Editor's Blog
High school students huddle at a Leadership seminar at the U.S. Military Academy, west point, N.Y. (Reuters/File)
What kind of leaders do we need?
Everyone admires a leader. Their biographies are bestsellers (see “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson). Their tales are thrilling: How Ray Kroc scrubbed the uncertainty out of the hamburger joint; how Sam Walton struck a rich retail vein in rural America; how Estée Lauder’s relentless sales effort made her uncle’s skin cream a billion-dollar success.
Scholars and fans love to devise formulas for what leaders do. We read about their seven effective habits, four keys to success, six pithy sayings, and one or two life-changing crises. But leadership isn’t a simple subject. As Professor Jodi Sandfort of the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs told Monitor correspondent Jina Moore recently, while the best leaders start with the vision thing they never neglect the follow-through. They “mobilize the resources, implement the vision, and understand the policy of it.”
If resources, implementation, and policy sound wonky, they are. Despite what the mythmakers write, leadership is not all swashbuckling and genius. If you are looking to build something that lasts – a successful organization, a prosperous business, a harmonious society – follow-through is crucial. That means meetings, deliberation, testing, revision, more meetings, and trying again.
Jina’s special report (you can read it here) – one of our quarterly Future Focus features – delves into the latest thinking on leadership in business, the nonprofit sphere, and politics. You’ll find two interesting leadership profiles in diplomat Dennis Jett and nonprofit innovator Mark Hanis. Contributor Hamilton Wende takes you inside the African Leadership Academy in South Africa, where the future of the continent may be being shaped. And presidential historian Allen Guelzo has a fascinating essay on what qualities Americans should be looking for in choosing a president.
One of Professor Guelzo’s important points is that a good political leader is much more than a spouter of memorable sound bites and three-point plans. He or she should, among other things, love the “daily toil and mechanics of politics.” (See what I mean about swashbuckling and genius not being the key?)
It is pretty clear that the era of the old my-way-or-the-highway leader – the maverick who acts on gut instinct, barks out orders, and silences dissent – is fast fading. A 21st-century leader needs to inspire, guide, and offer attaboys to the troops, but the most important thing a leader can do is to engage a much larger group of people in a complex task. In the past, those people were called followers, and they weren’t asked for much other than loyalty to the leader. Today, we think of teams. A leader is a coach, a quarterback, a captain, but it is the team that gets things done.
As much has been written about team-building, teamwork, dream teams, and the amazing products they have created as has been written about leadership. Google and Facebook emerged after punishing sessions of collective coding. The Edison light bulb, Ford assembly line, and U-2 spy plane came out of teams with a clear sense of mission, varied talents, and a willingness to continuously improve their product.
What makes a team succeed? The main factor seems to be the group dynamic. In other words, team members share the same values, respect one another, and enjoy what they are doing. They like having a challenge, learning from each other, and being part of something bigger than themselves. Being on a team involved in a breakthrough – whether it is developing a new technology, planning a successful event, fighting a war, or solving a difficult business problem – can be an arduous task. But arduous tasks, to paraphrase Aeneas’ motivational line to his battered team, almost certainly will one day be a joy to remember.
That’s the vision thing that modern leaders need – the ability to build a team and let the team build the future.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
A real-life still life at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/file)
Plymouth Rock: more than a homely boulder
Every town has memorials. They can be simple or grand, melancholy or rousing. Some are mystifying. (Why should that particular sword-brandishing dude and his horse forever command a key intersection?) Precious few – Maya Lin’s Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., and Michael Arad’s new September 11 memorial in lower Manhattan are two – inspire quiet awe.
We create these landmarks to keep alive the memory of significant people and events. Also to keep alive their ideas. Throughout the world, rocks and relics are visited by pilgrims with the hopes of recapturing the special qualities that once lived and breathed as we do.
