belgian Waffle or the 50-foot stick figure that gets torched at the end of the week—the burning man that gives the festival its name.

Find the rest of the Portfolio article here. Be sure to wear your baseball cap backwards.

The Need for Elevation

Why is it that all children - and many adults - upon seeing the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter films, exclaim, "I wish I could have gone to a school like that?"

Set aside the floating candles and the shifting staircases: The answer is Style.

Modern elementary schools look like factories in which people sort rags or hammer on blocks. The architecture does not inspire or announce, "This is a place where something special occurs." The same thing can be said of many business and government offices. It is as if some evil-minded administrator once decreed, "Let's put up boxes of steel and glass and squeeze the majesty out of life." No wonder workers glance longingly out the window at the trees and not at any structure. The architects have sold us a bunch of crap. Occasionally as an apology, they toss a feeble excuse for sculpture in front.

Now shift to lifestyles. We once watched Cary Grant and Grace Kelly portraying lives that elevated our hopes. They and other stars showed us how people with values and style behaved. The anti-heroes and automatons are now supreme and when an exception arrives on the screen we almost weep in gratitude. I won't even start on the dreck that passes for popular music and late night television has fallen from a place where once you might have seen Jack Paar or Dick Cavett talking to Buckley, Vidal, Mailer, or Updike to a spot where Jay and Dave let stars do infomercials for their latest film.

We have become so practical and utilitarian. I majored in "Government" as an undergraduate. Now it's called "Political Science" although it is anything but a science. The word might, however, impress the Board of Regents. Perhaps "sciences" don't get their funding slashed as quickly as the softer subjects. The same mentality that believes there is such a thing as "Social Science" doesn't flinch at using concrete boxes to house students nor does it consider just what sort of people those boxes will produce. No problem. They can join a growing tribe of pragmatic careerists that combines avarice with adolescence and scoffs at values and sacrifice.

Little things make a difference. We could use a renewed dedication to the type of conduct that elevates the individual and the society. Dropping the notions that Coarseness = Truth and Refinement = Hypocrisy and that Style is a waste of resources will be a good start.

We can have lives of beauty.



[HT: Jonathan Wade]

Snowmen

Daniel Henninger on what's afflicting the media:

But for the media ponderers there's a more troubling issue than the restoration of trust. It's the possibility that too many people now simply don't much care about the major media anymore. Normally the great media combines would overcome periods of lassitude by forming up focus groups to tell them what to do next. Hah! They want "Survivor"! Alas, living as we do now in a world of seemingly infinite choice, it is possible not to care for a seeming infinity of reasons, which is why the established media are having such a hard time knowing what to do.

Mr. Paxman identified one reason not to care: "In the last quarter century we've gone from three channels to hundreds. . . . The truth is this: the more television there is, the less any of it matters." Once there was a time when TV announcers used to say, "Stay with us." Now no one stays. They go surfing, endlessly seeking a five-minute wave of TV that will take them just a little higher than the five minutes they just watched.

Quote of the Day

It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.

- O.H. Mowrer

"Spandex is not forgiving."

If you think that you've got a strange job, Eccentric Employment may change your mind. Its current listings include ads for:

Caviar Sales Rep

Mayan Interpreter

Striptease Instructor

Spider Man

Look at That!

Tired of boring PowerPoint slides?


Don't miss this article on visualization in Smashing magazine.


Click through and be sure to scroll down. Creative stuff. Beats the pie chart I drew in grade school.



[HT: Guy Kawasaki ]

Assigned Mentors

Wally Bock has a thought-provoking piece on why assigned mentor programs are unnatural.

[It reminds me of the story about the Columbia University administrators who urged then Columbia president Dwight Eisenhower to direct the students to stay on the sidewalks and not to walk on the grass. Eisenhower replied, "Put sidewalks where the paths are."]

Book Review: Lessons on Leadership

Jack Stahl, the former President of Coca-Cola and CEO of Revlon, has written Lessons on Leadership: The 7 Fundamental Management Skills for Leaders at All Levels.

