23 May 2013

Blood and Sunflowers

I saw this film in an art gallery 20 years ago, and flirted a little with the animator who made it. I thought I would never see it again.

I stumbled across it again on YouTube today. I love living in the future.

22 May 2013

Organizational culture and purpose

Over on the Twitters, Marc Rettig points us to a little Forbes piece, ‘Culture of Purpose’ Is Key To Success According To New Research From Deloitte.

What’s the leader of the world’s largest audit, tax and consulting firm doing preaching about what seems like a squishy business attribute like “purpose”? As Punit tells me, “exceptional firms have always been good at aligning their mission or purpose with their execution, and as a result have enjoyed category leadership in sales and profits,” (think Whole Foods, Tom’s Shoes or even Apple). This seems particularly clear for companies where the founder is still very much involved in the business or where the founder’s ethos is culturally ingrained in the organization. Companies that are singularly focused on exceeding customer expectations tend to fall into this category. “So there is an empirical financial benefit to organizations that instill a purpose-driven culture,” says Punit.

The piece says some very good things, but it has such a stiff and awkward tone, it reads like a virgin talking about sex. Take this little passage.

Through interviews with the media and then in speaking engagements that he did at various campuses around the world during those times, the Deloitte Chairman was regularly challenged to justify business in general and even more specifically Deloitte’s reason for being beyond returning profits to its partners. “I found it disconcerting that business has been cast in a not so positive light,” said Punit.

Companies like Deloitte have earned disconcerting questions about what purpose they serve. So business has not “been cast in a not-so-positive light”, business has screwed up and we haven't held businesses nearly accountable enough.

It makes me wish this article didn't make these questions about purpose sound like the usual rah-rah corporate BS, because I believe in what it says. Devotion to purpose supports business success. It makes money.

Having been inside organizations with a strong purpose (and many more organizations without it), one can scent a true purpose focus in discussions of even the smallest projects. When one asks folks why they are doing something, they can — they will — tell you things like, “We are doing A in order to prepare the ground for B, which we are doing despite it being a compromise on C because it will help with the more important project of D and the essential project of E because D and E are both major initiatives in service of our organizational mission of F.” Not only can everyone walk up and down that chain from tactical moves to strategic projects to fundamental purpose and back again, they do it constantly. This makes the organization more effective because tactical actors keep the whole system aligned ... and they need less supervision to do it, freeing up executive attention for doing the work they need to do.

Breaks in this chain test the culture.

In truly purpose-driven organizations people will talk about a break constantly, with the expectation that fixing it matters more than the proximate work in front of them, since the fix must necessarily transform their tactical work.

In organizations without a true commitment to their purpose, people avoid talking about a break between purpose and tactics. Talking about these ruptures becomes politically dangerous, regarded as “distractions from the task at hand”.

That does not mean that every project in a purpose-driven organization must have some kind of perfect conception. People sometimes say, “Yes, we are neglecting the important principle X in service of the urgent need for Y.” But it is not only safe to say that in the organization, it is encouraged, because a purpose-driven organization makes its necessary compromises with its eyes open in order to ensure that those necessary compromises really are necessary.

This a deep organizational culture question. Having a purpose and talking about it isn't enough; you need a cultural commitment to talking about how it connects to everything you do.

And culture is hard to address.

When I was in consulting, I lost count of the number of companies I worked with who worried about keeping their culture as they grew. And I would always tell them, “That's not your problem. What will happen as you grow is you will discover what your culture really is, not what you have told yourself it is. As you get bigger, what will get harder is not keeping that culture, but changing it ....”

21 May 2013

David Simon on what happened to journalism

David “The Wire” Simon explains in a comment on his blog responding to the question, “ I’m curious to hear your thoughts regarding the Koch’s play for the Tribune company.”

My thoughts?

First, the locally-owned newspapers went to the publicly-traded newspaper chains, which promised economies of scale and great wealth to the owning families at the point of sale, as well as the preservation of editorial independence. It was a lie.

