Leadership

I think I can boil down the essence of what makes a leader. There are two qualities, I argue, that are necessary.

• The ability to articulate the tasks that need to be done to accomplish a goal.
• The ability to assemble the skills, resources, and motivation needed to complete the tasks.

This is why Obama has a Nobel Peace prize. The committee thinks he possesses these qualities and by the time his term in office is over (my opinion is that) he will have demonstrated a long list of achieved goals. As opposed to the previous President who's claim to fame is difficulty articulating even the most basic ideas (though, declaring himself as "The War President" certainly didn't help his cause for the Peace Prize).

But suffice it to say, there are lots of successful people who can either (1) articulate a set of goals and then get nothing done or (2) assemble skills, resources, and motivation and then do nothing of value with it. There are also tons of people who waffle or flip-flop during the course of mediation because "the issues aren't black and white".

If I were to categorize myself, I'm not sure exactly where on this spectrum I'd fall. I don't think my critics (if they exist) would figure the same thing for me than what I'd figure for myself. But I guess that's not currently relevant since historically I've never done anything of significance.

The point that I'm trying to get at is when assessing a person's abilities to be a leader the two questions that need to be answered affirmatively are, "What goals had the person set?" and "Did the person achieve the goals that they set out to accomplish?"

If you'll allow me to get political, I'd argue that former President Bill Clinton got lots of stuff done, but didn't have a clearly articulated set of goals (which led to legislation that eventually caused loans to be made to people who couldn't afford them because of fraudulent, unregulated "subprime mortgages"). The counterpoint is former President George W. Bush who had a clear goal of "stopping the terrorist insurgency", though he lacked the ability to figure out how to accomplish this and as a result lost control of all aspects of American politics. It would make a trilling debate to argue who the better leader is among these two. Though I will leave that as a thought exercise for the reader.

And with my fingers firmly crossed, I hope that Obama can make the changes that he's described ever so eloquently in his vision for America. I hope he truly has the two qualities needed to be a good leader.

Childhood Wisdom

When you're a little kid, adults like to tell you, "You can be anything you want when you grow up, even the President of the United States". Upon reflection, I would propose a revision to this axiom, "You can be anything you work towards when you grow up."

This subtle distinction makes a big difference. The entitlements that people think should be bestowed upon them just for existing shouldn't be confused with the rewards of following through on a path that leads to honor and dignity.

Entitlements should be limited to things like water, heat, not-super-comfortable shelter, minimally convenient transportation, the bare-minimum in telecommunications, "good enough" health care, and basic food. The rewards of honor and dignity for working towards something meaningful... I'd propose a number of luxuries that include everything not in the aforementioned list.

Snow

Yesterday I was playing tennis down the street from where I live. Today as I was driving home from a friend's house I watched snowflakes evaporate as they landed on my windshield. Snow on October 18th in Boston? That's crazy.

Birthday Holy Day

I was born 490 years after the discovery of America. Some organizations see this (my birth) as an occasion for a holy day. My current employer holds the opinion that my birth should be reason to give the entire company the day off. Jen's faux-employer agrees. I'm grateful for the honor. I'm going to hopefully enjoy a nice and relaxing day off with her. Right now she's cooking me pancakes. :)

Everyday should get a free holy day from their employer for their birthdays and their significant other's birthday. :)

Cost of Specialization

In July I wrote about Supermarket Convenience (which is to say that having lots of choices can itself be a burden). While I was at one of these markets today, I found a name for this phenomena. It's the cost of specialization. In order to compete in the supermarket business in a city like mine markets need to find niches where they can distinguish themselves. For one market, fresh produce at low prices is the name of the game. For another market, affordable prices and a wide selection are what motivates me to go there. For a third market, I go because they price Clif Bars lower than anywhere else and I buy them by the box (Maple Nut... best flavor ever... look it up). For other options there is a pure laziness factor if I need something quickly and put aside the fact that I hate Stop and Shop.

Anyway, what's my point? Well, anybody who has taken an introductory economics course knows about benefits of specialization. That's when two productive citizens use all their energy to learn how to make two different products as efficiently as possible. If they're on a desert island, Citizen 1 labors to get coconuts and drink the milk that's in them while Citizen 2 labors to catch fish. This is about twice as effective as if they each spent half their day milking coconuts and the other half fishing. At the end of the day, they find they've got a two day supply of coconut milk and fish to share so they can either take the next day off or spend it trying to get rescued.

