Glenn School/Wilson Center Panel on the Crisis in Syria

On Friday, July 19, the Glenn School's Washington Office and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars co-hosted a panel on the crisis in Syria.  The event was held in the Wilson Center's auditorium at their headquarters in the Reagan Building.  Moderated by Michael Van Dusen, executive vice president of the Wilson Center and long-time Congressional staffer, the panel featured Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian pro-democracy activist; Scott Mastic, head of the Middle East and North Africa division at the International Republican Institute (and an Ohio State graduate); and Dr. Peter Mansoor, U.S. Army Colonel (ret.) and professor of Military History at OSU.  In the photo above, the panelists are shown in that order, left to right. Behind the scenes was program coordinator Joe Sadek, who worked with the Wilson Center to compose and publicize the panel, which attracted a large and enthusiastic audience.

Friending the Lonely Crowd

I have discovered to my chagrin that the Glenn Fellows—or some portion of them, anyway—are aware of my dalliance with Facebook.  I put it this way because I don’t entirely approve of Facebook, and I almost never use it to report my own random activities or idle ruminations (I have a blog for that).  Frankly, I find Facebook useful mainly for unobtrusive parental surveillance, a tool the efficacy of which is inversely related to my level of overt activity.  At one point, my children, both of whom are adults, had to approve my request to “friend” them—in doing so they must have known that they were devaluing the currency—but at this point I suspect they have forgotten that their old man is still lurking in the shadows. 

One oft-lamented feature of Facebook is its habit of using “friend” as a verb, and that is only one of the ways in which Facebook has corrupted our language.  Even more objectionable, in my view, is the site’s propensity to inform me that my friend Mary Jane has updated “their” Facebook profile.  This infelicity no doubt stems from the difficulty of engineering a distinction between male and female Facebook members, English lacking as it does a neutered version of “his” and “hers.”  Perhaps it’s time to borrow from Finnish its versatile, trans-gendered, third-person pronoun, hän.

It was in Finland, in fact, that I first encountered Facebook.  Oulu, the home of the university where I taught as a Fulbrighter in 2006, is a city of about 110,000 in what is known as Finland’s Silicon Valley.  (In the late 1980s, when perestroika was in full swing and Mikhail Gorbachev visited Finland, he caused a sensation by electing to visit a Nokia factory in Oulu instead of the Lenin Museum in Tampere.)

I created my own Facebook account because I thought it would be rude to resist the overtures of my Finnish hosts and my students at the University of Oulu.  Over time, I noticed that many of my Finnish “friends” were migrating to LinkedIn, another social networking Web site designed more explicitly to serve professional purposes, and another place for yours truly to hang out.

Perhaps because I was introduced to social networking overseas, I was unaware that Facebook was founded as recently as 2004, and that it began as an extracurricular intramural activity at Harvard University.  This I learned a few years ago from The New York Review of Books.  In an insightful article, Charles Petersen argued that the secret to Facebook’s success lies in the way that it exploits the dynamics of social stratification.

In his explication of Facebook’s “snob appeal,” Petersen refers to the concept of “position taking” associated with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.  It has to do with the branding and marketing of self, to wit:  “When Facebook had been limited to a few elite schools, listing Beethoven among one’s ‘favorite music’ could easily stand as a statement of aesthetic discovery.  This was due to that other salutary fiction of an elite meritocratic education:  that class distinctions disappear, to be replaced by pure judgment and analytic reason.”[1]  To me this has the ring of truth.  It also is reminiscent of a classic work of sociology that, these days, is more often cited than read.  I refer to David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1950), the most popular work of modern sociology—1.4 million copies sold—ever. 

The Lonely Crowd attempts to demonstrate that large, impersonal societal forces tend to call forth certain character traits or personality types.  In medieval times, a relatively stable and static society favored pious and traditional individuals.  The industrial age, by contrast, was all about production and destruction.  Its “self-made” men were driven by internalized values; Riesman refers to them as “inner-directed.”  In an age of consumption, by contrast, it is appropriate for individuals to look outside themselves when they engage in “position taking.”  These “other-directed” souls become masters of the art of exchanging tastes with their peers, though that condemns them to being forever buffeted by the fickle winds of fashion.  If inner-directed people have gyroscopes that govern their movements, other-directed people are propelled by highly sensitive radar systems.  That’s why they join Facebook, and then maybe they worry about what inadequacies they are revealing in the process.

