New Starting Blocks for the Future of Work

March 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a challenging future rushes towards us, I often wonder whether our democratic values will continue to provide a sound enough foundation for our lives and work.

In many ways, this “white-water world” is already here. As framed by John Seely Brown in a post last summer, it confronts us with knowledge that’s simply “too big to know” and a globe-spanning web of interconnections that seems to constantly alter what’s in front of us, like the shifting views of a kaleidoscope.

It’s a brave new world that:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate [its] turbulent waters successfully;

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone; and finally,

– requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

In the face of these demands, the most straightforward question is whether we will be able to safeguard our personal wellbeing and continue to enjoy a prosperous way of life. Unfortunately, neither of these objectives seems as readily attainable as they once did.

When our democratic values (such as freedom and championing individual rights) no longer ensure our wellbeing and prosperity, those values get questioned and eventually challenged in our politics.

Last week, I wrote here about the dangerous risks—like addiction and behavioral modification—that our kids and others confront by spending too much screen time playing on-line games like Fortnite. Despite a crescendo of anecdotal evidence about the harms to boys in particular, the freedom-loving (and endlessly distracted) West seems stymied when it comes to deciding what to do about it. On the other hand, China easily moved from identifying the harm to its collective wellbeing to implementing time restrictions on the amount of on-line play. It was the Great Firewall’s ability to intervene quickly that prompted one observer to wonder how those of us in the so-called “first world” will respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded [like China’s] on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

Meanwhile, in a Wall Street Journal essay last weekend, its authors documented the ability of authoritarian countries with capitalist economies to raise the level of prosperity enjoyed by their citizens in recent years. Not so long ago, the allure of West to the “second” and “third worlds” was that prosperity seemed to go hand-in-hand with democratic values and institutions. That conclusion is far less clear today. With rising prosperity in authoritarian nations like China and Vietnam—and the likelihood that there will soon be far more prosperous citizens in these countries than outside of them—the authors fretted that:

It isn’t clear how well democracy, without every material advantage on its side, will fare in the competition [between our very different value systems.]

With growing uncertainty about whether Western values and institutions can produce sufficient benefits for its citizens, and with “the white-water world” where we live and work challenging our navigational skills, it seems a good time to return to some questions that we’ve chewed on here before about “how we can best get ready for the challenges ahead of us.”

Can the ways that we educate our kids (and retrain ourselves) enable us to proclaim our humanity, secure our self-worth, and continue to find a valued place for ourselves in the increasingly complex world of work?

Can championing new teaching methods strengthen democratic values and deliver more of their promise to us in terms of wellbeing and prosperity than it seems we can count on today?

Are new and different classrooms the keys to our futures?

1. You Treasure What You Measure

Until this week, I never considered that widely administered education tests would provide any of these answers—but I probably should have—because in a very real way, we treasure the aptitudes and skills, indeed everything that we take the time to measure. Gross national product, budget and trade deficits, unemployment rates, the 1% versus everyone else: what is most important to us is endlessly calculated, publicized and analyzed. We also value these measures because they help us decide what to do next, like stimulating the economy, cutting government programs, or implementing trade restrictions. Measures influence actions.

It’s much the same with the measures we obtain from the educational tests that we administer, and in this regard, no test today is more influential than the Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA. PISA was first given in 2000 in 32 countries, the first time that national education systems were evaluated and could be compared with one another. The test measured 15-year-olds scholastic performance in mathematics, science and reading. No doubt you’ve heard some of the results, including the United States’ disappointing placement in the middle of the international pack. The test is given every three years and in 2018, 79 countries and economies participated in the testing and data collection.

According to an article in on-line business journal Quartz this week, “the results…are studied by educators the way soccer fans obsess over the World Cup draw.”

No one thinks more about the power of the PISA test, the information that it generates, and what additional feats it might accomplish than Andreas Schleicher, a German data scientist who heads the education division of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which administers PISA worldwide.

Schleicher downplays the role that the PISA has played in shaming low performing countries, preferring the test’s role in mobilizing national leaders to care as much about teaching and learning as they do about economic measures like unemployment rates and workplace productivity. At the most basic level, PISA data has supported a range of conclusions, including that class size seems largely irrelevant to the learning experience and that what matters most in the classroom is “the quality of teachers, who need to be intellectually challenged, trusted, and have room for professional growth.”

Schleicher also views the PISA as a tool for liberating the world’s educational systems from their single-minded focus on subjects like science, reading and math and towards the kinds of “complex, interdisciplinary skills and mindsets” that are necessary for success in the future of work. We are afraid that human jobs will be automated but we are still teaching people to think like machines. “What we know is that the kinds of things that are easy to teach, and maybe easy to test, are precisely the kinds of things that are easy to digitize and to automate,” Schleicher says.

To help steer global education out of this rut, he has pushed for the design and administration of new, optional tests that complement the PISA. Change the parameters of the test, change the skills that are measured, and maybe the world’s education-based priorities will change too. Says Schleicher: “[t]he advent of AI [or artificial intelligence] should push us to think harder [about] what makes us human” and lead us to teach to those qualities, adding that if we are not careful, the world’s nations will be continue to educate “second-class robots and not first-class humans.”

Schleicher had this future-oriented focus years before the PISA was initially administered.

In 1997, Schleicher convened a group of representatives from OECD countries, not to discuss what could be tested, but what should be tested. The idea was to move beyond thinking about education as the driver of purely economic outcomes. In addition to wanting a country’s education system to provide a ready workforce, they also wondered whether they could nurture young people to help to make their societies more cohesive and democratic while reducing unfairness and inequality. According to Quartz:

The group identified three areas to explore: relational, or how we get along with others; self, how we regulate our emotions and motivate ourselves, and content, what schools need to teach.

Instead of simply enabling students to respond to the demands of a challenging world, Schleicher and others in his group wanted national testing to encourage the kinds of skill building that would enable young people to change the world they’d be entering for the better.

Towards this end, Schleicher’s team began to develop assessments for independent thinking and the kinds of personal skills that contribute to it. The technology around test administration enabled the testers to see how students solved problems in real time, not simply whether they get them right or wrong. They gathered and shared data that enabled national education systems to “help students learn better and teachers teach better and schools to become more effective.” Assessments of the skill sets around independent thinking encouraged countries to begin to see new possibilities and want to change how students learn in their classrooms. “If you don’t have a north star [like this], perhaps you limit your vision,” he says.

For the past twenty years, Schleicher’s north stars have also included students’ quest to find meaning in what they are doing and to exercise their agency in determining what and how they learn. He is convinced that people have the “capacity to imagine and build things of intrinsic positive worth.” We have skills that robots cannot replace, like managing between black and white, integrating knowledge, and applying knowledge in unique situations. All of those skills can be tested (and encouraged), along with the skill that is most unique about human beings, namely:

our capacity to take responsibility, to mobilize our cognitive and social and emotional resources to do something that is of benefit to society.