I live not far from Plymouth Rock and often pass it while out for a walk. If you have ever visited this
memorial, you probably had this all-too-common reaction: Huh? Inside a relatively handsome tempietto is a lumpy, patched-together granite mound surrounded by wet sand and inevitable tourist coins. In a country rich with stunning seacoasts and purple mountains (and many nicer boulders), this is a homely memorial. Whether the first passenger on the Mayflower set foot on this rock in this place has always been questionable. Unlike, say, the Lincoln Memorial or the cemeteries at Normandy, Plymouth Rock is not about titanic struggles and the sweep of history. Still, I love the what it stands for. What began more or less around Plymouth’s dubious rock grew into a nation and a set of ideas that continue to influence world history.
Perhaps the strongest association with Plymouth is Thanksgiving. Sure, it is a foodie’s delight – a day to fix favorite dishes and dine with family and friends. In that, the American Thanksgiving echoes harvest feasts that stretch back into ancient history. While there probably was a communal dinner in the Plymouth Colony in 1621, a year after the Pilgrims landed, there had been thanksgivings in New Spain and the Jamestown settlement before then. The modern Thanksgiving is really only 70 years old. The fourth-Thursday date wasn’t fixed across the United States until 1941. But while we are still relatively new at what seems like an old tradition, what sets it apart from other celebrations is the idea that it is memorializing: gratitude not just for food, family, and friends, but gratitude above all.
Everyone from educators to doctors recognizes the value of a grateful heart in both personal health and societal improvement. Once you get the hang of it, they note, the gratitude shift is an amazingly simple and powerful tool. All you have to do is stop in the middle of the ambition, acquisitiveness, angst, or general bummed-outedness you may be experiencing and begin to think of the good that surrounds you. Do that, and your life changes.
This may seem schmaltzy. It may even seem suspiciously spiritual in an avowedly secular age. After all, if just shifting your thinking to emphasize good can improve your experience, might there be something else going on, something not evident to the five senses?
You don’t have to go that far if you don’t want to. Medical researchers believe that gratitude helps reset neural pathways, which accounts for an improved mental state. Fair enough if you see biology as the beginning and end of life. So let’s just say the common denominator is that gratitude is good for you.
Let’s also note that with a stagnant economy, a gridlocked political system, and a cornucopia of worries affecting us collectively and individually, we could employ this tool by counting up the good that we have – the always accepting friend; the beauty of a November day; the long arc of improved air, water, food, and health on our planet; the current flowering of democracy and freedom. If attitude adjustment can help us individually, it can also help the world.
Thanksgiving is more than an autumn chowdown. It is a living monument to gratitude.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
A horse carriage sits idle near a busy road along the Nile river in Cairo. (Ann Hermes/Staff)
Egypt's future? A democracy -- sort of
Democracy is a factory. People go in one end – people with ideas, beliefs, prejudices, and certainties – and then all the processes for regulating human behavior come into play, from parliamentary procedure to debate etiquette, political jockeying to secret balloting. Out the other end emerges a modified amalgam that tries to balance fairness with principle, majority rule with minority rights.
These factories operate in every culture. Egypt's is the newest one, the one that seemed impossible to imagine less than a year ago. Egypt today is where an entire society is trying to make the machine of democracy work. It faces myriad problems. The military is the power behind the scenes. Does it really intend to yield to a civilian government? What are the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood? Will the old Hosni Mubarak party try to regain power? Will the vast majority of Egyptians – culturally and religiously conservative as they are known to be – tolerate uncensored media, artistic expression, secular lifestyles, religious diversity, and all the other elements we associate with democratic societies?
Writing in The Political Quarterly, Amitai Etzioni, who directs the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University, sums up the Middle East moment this way: “[A]ssuming that the new regimes will be democratic – and not just nominally – can they also be religious? That is, Muslim? And if so, will they respect individual rights? And if not, what should be the position of the United States towards what ought to be called ‘illiberal democracies.’ ”
Perhaps the best way to look at Egypt is to look first, and realistically, at democracy. In each country it is different. Dr. Etzioni points out, for instance, that the great democratic hallmark of separation of church and state is followed in France and the US (though “In God We Trust” is on US currency, so ... ) but not as much in Britain, Germany, and other democracies. His point is that democrats need to be both pragmatic and principled when considering other cultures.
