Don't Call Me “Sir”

I acquired my distrust for honorifics like “sir” and “ma’am” early, from my father. He didn’t mean it that way. Rather, in fourth grade (so I would’ve been nine years old), I had a teacher who insisted that children use polite honorifics when speaking with adults. As a “go along to get along” kid, I complied. Then one day, at home, my father, who’d recently been commissioned a warrant officer, gave me a direction. I replied “yes, sir.”

“Did you catch that?” my mother asked. “He called you ‘sir.’ He’s trying to show you respect.”

“Oh,” my father said. “I just assumed it was because he knows I’m an officer now.”

His tone suggested he was half-joking, and knowing him as I do now, I suspect he was using jocularity to conceal the fact that he’d completely missed my attempt to show him respect. What struck me then, though, as a child, was that my father didn’t regard me as a son. He regarded me as a subordinate. I swallowed my desire for a sarcastic rejoinder, like the coward I was then, but I also learned an important lesson, and stopped using the word “sir.”

Recently a trusted friend, a schoolteacher specializing in middle-grade history, re-posted this brief harangue to social media: “Unpopular opinion: Children should respond with "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'am" and then do as they have been told.” He followed this comment, which he didn’t write, with his own words: “I’m less hung up on the “sir/ma’am” than I am on a pervasive attitude in the last couple of cohorts I’ve taught that overtly disregarding a teacher or responding to correction or redirection with sarcasm is an acceptable behavior.”

As a sometime teacher myself, I understand this frustration. Classroom learning requires a certain level of discipline, which begins by acknowledging that your teachers have paid their dues, earned their credentials, and want you to have the same opportunities they’ve had. (Toxic exceptions exist, I realize. Bear with me.) Adolescent resistance scores quick points with peers, certainly, but it poisons the long-term experience for everyone involved.

However, I can’t help seeing a straight line from a blanket demand that children should obey adult authority, and the problems Americans see unfolding right now. Whenever police, or other authority figures, shoot Black men for insignificant infractions, defenders of the status quo inevitably emerge from hibernation to insist that the dead men should’ve obeyed. Obedience, unmoored from other ethics, becomes the ultimate defense of authoritarian injustice.

Okay, I'd call him “sir”

As a longtime admirer of French anarchist and theologian Jacques Ellul, I explain myself thus: all authority derives from God. Anyone who claims authority over another person, thus claims to represent God, or if they don’t believe in God, at least they claim to represent the higher power. Even if power isn’t literally God-given, it’s nevertheless God-like. Therefore, all human authority is idolatrous and illegitimate, unless it’s yoked to humility and restraint.

But I also recognize this creates certain contradictions. Even the most doctrinaire anarchist will admit that sometimes it’s appropriate to acknowledge another person’s authority. Teachers couldn’t manage their classrooms without decision-making power. Complex multi-person activities, from simple barn-raisings to paving highways from coast to coast, require coordination, which means somebody necessarily has to take charge.

The question, therefore, isn’t whether authority exists; it’s whether (and when) authority is legitimate. I asked myself this several times in my teaching days. The state university system invested me with responsibility to teach youth how to write on a collegiate level, and authority to execute this responsibility. My students ostensibly acknowledged my authority by enrolling in my class. Does that mean whatever I do is legitimate?

Certainly not. My authority is circumscribed by time, space, and jurisdiction. If I assign students a paper on a given topic, that assignment is legitimate, because as a writing teacher, during a classroom semester, on campus, I have that authority. If I assign students math homework, that assignment is illegitimate, because it’s outside my jurisdiction. If I assign students to wash my car on Saturday, that’s also illegitimate, for hopefully obvious reasons.

My father’s expectation that I behave like his subordinate, that I salute him and follow his orders, continues to burn. It took years to understand why, though. As my father, he had certain authority over me, which corresponds with responsibilities to raise me well. His authority as an officer doesn’t correspond with his authority as my father. This fuzzy distinction causes my lingering dislike for the word “sir.”

America Has Surrendered an Important Global Battle

John Moore's heartbreaking image has captured world attention

Late in his book Stamped From The Beginning, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi makes a point I’d never considered before (one among many): America’s elected officials didn’t embrace the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s because it was right. They didn’t write laws extending voting rights, police protection, and public schools to African Americans because they felt fuzzy inside. They weren’t moved by some overwhelming change in America’s social conscience.

They did it because they knew the world was watching.

Following World War II and the upheaval caused by carpet bombing and the Marshall Plan, America had the moral heft necessary to change the world. We alone had the military might, economic power, and simple numbers to help create a better world. Granted, this happened because Europe and Asia had been bombed into oblivion, their industrial and cultural bases obliterated to expunge global fascism. But still, America had a unique opportunity in world affairs.

This opportunity wasn’t unchallenged, though. Having paid the high cost of two world wars, the Soviet Union desperately didn’t want to meet the postwar global landscape alone. Having established COMINTERN and the Warsaw Pact, it settled into a long-term global strategy session. It provided strategic help to revolutionary anti-colonialists like Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro. And it waited.

As the public face of capitalism, liberal democracy, and Enlightenment freedom, America needed to press the case before a global audience that our model of government better suited the world’s needs than Soviet mandatory collectivism.And we couldn’t do that if we kept designated groups subordinate at home. Civil rights weren’t merely a social good in the 1950s and 1960s; they were a PR front in the Cold War. A front we fought aggressively.

I couldn’t help remembering this fact as President Trump’s concentration camps for immigrants became a national and international news-gathering controversy. John Moore’s heartbreaking photograph of an unidentified two-year-old girl weeping at the border over her separation from her parents, has become an international phenomenon. This has become the face America currently presents to the world. And it’s a face we should all feel ashamed of.

This isn’t hay. I’ve written previously that America won the Cold War in part by subsidizing art, science, and education. Come to our side, we pledged the world through our actions, and you’ll have more beauty, more knowledge, and more opportunities for upward advancement than any other system our planet offers. We won partly on this platform. Then, having won, we burned the platform to the ground.

This, sadly, is how the world will see America for years to come

It’s impossible to disregard America’s precarious place in today’s world. Having won the presidency partly by telling voters “the world is laughing at us,” Donald Trump has prosecuted his presidency by openly disregarding global opinion. He’s launched tariffs on our allies in NAFTA and the EU, sometimes in defiance of treaties, while snuggling up to notorious opponents of freedom like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un.

Donald Trump is apparently immune to scrutiny, at home or abroad. He shows no awareness that people watch him, as America’s public face, and make determinations about how trustworthy Americans are on trade, rights, or economy. He doesn’t care that he’s telling the entire world they can’t trust us to keep our word, uphold our values, or present the global community a better choice than complete anarchy.

And I’m forced to wonder what’s the alternative.

The only countries capable of seriously challenging American global dominance today are China and Germany. China is currently on track to becoming history’s longest-surviving one-party state, and for obvious reasons, history takes a dim view of potential German world hegemony. This means we’re facing a potential future world without any sort of moral leadership, and the alternative is international lawlessness. Today’s economic and military complexity absolutely demands some form of world leader.

America absolutely needs to resume its former practice of showing the world its best face. We won the war against Soviet Communism, in no small part, by rejecting our worst impulses and enshrining antidiscrimination into our laws. Admittedly, we still have long strides to achieve the potential of our goodness. But showing the globe the worst aspects of our racist past is essentially surrendering the international PR front.

Donald Trump needs to become aware that the world watches him. Sadly, our era’s defining image may be that notorious G7 stare-down between Trump and Merkel. The forces who captained World War II are back at it again. And that, sadly, is the face the United States is currently showing the entire world.

