Endless Knots

Roland Merullo: Importing common sense from Cuba

Roland, author of so many books including his recent Lunch with Buddha (as well as a novel about Cuba completely unrelated to this story, Fidel's Last Days), traveled "90 Miles From Home" (see Warren Miller's 1961 book by that title) recently on assignment for a golf magazine, picked up a few souvenirs (total value = $75), and had them confiscated at his port of re-entry, Burlington, VT. Irony aside that the only state with a "self-described democratic socialist" as senator should be the customs gate that enforces our antiquated embargo of Cuban imports, Roland, as usual, reflects thoughtfully on why it's time to change our policies in "A new path to Cuba: It’s time the US admitted the embargo doesn’t work." Note also that instead of doing what countless other visitors to Cuba likely do -- pretend that they were in Mexico or Canada, allowing custom officials to look the other way -- Roland went for the true story, which ultimately makes for a better one.

Here's the opening to whet your clicking:

On my way home from Cuba the other day — Havana via Montreal — I had all my souvenirs confiscated at the US-Canada border. I’d spent a week in Castro country and had loaded up on about $75 worth of T-shirts and small gifts. Instead of lying to the customs officials and saying I’d been in Montreal visiting friends, which would have been easy enough, I decided to tell them the real story: I’d gone to Cuba on an assignment for a golf magazine. Good-bye, T-shirts.

I’m not really blaming the rules-bound customs guys at the border checkpoint north of Burlington, Vt. US law says that any goods purchased in Cuba — with the strange exception of literature — must be confiscated. “You should have checked the State Department website,’’ one of them told me, and he was correct. But setting my own travel sloppiness aside, the law that says you can’t bring home a small bag of gifts from Cuba is absurd. If I remember right, we lost 58,000 good Americans in Vietnam, and 40 years later you can bring home just about anything from that nation. China, Russia, Albania, Burma, the dictatorships of Africa — please, spend some money there, bring home souvenirs for your kids.

But don’t spend a peso in Cuba...

PS: This makes me want to create a new category: Common Sense, but alas I fear it would lack for entries.

 

Bebé boomers: Mas Media's Raul Medina on America 2050

Fascinating thinking on what the 2012 election tells us about our changing culture in the US on boston.com, "We've come (and are going) a long way, bebé."

Here's a taste:

So if we circle back (or zoom ahead, as it were) to 2050 when Quinceañeras—fifteenth birthday parties—will certainly be as well known as confirmations and bat mitzvahs, what will that election look like? For starters, one in every three voters will be of Hispanic origin. Hispanics will be younger than the general population. The average Hispanic will be 31 years old. - See more at: http://www.boston.com/business/blogs/global-business-hub/2013/03/weve_come_and_a.html#sthash.roT2znc2.dpuf

So if we circle back (or zoom ahead, as it were) to 2050 when Quinceañeras—fifteenth birthday parties—will certainly be as well known as confirmations and bat mitzvahs, what will that election look like? For starters, one in every three voters will be of Hispanic origin. Hispanics will be younger than the general population. The average Hispanic will be 31 years old.

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

Occupying leadership #occupy

Without making the media the story here since the media has this recursive, repetitive pattern when it can't make sense of a story... a few words about leadership and Occupy.

Google "leadership occupy Wall Street" and you'll find thousands (6814 as of this moment) of articles like this pretty good one in the Washington Post, attempting to describe a phenomenon where something elusive is wrongly explained by its opposite.

If it's not in the article's headline, it's in its lede--and if not there, it's certainly not more than a few grafs down: The Occupy movement is leaderless ((e.g., the Post story, "What is Occupy Wall Street? The history of leaderless movements").

Many articles have grabbed this quote: "We are all leaders." And from there goes the faulty logic that if everyone's a leader, then no one is. Or, its converse by implication: Without a designated, authoritative single leader, then it's just a messy group with... and here we go: no clear purpose, no mission, confusing demands, etc and so on.

Is the Occupy movement leaderless?

Leaderless?

Absolutely not.

It's leaderful.

Many leaders, not none.

Many leaders, not one.

Years ago, University of Minnesota anthropologists Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine (see People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation) studied the social movements of the Sixties, which many writers in the past month have used as the explanatory vehicle for the leadership structure of this current global phenomenon. Most have gotten the interpretation of the Sixties wrong too, rehashing the old saw that there was no leadership in the anti-Vietnam War, women's, civil rights, gay liberation, and suchnot movements in which my generation grew up.

What Gerlach and Hine discovered (and supported with extensive research) is that social movements are networks. And networks have polycephalous--many headed--leadership structures.

