A Swaggering Story That Speaks to Our Time

October 22, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There are three extraordinary aspects to the storytelling in Marshall, a new movie appearing in theaters this week.

Its protagonist, Thurgood Marshall, was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Several years before he took the bench, Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a high court case that found state laws establishing separate schools for black and white children to be unconstitutional. But long before his career peak or landmark victory, Marshall was a young NAACP lawyer struggling to represent a black defendant who was charged with raping a white woman.

That courtroom is where most of this movie takes place, and it’s the first story element that struck me. Marshall was virtually unknown back then. He seems to think he’s “all that,” but unlike the swaggering hotshot that we’re meeting for the first time, we know something that he doesn’t, namely, all that he’ll go on to accomplish. This absence of knowledge means that it could be anybody’s bright future that glitters in his eyes.

The second arresting feature is Marshall’s complicated, flawed personality.

We meet a whip-smart prankster who can be charming but also full of guile. In action, his bravado makes him the life of the party one minute and an arrogant jerk the next.

Before the Connecticut case, we see Marshall enjoying the high life of jazz era Harlem. But he also decides to leave his beautiful wife and celebrity friends behind to fight for civil rights in some of the most hostile corners of America. To leave these comforts for a life of combativeness and fear is either the definition of foolhardy or tremendously courageous.

It is the ambivalence of these details that enable us to share in his story. Brazen but also exposed, this Marshall is never too good to be true. It may have been the bright future in this man’s eyes and his relatable personality that caused Chicago’s Chance the Rapper to buy out two theater seatings of the movie—his announcement appears below—so that kids from his old neighborhood could encounter a role model who feels like the real thing.

What really got my attention though was the third turn that the story takes.

As the trial unfolds, Marshall confronts the fact that he is an out-of-state lawyer who cannot speak for himself or his client in this courtroom. Because he was not admitted to practice in Connecticut, Marshall literally has to “speak through his local counsel,” a young insurance attorney unversed in either criminal law or racial animosity. In other words, without his rhetorical skills and righteous passion, what everyone knows is Marshall’s best hand has been tied behind his back and that he has to learn to fight without it.

Chadwick Boseman, the actor who plays Marshall, described this element of the story in an interview when the movie was released:

Jeffrey Brown: You wanted to make your big courtroom speech?

Chadwick Boseman: Had to, you know. But the more I read it, I realized that this was the exact obstacle that would make the movie interesting. The truth of the matter is, when you’re acting [in the courtroom scenes] you’re silent. Your non-verbals are dialogue, subtext. And that’s actually just as hard, if not harder, than having the huge speech at the end….

Of course it is. A lot harder.

The young Thurgood Marshall was a black lawyer in a hostile community that had already made up its mind about the guilt of his client. The future of the NAACP, particularly financial support for the organization, depended on his success in cases like this one. As if these pressures weren’t enough, Marshall had to improvise his client’s defense with an untested accomplice at his side. He didn’t know where his attitude and talents would take him, but they would have to be enough. And all the while, he carried his own baggage.

During the same interview Reginald Hudlin, the film’s director, emphasized that the Marshall he wanted to portray was not an angel but a saint. He explained the difference this way:

Well an angel kind of implies perfection. A saint means, you know, you push through your humanity. You do something greater than.

That’s what Chance the Rapper wanted those young audiences in Chicago to see. A flawed individual, not unlike them, pushing through his circumstances and his humanity.

There is some real hope in that.

Lemmings

September 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Theil was in Philadelphia on Monday sharing some of his contrarian views. One that he expanded upon at length affects innovation, education as well as our careers. Theil described it as “people acting in lemming-like ways.”

Lemmings are tiny hamster-like creatures that live near the Arctic Circle. Our image is of them frantically following one another to coastal cliffs in places like Scandinavia where they jump to their deaths in the frigid waters below. While we’re wrong to characterize lemming migration as mass suicide, there is no denying the herd-mentality that characterizes their movement from one place to another. It is the tendency we all have to jump off the same cliff that Theil was complaining about.

