Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

The leader is the person with the most power in a group. A leader is non-coercive, goal-directed (Joel's note: I think this one is debatable; if someone can effectively veto any other goals, but puts forth no goals of their own, perhaps they are a leader that breaks this definition or an anti-leader; either way, their role clearly has something to do with leadership), and has followers.

A leader, who determines the group mission, is different from a manager, who implements that mission. But this distinction can be blurry, and one person can have both roles.

Great person theory says that all leaders tend to share special traits, such as drive, honesty, motivation, self-confidence, intelligence, domain knowledge, creativity, and flexibility.

Behavioral analysis of leadership suggests several dimensions. One grid is Autocratic to democratic and permissive to directive. Another is high to low person orientation and high to low production oriented; these are two different axes, and grid training is a technique to move people who are low on one or both to high on both, "9,9".

Analysis in terms of followers: the leader-member exchange (LMX) model, which defines "in-groups" and "out-groups"; leaders treat in-group members better. In self-managed teams, a team leader builds trust and teamwork, expands the team's capacity, attempts to create a team identity, exploits (in a positive way) differences between group members, and tries to foresee and influence change. Grassroots leadership empowers people to make decisions.

The attributional approach is a theory in which leaders try to understand and change the causes of followers' behavior. It also describes how followers think about leaders' motivations, e.g., the "rally 'round the flag effect" when followers extend additional trust to leaders when the group is in crisis.

Charismatic leaders exert special power due to personal charisma. Transformational leaders revitalize and transform their organizations.

Contingency theories focus on the relationship between leaders' characteristics and the context in which they lead. Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) contingency theory says that leaders can be evaluated by how they treat the follower they like least (like judging someone by how they treat waiters and servers). A low LPC leader is likely to succeed in environments of low situational control, when impersonal direction is usually appropriate, and high situational control, when the leader has unchallenged power. In context of moderate situational control, a high LPC leader will be more effective. The notion of putting leaders in situations appropriate for their personal capabilities is leader match.

Situational leadership theory defines two axes: task behavior (higher means more direction required) and relationship behavior (higher means more support required). In low task, low relationship, delegation is the best strategy. In low task, high relationship, participation. In high task, high relationship, selling. In High task, low relationship, telling.

Path-goal theory says that followers like leaders who help them on their path to their goal. Leaders can adopt four styles: instrumental, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented.

Normative decision theory says that seven criteria (leader information rule, goal congruence rule, unstructured problem rule, acceptance rule, conflict rule, fairness rule, acceptance priority rule) together suggest which of five basic strategies (autocratic, autocratic with input, consultative with individuals, consultative in group, group decision) is best for a specific context.

The substitutes for leadership framework describes conditions where leaders are not necessary, such as when individual characteristics of workers make leadership unnecessary, or when the jobs or organization are structured to not require leadership.

Leaders can develop via 360-degree feedback, networking, coaching, mentoring, and on-the-job experience.

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Okay, that was the study guide. Now I will stop biting my tongue on my personal interpretations:

• p 504. "In view of all the attention that has been paid to the dishonest dealings of many top business leaders in recent years (e.g., most notably the late Ken Lay and his associates at Enron), it's important to note that successful leaders do, in fact, place a considerable emphasis on ethics and morality." This is the purest bullshit, special pleading of the rankest species. "oh, those guys don't count, because they were caught. real leaders are good people. How do we know that? Because leaders are good." This line of logic comes from the same batch of mental vomit as Bush's assertions that the US doesn't torture, or the idea that, "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
• p 517. Rupert Murdoch's vision is cited as "To provide accurate access to news for people throughout the world." He may have said that, but nothing in his record suggests he's ever believed that for as long as one second.
• p 522. "An airline pilot leading a cockpit crew is expected to take charge and not to seek the consensus of others as she guides the plane onto the runway for a landing." In fact, the most horrible air disaster of all time happened because a pilot, impatient to take off on a foggy runway after many delays, ignored his flight engineer's concerns about another plane possibly being on a runway. 583 people died. It's certainly true that, "when the demands of the task make it clear what a leader should be doing, it is perfectly acceptable for them to focus on the task at hand." But the example cited better illustrates the risk of a leader refusing to listen to subordinates.
• p 529. So, can we run nations through the checklist and see if democracy ever comes out as the appropriate leadership style?
• p 540. Question for discussion: "What special qualities make Chan Suh [founder of Agency,com, an online advertising company] so effective as a leader?" Oh, I know. The quality of being lucky. Lots of people are bold visionaries who create companies in sectors that conventional wisdom says there is no market. It takes leadership to do that. But most of those companies fail; it takes luck to land in a sector that really does explode. Bad leadership will help you destroy a success, but good leadership is not a sufficient condition for success. Again, the premise of the question is that, because person X has success, they must be an effective leader, and to me this is a circular premise.

Ethnocentrism is in-group versus out-group identity; pride in the in-group; disrespect for the out-group. Ethnocentrism is necessary for maintaining group identity, and thus for maintaining groups. Every country's foreign policy discourse is ethnocentric, not just China's.

Okay, I'm having trouble following his point. Looking around the room, I'm not the only one. Looking around the room, I see only two other white people; perhaps the speaker would do better to switch to Chinese? He's reading prepared remarks, and his head goes up and down from the table to eye level every second or so, and if I look directly at him, I get dizzy. The talk is grammatical but, given how much trouble he's having getting to any sort of discernible point, the speaker is ill-served by his poor pronunciation.

Okay, none of the details and examples are registering in my brain, but the gist is that both the Chinese and Americans are ethnocentric. China and other countries are somewhat obsessed with the US; this is somewhat natural given the weight of the US, but many countries magnify that perceived weight. For example, there is a slogan that "the Chinese-American relationship is the weightiest of the weightiest" (it sounds better in Chinese). A sign of progress is that this slogan is no longer used. China's foreign policy elite were thrilled after good Clinton/Zhang Zemin relations, but the Belgrade embassy bombing was very bad for relations.

Many Chinese policy elite—challenge from the audience after the speaker names a Chinese academic: what makes him an elite? Does Deng Xiaoping listen to him? The tone in the rooms starts to turn a bit impatient. The speaker thinks the crowd is hostile because of his position; personally, I can't really figure out what his position is in order to judge it.

Chinese policy elites and newspapers give excess weight to the US; Kissinger and Brzezinski get quoted regularly and the US dominates "foreign"-oriented Chinese newspapers.

Some article titles, loosely translated: "Who else can take the ring after the inevitable decline of the United States". One academic's recent article is "Let's compete against political ideologies with the west." He was explicitly denying there is any universal ideology among men. "China should try to slow down the inevitable decline of the United States." "China's moral hegemony will sustain while the US immoral hegemony will not sustain." An outburst from the audience as an academic is named: "He's not an elite. he's my friend actually"

Obsession with the US will be counterproductive to a more dynamic Chinese foreign policy. Some signs of progress in shedding US obsession. The weight of the US in China's interests has declined. China cannot always use the US perspective on things, human rights, development, etc.

Q: You're saying that China's making its own policy based on its own interest. That's simple; why do you have to spend so much time working through this? What is your sample size? What is your hypothesis? How do you test it? A: (he's talking but I don't follow what he's saying or how it relates to the question.) I'm not taking a quantitative approach. How many articles? Fifty, and more than a hundred pieces ....

Q: Among "elites", have you found anyone promoting universal rights, individual human rights? (interjection from another person at the table: What universal rights? US or Chinese?) A: Because of the Chinese political system, talking about universal rights must be "fuzzy".

Q: Psychologists use experiments, not guesswork. Your sampling could be subject to selection bias. How do you define the foreign policy elite? Look at all their writing, speeches, comments, and then decide what are the dominant themes. (that reminds me of this.) A: Yes, in psychology you can do experiment, but not in foreign policy. You can't do a Cuban Missile Crisis experiment. ... Nietzsche, foucault, ... a lot of things can't be quantified. Interjection: you could use one journal back to 1997 or earlier and study all the words and issues.

Q: Many African-Americans and Hispanics still say in surveys that they are inferior to whites. ... A ...

Q: where is Chinese foreign policy formulated? At the X school, or the "muliao"? A: It's far more open than any time before; Zhang Zemin initiated more openness.

Q: There is a theory that national perception and interest are part of the context of foreign policy. But the elite groups actually express foreign policy.