Given our prevailing structures where one leader sits atop a stack holding yes/no power, we have a really hard time comprehending organizations where many people are making decisions. In Gautney's Post piece, she describes a completely different way of arriving at action: 

Occupy Wall Street’s organizational presence is the New York General Assembly or “GA,” which convenes numbers in the high hundreds at its squat-site in Zuccotti Park. Daily GA meetings are led by facilitators who rotate on a regular basis, and facilitation training is open to all. Specific issues, such as food, medical, legal, outreach, security and others are handled by working groups—also open and inclusive—that periodically report back to the GA. Instead of issuing top-down directives, Occupy groups use a consensus process in which anyone can join in the decision-making and propose an idea. Proposers must field questions, justify the hows and whys of their ideas, and engage a large-scale group discussion. Votes are then cast via an innovative system of hand signals, and proposals are revised until a nine-tenths majority approves.

How did this unelected, unhired, uncredentialed revolving band of disaffiliated thousands arrive at such a structure?

By dozens, if not hundreds, of articulate people stepping forward at different moments with good ideas about how to engage the commitment and intelligence of their peers. There is only one word for such people: LEADERS.

In the early 1990s, Andy Campbell, then an employee of the CIA who was working on the Clinton Administration's Reinventing Government program, said something to me that I've used in virtually every presentation since:

        "We can't solve 21st-century problems with 19th-century organizations."

Having studied and written about new organizational structures for the past 30 years with Jeff Stamps, I've attached a corollary to this:

    "Nor can we guide 21st-century organizations with 20th-century leaders."

"Solving" the "Wall Street problem" will not happen through traditional bureaucracy or hierarchy. As many a pundit has already said, the bureaucracies charged with curbing the abuses of greed are so tied up in their own knots (and such the beneficiaries either directly or indirectly of that greed) that they cannot disentangle themselves enough to even see solutions, never mind execute them.

We need to grow up. We need to recognize that networks--flexible, constantly-morphing, ever-linking organizations--are the structures we need to solve the phenomenal dilemmas in front of us.

Networks have many leaders. Some networks encase more formal organizations, like the ones we're all familiar with where people have recognizeable titles and clearly understood power structures, i.e. some organized groups are also showing up to "occupy."

Just a few ideas tend to link networks. As is the case with Occupy, a few simple phrases bubble up, even without the help of branding specialists: 99% for example.

Underneath it all is the thing that money can't buy (hello, Wall Street): commitment. Shared commitment was the energy field that Gerlach and Hine wrote about lo those many years ago. It's the gossamer thread that links all the Occupy sites, heaved from one to another by many many many many...

        LEADERS

Congratulations, Setti!

Photo of Setti and Tassy, Abigail (center) from his website

Our wonderful city of Newton, Mass., elected Setti Warren as our new mayor today. Several firsts here: Setti is the first African-American to become the city's mayor, the first Iraq war veteran, possibly the youngest person to ever win -- and also quite possibly the first twin to hold the post, a unique qualification that speaks only to certain people.

I originally met Setti through the Freedom House board, where we were both members (I still am). I liked him immediately: he's warm and thoughtful and inventive -- and I'm delighted to see him taking on this challenge.

What won me over to supporting him was an odd thing, really. A friend had made a video of one of Setti's opponents. After watching it, I wondered whether Setti had anything comparable so I searched and found this. Take the time to watch. And keep an eye on us here in Newton. The Garden City may become the Future City with Setti in the mayor's office.

Go, Setti!

The senior senator from Massachusetts

Once, at a memorial service for Irving, a shirt-tail relative whom I was quite fond of but in all honesty wasn't terribly close to nor had great contact with over the years, I became unreasonably upset.

Embarrassed, I said something to my cousin, who had been quite close to Irving (he was actually her uncle, not mine). "When someone dies, everyone you've ever known who's died dies again," she said, which immediately made me feel better.

Perhaps this helps explain how many are experiencing Senator Kennedy's death and why so many have made the trek to the Kennedy Library in the past 24 hours to honor him. Reliving other deaths aside, he was our senator (yes, I'm from Massachusetts), has been my senator for as long as I've lived here, and present enough that I can remember going to a meeting with him at the local junior high school about, guess what, healthcare as many as 17 years ago. Occasionally, I thought I saw him driving past my house on the way to the private school up the street that one of his sons attended (and which he did as well).

I've already told my favorite story about him here. Please see "Oh, hi, Ted" for a small peak at who the man really was in a unguarded moment.

And with his passing, may the search for the cure for brain cancer be amped up. It took the life of my best friend's husband in the same time that it did "Ted's."

Transparency for accountability as the funds roll out

Transparency was a keyword in Obama's run for the office and it's been a critical tenet of everything that he and his administration have spoken about since. The first presidential directives out of the gate for the new administration were focused on transparency and open government. And, it is central to the bailout-stimulus-rescue plans now underway and soon to come.