Imagine a Workplace Built on Trust

Jonathan Raymond, Good Authority: How To Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For

The common expression “work-life balance” assumes we compartmentalize whatever we do for pay from whatever gives our lives meaning. Jonathan Raymond, former attorney, tech CEO, and spiritual seeker, believes that’s a false division. Good leaders, in Raymond’s field-tested opinion, don’t manage human resources; they uplift people, a process that emboldens employees’ private lives as it improves their work output. But how, in a business climate of swinging machismo, can real leaders distinguish themselves from managers?

I applaud Raymond for avoiding chintzy buzzwords and trademarked Paths To Success. His approach involves self-scrutiny, human understanding, and professional mutuality. Though he uses occasional handy acronyms, and pinches liberally from simplified Jungian psychology, Raymond fundamentally calls managers to know themselves, and their subordinates, a slow, sloppy process that yields abundant rewards. Admittedly, this book is a billboard for Raymond’s management consultancy. But it exceeds other such books I’ve read by being grounded in facts.

For Raymond, leadership involves neither issuing orders and cracking the whip, nor heroically fixing others’ problems. Heroes, he writes, ensure their own job security by keeping subordinates dependent on frequent rescue. Instead, he encourages leaders to be “Less Superman, More Yoda”—that is, to give employees latitude enough to develop into the fully fledged individuals we already know they are. Leaders should avoid “company culture,” a buzzword that apparently offends Raymond, instead mentoring capable workers.

In pursuit of this goal, Raymond cites certain portable tools like the OWNER chart and the Accountability Dial. Accountability looms large in Raymond’s thinking, though he reserves it for fairly late in the book, since “accountability” often devolves into punishments and rewards. Instead, he systematically encourages workers to own their job performance, while demanding managers exercise good (rather than “borrowed”) authority over their charges. His system is portable enough to implement without necessarily hiring consultants.

As Raymond writes early, “the health of a [company’s] culture is equal to the collective ability of the people who work there to feel the impacts of their actions on others.” This requires employees to engage one another as fully human. Not necessarily equal: employees will resist improving their performance if they don’t anticipate consequences for their actions, and your buddy can’t sack you. Instead, when managers and employees consider their relationship mutual, outputs improve.

Jonathan Raymond

This creates certain tensions. Leaders guide and mentor their subordinates, do so without necessarily prying into workers’ personal lives. (Raymond uses the term “therapist” early, but ambiguously, and doesn’t harp on the concept.) This means meeting workers where they are, rather than bullying or chivvying them into an inferior relationship. This doesn’t mean exempting workers from fallout for their more egregious mistakes; Raymond makes clear that healthy culture requires setting firm boundaries and terminal limits.

Perhaps most important, in Raymond’s less-Superman-more Yoda model, leaders must relinquish the ideal of invulnerability. They cannot deny their own mistakes or weaknesses while simultaneously requiring workers to come to grips with theirs. Raymond’s OWNER chart, which is so good I’d rather let him explain it, does include “Name the Challenge” and “Embrace Mistakes.” Though he doesn’t use the term, his model relies on mutual honesty, too often a missing quality in today’s workplace environment.

Raymond’s model, and the examples he uses, draw from the white-collar technical world. A former tech CEO, Raymond’s experiences involve office work and skilled professional employees. However, with limited fine-tuning, his model, based on straightforward structures of group dynamics and social psychology, should translate into blue-collar work, like factories or construction. Having done both these categories, I’ve seen the importance of a firm but uplifting hand on the tiller, something frequently missing from manual trades.

Much as I appreciate Raymond’s model, he frequently misses his own assumptions. For instance, he assumes management and labor share mutual goals, and simply need to reconcile means. His three leadership archetypes—Fixer, Fighter, and Friend—miss one equally important model, the Foe, who threatens and insults workers into compliance, often preemptively. Similarly, his five employee archetypes overlook the Foe’s favorite self-justification, the Slacker. Maybe a management theory predicated on mutuality can’t accommodate these unilateralists.

So, for organizational leaders who want strong members on resilient teams, Jonathan Raymond offers a structural approach that rewards everyone together. Mutatis mutandis, Raymond’s business approaches could empower schoolteachers, religious and political leaders, activists, and others who would bring out the best in others. Having faced multiple workplaces where management and labor had essentially adversarial relationships, I find Raymond’s vision energizing. Despite its challenges, it needs leaders generous enough to implement it in real life.

How To Win By Appearing To Lose

Chris Voss with Tahl Raz, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Hollywood depictions of police or corporate negotiations generally star some big, swaggering action figure, who swaggers in, shoots from the hip, and makes demands. Chris Voss, former FBI international hostage negotiator, now in private practice, wants you to know: if you that, you’ll probably lose. But you’ll also lose if you follow negotiation tactics long taught at business schools. His time-tested approach, developed in the field, is more complex and subtle. It’s also more successful.

All negotiation, Voss holds, is about listening, acquiring information, and remaining receptive to the other side. It isn’t about being stronger than your opponent or holding their feet to the fire. Many issues claimed regarding negotiations nowadays, like “never apologize” and “deal from strength,” make bad policy, because they limit avaliable options and leave the other side feeling ignored. People enter negotiations hoping to be heard, respected, and helped. A negotiator’s goal is to listen.

Thus, Voss’s approach includes terms like “tactical empathy,” “accusation audit,” and “mirroring,” all of which stress listening to, and anticipating, your opponent’s needs. Voss emphasizes the value of asking questions—which should always be open-ended, since yes/no questions merely affirm what you already know. They also leave the answerer feeling defensive, which makes them less receptive to negotiation overall. Traditional, “rational” approaches back the other side into corners, leaving them feeling powerless and without autonomy.

Negotiation requires extending the illusion of control, even to criminals and outliers. “Dealing from strength” feels good, but seldom works. When negotiators attempt to demonstrate strength or act muscular, they telegraph that they won’t listen to even completely reasonable demands, which encourages defiance and extremism from their opposite numbers. It’s tactically better to permit your opponent the illusion of control, while gently nudging them toward your desired conclusion through unrestrictive questions. Demanding compliance simply produces resistance.

Chris Voss

Effective negotiators therefore open themselves to powerlessness, at least in the near term. In my favorite quote, Voss writes: “Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict.” Yet permitting confusion and conflict to run their course forces opponents, whose demands often start very nebulous and wooly, to crystallize their thoughts into language, which makes action possible. Equally, if not more, important, it makes goals concrete, and therefore verifiable.

These techniques may appear counterintuitive, especially to audiences weaned on classical rhetoric or MBA-school negotiation tactics. As Voss writes, traditional approaches begin with assumptions of humans as essentially rational actors, which we now know to be true only under certain, controlled conditions. By permitting the challenger the illusion of control, by letting them voice their grievances, Voss’s technique lets emotions and irrationality run their course. Then reason can assert itself, and solutions can be tested.

Voss discusses this as the difference between your opposer saying “that’s right,” where they agree with your underlying point, versus “you’re right,” where they falsely agree, mainly to shut you up. Simply mirroring their statements can persuade hard-liners to buy into your solution. When people agree with your message, rather than with you as a person, they’re more inclined to consider your demands, and more inclined to agree when they feel they’ve been listened to.

This doesn’t mean simply giving them everything they demand. Asking what Voss calls strategic questions, generally open-ended and involving the words “what” and “how,” forces people who may be issuing unrealistic conditions, to recognize the reality of brass tacks. It forces them to translate ideas they may hold abstractly, in an airy-fairy sense, into words which become actionable. When ideas coalesce into language, demands often become more manageable. Listening to others turns ideas into action.