What Schleicher and his testing visionaries began to imagine in 1997 have been gradually introduced as optional tests that focus on problem-solving, collaborative problem-solving, and most recently, so-called “global competencies” like open-mindedness and the desire to improve the world. In 2021, another optional test will assess flexibility in thinking and habits of creativity, like being inquisitive and persistent.

One knowledgeable observer of these initiatives, Douglas Archibald, credits Schleicher with “dramatically elevating” the discussion about the future of education. “There is no one else bringing together people in charge of these educational systems to seriously think about how their systems [can be] future proofed,” says Archibald. But he and others also see a hard road ahead for Schleicher, with plenty of resistance from within the global education community.

Some claim that he is asking more from a test than he should. Others claim his emphasis is fostering an over-reliance on testing over other priorities. Regarding the “global competencies” assessment for example, 40 of the 79 participating countries opted not to administer it. But Schleicher, much like visionaries in other fields, remains undaunted. Nearly half of the countries are exercising their option to assess “global competencies” and even more are administering the other optional tests that Schleicher has helped develop. Maybe educators are slowly becoming convinced that the threat to human work in a white-water world is too serious to be ignored any longer.

A view from Kenneth Robinson’s presentation: “Changing Education Paradigms”

While Schleicher and his allies are in the vanguard of those who are using a test to prompt a revolution in education, they are hardly the only ones to challenge a teaching model that, for far too long, has only sought to produce a dependable, efficient and easily replaceable workforce. The slide above is from Sir Kenneth Robinson’s much-heralded (and well-worth your taking a look at) 2010 video called “Changing Education Paradigms.” In it, he also champions teaching that enables uniquely human contributions that no machine can ever replace.

Schleicher, Robinson and others envision education systems that prepare young people (or re-engineer older ones) for a complex and ever shifting world where no one has to be overwhelmed by the glut of information or the dynamics of shifting networks but can learn how to navigate today’s challenges productively. They highlight and, by doing so, champion teaching methods that help to prepare all of us for jobs that provide meaning and a sense of wellbeing while amplifying and valuing our uniquely human contributions.

Schleicher is also helping to modify our behavior by championing skills like curiosity about others and empathy that can make us more engaged members of our communities and commit us to improving them. Assessing these skills in national education tests says both loudly and clearly that these skills are important for human flourishing too. Indeed, this may be Schleicher’s and OECD’s most significant contribution. Their international testing is encouraging the skills and changes in behavior that can build better societies, whether they are based on the democratic values of the West or the more collective and less individual ones of the East.

That is no small thing. No small thing at all.

This post is adapted from my March 10, 2019 newsletter.

Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?

March 3, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When travelers visited indigenous people in remote places, they often had problems when they took out their cameras and wanted to take some pictures. The locals frequently turned away, in what was later explained as a fear of having their souls stolen by the camera’s image.

After all, who wants to let a stranger take your soul away?

Indigenous people have an interesting relationship between their experience and their representations of it. The pictures here are of embroideries made by the Kuna people who live on remote islands off the coast of Panama. I don’t know what these abstractions mean to the Kuna, but I thought they might stand in here for representations of something that’s essential to them, like their souls.

Technology today is probing—with the aim of influencing, for both good and bad purposes—the most human and vital parts of us. For years, the alarm bells have been going off about the impact on our kids of video games (and more recently their on-line multi-player successors), because kids are really “each of us” at our most impressionable. Unlike many indigenous people however, most kids are blissfully unaware that somebody might be stealing something from them or that their behavior is being modified while they are busy having fun. And it’s not just kids today who become engaged and vulnerable to those behind their screens whenever they’re playing, shopping or exploring on-line.

Because of their ability to engage and distract, the tightly controlled environments of on-line games provide behavioral scientists and the others who are watching us play them a near perfect Petri dish in which to study the choices we make in the game’s virtual world and how they can influence them. As a result of the data being gathered, the “man behind the curtain” has become increasingly adroit at deepening our engagement, anticipating our behavior once we’re “on the hook,” manipulating what we do next, and ensuring that we stay involved in the game as long as he wants us to.

Games benefit their hosts by selling stuff to players, mostly through ads and marketing play-related gear. Game hosts are also selling the behavioral information they gather from players. Their playbook is the same as Facebook’s: monetizing behavioral data about its users by selling that data to whoever wants to influence our decision-making in all aspects of our lives and work.

When it comes to gathering particularly rich pools of behavioral data, two games today are noteworthy. Fortnite has become one of the most successful games in history in what seems like a matter of months, while Tetris, one of the first on-line games, has recently been updated for an even wider demographic. This week’s stories about them illustrate the potency of their interactions with players; the precision of the existing behavioral data that these games have utilized; the even more refined behavioral data they are currently gathering on players; and the risks of addiction and other harms to the humans who are playing them.

These stories amount to a cautionary tale, affecting not just the games we play but all of our screen-facing experiences. Are we, as citizens of the enlightened, freedom-loving West, equipped to “save our souls” from these aspiring puppet-masters or is the paternalistic, more harmony-seeking East (particularly China with its great firewalls and social monitors) finding better solutions? It’s actually a fairly simple question—

Whose values will save us from our technology?

1. The Rise of Fortnite and Tetris

Five years or an on-line lifetime ago, I wrote about “social benefit games” like WeTopia, wondering whether they could enable us to exercise our abilities to act in “pro-social” or good ways on-line before we went out to change the world. I also worried at the time about the eavesdroppers behind our screens who were studying us while we did so.

I heralded their enabling quality, their potential for helping us to behave better, in a post called Game Changer:

The repetitive activities in this virtual world didn’t feel like rote learning because the over-and-over-again was embedded in the diversions of what was, at least at the front end, only a game. Playing it came with surprises (blinking “opportunities” and “limited time offers”), cheerful reminders (to water my “giving tree” or harvest my carrots), and rewards from all of the “work” I was doing (the “energy,” “experience,” and “good will” credits I kept racking up by remembering to restock Almanzo’s store or to grow my soccer-playing community of friends).

What I’m wondering is whether this kind of immersive on-line experience can change real world behavior.

We assume that the proverbial rat in this maze will learn how to press the buzzer with his little paw when the pellets keep coming.

Will he (or she) become even more motivated if he can see that a fellow rat, outside his maze, also gets pellets every time he presses his buzzer?

And what happens when he leaves the maze?

Is this really a way to prepare the shock troops needed to change the world?

In a second post, I looked at what “the man behind the curtain” was doing while the game’s players were learning how to become better people:

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever!) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.

Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t. What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.

There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

In my last post back then, I concluded that there were both upsides and downsides to these kinds of on-line game experiences and agreed to keep an open mind. I still think so, but am far more pessimistic about the downsides today than I was all those years ago.

