Boneheaded aphorisms from Davos’ windy summit

TODAY

Lucy Kellaway

February 3, 2016


You can always go faster than you think you can. Those are not my words. They are the words of Ms Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise chief executive, who said them about two weeks ago at the Davos, where they were duly jotted down and published in a collection of quotes from world leaders during their week in the snow.

I admire the Whitman aphorism for its simple syntax and nice short words.

The only trouble with it is that it’s nonsense. Often in business you can’t go nearly as fast as you fondly think you can. When you try, you fall on your face — and Ms Whitman, of all people, should know that.

If her predecessor at HP hadn’t been quite so hasty in buying Autonomy, it would have saved itself a big mess.

The 35 other quotes are almost all as dismal; variously moronic (“The fourth industrial revolution should be a revolution of values”), silly (“Let’s put our optimism goggles on”) or empty (“We are not the prisoners of a predetermined future”).

When I first read the collection I thought it was a spoof. Then I thought the quotes were real, but selected maliciously to make the speakers look foolish. I now discover they were specifically picked by the World Economic Forum not as the stupidest things famous people said at Davos 2016, but as the smartest.

From news hound to feral beast... [excerpt]

[Blast from the past. This is an excerpt from a longer speech given by Tony Blair shortly after he left office. He spoke of the media and how the job of govt has changed and become more difficult because of changing nature of media.]


June 14, 2007

by Tony Blair

... First, scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light.

Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.

Third, the fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out.

Fourth, rather than just report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more important than the news itself. So - for example - there will often be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean, but what they could be taken to mean. This leads to the incredibly frustrating pastime of expending a large amount of energy rebutting claims about the significance of things said, that bears little or no relation to what was intended.

In turn, this leads to a fifth point: the confusion of news and commentary.

Comment is a perfectly respectable part of journalism. But it is supposed to be separate. Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible. The truth is a large part of the media today not merely elides the two but does so now as a matter of course. In other words, this is not exceptional. It is routine. The final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media. Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life's usual grey is almost entirely absent. 'Some good, some bad'; 'some things going right, some going wrong': these are concepts alien to today's reporting. It's a triumph or a disaster. A problem is 'a crisis'. A setback is a policy 'in tatters'. A criticism, 'a savage attack'. 

Success not fully within one's control

Aug 30, 2011

Writer Malcolm Gladwell, whose explanations of complex ideas have made him a best-selling author, corrects the myth that talent defines success in his third book, Outliers.

By Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer

WHEN Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell recently spoke to a roomful of Wall Street hedge fund managers, each of whom earned US$50 million (S$60.4 million) a year, he decided to mess with their minds.

Mr Gladwell, who turns 48 on Saturday, was then researching just how much money was enough for these financiers and their families to feel fulfilled. He recalls: 'I didn't know what the right figure was for 'enough' but I told them I did, and said they should be happy with US$75,000 a month.

'Now, each of these guys makes US$75,000 in the time he takes to walk from the water cooler to his office. So imagine their faces when I told them US$75,000 was enough.'

He then muses: 'When people get too well-heeled, they lose the capacity for certain action on certain ideas to stay ahead.'

This bachelor is one of three sons of a British mathematics professor and a Jamaican psychotherapist. He grew up in Canada, where he got his degree in history at the University of Toronto. He went on to write for, among others, The Washington Post before joining The New Yorker magazine in 1996. He has since written four international bestsellers, including The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005) and Outliers (2008), which have sold millions of copies in 25 languages. Time, Newsweek and Foreign Policy magazines have hailed him as one of this century's most influential global thinkers. But his many critics have said he writes books for people who hardly read.

He was in town last week to deliver the Singapore Institute of Management's 30th annual management lecture and so, last Thursday, he told me that he is now writing a book on the nature of power. He also mused about why he has as many detractors as fans:

What do you make of the runaway success of your books?

Well, I'm mostly surprised. When you write a book, you imagine that it will just be read by your mother. And 99 per cent of books sell only a small amount, so I assumed I'd be part of that group. Also, very few successful books are succeeded by equally successful books.

Your many critics take issue with your way to success, chiefly by extrapolating from select studies, without systematic analyses. What say you?

I'm always struck by how rarely those who accuse me of being unsystematic provide the evidence of my lack of being systematic. So, in accusing me of being anecdotal, they are themselves anecdotal.