Pragmatically, if only liberal secularists have our backing, “the result will be that we lose,” says Etzioni. Islamic groups are organized and disciplined thanks in part to their years operating underground. Liberal groups weren’t crushed, but they were stunted. (Dan Murphy, a veteran Christian Science Monitor correspondent who lived in Cairo from 2003 to 2008, recalls how in cafes before the revolution Egyptians could quietly debate politics “but were always looking over their shoulders to see if somebody sitting nearby was reading the newspaper upside down.”)
Egypt is probably going to tilt more Islamic when the votes come in. The key, says Etzioni, is to support Egyptians searching for a path that is both religious and democratic.
Such pragmatism is not abnormal in foreign policy, though it can seem cynical, especially if illiberals suppress other groups or smash human rights. Etzioni draws the line at moves that threaten life. Thus he supported the NATO intervention in Libya after Muammar Qaddafi said he would track down opponents and kill them. He thinks the Syrian regime has crossed the line with violence against its people. Torture and ethnic cleansing also are reasons to withdraw support.
But beyond that, he says, we should tread lightly. In Afghanistan, he points out, the US-led occupation required that one-quarter of parliamentary seats go to women. Such quotas are not required in the US. (When I phoned him, he also pointed out, only half-jokingly, that even antipolygamy laws might not hold up in today’s US legal climate.)
What emerges from the Egyptian factory may not be pretty. The main thing is that the doors stay open and Egyptian democracy continues to evolve.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor. To comment on this column or anything else in the Monitor, please e-mail editor@csmonitor.com.
A migrant construction laborer works on a residential building in Shanghai, China. (Aly Song/Reuters/File)
The China paradox: communist capitalism?
It wasn’t the most charming example of “Chinglish” I’ve seen. It didn’t hold a candle to delightfully mystifying phrases like “Far Out But Classic” or “Show Mercy to the Slender Grass.” But the words I saw stenciled over and over again on concrete fences outside Shanghai, China, in the mid-1990s seemed to capture the Chinese spirit:
“Praise profit. Praise profit. Praise profit. Praise profit. Praise profit.”
The same nation that Mao Zedong had exhorted only two decades earlier to “Practice Marxism and not Revisionism” was being commanded into full-throated pursuit of capitalism.
China is the wonder of the age. If you were around in the 1960s, the China you knew was both tragedy and threat. Every few decades it seemed to devour itself. Millions died in Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Millions during his Cultural Revolution. Heavy-handed propaganda skewered capitalists, imperialists, and the always handy “running-dog lackeys.”
Then came one of the most astounding turnarounds in history. In the same way that communist leaders once ordered the proletariat to build a socialist workers’ paradise, the Communist Party ordered millions of Chinese to go out and make money. The Chinese people didn’t look back. China became the hottest economy on the planet. Its exports are ubiquitous. Its appetite for raw materials enormous. China finances a big chunk of the US national debt. Increasingly, Europe is looking to it for help with its debt. Chinese dealmakers can be found in remote parts of Africa, Manhattan, and the Amazon.
At home, the Chinese people are growing in material wealth, creature comforts, education, even physical stature thanks to higher protein consumption. China’s rise has been a material blessing to millions of its people. What China wants most is for nothing ever to change – for growth to continue and prosperity to increase. For despite its remarkable economic progress, China has 500 million citizens who still make less than $2 a day. If the Chinese economy ceases to grow, those 500 million will be stuck in poverty. A mild slowdown could return millions to poverty as well.
But as with Japan in the 1980s or the United States in the first decade of the 21st century, China is by no means guaranteed continued good times. Some elements of the Chinese boom are looking like a bubble. Vacant malls, excess factory capacity, and ghost cities are plentiful. Five of the 10 largest office buildings under construction globally are in China.
Everything China has done over the past six decades has been massive – a massive attempt to create a communist society and now a massive effort in pursuit of profit. This is not a nation reflecting the will of its people. It is a government command center telling its people what to do. Right now, that looks like a shiny, happy world of capitalism. Less than 50 years ago, it was a mad world of little red books, ruinous five-year plans, and socialist conformity.