Q: Who and where to watch for changes in foreign policy? A: Read journals, but it's mostly private internal discussions. I can't name who I think are the most influential; I have a list but I can't tell you.

Q: At X university where I was for some time, perhaps half of students and professors' research focus was on US domestic politics or Sino-US relations.

Q: What's the percentage of Chinese elite have a strong version of ethnocentrism? A maybe 30%.

I wrote in March about the Democratic candidates for president that "I can visualize any of them as an excellent president and I can visualize (and have seen) all three of them disappoint." I wish the future weren't so easy to predict. Obama disappointed in a big way this week with his FISA cave. Sigh.

Some excerpts of what H.R. 6304 does:

• ... permits the government to conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States ...
• ... explicitly permit[s] the government to continue surveillance programs even if the application is denied by the court. The government has the authority to wiretap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use whatever it gathered in the meantime.
• ...ensures the dismissal of all cases pending against the telecommunication companies that facilitated the warrantless wiretapping programs over the last 7 years.

In reaction to the huge response to their last event, SPMI's schedule is blossoming with events. Another full room today (A few more ang moh's here today. Apparently we're all doing the shaved head thing now) for "Collaborating with the Enemy", by Steven Blais of IIL. This event is S$10 for SPMI members, including a very tasty Indian Vegetarian meal (places in the world that have to deal with halal and other religious requirements tend to be very kind to vegetarians as a bonus. Some sort of drawing with a prize over $1000 is announced, which gets a loud murmur going as people dig for their business cards. Given that S$10 each probably doesn't cover catered meals plus rental, IIL must expect to drum up a lot of business here.

Joel's executive summary: Projects must solve problems. Problems come from business. Business analyst, project manager, and system analyst are distinct and mutually exclusive roles. The business analyst role is responsible for ensuring the project solves the problem.

The rest of this post is my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise noted.

The great gap between project managers and those people who want our services. We have to bring in projects that are on time, on budget, and have all the features we promised. And what keeps us from doing this? The customers! When I started they didn't have this gap, they didn't have users. My first system was the automated payroll for the Navy. Punchcards, line printer. Chesty Puller: "I don't really understand this stuff; we have a printer that can print 1400 lines per minute; who can read that?" Not much user interface, the users worked with us, it was fine.

The project manager: what are your requirements?

The business person: I have a problem. You're the IT, you fix it. What are requirements? I have a problem with the annuities system.

PM: Give me some requirements

B: Well etc etc

PM: (to self) this is great, I can use that new java framework and ...

Joel's note: it doesn't seem like hilarity is going to ensue. Summary: the project manager and business person have different goals, contexts, and languages. Process-oriented business versus project-oriented project management. Business teams are together for years; project teams may last two months.

Anecdote about delivering a computer system to which the user responds, "it doesn't feel good." After many weeks, this was articulated into how it looks, how the mouse moves across the screen.

Standard personalities for technical people: INTJ (that sounds familiar. Now can we get the stereotypical FIRO-Bs?). For business people: ESFP.

How does the gap affect the project? changes, delays, scope creep, cost overruns. What tools help deal with this? change management, product acceptance. Joel's note: Hmm, agile techniques are one way to try and deal with this structural problem. I wonder if he'll talk about them, or some other approaches? Here's some thinking on integrating Agile and PMBOK.

I won an award 35 years ago for a US Navy project. On time, under budget, delivered everything promised, never had a defect reported since delivery. Of course, it was never used, and we knew it would never be used before we started working on it. Best project I ever did, because there were no users to mess it up. The point is that a successful project is not the same thing as a successful business. Projects are tactical, not strategic. Strategic business people should not be involved in projects. But now there's a gap between the business needs and the project. Who fills the gap? The PMO? No, it's not their business either.

Let's fill the gap. Organizations have a role for that, whether they label it or not: business analyst. Most of you PMs also do that role. The business analyst's job is to ensure that the project produces a product that solves the problem. The business analyst is a bridge.

As a consultant, I'll be working with a company to improve their project management, and I'll ask, what do you see the role of the business analyst as? And they say, they're a bridge between technical and business. Actually, they are a bridge between problem and solution, which may or may not be technology. The definition of the solution is the requirements. The business analyst establishes the bridge and the project manager gets us across the bridge. In SCRUM we call them the product owner. (Ding! Agile mention. Quick sidenote: I don't want to be mistaken for an Agile cheerleader. My own experiences with Agile are mixed. Whether or not one or more Agile methods is a good solution, they are at least addressing the right problem, which is basically this same gap he's talking about.)

Business Analyst is a role: they define the real business problem, completely and accurately; and "maintains full communication between stakeholders with the problem and solution team". At IBM we weren't allowed to have problems, only challenges.

The business analyst should ask, how will you know that we've solved your problem? If there isn't an answer, there isn't a problem. When we have that, we have acceptance criteria, a contract. The issue is that many times, the business doesn't know their real problem. Incidentally this happens well before we have a project.

If customers get more features, it's scope creep. If IT throws in some extra things, it's gold-plating. Notice who's naming these things.

Incidentally, this guy is a very good speaker, even though he's got powerpoint in the background. I think he could spike 80% of his slides, leaving only a few diagrams, and be better for it. But perhaps the other, wordier slides, which he generally ignores, are helping the readers? Anyway, he's very animated, vivid; you can see the punchlines coming but that just makes it more intimate.

Users don't have requirements; they don't know what's possible. They develop requirements together with the technical team. It's not if the requirements change, it's when. Plan for that evolution and you won't have creep. Halting scope creep won't help if the product doesn't solve the problem, e.g., have the right scope; if the product doesn't solve the problem, why are you making it? And, scope can't creep unless somebody agrees. It's up to the PM to say no to anything that doesn't solve the problem. Um. It feels like there's some sleight of hand here. How can you predefine the scope, given that we've agreed that it's impossible to understand the requirements before you start? I'm not convinced that scope exactly equals problem.

A need is not a problem. Why do you need it?

PM has conflict of interest. PM defines the project she's responsible for, and may push for a better project rather than a better solution. The business has a conflict of interest: it is not objective about the problem or solution. Businesses rarely do due diligence over the project: creating a charter, determining ROI, etc.

The business analyst starts before the project and ends after the project. The business analyst communicates changes back and forth between the business and the project. After project close, the business analyst is still confirming that the delivered product solves the problem. "If you have a solution that does not create at least three new problems, you have the wrong solution." If you are a PM who is also a business analyst, skip the party, go down and have just one Singapore Sling with the project team, then go back and see if the product works in production.

What's the difference between business analysts, project managers, and system analysts? They all do the same functions, (plan, manage risk, work with stakeholders, requirements, test, estimate, impact analysis, evaluate alternatives). But they all do them differently, for different people. BA does acceptance tests; PM tests project plan; SA tests integration. How to test the project plan? The plan breaks everything down into work tasks. Each task has an input and an output. You test the plan by ensuring that all inputs and outputs are used. You test it by laying out the tasks with your team (not with MS Project, but with the actual people). BA focus is business; PM focus is project; SA focus is technical. It is very difficult for one person to do all three roles, especially if they aren't trained.

How many of you grew up and went to school and said, I want to be a project manager. We're almost all accidental project managers. There are people who grow up to be systems analysts, go to school for that. Hopefully some day there will be schools for PMs, fraternities, etc. These three roles call for different personalities, different talents.

BA to customer: Is what you are asking for going to solve your problem? My job isn't to build something, it's to solve your problem.

(Side note because he said something about dodgeball: this is cute but raises the disturbing question: why would you pay three dollars to see the equator?)

How to wear two hats: As the PM, focus on the team. As the BA, don't let project noise (deadlines, etc) influence your relationship with stakeholders. I literally had different hats that I switched back and forth depending on the work I was doing.

First, make sure you understand what the role of the business analyst is. Keep the roles separate. Write the requirements as a BA; come back as a PM and pretend somebody else wrote the requirements.

about ten people just got up and left simultaneously. It's 8:35; are they all going to catch a bus, or like CEOs giving themselves raises, did they just realize that they could leave? The speaker is good but it's true the crowd (myself included) has been drifting for a few minutes.

An abrupt ending, and only one question. I think he could have wrapped up ~8 minutes earlier and had 10 minutes of good questions.

Q: Who has authority? A: The project manager has authority and accountability for the project, the BA for the business.

A lecture from Shaukat Aziz, former Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Joel's note: The Boston Globe seems to think he's one of the good guys. The following notes are my paraphrase of the speaker unless otherwise noted.

