Happy Birthday PRC!

Sixty years ago today, Mao Zedong stood on the gilded balcony of the Gate of Heaven (Tian an men) and declared the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. In the intervening decades, a society that was almost completely agricultural, rural, uneducated and desperately poor has made massive strides into modernity. On the whole, the Chinese people are more educated, wealthier and far safer from random violence than they were when the CCP took power. The educated urban middle class have opportunities open to them as great as those of residents in any developed country in the world, and ages from the dismal expectations that lay before their grandparents and great grandparents. China is one of the world’s leading economies, and the prestige and force of Chinese cultural and economic leadership is felt around the globe.

But this is a story full of difficulties and tragedy as well as triumph. tens, possibly even hundreds of millions of Chinese people perished in the thirty years of Mao’s reign, from famine and disease that were exacerbated by government policies. The land reform that brought so many peasants out of absolute poverty was carried out in one of the most brutal campaigns of human rights abuses in the history of the twentieth century. To this day, the people of China have limited freedom to speak their minds and act according to their conscience. Political dissenters are imprisoned without trial, and the absolute power of the state is enforced with deadly means.

Despite the enormous gains made by economic growth, half the country’s population remains rural, and many are still extremely poor. The divide separating the haves and have-nots in China is wide and growing wider by the day. When combined with the CCP’s total intolerance for opening up in the political process, this creates a dangerous brew of anger, resentment and desperation. The Chinese government must find a way to address these tensions in its society before the system breaks under pressure and millions more suffer the kind of deadly turmoil that kept China in a state of civil war and supplication for almost 150 years.

I love China, and I consider it my second home. I extend my warmest wishes to all the Chinese people today, and my fervent hope that together they can continue moving in the direction of progress, growth and stability as a society. But while we celebrate the successes of the People’s Republic for the country, we cannot forget where it has failed so many people, lest we lose our respect for each individual tree for admiration of the forest…

Of Tanks and Tyrants

Today I want to take a moment to commemorate the brave and inspirational actions of the students and other citizens of the People’s Republic of China who gathered in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago to protest the tyranny, incompetence and corruption of their government. The force of their spirit was so strong that tanks were needed to dislodge them from their protest. But all the armor in the PLA could not silence their voices, and today, while the men and women in Zhongnanhai try to deafen and blind their nation, the rest of the world pauses to remember. In memory of those who died and those who lived to continue the struggle for basic freedom.

Have We Learned Nothing? Why Amb. Khalilzad Should Not Join the Afghan Government

In the mid 19^th century, Count Kapodistrya, scion of Greek aristocrats from the Italian owned Island of Corfu, served at the court of the Czars, eventually rising to become the Russian Empire’s Foreign and Prime Minister. In retirement, he returned to the newly liberated Greece whos freedom he had helped to secure from his post in St. Petersburg, and was elected the first President of the new Greek Republic. Kapodistrya’s was perhaps the most successful example(discounting his eventual assassination) of a not uncommon career track for non Russians drawn into the great imperial orbit of the Romanovs.

I cringe at drawing the imperialistic parallels it implies of the United States, but the career of Zalmay Khalilzad bears remarkable similarity to this pattern. After serving with distinction and a little notoriety as a foreign policy adviser and Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations in the Bush Administration, he is now set to become the most powerful unelected official in his native Afghanistan. Although he will maintain his US citizenship, Khalilzad (affectionately known as “Zal” by many of his American colleagues) will serve as a kind of un-elected prime minister in the new Government of President Karzai. This deal was widely viewed as Karzai’s silver bullet to prevent the popular former Ambassador from switching his citizenship back after thirty plus years and running for President himself.

Unusual as it seems in the modern world, this arrangement is actually a rather natural progression for Dr. Khalilzad, who has always maintained strong links to his first home, despite serving for decades as conservative American muse on Central and South Asian policy. His relationship with his governmental colleagues in the US has sometimes been strained by perceptions that he was using his time to lay the groundwork for a triumphant transition to power in Afghanistan when administrations changed. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that he was effective and influential as Ambassador in all his assignments and is an individual of considerable intellect and political skill.