That the young David Riesman served as law clerk to Mr. Justice Brandeis, the obsessive collector of facts who would usher in a meritocratic age in the American judiciary, is probably no coincidence.  That The Lonely Crowd touched a nerve in the American psyche is a testament to the power of Riesman’s analytical skills.  The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook also may be a measure of the insecurity that other-directed people feel about their “position taking,” and of what another great sociologist called the “quest for community.”[2]  Then again, come to think about it, this may have nothing whatever to do with the American political culture, but rather, with the small-d democratic soul wherever it may be found—and an extremely egalitarian version of it is to be found in Finland.  But that’s another story.

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[1] Charles Petersen, “In the World of Facebook,” The New York Review of Books, February 25, 2010, 8-9.

[2] Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community:  A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1953).

The Wisdom of Cal Ripken, Sr. (reprise)

Because the Washington Academic Internship Program emphasizes the importance of public service, and because our students—Ohio State juniors and seniors all—will soon be venturing out on the job market, we devote a fair amount of attention to career planning.  We have found that our alumni are a valuable resource on this front, both as mentors and as guest speakers or presenters.  And we are very proud that a fair number of former Glenn Fellows find their way into public service jobs in the nation’s capital.  I have heard Senator Glenn estimate that about 20% of WAIP students end up in D.C.  I would guess that the percentage these days—perhaps because the Washington-area job market is not as distressed as that of Ohio—is actually closer to 25%.  Placement is an important enough part of our mission that it is one of the metrics by which we would want to be judged.

That is why we schedule a presentation early each semester by someone knowledgeable about the size and shape of the federal workforce.  It’s also the reason we like to introduce the Glenn Fellows to Presidential Management Fellows and OSU alumni who work in Congressional offices.  We invite civil servants with hiring authority to critique the fellows’ résumés, and we pay attention to employment patterns, hiring practices, and training opportunities.

And that’s why I picked up a book that a former Glenn School colleague, Ryan Meadows, had on his reading list for M.P.A. students a few years ago.  The book, written by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune, is called Talent Is Overrated:  What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (New York:  Vintage, 2008).  A central tenet is that nurture is more important than nature, which is why Colvin’s book would be more accurately entitled Innate Talent is Overrated.  But never mind…. 

Colvin’s is a positive message, in that being a great performer does not in any serious sense depend on having a special “gift” for one’s chosen profession.  People aren’t born with the innate ability to hit a three-iron like Tiger Woods, plot chessboard moves like Gary Kasparov, play the guitar like Eric Clapton, or belt out a tune like Luciano Pavarotti.  And being a first-rate scholar is not all about IQ.  The skills required to excel in any line of work have to be acquired—through practice.  But Colvin—and this is the “bad news” part of his message—argues that people in general and business corporations in particular have very little understanding of what one has to do to acquire the skills necessary to work at world-class levels.  And that means that while some people might be willing to put in long hours of arduous effort, they don’t know how to practice the right way. 

Colvin develops his thesis with great care, and he relies on a number of case studies that are fairly compelling.  Colvin’s portrait of Tiger Woods, which was written prior to Woods’s mortification, focuses on Earl Woods’s fanatical devotion to his son’s training; they were out on the course together by the time Tiger was two years old.  Judging from Colvin’s account, one wonders whether Earl Woods was more obsessed with nurturing genius than any man since Leopold Mozart.

Or consider the case of the Polgar sisters of Budapest.  Their father was a psychologist committed to the proposition that geniuses are made, not born.  He purposefully set out to prove it by turning his children into chess prodigies, which he did to prove a point:  neither he nor his wife were accomplished chess players.  His efforts at home-schooling proved to be completely successful, largely because he devised the right kinds of drills to structure his daughters’ practice.

Being a genius, in other words, is all about being willing to endure the regimen of what Colvin calls “deliberate practice,” which is not just going through the motions over and over again, but an entirely self-conscious process of constantly pressing the envelope of one’s competence.  In order to become an Olympic champion ice skater, for example, Shizuka Arakawa had to endure at least 20,000 episodes of failure, because that’s what deliberate practice is all about:  “Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.”