If the current freedom to choose consumer goods becomes an expectation of free speech or self-government, the command center is in trouble. That is why China’s rulers imprison dissidents, monitor and regulate Internet usage, and control what is said on TV and in the press. While the Communist Party is more lenient than it was during Mao’s day, it is still careful not to let anything challenge its authority.
You won’t see the party exhorting the people to praise freedom. But if China is to become a balanced culture rather than one swinging between extremes, it must allow democracy alongside material well-being. To pull that off would be a real cultural revolution and a genuinely great leap forward.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
Boston University Economics Professor Kevin Gallagher (L.) lectures at the Occupy Boston encampment in Boston's financial District Oct. 7. (Michael Dwyer/AP)
Is this the era of leaderlessness?
The tea party and the “Occupy Wall Street” movements evolved on different planets, even if members of both groups sport red-white-and-blue face paint, funny hats, and placards proclaiming their anger. Tea partyers tend to be older, antitax, and more Midwestern or Southern in origin. Occupiers are younger, in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy, and more urban and coastal.
But in that way that left and right can sometimes intersect, the tea party and OWS are in the same place in at least one important sense. Both have lost faith in established institutions. TPs are more down on Washington, D.C., than Wall Street. OWSers are more irked at big money than big government. But both are deeply skeptical of the stentorian voice that says “trust us, we know best.”
The spirit of the times, whether in town-hall shoutfests or on the streets of Europe and North America, is infused with anarchy – and I mean nothing pejorative by that. “Anarchy” is now a synonym for chaos and wild-in-the-streets mayhem, but in the original Greek it simply means “without a leader.”
Anarchism is not just the absence of government. It has a large body of theory behind it that emphasizes enlightened individualism, charity, voluntarism, and community. It envisions individuals being purely self-governed. That’s the theory, at least. Anarchism doesn’t have such a great history. Attempts to create leaderless societies in 19th-century Europe and early-20th-century Russia ended with the guillotine and gulag. But every political system – democracy, monarchy, oligarchy – has been hijacked by bad guys at times.
Are we perhaps living in a time when leaderless groups can flourish thanks to the open-source, peer-to-peer sharing, social networking wonders we enjoy? With cheap, instant communication and vast amounts of information at our fingertips, could we run a society without a ruling hierarchy? One of the more popular management books in recent years (read everywhere from business schools to the Pentagon to tea party book clubs) has been “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. It sings the praises of decentralized organizations (Craigslist, Alcoholics Anonymous, the Apaches of the 19th century) as resilient and superior to hierarchies where everything rests on the leader. Think of the starfish, with its regenerating legs, versus the spider, which is kaput when decapitated.
Starfish groups must have strong values, motivated members, and transparent information structures. The good news is that starfish are multiplying. (The bad news is that Al Qaeda may be one.) The question is whether an entire society can be built without central command, including everything from national defense to food and drug standards. That isn’t implausible. Wikis, tweeting, and friending may be taking us in that direction. The recently formed Americans Elect group is trying to choose a presidential candidate outside the two-party system and via the Internet.
You can get a sense for which institutions we still see as necessary by looking at public opinion. The latest Gallup poll on confidence in institutions has the military and small business at the top, Congress and big business at the bottom. Career politicians, nest-feathering bosses, and entrenched bureaucrats, in other words, may be heading for the dustbin of history. For now, however, we are in a hybrid era. We still need leaders. But we won’t let them lead without constant questioning. We’ll want competence, honesty, transparency, and humility.
The message from tea partyers, Wall Street occupiers, and lots of nonactivists who have lived through the epic economic and political mismanagement of recent years is the same: Dear leaders, don’t unpack your boxes.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor
Late afternoon sun illuminates books on a shelf at a used book store. (John Nordell/The Christian Science Monitor)
What an e-reader can't give you
Just a few days apart this fall, the Borders bookstore chain turned the lights out and Amazon debuted a new version of its Kindle e-reader. If ever there was an example of creative destruction, this was it. The onetime megabookstore that once was blamed (along with Barnes & Noble) for slaying independent bookstores was done in by the even more mega bookstore in the cyber cloud.