Good negotiators thus make the other person feel heard and respected, which encourages them to translate their thoughts into words. Negotiators voluntarily sacrifice the illusion of control, the language and trappings of aggression, to allow the opponent to realize better long-term solutions. This sounds impolitic in a world of brash authoritarian posturing and Breitbart-driven “don’t apologize/deal from strength” machismo, but generally work better in the long term. This should be what really drives successful argument.

Voss’ ideas flourish because they derive from experience. Having navigated both the law enforcement and big-business worlds, his principles have endured diverse, often savage tests, and proven themselves persistently effective. And they flourish because Voss writes well: this book unfolds with the tension of a novel, blending theoretical explanations with “mean streets” examples. Whether you’re rescuing a hostage, negotiating your salary, or keeping a discussion alive, this book offers tools for measurable, real-world success.

Neurocapitalism

Valeh Nazemoff, The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: How to Rewire Your Brain and Your Business for Success

First-time entrepreneurs stereotypically commence their careers with one of two approaches. Either they rely upon unique flashes of creative insight, which may show glimmerings of inspiration; or they front an analytical, data-driven technique that mainly repeats what others have accomplished previously. Valeh Nazemoff believes real success combines these two approaches. But having aggregated the left and right brains, she immediately identifies wholly new components.

Nazemoff, a business consultant whose résumé includes Walmart, Lockheed Martin, and several government agencies, lumps intellectual approaches into four angles: Financial, Customer, Data, and Mastermind Intelligence. Each serves specific roles within business structures, and each subdivides into further unique specialties. Her description runs short, punchy, free of ornamentation, and her discursive technique attracts a very self-selecting audience. Only you know if that includes you.

First, what this book isn’t. Nazemoff doesn’t use a narrative approach, like Malcolm Gladwell or Duncan J. Watts. She doesn’t tell stories to introduce concepts, and doesn’t consciously connect her important points to historical precedent. She assumes audiences already share her fundamental interest in “neuroeconomics,” and proceeds directly into difficult, sometimes jargon-laden explanations of complicated topics. Nazemoff demands an audience as dedicated to her topic as herself.

This produces a very slim book, under 120 pages including back matter. She doesn’t bother fleshing topics out once she’s introduced them; much of her text consists of bullet lists, schematics, and flow charts. Though occasionally she introduces narrative elements that connect hypothetical ideas to concrete examples—one extended interview with a Veterans’ Administration administrator comes to mind—she largely assumes you understand her thesis without clarification or object lessons.

Similarly, though Nazemoff names concepts, she doesn’t elucidate instructions. She frequently throws business terminology aggressively, like a thought grenade, and trusts audiences to comprehend what she’s said and why it matters. Very complicated principles like PR or social media marketing get named, but nothing further. Nazemoff’s principles rely upon readers’ prior familiarity with business technique; she basically assumes an audience already versed in MBA procedures.

Valeh Nazemoff

Therefore, Nazemoff’s target audience doesn’t encompass aspiring entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Throughout the text, Nazemoff implicitly expects readers to have a functioning business plan, and a managerial team segregated into utilitarian departments. She often mentions the separate but overlapping responsibilities of marketing, HR, and legal departments. Thus her assistance will primarily profit organizations large enough to foster actual departmental structure.

Not that entrepreneurs need not apply. Garage innovators and store-front start-ups can adapt Nazemoff’s technique. She just doesn’t write with such an audience in mind.

Rather than coaching newbs in rudimentary entrepreneurial principles, Nazemoff instructs established businesses in applying sophisticated approaches to existing plans. Oh, and what approaches she describes! Nazemoff anchors her precepts in “neuroeconomics,” a burgeoning discipline that, like its cousin Behavioral Economics, studies the core neurological origins of human action. By understanding how economic forces stimulate the prefrontal cortex, Nazemoff says, we can predict human economic action.

This is especially important because Nazemoff, unlike standard neoliberal economic business pros, doesn’t demand economic behavior follow famous graphs. The supply/demand arc, the Laffer curve, and other famous mathematical representations don’t appear herein. Instead, Nazemoff admits, your business is subject to unpredictable forces like “the economy, legislative mandates and regulations, customer and partner needs, technology implementations, and of course your competition.”

In such fluctuating environments, Nazemoff writes, human judgement becomes the one utility we cannot standardize and commodify. You must assess and respond to changing circumstances, which requires awareness, not only of your own deeper mental processes, but those of your clients and competitors, too. When is cooperation more economically viable than competition? What means of governing near- and long-term payoff ensures durable client loyalty? What patterns make our lives comprehensible?

These questions, Nazemoff explains, have no single answer. Rather, by understanding how human brains work, and what networks of action produce which common outcomes, we can make informed predictions and respond accordingly. Nazemoff reminds me of Duncan J. Watts, who writes that outcomes are never inevitable; we must resist the impulse to believe, because some event transpired, that event was deterministically predictable. Instead, we learn to read complex, sometimes contradictory evidence.

Consultants write books like this to support their business structures. They send copies ahead to advertise their services, or leave copies behind to memorialize their precepts in clients’ practices. Sometimes they merit reading separate from the consultant herself; usually they don’t. Nazemoff’s writing, because she eschews the journalistic touches Gladwell and Watts employ, makes tough reading. But it’s detailed, innovative, and up-to-the-minute enough to justify professionals’ time.

In the Kingdom of the Newbies

Liz Wiseman, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work

Did you ever read a book and think the author missed her own point? Say, an author praising the ingenuity of beginners, whose unclouded vision opens doors in today’s fast-moving economy? Liz Wiseman says plenty I find laudable in this book, but suffers the very tunnel vision she attributes to others. She’s so eager to extol the contributions rookies make in contemporary business, she misses that her evidence points to a related, but very separate, conclusion.

Wiseman, a management consultant and businesswoman of varied CV, covers much the same ground Shane Snow and Jack Hitt explored recently. However, where Snow and Hitt are journalists, Wiseman, an entrepreneur and researcher, brings hard analytical sophistication to her process. She makes a persuasive case that, in disciplines where innovative thinking matters, new players and career shifters bring strategic advantages which credentialed experts often miss.

Rookies accomplish this, Wiseman writes, through aggressive networking, diversifying the knowledge base, and seeking guidance where needed. Wiseman writes: “Aware of his [sic] own lack of knowledge, the rookie embarks on a desperate, focused, diligent search, hunting for experts who can teach him and guide his way.” Oh, wait, so experts really are necessary? Rookies benefit from their willingness to defer to experience?

That suggests, not that rookies beat veterans, but that rookies and veterans need one another, forming a symbiotic relationship where each advances the other. Indeed, where each lacks the other, catastrophic consequences frequently ensue. Untutored newbies created the Clinton-era tech stock bubble. Grizzled old hands with minimal tendency to ask plainspoken questions tanked the financial and housing sectors. Imagine if either had simply shown basic willingness to listen.

Shane Snow addressed this very topic (I had significant problems with Snow, but this wasn’t one). Though one-on-one mentorships tend to perpetuate old habits, a diffuse program where senior workers counsel up-and-comers encourages newbies to take chances, learn more, and do better. Though neither Snow’s journalism nor Wiseman’s research proves it, common sense suggests such relationships also keep veterans open to rookies’ innate wide-eyed wonder.