His impatience comes from wanting to nudge the world in a better direction if he thinks he can. As a result, Theil tends to be optimistic about innovation’s impact on the future and impatient with those who are failing to make the most of it. For example, on CNBC last week, he described Twitter as a “horribly mismanaged company” given its possibilities (“a lot of pot smoking going on there”), and took on Harvard Business School during the talk I attended, expressing his puzzlement about the games that are played there while accomplishing so little. Among entrepreneurs, his concern is that almost everyone is intent on “riding the last wave.”

“Big Data.” “The Cloud.” Whenever an idea gains some cache as the next big thing, everyone rushes in to contribute to what he calls “1 to n,” the adding of endless variations to something that has already been done. He called it the tendency “to ape” in the sense of imitating. Much harder but much better is to solve problems that no one else is thinking about in the way that you are. In other words, it is being able to go from Zero to One, which is also the title of a new book that captures his in-class discussions about entrepreneurship.

PETER THEIL / photograph by Olivia Poppy Cole

“Theil, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Faceboook, is probably the most successful—and certainly the most interesting—venture capitalist in Silicon Valley,” notes a recent piece about him in the London Telegraph. Whatever people are doing at Twitter or Harvard Business School or in places where the topic is innovation, Theil gets exasperated whenever they seem more intent on climbing onto one another’s bandwagons than in thinking for themselves.

For some people, going to the best schools you can get into for four or more years after high school is just where the herd is headed. In Philadelphia, Theil admitted that he might still have gone to Stanford for college and then on to law school, but “would have thought about it a lot differently beforehand.” I know what he means. When a high school student has a more individualized sense of direction, why should she follow everyone else into higher education? So Theil started the 20-under-20 Fellowship Program, now in its fourth year, an admittedly rarified experiment in personal and professional development that I’ve talked about here before.

With a propensity to learn by doing, the fellows work with mentors that Theil has assembled in a 2 year, paid program that helps them to launch their own companies. When he was attacked by Larry Summers and others for what they viewed as his anti-college stance, Theil responded:

I didn’t think it would hit this sort of raw nerve. I mean, how fragile is the education system when 20 talented people leaving and doing something else is somehow enough to threaten it? My only claim is that not all talented people should go to college and not all talented people should do the exact same thing.

Which brings us to the work that we do. The career path that leads from the best possible kindergartens to the best possible colleges and professional schools is clearly the path that most young people want to be on. And they’re paying for the privilege with record student loans and crushing debt that hangs over them for years, if not decades. Is it worth it? Here too, the road less travelled—where you sit with yourself and figure out what you need and want from your work instead of simply following everyone else—has much to recommend it. Wherever it leads will not only make you happier, but also vastly improve the chances that your career could take you (along with the rest of us) from Zero to One.

During his Philadelphia whistle stop, Theil said that we all tend to underestimate what is different, those people and things “that don’t have a comparable.” When someone as different as Theil himself achieves conventional success, it allows him to trumpet “the unique perspective” in front of Philadelphia’s management class. For those of us who seek the courage to be different, he connected the personal benefits to the opportunities it can give us to change the world in often breathtaking ways.

Morality Play

May 24, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Many who watched Frontline’s The United States of Secrets (May 13 and 20, 2014 on PBS) did so wanting to learn what happened before Edward Snowden’s massive disclosure of documents about the warrantless surveillance of American citizens. It was certainly the promised backstory—the bits and pieces gathered over the years and now stitched back together—that made me want to watch. But even more than the story itself, I was repeatedly overtaken by some of the characters in it. There are Shakespeare plays have had less courage, duplicity, guilelessness, arrogance and decency on display.

You can watch and judge for yourself.

Still from The United States of Secrets — Still from “The United States of Secrets”

When you do, keep an eye on 3 characters in particular, all of whom will interrupt the sidelong glance you’d usually cast in the direction of government bureaucrats:

Diane Roark, long-time staff member of the House Intelligence Committee;

Thomas Tamm, attorney and Justice Department liaison to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; and

Senior National Security Agency manager Robert Drake.

