Fighting Turbulence 2

When my children learned to climb trees, I always insisted that they needed to be able to climb down as well as up.

Gordon Brown is now being hailed as the only person capable of leading the British economy through an economic downturn.

"We would be mad to get rid of Gordon," said a minister, a Brown loyalist who wants him to lead the party into the next election. "There is no one else with his experience to get the country through the global financial crisis." [The Independent, 20 September 2008]

But experience going upwards doesn't imply expertise going downwards. We understand that the September 11th terrorists had learned to fly planes but not land them safely. Lots of financial wizards made money during the prolonged bull market, and then proved their incompetence and/or negligence as soon as the market faltered.

At the Labour Party Conference in September 2000, Brown promised the end of boom-and-bust. [Power to the People, 18 September 2008] And more recently, in March 2008, he promised to fight global financial turbulence. As Willem Buiter said in the Financial Times, welcome to a world of diminished expectations [FT August 2008 via Procrastinating Politicians]

Brutality and Public Service

Will Hutton, Is Gordon ready to be brutal? Plans to slim down the civil service demand a management revolution The Guardian, July 14, 2004 [update: URL corrected]

Hutton uses this article to give a plug for a report from his own organization, the Work Foundation.

David Coats, Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency The Gershon Review: Public Service Efficiency and the Management of Change (pdf 150kb)

The Work Foundation paper seeks to downplay Choice, and replace it with some notion of Public Value. Does this mean that old-fashioned civil servants (Sir Humphrey, Lord Butler) know best? From the supply side, Efficiency appears to be in conflict with Choice.

But when we look at the situation from the demand side, there is no conflict at all - indeed, you can only achieve true efficiency by personalization and choice. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor both seem to understand this, but they are surrounded by people with a vested interest in the status quo.

Technorati Tags: choice efficiency

Jimmy Carter

In my post on Ronald Reagan, I referred to Jimmy Carter as bright. Donella Meadows praises his grasp of systems thinking.

President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn't understand feedback.

What to do when systems resist change; an excerpt from Donella Meadows's unfinished last book.

But it's a real problem for a leader if he can't explain his ideas, and can't get them implemented.

Ronald Reagan

Today America has been celebrating the life and works of its 40th president.

Some recent presidents and would-be presidents have been remarkable intelligent. Richard Nixon was bright, effective in many areas, but brought down by flaws in his character. Jimmy Carter was if anything even brighter, with a strong and visible moral code which his predecessors apparently lacked, and yet was completely ineffective as president. In contrast, Ford was often scorned for his lack of intellect.

Reagan changed the equation. He is widely seen as having achieved more in foreign policy than Nixon. His evident lack of intellect, although causing some derision in European circles, only seemed to enhance his standing in America.

Following Reagan, the intelligent thing seems to be to hide your intelligence. Bill Clinton was intelligent but didn't show it. In contrast, George Bush senior and Al Gore presented themselves as intelligent - which was perhaps evidence that they weren't intelligent enough - and were rejected at the polls. George Bush junior is clearly not as unintelligent as many people think he is, but he has learned the Reagan lesson well.

In American history, the preference for Character over Intelligence goes back to Washington.