I confess to participating in the plundering of Borders. Everything – even the shelves and coffee bar – was 90 percent off. My car filled up with sumptuous volumes on cooking, travel, and gardening. For almost no money, I own how-to manuals that will make me a better carpenter and conversationalist, and one, appealing to my inner Boy Scout, promised to help me survive in the wild. I brought home hardbacks to replace worn-out paperbacks, humor anthologies I might only have shoplifted a chortle from in the past, and a handy epigrammatical collection (Who said “Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?” That would be Henry Ward Beecher.)
Borders didn’t change with the digital times, as Barnes & Noble seems to be doing. And for every loss, I’m convinced, there is a gain. Sure, I am saddened and worried that the Internet is killing newspapers, civility, and church socials, but the Net has brought us unimaginable access to information, people, and goods and services. If bookstores are joining record stores as the latest bricks-and-mortar losers, our digital options are only getting better. Once you start using an iPad, Kindle, or other e-reader and experience the almost-instantaneous download of a book you just heard someone praise, it is hard to go back to browsing the aisles or waiting for the mail carrier to arrive.
You don’t need a physical book, though it is a beautiful thing. And a good bookstore is about more than books. Even if shopping-mall bookstores are not warm and fuzzy places, they are places where a certain amount of serendipity reigns, where you encounter other people taking pleasure in ideas. Bookstores are part of what sociologists call “third places” – destinations that are neither home nor office, places to linger without feeling that the meter is running or another customer wants your table.
Tom Sander, a Harvard University specialist on civic engagement, is concerned about the decline in third places. E-mail and social media such as Facebook and Twitter are compensating to some degree, Mr. Sander says, but only mildly. Both the three-year-old tea party movement and the recent wave of “Occupy Wall Street” protests rely to a great extent on the organizing tools of the Internet. These, however, are causes, not the more open-ended relationships that traditionally evolved in independent bookstores, cafes where people hung out long after breakfast, even family pubs where the point wasn’t inebriation but being where everybody knew your name. Borders wasn’t the best spot for building social capital. Amazon isn’t. Reading at home alone isn’t. So what’s left?
Long live the library!
When he endowed the first public library, the one in Boston, in 1852, Joshua Bates recalled his early years lingering over books on cold nights at the Hastings, Etheridge & Bliss bookstore in Boston. A public library, he wrote, should have “large, well-lighted rooms, well-warmed in winter” in which “the moral effect will keep pace with mental improvement.”
That’s a third place where we should never turn out the lights.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
An abandoned filling station in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. (John Kehe/The Christian Science Monitor)
Why we need to get smarter about energy
Like many homes along the northeast coast of the United States, ours was without power for several days in the aftermath of a hurricane that blew through in August. The first hours were an adventure, the next an annoyance, and then came concern. (The fridge is getting warm. Home Depot’s out of batteries! Gas stations need electricity for their pumps?) Around the 18-hour mark, thought strayed to what would happen if this was the new normal.
Plenty of dystopic novels and movies have traveled this road, so I’ll spare you the drama (which there would be) or jeremiads about our wasteful culture (which it is). What becomes apparent as you listen to the 2 a.m. silence – the strange absence of streetlights humming, compressors kicking in, TV laughter leaking from nearby windows – is not so much that we would be worse off in an energy-constrained world but that we would be making different choices about where we live, how we travel, what we acquire, even how we learn what’s going on.
We couldn’t all move closer to the supermarket, so small grocery stores would move closer to us. Recreational shopping would fade. Without TV or the Internet, our social networks would be based on visiting, shopping, chatting, and getting to know real people in real places. That sounds kind of good. But we’d also see a dip in variety, freedom, and privacy.
Most of us are exquisitely price sensitive when it comes to energy. My dad was a frugal man, as were millions like him who grew up in the Great Depression. He would drive well out of his way in the family Packard to fill up at a Ritter’s gas station in the early 1960s. Gas was cheap then, especially at independent stations in central Texas. But if he had to pay more than 20 cents a gallon, he’d look elsewhere. I’m the same when gas approaches $4 a gallon.
We modify our behavior every time energy prices rise or fall. When we feel energy-poor, we turn down the heat, consider more-efficient cars, think about walking to the store. When prices fall, we buy Hummers, crank up the air conditioner, pop over to a megamall half a state away.