Fortnite may be the most widely played on-line game ever. As a hunt/kill your enemies/celebrate your victories kind of adventure, it is similar to hundreds of other on-line offerings. Like them, it has also drawn far more boys than girls as players. What distinguishes the Fortnite experience is the behavioral data that has informed it.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, “How Fortnite Triggered an Unwinnable War Between Parents and Their Boys,” the game’s success is due to the incorporation of existing behavioral data in its base programming and simultaneous machine learning while the game is afoot. Dr Richard Freed, psychologist and author of “Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age” says that Fortnite has combined so many “persuasive design elements” (around 200) that it is the talk among his peers. “Something is really different about it,” he said.

Ofir Turel who teaches at Cal State Fullerton and researches the effects of social media and gaming, talked about one of those persuasive design elements, namely how Fortnite players experience the kind of random and unpredictable rewards that keep their casino counterparts glued to their seats for hours in front of their slot machines. (Fifty years ago, behaviorist B.F. Skinner found that variable, intermittent rewards were more effective than a predictable pattern of rewards in shaping the habit-forming behavior of pigeons.) “When you follow a reward system that’s not fixed, it messes up our brains eventually,” said Turel. With games like Fortnite, he continues: “We’re all pigeons in a big human experiment.”

The impact of these embedded and evolving forms of persuasion were certainly compelling for the boys who are profiled in this article. Toby is a representative kid who wants to play all of the time and whose behavior seems to have changed as a result:

Toby is ‘typically a nice kid,’ his mother said. He is sweet, articulate, creative, precocious and headstrong—the kind of child who can be a handful but whose passion and curiosity could well drive him to greatness. [In other words, the perfect Wall Street Journal reader’s pre-teen.]

Turn off Fortnite [however], and he can scream, yell and call his parents names. Toby gets so angry that his parents impose ‘cooling off’ periods of as long as two weeks. His mother said he becomes less aggressive during those times. The calming effect wears off after Fortnite returns.

Toby’s mother has tried to reason with him. She has also threatened boarding school. ‘We’re not emotionally equipped to live like this,’ she tells him. ‘This is too intense for the other people living here.’

Of course, it could be years before psychologists and other researchers study larger samples of boys playing Fortnite and report their findings.

In the meantime, there was also a story about Tetris in the newspapers this week. Some of you may remember the game from the era of Pokeman. (Essentially, you attempt to navigate blocks or clusters of blocks into the spaces in a container on the screen below, where you drop them in.) How could a simple, time consuming, 1980’s era diversion like this be harmful, you ask? This time it seems to embed an endless desire for distraction instead of aggression.

A 1994 article in Wired magazine identified something called “the Tetris Effect.” Long after they had played the game, many players reported seeing floating blocks in their minds or imaging real-life objects fitting together. At the time, Wired suggested that the game’s effect on the brain made it a kind of “electronic drug” or “pharmatronic.” The random sample of players in this week’s article added further descriptors to the Tetris Effect.

One player named Becky Noback says:

You get the dopamine rush from stacking things up in a perfect order and having them disappear—all that classic Tetris satisfaction. It’s like checking off a to-do list. It gives you this sense of accomplishment.

Another player, Jeremy Ricci, says:

When everything’s clicking, and you’re dropping your pieces, you get into this trancelike rhythm. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re in virtual-reality mode, there’s things going beneath you, and to the side of you, and the music changes, and you’re getting all those elements at the same time, you get a surreal experience.

The article recounts that a Twitter search of both “Tetris Effect” and “cry” or “tears” will uncover tweets where players are wondering: “Why am I tearing up during a Tetris game?” testifying to the game’s deep emotional resonance. Reviewers of the newest version of the game (out in December) have also called it “spiritual,” “transcendental,” and “an incredible cosmic journey.”

What is prompting these reactions? While the basic game is the same as ever, the newest version surrounds the block-dropping action with fantastical environments, ambient new age music, and, occasionally, a soothing lyric like “what could you be afraid of?” Add virtual reality goggles, and a player can float in space surrounded by stars while luminescent jellyfish flutter by and mermaids morph into dolphins. When a player drops in his or her blocks, the audio pulses gently and the hand-held controller vibrates. While the new version of the game may seem aimed at seekers of “trippy experiences,” in fact it is being marketed as an immersive stress-relieving diversion. It is here where Tetris aims for a market beyond the usually game-playing crowd, which skews younger and more male. (Think of all those new pigeons!). Almost everyone wants a stress reliever after all.

You can see a preview of the new Tetris for yourself (with or without your virtual reality headsets) via this link.

These early assessments of Fortnite and Tetris only provide anecdotal evidence, but we seem to be entering a strange new world where a game’s interface and those gathering information and manipulating our behavior behind it have taken over more of our attention, healthy detachment, and ability to think for ourselves.

Another one from the Kuna people, San Blas Islands, Panama

2. Go East or Go West?

In “Fortnite Addiction: China Has the Answer,” David Mattin discusses China’s assessment of the problem, the solution that its social monitors are implementing today, and why their approach just might make sense for us too. Mattin is the Global Head of Trends and Insights (a great job title!) at TrendWatching and sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council. He put up his provocative post on Medium recently.

It’s been widely reported that China is rolling out what Mattin calls “an unprecedented, tech-fueled experiment in surveillance and social control.” Under this system, citizens are assigned a “social credit rating” that scores each citizen’s worth as a citizen. It is a system that seems shocking to us in the West, but it follows centuries of maintaining a social order based on respect for elders (from the “celestial kingdom of rulers” on down) and a quest for harmony in the community as a whole. The Chinese government intends to have a compulsory rating system in place nationwide by 2020. Individuals with low social credit scores have already been denied commercial loans, building permits and school admissions. Mattin reports that low scorers have also been blocked from taking 11.4 million flights and 4.2 million train rides. This system is serious about limiting personal freedoms for the sake of collective well being.

Like many of us, China’s monitors have become alarmed by reports of Fortnite addiction and Tencent, the world’s sixth largest internet company, recently started using camera-enabled facial recognition technology to restrict the amount of time that young people play a multi-player video game called Honor of Kings that’s similar to Fortnite. As in the West, the concern is about the impact of these gaming technologies on young people’s developing brains and life prospects.

Under government pressure, Tencent first trialled the new system back in October. Now they’ve announced they’ll implement facial recognition-based age restrictions on all their games in 2019. Under 12s will be locked out after one hour per day; 13–18-year olds are allowed two hours. And here’s the crucial detail: the system is fuelled by the national citizen database held by China’s Ministry of Public Security. Yes, if you’re playing Honor of Kings in China now, you’re being watched via your webcam or phone camera and checked against a vast government database of headshots.

Because we can’t imagine it happening here doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach, and in the most interesting part of his argument, Mattin partially explains why.