With that being said, I believe allowing Dr. Khalilzad to pursue the deal with President Karzai as it stands today is a bad idea and could prove profoundly detrimental to US policy in Afghanistan and indeed the whole region. There are pros and cons which must be weighed carefully, but at the end of the day, the risks are too many to justify the possible rewards.

Not to say that Dr. Khalilzad would do a bad job as CEO of Afghanistan. To the contrary, the harried and ineffectual Karzai regime might benefit greatly from his popularity, political sophistication and international clout. That is not the point. At the end of the day, sadly, it is a question of passports. So long as Khalilzad maintains his U.S. citizenship no amount of speechifying and denial by the US will convince the world that he is other than an American consul in sheep’s clothing.

This perception is dangerous for a number of reasons. Its impact on Khalilzad’s effectiveness cuts both ways. He gained credibility as a tough player with the more recalcitrant elements of Afghan society when he was representing the US, but for every warlord impressed by the mystique of Armani suits and FA-18s, there are two who will view him as a mouthpiece for Washington. Think of the predicament Khalilzad might find himself in the next time (and there will be a next time) the US military and the Afghan government find themselves at conflict over the truth about an incident of civilian deaths.

Pirates and Tea Bags…

Two things have been occupying my thoughts the last day or so: pirates and tea parties. The business of Somali piracy is getting to the point where serious systemic, proactive steps are going to have to be taken unless we want to keep the Navy occupied chasing down hostages every week or so. The question is what to do? Piracy has been a problem for global commerce since the first person put to sea. During the Roman Republic (I know I reference Rome all the time, but it’s one of my favorite historical periods, and one I know a lot about), piracy in the Mediterranean became a huge business and a huge pain for the nascent empire’s commercial and political interests. There is a famous story about the young Julius Caesar being captured by pirates en route to his military assignment. Insulted by the low ransom they were going to ask for his return, Caesar demanded that the commander of the vessel ask the full standard amount for a Roman Senator. Impressed by his gumption, the pirates became friendly with Caesar while waiting for the money to arrive – which they regretted later when he was freed and led an expedition back to their secret base.

Charlton Heston as Ben Hurr, captured by ancient roman pirates

Two massive anti-pirate campaigns were waged several years later. One on land in Crete where the major pirate bases were, which lasted for years under the command of the chronically under funded and probably mildly inept Metellus Creticus (yes, he was there fighting for so long he got nicknamed after the place). The second was a huge mop up effort across land and sea from Gibraltar to Syria under the command of Pompey. The latter operation proved so successful that piracy was effectively wiped out for close to twenty years until, ironically enough, Pompey’s own son Sextus turned to thievery on the high seas during a civil war.

Pirates also plagued the golden age of navigation and exploration from the early Portuguese voyages through the middle of the nineteenth century. Buccaneers, freebooters, privateers, corsairs – English has a plethora of names for scoundrels who sail under the black flag. And while it is all much romanticized today (Pirates of the Caribbean, Lego pirate ships, etc.) it was a dangerous, dirty, savage way of making a living, and was a huge threat to the commerce of Europe’s seafaring powers. As navies grew in size and there became fewer lawless places for pirates to hide out and fence their stolen goods, the changing times drained away the economic advantage of piracy. The twentieth century saw piracy mainly in poorer parts of the world where it still made financial sense for a guy with a boat and a gun to take up that career.

Now piracy is in again! And it’s back in – surprise surprise – lawless parts of the African coastline where failed states like Somalia provide the perfect environment for supporting the land-based short range kidnapping operation we have seen growing so fast in the last two years. These pirates are no Viking warriors carrying goods back to their villages as a sort of early version of corporate raiding (Wall Street’s mentality is perfectly suited to the use of the reprehensible but slightly romantic image of piracy…). They are young men, boys in some cases, who are driven by desperate poverty to risk their lives stealing money that mostly goes to line the pockets of a few criminal kingpins – not keep their local economy chugging. This is a problem that cannot be solved on the seas, it has to start with stabilizing the situation in Somalia. And that’s what is so hard to figure out, after all we don’t have the best history with operations there…

US Navy ships take on Barbary Pirates

The fate of the young man who survived the Navy rescue operation this week is undetermined, but he might be prosecuted in the US since the backbone of international maritime law is the precedent that any nation has the right to prosecute acts of piracy against its citizens or flagged vessels no matter where in the world the acts took place. Interestingly enough,  piracy is one of the few crimes that is addressed specifically in the US Constitution, where Congress is explicitly given the power to regulate all matters related to piracy against American persons and property. Further reinforcement of the importance of piracy as a threat to 18th century maritime commerce. Indeed Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency was marked by the US war against the Barbary Pirates who captured American vessels off the North African Coast. Ironically enough some of the Jefferson’s friends who crafted those lines were complicit in an act prosecutable as piracy when they pitched a cargo hold full of tea into Boston harbor to protest British taxes.