That sentence will cause some readers to crouch behind the sofa. "Another leadership book by a CEO?" they'll gasp. "Can't we be spared another tale of corporate heroism?"

Fortunately, Mr. Stahl does spare us at least most of his heroic tales in this readable review of leadership lessons. My favorite anecdote was how Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta once used a mistake to teach a powerful lesson. Goizueta had noticed an error in an internal management report. He called Stahl, who had just arrived in Austria for a week of review meetings. The conversation went as follows:



Goizueta: "This report is wrong. It needs to be fixed. Find out how this could have happened."



Stahl: "I am already aware of the error, Roberto, and our financial people are working on the issue. As soon as I get back to Atlanta next week, I'll resolve it, and will let you know the outcome."



Moment of silence.



Goizueta: "Jack, what flight will you be on tomorrow morning to fix this problem?"



Stahl: "I have meetings scheduled here in Austria all this week - it's being worked on, and I will focus on it as soon as I return to Atlanta from Vienna next week."



Goizueta: "No, Jack - I want you back here on the first plane tomorrow to deal with this."



Stahl notes that Goizueta used the mistake as an opportunity to send a powerful and pointed message about the importance of accuracy in reports. One can imagine the effect that the story of Stahl's early return had as it rippled through the organization.

Although this and similar examples of the intangible aspects of leadership may be the most interesting parts of Lessons on Leadership, they are not necessarily the most helpful. Stahl is a systems advocate who is aware of the continuous need to search for what he calls "cracks in the execution of details" and he deftly covers the importance of developing people as well as creating a high-performance organization. With regard to the latter, he notes:

Great performance and results do not happen by accident. They are most often the product of improvements in overall critical capabilities, which are driven by the leadership of the organization. However, even good leaders sometimes miss this point: Like sustainable increases in performance, new strategies also require organizational capability shifts.

He sees connections. He appreciates how cost reduction programs may require negotiation training for the employees who will have to bargain for low-cost raw materials or how a new information system may be needed to measure the costs and expenses. He notes that cries for new products should also be accompanied by a reassessment of how new products are developed. Stahl clearly understands how positive pressure in one area can cause a negative result in another.

Since this is a leadership book for a general audience many readers will find sections that are more than familiar. That is the nature of general leadership books, however, and it should not detract from the real value of Stahl's ideas. [He tucks "Valuing a Business Using the Discounted Cash Flow Approach" and "Determining the Cost of Capital" into the back of the book, possibly so they won't scare off the average reader.]

I found Lessons on Leadership to be a practical and insightful guide on how to gain control of the myriad details and pressures that confront the modern leader/manager. If you are a new leader or a seasoned one who wisely wants to review your assumptions, it's well worth your time.

Check it out.

Clip Job

Andrew Stark examines the odd - and reported here in an earlier post - story of how Kyle MacDonald took a paperclip and wound up with a house. An excerpt:

But Mr. MacDonald was looking to own, not rent, and so he kept going. It turned out that rock star Alice Cooper has a restaurant in Phoenix. An employee at Alice's restaurant, looking to live rent free, offered an afternoon hanging out with her boss. Mr. MacDonald promptly traded quality time with Mr. Cooper for a snow globe branded with the logo of the rock band KISS. Enter the actor Corbin Bernsen, who starred in the TV show "L.A. Law" years ago and now appears on the series "Psych." Mr. Bernsen owns more than 6,000 snow globes. He offered a speaking part in his new movie in return for Mr. MacDonald's.

Then, in July of last year, the town of Kipling, Saskatchewan, entered the barter-sequence. It gave Mr. MacDonald a renovated 1920s house on Main Street in return for the film role, which it then raffled off in a local "American Idol"-style audition won by a town resident named Nolan Hubbard. Mr. MacDonald and his girlfriend, Dom, moved to Kipling, having achieved their goal of turning a paper clip into a house. Mr. MacDonald, by the way, now has a movie deal with DreamWorks.

Quote of the Day

The most important measure of how good a game I played was how much better I'd made my teammates play.