Liz Wiseman

Further, Wiseman repeatedly extols “humility” as a rookie virtue. Rookies, she insists, are naturally humble, where veterans are cocksure, shunning advice. I say: can be. We’ve all known noobs who accept, even solicit, guidance, and pundits who talk without listening. We’ve also known old warhorses who maintain the cheerful mindset of perpetual students, and novices who prove the adage, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

In my varied career, I’ve seen:

• Apprentice actors who argue with directors, believing themselves unrecognized Pacinos;
• Freshman Comp students who demand top marks because they received all A’s in high school;
• Recent nursing graduates who unilaterally countermand doctors’ orders;
• Graduate students picking fights with otherwise generous professors in defense of theories discredited decades ago;
• Writing workshop participants who eagerly give criticism, but turn deaf when receiving it; and
• Factory noobs who need bandages or splints because they reach around basic safeguards.

And I must admit, at various times, these people have been me.

Wiseman talks up “green belt syndrome,” a martial arts term for student fighters who, having received their first Dan rank, believe themselves born samurai. Wiseman clearly thinks this makes them scrappy and indomitable. But martial artists call it a “syndrome” deliberately: GBS sufferers frequently pick fights they’re unqualified to win, jeopardizing themselves and others. Some people require periodic ass-beatings to instill needed humility.

So, if neither rookie humility nor teamwork are foregone conclusions, what remains? Neither innocence nor experience seems sufficient, whether from common sense nor Wiseman’s exposition. Indeed, from Wiseman’s own evidence, I draw a contrasting conclusion, the necessity of all stages within complex organizations. Apprentice triumphalism is as unwarranted as professional self-satisfaction. Rookies need expert guidance; veterans need unfiltered newbie eyes.

Even Wiseman acknowledges this early: “Rookie smarts isn’t defined by age or by experience level,” she writes; “it is a state of mind.” Complex organizations benefit from occasional transfusions of fresh blood, whether from new hires or internal reshuffles. This doesn’t mean putting your best shellbacks to pasture, because new blood needs old. But it does require never becoming so enamored of past triumph that you miss the approaching future.

In my favorite quote, Wiseman writes, “What we know might mask what we don’t know and impede our ability to learn and perform.” I agree; I’ve seen Taylorist managers submarine their own operations by refusing floor-level advice. But that doesn’t make the diametrical opposite true. Wiseman’s so focused on rookie contributions that she apparently misses the two-way nature of the relationship.

An Open Letter to My New Favorite Author

Shane Snow, Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success

Note: this commentary is a continuation of my previous review, Success on the Installment Plan.

Dear Mr. Snow:

On August 12th, 2014, shortly after I published my pre-release review of your first book, you contacted me personally. Among other things, you asked: “what [do] you think would have solved that ‘half an argument’ issue?” And: “were there chapters where you feel the ‘half an argument’ thing wasn't a problem?” Having taken a month to contemplate your questions, I think I’m finally ready to venture an answer.

Let me first thank you for your courteous, intelligently self-critical message. I’ve suffered recently from authors who think they’re owed positive reviews simply for publishing something, or accuse me of vitriolic bias for disagreeing, or aggressively attempt to squelch and silence my response. Your gentlemanly willingness to keep civil, engage in dialog with opposing viewpoints, and solicit further feedback suggests you’ll go far.

Therefore, after careful consideration, I must conclude my problem isn’t with your book specifically. That is, while your book embodies problems I’ve seen increasingly often recently, my problem is the trend upon which you ride. I’m troubled by the popularity of a secularized pseudo-Calvinist determinism that treats success and failure as foreordained, business and life circumstances as transferable, and life as free from contingency.

Essayist, businessman, and hedge fund manager Nassim Nicholas Taleb identifies three fallacies that impede our ability to analyze economic, social, and cultural movements:

1. “The illusion of understanding,” the belief that reality is, in full, comprehensible;
2. “The retrospective distortion,” the tendency to evaluate events afterward, seeking linear narrative and clear cause-and-effect relationships; and
3. “The overvaluation of factual information,” the assumption that, with sufficient facts, we can preclude flukes and fortuity from all decisions.

This tripod accurately describes my problem with many business theorists’ writings, including Clayton Christensen, Seth Godin, Josh Linkner, and now you. By assuming we can retrospectively reconstruct success, and market it generically, we systemically dismiss life’s unpredictable circumstances. We treat every success as happening in a vacuum. (I have significant problems with Taleb, too. But that’s for another diatribe altogether.)

The model you utilize in writing your book essentially involves finding people you deem successful, admirable, and worthy of emulation; tracing the path they followed to arrive where they are; and urging us to do much the same. Certainly, in describing business pioneers like Elon Musk, or cultural innovators like J.J. Abrams, I cannot fault your facts. Yet in stepping outside your text, I cannot avoid noticing significant omissions.

Consider: your profiles frequently involve what your subjects reveal in direct interviews, official press biographies, and other forms of self-reporting. You never ask yourself why successful people report themselves certain ways. Smarter people than me have observed that simply being wealthy changes how people think. They write biographies to justify themselves, or propound moral principles, or sell product. Factual accuracy ranks low in their priorities.

I’ll revisit an example from my first review. Having a theatre degree myself, your Jimmy Fallon example speaks to me directly. I’m intimately familiar with performance—not just the love of engaging an audience, but the frustration of turning one’s love into one’s career. Therefore, it bothers me that you spend pages and pages and pages on Fallon (and several on Louis CK), but none whatsoever on the thousands of aspiring comedians forced to quit every year.

Examining Fallon’s success, and nobody else’s failure, creates the retrospective illusion that Fallon succeeded because he had to succeed. Numerous comedians follow his exact arc. But they didn’t play Zanies the night network scouts visited, or they died onstage the night somebody else killed, or they auditioned for SNL the day Lorne Michaels ate bad pastrami, or any of ten thousand circumstances not encompassed by Fallon’s official biography.

Because your work spells out success anecdotes in exhaustive detail, while giving only nodding recognition to failures in similar fields, it creates an illusion of false control. In your personal e-mail, you acknowledge that “business indeed is often like gambling...but that there are ways to make smarter bets, and that's through pattern recognition.” But remember the bromide, the house always wins. Your best chapters aren’t about gambling at all.

I particularly like your chapter on how Eli Pariser parlayed Upworthy.com into a competitive Web venture by co-opting techniques from listicle writers and spam merchants. My favorite bit has you describing how he floats multiple link titles to experimentally test which attracts the most clicks. But that’s almost exactly the opposite of gambling: he starts with a desired outcome, tests variables, factors for contingencies, and thinks like an engineer. Can you not see that?

Benedict Carey’s How We Learn, published the same day your book was, focuses on how people can systematically improve themselves, their careers, and their chances in real life. It’s truly possible to reduce happenstance to an acceptable level. But to do so, we must plot opportunities prospectively, not retrospectively. And we must chart our own course, not assume we can replicate something somebody else already did.

If we could genericize success and market it broadly, somebody already would have. While I don’t mind using others’ stories as inspiration or exemplar, we must resist the temptation to think we can follow somebody else’s paths to success. “Overnight successes” play from long, painful investments. You hint at the difficult parts of slow learning, Mr. Snow, but your text spotlights dramatic high points. In short, your book needs more process, less spectacle.

Is America Over?

Bruce Jones, Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint

Unfortunately, this book provides an excellent example of how to be completely right, and absolutely wrong, at the same time. It also demonstrates how an excellently researched, thoroughly documented, and useful thesis can vanish beneath the weight of leaden prose. It feels like the rudiments of a good book, waiting for somebody to complete the process, perhaps a translator skilled in rendering dense academese into vernacular English.