Which segues nicely into my second subject: tea parties. The anti-tax Conservative groups that held symbolic “tea parties” yesterday to protest tax day and federal taxes in general drew their inspiration from the famous act of protest back in Bean Town. Of course while it is cute, it is a completely facetious and insulting comparison. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against outrageous tariffs on imported British goods that were being used to drain the colonies of their wealth, and punish them for their insubordinate attitudes towards the Crown’s authority. The modern federal tax system does not really bare comparison. Income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes, however much we may resent paying them, are the main source of funding the government services upon which we all depend every day. Yes, even Grover Norquist drives on roads built with tax dollars (or at least with bond money secured by the revenue of tax dollars). Even Rush Limbaugh will be entitled to the protection of the police if he needs it. The only thing the tea tax and the stamp tax provided the colonists was the protection of the British Military, which after the French and Indian War spent far more time keeping the Americans down than “protecting” them from the good citizens of Louisiana.

And perhaps most importantly, the chief complaint of the colonists was not the paying of taxes and tarrifs, even they recognized the need to fund public services. No, it was the right to decide on those taxes that was the lynchpin of their rebellion. Repeat it after me, we’ve all heard it a million times: No taxation without representation. That’s the rub. If the attendees of these tea parties want to stop paying taxes, all they have to do is convince their Members of Congress that taxes are evil and get them to vote them all away. And you know what, despite two hundred plus years of making precisely the same argument, they still have not convinced the elected representatives of the entire nation that government can be made so small and so simple it will run on nothing. Nice PR stunt though. Keep trying. Remember not to run up such a massive debt though next time you are in office, otherwise we tax and spend liberals are going to keep winning.

Uncle Ted and 21st Century Political Morality

Ted Stevens, it turns out, was not content to wield the awesome power of senior Republican member of the United States Senate, or trade it for the opportunity to make vast riches as an influence peddler. No, Uncle Ted wanted both – at the same time. Today, we call that an ethics violation, but the idea that great public offices are for public service, and not also private enrichment, is relatively novel to our day and age. It is hard to imagine a courtier under Louis XIV failing to exploit his power for personal gain – to say nothing of history’s first great republican world power: Rome.

Uncle Ted

To be a Senator in the Roman Republic you had to meet two criteria – neither of which was election. First, you had to belong to a “noble” family. Although we throw around the term patrician pretty casually, the truth is that there were plenty of plebians in the Senate as well – they just had to be of an old and well established gens. Patrician in the modern English usage is a good way of thinking about it: your family had to have a long history of service to the State, military and political being the most illustrious forms, and an equally long history of intermarriage with other acceptable people. True patricians were nobles dating back to the Roman Kings, and were undeniably the creme de la creme of Republican society, but by the time of Julius Caesar, there were few rights reserved to them which were not accessible to the noblest plebian families as well.

The second key criterion was wealth. Big-time wealth. To be eligible for Senate membership during most of the Republic, one usually had to be comfortably in the top 1% of Roman citizens by net worth. Certain exceptions were made at different times for winners of high military honors and others, but generally speaking being a Senator also required being filthy rich. Now that’s not to say the rules were always enforced. Indeed one of the most important times in the lives of many a Senator from illustrious but penurious family was whenever the state decided to conduct a new census. This was done in a shockingly arbitrary manner. If the two senior officers of the Senate called Censors were elected, and they often were not, it was their duty to carry out the census – but no one looked over their shoulders. Thus many families retained their Senatorial rank for generations without having their assets subject to review, and many more were allowed to slip through the cracks when it came time to tally the numbers. After all, even the prickliest rule-follower would have trouble throwing out his wife’s brother – especially if said relative carried a name like Julius, Servilius, Cornelius or Junius.