- Bill Russell

Buzzless

The honeybee population is dropping and, as a Fortune article notes, the effects may be far-reaching:

We wouldn't starve if the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect pollination.

But in a honeybee-less world, almonds, blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers, and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa too.

And jars of honey, of course, would become golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last for decades in sealed containers.)

In late June, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns starkly warned that "if left unchecked, CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses."

Get Swept Up!

When it comes to serious sports, sometimes the excitement is too much to bear.



[HT: Adfreak ]

Godwin and Man: How Ideas Spread

Think good viral: Seth Godwin, with a touch of Darwin, on how elephants and ideas spread.

Urban Terrorism: "Improvements in Lethality"

Writing in City Journal, John Robb explores the future of urban terrorism. He also provides some provocative answers. An excerpt:

Unfortunately, the improvements in lethality that we have already seen are just the beginning. The arc of productivity growth that lets small groups terrorize at ever-higher levels of death and disruption stretches as far as the eye can see. Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past. Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.

The Geist Weight Chart

Ideal weight chart for fiftyish females and males:

Height: 5'0"
Small boned: 180 lbs.
Medium boned: 200 lbs.
Large boned: 250+ lbs.

Height: 5'6"
Small boned: 225 lbs.
Medium boned: 250 lbs.
Large boned: 300+ lbs.

Height: +6'0"
Small boned: 250 lbs.
Medium boned: 300 lbs.
Large boned: 400+ lbs.

Mr. Geist notes, "Using this system to calculate your own exact personal ideal weight, simply take your current weight and add 8 pounds."

Source: The Big Five-Oh!: Facing, Fearing, and Fighting Fifty by Bill Geist.

His book is, of course, must reading for those who have been fifty, are fifty, or some day expect to be fifty.

Doing More by Doing Less

Matthew Cornell conducted a productivity experiment with The 4-Hour Workweek.

Here are his results.

Great Staff Work: 7 Tips

It is shocking how seldom the elements of great staff work are discussed in the modern workplace. Such discussions can go against the egalitarian tone of the times since the role of a reliable staff member is to support and not decide. Subordinate roles have such a bad image that some individuals afflicted by excessive sensitivity even refrain from using the word, "subordinate."

Those who do so miss the crucial role fulfilled by talented staff members who perform the heavy intellectual lifting so the ultimate decision maker can make the best possible decision or, at the very least, a practical one.

The ground rules of good staff work are simple but crucial:

1. No decision should go to the decision maker unless he or she needs to make that decision. Keeping trivial and minor decisions at a lower level saves time and prevents distraction.


2. Only excellent work should go to the decision maker. The boss should not have to play editor or proofreader. Will some bosses do so? Sure, but that does not mean the staff should engage in reverse delegation or turn in half-done work. All bosses have their quirks and any staff officer with basic smarts will commit those biases to memory so future work will be as change-proof as possible.


3. Adverse information should never be omitted. The staff officer's role is to clarify, not to decide. This means surfacing the negatives as well as the positives.


4. Err on the side of excessive coordination. It will save no time and will create enemies if a staff officer fails to obtain the ideas and positions of others who may have a substantive interest in the decision. Doing so will also jeopardize losing the trust of the decision maker.


5. Recognize that the best can be the enemy of the good. The staff officer who seeks perfection will frequently find that the work's quality has been damaged by its tardiness. Timely decisions are needed. Go slowly on irreversible decisions and quickly on ones that can be easily reversed.


6. Always present more than three options. Anyone can produce three options: Do nothing, do everything, and do a middle option that is favored by the staff. A good staff officer knows that some very creative options are often discovered when the list of options is increased. Savvy decision makers are righly suspicious of the old "three option sandwich."


7. Give a recommended course of action. That's your job. It doesn't mean that the recommendation will be accepted but it gives the decision maker the advantage of seeing what is, in your judgment, the best option. Staff work that is inconclusive and neutral is incomplete. Have the courage to stand by your research.

