IMPLICIT BIAS--THE INFLUENCE OF STEREOTYPES

February 23, 2015

REFLECTIONS ON TWO OUTSTANDING BOOKS:  "BLIND SPOT" AND "WHISTLING VIVALDI"
  
These two excellent books have provided perspective on the implicit bias that discloses itself in stereotypes of two kinds – stereotypes we have of others and self-imposed stereotypes we have of ourselves – which have a negative effect on behavior in many cases and, in some (i.e. a positive self-imposed stereotype of ourselves) actually have a positive effect.
 
In “Blind Spot,” we encounter the telling test where we are asked to associate pleasant words and unpleasant words with African-American and European-American children’s faces.  It discloses in a very uncomfortable way the stereotypes that I have which are more likely to link negative connotations with African-Americans.
 
What is most encouraging in this book and in “Whistling Vivaldi” is that it is possible to change existing associations.  Data has shown that hidden bias can be weakened by relatively minimal interventions; for example, showing student research subjects pictures of 10 admirable Black Americans and 10 despicable White Americans show weaker White=good association in a subsequent test.  
 
As Claude Steele writes in “Whistling Vivaldi,” the purpose of his book is not to show that stereotype threat is so powerful and persistent that it can’t be overcome.  Quite the contrary:  it intends to show how, as an unrecognized factor in our lives, it can contribute to some of most vexing personal and societal problems, but doing quite feasible things to reduce this threat can lead to dramatic improvement in these problems.
 
The book underscores that although we have a strong sense of ourselves as autonomous individuals, “evidence consistently shows that contingencies tied to our social identities do make a difference in shaping our lives, from the way we perform in certain situations to the careers and friends we choose.”
 
It presents a set of actions we can take as individuals to reduce the impact of these threats in our own lives, as well as what we can do as a society to reduce their impact in schools and work places.
 
The lack of intimate association, Black versus White, is still with us.
 
When Black and White students were asked how many close friends of a different race they had, among the six closest friends, neither White nor Black students averaged even one friend from the other racial group.
 
As just one example of what an established stereotype can do, when a math test was given to women who were first told that the test would disclose gender differences, when in other words women could feel the stigma of doing poorer in a mathematical test, women did worse than equally skilled men.  However, among women participants who were told that the test did not show gender differences, women performed at the same level as men.  The same thing happened in testing with Blacks where there was a difference in establishing the nature of the test up front as to whether it measured intelligence.

The same impact of a stereotype being reinforced before a test held true among older people.
 
Steele attributes the decline in test performance to “over-efforting” based on the desire to overcome a bias.
 
The book establishes clear evidence that people will tend to favor their own group.  We see that even in learning a language at the very earliest stage.  “No type of person or a nation of people has shown immunity to this ‘minimal group effect.’”
 
One must avoid cues that implicate one’s marginality.  For example, “do I belong.”  This takes me back to that unforgettable encounter I had with Lloyd Ward, our first African-American General Manager at P&G, who when I asked him if there was anything I could have done to have kept him with the company, he answered “no.  I didn’t feel in the house.”  
 
In Steele’s words, there may be “a principle of remedy if enough cues in the setting can lead members of a group to feel ‘identity-safe’”.
 
Another powerful insight in the book, which I can identify with so well, is the story of a professor who had “faith” in the book’s author as a “worthy partner.”  “Somehow his assumptions about what he was doing as a scientist included me as, at least potentially, a capable colleague.”  That captures precisely the cognitive and emotional reaction I had to the chance encounter I had with John Smale when he was two or three levels above me in the company and asked me in the course of a car ride coming back from a presentation by an agency head, what I had felt about that presentation.  He made me feel like a “worthy partner.”
 
There is another question raised by the author on how to provide critical feedback to a student, such as an African-American, or a woman, who might feel negatively stereotyped.  His conclusion was that it didn’t work to try to “be neutral” in giving feedback, nor by prefacing the feedback with a “generally assuring positive statement.”  Black students didn’t trust these forms of feedback, the author writes.  The one form of feedback which did work, for both Black and White students, was described as the feedback-giver explaining that he “used high standards” in evaluating the material.  Having read the students’ essays, he believed the students could meet those standards.  His criticism, this form of feedback implies, was offered to help the students meet his high standards.
 