Of course, every so often, that’s exactly what happened. It was during these times of peril that the pressure to squeeze money out of one’s office was really on. Technically Senators were not allowed to engage in trade of any kind, including the lending of money – activities which were reserved for the non-Senatorial banking and business class known as ordo equestor – or “knights” in modern parlance. That meant the only valid source of income for Senators was land: rents, farms, agriculture, etc. good traditional preserves of any aristocratic elite, no matter how Republican.

Cato the Elder, a famous Censor and all around moralizer

In practice, land was the first thing to go when a family hit hard times and needed cash, so many of the poorer Senators lacked an estate to call their own. Indeed, Julius Caesar himself was famously poor at the start of his career, his father having left him a plot of land that was just enough to meet the Senatorial census, but was too mortgaged to provide much income. Nobles of the Senatorial class usually had access to vast amounts of credit, but Roman bankers were not above taking their vaunted clients (and sometimes their relatives) to court to recover their loans, and at any rate, borrowed cash would not appease the Censor’s clerks.

The grand result? The purpose of any ambitious Senator was to achieve the high offices of state and line his pockets as thickly as possible on the way. The Roman Republic was governed by a set of magistrates and it was mainly through exercise of these offices that the conscript fathers enriched themselves.

Every year the Republic elected two Consuls, who served as head of state and government; four or six praetors who were administrators and the heads of the courts; and a number of lesser officials. Each praetor and consul when finished with their year in office was given one of Rome’s provinces to govern. These governors – known as propraetors and proconsuls – were absolute rulers within their provinces, answerable only to the Senate and Assemblies, and only once they got back to Rome.

Based on this system, two major forms of public corruption emerged. First the corruption of serving magistrates. Typically this involved accepting massive sums of money, often from foreign rulers, in exchange for advancing certain legislation or policies – sound familiar? For example, it is speculated that the last Kings of Egypt regularly distributed unholy sums of cash to needy Senators to prevent a Roman seizure of their wealthy but weak realm.

Second was the corruption of provincial governors. Fighting a small war was usually a good way to make a buck, since the general/governor got a healthy slice of whatever spoils were seized before they went to the Treasury. The dumbest governors simply appropriated cash, goods and land from their provincial citizens – but while effective in the near term, this was a great way to get hauled up before the corruption courts on your return to Rome. Cicero made his reputation as an advocate prosecuting corruption, including one famously avaricious governor who was exiled for life after he was convicted of stealing precious works of art from Greek cities in Asia Minor.

The smart governors got into the tax racket. Like most pre-modern governments, the Roman Republic did not have a centralized bureaucracy capable of collecting taxes accross its vast domains. So, to ensure the flow of revenue, the Senate contracted collection to firms of “tax farmers” who got a portion fo the revenue as a fee for their trouble. Governors who colluded with their local farmers could make a killing by imposing new taxes on their province – using whatever excuse was handy – and then accepting a share of the revenue generated by the collection firms as a “thank you” gift from the happy profitmakers.

the Roman Province of Asia during the Republic

This practice was more or less invented in the generations prior to Caesar and started out relatively small. By the end of the Republic however, tax farming was big business and the profits were heady indeed. The problem was that rich provinces like Greece and “Asia” (encompassing most of modern day Turkey) were squeezed to the breaking point by avaricious profiteers and their gubernatorial collaborators. This reduced the amount of tax revenue reaching the Treasury as well and tax farmers became highly unpopular people.

So while some stigma still attached itself in Rome to the idea of wealth gained through office – other than by prosecuting a war against the enemies of the state – it was still accepted as a fact of life. Imagine our world today if Governors were allowed to keep a portion of their state’s tax revenue? And yet still we grapple with the gray areas. What of all the former Members of Congress who join lobbying firms? Think about the current hot water Tom Daschle is in for his lucrative career as an adviser and rainmaker even though it is clear he did nothing approaching wrong.