There are many potential traps in promoting transparency, of course, and each time something seems a little untransparent, the commentators are quick to wave the hypocrisy flag. Putting aside the media's lack of transparency, we want to focus on another aspect of transparency which is this: its ability to keep a clear focus on accountability. If we know what ends are sought and who's responsible for reaching them, then we have a clear roadmap of accountability.

But how do you have a clear roadmap when the thing itself is far more huge than anything has ever been before?

We talked a bit here about the need for clear maps during reorganization where enterprises are shrinking, but we haven't talked at all about the need for clear maps when organizations are growing, or exploding in size.

Take the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, whose head, Sheila Bair, has been one of those voices for greater transparency. Yay, Ms. Bair. We've spent a bit of time putting the top levels of FDIC into our US Government Map (go to Federal Agencies, at about 2 o'clock).

Thanks to the careful reporting of Eric Lipton in a NY Times Valentine Day post ("Failed Banks Pose Test for Regulators"), we learn that the work--and the budget--of FDIC increased astronomically from 2007 to 2008. FDIC, which has the thankless task of toxic clean-up of failed banks (and the businesses that led to their failures), had just three failed banks to scrub-rinse-repeat in '07. Number in '08? Twenty-five, or, arithmetic fans, eight times the number it had to launder, so to speak, just a year earlier. Given that, as of last week, thirteen more banks already have failed in '09 (and we're only halfway through February), a whole lot more are landing in FDIC's dirty laundry basket even as we write.

To provide some perspective, Lipton examines just one part of FDIC, its Division of Resolutions and Receiverships, whose 2008 budget was $75 million. The budget for 2009? $1 billion. Let's keep following this through. How does FDIC manage to negotiate the deals that allow billions of dollars in assets to move to higher ground?

It hires people. As of right now (or maybe a few weeks ago), FDIC employs 4800 people, according to Lipton's article. When it was last responsible for the prior big bank horror show in the '90s, it employed as many as 15,000. Given that the mess we're dealing with now is HUMUNGUSLY BIGGER than what transpired in the '90s, shall we speculate that perhaps FDIC may need to do more than triple its size? Will the FDIC grow to 30,000? 45,000?

To meet this challenge, it is only hiring 1500 new people. Lipton reports that $700 million (!) will be spent hiring contractors to provide the warm bodies to do the work. So like so much of the rest of corporate America, FDIC is outsourcing the work to avoid the painful ballooning up followed by the excruciating shrinking that always follows windfalls.

How will FDIC manage accountability across such a fast and vast ramp-up of its capabilities? Accountability is all the more important because of the "army of contractors."

Like the dozens of other agencies whose budgets are about to swell--at the national, state, and local levels, FDIC desperately needs to upgrade its accountability mechanisms. One fundamental way to do that is by establishing and maintaining org charts of the whole organization, which are literally the structure of accountability. We're putting in some time as a start to that process and we encourage FDIC and the other agencies and departments charged with implementing the stimulus and other spending to do the same.

With transparency you can see accountability which (re)builds trust.

"...so that all our children could fly"

Speaks, make that, sings (see Amy Dixon-Kolar) for itself, posted for all veterans of the Civil Rights movement, for my parents who called themselves "integrationists" in a segregated Pennsylvania town where that word was hardly understood, and for all of us, still shaking our heads while looking ahead:

No IM for WH Staff?

This just gets interestinger and interestinger. First there was the showdown at the BlackBerry Corral, with the President holding on for dear life while the Security Forces threated to rip the device from his hands. Pres 1, Security 1, I'd have to say, because we certainly don't want the President to be insecure in any way.

Now Politico reports that IM is banned for all White House staff. The most technologically advanced team in politics, ooops, in government, is having one of the most useful tools ever taken away. Great headline, by the way, Politico for Ben Smith's article: "Obama staff will say cu l8r 2 IM."

When we were involved in Reinventing Government 15 years ago, many people in government agencies weren't allowed to have email. So they went home and sent email to one another on their private accounts. We don't want that, obviously, and these folks are in the White House, which we want to be the most effective, fastest, most accurate (enough superlatives yet?) government on earth. Taking away IM is not a step in that direction.

Seriously: we've talked before about Tom Allen's famous finding - that if you're more than 50 feet apart, you've got a virtual communication problem to address. Everyone in the White House is more than 50 feet apart and they need to stay in very close contact.

Information policy is lagging, folks. We need some quick brain work from the folks who've really been thinking about this stuff. The desire for transparency should not be blocked by the fear of discovery.

Here are a few choice paragraphs from Ben Smith's piece:

Barack Obama may get to keep his BlackBerry, but David Axelrod is losing his IM.