Another intriguing example that illustrated lessening stereotypes occurred in a racially integrated classroom.  Teachers gave each student an envelope instructing them to write down their two or three most important values and then a brief paragraph about why these values were important to them.  In other words, the value statements were put in the form of a personal narrative.  It took only 15 minutes.  That process resulted in the African-Americans doing better in their tests.
 
In conclusion, the author sites a “preponderance of evidence” which strongly suggests that “under-performance, when not caused by discrimination is likely caused by stereotype and identity threats and the interfering reactions they cause.”
 
A final perspective which opened my mind is that while all of us have identities, they are truly multiple identities.  No one or two or three identities will capture or represent a whole person.  And also, identities are fluid, “their influence on us is activated by their situational relevance.”

 

THE BENEFITS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT PERSIST OVER GENERATIONS

February 15, 2015

THE UNACCOUNTED FOR MULTI-GENERATONAL BENEFITS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

On Thursday and Friday of last week,  I  attended a Childhood Development Summit in Helena, Montana. In attendance were about 250 early childhood providers and funders and other NGO leaders.

As one part of the Summit, I participated in a 4-person panel. One of my fellow panelists was the Sheriff of near-by Cascade County, Bob Edwards. 

The Sheriff brought home the agonizing outcome of poor youth development which we have learned about so often. His prison, with authorized 380 beds, now has 420 inmates. Of them, 80% of the women inmates are high school drop outs and 75% of the male inmates are drop outs.

But that was not the most electrifying part of what he had to say! No, that was when he told us that:

-Prisoners whom he brought in to jail 20 years ago, are coming back again and again, calling him by his first name and  congratulating him as they have seen him being promoted. Recidivism is rampant.

-And it gets worse: he now has prisoners coming in who ask to be put in a particular cell block so they can be with their father who is there in prison at the same time. Or a wife comes in, asking to be near her husband who is already there. 

-It gets even worse: The Sheriff is now seeing incarcerations involving three generations of the same family: grandfather, father and son. At the same time. This horrifying spectacle led me to recall being in a P&G plant years ago and having dinner with a Grandfather, father and son, all working there at the same time. What a contrast!

We talk about breaking the cycle of poverty. I have read  that among children born in 1990 to a family in the bottom income  quintile, only 9% will graduate from college. It is no coincidence this is the same percentage (9%) who moved to the upper income quintile. 

But what Sheriff Edwards brought home in an unforgettable way is that we have to break the cycle of criminality. 

Childhood development is critical to this.

Sheriff Edwards' deeply-felt testimony brought home to me that helping a child achieve what early education and caring development  can provide impacts not only them. It will impact their spouse, their children, their grandchildren.

We know that  the return on investment in the development of a child pays out at better than 2:1, considering only the higher income of the child and his or her lower costs of repeat grades, special education, involvement in the criminal system, etc.

Just think how much that return is expanded as the benefits of a mature, stable income-earning adult are passed down through his or her children and then their children.

We have the opportunity to go a long way in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and criminal behavior. We must seize it.  

We read about nother dimension of the rippling impact of early childhood development  in a column in today's Enquirer written by Catherine Rampell. It recognizes how good child care and pre-K options allow parents and often single parents* to be more fully employed in better jobs. I have included portions of this column below:

  Opinion writer  February 9  
In  2013’s and  2014’s State of the Union speeches, President Obama proposed universal pre-kindergarten as a means of helping poor children catch up with their richer peers. 
In this year’s speech, he eschewed all mention of universal pre-K. Instead he spoke of “ universal child care,” as a means of helping working parents. 
Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.  View Archive
Today, both proposals seem to have lost any momentum they may have initially had. Which is a shame, because they are actually two sides of the same coin — and, recognized as such, could provide a sort of double dividend for the American economy. 
At this point, you’ve probably already heard all about how public spending on high-quality preschool helps poor kids achieve more later in life and improves the government’s bottom line as a result. As  research from Nobel economics laureate James J. Heckman has showed, early investment in disadvantaged children improves academic achievements, career prospects and, ultimately, their lifetime income, which brings in more tax dollars. It also reduces public spending on criminal justice, remedial education, health care, and safety-net programs that disproportionately get used by people who grew up poor. Heckman’s work suggests that a dollar spent on high-quality early-childhood education programs produces a higher return on investment than does almost any major alternative. 
But that’s looking only at the effect of early-childhood education programs on kids. Improving access to high-quality child care and preschool offers even bigger returns when you also consider their effect on parents. 
That’s because they can help parents who want to work stay attached to the labor force, thereby improving their lifetime earning potential, too. 
Survey data suggest that many stay-at-home mothers want to work outside the home, at least part time. Why is this? The problem  probably isn’t sexist husbands. Rather, families weigh the costs of paid child care against mom’s post-tax take-home pay and decide that it’s just not worth it for her to take a job. If every dollar of mom’s paycheck goes toward child care and other household help, she might as well handle all these responsibilities herself.  
But that’s the wrong calculus: By dropping out of the workforce, these mothers are not just eliminating their current earnings; they are depressing their future earnings, too. Research shows that women who take time off from paid work to raise kids suffer permanently lower wages. Families are considering only the immediate problem of money coming in and going out today, rather than the long-term problem of how a decision to outsource some household production today might affect the family’s collective earnings tomorrow.  
*Over 50% of children under 6 live with families where all available parents work.  
**********************************************************************************************
We see here two additional reasons why providing early childhood development support through home visiting of the kind offered by "Every Child Succeeds" and quality pre-K pay out abundantly,  financially and in the social health of  our communities and nation.