I’m betting that Geoff Colvin is not a baseball fan, for if he were, he would have known to invoke Cal Ripken, Jr., as the epitome of the idea of deliberate practice.  Ripken was the product of a training regimen devised by his father, Cal Ripken, Sr. (see photo above).  Much like Colvin, Ripken père rejected the idea that “practice makes perfect”; in fact, he insisted that “It’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.”  For Ripken fils this meant self-consciously repeating drills designed to address whatever his inadequacies were at a given point in his development as a shortstop and hitter—the baseball equivalent of falling on his butt twenty thousand times.  It made the legendary “iron man” a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

There is another world class innovator missing from Talent Is Overrated, and his story is dramatically conveyed by Dava Sobel in her Longitude:  The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York:  Penguin, 1996).  The genius is John Harrison, an eighteenth-century clockmaker whose innovations resulted in the perfection of a timekeeping instrument that was accurate and reliable enough to determine longitude at sea.  Harrison’s is an unforgettable story of sheer, mind-boggling tenacity over four decades during which the British parliament kept raising the bar, sending Harrison back to his workshop over and over again to improve his marine chronometer.  It’s a case study that Colvin should have cited because it demonstrates—conclusively, to my mind—that innovation is based on knowledge and the mastery of sharply focused technique (deliberative practice), and that it is foolish to think, as do some admirers of the cult of amateurism, that “too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement.”

There is another lesson in Talent is Overrated to which Glenn Fellows ought to pay heed.  It is the idea that career planning isn’t just about landing a desirable entry-level job in one’s chosen profession.  It’s about maintaining and adding to the skills associated with high performance on the job.  And one should be encouraged by what Colvin has to say about the inexorable effects of aging.  It turns out that outstanding performers “suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise” [emphasis added].  In short, on-going professional development and career planning are life-long enterprises, to be sustained up to and even into retirement.

The Strange Career of Pithole City (reprise)

It's week 11, which means that the Summer 2013 edition of the Washington Academic Internship Program is starting to wind down. I like to wrap things up by reading several public policy classics, including Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," which tries to explain why fouling one's own nest is both unnatural and widespread.  This semester I'm asking the fellows to read a case study that I recently published about the environmental degradation accompanying the world's first oil boom, which occurred in the 1860s not far from where I grew up--though it antedated me by a few years--in western Pennsylvania. There is a link to my essay, "Pithole City: Epitaph for a Boom Town," over on the right-hand side of this blog. And here is a link to a 7-minute summary of the astonishingly brief but intense history of Pithole City. The photo above is the view down Second Street today. Obviously, Pithole exists today mainly as an archaeological site; it could scarcely even be called a ghost town.

A Visit to Mount Vernon

L-R:  Travis Madden, Rachel Gattermeyer, Jenny Stuhldreher, Alexandra Nardo, Adam Midkiff.

Lessons from a Diplomatic Life

Marshall P. Adair, the author of the book under review here (Lessons from a Diplomatic Life, Lanham, MD: Rowman, Littlefield, 2013) is the scion of one of those splendid Mandarin families—the progeny of John and John Quincy Adams—who have played such a prominent part in the history of the U.S. foreign service. The son of a former U.S. Ambassador (Charles Wallace Adair) and grandson of a gentleman who participated in the drafting of the peace treaty that ended World War I (Hugh Dow Marshall), Marshall P. Adair retired as a Minister-Counselor in the Senior Foreign Service in 2007. Those of us in the Glenn School got to know him at an event that we co-sponsored with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Like most seasoned foreign service officers, Mr. Adair has interesting stories based on a string of exotic postings abroad (in chronological order: Paris, Lubumbashi, Taipei, Hong Kong, Beijing, Rangoon, Chengdu, and Tuzla). And he has worked with a few of the world’s most charismatic and colorful characters, including Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he befriended during his tour in Burma, and uber-diplomat Richard Holbrooke, with whom he worked in Bosnia. Of the lessons he learned in the foreign service, some are fairly mundane: for example, that there always will be tension between the experts (i.e., professional diplomats) and the amateurs (i.e., political appointees). Others are a little more nuanced (for example, that an embassy staffer cannot afford to be completely dependent on his or her official hosts, or the U.S. will have no credibility among opposition elements). Mr. Adair was reminded repeatedly that in recent decades the role of the Department of State in making U.S. foreign policy has been significantly diminished by the Almighty Department of Defense, which has perfected the art of ingesting the massive military-industrial budget, converting it to pork, then channeling it back to carefully selected Congressional districts.