Then the chains went to Wall Street, where analysts who only measure the health and purpose of any endeavor in terms of short-term, quarterly profits, demanded greater mediocrity long before the internet arrived to pressure the industry. The analysts promised greater profits than ever before. In the end, they lied and diminished the product just in time for digitization.

Then the newspapers went to the internet hat in hand, afraid to charge for their weakened, eviscerated product and hoping against hope that giving the news report away for free would somehow encourage a revenue stream. The mavens of new media lied.

And now, those end-game capitalists who will not be content until nothing — no societal need, no communal ambition, no other American ideal save for maximized profit — is left standing. They , will buy up the gutted newspaper carcasses, so that they can lie on a scale that makes all the previous dishonesty a trifle. They will regard what remains of the news report merely as a platform to advance themselves and their capital, just as they regard the political system as such.

Once and forever, capitalism is a worthy tool and a necessary one for creating mass wealth, but as to the distribution and uses of that wealth within a society? No, capitalism is not a metric for anything but profit itself. This is the lie at the core of free-market ideology and libertarianism. And free markets are never the whole or complete answer when addressing any societal goal, compact or responsibility. It’s easy to make money when all you give a fuck about is making money, to invoke Orson Welles. And the Koch brothers and others of their kind wish to build a society that does little but transfer wealth to a select few while obliterating any other ambition for American society. If newspapers can help them secure that future, so be it.

But journalism in those cities where they own the daily newspaper and its digitized versions will be crippled until alternative news sources are developed by independent, professional journalists.

What do you call it when capital has purchased not only government, but all plausible means to criticize governance? A prelude to fascism.

17 May 2013

We live in the future

Goofy, I know. But I couldn't resist.

15 May 2013

IRS mini-scandal

So I guess scandal season is upon us, as once again Republicans try to disrupt a Democratic President's electoral victory through a combination of legal action and press manipulation. Benghazi has been a big success with the Republican base and a nonstarter with anyone else because there's just no there there; like a lot of lefties, I cannot even tell what the scandal is supposed to be on that one. The Department of Justice getting Associated Press journalists' phone records, on the other hand, is a legitimate scandal that I'm upset about. I expect to post about again, but it hasn't quite caught fire yet, in part because it's a continuation of the ongoing development imperial executive in the name of national security which has been an uninterrupted process whichever party has held power.

Then there's this IRS thing. That one's legitimate but not actually all that big a deal; hence “mini-scandal”. I have a couple of helpful commentaries.

The first is from the Rude Pundit, who lays out what obviously happened.

Look, we know how this went down: Post-Citizens United, the Internal Revenue Service was flooded with applications for tax-exempt status for whatever organization a couple of fucksacks with a tricorner hat wanted to start. “Social welfare” groups, they were called, and they could not be involved with specific political candidates or advocacy (although, you know, c'mon). So the IRS told its low-level drones who had to look at all the fucksack applications to flag ones that looked hinky. So the low-level drones, who are overworked to begin with because Congress won't give the IRS the funding it needs to do its fucking job, used some search terms.

It's 2010 and who are the fucksacks who are everywhere? The “Tea Party” groups. So, sure, fine, let's fuckin’ search that. Low-level drone 1 tells low-level drone 2 (and for god's sake, they live in the dull, dull, boring, dull city of Cincinnati, so give ’em a little break), “Hey, just use ‘Patriot’ as a search term and you'll get your job done faster because if there's one thing we know, it's that a whole bunch of these applications are from crazed fucksacks applying for tax-exempt status because they hate them that black guy in office.” Low-level drone 2 might have said, “Oh, shit, that'll get us in trouble.” But low-level drone 1 had a convincing argument by saying, “You wanna get to the bar sooner?” By the way, chances are that LLD 1 and LLD 2 have been LLDs forever, under at least one GOP president.

Does this narrative need to be completed?

Digby offers a quote from Josh Micah Marshall which explains why this trivial thing is such a big thing.