SURELY THE TIME HAS COME TO ACT. 


"WHAT EXCUSE TO WE HAVE FOR NOT WORKING TOGETHER TODAY?"

WHAT EXCUSE DO WE HAVE FOR NOT WORKING TOGETHER TODAY?”

Helping Others Who Need Our Help
 in Recognition of Our Common Humanity


More than a decade ago, noted historian Jim Horton was commenting about the meaning of the Underground Railroad, and he said something close to the following:

“If people back then would help others, not even knowing who they were and at risk to their own lives, what excuse do we have for not working together today?”

That powerful statement has motivated me from the day I heard it.  It lies at the heart of my commitment to tell the story of the Underground Railroad and other stories like it which demonstrate man’s humanity and one’s willingness to help another who needs help notwithstanding the personal risk involved.

I was recently reminded of this as I read a remarkable diary of a woman named Iris Origo who lived in the Tuscan countryside during the height of World War II.*  The German Nazi Army was in control of the surrounding land, yet there were allied prisoners of war who had escaped from Nazi internment camps and others who had become detached from their units.

This diary includes many remarkable stories which bring to life the same values of courage and cooperation and perseverance which undergird the story of the Underground Railroad.  They are yet another example of why stories like those of the Underground Railroad can provide inspiration on how we can live at our best today by helping others who need our help no matter where we live.

Iris Origo owned an estate not far from Florence.  She, along with other partisans were risking their lives rescuing escaped allied prisoners of war and other allied soldiers who had been detached from their units.  I love the way she explained the motivation of those who were helping these soldiers at the risk of their own lives.  It reminded me of what motivated the heroes of the Underground Railroad.

“What, it may be asked,” she wrote, “was the motive underlying the generous help given to the hunted Allied prisoners of war by the Italian countryfolk, often at the risk of their own lives?  It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute it to any political – or even patriotic – motive.  There was, it is true, a certain amount of anti-German and anti-Fascist feeling, especially among those peasants whose sons had been in the army against their will.  But the true motive was a far simpler one.  It has been described by an Italian partisan as ‘the simplest of all ties between one man and another; the tie that arises between the man who asks for what he needs, and the man who comes to his aid as best he can.  No unnecessary emotion or pose.’” 

*War in Val D’Orcia – An Italian War Diary – 1943-1944 by Iris Origo



An English officer, himself an escaped prisoner of war, who owed his life to the help given him in this manner, expressed views in almost identical words:  ‘The peasants’ native sympathy with the under-dog and the outcast asserted itself.  Simple Christianity impelled them to befriend those complete strangers, feed them, clothe them, and help them on their way.  All over Italy this miracle was to be seen, the simple dignity of humble people who saw in the escaped prisoners not representatives of a power to be withstood or placated, but individuals in need of their help.’”

This example was repeated many times:

Of the 70,000 Allied p.o.w.s at large in Italy on September 8th, 1943, nearly half escaped, either crossing the frontier to Switzerland or France, or eventually rejoining their own troops in Italy; and each one of these escapes implies the complicity of a long chain of humble, courageous helpers throughout the length of the country. “I can only say,” wrote General O’Connor to Iris Origo, “that the Italian peasants and others behind the line were magnificent.  They could not have done more for us.  They hid us, escorted us, gave us money, clothes and food – all the time taking tremendous risks…We English owe a great debt of gratitude to those Italians whose help alone made it possible for us to live, and finally to escape.”

