Just some random bits…

The art of Flash animation continues its hillarious tradition and gives us a likely scenario on the end of the world…

Richard Perle and David Frum demonstrate their own shortsightedness…

Georgians for Better Transportation, meanwhile, asks us all to become shortsighted. Not to mention, we should all align ourselves with special private interests for the public good.

The federal government finally banned ephedra. Nevermind that the FDA has had problems of aligning itself with private interests for a while now.

Happy New Year! Mayor Bloomberg demonstrates the meaning of courage while Rep. Chris Shays demonstrates the meaning of cowardice. Or should I say… chickenhawk.

Somehow over the break I not only managed to clean my room — certainly a herculean task — but I also got a new top for my desk and a couple of sets of shelves to organize my CDs and DVDs. Somewhere in all this I managed to capture an image of this for posterity. We’ll see how long it lasts!

In other news, I first mentioned someone named Holly back in May. You may still be wondering just who this Holly person is, especially now that she’s commented on my blog before. Well, Holly is my girlfriend now. We’ve been going out for a few months, and the one opportunity I took to awkwardly swing dance with her took place at Cathy’s wedding rather than swing night. Somehow that made it much more special.

I’m not going to blog much about Holly for now, except to say that she’s really awesome. I think at this point the only things I’d really like to change in our relationship are her dislike of Mexican food and my dislike of seafood. So, here’s to you, Holly…

Just a few pictures from my trip to Turlock and San Francisco for your entertainment:

Recall Arnold Sticker

The Hottest Buddha in Chinatown

Chinatown

Greta

This passage is made up of clips from an excerpt of Robert Reich’s book Locked in the Cabinet. In it, he describes his tour through the L-S Electro-Galvanizing factory in Cleveland. As he takes his tour through the plant, he asks the front-line workers various questions to see if they pass his “Pronoun Test.” Do the workers describe the company as “they” and “them,” or as “we” and “us?”

“Hi! What’s it like to work here?” I ask the first person on the factory floor who’s running a piece of equipment, a huge rolling machine disgorging a continuous four-foot-wide sheet of flat steel. He’s about twenty, with long hair and a beard.

This is not likely to be a moment of brutal candor. The plant manager is standing next to me, the CEO is just behind, and the TV camera is recording the whole scene. We are bathed in an intensely bright spotlight.

“Oh, I like it a lot.” The kid pushes the hair out of his face, which is covered with pimples.

The plant manager and the CEO smile. Then I begin the test. “Tell me a little about this company.” I expect another flunk.

“Oh, we work hard here. We put out a good product.”

Hmm? I thank him and move on to another fellow down the line who’s monitoring a machine that lays a thin layer of gray liquid over the steel. Plant manager, CEO, camera, and spotlight all move with me.

“Hello.” I extend my hand. This fellow is stout, balding, middle-aged. He shakes my hand limply. “So, tell me about this machine,” I ask.

“This is our new zinc-coater. We got it last month.”

Two for two.

Five minutes later, I’m talking with a woman who drives a forklift, carrying steel coils to the delivery dock. I ask her about company-sponsored training.

She delivers this stunner: “We train everyone on a variety of jobs. Our goal is for everyone to know the whole operation.”

…

At L-S Electro-Galvanizing, worker committees do all the hiring, decide on pay scales linked to levels of skill, and set production targets. They rotate jobs, so every worker gradually learns about the entire system. More than ten percent of payroll is spent on training. And jobs are secure. Even during the recession, when its customers were scaling back, the company kept everyone on board.

…

“Fifteen percent return on equity. We’re growing twenty percent a year,” [the CEO] says… “This is the most profitable cold-rolled steel company in the Midwest, maybe in all America.

Jump forward to today.

A recent news story on the current elevation in the terror alert level quoted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as saying, “You ask, ‘Is it serious?’ Yes, you bet your life. People don’t do that unless it’s a serious situation.” The headline to the story highlighted the “you bet your life” part of his statement. But when I read the full quote, the use of the word “people” stood out to me, partly due to the passage from Reich’s book.