On a stage filled with dissemblers, careerists, and preening journalists, it is hard to take your eyes off of them. However you view opponents of our government’s surveillance programs, there can be no argument that each of these individuals risked their jobs, along with the quality of their future lives, to stand up for what they believed in the face of terrible odds.

Truly terrible odds.

Prevention of another 9-11 is what propelled the US reaction (or over-reaction) in the ensuing years. After more than a decade with no major terrorist incident on our soil, it is easy—much too easy—to discount the concerns that we all had much closer to that terrible day about the reasonable costs of our personal safety in a free and open society. Indeed, the courage in this documentary is directly proportionate to a threat we could all barely fathom on 9-12, and in the weeks, months and years that followed. The question could not be more important. What should you do (and those we rely on to protect us) do or not do, when caught up in the grip of fear?

By saying that the U.S. could not break its own laws to confront this threat, Roark, Tamm and Drake each challenged those they worked with in the government, as well as everyone in their chains of command (like vice-president Cheney) who were convinced that the fate of the nation would be undermined by their dissent. In order to do their jobs, these individuals were not only prepared to lose them, but also to be accused of having “blood on their hands” if their quibbling about legalities and moralities opened a fatal breach in the new “safety net” that was soon being assembled around us.

What they personally risked was like the excommunication that a former teacher of mine was threatened with when she encouraged a new dialogue within the Church about the nature of love; when she was told, in essence, “you cannot write about these things and be part of us anymore.” But being seen as “a Heretic,” “a Traitor” or “a Potential Murderer” didn’t stop (perhaps couldn’t stop) any of them, because they were not overtaken by their fears. Something even more basic and bedrock than that was involved, for better or worse.

You can catch a glimpse of these basic building blocks in Roark, Tamm and Drake. Because it is hard to speak from your conscience and easy to stay silent and go along, it can always be instructive to look in the faces of fairly ordinary and usually invisible people when they have simply refused to yield to larger forces.

My personal hope is that I can see in them something of my better self too.

Individuals who are working at the top of their games often learn about things that are far above their pay grades. Diane Roark was one of them, and in the immediate wake of 9/11 she started hearing about NSA surveillance of American citizens conducted without judicial sanction (that is, after a warrant arguing probable cause had been submitted and approved). She knew this was illegal, and began an impassioned harangue of her Congressional bosses. She argued with them. She documented what she kept learning and peppered them with memos. People connected to the government kept talking to her, because they were concerned too.

What Roark didn’t know was that the White House was also briefing her bosses on the House Intelligence Committee. She didn’t know that once these Congressional leaders were told about the new surveillance, how many of them felt that they could no longer exercise oversight, because the specter of having “blood on their hands” effectively silenced them.

Because Roark was unaware of this, she kept trying to convince her Committee members and, in an expression of frustration, was finally told to take her suspicions up with General Michael Hayden, who ran the NSA. Her bosses knew it was a dead-end, but the evasive answers she received and the assurance she finally got of authorization “from the top” made her more concerned than ever. She redoubled her efforts to convince somebody, anybody, that this program was “unethical, immoral, politically stupid, illegal and unconstitutional.” That was her job, after all. You can still hear the disbelief in her voice that the government she was working so hard to serve was acting in this manner. Roark resigned in frustration a year after 9/11, having dared to raise her voice, both loudly and clearly, when our leader’s fears were at their highest.

Thomas Tamm was the Justice Department attorney who submitted requests for warrants made by federal investigators to the special court charged with either authorizing or rejecting the surveillance of American citizens suspected of terrorism. In other words, he was literally one of the lynchpins in the pre-9/11 safeguards that had been established to protect citizens from being monitored by their government without probable cause.

Tamm came from a family of law enforcement professionals. His father and grandfather both held senior positions at the FBI. Like Roark, Tamm also started hearing about surveillance reports that were not tied to any standing warrant.