He begins with the observation that priorities in Chinese society and the trade-offs they’re making are different—something that’s hard (if not impossible) for most of us Westerners, overtaken by our feelings of superiority, to understand.

– “Enlightenment liberal values are not the only way to produce a successful society” and

– “value judgments are trade-offs; you can have a bit more of one good if you tolerate having a bit less of another.”

Indeed, it is how all ethical systems work; some values are always more important than others in decision-making. Mattin drives his point home this way:

What western liberal democrats have never had to countenance seriously is the idea that theirs are not the only values mandated by reason and morality; that they’re not the universal end point of history and the destination for all successful societies. In fact, they’re just some values among many others that are equally valid. And choosing between ultimate values is always a case of trading some off against others.

Mattin rubs it in even further with an uncomfortable truth and a question for additional pondering.

For us, as the supposed champions of freedom and the rights of every individual, the uncomfortable truth is that every single day “we’re actively deciding (albeit unconsciously) that we hold other values — such as convenience and distraction — above that of individual liberty.” So it is not really government interference with our freedoms that we reject; it is anyone else’s right to interfere with our convenience or right to be distracted as much as we want anytime that we want. Of course, I’ve been making a similar argument when urging that new restraints be placed on tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. However uncomfortable it is to hear, our insatiable desires for convenience and distraction are simply not more important than preventing the harms these companies are causing to our political process, privacy rights, and competitive markets. Even so, in the U.S. at least, we seem to making very little progress in any of these areas because we supposedly stand for freedom.

Mattin’s what-if question to mull over is as follows. What if the evidence mounts that excessive screen time playing games and otherwise really is damaging young people’s (or maybe everyone’s) minds and that China’s government-imposed time restrictions really do limit the damage? How will the West respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

3. Whose Values Should Help Us To Decide?

I have a few additional questions of my own.

If empowering a Big Brother (or Sister) like China’s in the West is unpalatable, how can a distracted public that is preoccupied by its conveniences be roused enough to counter tech-related harms with democratically determined cures?

Do we need to be confronted by an epidemic of anti-social gamers before we act? Since an epidemic of opioid addiction and “deaths of despair” hasn’t roused the citizenry (or its elected representatives) to initiate a meaningful response, why would it be any different here?

Even if we had The Will to pursue solutions, could safety nets ever be put into place quickly enough to protect the generations that are playing Fortnite, Tetris and other games today? After all, democracy is cumbersome, time-consuming.

And continuing this thought, can democratic governments ever hope to “catch up to” and protect their citizens from rapidly evolving and improving technologies with troubling human impacts? Won’t the men and women behind our screens always be ahead of a non-authoritarian government’s ability to constrain them?

I hope you’ll let me know what you think the answers might be.

This post is adapted from my March 3, 2019 newsletter.

When Is Generosity Something Else Again?

February 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The Sacklers are best known as patrons of the arts, including the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York with its Temple of Dendur, and the Sackler Gallery, the national museum of Asian art at the Smithsonian. Over the years, the family’s generosity has been noteworthy in areas like education and medicine as well.

More recently, the family has become almost as well known as the principle shareholders of Purdue Pharma LP, the manufacturer of OxyContin. Their business endeavors have made them the subject of multiple legal actions claiming that the company’s aggressive marketing has helped to produce the nation’s opioid epidemic. Purdue Pharma has helped the family to build the fortune it’s been using in its philanthropy. In 2016, Forbes estimated the family’s wealth at $13 billion. Since it was introduced to the pubic in 1995, OxyContin has reportedly generated more than $35 billion in revenues for the company.

A spokesman for the Sachler family responded to the OxyContin-dirty money allegations that were made in a Massachusetts lawsuit as follows:

For more than half a century, several generations of Sacklers have supported respected institutions that play crucial roles in health, research, education, the arts and the humanities. It has s been a privilege to support the vital work of these organizations and we remain dedicated to doing so. While plaintiffs’ court filings have created an erroneous picture and resulted in unwarranted criticism, we remain committed to playing a substantive role in addressing this complex public health crisis. Our hearts go out to those affected by drug abuse or addiction.

In their statement, the family places the allegations of predatory business behavior in the context of their longstanding generosity—asking us to give them the benefit of the doubt given all the good they have done. An article in Esquire at the time was far less forgiving:

the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling Oxycontin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and second have nothing to do with one another.

Given the high emotions around the “deaths of despair” that are associated with opioid addiction–and the overuse of OxyContin in particular–it is easy to join activists and many in the press who have condemned the Sacklers before they’ve had their day in court. After all, no one forced doctors to prescribe these painkillers or anyone down the line to take them. But this story does raise some broader questions, including:

– How often is philanthropy (and the moral afterglow of generosity) a cover for wealth that wasn’t earned in nearly as moral a way?

– What might the givers and the receivers in this situation have done differently?

– Since “generosity born of success” always seems to come with the suspicion that you’re “dressing-up the road that got you here,” how can gifts like the Sacklers ever hope to match their best intentions?

– And beyond philanthropy, what responsibilities should all receivers and givers—including you and me—have in supposedly “generous exchanges”?

1. The Toxic Givers

The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Temple of Denhur

Nothing about these questions is easy.

For example, some members of the Sackler family have no financial interest in Perdue Pharma, the opioid manufacturer, although it has been argued that marketing strategies pioneered by the family patriarch utlimately drove OxyContin’s success. Some of the Perdue profits that did go to Sacklers were attributable to other products or were produced before the opioid painkiller entered the market. Linking particular individuals to toxic profits that then went into specific gift giving is a complicated question of attribution. In fact, it is a problem for all philanthropy that may have toxic origins. How do you know that the donated Picasso was purchased with a philanthropist’s dirty money?

In the case of the Sacklers, it seems clear from an Inside Philanthropy piece last year that at least some of their OxyContin profits likely became gifts to organizations as diverse as Tufts University’s School of Biomedical Sciences, New York Presbyterian Hospital, the Central Park Conservancy, the Guggenheim and Victoria & Albert museums, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies upon for independent scientific advice on issues like opioid addiction).

While the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was funded long before OxyContin came to market, it continues to bear the family name and has been at the epicenter of protests against the family’s toxic giving.

It’s a thorny path from here for the givers as well as the receivers.

For givers like the Sacklers, a couple of avenues are clear to me at least, but neither seems to have been taken by individual family members to date. The first is new philanthropy aimed at opioid addiction treatment, a need that remains woefully underfunded nationwide. Maybe in a strange twist of public relations and legal advice, family members are waiting for a court to tell them what to do instead of making up their own minds.

The second road-not-taken is any suggestion that Purdue Pharma is curtailing its global roll-out of OxyContin. According to a 2017 New Yorker article that helped to trigger the current outrage: “the Sackler family has only increased its efforts abroad, and is now pushing the drug, through a Purdue-related company called Mundipharma, into Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.” Again, the better part of valor would suggest that the company should be reducing, instead of expanding its marketing outreach for this painkiller—even if its marketers and lawyers are advising that to do so could be construed as a kind of admission of liability.