If you wanted create a scandal to have maximal appeal to GOP base freakout, this is it. And it has the additional advantage of not creating the same sort of off-putting crazy as hitting other bugaboos beloved by base Republicans. It’s not about Obama’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood or his foreign birth. It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands. And it’s at least rooted in something that’s true. Something really did happen. And it’s not good. It shouldn’t happen. It even has unexpected knock-on effects like the IRS’s supposed connection to the dreaded ‘Obamacare’.

14 May 2013

White House Down

So I go to see Iron Man 3 and there are a bunch of action movie trailers before the movie starts. Including this one for White House Down. I want to say something serious about it.

Hang on a second before you watch that trailer. I'd already seen an earlier trailer, cut rather differently, playing up the classic Bruckheimer stuff: explosions, crowds of people running, explosions, the US military's expensive toys, explosions, famous landmarks, and explosions. Since Independence Day opened big on the strength of an effects shot of aliens blowing up the White House, here we get the White House and the Capitol Building on fire. Jerry Bruckheimer and Roland Emmerich sure know how to hook a certain deep part of the American id.

The newer trailer, which I posted above, is more character-driven. We meet Channing Tatum as the big dumb lunk who's going to have to save the day, a failure who will be redeemed by his standing up as a hero when his moment comes. Add some rifles and terrorists and running around in corridors and our hero wearing an A-Shirt with a few scratches on his face and we've got the Die Hard formula: it's Die Hard in the White House, a perfect set-up for a big dumb action movie.

And then we meet his co-star, Jamie Foxx, who will be his action-comedy buddy, a reluctant hero who has to overcome his discomfort with violence to pick up a gun and save the day. Check them out. Does Foxx look like a dapper badass or what?

Foxx is the brains of this team, right? Of course, because This Is America, that just means that he has a lot to learn from the big dumb lunk. Still, remember that back when Emmerich did this in Independence Day, to have Will Smith as the hero we needed to give him a Jewish sidekick to figure out the brainy stuff, because racism with racism sauce. So this is progress, sort of.

Foxx is the smart one in a nice suit because he's playing the President of the United States, following in the footsteps of Action Hero President Harrison Ford from Air Force One. Because Obama. Now I don't want to be one of those White guys who's all now that Obama is President racism in America is totally solved because obviously not. But. Something's happening here.

And I cannot help but notice that the image of a black guy in a suit running around the White House with a gun ... because he's Action Hero President ... is quoting one of the most powerful propaganda images of the 20th century.

What do you want to bet that there's a shot in this movie which mirrors that photo exactly?

We've gone from that image signifying Malcolm X deliberately evoking White fears of Black political violence to it signifying that we need a heroic Black leader with a gun to save America.


Sort of.

God bless America.

05 May 2013

The paranoid style

Driftglass offers a thumbnail sketch of paranoia and deceit entangled in pseudo-libertarian politics.

For them, the world makes only makes sense as a Philip Dick novel in which everything the government does at virtually every level is suffused with monstrous intentions and dark designs. For them, the world is The Matrix: a massive scam built on top of a web of far-reaching and apparently infinite number of conspiracies in which everyone who is not 100% on their side is either a co-conspirator or a somnolent dupe.

Of course, when the mundane realities of the business of government — even government during a crisis — falls short of proving their specific brand of vast and terrible plots, they have to back-fill or pave over all bits that don't fit — all the chuckholes and logic-chasms and tire-shredding facts — with, well, bullshit.

He provides a tidy example in the form of a clip about Rand & Ron Paul.

04 May 2013

Wolf + Rockwell

Another item for the “Naomi Wolf is not too bright” file: she's allowed LewRockwell.com to post several articles of hers.

Lew Rockwell is almost certainly the author of Ron Paul's old racist newsletter and his site is a hotbed of goofy crackpottery, predictions that a civil war is coming when the government sends former gang members to confiscate our guns and put us in FEMA concentration camps, and other craziness. No responsible person should allow their byline under his masthead.