One of the fundamental burdens we struggle with in our modern democracy is the meaning of a spirit of public service. In a world where such awe inspiring material rewards are available to the brightest, most driven people, what are we asking of their personal morality to devote their lives to the public good? To drive Toyotas while they watch their peers acquire beach houses and yachts? And what about those elected officials of huge personal wealth, our modern day Crassuses? Does their money get them immunity to petty corruption – and if so, what about the more vast and tempting opportunitites available to a lawmaker with a few hundred million to invest? These questions have been a part of elected government’s self examination since the dawn of democracy and they will continue. The important thing is that we think about them regularly, and have open public dialogue. As for Senator Stevens, I may not have agreed with most of his politics, but it is undeniably a sad thing to watch a towering personality of historic importance undone by a free viking stove and a gas generator. Makes you think.

Tete a tete – Bloomberg, Lauder and the demise of term limits

Being a billionaire has a lot of advantages: better housing, food, and god knows better parking than the rest of us mortals – even in Manhattan. But beyond the direct material benefits, a place among the world’s wealthiest individuals also confers status. On certain playing fields only people with a ten or eleven figure net worth are truly your peers, since other kinds of power are so susceptible to the influence of money. When plutocrats enter politics, the combination can produce a kind of devil-may-care devotion to honest public policy not often encountered among the ranks of those who must kowtow to donors in order to protect their electoral futures. And when two plutocrats face off over a political issue, it can sometimes seem like they are the only people in the room who’s opinions truly matter.

Witness the current battle over term limits in New York City. Of all the rich people holding public office in the United States, no one is richer than Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With a personal fortune estimated at $11.5 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 65th wealthiest person in the world. He spent over $60 million of his own money on his re-election campaign, and if he succeeds in overturning the City’s term limits, he will likely spend at least that much fighting another election this coming year – even if he faces no credible opponents (he didn’t last time).

Ronald Lauder, heir to part of the Estee Lauder fortune, is not an elected official, but he is one of New York’s most prominent public figures. A philanthropist, art collector, museum founder, business leader, and general custodian of what he views as the public interest – and a titan in the Park Avenue social scene – Lauder wields immense influence. He is also largely responsible for the existence of the term limits in question, since he financed the successful referendum that put them in place. Oh, and by the way he’s worth an estimated $3.2 billion, which although only about a third of Bloomberg’s fortune, still places him comfortably in the “astronomically wealthy” category.

The Heir – $3.2 billion

The Empire Builder – $11.5 billion

No surprise then that of all the conversations the Mayor must have had when deciding how to handle this issue, one of the most important was with Mr. Lauder. It turns out, it was also one of the most controversial. Papers filed with the NY State Supreme Court today to stop the vote on overturning term limits describe a “deal” struck by the two men. Lauder agrees not to oppose the Mayor and in return the Mayor agrees that the extension should a one-off deal for current incumbents and Lauder will get appointed to a special commission to decide the future of term limits. You can almost picture it: a quiet power breakfast at the Four Seasons, maybe a chat in some silent as the grave, marble and mahogany cavern of an office in midtown. One is tempted to think that if it were another Mayor – say the prosaically well to do Giuliani – the meeting’s outcome might have been different. Who can say? But surely Bloomberg’s ability to take on Mr. Lauder on any playing field no matter how high the stakes brings a singular aura of “master of the universe-ness” to the whole affair. “Don’t let’s you and me worry about the other people for now Ron. I want you to be ok with this, and I know you see the value of us reaching an understanding, rather than say laying waste to everything around us in some Clash-of-the-Titans financial bloodbath.”

Now, the NYTimes ever entertaining City Room blog has started soliciting the opinions of other billionaires:

“Why do you want my opinion?” Leonard N. Stern, who is No. 97 on Forbes’s list of the 400 richest Americans, asked when a reporter called. “Just because I have a lot of money?”

Actually, yes. With two billionaires on opposite sides of the debate about extending term limits — Ronald S. Lauder (No. 118 on the Forbes list) for, and Tom Golisano (No. 281) against — this seemed to be the moment to ask other extremely well-to-do New Yorkers what they thought and why they hadn’t weighed in.

Oh, and don’t forget Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (No. 8), who is behind the proposal to change the term limits law.

Some of the 66 billionaires on the Forbes list who live in New York City were hard to reach. Some were traveling. Some were not working because of the Jewish holiday of Simchat Tora. Some, like Bruce Kovner, No. 105 a backer of The New York Sun, the conservative newspaper that shut down last month, said through secretaries or public relations people that they never talk to reporters.

