EricGardner.net

Category: Blog

  • Obama, Thurgood Marshall and the Importance of a Long Term Vision

    Today marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Thurgood Marshall.  He was a complicated man and perhaps the person most responsible for ending segregation in America; first as Chief Counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and then as a Supreme Court Justice. Marshall had immeasurable courage, once saving an innocent plaintiff from certain execution by interrupting a poker game between the President of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When asked by Marshall to sign a stay of execution Chief Justice Fred Vinson remarked, “I’ll tell you one thing, if you’ve got guts enough to break in on this, I’ve got guts enough to sign it.”

    For those interested in learning more about Marshall I’d recommend Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove a Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into the 1949 Groveland Four Trial. The book offers a history of the civil rights movement, a biography of Thurgood Marshall, and a parallel to Obama’s second term strategy. [1. All unattributed quotes in this post are from King’s book]

    Overturning 100 plus years of institutional racism needed not only courage, but a legal and strategic genius. Marshall was both. If he found out that a judge liked English precedents he would craft a brief overflowing with English cases from the 1700s. If he needed help from federal officials he would release a well-placed memo condemning communism. If he needed information from a rival he would take them out drinking. “He’d get a lot of outside lawyers together in a room, and he’d be talking and laughing and drinking along with the rest of them and getting everybody relaxed and open, and he’d seem to be having such a good time with them that you wouldn’t think he was listening.” Franklin Williams a former NAACP lawyer turned diplomat later recalled, “But after they’d left, there it all was—he’d had the benefit of all their brains, which was his strategy in the first place.”

    (more…)

    Today marks the 21st anniversary of the death of Thurgood Marshall.  He was a complicated man and perhaps the person most responsible for ending segregation in America; first as Chief Counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and then as a Supreme Court Justice. Marshall had immeasurable courage, once saving an innocent plaintiff from certain execution by interrupting a poker game between the President of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When asked by Marshall to sign a stay of execution Chief Justice Fred Vinson remarked, “I’ll tell you one thing, if you’ve got guts enough to break in on this, I’ve got guts enough to sign it.”

    For those interested in learning more about Marshall I’d recommend Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove a Pulitzer Prize winning investigation into the 1949 Groveland Four Trial. The book offers a history of the civil rights movement, a biography of Thurgood Marshall, and a parallel to Obama’s second term strategy. [1. All unattributed quotes in this post are from King’s book]

    Overturning 100 plus years of institutional racism needed not only courage, but a legal and strategic genius. Marshall was both. If he found out that a judge liked English precedents he would craft a brief overflowing with English cases from the 1700s. If he needed help from federal officials he would release a well-placed memo condemning communism. If he needed information from a rival he would take them out drinking. “He’d get a lot of outside lawyers together in a room, and he’d be talking and laughing and drinking along with the rest of them and getting everybody relaxed and open, and he’d seem to be having such a good time with them that you wouldn’t think he was listening.” Franklin Williams a former NAACP lawyer turned diplomat later recalled, “But after they’d left, there it all was—he’d had the benefit of all their brains, which was his strategy in the first place.”

    (more…)

  • Average is Over and Obama’s New Manufacturing Initiative

    Average is Over and Obama’s New Manufacturing Initiative

    [drop_caps]L[/drop_caps]ast week President Obama announced plans to build a high tech industrial institute in Raleigh, North Carolina. The public/academic/private partnership will produce next-generation semiconductors, and is the first of 3 planned manufacturing projects by the Administration. “We’re not going to turn things around overnight,” President Obama told the crowd, but “we are going to start bringing those jobs back to America.” Stump speeches are great, but change happens is in the details, and the details haven’t been answered yet. The News Observer reported that specifics of the agreement “remain to be worked out in contract negotiations.”

    One thing is clear, American manufacturing has been devastated in the last 20 years. The cause differs depending on which side of the political isle you stand, but it is hard not to believe that poor policy hastened the decline. According to a 2012 Yale study, the establishment of normal trade relations with China directly contributed to America shedding about 6 million manufacturing jobs from 1970 to 2007. Others  argue about labor unions killed the factory, technology hastened the death, and  the  gravity of globalization made the preceeding two irrelevant. The simple fact is that America is now defined by cheap consumer goods, rising structural costs (healthcare and infrastructure) and stagnant incomes. “You have an economy,” Obama told  The New Yorker in January 2014, “that is ruthlessly squeezing workers and imposing efficiencies that make our flat-screen TVs really cheap but also puts enormous downward pressure on wages and salaries.”