Second, even if that criticism were true, I'm not sure how it would distinguish me from anyone else; what I do is what those who make arguments do at every level... You can't make a coherent argument or tell a story by including absolutely every piece of evidence, can you? And so what is unseen whenever I write a book is the amount of time I spend sorting out vast amounts of evidence and choosing what I think is most compelling. In my office, you will see that for each chapter in each of my books is a huge filing cabinet full of studies that I have digested and talked to people and made my decisions... I'm writing books that are meant to have wide public appeal, so my research necessarily stays below the surface.

What's the price you've had to pay for success?

I don't know that I've had to pay any price at all! I'd have to be terribly churlish and self-involved if I were to say that I'd be better off if my books hadn't been successful.

But haven't you had to forgo something to write your wide-ranging books?

I'd flip your question around and say that were I forced to write about the same things over and over again, then I would be making a sacrifice because I would be giving up on opportunities to explore new worlds; I would be imprisoned by one subject.

It'd be like saying that I could never leave New York City again and all I could do was walk down the same streets day after day. I'd then be paying a terrible price. So I don't find writing books difficult - on the contrary, it's liberating.

So liberating that it's light reading, at best?

I will say one thing: I go broad but not deep, and I don't mean that as a form of self-criticism. I hope my books introduce people to subjects which they can then go and examine in greater detail. I open the door for them. That means I have to be careful because I'm constantly diving into areas where I'm not an expert. That does require that I make sure I talk to the right people and don't put my foot into my mouth - occasionally, I do, which is fine. To the extent that there is a price for my success, it is that risk.

How do you lessen the risk of putting your foot in your mouth?

That risk was a lot greater earlier in my career because I'm now no longer searching ceaselessly for new doors to open... My writing career has been serendipitous.

So how then have you been so effective?

You just have to be flexible and keep your ego in check and if something doesn't work, you've to be willing to stop and start over; you're almost always better off reacting than you are attempting to chart a clearly defined course.

Speaking about reacting, how can you stay optimistic after being picked on by the police constantly after you started sporting an afro?

Most of the casual sort of discrimination I encounter is nowhere near the true level of sustained discrimination and prejudice that exists everywhere. So when I say I wrote my second book, Blink, based on my experiences with racial profiling, I wouldn't describe those experiences as paralytic or devastating because it was nothing like real racism. So I was able to have a wry, as opposed to an angry, interpretation of it. But the appropriate response to real racism is anger. So there's a very serious side to Blink, the book that I feel is most often misunderstood.

Why so?

Because there's supposed to be an impassioned, angry undercurrent to it. It begins by celebrating our snap judgments because I thought that was the only way to get people's attention. But having hooked them, I tried to convince them that unless they managed their instincts appropriately, they'd be incredibly dangerous... Sometimes, I see people misinterpreting Blink and wonder if I wrote it as skilfully as I ought to have.

Speaking of skills, in Outliers, why did you strike a hopeful note for all by saying that if the average person honed a skill for 10,000 hours, he'd likely taste success?

I'd quibble with the description of Outliers as a hopeful book. It's deeply realistic and corrects the myth that individuals are wholly in control of their own destiny and that the talent you're born with is definitive of your success.

Isn't that the American dream?

Yeah. And what Outliers says is that, actually, success is a big, messy combination of all kinds of things, some of which are within your control and some of which are not... You're simply supposed to come out of Outliers with a more thoughtful appreciation of success; it's not supposed to be either inspirational or depressing, but it is supposed to complicate our understanding of what makes people successful.

So how would you account for your own success?

I don't know; maybe I'm just lucky... Those who do original research are very brilliant people who necessarily write for a small, expert audience, and there's a very important role for people like me to play, which is to take what they do and put it such that many others share their brilliance.

suk@sph.com.sg

Cut out the socialist flab from US defence

Aug 6, 2011

By Fareed Zakaria

THE scary aspect of the debt deal meant to force all of Washington to its senses is the threatened cut to defence spending. If the congressional 'super-committee' cannot agree on cutbacks of US$1.5 trillion (S$1.8 trillion), the guillotine will fall and half of those cuts will have to come from expenditures on national security.