For the moment, the economic slowdown, combined with alternative fuels, improved efficiency, and new energy sources from techniques like hydraulic fracturing, appears to have ensured that hydrocarbons are still relatively plentiful. But there still are many reasons why we would want to move beyond the age of oil. Two of the most important are national security and the possibly dire effect carbon emissions are having on the climate. Also, economic growth in China, India, Brazil, and other emerging middle-class nations means that competition for – and sometimes conflict over – energy will only get more intense.
We probably won’t find a silver-bullet energy resource in the next few years. But, as Daniel Yergin notes in his new book, "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World," we’ll manage as we always have by harnessing our one great resource: human creativity. “[T]he energy solutions for the twenty-first century will be found in the minds of people around the world,” he writes. “And that resource base is growing.”
Energy prices will continue to rise and fall. Life will be easy when energy is cheap, less so when it is expensive. There will also be storms – whether the atmospheric type or the supply-disruption type. These will plunge us into darkness at times. We’ll rough it for a night or two, sigh with gratitude when the lights come back on, and continue to look for new ways to be smarter about energy.
ρ John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
Photo illustration. (Alfredo Sosa/Staff; Photos by AP )
The lesson of Apple: design matters
It was early 1984 when my wife and I unboxed our first Mac. Even in those days, the little computer had a design simplicity everyone from Cupertino, Calif., to rural China now associates with Apple: spare graphics, simple instructions, friendliness just this side of being cloying. When you booted up the beige unit, a Mac icon with a smiley face appeared. Cute, yes. But computers circa 1984 were unfriendly, buggy, mystifying machines that only a special priesthood knew how to operate.
The Mac cost us $2,500, which would be $5,400 in today’s dollars. It had negligible memory. It couldn’t even connect to the Internet because there was no civilian Internet. We were nevertheless sure that the future had arrived. The Mac was light enough to heft with one hand. All the code was hidden beneath a “desktop” with “icons” you moved with a “mouse.” I’ve put quotes around those words because they were new concepts in 1984. They hadn’t been focus-grouped. We didn’t know we needed them. But they made sense immediately.
The programs were primitive. MacWrite let you format a document. MacPaint let you design a graphic. That theoretically eliminated professional typists and print jobbers. But early “desktop publishing” (another novel idea) had a homespun, made-on-a-Mac quality. You wouldn’t have wanted to send out Mac-generated wedding invitations.
The early Mac also had a few simple games, a rudimentary tool for balancing your checkbook, and odd features like “FatBits” in which you could tweak images at the pixel level. FatBits was as aimlessly amusing as popping bubble wrap, but it introduced amateurs to the world of computer graphics. (Hey, I just clicked a pixel!)
Over the years, early adopters endured ribbing from friends and co-workers who couldn’t believe we would settle for Apple’s manifest limitations when we could have power (IBM), programming variety (Microsoft DOS), or a much cheaper price (Dell). As things turned out, of course, Apple is now the king of all media. Even die-hard PC lovers carry iPhones or listen to iPods or at the very least buy songs at the iTunes Store.
The story of Apple is the story of its founder -- his vision, discipline, and inventiveness; the near catastrophe that befell the company after he was ousted; and its spectacular triumph after his return. It is a tale that has already passed into legend, a case that will be studied in MBA programs for generations to come.
There are many threads to the Apple saga. They all lead back to Steve Jobs and his view that design is a discipline to be relentlessly pursued at every level – from circuit boards to plastic housing, supply chains to software, advertising to retail sales.
All of us have reason to be suspicious of design. We’ve seen enough pouty fashion models, costume jewelry, and extravagant-looking/cardboard-tasting baked goods to know that appearances can be deceiving. Mr. Jobs showed how when design permeates a product it taps into something deeper. In Leander Kahney’s 2008 book “Inside Steve’s Brain,” onetime associate (and later rival) John Sculley describes a meeting between Jobs and one of his heroes, Polaroid inventor Edwin Land. Each man talked about how he could envision his baby (the Mac, the Polaroid camera) as a real thing before it was built.