For receivers like the supposedly independent government bodies that play a role in regulating opioids, the answer also seems clear. They should disclose how OxyContin-related donations were used by them in the past, modify standards that permitted receipt of donations by interested parties in the first place, and refuse to take any additional donations from them.

For other receivers of Purdue Pharma related largesse, the issue is complicated by two additional factors: how desperate many (most?) non-profits are to reach their fund-raising goals each year, and how nearly all significant gifts and naming rights are bound up in legal agreements.

Even if the public or moral pressure were enough to make reluctant institutions consider returning toxic funds, in most situations the donors would need to voluntarily agree to take their money back or to removal of their names from programs or buildings. Whenever the givers demur or outright refuse, the receivers need to convince a court that they have the right to unwind the gift agreement unilaterally. In addition to the preoccupation and expense of a legal proceeding like this, the non-profit might also have to prove that the donors were personally responsible in some way for their gift’s toxicity (the attribution issue again). According to Marcus Owens, former director of the IRS’ tax exempt organization’s division:

For the institutions, it’s a real balancing act where there hasn’t been an actual conviction of a crime and it’s more that the donors have done something that is optically troubling to the recipient.

While there has been litigation involving Perdue Pharma and OxyContin, no court to date has tied its toxic marketing to any individual member of the Sackler family, despite the fact that several are in senior management or board members.

Given all of the brouhaha, I assume that institutions that stand to gain from future Sackler donations are considering the risks of acceptance before they do so. But even here, the path regarding toxic gifts that have already been given or may be given in the future is far from clear. Some insist the amount of good that tainted money can do when invested in a school or museum offsets whether it was made in a deplorable fashion or was given by a deplorable individual. Even if you buy the argument that the ends justify the means, the 24-7 social-media environment makes every receivers’ reputation a key factor in the calculation of ultimate ends .

While the opioid crisis has thrown Sackler family philanthropy into bold relief, the moral debate today is hardly confined to individuals who are trying to launder their unclean profits by giving money to prominent institutions.

On this page, I’ve briefly considered whether living artists (like Chuck Close who was accused of victimizing his female models) should have existing art they have given to museums taken down and new art they are creating boycotted by collectors. I’ve discussed Anand Giridharadas contention in Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) that Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook are using their philanthropy as a rationale for “us liking them” however much they are also causing us harm. As Giridharadas said at the time:

What I started to realize was that giving had become the wingman of taking. Generosity had become the wingman of injustice. ‘Changing the world’ had become the wingman of rigging the system…[L]ook at Andrew Carnegie’s essay ‘Wealth.’ We’re now living in a world created by the intellectual framework he laid out: extreme taking, followed by and justified by extreme giving.

It sounds a lot like what the Sacklers are being accused of today.

There is also the complicated moral dynamic between individual givers and institutional receivers when it comes to sources of information and the reporting of that information by the press. Media outlets eager to capture audiences with breaking news usually have little time to consider either the truth of the story their source has brought them or the bias and other hidden motivations that could undermine it after publication. When lapses in this kind of giving-and-receiving occur, the implications are wide-ranging because they tend to erode the press’s general reputation for truth telling.

Consider too the prominent individuals who may have been too quick to believe the story that Jessie Smolett gave to the media about a racist and homophobic attack in Chicago—and if it turns out to be false—how the breakdown in that exchange could call into question the veracity of everyone who claims they were victimized by a hate crime going forward.

Giving nearly anything that has value to an institution today (be it a donation, a work of art, or even an interesting story) can easily become a morally fraught transaction.

2. Giving and Taking One-on-One

I started this post with a picture of a sculpture from prehistory that conveys—to me, at least—the openness of giving. The bad news is that generosity is rarely this simple, pure or beautiful.

Generosity towards others is the key corrective for acting on our own behalf. Whenever we act, we try to be mindful of how that act impacts us as well as others. In autonomous exchanges, we strive to realize the best we have to offer while having the generosity to respect the same kind of striving in others.  The aim is reciprocity in how we treat ourselves and others and how we hope that others will treat us in return.

Of course, problems arise in life and work when any part of this exchange become unbalanced, but it seems to me that far more attention is spent on the imbalances caused by selfishness than on those that are caused by generosity.

Not unlike a wealthy family bearing much-needed gifts for a non-profit or a source dangling a juicy story before a ravenous press, giving can foist significant burdens on the receiver or mask a giver’s less than noble motivations. These pitfalls seems equally likely in our exchanges with one another.

For example, it’s easy to be ravished by someone’s seemingly spontaneous generosity, until you’ve been singed by it.  A stranger offering you a trinket when he’s looking for a hand-out makes you reluctant to take anything that’s being handed to you when you’re walking down the street. But what if they are items with real value, graciously offered, and part of you wants to accept them? This happened to me while I was traveling recently and unfamiliar with the local customs. It was only later that I discovered what was expected of me in return and could safely provide it…but not before I felt the burden of indebtedness born of generosity.

To return to the Sacklers for a minute, there may have been several motivations behind their gift-giving, but at least where philanthropy and random acts of kindness are concerned, such motivations become irrelevant whenever the giver gives anonymously. Unfortunately, among lovers, friends, neighbors, co-workers, bosses, employees and (when in Rome) strangers on the street, anonymity is simply impossible.

In our personal relationships, we’d prefer not to focus on the ledger balances between us most of the time. Rough reciprocity in what we give to and take from one another will usually suffice. But losing sight of these balances altogether can weaken and even jeopardize those same relationships. Overly generous givers can feel depleted and exploited by others’ needs. Givers who use their generosity to gain others’ approval can be oblivious to the burdens their giving places on receivers to reciprocate. The needs and motivations at play are as relevant when we give to one another as they are in the seemly less personal world of philanthropy.

There simply aren’t many rules of thumb here, but maybe Khalil Gibran (that Siddhartha for hippies) came closest to providing one:

“Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.”

This post was adapted from my February 24, 2019 newsletter.

How Can We Hold Our Common Ground?

February 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Our relationships at work are harmed when we disagree with others and experience their convictions as an assault on what we believe is right and true.

Without basic trust—along with at least some beliefs and convictions that we hold in common—it becomes almost impossible to move forward with our co-workers productively, but:

– How can I be confident in somebody’s judgments at work when their judgments in politics are so offensive?

– How could I ever collaborate with, even be friends with, somebody I disagree with so fundamentally?

– If, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the most productive meetings and collaborations are comprised of people with divergent opinions who are both willing and able to declare them, then how can the right people ever come together and accomplish anything worthwhile when (deep down) they distrust and often loathe what those who disagree with them stand for?