As with so much Washington accounting, there is a lot of ambiguity in baselines and terms (for instance, what is covered under 'national security'?). Most experts estimate that the defence budget would lose US$600 billion to US$700 billion over the next 10 years. If so, let the guillotine fall. It would be a much-needed adjustment to an out-of-control military-industrial complex.

First, some history. The Pentagon's budget has risen for 13 years, which is unprecedented. Between 2001 and 2009, overall spending on defence rose from US$412 billion to US$699 billion, a 70 per cent increase, which is larger than in any comparable period since the Korean War.

Including the supplementary spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, America spent US$250 billion more than average US defence expenditures during the Cold War - a time when the Soviet, Chinese and Eastern European militaries were arrayed against the United States and its allies.

Over the past decade, when America had no serious national adversaries, US defence spending has gone from about a third of total worldwide defence spending to nearly 50 per cent. In other words, America spent almost as much on defence as the planet's remaining countries put together.

It is not unprecedented for defence spending to fall substantially as America scales back or ends military actions. After the Korean War, then President Dwight Eisenhower cut defence spending by 27 per cent. Mr Richard Nixon cut it by 29 per cent after the Vietnam War. As tensions declined in the 1980s, Mr Ronald Reagan began scaling back his military spending, a process accelerated under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Given the enormous run-up in spending under president George W. Bush, even if President Obama made cuts comparable to those of his predecessors, defence spending would remain substantially above the levels under all those presidents.

The Bowles-Simpson commission's plan proposed US$750 billion in defence cuts over 10 years. Mr Lawrence Korb, who worked at the Pentagon for Mr Ronald Reagan, believes that a US$1 trillion cut over 10 to 12 years is feasible without compromising national security.

Serious conservatives should examine the defence budget, which contains tonnes of evidence of the liberalism run amok that they usually decry. All the talk of waste, fraud and abuse in government is vastly exaggerated; there simply isn't enough money in discretionary spending.

Most of the federal government's spending involves transfer payments and tax expenditures, which are - whatever their merits - highly efficient at funnelling money to their beneficiaries. The exception is defence, a cradle-to-grave system of housing, subsidies, cost-plus procurement, early retirement and lifetime pension and health-care guarantees. There is so much overlap among the military services, so much duplication and so much waste that no one bothers to defend it any more. Today, the US defence establishment is the world's largest socialist economy.

Defence budget cuts would also force a healthy rebalancing of American foreign policy. Since the Cold War, the US Congress has tended to fatten the Pentagon while starving foreign policy agencies. As former defence secretary Robert Gates pointed out, there are more members of military marching bands than people who make up the entire US foreign service. Anyone who has ever watched American foreign policy on the ground has seen this imbalance play out. Top State Department officials seeking to negotiate vital matters arrive without aides and bedraggled after a 14-hour flight in coach. Their military counterparts whisk in on a fleet of planes, with dozens of aides and pots of money to dispense. The late Mr Richard Holbrooke would laugh when media accounts described him as the 'civilian counterpart' to General David Petraeus, then head of the US Central Command. 'He has many more planes than I have cellphones,' Mr Holbrooke would say (and he had many cellphones).

The result is a warped American foreign policy, ready to conceive of problems in military terms and present a military solution. Describing precisely this phenomenon, Mr Eisenhower remarked that to a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In his often-quoted farewell address, he urged a balance between military and non-military spending. Unfortunately, it has become far more unbalanced in the decades since his speech.

WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

[So it was Eisenhower who said that hammer quote.]

Music - Tim Rice

I don’t get people who jog, run or walk around on the streets with music in their ears because for me, you’re neither appreciating what you’re doing, which is walking or running, nor are you really appreciating your music. Music becomes background and it’s just wallpaper.

I like to sit down and put a record on, preferably with a needle and scratches, or at least listen to it and read the sleeve notes and enjoy the music. And if you’re walking around the streets – apart from the fact that you might get mugged or hit by a car without hearing it — even if you’re being bored, I think it’s good to appreciate what it’s like being bored.

I mean you’re still bored if you’ve got the music on. Except that you don’t think you are being bored. So you’re bored and you’re being stupid. -- Sir Tim Rice

Very Tao-Zen. Be in the moment.

Quote: On fighting corruption in China

'Fighting corruption here is like handing out speeding citations at a Formula One race: all one has to do is look around,' said Beijing-based analyst Russell Leigh Moses, adding that graft is a useful means to attack opponents within the Chinese Communist Party.