Professor Jones of Stanford University and the Brookings Institution has no patience for people lamenting America’s supposed decline from global leadership. He concedes that America’s “only superpower” standing, which existed unchallenged from the Soviet collapse in 1991 to the financial crisis of 2008, will probably never return. But America stands uniquely poised, by its economic might, diplomatic seniority, and military security, to lead humanity through coalition-based influence and guidance.

Jones makes this point concisely in his introduction, then spends the remainder of his book mustering evidence for why we should believe him. There’s where he makes his first mistake. As much as I enjoyed his breviloquent thesis, Jones’ best writing comes in the first eight pages. After that, he opens a firehose of information. Unsurprisingly, from that point, I began flailing around Jones’ undifferentiated prose like a drowning man.

Please don’t mistake me. I’ve grown disgusted with Americans’ propensity to make momentous decisions based on TV-friendly sound bites and context-free factoids. Fox News and MSNBC have reduced our generation’s most important national and international controversies to simplistic bromides. Political candidates build platforms around clichés so anodyne and sparse, they could literally mean anything. I cannot be alone in wanting to base my decisions, as a citizen, on actual information.

But humans think in narrative. The most effective political writers, those who attract large audiences and sell books in today’s book-averse society, have discernable through-lines. From humorists like PJ O’Rourke and Jim Hightower to scholars like Niall Ferguson and Noam Chomsky, successful commentators find the story unifying their message. Jones’ explication reads like a data dump. Without a narrative anchor, I found my mind constantly drifting.

Worse, whenever I successfully processed some informational nugget, I felt something important had been excluded. Jones repeatedly discusses people in the aggregate, particularly when lumping entire nations together for rhetorical impact. In discussing international relations, he overlooks internal circumstances, in America no less than the developing world. His tendency to average nations toward the mean overlooks important impending controversies that could have game-changing consequences in the near future.

To give just one example: mainland China has overtaken Germany and Japan to become Earth’s second largest economy. It could overtake America as early as 2030, an overtaking that travels hand-in-glove with China already supplanting America as Earth’s largest carbon emitter. But don’t worry, Jones assures us; while China and its BRICS allies may overtake us numerically, their per capita economies will never challenge us during our lifetimes.

I say: maybe so. But United Nations statistics indicate that China and the United States compete furiously for which country has Earth’s widest gap between rich and poor. America’s average wealth continues escalating; but wage-earning workers’ real pay has stagnated, in constant dollar terms, since Richard Nixon. Further, the Genuine Progress Indicator, an alternate economic model tallying significant liabilities, shows America’s economy essentially frozen since roughly 1978.

Admittedly, Jones acknowledges significant doubts reasonable readers could apply to his thesis. While America enjoyed unipolar global dominance after the Cold War, our position today is more nuanced, and possibly vulnerable. Jones writes early: “The narrative of decline is in part an inevitable corrective to the overwrought and often hyperbolic punditry about American imperial might that followed the 9/11 attacks and the start of the U.S.-Afghanistan war.”

Jones writes, however, apparently for highly informed audiences already familiar with his domain; amateur but thinking voters evidently don’t interest him. He feels no need to differentiate sweeping quantities of information or contextualize them for non-specialist readers. He simply divulges masses upon masses of data, a technique that probably works for scholars and policy professionals who already understand his context, but leaves curious generalists, like me, confused and overwhelmed.

In his introduction, Jones pitches an energetic, persuasive thesis that America is uniquely positioned, by its wealth, diplomacy, and firepower, to lead international affairs. Not dominate or monopolize, but lead. Reading this, I wanted to believe Jones’ message. But his approach to evidence leaves me overwhelmed. Hey, I’m a knowledgeable guy with an advanced degree. If I can’t find Professor Jones’ through-line, who exactly is he writing for?

Christian Leadership in an Authoritarian World

James C. Galvin, I've Got Your Back: Biblical Principles for Leading and Following Well

American society has a leadership fetish. Schools, business books, and seminars offer to instill “leadership qualities.” Employers claim to want “natural leaders.” With so much leadership, why isn’t anything getting done? James Galvin suggests that we need to reclaim “leadership” from the business gurus and return to an older model. Unfortunately, I like his ideas much more than his approach.

Galvin takes a two-part teaching tack. In the first part, four college graduates facing abusive leadership work with a mentor. They explore what it means for Christians to live under worldly authority. Must they passively submit to every leader, as many scriptural interpretations suggest? Not so, their mentor replies; by becoming more astute followers, they prepare themselves for eventual leadership roles.

In the second, Galvin translates his narrative “parable” into a theologically based treatise on Christian leadership and followership. He expounds on how leaders abuse followers, and how “follower abuse” arises in modern technological society. His thesis in brief is that everyone follows someone, and that skillful followers make the best leaders. He underpins this with a mix of business acumen and scriptural foundation.

Galvin differs from other business consultants through his emphasis on narrative. Nearly three-quarters of this slim book (barely 200 pages) is a “parable,” a novella of characters similar to his intended audience learning the lessons Galvin hopes readers will take away. This emphasis makes sense. Many youth starting their careers are bombarded by talky academic advice; simply telling them a story probably reaches them more effectively.

Supposed gurus like Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer present a very I-oriented world, where self-aggrandizement is our highest goal, and we achieve leadership to unlock our own potential. Galvin would rather have us lead for something. Whether to build our organization, improve our community, or serve God, Galvin presents leadership as a tool with a purpose. This makes a hearty antidote to today’s self-seeking culture.

This book suffers because Galvin uses characters to prove points; their challenges are circumscribed by Galvin’s message, their triumphs pat and weirdly concise. His characters don’t so much speak as discourse at one another. Galvin’s discursive passages run long, while his narrative examples run short. Characters spend entire chapters conferencing in the abstract, but their applications mostly run less than one page per character per chapter.

Not that Galvin says anything wrong. His spiritual take on individual roles and collective authority resonate with anyone who wonders what it means to be spiritual in today’s authoritarian world. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Obery Hendricks have written sagaciously on this topic. Galvin probably has a leg up on these more scholarly writers, in that he writes in plain English, not seminarian academese.

Unfortunately, Galvin isn’t an experienced storyteller. Not only do his characters speak in oddly complete paragraphs, explaining the author’s point in prose rather than dialog; he forgets important conventions of narrative. Characters hold forth in exceptionally well-developed peroration, tagged at the very end with “he said.” Galvin drops quotation marks and dialog attributions, forcing us to reread passages to understand what just happened.

Then, following his novella, Galvin restates his message in essay form. He reiterates everything we just read four students and their mentor discussing, sometimes verbatim. If Galvin could declare his points more briefly, in prose form, he should do so. This would free more page space for his characters to have nuanced encounters with leaders and followers, living out his principles in detail.

Jesus used parables to teach important spiritual lessons, which inspires Galvin’s narrative approach. But consider how Jesus told parables. He kept very short; even longer parables, like Lazarus and Dives, run only a few paragraphs. He focused on action and dialog, only explaining after he was done. When he needed to deliver a sermon, he delivered a sermon, not blurring the distinction between forms.

If Galvin delivered his essay portions as essays, then spent more time and detail on how his four students experience his principles, this would not only streamline his narrative. It would also allow readers, bombarded as we are today by self-appointed gurus, to see Galvin’s principles lived in real-seeming environments, not the friction-free neverlands self-help gurus apparently occupy.

Galvin makes solid points and backs them with robust evidence. Well done, James. But throughout the reading, his technique intruded on my learning experience. I wanted to like his ideas, but he never permitted me to do so. If he stopped talking about his principles, and showed us how they work, he would have had a more powerful book.