"Think beyond and outside the box, and try to meet the new challenges with vigor. ... The only constant in life today, ladies and gentlemen, is change. You must adapt to change. ... Staying still is not the answer." Apparently this will be an all-platitudes speech?

Today's topic was chosen and approved by Dean Mahbubani. Perhaps he thought that as a survivor of several assassination attempts I would be qualified to speak ... Terrorism is global.

With the recent upsurge in terrorism—clearly it has increased. If you try to travel today, it is a hassle. If your name is Muhammad .... This is done because not everybody knows who you are and there's a risk that if they let the old person in, they will cause trouble.

People link terrorism with a particular region or religion, Islam, but this is not historically the case. In my view, one word can describe most, not all, of the causes: "deprivation".

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Joel's note: Hm. Let's see what a cursory literature search says.

Club de Madrid says ... well, they certainly didn't come down to one word. "Poverty per se is not a direct cause of terrorism."

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert A. Pape, U Chicago :

"this study collects [188] terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001. ... This study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism hasbeen rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays.

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Meanwhile back to the speaker, who has said essentially nothing notable. "If you treat people with respect, they'll be less prone to getting into extreme behavior. More importantly, we must give people a voice. ... At the end of the day, if people have a voice, can within certain norms express their views .... Give people a level playing field and a sense of hope and you will see ... this will bring the temperature down. It has to happen, because there are many fires burning around the world ...."

"Here the role of the media in civil society is critical. The media ... if there is a message that, see how destructive this is, it will help in the hearts and minds of people."

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Q: (from Dean Mahbubani) We both lived in New York, in fact in the same apartment, St James Tower. A: but your apartment was twice as big. Q: But your salary was more than twice as much. A: That's true.

Q: How do we change the American conception of Islam? A: If you see what goes through their minds, 9/11 and 7/7, these are not minor incidents. The whole country was shaken up. ... Make people aware that the acts of a few angry people do not represent ...

Q: So Pakistan decided to side with the US. We hear that Pakistan is signing deals with the people it was fighting against. Is this a good idea? A: We joined the coalition against terrorism because terrorism is bad [my paraphrase]. If a group is willing to talk, I think that is the right way to go. The more people you can get back to a normal life, you have gained.

Q: Assassination of Bhutto discouraged good men and women. to some, terrorists are merely freedom fighters. Can you comment on that? A: Bhutto's death was a national and global tragedy. Every life is precious.

Q: [A regular attendee at these seminars reads from two pages of notes until he is cut off firmly. No idea what his point or question was. He started with "Singapore has found racial harmony with four races and four religious beliefs living together." Aziz responded that the questioner had an incorrect view of Islam?

Q: Is Islam being used as a force multiplier, or is the root cause relative (not absolute) deprivation? Is there a need to control radical madrassas? A: Madrassas are religious schools. I was asked to open a school; they had O-levels and were going to A-levels, they had proper computer classes. In Pakistan, the madrassas we have are clearly performing a role. There may be a few, who are, not as an institution but with individual teachers promoting extremism. Largely they are helping people memorize the Koran and so forth, and also free lodge and board for children who need education. Free books. The curriculum is being broad-based; those who are strictly in religious teaching, no need to be defensive about them, this is an important function in any society. To your first part, there may be affluent people going into terrorism, but they can still be deprived. They may be living in a country where a dispute is festering for ages.

The dean is getting very impatient with long-winded questions. A: The question is on ISI and its links to uh. Let me say that ISI is professional and respected. They pursue the national interest. The Taliban, the people in Afghanistan ... the rest of the world together recruited young people to fight the Soviet Union. ... Pakistan is very clear that we do not allow on our soil activities that are prejudicial to our interests or any other nation's. The Taliban is an Afghan government. We have 3 million refugees in Pakistan, Afghan will not take them back. We would like resettlement, more aid (which is happening in the Paris conference), a concerted effort against drugs.

Q: Karzai threatened to send troops to Pakistan after a jail break? do you think he's serious? A: Pakistan has always said that a strong, stable Afghanistan is good for the region.

Q: in the west, there's a myth that the religious reasons for terrorism are more important. Is that true? A: Faith does play a part, but it's only part. Islam as a faith doesn't promote violence. There are many attacks outside the Islamic world.

Q: When you were prime minister, what did you do to improve the quality of life of the people and deprive people of the financing for the terrorism? A: Great economic growth in Pakistan. Pakistan's per capita GDP is much greater than India. For the last several years, 7.5 percent growth, 5.5 percent this year. In terms of quality of life, reduction of poverty .... In terms of financing, it's a global effort.

Q: What is the greatest cause of deprivation that is leading to terrorism and what can we do? A: It's hard but I'll give you a few. Lack of people having rights, lack of income, feeling of hopelessness, ...

Like many of these seminars featuring politicians, the informational content of the seminar is very close to nil. The value in attending is in getting a sense of the personality of the speaker.

Impact Analysis

What would have happened to those receiving intervention if they had not received the intervention? In scientific terms, you need a control group. Remember that a control group is not a population that remains unchanged. A control group is a population that is subject to everything the target group is subject to except the intended intervention. The important thing to know here is that there are many, many ways to end up with useless data, as this Economist article about randomized evaluations discusses. A randomized study showed that giving away mosquito nets for free was far more effective that charging anything.

You might conclude that the trial showed that they should always be given away. Yet it turns out that millions of nets were already in use in the part of Kenya where the field trial took place, so their value was known. The experiment guaranteed supplies, so it did not test the assertion that you need to charge something to encourage reliable suppliers. And the recipients were pregnant women, whereas the point of giving bednets away is to provide anti-malaria treatment universally. The evidence from western Kenya was clear. But it hardly settled the question of whether the government should give bednets away across the country.

As an aside, it seems like we could very profitably spend a few weeks on the scientific method directly, rather than orbiting it with alternate language.

Experiments

The best experiment possible: fully blind, randomized, large sample size, repeated.

Since this is rarely possible in economics and social science, especially at larger scales such as national development, we can use alternative methods:

• natural experiment. For example, when different states in the US which are otherwise similar adopt different policies.

  An example of a natural experiment occurred in Helena, Montana during the period from June 2002 to December 2002 when a smoking ban was in effect in all public spaces in Helena including bars and restaurants. Helena is geographically isolated and served by only one hospital. It was observed that the rate of heart attacks dropped by 60% while the smoking ban was in effect.—Wikipedia

• matching
• statistical equated controls
• non-experiments

The instructor apologizes for putting Mao in a list with Stalin and Hitler in a previous lecture. I certainly think, based on my understanding of history, that by many plausible definitions of the set of "most prolifically evil dictators of the 20th century", Mao is a solid member (scholars actually put him at the top of the democide league table). Where's my apology for taking him out of the list? The instructor further notes that anyone who thinks that Hitler, Mao, et al were "born evil" is missing the point of the class. Judging from remarks in this and previous classes, those of us who are not in the habit of writing and forwarding angry emails are missing out on a substantial portion of discourse for this class.

Perspective: when I get somewhat frustrated with the challenges of this course and fantasize about nasty feedback (example: instructor: "students who are not faring well in terms of points right now should ..." me: "is there a way for us to know how we are faring in terms of points right now?" instructor: "no, but there will be soon" Oh good, it's the final session of class for the semester and the only information about our performance is a single paper that has been returned.) I find it helpful to read things like this, which illustrate how you can easily out yourself as an asshole to be ignored. Then I take a deep breath and pet my dog.

I supported the notion of impeaching Cheney enough to make T-shirts, which very aggressively failed to sell. Now that Kucinich has introduced a bill to impeach Bush, it's worth thinking about again.

Briefly, the basic argument for impeachment is that Bush committed many impeachable offenses. But just as Supreme Court decisions are rooting more in counting to five than in pure application of legal theory, impeachment is a political, not legal act. Probably most presidents have committed impeachable acts; after all, the US has gone to war at least eight times since the Congress, the sole organ with Constitutional power to wage war, last passed a bill declaring war. But only two presidents have been impeached, and neither was convicted.

Politically, both Bush and Cheney would have to be impeached simultaneously, which would lead to the speaker of the house succeeding to the presidency, which puts Pelosi in a very awkward position and probably ends up as a strong incentive for her not to allow impeachment. The other standard political arguments against are that it will distract from more important issues, and than Bush will be out of office very shortly anyway.