“Both of them,” said Mr. Sculley, “had this ability to – well, not invent products – but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it’s just that no one has ever seen them before.”
There are plenty of beautifully designed products not sold at Apple Stores. What has been inspiring about Jobs is that he has hewed to a simple, functional, friendly design ethic for an entire career. That’s not easy. The norm in everything from cars to websites to Swiss Army knives is to add features and services to satisfy every taste, to build Baroque cathedrals where once a simple house of worship stood. It takes a Jobs to enforce design discipline. That can produce great beauty and functionality, not to mention wealth.
Such geniuses are rare for a reason. The very large and messy enterprise called humanity can only tolerate so many artists and autocrats stamping their feet and demanding that others see the underlying vision they see. Every generation has a handful of such geniuses. We are better off for them – and probably better off that we aren’t all that way.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
An Afghan man rode through the Panjshir Valley, home to legendary fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, in 2007. (Andy Nelson/The Christian Science Monitor/file)
Before 9/11: The tale of an Afghan 'lion'
The closest thing to a good guy that modern Afghanistan has given birth to was Ahmed Shah Massoud, a resourceful guerrilla leader who was both a pious Muslim and an enlightened modernist. Mr. Massoud supported schools for girls, for instance. And though he and his troops committed their share of wartime excesses, he took care to protect civilians from getting caught up in the vicious war he was fighting against Soviet military occupation in the 1980s.
Massoud was hospitable, well read, and had a good sense of humor. Although he was a Tajik in a predominantly Pashtun nation, he was a quintessential Afghan in his unwillingness to be mastered. Known as the “Lion of Panjshir,” Massoud spent more than a quarter century fighting one war after another – against the Red Army, rival warlords, and finally the Taliban.
Edward Girardet first met Massoud in the summer of 1981 after trekking deep into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. In the evenings, when he and Ed would sit in a cave and chat as Soviet MIGs pounded the area with bombs, Massoud would talk about everything from Persian poetry to the leadership qualities of George Washington, Ho Chi Minh, and Charles de Gaulle. Often, he would ask searching questions about the meaning of life. His troops admired him; the Soviet military was bedeviled by him.
Ed, who reported for the Monitor for much of his journalistic career, tells the story of Massoud at the beginning of a fascinating new book, “Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan.” As a young man in the 1970s, Ed fell in love with the stark beauty of Afghanistan and its proud people. With local guides and guerrilla units, Ed walked hundreds of miles through the mountains in the 1980s and ’90s, searching for news. He was greeted even in the poorest villages with tea and pistachios.
“Every trip to Afghanistan was a step into another world, another time that was real adventure,” Ed recalls. “It was a place of constant challenge from which one would emerge, one hoped, with an inspiring story of simple humanity.”
In the summer of 2001, he decided to track down the Lion again, making his way to a forlorn settlement called Khoja Bahauddin in northern Afghanistan. In a guesthouse, he waited for Massoud with an assortment of aid workers and journalists, including two taciturn Arab TV reporters. A dust storm had blown up, keeping Massoud from arriving. After a week of waiting, Ed ran out of time and had to leave. He would have to see Massoud on another trip.
Three days later, on Sept. 9, 2001, Massoud was assassinated in a suicide bomb blast. Two days after that, Ed watched TV from his home in Geneva as the twin towers crumbled. The Massoud assassination and the 9/11 attacks, he realized, could not have been a coincidence. He was right. Those two Arabs, it turned out, weren’t journalists. They were agents of Osama bin Laden.
In those few September days 10 years ago, Ed’s romanticism about Afghanistan died. Less than a month later, something he never imagined happened: American troops were in the country. Ten years later, they are still there, fighting an intractable war against elusive, resourceful guerrillas.
9/11 has myriad legacies, both intimate and global – the tears shed, the lives altered, the rebuilding, vigilance, and twists and turns of international affairs over the past decade. The US-led operation in Afghanistan increasingly seems caught in the same kind of murky impasse Moscow was caught in 30 years ago.