    What do we do about it?

    We start by turning one of the causes of the decline into the solution.

    Essentially all economists agree that technology hastened the decline of American industrial labor, in fact I’d argue that most middle class jobs will be either replaced or supplemented by computers in the next twenty years. This is not unique to America or to modern information technology. Just as IT made many factory jobs expendable, the car killed horseshoe makers, and the cotton gin decimated hand weavers. In his latest book Average is Over, Economist Tyler Cowen chronicles the increased inequality of the American labor market, with a special focus on the impact of smart machines. Technology has replaced a large amount of middle class jobs with service jobs, and his underlying assumption is that artificial intelligence will do the same to accountants, lawyers and factory workers. The key questions facing future employees will be:

    Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer? Are computers helping people in China and India compete against you?

    It is early, but these questions have not been answered yet. Will this initiative place workers in tandem with smart machines or in competition? If production and not analysis is the goal (Cowen argues that smart machines will eventually be used as a guide to production, where workers take a computer’s analysis into consideration but make the final decision), we may be jumping head first into a commodity pricing. The last 20 years have shown what happens when we tried to compete on price with humans. We can’t expect to win the battle against a computer.

  • Charlie LeBuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy, and a New Business Model

    [drop_caps]I[/drop_caps] first found out about Charlie LeDuff when I saw him expose the decline of Detroit’s Meals on Wheels Program. Little did I know that he previously won a Pulitzer with the New York Times and followed it up with 2013’s Detroit: An American Autopsy.

    Detroit is an incredibly well written and heart felt exploration into the decline of one of America’s greatest cities. It details the ongoing legacy of racial tension that sparked 2 major race riots, but lacks a macro view of the policy crisis that led to a major American city losing over a million people in under a generation. LeDuff makes up for it with a detailed take down of local corruption and a nuanced report on the people who still call the Motor City home.

    One of the best parts of the book isn’t “ruin-porn” but comes from his description of the mortgage crisis (of which his brother was part of) [1. Although there is plenty, especially an infuriating story into why Detroit firefighters are using broken equipment, which eventually costs a man his life.]. His brother sold, “bullshit mortgages, subprime, negative amortization,” and admits, “A lot of people got fucked.” By now it is clear that mortgage fraud decimated the lives of millions of Americans and upended the structure of society, what LeDuff’s brother argues is that the whole thing was one big ploy. He describes:

    “You get the guy in a loan and then you call him 3 months later and tell him the loan he’s in–the loan you got him in–is a bad deal, and you sell him a different loan. It was a shell game. And the company pushed us to do it. We were making six points on every deal. Six! And nobody cared, ’cause everybody was getting what they wanted for free.”

    This business model is strikingly similar to the model that most major blogs operate on. That is, error is built into the business plan.

    Ryan Holiday, writing for The New York Observer explains

    Why do blogs publish hoaxes and hit pieces so often? So they can post “corrections” after benefiting from the rush of traffic from the sensational first draft. The upside is traffic, the downside is … more traffic. Take the recent Shell Oil Hoax, which was orchestrated by Greenpeace, and which Gawker Media fell for. Gizmodo, Gawker’s sister site, broke the fake story: “Malfunctioning Cake Ruins Party and Spews Liquor All Over Oil Tycoons” for a quick 30,000 pageviews. Later in the day, Gawker got around to debunking the story their sister site had created the market for with a post called “Viral Video of Shell Oil Party Disaster Is Fake, Unfortunately” that earned three times as many viewers.

    The cynic in me wants to say welcome to 2014, but the capitalist knows that firms that adopt this model will experience short term gains, only to fail spectacularly.

  • The Problem with Thought Leadership

    With shrinking tenure rates the impact that higher education has on the intellectual landscape of America is uncertain. What’s even more petrifying is it’s replacement. Ann Friedman’s “All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go” is one of my favorite articles of the year, precisely because what it questions and addresses one of the problems of one of the largest social networking sites on the internet.