The strongest argument for, I think, it to begin re-establishing the basic civil norm that politicians, even and especially the president, must obey the law, and that there will be consequences if they do not. From that perspective, Ford's pardon of Nixon morally enabled the disasters since. A commenter at Making Light argues that it literally enabled some of the disaster-makers:

... if [they] are impeached (House) and tried and convicted (Senate), they will not get Federal pensions and they will be ineligible for any Federal office.

This is what should have been done to Nixon and Reagan's cohorts -- if it had we wouldn't be dealing with the current criminals.

A third argument would be that impeachment might help restore international respect for the United States (and restore some of our "soft power"). Between that, re-establishing rule of law, and removing many dedicated imperialists from government permanently, I think impeachment is at least worth serious public discussion. Otherwise, it's business as usual.

Since we are still talking about cost-benefit analysis and how to apply it to situations with hard-to-value outcomes, here's an interesting article in the New York Times:

The Bush administration is about to propose far-reaching new rules that would give people with disabilities greater access to tens of thousands of courtrooms, swimming pools, golf courses, stadiums, theaters, hotels and retail stores.

... The Justice Department acknowledged that some of the changes would have significant costs. But over all, it said, the value of the public benefits, estimated at $54 billion, exceeds the expected costs of $23 billion.

If you've seen my sidewalks photo-essay, you'll know that Singapore isn't great with accessibility. This is not scientifically collected data, but I do see very very few disabled people, such as people in wheelchairs. in public here.

About half an hour before class was over, a camera crew from "Corporate Communications" came in to film the lecture in progress for some unspecified purpose. A few minutes later, we came to this slide in the lecture:

Design contamination refers to the situation where participants know that they are being observed (tested) and act differently because of it.

In the slightly stunned silence after they left, someone muttered, "this is contamination."

Evaluation

Programs convert inputs to outputs, which lead to outcomes. Process evaluation is a descriptive analysis, performed after implementation, which measures the efficiency of inputs to outputs. Impact analysis measures the relationship between outputs and outcomes and seeks causes.

Reading

Rossi, P., M. Lipsey and H. Freeman (2004) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 7th Edition. Sage Publications, Chapter 1—An Overview of Program Evaluation, pp 1-28

Rossi, P., M. Lipsey and H. Freeman (2004) Evaluation: A Systematic Approach. 7th Edition. Sage Publications, Chapter 12—The Social Context of Evaluation, pp 373-419

Each time I try to do the readings for this class, I bounce off. There's more than a few Harvard Business Review articles, and they all tend to blend into one ur-article, which goes something like this:

Does A Successful Dynamic Leadership Framework Need Great Followers?¹

I've dedicated my entire life to following the greatest men in the world. I know that they are great because they are the CEOs of big corporations that make lots of money. And they have security guards, so I can't follow them too closely. But I am compelled to understand why they are so, so great. When I first started in the 70s, everyone said I was daft to research greatness, but I did all the same, just to show them. I conducted research so intense that they had to invent a new kind of supercomputer to crunch my data. It melted. So I recruited a team of highly trained interns and conducted more research, on a more powerful supercomputer. That one melted. So I built a third. That one caught fire, set off the halon system, killed three of my interns, then melted. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, reader, the strongest leadership research on the strongest leaders in the world.

And what I discovered is that one single factor explains why some men are great and others are not. That factor is awesomeness. The greatest men are awesome. In the chart, you can see a list of awesome men and details of how awesome they are. If you train yourself to be awesome, you too can be a great man. But you have to be awesome.

By the way, I have a consulting business where I teach people how to be awesome. Call me.

Yes, these articles really annoy me. If you want straight-up notes for the exam, go read my notes for Policy Analysis, the other core module this semester. I promise those are straight up. Anyway, here is the reading for the class.

Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself. Best of Harvard Business Review 1999.

Know yourself, including what kind of learner you are (visual, auditory, etc) and if you are more of a leader, follower, or adviser. Do this by feedback analysis. "Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations." Once you know yourself, do what you are good at.

W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Tipping Point Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Bill Bratton is great. Do what Bill Bratton did. Which is Tipping Point Leadership. So you should do Tipping Point leadership. There are four hurdles, Cognitive, Resource, Motivational, and Political. You should, respectively, Break Through, Sidestep, Jump, and Knock Over these four hurdles. (Yes, the palimpsest on this one is pretty easy to see through. They had an article about hurdles, a book called "Tipping Point" was a big best-seller, so they put the words "Tipping Point" on their hurdle article. What it really is is a missed opportunity to talk about the tipping point of the hurdles. But you only actually tip the Political Hurdle, so I guess that wouldn't work.)

Here's a reality check, courtesy the Washington Post. It shows crime over Rudy Giuliani's whole tenure as mayor; remember that Bratton was only commissioner from '94 to '96. And don't forget to look for the tipping point:

As a further aside, as long as Rudy continues bragging about his 9/11 leadership, perhaps those deaths should be included in the graph in 2001, which would obliterate the notion that violent crime decreased in New York over his tenure. But happily we haven't heard much of him lately; presumably running one of the worst presidential campaigns in American history has shown that platform consisting of three digits and a punctuation character isn't a winner.

In fairness to Malcolm Gladwell, the graph shows an inflection point, not a tipping point, which is "the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable", something more relevant to network theory and propagation models. Whether or not there's anything to "tipping point" beyond glib pseudo-science is a discussion for another day; suffice it to say there's little of Gladwell in Tipping Point Leadership.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance. Harvard Business Review: Breakthrough Leadership, December 2001.

Summary: emotions matter. Great leaders cited: Jack Welch, in a sidebar.

Maria T. Farkas, Linda A. Hill, A Note on Team Process.

This is actually quite useful. It is from Harvard, but not from the Harvard Business Review. It's a note prepared "for class dicussion". It's too good and thoughtful to glibly condense to one sentence. And it mentions women and other groups that may be excluded from team discussion.

Jim Collins, Level 5 Leadership, The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve

Out of 1435 Fortune 500 companies, only 11 sustained greatness for 15 years after a major transition. All 11 had a "level 5 leader." Therefore, you should become a level 5 leader. A level 5 leader is deeply humble and intensely willful.

From page 6: "If Moclker had given up the fight, it's likely that none of us would be shaving with Sensor, Lady Sensor, or the Mach III—and hundreds of millions of people would have a more painful battle with daily stubble." All I can do in response is point to this article by Moclker's successor, James Kilts: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades. (Here's some more serious criticism, noting among other things that "Kilts was personally never part of our community anyway. He never moved here, commuting from Rye, N.Y., and even holding his ''worldwide annual meetings" within a few miles of his home."

If you google for Level 5 Leadership, Jim Collins' home page cites David Maxwell of Fannie May. When "Maxwell’s retirement package, which had grown to be worth $20 million based on Fannie Mae’s spectacular performance... became a point of controversy in Congress", Maxwell voluntarily gave up the last $5.5 million of it. Wow! Amazing. What humility! Meanwhile, Fannie Mae engaged in "extensive financial fraud" over six years by doctoring earnings so executives could collect hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses. Of course, Maxwell retired in 1991 and fraud was only uncovered going back to the late 1990s. I'm sure Maxwell was completely clean..

Louis B. Barnes, Managing Interpersonal Feedback

Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

Nothing to do with Harvard.

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, A Survival Guide for Leaders. Harvard Business Review.

When people are forced to change, they often attack the person responsible. Be prepared for this.

This is actually a perfectly reasonable point, and there's some good advice: recruit the uncommitted; "resist resolving conflicts yourself—people will blame you for whatever turmoil results"; "restrain your desire for control and need for importance", "read attacks as reactions to your professional role, not to you personally". I have only two objections to the article. First, it very strongly encourages you to assume that the change you are promoting is the right change, and dismisses the idea that people are resisting the change because it's a bad idea. It's quite true that people resist good changes, but people also resist bad changes and the people directly affected by a change do have special insight into its impact. That shouldn't amount to an automatic veto, but it shouldn't be treated primarily as resistance to overcome or subvert, either.

Second, Heifetz and Linsky are the perpetrators of "Adaptive Leadership", the basis for books and articles and who knows what else. It just reeks of bullshit, in this case the bullshit of perfectly good but un-novel ideas repackaged under a new name to start the next fad. "Who Moved my Tipping Cheese Fish: Adaptive Leadership Lessons from the Great Lieutenant Bligh".