I phoned Ed Girardet recently and asked him about the prelude to 9/11 that he had almost been caught up in. “While 9/11 wasn’t waiting for the assassination of Massoud,” he said, the attack on him “was a present the Al Qaeda was giving the Taliban.” Massoud led the Northern Alliance. He wanted a different Afghanistan than the brutal misrule the Taliban imposed. Had he survived, Ed said, perhaps ...
His words trailed off. 9/11 left an ellipsis in millions of lives and entwined the United States and Afghanistan in a way no one, not even an astute observer of Afghanistan, could have predicted.
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
Office vacancy: White-collar woes
Offices have been around since the earliest potentates and priests needed a place for scribes to craft grand pronouncements and number crunchers to tally the loot. For most of history, offices were for the fortunate few. It was nice work if you could get it, especially compared with plowing fields, lugging water buckets, and slaying Hittites. Only in the past century have most of us spent 9 to 5 Mondays through Fridays in offices.
During the 20th century, office work boomed. All those gleaming towers in every city around the planet represent a real-world bar chart that tracks the growth of office culture. And culture it is, though the white-collar theme usually centers around alienation and absurdity, as seen in everything from the Tracy and Hepburn classic “Desk Set” to Sloan Wilson’s “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” and from “Glengarry Glen Ross” to “Dilbert” to the comically transgressive world of “The Office.” In offices, the ties of the past – family, farm, parochialism – could be set aside and new lives as corporate citizens could be forged.
Offices have many advantages (clean, well-lighted, air-conditioned) and drawbacks (tedium, gossip, PowerPoint). But while office life is easy to poke fun at, office work is an important part of millions of lives. World-changing ideas are launched in offices. Airplanes, algorithms, and electric grids are not the product of a sole proprietor scribbling at a kitchen table. Office workers accomplish great things and earn honest salaries, which cycle back into the economy as houses, groceries, and educational expenditures. Yes, there’s also office politics. Office mates bond, disagree, and sometimes fall in love (see Tracy and Hepburn). All those inside worlds, after all, are occupied by humans.
IN PICTURES: The 10 happiest jobs
Increasingly, though, the century-long boom in office work appears to have peaked. The overbuilding of commercial space in the first decade of the 21st century and the layoffs of the past few years have turned many office buildings into echoing reminders of past glory. In newspapers, real estate agencies, mail-order houses, and insurance companies – among the businesses hardest hit by the Great Recession – whole floors have gone dark and every other cubicle is empty.
The “jobless recovery” is partly to blame. Skittish employers are reluctant to hire, and workers out of work are often shunned by companies that have jobs to offer. Moreover, new-economy powerhouses run lean as a practice. Google and Apple employ fewer than 75,000 workers combined, a fraction of the jobs that old-line companies like General Motors and AT&T salaried in their heyday.
Outsourcing and telecommuting also are making steel-and-glass headquarters buildings anachronistic. With employees working remotely, clerical work being aggressively automated, and employers avoiding the commitment of hiring for the long term, the career-long office job seems to be heading for obsolescence.
Literature has begun to reflect this shift. Joshua Ferris’s 2007 novel “Then We Came to the End” and Ed Park’s 2008 “Personal Days” recorded the anxiety of the era of downsizing. Mr. Ferris describes how a white-collar advertising tribe in Chicago watches news reports of distant layoffs in factories confident that they were “corporate citizens, buttressed by advanced degrees and padded by corporate fat,” never realizing that “in a downturn, we were the mismanaged inventory.”
This is dark stuff. Let’s pause for perspective: White-collar unemployment is only half as bad as blue-collar unemployment. Still, it is higher than it has been in previous recessions, and if the economy is fundamentally restructuring (see this special report), then the office world is in for continuous disruption in the years ahead.
What’s to be done? Four years into a downturn that still hasn’t turned up enough jobs, the unemployed, the marginally employed, and those worried that they might one day be seen as mismanaged inventory know that they have to persist in their quest for work. That can mean education, retraining, and job interviews stretching to the horizon.
This is not a story with a happy ending, except perhaps for this: Millions of people have come to realize that they are not in this alone. They need the world outside the office – family, friends, faith, and community – the world too often neglected in the quest for corporate citizenship.
IN PICTURES: The 10 happiest jobs
John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.
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