Tested Faith

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934--and not 1998 or 2006--was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming "denial machine." I hereby perform mine with a denier's confession

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre's discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a "statistically meaningless" rearrangement of data.
But just how "meaningless" would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach?

Read the rest of Brett Stephens's "denier's confession."

Quote of the Day

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.

- James Whistler

How To Talk When Times Are Tough

Steven Silvers notes that Mattel, Inc. and Countrywide Financial have given quite different examples of how to handle communications during a crisis:

Mattel faced its second product recall in two weeks, having to pull in some 19 million toys because of lead paint and other safety issues. The company’s response has been textbook crisis management: clear facts and continuous communications, broad outreach to all stakeholder groups, plenty of media access to the top executive. There’s even a dedicated web site on the recall that includes detailed information and a personal video message from CEO Bob Eckert.

Countrywide, on the other hand, faced the highest level of foreclosures and delinquencies in many years. How did it respond? The company “all but shuttered the doors at its Calabasas headquarters, offering scant public comment even as news turned worse and customers rushed to its bank branches to close their accounts,” reported the LA Times.

[HT: Political Calculations ]

Creative Introduction

This in itself is creative:

What is the first phrase that creativity consultant Roger von Oech learns in any foreign language?

"I is a college student."

I was working with a law firm last year on a hiring process. Lots and lots of CVs, cover letters and application forms coming in from some very smart young people. I ended up sitting in a conference room with the HR person and the Hiring Partner screening the applications. One of the ground-rules we laid down was that any application with a spelling error should be dumped on the first pass.

"That kind of carelessness simply isn't acceptable for a job of this nature," intoned the partner. That sounded just fine to me and we proceeded. We had about 500 applications to whizz through on the first pass. We hit a snag. A big snag.With the first pass completed, we had no applications left. None. Count 'em again - not one.

Read the rest of Rowan Manahan's post on the next generation of job-hunters.

Elixir of Youth (or Empire-Building)

Sumner Redstone's anti-aging secret is a Brazilian berry:

A dark-purple elixir with a cult-like following, MonaVie is an antioxidant-rich concoction whose main ingredient is the Brazilian açai berry (pronounced ah-sigh-ee), long touted among health nuts for its anti-aging ingredients.

Vitamin-water it's not: MonaVie costs $40 a bottle, and you can't get it in stores; it's marketed only through the company's network of thousands of individuals who sell it out of their homes (think Avon or Tupperware).

Ten Time-Savers

1. Clear responsibilities and authority.
2. Limited phone calls.
3. A team without factions.
4. A meeting with a clear agenda.
5. An e-mail box without spam.
6. Leaders who make decisions.
7. Workers who take initiative.
8. A limited open-door policy.
9. Supportive family members.
10. Access to resources and information.

Sweet Deals

John Fund looks at state certification boards and the question of whether they are out to protect the consumer or restrict competition:

Reason Foundation analyst Adam Summers has written a new study of occupational licensing (available here) that catalogues some of the absurd requirements to get occupational licenses. Does a hair braider really need hundreds of hours of instruction in all aspects of cosmetology, hardly any of which he will ever use? Is it essential to the well-being of young children that directors of day-care centers possess master's degrees? What's the point of refusing to license a car service unless it has at least 10 cars?

Some states require licenses or credentials for all manner of jobs, while others seem to get along just fine with a much more targeted list. California has been burdened for years with an uncompetitive business climate, and part of the reason is that it requires licenses for 177 different job categories. Next door, Arizona licenses only 72 job categories and Nevada only 95. No wonder job growth is much higher in those states.

Quote of the Day

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.

- Eric Bentley

The Cartoon You Shouldn't See?

Here's a link to the Opus cartoon that some newspapers are refusing to run.

[HT: Ed Driscoll ]

Book Review: The Last Days of Europe

Walter Laqueur, historian and former chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has written yet another important book.

The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent is powerful because it is restrained. Employing a tone that might accompany a CPA's report, Laqueur dissects the impact of Europe's declining population as well as its alienated Islamic groups and rapacious welfare systems and concludes that a perfect storm may be on the horizon.