I think what really gets my goat on these things is that I don't buy the premise. The premise of almost all of these articles is, X is objectively great, as proven by outcome Y. X's secret is Z, and therefore you should do Z. But outcome Y is often quite flimsy. Bratton wasn't responsible for decreasing crime in New York. Jack Welch's financial success with GE may have been partially built on sand. Maxwell shows humility for giving back a fraction of a monstrous cashout. I think the real lesson is that, at a minimum, we know much less than we think we know, and we should be really cautious about people drawing bold conclusions, especially when they are trying to sell us something. I hope that's not news to anybody.

What about Enron?

I found two HBR articles about Enron prior to 2001 (plenty more afterwards). Both were positive:

Enron, with its "loose-tight" management policy, is an example of an organization that has figured out how to effect change without the usual pitfalls, says Mintzberg. [It] manages only two corporate processes very tightly: performance evaluation and risk management. Everything else is managed loosely, and local leaders get an enormous amount of discretion in figuring out how to get things done.

—Burning Questions 2001: How to overcome Change Fatigue". Harvard Management Update

[Enron] has invested millions of dollars ... to ... ensure that fluctuations in gas prices do not jeopardize the company's existence. ... [Enron]'s success - measured by both market share and profits - illustrates how financial engineers, working with marketers and strategists, can differentiate a commodity product without taking undue risk.

—"How Financial Engineering Can Advance Corporate Strategy", Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb 1996

---

1 This title is derived from the most commonly used words in the 90 Harvard Business Review articles with Leader in the title.

Google Foundation has a program, RechargeIT, to promote plug-in hybrids. This is very exciting because a plug-in hybrid can have radically less impact than a regular hybrid. In a nutshell, a regular hybrid is just a standard gasoline car with some doodads to make it more efficient. But a plug-in hybrid is a real electric car, that can also use gasoline so you don't get stranded on the road.

And now for the details. First, although hybrid sometimes means an engine that can burn natural gas or ethanol in addition to gasoline, here we're talking only about gasoline/electric hybrids.

Cars burn gasoline to move you around. That is, they spray gasoline into cylindrical chambers of an internal combustion (e.g., "inside-burning") engine, mix it with air, and then explode the mixture with a spark. The hydrocarbons—molecules of hydrogen plus carbon—in the gas combine with the oxygen in the air to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen dioxide—water— plus some energy. The resulting hot exhaust gas wants to be much bigger than the space at the top of the cylinder where we detonated the fuel/air mixture, so it pushes a piston in the cylinder. The motion of the pistons spin a shaft, and that drive shaft in turn connects to the wheels via the transmission, moving the car forward. But only about 35% of the energy from the gasoline makes it even as far as pushing a piston. The rest just heats up the engine block, which heats up the coolant fluid, which heats up the air passing through the radiator. Unless you live in Alaska and hence diverted a bit of that heat to warming up the inside of the car, it's purely wasted energy. And of the fraction of initial chemical energy that did go into pushing the pistons, almost half will be wasted in friction along the path between the driveshaft and road/rubber interface, so that only about 20% of the energy in the gasoline actually moves the car forward. At best.

The exhaust gas, meanwhile, has some impurities, such as incompletely burned carbon (carbon monoxide instead of dioxide, the former being far more toxic) and even raw gasoline. It travels through a device which catalyzes the incomplete chemical reactions into finishing (hence, a "catalytic converter"), various other devices to capture other impurities such as sulfur from the gasoline, a muffler, and out the tailpipe. If all of that equipment is modern and in good working order, the exhaust gas is actually fairly free of toxins and smog-producing chemicals. It does, however, have plenty of carbon dioxide, which of course is a greenhouse gas the emission of which will possibly turn Miami into another New Orleans by 2050.

A diesel is much the same except that it burns at a temperature so high it doesn't need a spark; because of the higher combustion temperature, a modern diesel engine can be more efficient than a gasoline engine.

So what's a gas/electric hybrid? Well, it's a gasoline engine car with a set of electric motors and really big batteries. Big as in hundreds of pounds of batteries. What's the point? Well, gasoline engines aren't especially flexible. They like to run at a certain speed. Even with a transmission—a set of gears that let the engine shaft turn at a different rate than the wheels—cars are finicky. My old Toyota MR2 had an unusually wide "power band", from about 2000 rpm to 7000, but even it didn't develop much power at 1000 rpm. And to get a range that wide, the engine computer has to play tricks like spraying in extra gasoline that won't get burnt (called a "rich" mix), or extra air (a "lean" mix). I hope you will not be surprised to learn that a rich mix is not good for your mileage, or, for that matter, your catalytic converter. I'll skip over the details of Carnot efficiency and stoichiometric ratios; what you need to know is that any particular gasoline-burning engine can be made very clean and very efficient, but only in a very narrow range of speed and power. The engine block design that got 30 miles per gallon in my 2500-pound MR2 at 60 miles per hour (or would have, if I hadn't driven it with a 21-year-old right foot) will not be as efficient in a two-ton truck. In fact, it won't even be as efficient in the MR2 at 30 miles per hour. And that's where hybrids come in.

The thing with energy is that it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed. Power plants don't create energy; they just transform the chemical energy in coal or oil or natural gas into the kinetic energy of a spinning turbine, and then into electrical energy. Dams and windmills, well, you can probably figure them out yourself.

The other thing with energy is that it's hard to store. So almost all of the energy that we generate—by generate I mean liberate from coal, or steal from rivers and breezes, etc—gets used right way. And I don't mean right away as in "your call is important to us" right away. I mean that if you flip a switch to turn on the light on the ceiling, at the same instant a turbine in a big industrial building somewhere shudders microscopically.

The total power output of the entire Western United States power grid at any moment equals the total power consumption. (Almost. About seven percent of the output is wasted in transmission, turning into heat and that eerie hum you hear around power lines.)

The power grid notwithstanding, it is actually possible store power on a smaller scale. And that's what a hybrid car does. Each wheel has its own electric motor, and they all connect to a big battery. The big battery in turn connects to the engine. It tries to keep the engine running at its optimal speed, and when that speed produces more power than the car needs to move, the extra power at the drive shaft is converted, via an alternator, into electricity stored in the battery. When the driver asks for more power than the engine can efficiently produce, the battery sends electricity to the wheel motors to supplement the power coming from the transmission. Electric motors are more efficient over a much wider range of speeds and powers, especially in starting from zero, than gas engines attached to mechanical transmissions, so this can work out quite well. In particular, hybrids will often use only battery power at low speeds, with the gas engine helping push the car only at faster or freeway speeds.

With all of this extra gear, you can play some extra tricks. The coolest one is regenerative braking. Electrical motors can easily reverse; that is, they can turn motion into electricity instead of vice versa. So when you tap the brakes in a hybrid, the car does not need to push brake pads into rotors, thus converting your precious energy of motion into hot brakes. Instead, the motors turn into little generators, with your car wheels playing the role of the rushing river. The wheels get slowed and the battery gets topped off. If everything were perfectly efficient, you could start at the top of the Grapevine with a dead battery and empty tank of gas, roll several miles down the hill, brake to a halt, enjoy an In-n-Out burger, then turn around and roll all the way back up on battery power. (This would work better if the Earth didn't have any air to cause wind resistance, but then the milkshakes probably wouldn't taste right.)
View Larger Map

Regenerative braking is unique to hybrids, because you need both the electric motors and big battery. But the other trick hybrids can play is simply to turn the gas engine off whenever it's not needed. In particular, an idling engine always gets zero miles per gallon regardless of how efficient it might be. (Similarly, a really expensive Lamborghini which is lost and going in circles isn't any faster than a Hyundai, though it's much funnier to watch go past you the second time around.) This is something that most new gasoline cars are supposed to start doing Real Soon Now, since improvements in gas engine technology mean that starting the engine no longer wastes a minute worth of gas, the way it used to when Eisenhower was president.

The upshot of all of this technology and cleverness is that the current batch of hybrid gas/electric cars, most famously the Toyota Prius but also plenty of Hondas, Fords, and so forth, get maybe a quarter more energy out of a gallon of gas. So the Prius gets about 45 mpg. By the way, there's all sorts of controversy about how the US government calculates mileage. One of the things RechargeIT is doing is driving some Priuses around with lots of instrumentation; among other things, they are averaging 44.6 mpg over the last year. That's pretty good, but it's barely better than a diesel Jetta, which doesn't have the hundreds of pounds and thousands of dollars of extra equipment. And VW claims to have 60 mpg Jettas on sale in the US in months.