Iris Origo concluded with these words:

“It will, I think, be obvious that I love Italy and its people.  But I have become chary of generalizations about countries and nations; I believe in individuals, and in the relationship of individuals to one another.  When I look back upon these years of tension and expectation, of destruction and sorrow, it is individual acts of kindness, courage or faith that illuminate them; it is in them that I trust.  I remember a British prisoner of war in the Val d’Orcia helping the peasant’s wife to draw water from the well, with a ragged, beaming small child at his heels.  I remember the peasant’s wife mending his socks, knitting him a sweater, and baking her best cake for him, in tears, on the day of his departure.”

There were other heroes who reached out to save the lives of others.  One of them was the Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal della Costa.  When some of his nuns were arrested because they had given shelter to some Jewish women in their convent, he went straight to the German Command.  “I have come to you,” he said, “because I believe you, as soldiers, to be people who recognize authority and hierarchy – and who do not make subordinates responsible for merely carrying out orders.  The order to give shelter to those unfortunate Jewish women was given by me:  therefore I request you to free the nuns, who have merely carried out orders, and to arrest me in their stead.” 

“The German immediately gave orders for the nuns to be freed,” Ms. Origo writes, “but permitted himself to state his surprise that a man like the Cardinal should take under his protection such people as the Jews, the scum of Europe, responsible for all the evils of the present day.  The Cardinal did not enter upon the controversy.  ‘I look upon them,’ he said, ‘merely as persecuted human beings; as such it is my Christian duty to help and defend them.  One day,’ he gave himself the pleasure of adding, ‘perhaps not far off, you will be persecuted:  and then I shall defend you.’”


January 22, 2015

“WORLD ORDER” BY HENRY KISSINGER-THE DANGER OF "MESSIANIC VISIONS"

This is one of the most erudite, comprehensive accumulations of wisdom which I’ve ever read. 


It reveals the insidious impact of "messianic visions" of one's country 
or religion or dogma of any kind that become so "exclusionary" that the rights 
of others are ignored or given scant respect and at worst become the rationale 
for killing others. 

I am not sure there is any antidote to this other than the belief that we are 
all creatures of God endowed with God-given rights-- even though history sadly 
demonstrates that  this antidote is often not strong enough to overcome the 
human tendency to seek meaning for one's existence by comparing ourselves as a 
group to some "other" group. 

I will try to illuminate, using Kissinger’s words, some of these multiple
“messianic visions” which have brought with them great tragedy as well as no small
amount of good. 

Today,these “messianic visions", if pursued unilaterally and without recognition of other people's history and culture and respect for the right of everyone to
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” will continue to lead to enormous
human suffering.

Theme #1.  The messianic ambition of the United States and how it has formed our policy, leading to great good and considerable harm.  For example: 

·      As John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer who left East Anglia to escape religious suppression, preached aboard the Arbella in 1630, bound for New England, God intended America as an example for “all people”:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.”  For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us.

None doubted that humanity and its purpose would in some way be revealed and fulfilled in America.

·      As the frontiers of the nation crept across the continent, the expansion of America was seen as the operation of a kind of law by nature.  When the United States practiced what elsewhere was defined as imperialism, Americans gave it another name:  “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

·      The American experience supported the assumption that peace was the natural condition of humanity, prevented only by other countries’ unreasonableness or ill will.

·      John Quincy Adams summed up these sentiments in 1821, in a tone verging on exasperation at other countries’ determination to pursue more complicated and devious courses.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendships, or equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.  She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.  She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.  She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

·      In 1839, as the official United States Exploring Expedition reconnoitered the far reaches of the hemisphere and the South Pacific, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review published an article heralding the United States as “the great nation of futurity,” disconnected from and superior to everything in history that had preceded it:

The American people having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of national Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its crimes.  On the contrary, our national birth was the beginning of a new history.

We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march?  Providence is with us, and no earthly power can.

The United States was thus not simply a country but an engine of God’s plan and the epitome of world order.

Talk about haughty presumption.

·      Like many American leaders before him, Woodrow Wilson asserted that a divine dispensation had made the United States a different kind of nation.  “It was as if,” Wilson told the graduating class at West Point in 1916, “in the Providence of God a continent had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful people, who loved liberty and the rights of men more than they loved anything else, to come and set up an unselfish commonwealth.”

