On Organizational Culture

Joel Achenbach in the chatroom followup to his good piece on space exploration in the Washington Post Magazine: To Infinity and Beyond says (referring to NASA): "

Joel Achenbach: I'm always skeptical when I hear people talk about 'internal cultural change,' because let's face it, most organizations have a culture that rises organically from below, rather than imposed dictatorially from above (though I should check with someone smart, like Malcolm Gladwell, about that). "

I'd modify that. In my view an organization often reflects the founder (think FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, IBM and Tom Watson, etc.). If the organization is able to survive, it and its culture become almost the same thing, so new leaders have great difficulty in changing the culture (which is what Achenbach is getting at). Some change is possible, as in the differences between Secretaries Rice and Powell at State, but major change is very difficult. (Look at all the old blue-chip companies that have either gone under or lost their former eminence.) But sometimes what people call "culture" is really the interlocked networks of stakeholders, of customers and suppliers. See the Innovator's Dilemma by Christenson.

True Conservatives, As Defined by a Liberal

A true conservative is one who not only believes Stephen Decatur's words: "our country, right or wrong", but also knows who Decatur was.

Mailer and Conspiracy, via Achenblog

Joel Achenbach at Achenblog comments on Norman Mailer's conspiracy theory on Newsweek:

"Journalists and pundits and aging novelists should try to think more like scientists, who typically favor parsimonious rather than elaborate theories. Dan Rather and Mary Mapes and many other reporters have gotten in trouble when they've tried too hard to prove a theory and ignored possible alternative explanations (like, these documents could be fraudulent). Conspiracies do exist, but so do simple mistakes. The Mailer scenario has an implausible number of moving parts. That's not to say that it couldn't be possible, only that it's exceedingly more likely that a journalist unwisely relied on a single source who didn't know what he was talking about. Happens all the time, and you don't need the White House Office of Counter-Espionage to orchestrate it."

I absolutely agree. I also comment: "Mistakes are much more common than conspiracies. A mistake has only one prerequisite: a person. A conspiracy requires two people."

Three Party Conflicts

One of the interesting aspects of the Koran flushing episode is the light it throws on three party conflicts. What do I mean?

Take any war. Typically it seems that the adversaries demonize each other. It's easy to think of examples: Japanese in WWII, Chinese in Korean War, native Americans in the Indian Wars, parents in a divorce. But there are cases where there are third parties, neutral states or fence-sitters, children in domestic disputes. In these cases both combatants try to appeal to the neutrals for support, or at least to keep them from joining the other side.

In the case of Bush's war on terror, we see both impulses at work in the U.S. Demonizing the adversary--there's plenty of it. Appealing to the neutrals--also plenty. After Bush's first misuse of "crusade", he's been careful to include Islam as one of the U.S.'s major religions, etc. To the extent that Americans in uniform have mistreated the Koran, that fits the demonization side. To the extent that the Establishment is horrified by the Newsweek error, the net effect of the episode seems to reinforce American tolerance.

Kerala and Reading

The Christian Science Monitor has a very interesting piece on the Indian state of Kerala, known for its radicalism and more recently for its universal literacy.

"The roots of Kerala's literacy culture can be traced back at least to the Hindu rulers of the 19th century. The Queen of Trivandrum issued a royal decree in 1817 that said, 'The state should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment.' She hoped education would make her people 'better subjects and public servants.'"

Significantly, that's earlier than in the U.S., showing the power of enlightened autocracy. This also shows the effect of the first mover.

Rice's focused style creates learning curve at State - The Washington Times: World - May 18, 2005

Management style makes a difference. Kudos to the The Washington Times: World for an article on the differences between Powell and Rice. Powell was into e-mail and was open to messages from the bureaucracy. Rice is more like Ike, short memos and structured meetings with input from fewer people. The Times doesn't mention another obvious difference: Rice likes to travel and meet while Powell didn't. It would be interesting to know more about the differences--does Rice's personality fit with a classical musician as opposed to a jazz one? Have the differences always been there or is the relative experience of each a factor?

From a bureaucrat's view there's no consistent advantage to either style. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and each will produce good results on particular types of issues. On the whole, though, I'd prefer a traveller who e-mails.