To make sense of this apparently poor performance, you have to remember is where a gas/electric hybrid gets its energy from. Yes, it has an electric battery, but what charges that battery? The Toyota Prius doesn't plug into anything. The only way that you add energy to the car is by pumping gasoline into the tank. The battery charges only when the engine is running. So all that fancy technology merely makes the car a really, really efficient gas-powered car. But gasoline engines have efficiency limits; the hybrid system lets the car spend more time at those limits, but cannot exceed them. The bottom line is that current hybrids are still 100% gasoline-powered.

I wrote about this when I first drove a hybrid Honda in Seattle's Flexcar fleet, five years ago. I wrote then that "by putting electric technology into a non-masochistic package (unlike the EV1 or earlier Honda Insight) that will actually sell tens of thousands of units, familiarizing consumers and generating real-world trial experience, it's a medium-sized technological step towards true renewable-resource cars." Well, Toyota's sold a million Priuses, gas has passed US$4/gallon, and the next step is at hand. The next step is plug-in hybrids. The difference between a regular hybrid and a plug-in is $10,000 worth of extra equipment and lots more batteries. Enough batteries for the car to hold forty miles worth of electrical energy. And instead of filling the batteries by burning gasoline, you can plug the car into regular 120-volt outlets. Suddenly, that entire second drivetrain, previously slave to the gas tank, is liberated. To be sure, it's still going to be slave to oil, natural gas, and coal-fired power plants, but the frying pan is a better place to be than the fire: even coal plants can be well over 40% efficient, and an electrical drivetrain is much more efficient than a mechanical transmission. Of course, from a climate change perspective we probably want to look at pounds of CO₂ emitted mile traveled, which is a research topic for another day, but remember that you can use zero-emission wind, solar, and nuclear power as well. So a plug-in hybrid is the best of both worlds: you can use clean electrical power for shorter trips, plug in anywhere to recharge, and if you don't have time to recharge or want to go more than 40 miles, you've got a gasoline motor and gas tank that give you all the freedom of a very efficient regular car.

How well does it work in the real world? Again, RechargeIT has equipped a fleet of cars with sensors, in this case four cars, and they end up getting 66.2 mpg. Since every single trip is recorded down to the second, you can start getting at the why of the numbers. Here's a trip from yesterday:

Speed (mph):

Engine RPM

Battery (%)

Even though the trip was only 3.6 miles and never broke 40 mph, it looks like the gas engine still kicked in 11 times, almost once per minute. And of course on a long freeway trip, you're going to completely deplete the pre-charged battery and then all of your energy will come from the gas tank. So I guess there's still a ways to go. Even so, over the last year the plug-ins' mileage averages about 50% better than the stock hybrids, and the greenhouse gas emissions are 29% lower per mile. I think the GHG numbers are based on the Googleplex using all solar power, in which case the plug-in charge is emission-free. I would want to know if they take into account drivers' plugging in at home or elsewhere, in which case you'd want to charge the plug-ins with the GHG emission per Wh of power sources for the Bay Area power company. And of course a true lifecycle analysis would take into account the GHG emitted building the cars, shipping them to Mountain View, etc etc. Even so, plug-ins are almost certainly another step in the right direction.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember before when we were talking about the power grid in the US, and how it doesn't have any ability to store power? Well, what if we attached a bunch of batteries to the grid, and charged them up at night, when there is surplus (and more efficient) capacity, and then dumped it back into the grid at noon, when demand peaks and the old, less economical, heavily polluting power-plants have to be maxed out to prevent brownouts? A fleet of plug-in hybrids, of course, could do that. Apparently, if you play your cards right and all the regulation falls into place, your plug-in hybrid could be a profit center.

One thing on the RechargeIT blog really surprised me:

Not the Lexus hybrid; I've even seen them on the street here in Singapore. But I had assumed that when a hybrid motor is put into a luxury car, producing only a 1-2 MPG efficiency improvement, it was pretty much a farce, a bit of greenwashing. But what this graph points out:

is that an improvement from 10 MPG to 12 MPG is worth as much as an improvement from 30 to 60. So maybe those hybrid limos and SUVs aren't completely ridiculous. But don't get carried away; 30 is still much than 12.

Meanwhile, California's regulators, CARB, seem to have done a decent job over the last few decades in standing up to car manufacturers to force them to improve the environmental impact of their cars. But the terminology can get confusing: LEV, for Low-Emission Vehicle, ULEV for ultra-low, and on and on to the latest: AT-PZEV, "Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emission Vehicle". This refers to different levels of pollution coming out of the car, like sulfer dioxide and carbon monoxide. The confusing thing is that, when they use "emission", they aren't talking about carbon emissions. So a car can be ATPZEV and still be pumping out the CO₂ that will ultimately put Miami and Bangladesh underwater. Perhaps one day CARB will start regulating greenhouse gases tracking that as well, though for all I know that's tied up in a lawsuit or something. Apparently RechargeIT is lobbying CARB on the issue.

By the way, the head of the EPA, which is federal as opposed to the California state CARB, has been going to absurd, and possibly illegal, lengths to stall on doing anything about GHGs. Watch for yourself:

Presenter: Larry Hahn, retired DEA agent now living in Singapore.

Training was in Jordan, not Iraq, for safety reasons.

8 week training period, would have preferred 16. Time pressure came from political timetable for government turnover. Training to a standard of "minimum competency".

Trainees were motivated primarily by job-seeking. Instructors were from about twenty coalition countries, and all spoke English (except for the Scots), using Arabic-speaking translators. Almost a third of instructors were Jordanian and spoke Arabic.

Training based on UN/Kosovo model, emphasis on human rights; 4 weeks general policing and 4 weeks tactical exercise. Modified to a more paramilitary curriculum: democratic policing; patrol; terrorism; crime; firearms; defensive tactics; patrol 2; patrol 3.

Training site built in the desert in Jordan (by DynCorp, on a no-bid contract).

What went wrong? See "The Coalition Provisional Authority's Experience with Public Security in Iraq", US Institute of Peace. Large-scale public order breakdowns; army not trained to deal with civil disorder or provide police functions. Existing Army and police force disbanded, and probably would not have been effective anyway.

Some recruits said that when they went back, their bosses would just send them out to get money. "When you do this training, you've got to train all segments." It takes about five years to train an effective police force.

I knew that IKEA was ultimately owned by a non-profit foundation, and I wondered that we didn't hear more about it. Apparently, it may be mostly a tax dodge, not an actual philanthropic adventure like the Gates Foundation. That's a shame.

Context analysis of Queen Elizabeth I at her ascension to power.

Scope	Boundary	Opportunity
Global	Catholic Church, Spain, France	Colonies
National	decentralized power system sectarian civil war threats from abroad	public desire for peace Crisis=opportunity
Organizational	No money no standing army parliamentary limits on monarch	offer of marriage Institutional power of monarchy
Personal	gender limitations questions of legitimacy	daughter of a king

Seven sources of power: positional, coercive, reward, expert, referent, network, and associative.

Reading

The readings come from a book in pre-publication.

• p 40: "power without legitimacy is always transient." Oh really? An awful lot of dictators-for-life (or their subjects) would disagree, surely. You could argue that the ability to maintain power through violence is a form of legitimacy, but then you get fairly tautological: power without the ability to maintain power is transient.
• p 49: Wikipedia says Bill Gates topped out at just over $100 billion, not $160B.

Valuation Techniques for Cost-Benefit Analysis

If a market price is not available for a cost or benefit being analyzed, other methods can assign a value. These are called shadow values. One example is Travel Cost Method, which determines the value of an attraction by measuring what fraction of people at different distances are willing to travel to it.

Methods to value human life are controversial to some, but public policy analysis cannot be performed without valuing human life. And, analogous to the argument that everybody is operating through models all the time, whether consciously or otherwise, it's clear that everybody does in fact apply an implicit value to human life all the time. Various methods can extract numeric values from observing human behavior. There is huge variation in the value people implicitly place on their own life in different contexts, suggesting (proving?) that psychology is a better framework than economics for understanding much human behavior.

Reading

Zerbe, Richard O., Jr., and Allen S. Bellas. 2007. A Primer for Benefit-Cost Analysis. Chapter 7, pp. 164-214. Edward Elgar Pub

One of Tufte's key ideas is data ink: most of the ink should embody data, not other things. For a spectacular example, compare the two illustrations of the British Empire on Wikipedia:

Of course the first map contains a lot more information, so it's not a fair comparison, but as a visual answer to the question, "what was the British Empire?", the second map is far more effective.