For those readers who have been following the demographic projections, Laqueur's statistics will not come as a surprise, but to cite just a few:

• Russia's current population of 145 million is shrinking annually by 2 percent and within 50 years is expected to be one-third of its current size. Its population may be surpassed by those of Turkey and Yemen.


• The United Kingdom's population is expected to decline from its current 60 million to 53 million in 2050 and 45 million in 2100.


• Germany's population is expected to decline from its current 82 million to 61 million in 2050 and 32 million in 2100.


• Italy's population is expected to decline from its current 57 million to 37 million in 2050 and 15 million in 2100.


• Spain's population is expected to decline from its current 39 million to 28 million in 2050 and 12 million in 2100.


• In 2050, the median age in the United States will be 36. In Europe it will be about 53.

In short, many of the European nations are in this box: Their populations are shrinking and aging. In order to maintain the generous benefits of their welfare states, they will require younger workers. A large portion of those younger workers, however, will be Muslims who may - or may not - desire to be assimilated into or maintain democratic societies. Consider the extent to which American minority groups with 10 to 14 percent of the population can affect American political stances and then imagine what the effect would be if such groups favored sharia law and opposed freedom of expression and equal rights and you may gain a sense of what Europe will be facing.

Laqueur follows writers such as Bruce Bawer and Mark Steyn in stating this concern and yet his international relations and scholarly credentials give added weight to his arguments. There is little doubt that his book will be widely read in the United States. One hopes that it receives an even larger readership in Europe.

Recycling Architecture

Strange and yet oddly appealing: an apartment made from a water tower.

Geekologie has the details.

Preferences: Unintended Consequences

Gail Heriot examines indications that affirmative action preferences have reduced the number of black attorneys:

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

Quote of the Day

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

- Ernest Dimnet

When Yugos Fly

Jalopnik poses the philosophical question of the weekend:

Is it more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow?

Reviewing the Marshall Plan

Writing in The New Yorker, Niall Ferguson evaluates the Marshall Plan. An excerpt:

Flitting across this crowded stage are some better-known figures: Harry Truman, who declined to call the program the “Truman Plan” not out of modesty but for fear of riling Republican opponents; Josef Stalin, whose aggressive action toward Czechoslovakia greatly helped Vandenberg to overcome congressional resistance; Ernest Bevin, the overweight, ebullient, and ineffably proletarian British Foreign Secretary, who was the Plan’s biggest fan; and the diarist and wit Harold Nicolson, whose condescending characterization of the United States (“a giant with the limbs of an undergraduate, the emotions of a spinster, and the brain of a pea-hen”) now reads like postimperial sour grapes. The United States in 1945 was a giant, all right, but with the wealth of a Harriman, the altruism of a Marshall, and the sheer dedication of men like Clayton, Vandenberg, Hoffman, and Bissell, it was surely a benign colossus.

Gaining by Giving

I used to jar some of the department heads in one organization by insisting that when employees file discrimination complaints through the internal complaint process, they should be told about the federal and state agencies where their complaints could also be filed.

"Why should we should tell them that?" groaned some of the executives and managers. "All you are doing is encouraging them to file elsewhere. We'll wind up spending large amounts of time dealing with some outside investigator."

I replied that the main goal of any internal complaint process should be to determine the truth and then take appropriate action. Why hide information from the employees? Let them know their options and then move forward to make sure that the internal investigation is prompt, thorough, and impartial.

After several years of following that approach, we were able to monitor the results. The number of internal and external discrimination complaints had not risen; in fact, they had fallen dramatically.

I recall that development whenever I see executives and managers who are so intent on hanging onto power that they wind up losing power. Their focus is invariably on the wrong thing. They are seeking control when they should be after credibility. That sin isn't confined to operations and folks in the field. Propose giving away information and power and many soft-skilled HR types are just as eager to pull up the drawbridge and station the archers.

The natural tendency may be to hunker down. Our professional commitments, however, should cause us to question whether that is wise.