The Sepoy Mutiny and Flushing the Koran

History is instructive, as reader Sean McEnroe observes in letters to the Washington Post:

"In 1857 the British were nearly driven out of India when rumor spread among their Hindu and Muslim soldiers that ammunition was coated in unclean grease from cows and pigs. A year later, after much death and destruction, the British were wise enough to realize that the conflict was not just about rifle cartridges. I hope U.S. policymakers understand that the past week's anti-American riots in Afghanistan ['Afghan Protests Spread,' news story, May 14] were not just about one Newsweek article."

Definitional Drift: Math Goes Postmodern

According to the LATimes, solving mathematical propositions and proving the solution is correct has become so difficult mathematicians are either giving up or turning to the computer to do checking by brute computational force. In the end, if the community agrees it's solved, it's solved.
So:

"Like so many other fields, mathematics is becoming less about some Platonic ideal of ultimate answers, and more a functional project of computational simulation and communal negotiation. Dare we say it: Math is becoming postmodern."

Writing History for Governement, Ernest May and 9/11

Ernest May, an eminent historian, provides a look behind the scenes at the writing of the 9/11 report. Worth reading for anyone interested in 9/11. But as a bureaucrat I was struck by this quote, following a description of how Richard Clarke's Delenda plan made no impact on the bigshots:

"... we learned that many documents in SOLIC files never reached--or at least made no impression on--secretaries or deputy secretaries or other assistant secretaries of defense or senior military officers. Pentagon witnesses reminded us that they had had a lot of other matters on their minds, including military operations in Bosnia and Kosovo and the reshaping of forces to fit a post-Cold War world. "

Bureaucracies move paper. Unfortunately, you often need a bureaucracy to focus on an issue, but the paper storm rains on all alike. One of the first things a bureaucrat learns is to ignore paper generated outside her bureaucracy. Unless, of course, somehow it's going to be followed by a direction from on high to do something. That's one of the points of Jamie Gorelick's pressing the issue of the Y2K meetings that "shook the trees" (I think that's the term.) Such meetings can get people paying attention.

Another interesting bit was this:

"Writing the bulk of the report as straightforward narrative helped the commission achieve its surprising unanimity."

The narrative focused the commission on the facts and the chronology first. That's a lesson bloggers often ignore--you need to establish what the reality is before you go off.

Finally, the commission's work reaffirmed Richard Neustadt's observation about Presidential power. Clinton had little power over DOD, CIA, or FBI; they were all alienated. That's one reason to take many political scientists and economists with a large grain of salt when they write about bureaucracies. Personalities count a hell of a lot, especially at the margins, and 9/11 showed us the margins matter.

Why Are Whippersnappers Smarter Than Me?

The "Flynn effect" is the observation that people keep getting smarter--that is, each time IQ tests are redone and revalidated, people who score 100 on the new test score over 100 on the old. See this article in Wired. Apparently this is true over all industrialized countries. So the assumption is that "G" (general intelligence) is real but responds to the environment, regardless of data that seems to show that the correlation of IQ and heredity is about 60 percent. The question is what would account for it--the author pushes the hypothesis that cognitively demanding leisure activities push it. (More later.)

The article includes this bit:

"Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation [than intelligence depending on genes], one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine 'somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends,' Dickens says. 'That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball.' Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. 'And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA,' Dickens says."

I'm struck by this because I firmly believe in vicious and virtuous cycles. Addiction is more common than we know and so is saintliness. Putting one's faith in cycles also cuts the Gordian knot for liberals: how do we reconcile the evidence for genetic correlation and our faith in equality? (There would be a side question of inheritable personality traits. When we disapprove we call them addictive personalities, when we approve we talk of persistence, stubbornness, etc.)

Back to the Flynn effect. As well as cycles I believe in the power of learning by example, learning by osmosis. Humans imitate, they imitate from birth. The fact is that the poorest among us still live a life of more choice and complexity, more stimulation, than my college educated great grandfather did in 1850. (I hasten to qualify--the comparison is not so stark as I state it. Our ancestors knew and dealt with many things we don't, but none of them appear on IQ tests.) So all our children are exposed to our dealings with the complex, human-formed life and absorb lessons. These get reflected in IQ test development and in performance on the test.