Nearly all of Wilson’s predecessors in the presidency would have subscribed to such a belief.  Where Wilson differed was in his assertion that an international order based on it could be achieved within a single lifetime, even a single administration.

Theme #2.  The messianic vision of Islam.  Its ambition to rule the whole world.  For example:

·      Other religions—especially Christianity—have had their own crusading phases, at times exalting their universal mission with comparable fervor and resorting to analogous methods of conquest and forced conversions.  (Spanish conquistadores abolished ancient civilizations in Central and South American in the sixteenth century in a similar spirit of world-conquering finality.)  The difference is that the crusading spirit subsided in the Western world or took the form of secular concepts that proved less absolute (or less enduring) than religious imperatives.  Over time, Christendom became a philosophical and historical concept, not an operational principle of strategy or international order.  That process was facilitated because the Christian world had originated a distinction between “the things which are Caesar’s” and “the things that are God’s,” permitting an eventual evolution toward pluralistic, secular-based foreign policies within a state-based international system.

·      No single society has ever had the power, no leadership the resilience, and no faith the dynamism to impose its writ enduringly through the world.  Universality has proved elusive for any conqueror, including Islam.  As the early Islamic Empire expanded, it eventually fragmented into multiple centers of power.

·      In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.”  It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state.  In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life.

Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power.  And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived.  “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” 

Ambiguities lingered in al-Banna’s text, but the record of many Islamist thinkers and movements since then has resolved them in favor of a fundamental rejection of pluralism and secular international order.  The religious scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned and influential version of this view.  In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order that became a foundational text of modern Islam.

In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system of offering the only true form of freedom:  freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order).  Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran.

In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale.

·      As Khomeini elaborated, “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.”  This would require an epic struggle against “America, the global plunderer,” and the Communist materialist societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”

Theme #3.  The messianic vision of China. 

·      From its unification as a single political entity in 221 B.C. through the early twentieth century, China’s position at the center of world order was so ingrained in its elite thinking that in the Chinese language there was no word for it.  Only retrospectively did scholars define the “Sinocentric” tribute system.  In this traditional concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the world.  Its Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin between the human and the divine.  His purview was not a sovereign state of “China”—that is, the territories immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,” of which China formed the central, civilized part:  “the Middle Kingdom,” inspiring and uplifting the rest of humanity. 

In this view, world order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of competing sovereign states.  Every known society was conceived of as being in some kind of tributary relationship with China, based in part on its approximation of Chinese culture; none could reach equality with it.

A Chinese foreign ministry was not established until the mid-nineteenth century, and then perforce to deal with intruders from the West.  Even then, officials considered their task the traditional practice of barbarian management, not anything that might be regarded as Westphalian diplomacy.

Russia, too, has had its messianic vision, one rekindled by President Putin in recent years.

Needless to say, Nazi Germany was propelled by Hitler's corrupt messianic vision of an exclusive Aryan race ruling the world

 It is from the cloak of exclusive messianic visions that war and untold human tragedy flow.  It is in the failure of these visions to recognize that we all have endowed God-given rights that need to be respected and honored.

*****

Some other mind-opening reflections from Kissinger:

·      We will usually be better served as Edmund Burke once wrote, “to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea, and to push for the more perfect.”

·      In the United States, the quest for world order functions on two levels: the salvation of universal principles needs to be paired with the recognition of the reality of other regions’ history and culture.  We failed the test on balance many times, including in our relationship with Russia over the past decade.  We failed when we intervened in Iraq as we did and in Vietnam as we did decades before that. 

·      Kissinger relates that, in his youth, he was brash enough to think himself able to pronounce on “The Meaning of History.”  He now knows, he says, “that history’s meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared; a question we must attempt to answer as best we can and recognition that it will remain open to debate; that each generation will be judged whether the greatest, most consequential issues of the human condition have been faced, and the decision to meet these challenges must be taken by statesmen before it is possible to know what the outcome may be.”

·      Order should not have priority over freedom.  But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.  The quest for humane values, the expression of elevated principles is a first step; they must then be carried through the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of all human affairs which is the task of policy.

·      Great statesman, or I would say leaders, however different their personalities, almost invariably had an instinctive feeling for the history of their societies.  As Edmnud Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity who never looked back to their ancestors.”