    What the hell use is it?

    “If the poor, as John Steinbeck once observed, see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” she writes, ” it seems fair to assume that on LinkedIn, followers see themselves as temporarily embarrassed thought leaders.”

    Generally speaking LinkedIn sucks, despite their promises most jobs are still filled by personal connections, but what struck me was how dead on Ann Friedman was with her attack on the current state of thought leadership. The problem with thought leadership today is a mixture of inverse incentives and lack of heft.

    She writes

    A post by “Technology Futurist, Innovation Expert, Business Strategist, Bestselling Business Author, Keynote Speaker” Daniel Burrus instructs would-be Steve Jobses to “take the time to think both short-term and long-range. Build your future by competing on things other than price, and by asking the right questions, especially when it comes to consumers.” Never mind that Burrus hasn’t built an Apple-like company; such perorations are like the incantation of a devotional prayer: they call down the mercies of a remote techno-deity in order to ritually cleanse the grubbier aspirations of the business-strategizing, keynote-speaking class. And in the same circular fashion, the point of encouraging users to connect and follow and exchange points of view on LinkedIn is to marshal those users behind the simple, world-conquering faith in networked connectivity. The thoughts that lead the LinkedIn experience, in other words, are usually subtle advertisements for the LinkedIn experience. Or not-so-subtle come-ons: one post promises to help people answer the question “What should I do with my life?” in three steps—by using LinkedIn.

    In short, we have an army of “thought leaders” who haven’t had an original thought.

    Source: Ann Friedman – All Linked in With Nowhere to Go

  • Mangini’s Mess – Or How Not to Manage

    As a defensive assistant Eric Mangini won three Super Bowls with Bill Belichek’s New England Patriots. In 2006 he became the youngest Head Coach in the NFL. By 2013 he has a reputation for being an incredible asshole–and this article does nothing to dispell the notion. In fact, it reads a how to run a poor organization handbook. Micromanagement was ripe. Players became assets.

    Nate Jackson played over half a decade in the NFL, and after 5 years with the Denver Broncos he signed with the Cleveland Browns and the recently hired Eric Mangini. He walked into an organization defined by mistrust and micromanagement. Over the course of 2 seasons Mangini complied a .313 winning percentage. He was prompty fired. “Being a head football coach is not about being a strategic genius,” Jackson wrote. “Every coach in the NFL knows football strategy. It’s about leading a group of grown men toward a tangible goal and treating them with the respect their sacrifice deserves.”

    Jackson then details how and what went wrong.

    Source: Nate Jackson – Cleveland Scene

  • Leadership Lessons from Robert Oppenheimer

    In 1941 J. Robert Oppenheimer started work on the Manhattan Project. Less than a year later he was running a secret weapons program with the sole purpose of developing nuclear weapons. In August 1945 his team did the impossible, they conquered the atom and the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki found themselves elevated from footnotes to the front page of history.

    Freeman Dyson’s illuminating profile of Oppenheimer not only unmasks the mystique of one of America’s greatest scientific tragedies (Oppenheimer was stripped of his Security Clearance due to the Red Scare) but outlines the leadership mistakes that led to his unfortunate demise. “He always wanted to be at the center” wrote Dyson, “He paid too much attention to famous people working on fashionable topics.” In Dyson’s opinion Oppenheimer had the potential to become the next Einstein or Bohr, but instead known as the destroyer of worlds. ”For forty years he put his heart and soul into thinking about deep scientific problems,” wrote Dyson, but co-authored just one seminal paper (and never talked about the importance of the discovery while alive).

    This is ironic given that Oppenheimer talked a lot about science for science sake.

    Today when we talk about innovation we often talk about the promise of computer software. Have trouble reading- buy this app! Have trouble sleeping- buy this sleep measurement device! Can’t loose weight- buy a calorie counter! The answer to everything is just $9.99. In reality, the real answer is work. Hard work.  For all his genius Oppenheimer can be viewed as an underachiever. ”He could never sit still long enough,” said his former protegee, “to do a difficult calculation.”