– What must members of a group share with one another in order to disagree deeply yet not fall into disarray while doing so?

– How can those who fall on different sides of the most divisive issues still be friends, collaborators, co-workers, or citizens who remain able to fight for the same future together?

– How small can their common ground be and still be enough?

These are the questions that two prominent teachers, who happen to stand on opposite ends of the political divide, have been asking when they come together.

A Conversation with Cornel West and Robert George on Friendship and Faith Across Political Differences – February 8, 2019

And it wasn’t just this joint appearance. Cornel West and Robert George have been on a road show talking about their friendship, their profound differences, and their common ground for several years now.

I overheard one of their conversations for the first time in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year. In it, they made a radical suggestion. In order to gain an ethical perspective on any issue, try to imagine (and then follow through on) whatever Martin Luther King would have done under the same circumstances. I was moved enough by it that it became the subject of a newsletter I called “Trying on a Hero’s Perspective.”

Well they were at it again at Duke a couple of Fridays ago, and a video of their hour-long talk (with another half-hour of follow-up questions) came on-line last week. If you’re interested in spending a fascinating hour, you can safely start the recording at the half hour-mark following their voluminous greetings—but make sure and stay tuned through the questions at the end.

I hope the following summary of their remarks peaks your interest in listening to what West and George actually said that night as they gestured towards the “thin” foundation of commonality we all share and need to preserve; the kind of person you’ll need to be in order to champion it; and some additional ways that you can go about doing so.

1. A Thin Foundation of Commonality

At the beginning of their conversation, George wonders:

How thin a basic set of shared values can you have and still share enough to have a relationship where you can disagree and still have a friendship?

Of course, his first answer was reflected in his longstanding friendship with Cornel West.

George then reminds us that America never became a nation because we had the same ethnicity or religion but because we shared “a political set of values,” as both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King reminded us during two of the most divisive periods in our history. George believes that we do share enough “to flourish in our pluralism,” but that there are serious dangers too, and we are seeing many of the warning signs today. We always “wrap emotions around our convictions to get things done”—and wouldn’t accomplish anything if we didn’t—but when those emotions are “wrapped too tightly” we become dogmatic, identifying too closely with our beliefs. We experience any challenge to our convictions “as a personal assault” which separates us from one another while creating hostility. Because of these tendencies, every pluralistic society rests on very thin ice.

It is not just America. George talks about the Hutus and Tutsis living together peacefully in Rwanda for many years until leaders enflamed local rivalries and friendly co-existence devolved into mass murder. George has a Syrian parent and visited his family’s home village in Syria a decade ago when Christians and Muslims were living and working together peacefully until it too turned into “a genocidal nightmare.” He reminds us that in democracies in particular, “civic friendship is very fragile,” and that whenever that friendship is lost, democracy tends to be replaced by tyranny.

Cornel West picked up the theme by rejecting both Plato’s and Dostoevsky’s views on society in favor of a vision that was championed by America’s Founding Fathers. Plato argued that the public was too emotional and ignorant to sustain a more inclusive form of governance, while Dostoevsky was convinced that most individuals don’t want to be free, preferring “pied pipers” to lead them and “magic” to amuse them. Instead, America’s founders believed that citizens could rise to the occasion and govern themselves because of basic principles they shared, memorializing this common ground in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine also knew that “If you don’t renew the democratic possibilities, you are going to lose them.”

In their conversation at Duke, neither George nor West describe the foundation that needs continuous renewal beyond their reference to America’s founding, but they do address key aspects of it elsewhere. “Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression-A Statement by Robert P. George and Cornel West” is a statement of principles which they published (and asked other concerned Americans to sign onto) in March of 2017. It is a key part of their joint effort to renew our democratic possibilities so that there continues to be “enough” of a foundation to support our civic friendship. This is a link if you wish to add your signature to it. (Please drop me a line if you do!) And here is their statement in full:

The pursuit of knowledge and the maintenance of a free and democratic society require the cultivation and practice of the virtues of intellectual humility, openness of mind, and, above all, love of truth. These virtues will manifest themselves and be strengthened by one’s willingness to listen attentively and respectfully to intelligent people who challenge one’s beliefs and who represent causes one disagrees with and points of view one does not share.

That’s why all of us should seek respectfully to engage with people who challenge our views. And we should oppose efforts to silence those with whom we disagree—“especially on college and university campuses. As John Stuart Mill taught, a recognition of the possibility that we may be in error is a good reason to listen to and honestly consider—and not merely to tolerate grudgingly—points of view that we do not share, and even perspectives that we find shocking or scandalous. What’s more, as Mill noted, even if one happens to be right about this or that disputed matter, seriously and respectfully engaging people who disagree will deepen one’s understanding of the truth and sharpen one’s ability to defend it.

None of us is infallible. Whether you are a person of the left, the right, or the center, there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share your fundamental convictions. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid or that all speakers are equally worth listening to. It certainly does not mean that there is no truth to be discovered. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily wrong. But they are not necessarily wrong either. So someone who has not fallen into the idolatry of worshiping his or her own opinions and loving them above truth itself will want to listen to people who see things differently in order to learn what considerations—evidence, reasons, arguments—led them to a place different from where one happens, at least for now, to find oneself.

All of us should be willing—even eager—to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments. The more important the subject under discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage—especially if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply held—even our most cherished and identity-forming—beliefs.

It is all-too-common these days for people to try to immunize from criticism opinions that happen to be dominant in their particular communities. Sometimes this is done by questioning the motives and thus stigmatizing those who dissent from prevailing opinions; or by disrupting their presentations; or by demanding that they be excluded from campus or, if they have already been invited, disinvited. Sometimes students and faculty members turn their backs on speakers whose opinions they don’t like or simply walk out and refuse to listen to those whose convictions offend their values. Of course, the right to peacefully protest, including on campuses, is sacrosanct. But before exercising that right, each of us should ask: Might it not be better to listen respectfully and try to learn from a speaker with whom I disagree? Might it better serve the cause of truth-seeking to engage the speaker in frank civil discussion?

Our willingness to listen to and respectfully engage those with whom we disagree (especially about matters of profound importance) contributes vitally to the maintenance of a milieu in which people feel free to speak their minds, consider unpopular positions, and explore lines of argument that may undercut established ways of thinking. Such an ethos protects us against dogmatism and groupthink, both of which are toxic to the health of academic communities and to the functioning of democracies.

Once again, by regularly appearing together George and West are actually demonstrating the same civic friendship that they are championing in this statement.

2. The qualities we’ ll all need more of to help renew our democratic possibilities

Several of these qualities can be inferred from the statement above (such as intellectual modesty), but at Duke, George and West made several additional observations, particularly in the Q&A.