The American Evolution

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution

If 1992 sounded the death knell for global communism, 2008 and the worldwide stagnation thereafter have left many disillusioned with market capitalism. Yet for generations, media, business and education have trumpeted the socialist/capitalist coin-toss so persistently, many citizens cannot imagine a third option exists. But what if a respected economist said forward thinkers have spent years building new options, right under our noses?

Maryland political economist Gar Alperovitz wants citizens to use their imaginations. We’ve become so trapped by the past, yearning for mid-20th century prosperity, that we try to recreate long-gone conditions. But neither triumphant American postwar prosperity nor aggressive liberal reforms are likely to recur, because the conditions that existed, roughly from 1930 to 1966, will never reappear. We may praise the past, but we must look to the future.

According to Alperovitz, the spectre of failed state socialism keeps economic discussion, left and right, beholden to corporate capitalism. Whether conservatives would use money as a barometer of virtue and entrust governance to the wealthy, or liberals want government and organized labor to provide counterweight to corporate power, we nevertheless assume corporate might is somehow normal. We have let a minority narrow our thinking.

Instead, Alperovitz calls attention to maverick innovators on the edges of our economy. As early as the 1970’s, trailblazers pioneered new approaches to ownership, industry, and democratic wealth. When workers engineered an unprecedented buyout of a floundering Ohio steel mill, Alperovitz was there, helping them forge a new kind of corporate charter. Alperovitz witnessed the rise of agricultural co-ops, pathbreaking land trusts, and philanthropic investing.

Alperovitz calls this a “checkerboard strategy.” Instead of waiting for national intervention, economic innovators focus on one town, area, or economic sector. Their innovations may reach as small as one business, or as large as an interstate compact. But they share common goals of transforming the way business, government, and people respond to the ever-changing needs of a volatile globalized economy.

At first blush, such pathbreakers have a long fight ahead. Looking around, we see stagnant global economies where long-term unemployment and bleak prospects have become normal. We can say, without exaggeration, that inequality has hit medieval levels. It’s easy to wallow in our own gloom. Alperovitz admits, “All of us have a vested interest in pessimism. We don’t have to do anything if nothing can be done!”

Realistic, ambitious attempts at economic reform have repeatedly failed because activists have put their trust in politicians and policy. That succeeded during the New Deal and Great Society due to unique historical circumstances. Today, kowtowing to politicians will help little, because government policy is part of the broken, lopsided system. Politics can do little about a society hobbled by more workers than work, and massively undemocratic concentrations of wealth.

But faced with such circumstances, some individuals and communities refuse to cave. They prove the long-term viability of collaborative business models and public-private hybrids. They invest money into new industries, even during recession, and draft new business categories driven by what Alperovitz calls a “triple-bottom-line” model: people, planet, and profits. They stare in the eye of economic despair and answer, “No.”

Alperovitz doesn’t waste readers’ time with pie-in-the-sky notions of how economies ought to run. He focuses instead on how dauntless innovators have successfully built new economic models that should serve to inspire millions to seize their own futures. Looking forward, Alperovitz challenges us to imagine ways we can build upon these successes, forging a society of democratic wealth and renewed community.

These suggestions don’t come easy. Alperovitz doesn’t promise quick fixes. Quite the contrary, he emphasizes the generational nature of his suggestions. We intend to build new social nstitutions that serve the greater good, Alperovitz repeatedly avers. The biennial focus on elections permits others to control our lives. Such essential surrender has successfully stripped democracy from our treasured democratic institutions.

Instead, Alperovitz extols visionary new ways we can assert power autonomously. While nobody can predict the future, we have the choice whether we let the future roll over us, or take a steering hand ourselves. We can continue along our current path, circumscribed by the options others offer. Or we can, in small and growing ways, blaze our own trail.

America is Earth’s richest, largest, most populous nation, which Alperovitz stresses repeatedly. The experiments we undertake don’t stop at our own borders. We have the choice: a new, democratic economy, or more of the same, with the disastrous consequences we see around us. Our past does not control our future.

The Long Haul and the Short Attention Span

Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed

As an amateur reviewer, I have no greater frustration than agreeing with a book’s core thesis, but feeling disappointed by its execution. Take this one: I like Carl Honoré’s claim that we must abandon the myth of the “quick fix,” in which we want to spot-check problems with spit and string and fairy dust. Particularly in light of recent hot-button news, we need to dispel that illusion and reawaken our passion for long-term investment in slow, fundamental remedies.

But when Honoré stops talking abstractions and gets into the details, he becomes an object lesson in his own point. He anchors each of his fourteen very short chapters on a narrative that supports his point, but only spends about half of each chapter on his exemplar story. He name-drops sources old and new, caroms among interesting but loosely organized anecdotes, and doesn’t so much make his point as circle it, waiting for us to make his connections.

What Honoré terms “the slow fix” comprises a range of solutions to life’s problems, which we can apply individually or (ideally) in some combination. We might think of these solutions as character traits, or leadership skills. They include, but are not limited to, long-range thinking, preparing for diverse circumstances, heeding the right advice, and honing our intuition. Our parents tried to teach us these traits as kids, but as adults, we too often need to be reminded.

Again, I agree with this, in principle. But Honoré explicates what each of these means in ways that sprawl all over the map. He will anchor a chapter about, say, fine detail thinking, on the story of an oil rig inspector who accurately predicted a major blowout. But he’ll veer off, for little visible reason, to a paragraph about Steve Jobs, two paragraphs on classical music, a brief discourse on surgical antibiotics. It’s like watching an ADHD student trying to paint.

In my favorite example, Honoré stops a discursion on a successful effort to revive a decrepit urban school, to quote a French marriage counselor. Honoré’s source wants us to understand the importance of finding the unstated story behind one incident: “You cannot understand a Shakespearean play by listening to one soliloquy... A relationship is like a large and complex puzzle, so you need to examine all the pieces and then work out how to fit them together.”

That’s a clever quote, to underscore a valid point. But in context, what does it mean? It’s a prime example of what rhetorician Gerald Graff calls a “hit-and-run quotation,” where an author will throw some citation in, expecting the audience to instinctively understand why it matters. That line deserves to be unpacked more, because thrown out as it is, it looks like an inexplicable digression that slows the pace of an already rocky narrative.

I so much wanted to like this book. Research has shown, time and again, that the key to success rests on long-term investments and tenacity. You can tell how someone will handle work, education, and life by how long they can work on a math problem before they give up. Education journalist Paul Tough stresses the point that long-term perseverance makes more of a difference than sudden flashes of genius.

But Honoré just gives me no place to hang my hat. As he slaloms through his list of bromides, anecdotes, and pointers, he pauses on none of them long enough for them to have any sense of depth, or for them to feel particularly real to me. Though I did take a few valuable lessons from this book, one by one, I really felt Honoré expected me to supply the overarching narrative for him.

Honoré fixes his book among writers like Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, and Charles Duhigg. And not only among them, he quotes them. I keep wondering if Honoré has a new idea for his context. The New Republic reviewed a book by the disgraced Jonah Lehrer as “self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it.” I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but reading this book, I think I now understand.

In his introduction, Honoré admits he falls into the trap of the quick fix, and that he wrote this book as much for himself as for us. To which I reply: and how! Excluding the back matter, this book runs less than 200 pages. Honoré’s important, timely thesis deserves much more conscientious unpacking. Instead, it becomes an object lesson in our society’s addiction to haste.