Guest lecturer.

Context matters. Um, was somebody saying it didn't? The context paradox: it both enables and constrains. Four levels of context: personal/team, institution/organization, the nation, global.

Does a good leader adapt to the environment or pursue a consistent vision and, perhaps, choose the moment where the variable environment suits that vision?

The most critical part of leadership is knowing when to step aside, and a system which enforces that is a good idea.

Reading

The readings come from a book in draft form.

• p 8: To quote Samuel Huntington, "a framework is a simplified way of viewing reality." I don't care for that definition at all. I think "modeling" is a much better term for simplifying reality. OED's first definition is "A structure composed of parts framed together." A conceptual framework may set some things as more or less important, but that's not essential to its function.
• p 13: "According to ... the US State Department ... between 1985 and 2004, 13,096 people around the world were either injured or killed as a result of terrorist attacks." This is then compared to deaths from a few genocides and wars. Setting aside the incorrect conflation of casualties with fatalities, if this chapter is about context, then how about seeing death tolls from diseases, malnutrition, natural disasters, and so forth. (An interesting side-note would be to look into somehow better identifying "inevitable" versus "evitable" consequences of natural disasters, where evitable consequences come from population patterns, building codes, etc. Then we would get into which population shifts are themselves evitable and inevitable and ... maybe that thread is better left unpulled.)
• p 14. You can compare GDP with sales revenue? We've been discussing that here (1, 2). As a rule of thumb, profits plus one half of revenue (approximating labor costs) may be a better equivalent to GDP. Although this quibble does just bolster the point of the book, that the biggest companies are still smaller than "minor regional powers". Although I wouldn't call Taiwan minor. What's halfway between minor and major?
• p 14.

  ... what then defines the national context? We offer a simple list of three defining elements:

  1. Geography
  2. History and Culture
  3. Economy

  That's four elements.
• p 16: "Huntington identified a number of conflicts which were occurring at what he termed the fault lines between Civilizations. His choice of a geographic expression to describe this phenomenon was not accidental because most of the conflicts he identified occurred in places where two civilizations came into proximate contact and hence conflict." But the majority of conflicts since World War II have been civil wars. So I'm not clear on what point Huntington (or his paraphrase) might score by showing that most conflicts between civilizations happen where two civilizations come into contact. It seems like the (wrong) point lurking in the shadows is that most conflicts are are between civilizations, which they aren't.
• p 17. Now we're citing Bernard Lewis, having heard from Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. It would be nice if every public intellectual who was utterly wrong about the Iraq War was then treated more critically for the rest of their career.

The point of the chapter seems to be that context matters. I agree, but don't see anything novel or outstanding about how the chapter develops that fairly obvious point that justifies the existence of the chapter. It felt like a series of, "yeah, and?" moments.

Two interesting books covered in the Freakonomics blog today. Traffic is about the behavioral aspect of ... traffic. And Nudge, co-authored by Cass Sunstein, is about how the presentation of choices affects the choices people make. The latter in particular seems to offer a way past the paternalism vs freedom debate: wherever possible, governments should not coerce people to do things that are good for themselves or for society, but should structure institutions (primarily paperwork, I guess, but not exclusively) to direct people to do the "right" thing. An example, including unintended consequences, is presented concerning organ donations:

1. When organ donation is an option that people have to select (in the US, this usually happens while getting a driver's license), donation rates are low.
2. Changing the policy to opt-out, so that unless you take action you are a donor, dramatically increases donation rates.(Singapore is enacting this for Muslims, who thanks to a past exemption from opt-out policy, have low donation rates in Singapore, which de-prioritizes them for getting organs.)
3. But opt-out also leads to more cases where family members challenge organ donation, since the donor's will is only recorded implicitly, not explicitly. This is still a better state of affairs than before opt-in, but not optimal.
4. The new policy solution proposed is to force everyone to make a choice, to donate or not donate. If you don't pick one of the two, presumably you can't complete some other task (like getting a license) that's important to you.
5. What unintended consequences will that have? I guess we'll see. In software design we are constantly faced with similar issues of user volition and assumptions, and usually the best thing is to understand what the user intended and make the software tend to do that, rather than force them to make a lot of decisions. Which works fine until there is more than one obvious thing for a user to intend at a specific decision point. The trade-offs are different for something as heavy as organ donation, but only in degree, not in kind.

Chee Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party, is in the news lately because of court hearings to ... well, there are a bunch of things, all stemming from civil disobedience and arguments with the Singapore establishment, e.g., Lee Kuan Yew. There was a three-day hearing to "assess damages in a defamation suit brought against them by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew." During that hearing, Chee and his sister "behaved in a manner that 'scandalised the court, adversely affected the administration of justice, and impugned the dignity and the authority of the court'," which led to contempt of court charges. One of Chee's lawyers was Mr Jeyaretnam, who "became an opposition MP in 1981, but has been in the political wilderness since 2001. That was when he was declared bankrupt for failing to pay damages totalling about $600,000 from defamation." During the course of the hearing, both Lees were witnesses, and Chee, acting as his own lawyer, had some intense confrontations with the Lees, which (judging from the newspaper accounts) amounted to Lee Kuan Yew being so kind as to tell Chee what his problem was.

For good measure, "in a separate hearing ... Chee Soon Kuan and a party supporter were fined for speaking in public without a permit."

I'm not informed enough about the details of the cases or the laws to offer my own opinion; it wouldn't surprise me if Chee was technically guilty of everything he's charged with. What's more striking to me is how utterly thin-skinned both LKY and Singapore's legal system appear to be. For Lee, who is profoundly powerful many years after his nominal retirement, to castigate Chee, who was never more than the most token of opposition and seems just about as close to powerless as one can be—broke and nearly devoid of allies or public sympathy—is graceless and petty.

Followup articles about the incident quote the judge as saying that, if left unpunished, misbehaviour in court will diminish the dignity and authority of the court. Chee and his sister started serving 10 and 12-day jail sentences for contempt this week; I didn't see what happened with the damages for defamation.

On the same page of the Straits Times we read that

Singapore's Attorney-General has warned against "fanatics" who seize on the cause [of human rights] to further their own political agendas. Human rights has become a "religion" that breeds devotees who border on the fanatic ...

The A-G's fellow speaker was Professor Thio Li-ann, whom I've quoted before for her anti-gay bigotry.

The last thread of this saga is Gopalan Nair, a former Singaporean who is now a US citizen. Singapore disapproves of his calls for civil disobedience on his blog, and threatened to arrest him when he arrived in Singapore to observe the Chees' hearing. He dared them to, and they did. He's now out on bail, though he surrendered his passport. He's asking for the right to travel in order to, among other things, deal with accumulating parking fees for his car at the San Francisco airport. I just have to say, if you are going to fly to a country whose authorities behave as demonstrated above, and you dare them to arrest you, do not leave your car in short-term airport parking. That's just a failure of common sense.

On a personal note, I've tremendously enjoyed my stay here in Singapore, a stay which is due to end in six weeks. I'm quite grateful to the Singapore government and taxpayers for partially subsidizing my stay here. It's a very interesting country with some lessons to teach, both good and bad. I cannot imagine being comfortable enough with the political climate to settle here, and I think even a two-year stay would have been a bit too long. The only other place I've lived that had the same oppressive sense of fearful self-censorship was mainland China. I guess you could say I have to leave for religious purposes.

Discount Rates

A thousand dollars today is not the same as a thousand dollars in ten years. Cost-benefit analysis must account for changes in the value of money, i.e., inflation. This affects both costs and benefits.

Dealing with uncertainty

Several tools to account for uncertainty in cost-benefit analysis.

Sensitivity Analysis

Adjust some of the variables and see how much the projected outcomes change. Ignores relationships, especially non-linear relationships, between variables. This can be addressed by bundling various "consistent combinations" of changes into scenarios and comparing scenarios.