George begins with the importance of cultivating friendships with those who have different perspectives. But he also reminds us that when you do, you are leaving the conformity of those who are “most like you,” meaning that you will also need the courage of your free will to speak the truth as you see it. When you leave the comfort of your fellow travelers, it helps to have role models, including those whose courage has carried them to the point of martyrdom. He also acknowledges that you’ll need “a few others to hold you up” when you champion what you believe and encounter the hostility that is the most likely response.

For his part, West characterizes those with the necessary courage as being “more revolutionary,” noting that you must be “willing to bear your cross” which “signifies your quest to unarm truth and unapologetically love” those who vehemently disagree with you. He continues: “to be a polished professional usually means don’t get too close to that cross” because what is most important to you is wanting to conform to those who are most like you. But when you are willing to bear that cross and become a revolutionary, you need to know that you are also on your way to character assassination or (like Lincoln and King) literal assassination.

Embodying the courage, loneliness and pain that George and West were describing, one of the night’s three questioners was a Christian Palestinian woman from Israel whose involvement in the peace movement there has been regularly vilified by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Israelis and Palestinians. While George and West were embodying civic friendship, she embodied the pain that goes into finding it.

3. How to find a patch of green where civic friendship can grow

George and West give several examples, including these:

– When pursuing civic friendship with those who vehemently disagree with you, it is essential to decide which truths are negotiable for you and which are non-negotiable. For the Palestinian-Israeli peace activist, one non-negotiable truth is that every Palestinian baby deserves to live. When the ice is this thin, nothing is too basic to be left unsaid.

– Within Christianity, it is possible to harbor an intense hatred for a person’s sin while, at the same time, recognizing that his or her sins do not exhaust that sinner’s humanity. To similar effect, however odious a person’s convictions, they never rob that person of his or her essential dignity and integrity. Hate the sin but not the sinner. As West observed: we “must recognize the limitations but always hold out the possibility of transcending them” in the course of our civic conversations.

– To follow those possibilities even further, a person’s conviction always “lives” within a broader context or set of circumstances and is rarely either good or bad in spite of those circumstances. When you take the time to understand the context where another’s convictions arise, it is often possible to recognize how differences between you arose, agree to disagree, and step down from your mutual hostility. West illustrates this point by reference to our current divisions over “black face,” recalling that its original context suggests a kind of appropriation of black power by white slaveholders who wanted to have some of that power for themselves. In other words, “black face” was about attraction and not merely ridicule and oppression. Where there might be some “overlap” between positions within a particular context—that is, a more hopeful ground between those who are for and against a particular issue—there exists the possibility for civic conversation and even friendship.

I think you’ll enjoy the Robert George-Cornel West conversation at Duke when you get to hear it. I’d also recommend that you follow their road show as it winds its way across an America that is likely to grow even more divided as another presidential election approaches.

The unfortunate truth is that our divisions are never confined to the realm of politics. As hostility intensifies, it infects our work and leaches into our home lives.

The best way to champion common ground is by acting with the courageous belief that common ground is possible, that democracy is worth renewing, and that its renewal won’t begin with somebody else.

This post is adapted from my February 17, 2019 newsletter.

Writing Your Thinking Down Enables High Level Problem-Solving

February 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Gathering your thoughts, working them out on a page, and sharing that page with others is the spur for high level, creative problem-solving and the best (most productive) conversations. Instead of “winging it” by making up what you think, want and propose as you go along, the discipline of writing your thinking down first makes a remarkable difference.

It’s more than laziness that gets in the way of our doing so, although laziness and the smug belief that our wits will be enough is certainly a part of it. There is, after all, a long tradition of not thinking too much “while going with what we believe and feel” in American culture. The great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote AntiIntellectualism in America in 1964, and others like Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason (2008) have picked up the thread more recently. Anyone viewing the political maelstrom today can see a ton of beliefs and emotions for every ounce of careful thinking.

So our reluctance to think through the issues beforehand is nothing new. And our suspicion of “intellectuals” who actually do helps us to confirm our general unwillingness to read about, consider, write down our thoughts, learn how to dissent from others’ thinking, and really converse with one another. There are several contributors to this reluctance, and I guess I’m working my way back through the list, having already discussed the emotional bars to political conversation (or how “The Danger of Absolute Thinking is Absolutely Clear”) and the generative quality of dissent (about Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers) on this page.

So what does writing down our thoughts before sharing them with others have to do with living and working? As it turns out, quite a lot.

As a group, Americans clearly don’t believe that the act of thinking (for itself) is as great as all those intellectuals keep telling them it is. As a people, our reaction is kind of: show me what’s so good about it and then I might try thinking-about-it-more if I’m convinced that it might actually be useful.

Among other things, this skepticism was the subject of another recent post about Robert Kaplan and his Earning the Rockies. Kaplan notes that Americans “washed” all the philosophizing that had trailed them from Europe in their vast frontier, reducing that thinking and ideology into something that they could actually use to build a new way of life. “Show me how all of these ideas can help me to solve the problems I face everyday, and then, maybe I’ll take them seriously.”  It’s no mistake that Missouri, the gateway to the American frontier, is also called the Show-Me State.

What Americans found on the frontier (and translated into a national way of life) was that ideas are useful when they help us to improve our hard-working lives and, in particular, to make more money while we’re at it. I suspect that this makes us unique as a country and a people. Unlike the intellectual elites of Europe who argue ideas, our favorite “intellectuals” are of the practical variety. They show us how to live and work better (entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk) and to make more money while doing so (Warren Buffett and Vanguard’s Jack Bogle).

Which is where Jeff Bezos comes in.

In a week that saw him fighting with the National Enquirer about nude pictures that he exchanged with his mistress—more on that later—we also know Bezos as the founder of Amazon, which has become one of the largest companies in the world and made him the world’s richest man in only 20 years. Like Jobs, Musk, Buffett and Bogle, there has been a great deal of intellectual rigor, with highly practical outcomes, behind Bezos’ and Amazon’s remarkable success.

While I’ve been talking for months about Amazon’s anti-competitive and job-killing behaviors, it also seems fitting to recognize one of the insights that Bezos has used to drive Amazon’s dominance–and how you might profit from it too.  All that is necessary is overcoming the laziness of easy answers and some of our native suspicions about thinking too much.

1. On Writing Your Thinking Down Before You Share It

To build one of the largest companies in the world in two decades took several really good ideas, and even more importantly, several really good ways to turn those ideas into solutions for the legion of problems that every new company faces. Many of those solution-generating approaches were applied by Bezos, and one of them, in particular, has been a key to Amazon’s supremacy as an on-line retailer and to its leadership in related industries, like cloud-based data solutions.

In his excellent 2-5-19 post on what he calls Bezos’ “writing management strategy,” Ben Bashaw gathered the underlying documentation and made several of the observations that I’ll be paraphrasing below. He starts off by noting:

There’s probably no technology company that values the written word and produces written output quite as much as Amazon….