All Work Is All Play

Jack Hitt

Popping prefab cartons into shape for the assembly line gets tiresome fast, so to shake off boredom, I ramp up my pace, get several places ahead, then jump back and grab more flattened cartons to refill my work station. Normally, this is somebody else’s job. Packing techs, line runners, or anyone passing should replenish our cartons; but their presence is unpredictable. I’d rather take on the challenge of stocking the station myself.

After I do this several times, replenishing cartons, crushing packing boxes, and generally doing two mens’ jobs, Cindy at the next station looks up. “Kevin, are you testing yourself again?”

I pause for a moment. “Yes.”

Cindy has seen me do this before. I’ll do more than my job description requires, sometimes pushing myself to the limits of my strength, just to see if I can do it. I have sometimes attempted more than I can do. I have wrenched myself at times. But I keep doing it, because only doing the minimum is boring. Doing more than required doesn’t just keep me engaged through long midnight shifts; it gives me something for my job to be about.

Psychology has demonstrated that humans derive meaning from complexity. It’s the reason many people see a starry sky as evidence of a benign creator. It’s also the reason why difficult jobs feels more rewarding than simple jobs. I’ve seen many line workers complain about how tedious factory work is, then find ways to do the absolute minimum. Those people tend not to last.

Biohacker Meredith Patterson

Jack Hitt writes about the play principle, the idea that we do more and better work when it feels fun, than when we do it for pay. This idea of intrinsic motivation, getting our momentum to work inside ourselves rather than from an outside authority, has support going back a long way. Writers like Paul Lockhart and Richard Lanham advocate for a return of play to education, but their core arguments apply to the workplace as well.

In perhaps his most engaging passage, Hitt describes sitting for ten hours in a jury-rigged laboratory in a San Francisco apartment with amateur geneticist Meredith Patterson, experimenting with ways to use the transformer from a neon sign to attach a bioluminescent gene to live yogurt cultures. You read that right. But if you think it resembles the tedious “experiments” you ran in high school biology class, you’re wrong

Importantly, Hitt makes gene hacking sound fun. If the tech slaves in America’s biotech firms enjoyed their jobs as much as Patterson does, imagine how much further along science would be today. Imagine lab-grown organs for transplant, inexpensive vaccines for common diseases, or affordable biofuels. But because industrial organization reduces our smartest minds to the level of service station grease monkeys, such progress hasn’t happened yet.

The industrial model now ascendant in America was devised over a century ago, by a machinist and Harvard dropout named Frederick Winslow Taylor. His system was dubbed scientific management, though empirical science had little to do with it. Taylor believed that control should rest entirely in the hands of credentialed managers, not artisanal workers. Labor should remain entirely in the dark about the work they do; they are simple machines.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Reading Taylor’s words now, with his overt disdain for labor and almost magical belief in the goodness of management, looks stunningly naive, especially after managers almost tanked the economy in 2008. But we cannot deny his system has produced some benefits. Standardizing industrial products ensures that any screw I buy will fit the same size screw hole. And the computer I wrote this on would not exist without industrial standards.

But we also know, if we’ve done industrial work, that the marginal cost has been great. Because machines are expensive, scientific management has created an unbridgeable gap between labor and management. And it has created generations of workers who have no investment in the job they do, because the job is dull, repetitive, and bland.

My managers love to tell us line workers how vital we are to the company’s economic viability, yet I have to find ways to make meaning in my work. Political economists like David Brooks and (yeah, I’ll say it) Mitt Romney claim that if we aren’t rich, it’s our own fault, yet my peers are refused any stake. I believe our industrial masters would see a flush of wealth, for themselves and the nation, if they could restore a sense of complexity and play to the work we do for pay.

One Possible Cure For Small Town Malaise

Ever since Sinclair Lewis diagnosed the “village virus” in his 1920 classic Main Street, America has remained deeply divided in its feelings about small town life. On the one hand, we often treat small towns and rural areas as bastions of earthy virtues and interlaced community. On the other, small towns often produce small minds, and serve as seething cauldrons of resentment. Unfortunately, both views are right, which means both views are wrong.

Anyone who has lived in America’s small towns recently, however, knows our rural communities are certainly one thing: marginal. This has been the state of American village life since at least the Eisenhower era, when cheap cars and postwar prosperity led to a concentration of industrial might in metropolitan areas. Small towns became stopovers on American transportation routes—and, with the rise of Interstates and cheap air travel, became not even that.

Nowadays, John Mellencamp serenades his happy memories of small town life, though his tours stay in cities large enough to support arena venues. Bill Clinton touted his birth in tiny Hope, Arkansas, while eliding that, when he was a boy, his mother moved the family to the resort suburb of Hot Springs, or that he left Arkansas altogether to commence his career. People tout small town origins, but have to leave to make something of themselves.

Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, describes studies that have indicated why some of the world’s largest cities have also proven the most creatively fertile. Where large, diverse populations interact, people have the opportunity to discover new points of view, prod others to greater accomplishments, and test each other’s capacities. Simply put, as the population increases, productivity increases, geometrically.

This thesis has its limitations. Were size the only relevant variable, Lagos, Nigeria, would be as creative and prosperous as London, which is about the same size. But if we look at those cities and neighborhoods that have proven the most productive over the years—Greenwich Village, Haight Ashbury, Bloomsbury, the Left Bank—we see they aren’t just populous. They’re also arranged to facilitate interaction among diverse populations.

Manhattan’s White Horse Tavern, famous for Dylan Thomas’s fatal drinking binge, began life as a longshoreman’s watering hole. Hampstead pubs famously draw artists, laborers, businessmen, and tourists. People meet one another across economic and social lines. Even the streets favor interactions, since crowded main roads slow traffic and advantage pedestrians. How many novels, paintings, and business ideas were conceived in Paris Metro stations, I wonder?

By contrast, the small towns where I’ve lived have a self-segregating tendency. We have working class bars, professional bars, student bars, sports bars, and their clientele never mixes. Different coffee shops and tea houses, different restaurants and businesses, cater to distinct customer bases, deepening divides. Too often, small town dwellers never meet anyone particularly different from themselves.

This is heightened by village layouts. Low land values and minimal space competition means towns sprawl. Without a car, small town dwellers are stranded, but with cars, they never meet anyone they don’t want to. People can ensure they only frequent businesses that cater to them, not ones near where they live or work. One of my town’s major coffee shops is drive-thru only, so you can enjoy your mocha frappe without any messy human entanglements.

Where communities have economy enough to encourage new building, that tendency becomes more pronounced. Single-use developments include similarly sized houses on identical lots, forbidding mixing of economic strata. They also seldom have restaurants, bars, shops, or hangouts where people can meet. They may have a few lots zoned commercial, but building costs ensure only chain businesses, like fast food franchises, can afford to move in.

In Nebraska, where I live, politicians invest much hair-pulling in wondering what it takes to keep ambitious, educated young people from leaving the state. Yet large-scale economic development funds exclusively create pedestrian-hostile towns which minimize human interaction. Even for those whose education and connections ensure economic mobility, social mobility has dwindled to insignificance. Free flow of ideas just doesn’t happen.

Shifting design priorities to boost interaction would alleviate at least part of the ennui that blankets many small American towns. If people could sit down to eat and drink in the same space as a callused tradesman and a necktied attorney, they would encounter new ideas, which they could then experiment with, until they created something truly new. If people had to walk to work, they could enjoy the surprise of simply saying hello to people they don’t see every day.

Such changes wouldn’t be a silver bullet to save America’s small communities. Many towns need to modernize their infrastructure and overcome cultural habits that defy the times. But if people could meet newer, more diverse groups, such towns would be well on their way to achieving such much-needed goals. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to overcome inertia.

