Take Five

Thursday, February 26, 2009
Take five!
Last night Washington experienced an evening of celebration with President and Mrs. Obama at the White House in honor of musician Stevie Wonder's receipt of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. My personal feeling is that President Obama should have listened to Dave Brubeck’s Take Five instead. Yes I think Mr. Obama should take five and slow down his frantic pace. My feeling is that he’s chasing too many rabbits As the saying goes if you try to shoot two rabbits you most likely ain’t gonna hit none.” During his first three-four weeks Mr. Obama has tackled more issues than one could imagine. Some of these issues are or appear to be easy to deal with. Some other issues, however, are in my opinion very complex and intractable and should for this reason have been left alone at least for a while until the new administration had the time to study them. Yes Mr. Obama should have taken the time to “Take Five.”

Last September I gave a little talk to the Athens Area Democrats when I recommended that Mr. Obama, who appeared to be our next president back then, should assume the role of what we call in the business management lingo, The Turnaround CEO. The job of the turnaround CEO is to, well it seems obvious, change the current direction of the company! Obviously the current direction of the country wasn’t in most people’s opinion the right one. Ergo somebody had to turn it around. And of course that was Mr. Obama’s campaign theme: Change! In that talk I divided the actions that Mr. Obama should take into two categories: Tactical and Strategic. Tactical actions by the turnaround manager aim at (1) the most obvious wrongs (2) the easiest to deal with and (3) have immediate and tangible results. Strategic actions, on the other hand, aim (1) not too obvious issues (2) are difficult to deal with and (3) have long-term effects that might or might not have tangible results.

Smart turnaround managers follow this two-step process and use it as learning exercise. The first step tests their ability to execute, to do what they promise. This is the time where they accomplish small successes that give the manager a good image in the eyes of his or her coworkers. Once they gain this confidence for themselves and the collaboration of their coworkers then they inch toward the second step. Here their job is to identify the common aspirations of their coworkers and transform them into the organization’s vision: an attractive, doable and compelling future image of the organization. The next task is to identify each coworker’s unique capabilities and direct them toward the common goal of realizing the vision. It’s this dual task of (1) creating an organizational vision based on commonalities and (2) marshalling an execution based on the differences of its coworker that is what we call Strategic Plan! If this simple two-step process looks easy it ain’t necessarily so!

For reasons that must be obvious to Mr. Obama that aren’t to me he chose to put a lot of effort, and money, to what might be called the Lernaean Hydra. As you can recall from your high school days the Greek mythology contains an exaggerated story about an octopus or giant squid. The Hydra had 9 heads, and the middle one was immortal. Hercules fought the Hydra with his club, but each time he knocked off a head, two more would grow back. Finally, he used a torch to burn off the new heads, and buried the immortal one under a rock. Well that seems a bit too far fetched. Or is it? Here in the US and I guess everywhere in the entire world, we have our own Hydra. It’s the Health Care Issue! The problem is that while the Hydra had a number of heads that one could identify and count our own Hydra is equipped with an unknown and unaccountable number of heads! Of course we do have a bit of history on this Hydra. The previous Democratic administration had an experience similar to Hercules for a while. Finally exhausted from the seemingly impossible labor they gave up. Do we have a déjà vu allover again?

Wake up America!

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Wake up America! Learn from Experiences!

I heard on the NPR news today that Germany’s Foreign Minister flew to Iraq to “talk business.” Germany follows the example of France. President Nicolas Sarkozy has spent a few days presenting to Iraq the benefits of TOTAL, France’s oil company. These are the visits that made the news. Here is how the Associate Press reported these visits. You draw your own conclusions.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Germany's foreign minister met with top Iraqi leaders in Baghdad on Tuesday in the latest high-level visit by a major Western nation that opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion but has promised to help Iraq rebuild now that security has improved. Frank-Walter Steinmeier's visit — the first by a German foreign minister since 1987 — comes on the heels of a similar trip by French President Nicolas Sarkozy a week ago. Germany and France were strong opponents of the war that toppled Saddam Hussein but the governments in both countries have changed since 2003 and have sought greater roles in Iraq. German and French companies could benefit from the change by striking lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts. Iraqi leaders appear eager to shore up their ties with European nations like Germany and France to ease their dependence on the United States.
These are the visits we know. There are however some “unknown knows and some unknown unknowns”…as the former Defense Secretary Mr. Rumsfeld once put it. Do you suppose the Chinese and Japanese aren’t noticing? Meanwhile American companies aren’t getting their contracts renewed. A friend of mine wrote a book some years ago under the title “After All I’ve Dome for You.” Every child in this country knows that “we are building the country of Iraq… schools, roads, bridges, power stations, the whole kit and caboodle.” Are we laying the infrastructure so that the French and the Germans who opposed our “benevolent” act to free the people of Iraq of malignant tyrant won’t have to spend a penny? Consequently their companies can find a nice ready infrastructure so they can “hit the ground running”?

Tom Friedman in his book The World is Flat pointed out some years ago that during the seventies and eighties American IT companies spent billions of dollars laying the transatlantic cables that Chinese and Indians used to set up their outsourcing companies without themselves having to invest their capital or pay a penny for their use. We are spending billions dollars to build the largest and most modern embassy in Iraq. How long do you think will be before some warlords will make it their headquarters? We spend billions in building roads in Afghanistan to move tanks, trucks, guns and food to remote mountain areas of that country. The Germans have had business and cultural relationships with the Afghans for years. Thousands of Germans learn the Afghan language. Equally as many Afghans are learning German while they are burning the flag of the country and blowing up the trucks which bring them their much needed food and medicine!

Is there a pattern here? Why is it so difficult for Americans to learn from other people’s mistakes? Why can’t we learn from our own mistakes? We teach our children to make mistakes by all means but please do learn from them! Why is it they seem to forget that basic advice when they grow up? Or maybe they never grow up? Nobody has ever, never ever, won in Afghanistan, not even Alexander the Great or Putin! What makes you Mr. Obama think that you will? It’s time to face up to the harsh reality: Nobody ever wins a war in somebody else’s back yard! No mater how sophisticated your military technology is, it’s made for a different kind of war than the one you are fighting right now in Asia. So get out of it there before it’s too late!