·      There are traps in the all-pervasive technology that exists today.  Approbation has become the goal, Kissinger says.   Communication risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture short-term approbation.  Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future.  The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing, per Kissinger.  We’re seeing a lot of that these days.  The challenge of technology is captured in a poem of T.S. Eliot: 

“Where is the Life we’ve lost in living it? 

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? 

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Kissinger:  “Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, interpretation, at least in the foreign policy world, depend on context and relevance.




FM_WorldOrder_HenryKissinger122914

A Study in the Power of Trust and Teamwork-"Boys in the Boat"

December 24, 2014


“The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown

A magnificent story of nine young men who labored valiantly with two great coaches from the University of Washington to win the Olympic Gold Medal in 1936 in Berlin.

It is a story that vividly brings to life the power of trust and teamwork and giving one’s last ounce of effort for a noble cause.

It made me appreciate  even more than I had before the values to be gained from great sportsmanship. I came to see as never before how crew like other team sports teaches much of what is most important about life.

It teaches teamwork, for the synchronized effort of the eight crew members and coxswain is fundamental for success.  It teaches the importance of practice, practice, practice.  Of dedication to technique.  It teaches the importance of drawing on the last ounce of one’s energy and courage, past the point of feeling the body could do anymore, or the mind either.  As George Yeoman Pocock, the designer of virtually all the winning crew shells of that generation said, “where is the spiritual power of rowing?  The losing of self entirely to the cooperative effort of the crew as a whole.” 

Joe Rantz, who emerges as perhaps the “hero” of the book, though every one of these boys was a hero, discovered the moment that led him to break through was when Pocock told him that he needed to learn how to trust. “Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power working within you that is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Sometimes you will feel as if you’ve rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.”

As the “Husky Clipper” (Washington U.’s boat) approached the finish line, author Brown vividly recalls the scene,  “Joe realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win the race, beyond what he was already doing.  Except for one thing.  He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it.  He had known that in that instant that there could be no hesitation, no shred of indecision.  He had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself off a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the shell on his blade.  And, he had done it.  Over and over, 44 times per minute, he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not just believing but knowing that the other boys would be there for him, all of them, moment by precious moment.”

Trust in the team. Again and again, I have seen it play out. At P&G, at Yale, at Disney.

The team’s coach, Al Ubrickson, said it this way: “Every man in the boat had absolute confidence in every one of his mates. Why they won cannot be attributed to individuals. Heart felt cooperation all spring was responsible for the victory.”

I am reminded of a belief expressed by the legendary football coach, Vince Lombardi. “I don’t necessarily have to like my associates, but as a man I must love them. Love their loyalty; love their teamwork. Love respects the dignity of the individual. Heart power is the strength of a corporation.”

This also took me back to the wonderful words of Marina Keegan, a young Yale valedictorian that tragically died in a car accident driving home with her boyfriend right after her graduation.  She used these eloquent words to describe what she termed as “the opposite of loneliness”. This is what she felt when she was with her classmates:  “there was just this feeling that there were people, an abundance of people, who were in this together.”

People—in this together—an irreplaceable ingredient not only for success but for happiness.

I loved something else that George Yeoman Pocock said in the book:  “Harmony, balance and rhythm.  They are the three things that stay with you your whole life.  Without them, civilization is out of whack.  And that’s why an oarsman, when he gets out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life.  That’s what he gets from rowing.”

There was another telling reflection in the book that bears on how I have sometimes felt in my role and probably how other people have felt as well.  I refer to Joe Rantz’s belief that “he was the weak link in the crew.”  He recognized that he had been added to the boat last and had often struggled to master the technical side of the sport and he, in his view, still tended to row erratically.  “But what Joe didn’t know,” Brown writes, “and what he wouldn’t, in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men, was that every boy in the boat felt exactly the same that summer.  Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in the boat, and that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and that he might fail the others at any moment.  Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen.”

And they did not let it happen. In the final race of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin with Hitler in the stands, “Husky Clipper” passed the finish line 6/10th of a second ahead of the boat from Italy and one second ahead of the German boat. Over the 2,000-meter course and in a race that had taken 6 minutes and 25 seconds—or 385 seconds—the margin between the first and third boat was only 1 second. What testimony to the power of teamwork, preparation and the expenditure of every ounce of effort by every team member. Of such elements are victories gained, in every walk of life.