The lawyers broke the bad news to Obama aides at a briefing Friday morning convened by incoming Deputy White House Counsel Cassandra Butts: Not only are they leaving the modern world to enter a White House where some of the clunky desktop computers still run Windows 2000 but — worst of all — they'll be forced to surrender a form of communication staffers have relied on for the last two years to communicate with each other, outside allies, and the press.

From Axelrod, the chief campaign strategist, down to junior staffers in the press office, Obama's campaign relied heavily on software many of them began using in high school — AOL Instant Messager and Google Chat. Instant messaging, though little mentioned, is — perhaps as much as e-mail—deeply woven into contemporary politics and media, whose fabric is the constant, quick, gossipy transmission of spin and information. But a calculus that's perhaps one part security, one part law, and two parts politics, has long barred instant messaging from the White House.

"They just told us flat out we couldn't IM in the White House," groused one senior staffer Friday.

"It sucks. It's really going to slow us down," complained another, saying that lawyers had warned that, along with instant messaging, White House software will restrict users to a range of sites roughly "like your average grade school."

The clunky technology is standard issue for government offices, but the bar on instant messaging is  particular to the White House. Legal and security experts say it is dictated by the fear of embarrassment if IMs were to be disclosed.

Reorganizing the Executive Office of the President

While he has not used the word, President Obama's very first act, even before being sworn in, was to reorganize. As Jessica said yesterday, at the stroke of noon, January 20, 2008, the White House website changed, and with it a new, reorganized Executive Office of the President went into effect.

Having kept a close eye on the various Executive Branch charts over the past few months, I can now report on the major changes as I perceive them, including promotions, additions, and deletions to the president’s core staff structure. These reorganizations reflect profound changes in emphasis and priorities, adaptations to the external environment (literally), and a respect for the complexity of the job. All of this comes through in a number of new functions focused directly on the importance of organization itself.

Until today, our digital US Government organization chart used the Executive Office/White House structure of the Bush Administration as its basis. Each time, Pres-elect Obama made appointments and nominations, we entered those new names into existing positions, as we did when Larry Summers was named director of the National Economic Council. When a new position, such as Carol Browner’s remit to connect energy and climate, we engaged in some guesswork, trying to figure out how these new posts would hook together. Now we know.

President Obama's first appointment was Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff to the President, who now runs the Executive Office. From what we can tell, Emanuel has 19 people reporting directly to him--ranging from senior advisors such as David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett to James Jones, Director of the National Security Council. One of those 19 positions is that of the "White House Office" itself, which, in turn, is run, we think, by one of two Deputy Chiefs of Staff, either Mona Sutphen or Jim Messina. (This use of dual deputies is already a departure from the apparent Bush rule of one deputy.) While we can't quite determine yet whether Sutphen or Messina has this job, one of the two deputies has 23 people on staff, comprising a second group of advisors, offices, and councils that are two steps below the root of power.

Both the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff, with 19 and 23 direct reports respectively, are what we call “hub” positions in the US government, which we discuss extensively in our report and blog post on “Analyzing the Organization as a Network.”

Meanwhile, five organizations have been "promoted," their org-chart boxes having been moved up a level in the White House Office:

·        Domestic Policy Council (Melody Barnes);

·        National Economic Council (Summers);

·        Office of National AIDS Policy;

·        Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; and

·        White House Military Office.

Then there are nine new boxes representing official functions that simply were not there before:

·       Chief of Staff's Office;

·       Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (Browner);

·       Office of Management and Administration;

·       Oval Office Operations;

·       Office of Presidential Personnel;

·       Office of Urban Affairs Policy;

·       Office of Social Innovation (!); and

·       A splitting of the position of Advance and Appointments into two functions

And two organizations have been eliminated:

·        Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives; and

·        USA Freedom Corps.

Missing from the list (so far as I can tell) and unaccounted for is the announced, and highly unusual, Office for Health Care Reform and its Director, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Daschle.

Based on press releases from the Obama-Biden change.gov site and the newer, but not complete, list of Nominations & Appointments on the whitehouse.gov site, we've been able to map about 50 positions in the Executive Office of the President. This means that we've got about half of them as press accounts of the President’s January 21 briefing for his staff, (the one announcing a pay freeze and emphasizing transparency), indicate that the staff as a whole numbers around 100.

To carry transparency the next step and to set a good example for other government departments and agencies to follow, we believe that President Obama should immediately publish the org chart of his office. In our view, such a chart should include names and responsibilities, indicating where jobs have been filled and where there are empty spots still awaiting appointments. Although all the departments publish org charts (you can see these charts on our site), the Bush White House's chart never went deeper than the two-level structure we just discussed.

--Jeff Stamps