Mr. Stern, who called Mr. Bloomberg “an exemplary public servant,” said he was troubled that big-money types were pushing the term-limit question. “That’s what’s wrong with the system,” he said. “We have people who are very, very wealthy who believe they have a right to a disproportionate voice in the process of government.”

Stephen Ross, No. 78 and the chief executive of the Related Companies, said he had long opposed term limits and was troubled by Mr. Golisano’s involvement.

“He doesn’t live in New York City,” Mr. Ross said. “It sounds to me like somebody who’s trying to get a lot of publicity and to insinuate himself in something he has nothing to do with to help his agenda.” (Mr. Golisano, who owns the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, is from Rochester.)”

[A note - the rankings used by the Times are for US billionaires as opposed to the World Wide ranking I used above]

If only London Mayor Boris Johnson were a billionaire too! Maybe someone would have thought to call and ask him about his plans for that fair city…

What the Hekmatyar!?

Further proof that Afghanistan is rapidly declining into violent chaos came last night and today when US and French soldiers were subject to two daring, well-coordinated and tactically sophisticated attacks by Taliban militia (see NYTimes story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/world/asia/20afghan.html?hp). The increasing size of the forces availible to the Taliban, as well as the use of more complex tactics and multiple weapons signals nothing but bad news for the effort to keep the country under control.

Sarkozy flies to Kabul today to try and rally French morale after 10 of that country’s soldiers were killed, but frankly, nothing about the scope of the NATO operation in Afghanistan, or the size and historic resilience of its warring militias suggests that the status quo will produce anything but increasing body counts in the near to medium term.

One of the astonishing things about Afghanistan is the longevity of some of the top militant players, some of whom have survived literally three decades of non-stop civil and insurgent warfare in the same positions of leadership. Among them, few can compete with Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – founder and commander of the Hizb e-Islami faction/party/militia – for sheer staying power. Mr. Hekmatyar.

Hekmatyar at one of his ubiquitous press conferences

Hekmatyar got his start fighting in the anti-Soviet resistance that morphed into the Mujahiddin in the eighties, and has been a fairly consistant enemy of the West, foreign powers and the Northern, non-Pashtun forces in the country. He has been a serial guest of the Pakistani Tribal Region, where he has based himself off and on for twenty odd years, and although once allied with Iran, he got kicked out after pressure from the US government in 2002-2003. A firm supporter of Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and other reactionary figures, he continues to lead his faction (from an undisclosed location of course, although widely suspected to be in Pakistan) publish press releases and play a role in the anti-NATO insurgency despite the persistent efforts over the last decade of the US, Russia, Iran, the Afghan Government and twenty or thirty other militias to kill him.

Words that I Cannot Stand!

Every discipline and field has it’s jargon, but the world of management and leadership studies – both in the corporate arena and others – has produced some of the most irritating, hackneyed, cloying perversions of the English language ever to grace the pages of a memo or handbook on executive decision making. Herewith, some of my “favorites” as well as some good words that have been horrendously misused.

Paradigmatic – Thomas Kuhn was speechless towards the end of his life at the outrageous abuse of the word “paradigm” which he brought into fashion with his masterpiece The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigmatic is one of the variations that gets used randomly for all manner of purposes by people who clearly do not know what it means, they just get that it has something to do with models of doing stuff and it sounds “Peter-Drucker-Sexy.”

incentivize, monetize, corporitatize, operationalize, etc. – Lord! It’s like “prioritize” had a batch of horrid children. Want to make something into something else? No problem, just “ize” it and you are good! A special note about socialize – it used to mean to bring a person or animal into contact with the social order around them, now it means to show a document or idea to your co-workers. For the demon of them all, see below:

Actualize(d)/Actualizing/Actualization – This used to be a nice word, wholesome and sort of the homely cousin of “manifest.” Now, it has become a monster, used to obfuscate the meaning of a phrase by replacing a more threatening or pedestrian sounding word: self-actualization tends to mean just a narcissistic yuppie shopping spree; actualized returns is merely “real product” or “profit.” But it would not sound jargony enough to put it that way, so we say actualized, as in “hey, here’s what we actually produced, as opposed to say, what we implied in our advertising.”
Process/Processing – Here is a noun that was “verbed” originally by the industrial revolution and then the banking industry: “We need to process that iron ore” or “it will take a moment to process your transaction.” Some years ago it migrated into the realm of leadership and counseling where now issues and feelings must be processed appropriately. At best, it is simply an irritating – and somewhat innocuous – thing to call legitimate activities like grievance resolution or brainstorming. At worst, it is a red alert warning you that a massive complaint-a-palooza is about to ensue and it is entirely likely that someone in a leadership role will be avoiding their responsibility to accept consequences and make fair decisions (like the media is avoiding the issue of John Edward’s mistress).