In Lessons from a Diplomatic Life, Mr. Adair demonstrates the many advantages that foreign policy professionals have over the rest of us by virtue of their having a historical context in which to fit contemporary events. Consider the case of Tibet. Adair clearly is drawn to Buddhism, and so he admittedly is fascinated by “exotic and mysterious” Tibet; that is why he welcomed (as “a dream come true”) his posting to Chengdu, which is relatively close by in China. Thanks to that proximity, and a close study of the history of the region, his perspective on Tibet-China relations changed substantially during his time there. He discovered, somewhat to his surprise and chagrin, that there is some truth in China’s claim that prior to its intervention in the 1950s, Tibet, far from being the Shangri-La of romantic myth, was in many ways a feudal theocracy heavily dependent upon slave labor. He learned that Tibet, contrary to myth, was for many hundreds of years not a separate state but rather an integral “part of the Chinese empire.” He came to understand that China has good reason to regard Tibet as a potential threat. Finally, he learned to appreciate a painful irony: compared with the treatment of native Americans in the Western Hemisphere, China’s relationship with Tibetans and Tibetan culture could be considered “a model of respect and restraint.”

The nine chapters (plus preface and coda) of Lessons from a Diplomatic Life are free-standing in many ways, but there are a few themes that run throughout the book. One, already alluded to, is the pathetic status—in terms of budgetary and political clout—of the Department of State compared with the Department of Defense. Another, related to the first insofar as it is a function of draconian budget cuts, is the status of foreign language training in the U.S. foreign service. Americans in general are not good at foreign language acquisition, in part because we haven't had to be multilingual. But wholly inadequate resources exacerbate the problem for our foreign service. Take the case of Zaire: “Because most of us did not speak the indigenous languages or Kiswahili,” Adair writes of the embassy staff, “we were not able to communicate with about 80 percent of the population except in the most rudimentary fashion. Communicating with a country’s elite is insufficient.”

I’ll say. The problem is particularly acute in countries that have indigenous languages beyond the official national languages that are usually a vestige of colonialism. We have a very unimpressive record of training FSOs in indigenous languages, and our performance, according to Adair, is getting worse, not better. “Inadequate financial resources limit the number of teachers and classroom space. A shortage of Foreign Service positions makes it impossible to assign existing Foreign Service officers to more extensive language training.” It’s not a pretty picture.

Mr. Adair has written a most thoughtful account of his career as a third-generation diplomat, one that offers real insight into the changing status of spouses and children accompanying foreign service officers in the field. His anecdotes are informed by his own youthful experience as an embassy brat in Uruguay, Panama, and elsewhere. I was moved by his sensitive treatment of the often uncomfortable role that his wife, Ginger—a Taiwanese-American—was called upon to play during various tours of duty, particularly in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Chengdu. Adair introduces us to his son, Charles, and ruminates about the agonies and ecstasies of living abroad (and changing schools!) as a teenager.

Mr. Adair does an excellent job of demonstrating how the personnel policies of the U.S. Department of State often impacted his career. Rotational assignments, for example, require junior officers to float through the different parts of a U.S. embassy, where they will learn about cultural, political, economic, and consular affairs, in sequence, thereby becoming acquainted with the many dimensions of diplomatic work; he seems to think rotational assignments are a good thing, and I am inclined to agree. Hiring decisions, training opportunities, short-term details, performance evaluation, and the system of bidding on jobs are among the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that Human Relations administers, and that shape a working environment that any federal employee will recognize as profoundly bureaucratic—again, it’s a mixed bag.

Most impressively, Mr. Adair owns up to his own errors, whether of commission or omission. For example, he relates the story of a senior Defense Department official who asks him in Bosnia about lessons learned that could perhaps be applied to Iraq in the aftermath of a war waged in the name of regime change. Based on his experience working with war criminals in Bosnia, Mr. Adair took the opportunity to argue in favor of “cleaning house”; after 2003, he wonders how much that conversation contributed to the forging of a campaign to purge the Iraqi government and military of Baathist party members, a policy that was “probably a huge mistake.” Readers who take public service seriously will sympathize with the author and value his unusually candid reflections on his diplomatic career.