Bezos is Amazon’s chief writing evangelist, and his advocacy for the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique has been ordering how people think and work at Amazon for the last two decades—most importantly, in how the company creates new ideas, how it shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider world.

(How, how, how instead of why, why, why are questions that practical intellectuals ask.)

As a manager, Bezos grew impatient with meetings as brainstorming sessions early on. He came to appreciate what the behavioral research tends to prove: that individuals are better at coming up with new ideas on their own, while groups are better at recognizing the best ones and deciding how to implement them.

But he also appreciated that for groups to engage quickly, a new idea needed to be delivered “in high resolution detail” by the individual who had come up with it. The insight led to a June, 2004 email that banned the use of powerpoint presentations at Amazon and insisted that people with ideas tee-up the meetings that would receive them with tight, well-structured and reasoned narrative texts.

The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

Bezos banned powerpoint presentations company-wide because he knew that to generate new ideas consistently, a business needs better processes it can repeat every time. He was also convinced that writing your ideas down clarifies your thinking about them and improves the chance that your ideas will be good ones because you’ve thought nearly everything through beforehand.

When composing a detailed narrative, logical inconsistencies are no longer hidden but acknowledged and (if possible) addressed. To set up “a deep debate of the idea’s costs and merits,” these 4 pages are designed to be “a full logical argument” by the idea’s sponsor that includes a narrative about the issue; how others have attempted to address it before; how the sponsor’s approach differs; the advantage of the new idea to the company; a defense to potential objections; and attachments that include the relevant data. In other words, in drafting the memo, the idea’s sponsor has considered it from every angle he or she can think of before it’s presented.

A link that Bashaw includes in his post references first-hand group responses at Amazon after the sponsor provided his or her written narrative. Discussion is “very focused” around the proposal; meeting participants are “incredibly sharp” and “you can expect the meeting to be among the most difficult and intellectually challenging that you will ever attend”; “data is king” and had better be well-researched and assembled; and how Bezos would “consistently surprise” the idea’s sponsor with at least one question about “the big picture” that the sponsor had never considered before. No more rambling brainstorming meetings where powerpoints create the illusion of depth but fail to engage the participants productively. It is one practical reason why Amazon has grown as quickly and boldly as it has.

What may be most interesting here is how drafting a tightly written narrative that contains your full logical argument can stimulate engagement with groups and others that you need to engage on any issue that is truly important to your life and work. It is taking a full stand about something, declaring yourself in a way that immediately invites respect and collaboration. It is a demonstration that you’ve thought about everything you can think of already—including what these others stand to gain—on whatever issue you are raising. The work that you’ve put behind it makes you an immediately credible partner to explore the next steps.

In an aside to this basic wisdom, it’s hardly surprising that Bezos used his customary approach to narrative writing when he accused the National Enquirer of blackmail this week. The Enquirer threatened to publish nude pictures that Bezos took of himself during an extramarital affair if he refused to abandon prior legal claims that he had against the gossip page. (If you have not read Bezos’ refusal to bow to these threats because–as it turns out–he was willing to publish the photos himself, here is the link to “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker”.)

What I found interesting enough to share with you was the following: (1) how many other people, both in and outside business circles, take Bezos’ writing seriously and (2) how one subsequent commentator actually provided a tongue-in-cheek critique of his “think of everything” writing style a couple of days ago. Jenni Avinns, a writer for Quartz business news, led off with the observation that Bezos’ post “clocked in at fewer than 1500 words” or, by my calculation, the four pages that launch all good ideas at Amazon. Then she gave some additional observations on how Bezos writes down his thinking, including his willingness to:

Embrace the poetry
If pictures of your penis are at the center of the confrontation and the person threatening you is David Pecker, don’t shy away. (Even if your blue-chip private security consultant is de Becker and it rhymes.) Put that Pecker right in the headline. Put a “Mr.” in front of it to emphasize the indignity: “No thank you, Mr. Pecker.” …

Make up Words
If the English language isn’t complex enough to provide the word you need to describe how your ownership of a national media outlet complicates your dealings with other powerful people [including the President], make one up. “My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.” People will know what you mean, and even appreciate that you didn’t permit a tedious copyeditor to question you, though you clearly employ some.

Make fun of their words with “scare quotes” and repetition
“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our [i.e. the Post’s] investigation” of his company’s relationship with the Saudi government, wrote Bezos. Apoplectic is a strong word, and honestly makes this person sound kind of hysterical and unhinged. If someone says they’re apoplectic, turn it around and say it again, like it’s a medical condition: “A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. “ …

Just [provide] the facts: I’m Jeff Bezos, and you’re not
If someone attempts to question your business acumen, school them:“ I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world.”

But act relatable
… “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”

Once again, great narrative writing skills always translate when you are trying to solve important problems at work or in private life. Unfortunately, they can rarely explain away incomprehensibly poor personal judgments. Perhaps it’s no accident that the last time I imagined pictures like this, they were taken by somebody who was (improbably and poetically) named Mr. Anthony Weiner.

On the other hand, and practically speaking once again, whether his post succeeds in solving Mr. Bezos’ immediate problem with the Enquirer is something I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

An Image of How Tight Narrative Writing with High Resolution Details Might Actually Look

2. How I’ve Used This Kind of Narrative Writing Recently

An important problem ahead of me is attracting interest in my first book.

I want to make sure that its disparate parts (arguments, short stories, etc.) hang together; that they reinforce one another nicely and enhance the freshness of my thesis; that likely questions about the approach I’ve taken are asked and answered by me; and that the benefits to readers in my approach are clearly in mind throughout.

Moreover, these problems are closely related to another one, because what will attract a publisher most is a well-considered and organized book with fresh ideas that meets readers’ needs to take more satisfaction from their work.

These are precisely the kinds of problems that “tight narrative writing with high resolution detail” can package for everyone who faces me down the line, including agents, publishers, retailers (like Amazon) and, of course, the readers themselves. In other words, it’s not just about your book but how you tell the stories that need to be told to others about it.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on the written materials that serve up my book to everyone outside of my book writing process. Without handing out the book itself and expecting people to read it, these are the shorthand essentials: descriptions of key concepts and how they operate, along with demonstrations of my ability to persuade with an argument, tell a good story and understand who might be interested in them. In other words: tight narrative writing with high resolution detail.

Quite frankly, it has been a lot of work, but its almost done. I’ve been amazed by the foundation it has provided to promote my book and how much the book itself has changed (and improved) from my efforts to capture it in its own narrative.

I had also taken this approach before I learned that Jeff Bezos had been taking it at Amazon too. It’s a great idea that’s long been out there waiting to be picked up and put to good use. But best of all, anyone can take the same approach to face a challenging and skeptical world with a maximum of confidence when trying to solve an important problem.

This post was adapted from my February 10, 2019 newsletter