Monte Carlo Analysis

Estimate the probabilities of the different values of the key variables, including probabilities relative to other variables' changes. Use a computer to simulate thousands of different outcomes and see which are most likely. (Example)

Reading

Zerbe, Richard O., Jr., and Allen S. Bellas. 2007. A Primer for Benefit-Cost Analysis. Chapter 9-10, pp. 215-289. Edward Elgar Pub

This book says benefit-cost instead of cost-benefit. The difference has me counting syllables and emphases to figure out why it sounds worse. I think cost-benefit is iambic, or nearly so, as "cost" is de-emphasized. And analysis is purely iambic, so putting them all together is magical: "cost ben-e-fit a-nal-y-sys". But be-ne-fit-cost a-nal-y-sis sounds terrible.

• p 250. Using inflation numbers like 5% or 10% for discounting, when extended over a human lifespan or longer, produces a discount multiplier close to zero. That is, it says that the present value of something 70 or 100 years in the future is nothing. Taken at face value, this makes long-term cost-benefit analysis useless, and raises ethical questions. Instead, other rates such as "Social Rate of Time Preference" and "Shadow Price of Private Capital" can be used; charts on page 251 suggest values for time periods measured in decades and centuries.
• p 256: Risk is typically ignored in cost-benefit analysis. That's been very clear to me as a project manager doing estimates, and the key reason is that the users of the analysis don't want the risk. They just want a number. So I try to present a range instead of a number, but I think it just gets collapsed to the side of the range that the user wants to hear.

We tend to read the blogs (or watch the TV) that reinforces our existing beliefs, because they are more comfortable. So I was amused to read emotionally conflicting reports of the same event, from two different blogs that I read and tend to agree with:

The newswires report that the judge in the case has ruled that the use of copyrighted materials in the movie Expelled is protected by the “Fair Use” doctrine and that the request for preliminary injunction has been lifted.—Panda's Thumb

The quote is neutral, but Panda's Thumb (a "voice for the defenders of the integrity of science"; I would characterize it as in opposition to the intellectual dishonesty of the anti-evolution movement) has been deeply critical of Expelled; reading between the lines they are disappointed that the injection was lifted. Meanwhile:

We (Stanford's Fair Use Project) got word of another great success today. We're representing the filmmakers of Ben Stein's Expelled. The film is an attack on the culture that forbids "intelligent design" from being considered seriously. (I'm a member of that culture.) The film uses a 15 second snippet of John Lennon's "Imagine." Yoko Ono was not happy with the use, and sued. In a decision issued this morning, Judge Stein denied Ono's motion for an injunction against the film, finding we were likely to prevail on our fair use defense.—Lessig Blog

The class to date in context. First, we did a two-day module on leadership and communication, unfortunately scheduled in the middle of the busiest stretch of the previous semester, and discussed "inner compass" issues (classes -1 and 0). Then we did reviewed our Myers-Briggs results (class 6), which are a bridge from the self to the group and FIRO-B (class 5, I think). The 360 reviews (class 6) are very much, how does the group see me. Presentation skills (class 7). Today is the penultimate lecture by the professor; then a guest lecturer gives two lectures on context, then the final lecture is on theory. The self-oriented material is more psychological than other things, and that can chafe. At the outer areas, context and organizations, studying these issues hasn't been proven to change behavior.

Class exercise to identify and deconstruct the behavior that we want to change.

Cost-benefit analysis

Financial Analysis

Starts with the cash flow, the direct, measurable flow of money as a consequence of a policy alternative. Then broaden to include indirect costs, such as opportunity costs. IBM, for example, calls these green dollars and blue dollars. I once worked with a CIO who said that a particular policy option would be "free" because they could use their existing staff without extra training or having to hire or rent experts. This fallacy reflects a failure to understand "blue dollars".

Financial analysis vs cost-benefit analysis

To get to a true cost-benefit analysis, the scope of analysis must be widened even further. In addition to direct cash flow and indirect costs, complete cost-benefit analysis includes broader social costs and externalities.

Ex ante CBA is performed during planning, to inform decision-making. Ex post CBA is performed after a project is complete, to evaluate the outcome and add to general knowledge. It is also possible to do CBA in the middle of a project, and to compare ex post and ex ante CBAs to see how accurate the ex ante analysis was.

Kaldor-Hicks Criterion (an improvement on Pareto optimality): a policy should be adopted if the gainers could, in theory, compensate the losers and still be better off.

What's better, a cheap project with a very high benefit/cost ratio, or an expensive project with a lower benefit/cost ratio? They have different scales, and cannot be directly compared without more context.

Standing is very important: who and what should be counted in CBA?

Include only the changes in costs and benefits which are attributable to the alternative, i.e., the difference between baseline and the alternative. Exclude sunk outcomes. Exclude costs which are shared across all alternatives. Exclude transfer payments (not to be confused with transfer pricing), because they don't change the net cost or benefit, just the distribution. Treat taxes and subsidies case by case. Include true opportunity cost of government costs, not arbitrary prices. Avoid double-counting. Consider changes in asset value. Include externalities. Consider secondary outcomes. Include unpriced outcomes.

Reading

Boardman, A. E., D. H. Greenberg, A. R. Vining &D. L. Weimer. "Cost Benefit Analysis Concepts and Practice. Chapter 1

• p 5: Discussion of US federal requirements for performing CBA, starting in 1981. I think it's important to note (though the authors don't) that CBA is often a partisan political tool. A few ways it can be manipulated: require CBA for disfavored projects while not performing CBA on favored projects; control the scope of CBA to include or exclude important factors; selectively use or ignore the results of CBA.
• p 18: three perspectives, based on role. Analysts do real CBA. Guardians (e.g., OMB) tend to do only financial analysis. Spenders (in "service or line departments") tend to see all expenditures as benefits. They also weight their CBA heavily by political support.
• p 22: "CBA is often taught in a way that is completely divorced from political reality. We wish to avoid this mistake."

Sinder, J. A. & D. J. Thampapillai, "Introduction to Benefit-Cost Analysis", Chapter 4 & 5

• p 52: exclude international outcomes. Um. It's hard for me to get on board with that while still feeling like an ethical person.
• p 61: handy checklist of private vs social perspectives on various costs.
• p 62: Review questions. This looks like good practice.

Framework for feedback observations:

Situation

Behavior

Impact

Student presentations

The groups that volunteered to present today on Adaptive Leadership had a very vague brief. Our group decided after some discussion to present by play-acting our discussion about how to present, simultaneously a bold move and a kind of cop-out. (Amusingly, the way we played with the fourth wall was by raising it, since we interacted as if the audience didn't exist, instead of by speaking to them.)

We were lucky to have an expert presentation coach present for class, albeit a grumpy one since she had come directly from the airport without a stop home. It was tough for me to listen positively to the feedback, because I was proud of our work and wanted more strokes before the criticism, which the coach was simply not in the mood to provide. So it might have been an artifact of my imagination that her final words, congratulating us for making a presentation tailored to the group that communicated our message, came across in a tone of damning with faint praise.

Our most essential feedback, I felt, was when the class was asked for a show of hands: who thought we achieved our objective. The majority raised their hands. Other feedback: our method of writing out dummy text for our points as we went, and then revealing well-formed writing on another whiteboard as we left, was a bad idea. We should have just planned our stagecraft better to write out legible points as we went.

The presentation following us used the overhead for powerpoint, a minus in my book, but they more than made up for it by showing clear signs of practice: they all spoke freely and naturally without notes (except for the over-long Churchill quote). So the fluency was a big plus (update: well, two and a half well-performed segments out of five was still a huge step up from most presentations last semester). Content-wise, it didn't seem especially penetrative; something about politics as an integral part of leadership; a profile of Jesus as a leader, another of Churchill, and a shout-out to Jack Welch. At the very best, they didn't get any closer to defining "adaptive" leadership than our group did. (The message of our group was that adaptive leadership was an ill-defined buzzword, even to the point that we weren't sure whether it was intended to mean leaders who adapt, or leaders who lead people to adapt. While there might be useful ideas related to adaptive leadership, we weren't convinced they were new ideas.) Overall, the second group seemed like five independent presentations on peoples' personal interests, coordinated neither with each other nor with those before or after.

Side note: Jack Welch's leadership skills should be continually re-assessed for the next twenty to fifty years as the long-term damage he did to GE in search of consistent, indefinite short-term results emerges.

Second side note: I don't think Jesus is a good example to use for illuminating adaptive leadership. Religious figures aren't very suitable as case studies or anecdotes, because they're mythological. I don't mean that they're false (though as an atheist I happen to think that as well), I mean that they are loaded with content and meaning that is distracting from the point. Believers may overly credit, or perhaps not bother no notice, the actual context; disbelievers