While that theory works well for the economy in general, it ignores the social cost of specialization. Suppose a third Citizen is on the desert island and he wants coconut milk and fishes, too. But imagine there isn't anything else he can produce that the other two Citizens want. Citizen 3 is forced into a corner.

He can produce a better product than one of the other two citizens and take their place in the economy (generally called "competition"). Though, this results in an economic swap where Citizen 3 switches places with one of the other two people on the island. Essentially, the end result is more of a certain product with less effort.

Another option for Citizen 3 is to collude with one of the other people by making a deal to help produce more of that product, but limiting production so that there is only enough to go around. This is a called a "duopoly" and it's not good for the Citizen who isn't in on it (who has to work extra to then be able to afford the market limited price of whatever is controlled by the duopoly.

Option three is to do nothing and hope that Citizen 1 and Citizen 2 increase their production so that they can afford to provide him with enough charity to survive. This welfare system doesn't sound that great, but it's ingrained in the "competition" system explained above.

Of course, there is always a fourth option. He could beg the Citizens until one of them "hires" him. They'll train him, pay him a wage, and give him production quotas to meet. Eventually, Citizen 3 will be doing all the work that one of the other Citizens used to do (based on their training) and they'll be free to put their feet up as long as he keeps producing.

That's the cost of specialization. You'll eventually be working to feed the person who hired you. The question becomes, how do you avoid this cost? The answer is... collaborate openly and figure out a way to make everybody accountable for injecting a fair quantity of blood, sweat, and tears into the overall work effort. An unproductive boss is no more useful than an unproductive charity case.

In the desert island example, this means Citizen 3 alternates between working with the fisherman and the milker. In the real world, it means figuring out a true "average work done per citizen" and then mandating that as the new economic standard.

Now, I know designing CAD models and working on the high steel aren't time-comparable (a useful thought exercise is to ask the question, "which one adds more value to the project?"), but I'd suspect there's a 2-to-5 time ratio of "terrible job" to "awesome job" where these things could be rated fairly by economists. In this fairy-tale "fair" world (do you suppose it's called a fairy tale because the plots generally end up benefiting a character who is accustomed to getting the shaft?) the "terrible job" workers would work "national average amount of work" / 5 hours, while the "awesome job" workers would put in "national average amount of work" / 2. It shouldn't need to be stated that "national average amount of work" is a normalized value somewhere between 50 and 150 hours per week (or 2500 to 7500 hours per year).

And yes, I'm essentially saying "Welfare is stupid, stop overpaying American corporate executives, and give the 10% of the country who are unemployed some work to do." Also, what I'm saying is to evaluate people's spots in an organization more fairly. A "great employee" will spend about 20 hours fraternizing with co-workers and 30 hours doing real work. This somehow exceeds and fails to meet the typical 40 hour work week which is supposedly normal in America. I'm saying... tell "mediocre employees" who just want to make a living and support their families that 30 hours is enough. Not everybody wants to spend that extra time doing something that doesn't add value. Perhaps they'd rather go home and work on keeping their families together? I think this would be a good side-effect of my guidelines... a lower national divorce rate and more kids with a pair of positive parental role models.

Meanwhile, next time you think of all the effort you're saving because of benefits of specialization, remind yourself about the costs of specialization that are also incurred where society makes available 101 different ways for average citizens to get by without making any contributions to the greater good.

Fun Writing

I tried something fun recently. Instead of typing out verbose paragraphs with rich-textual descriptions I hit up the Wikipedia Featured Pictures archive and found a wonderful shot of the USS Honolulu and some polar bears. From here, I pillaged the internet for public domain high-resolution pictures related to polar bears by searching Google Images for "site:gov" with various terms related to polar bears and setting a target for only "large images". After a few hours of work, I had a complete (albeit brief) illustrated story that may or may not be good for small children. I was proud of myself for my ability to pull a small project like that together so quickly. I'll be posting the PDF to my Homepage sometime next week for your enjoyment.