Manly Men in a Girly Church

Look around any Christian church service. Chances are, among adults, women outnumber men two to one in the pews. Unmarried men are largely absent. A man may occupy the pulpit, but women probably do everything else, from presenting liturgy to performing music to distributing communion. Media producer David Murrow noticed this, and set out to discover Why Men Hate Going to Church. His findings seem bleak at first, but ultimately offer a great deal of hope.

Statistics abound that men avoid church. This applies across congregations, denominations, races, and nations. Other religions don’t have this problem; it crosses every demographic divide, but is a uniquely Christian phenomenon. It isn’t even new; Murrow cites one historian who traces this divide back seven centuries. Not coincidentally, this corresponds with when Church iconography started emphasizing a battered, bleeding Jesus versus a smiling Virgin Mary.

Though many have disparaged church as a patriarchal institution, anybody who watches how congregations run will notice that men occupy a thin stratum at the top of the pyramid. The pastorate remains a largely male occupation, in some churches exclusively male. But women dominate committees, volunteer organizations, and all other nuts-and-bolts aspects of the congregation. One man may “lead,” but women make the place run.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when church becomes feminine. Theology has grown spongy, emphasizing love and minimizing ethics. Music has become feminized, and many church composers write songs about being “in love with Jesus.” Many congregations have replaced altar paraments with lace doilies and flower arrangements. Even the typical Jesus portrait renders Him demure and androgynous. No wonder dudes don’t want to show up on Sunday.

This doesn’t accord with the scriptural Christ. Sure, He urged us to love one another, welcomed children, and promised us rest in Him. But He also drove out the money changers, called the Pharisees some pretty harsh names, and never backed down from a just fight. Empires don’t execute hairy provincial preachers for gently suggesting people get along and pray more. But you wouldn’t know that from the contemporary church.

David Murrow

This trend pushes men out of America’s churches in droves. Though most American men self-identify as Christian, they see church as an impingement on their masculinity. Six days a week, we have to be butch, mighty, and ready for any challenge; but on the Sabbath, we have to take on girly appurtenances and act dainty. Guys ain’t having it.

Murrow admits this sounds sexist at first blush. And he admits there are men in church; he’s one of them. But church as it stands attracts men who are primarily emotive, artistic, and introspective. Men like Murrow and me. Men, in short, who think like women. These are the men who go to seminary. This leads to the effete vicars so familiar to Monty Python fans.

Of course, there are also women who think like men. Just don’t look for them in church.

This is more than a gender issue. Murrow collates numerous statistics demonstrating that churches dominated by women tend to focus internally, fear making tough decisions, and resist needed changes, for fear of hurting anyone’s feelings. Without a balance of the masculine and feminine, like Jesus Himself demonstrated, congregations founder. Only those churches that attract both men and women have a future.

Fortunately, all is not bleak. Murrow spotlights many steps congregations have already taken to reverse their loss of men. One church he extols, led by a female pastor, reversed its decline by simply asking, while preparing the weekly service, what would a solid blue-collar dude think of this? Reclaiming men doesn’t require revised theology, new liturgy, or male dominion. It just requires keeping men’s unique psychological needs in mind.

Attracting men doesn’t mean discouraging women. Indeed, since women are allowed into male domains in ways men can’t enter female domains, women will come to churches that invite men. Note, this doesn’t mean they should come or they ought to come. Murrow doesn’t deal in abstractions. He shows how real churches, taking practical steps, have boosted both men and women in the pews by keeping men in mind.

If we want men back in our churches, we don’t need new music or new ministries. We don’t need showmanship or spectacle. Churches simply need to relearn how to speak the language of dudes in the regular activities they carry on right now. Men show up when they feel needed and useful. Jesus started a movement with twelve guys. Surely the modern church can do just as well.

Companies That Know Our Needs Before We Do

Why did the iPod and Kindle create an appetite in consumers while the Zune and the Sony Reader didn’t? Why do grocery buyers regard visiting Safeway a chore, but look forward to shopping at Wegman’s? Adrian Slywotzky investigates these questions in Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It. But he overtalks the point and, unfortunately, blurs the line between business writing and advertising.

Consider: did you have any idea you were unhappy with Lackluster Video before Reed Hastings launched Netflix? Did you feel the need for constant social networking before you signed up for Facebook? Of course not. Yet the creative minds behind these breakthroughs recognized needs so completely unmet that we hadn’t even noticed we had them yet. Now we can’t imagine our lives without these cushy conveniences.

Slywotzky admits from the beginning that he has no simple formula for what he calls “demand creators,” those producers and vendors who sell what we never knew we needed. Though he identifies several areas where future developments will happen, he can’t give you a step-by-step guide to creating demand. Demand creation relies on creativity and insight. Our best hope is to learn from those who have done it before.

It may seem that many demand creators have their leaps only once. Slywotzky published this book before Netflix’s recent flame-out. While Reed Hastings had a good idea, his follow-through hasn’t been exemplary. He had one idea that revolutionized the media distribution business, but he has peddled a great deal of confusion lately. Can we really learn anything from someone who misjudged his audience so badly?

Yet remember how many times Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos hit the nail on the head. Each correctly anticipated not only what customers wanted, but how developing technology made fulfilling those wants possible. And technology isn’t even necessary. The Wegman’s grocery chain has stayed ahead of the competition for decades by simply making their stores a destination, and by not expanding faster than economic realities permit.

Some demand creation requires routine awareness. Jeff Bezos recognized the Kindle’s potential when he saw a Sony Reader, which was well designed but poorly pitched, and realized it could benefit from Amazon.com’s infrastructure. Other demand creation is more studious. California-based CareMore delivers managed medical care to the elderly at steep discounts while improving quality because market research returned results that appear downright counterintuitive.

Adrian Slywotzky

For all their differences, though, demand creators share an ethic of recognizing their customers as real people with real needs. Even non-profits like Teach For America or the Seattle Opera recognize their audiences, in very real ways, as customers. The institutions have something people need—such as education or culture—and their first responsibility is to match their product with others’ needs.

But I have difficulty understanding the mental habits Slywotzky wants me to gain because his segmented structure doesn’t let me spot patterns. He discusses two or three companies per chapter, from profitable industries to philanthropic institutions, but by the next chapter, those examples vanish. I’d love to know how Zipcar embodies Slywotzky’s various virtues, but once he’s done with it, he never mentions it again.

And his praise of companies he admires goes on at length. His praise, in particular, of Tetra Pak and the Kindle go well beyond what we need to understand these products’ success. Slywotzky’s stories mount up, with such unflagging praise that he starts to sound like a PR flack. Is he paid by the line? My eyes glaze over, and I find myself wondering whether I’ve really learned anything in the last fifteen or twenty pages.

Business writing must respect that business innovators lead busy lives. They generally exceed forty hours, and time spent reading should be remunerative in some way, whether by teaching something useful or providing needed psychological refreshment. Writers must put every anecdote, every discursion, every rumination on trial for its life. Anything that doesn’t advance the point must go.

This relatively long book could use a firm editor. It’s nearly a third longer than similar business books, and even at that length, feels disjointed. Much as I appreciate the individual points, and as much as I they advance ongoing discussions, this book doesn’t go nearly as far as it should. Inquisitive readers can gain plenty from reading, but it simultaneously goes way longer than it should, and doesn’t do its topics justice.

I’ve identified a demand I didn’t know I had. I demand this necessary book, with the numerous kinks worked out.