This is a real nit-pick, I know. But I hear the word “people” used too often and too loosely to strengthen arguments. In my own mind, use of the word “people” just triggers a red flag when I’m engaged in either political or organizational-related discussion. To me, language is important, and it can help me predict an individual’s hidden attitude or motivation. Some examples of how the subtleties of spoken language can be significant can be given with a few things I’ve heard over the past few years. While none of these statements are likely true one hundred percent of the time, they are statements I’ve heard people say that help them make behaviorial and attitudinal predictions:

• People who say “people” in their arguments don’t have much ground to stand on.
• The tenants who are the least likely to pay their rent on time are the same people who always end their conversations with “Have a blessed day.”
• A job applicant who asks about money during the interview is more interested in money and won’t contribute to the organization.

There are others, and I could probably stand to offend just about everybody with more generalizations about what people say and what they mean. The point here really goes back to Donald Rumsfeld’s comment about what people are doing.

Perhaps the real intent of his statement was to say that we shouldn’t question the motives of the folks who decide where the terrorist alert level stands. After all, they take their jobs seriously enough and they’re not going to raise the alert level out of some political motivation. Not to mention, perhaps Rumsfeld uses the word “people” instead of “we” to mean that homeland security is a separate department from defense, so he has no connection with what goes on over there. The consequence is that there is only one way to describe “connecting the dots” — useless.

On the other hand, his use of the word “we” could go more along the lines of where my own prejudice lies. After all, Rumsfeld isn’t the one doing the work. So when something goes wrong under his watch, he’s not really responsible. Those “people” can take the blame.

Not knowing the mind of Donald Rumsfeld, I can’t really vouch for what his motivations really were in using the word “people.” Either way, for anyone who feels that language is important, it’s a troubling sign of where the lines of accountability lie within the administration.

There’s an underlying lesson in leadership, whether that’s corporate or political leadership. As someone in a position of leadership, it’s very important — not to mention, difficult — to not only become a part of the “we,” but also to allow others an opportunity to become a part of the “we.” If “people” and “they” become a normal part of your vocabulary, the leader can falter by allowing this subtlety in language become not only a part of your attitude, but also a defining element of the corporate culture.

I recently had lunch with a professor who got me thinking about what I should do about my major. Right now I’m still going at a snail’s pace through college, and keeping up with two majors is proving to be a bit difficult, especially considering that one major does not offer enough times for any given class and the other major has too many classes with group projects where I learn nothing. It’s time for a change, indeed.

What would help me graduate faster? It turns out that I could either simply drop one of the majors, in which case I would have five classes left to graduate, or I could switch to an entirely different major alltogether. If I drop the policy major and go with Management, I would have about nine classes to go before I graduate.

The alternative major turns out to be Human Resource Management. After obtaining this sheet known as a PACE form, which gives me a hypothetical outlook of how far I need to go to graduate as a particular major, I discovered I would need only seven classes to go before graduation. The only problem is that all of the possible classes I could take next semester are already taken.

Of course, to me the real advantage is that oddly enough, the Human Resource Management major appears to incorporate elements of policy and management… or, at least the elements I was interested in to begin with… or, something like that.

I’m starting to think I should go for it. Meanwhile, I’m left with next semester to take only a couple of totally unrelated classes I’m simply interested in anyway.

Surgeons, as a group, adhere to a curious egalitarianism. They believe in practice, not talent. People often assume that you have to have great hands to become a surgeon, but it’s not true. When I interviewed to get into surgery programs, no one made me sew or take a dexterity test or checked to see if my hands were steady. You do not even need all ten fingers to be accepted. To be sure, talent helps. Professors say that every two or three years they’ll see someone truly gifted come through a program—someone who picks up complex manual skills unusually quickly, sees tissue planes before others do, anticipates trouble before it happens. Nonetheless, attending surgeons say that what’s most important to them is finding people who are conscientious, industrious, and boneheaded enough to keep at practicing this one difficult thing day and night for years on end. As a former residency director put it to me, given a choice between a Ph.D. who had cloned a gene and a sculptor, he’d pick the Ph.D. every time. Sure, he said, he’d bet on the sculptor’s being more physically talented; but he’d bet on the Ph.D.’s being less “flaky.” And in the end that matters more. Skll, surgeons believe, can be taught; tenacity cannot. It’s an odd approach to recruitment, but it continues all the way up the ranks, even in top surgery departments. They start with minions with no experience in surgery, spend years training them, and then take most of their faculty from these same homegrown ranks.
—Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve”

There’s a certain extent to which there’s not much to say about this. The entire essay, on the issue of practice versus perfection in the medical field, is quite long and rather informative about the issue of hands-on training for residents in the healthcare field.