Containers, the setting of – this one drives me insane. I go to a lot of meetings, and deal with powerful and unhappy people over prickly issues. I know all about the need to manage the tone and direction of an encounter. But please, please, just lay out some parameters, or frame the issue a certain way. Leave setting the container to the guy who designs tupperware. We will all be happier and live longer.

Visioning – Really? Enough said.

Core Competence, Centers of Excellence and Buy-In – “really, Barry, what we need to do is seek buy-in from the top on building these centers of excellence around our core competencies” Translation: “hey, why don’t we agree to do what we are good at instead of other random stuff?”

Actionable – a way to say “achievable” but sound like a CIA officer.

Let’s see… 3:00pm – mass killing, 4:30 – aura clensing session…

Good lord! Radovan Karadzic was not only living right under the nose of Serbian authorities in a Belgrade suburb, he was also practicing medicine at a holistic healing center, under an assumed name! You have GOT to be kidding me. Seriously. Let’s leave aside for the moment the issue that it seems close to impossible to believe that someone in the Serbian state security apparatus did not know his whereabouts and just decide to look the other way. Can you imagine if you learned one morning that your acupuncturist or, say, chiropractor, was a war criminal hiding from INTERPOL after being indicted at the Hague for crimes against humanity amounting to the deaths of some tens of thousands of people?! Uuuggghhh! Here is the TIME story: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1825481,00.html

Radovan’s remarkable transformation from svelte (if beefy) tyrant into bizarre ascetic santa of death can only be appreciated visually. It really is remarkable:

yogi Karadzic - commandante Karadzic

Nevertheless, in terms of the effectiveness of this disguise, I just think about the voice. Karadzic was a major, popular figure in Serbian politics for years. He has a distinctive voice with memorable intonation and timbre. To me it seems like if I met Bill Clinton in disguise, I would still know it was Bill Clinton the minute he opened his mouth – I find it hard to imagine any well informed Serbian citizen could have interacted with the so-called Dragan Dabic (his assumed name) without getting suspicious. Not to mention the clinic that hired him! Talk about giving alternative medicine a bad name! Did they not even check to see if “Dr. Dabic” had a medical license – or say even a birth certificate???

Ugh.

China-Russia border dispute over – forty years later…

Today Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov flew to Beijing to formalize a deal that has taken China and Russia more than forty years to negotiate. As the late and unlamented Lord Curzon observed: “Frotiers are the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the issue of war or peace and the life of nations.” This could be true of any country, but it is an especially poignant political issue in China, where territorial integrity has been a main driver of foreign policy since the Ming Dyanasty.

During the fifties, a border skirmish between China and Russia left Russia in possession of several islands at the confluence of the rivers which demarcate part of the long border between the two countries. Regaining ownership of this territory has been a long term but high importance issue for Beijing, and the finalization of a deal that transfers most of it back is the last step in a border-clarification process with Moscow that began well over a decade ago.

I believe the success of this process also says a lot about the changing nature of China’s foreign policy. The negotiations that brought many long standing border disputes between the two giants and their smaller neighbors to a close were facilitated through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The group, which includes the two main actors as well as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, has evolved from an quasi-official discussion group on border disputes into a full-fledged international organization, complete with a Secretariate, staff – even its own joint counter-terrorism training center.

The success of this organization is a testament to the changing times. Beijing’s reticence about international organizations used to be a mainstay of Chinese foreign policy. The decision to make the SCO “for real” is a significant departure from the old standard operating procedures and has defied the early expectations of some scholars and experts, who predicted that it was more for show. This is an issue to watch, its implications for China’s broader international participation (especially with ASEAN for example) could be significant.