The striking element of this paragraph was the use and application of the word “egalitarianism.” An egalitarian outlook is one that, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, believes in “equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people.” So, if I understand the author correctly, every surgeon begins residency with the same potential, and will survive purely through practice, not talent. If this notion is taken further and applied to other areas, a more universal truth behind the notion of egalitarianism begins to emerge.

For example, there is the old riddle of how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. In the world of music, I’ve always heard an emphasis on the notion of talent, especially in classical music. There are talented pianists, talented rock stars and talented singers. That’s what they say, at least. However, what I’ve personally witnessed tells me a different story. I’ve seen singers who start out virtually tone deaf, then through many hours of practice and hard work, become soloists. In witnessing this dedication to music, whole audiences receive entertainment and (presumably) a sense of inspiration to greater things.

In the world of politics the application of the egalitarianism concept translates to the practice (or the art) of winning elections and re-elections. Just as surgeons may make an imprecise incision or musicians may hit a wrong note, many politicians lose some of their elections before winning higher offices. That’s one way of looking at it. On the other hand, politics is not simply about winning elections. To be an elected administrator or legislator is itself a practice. Clarence Stone’s book Regime Politics, for example, focused on the importance of forming alliances in not only winning elections, but also in running a city and keeping the peace. In a real world example, Hillary Clinton’s refusal to play politics with Ari Fleischer is said to have been a decisive move that facilitated her long-term effectiveness as a senator.

When politics is cast in an egalitarian light rather than a competitive light, ideology and self-interest matter less; the public interest (presumably) matters more. Rather than fight over what our founding fathers intended&emdash;they had ideological disagreements among each other&emdash;we can at least take a look at the compromise they eventually came up with, our Constitution. It is not the practice of winning elections and advancing a particular ideology that would matter nearly as much as advancing the public interest and providing public goods in an efficient manner.

To that end, it may be worth studying what factors account for shifts in the voting preferences of the public. A research study that followed Reagan’s win for a second term as president found that “no liberal-to-conservative shift occurred during the 1980s… Some measures of voting strength during the 1980-86 period show that liberal legislators received slightly higher support than conservative candidates” (”The Myth of the Conservative Shift in American Politics” by Larry Schwab, Western Political Quarterly, Dec. 1988). Is it possible, then, that the general public would respond less to ideology and more to a skilled political practice? If only it were that simple.

As noted in The Economics of Collective Choice (p. 238), while the ideological positions of voters tend to be moderate, legislative politicians tend to listen to the extremes among the ideological spectrum. What research has found is that “participation in the political process is highly self-selective. Consumers, workers, voters, and firms who have the largest net gains from action (or the largest net losses from inaction) will tend to participate.” Ideological groups, as a result, tend to cluster and vote together. The question remains: how does the seasoned politican figure into this formula? Of any application on the notion of career-oriented egalitarianism, the political application may be the most difficult.

There are a few entries here and there where I’ve quoted passages from books, papers, essays, etc., and sometimes made some commentary on them.

In the case of “Motivation, Happiness, Nostalga” I merely quoted from the passage without giving commentary. That was probably a mistake, but the quote was quotable nonetheless.

In “Heschel and Hierarchies” I made some attempt to comment, though I don’t think my commentary was really worth all that much hoo-ha.

Having said all that, there’s a particular point I want to make, and it’s about this blog entry. This blog entry will mark the introduction to a series of blog entries I’ll call Passages. Perhaps I’ll eventually put all the Passages entries off in the sidebar, but whatever happens, just be forewarned that if you see an entry with a title of “Passages, Part Whatever” you might find it worth your while to skip that blog entry and move on. That way, if I find myself working a little harder on my Passages entries, you’ll never notice. If I fully follow through on the idea, then you can be further forewarned that the typical Passages entry will be a bit longer than normal.

Who knows. Maybe there will be some hoo-ha for dessert.