His immediate superior was repeatedly unresponsive when he raised his concerns with her (although she talked about probable illegality in a telling aside). Months passed and he went “outside his chain” to a Congressional staffer involved in government oversight but was stonewalled again. It was clear that the government was going around the job he was trying to do with a secret and unauthorized program. Unable to get any kind of response to his concerns from within the government, in a fateful move Tamm called a reporter covering post-9/11 security issues at the New York Times before, in the words of the narrator “disappear[ing] back into the bureaucracy.”

Angry about leaks to the press, Vice President Cheney’s office started a “manhunt for leakers” during this time, an initiative that continued under President Obama (despite assurances while he was campaigning that there will be “no more ignoring of the law when it is inconvenient on my watch”). His home as well as Roark’s were ultimately raided by the FBI, and both had their documents as well as computers seized. Both left their government jobs and endured years of uncertainty (and in Tamm’s case depression) facing possible arrest, although neither ultimately was. In the documentary, Tamm’s quiet sadness about these events is easily as compelling as Roark’s agitation.

Senior NSA manager Robert Drake was also alarmed when he started to suspect that his own agency was conducting warrantless surveillance. It was his job to find existing capabilities within the NSA that could be mobilized post-9/11.

The National Security Agency was chartered after World War II to ensure that there were no more surprises like Pearl Harbor, so it was not surprising that it had developed a program called “Thin Thread” that could eavesdrop on every American’s electronic communications, but with the built-in privacy protections mandated by law. (All personal data that the program captured was encrypted until a judge deemed that it could be read upon presentation of a warrant.) When Drake told his superiors about Thin Thread, he was surprised when they told him they were “going with another program.” He soon discovered that the other program was essentially Thin Thread without the legal safeguards.

If possible, Drake was even more dogged than Roark or Tamm in his efforts to convince his superiors to stop the warrantless surveillance. Unlike them however, as he continued to raise concerns his job duties were taken out from under him. He bypassed his chain of command and wrote directly to General Keith Alexander, by then the head of the NSA, that the warrantless surveillance program was “out of control” and needed to be “reigned in.” In the meantime, his worst fears were being confirmed by the New York Times’ reporting.

For 4 years, the stonewalling continued and his frustration festered. Drake ultimately reached out to a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. Before long he too was caught in the same dragnet for leakers as the others. When the FBI raided his home, for hours all they wanted to talk about with him was the press reports, and all he talked about in return was how law enforcement should be pursuing lawbreakers elsewhere in the government.

Prosecutors decided to make an example out of Drake, indicting him in 2010 under the Espionage Act because he allegedly had classified documents in his home. He exhausted his financial resources on his defense. After repeatedly threatening him to plead guilty, his attorneys successfully argued that the documents in question had previously been made public by the government itself. On the eve of his trial, all serious charges were dropped. Drake was required to pay a $25 fine for misuse of his government computer.

Roark, Tamm and Drake raised concerns about warrantless surveillance and assumed the attendant risks because the proper handling of intelligence gathering was at the core of their jobs. It was their business to know what was legal and illegal, and unlike most others in the government, they raised their voices and never bowed before the strenuous efforts that were made to stop them from doing so.

Whether they deserved what their principled tenacity brought them or suffered in vain is not for me to decide. On the other hand, when your work—your very job description—brings you knowledge of wrongdoing, you essentially have two choices: to raise your voice and assume the risks, or to remain silent and go along. The morality play that is The United States of Secrets is really about some of the ordinary characters who made the more extraordinary of these two choices.

Tallying Up

December 28, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s the time of year to tally up what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t, what we might have done differently, or not at all.

Perhaps because of that, Todd May contributed an op-ed to the New York Times a few days ago in which he pondered the notion of good years, best or “peak” years, and years when you’re simply rolling downhill toward your final whimper.

For me, I’d like to think that I’m on an upward trajectory, that I’ll continue to engage and grow, and that tomorrow will be better than today. But it’s more than my optimism and sense of purpose. A lot of it also has to do with how the world engages back.

photo by Susan Melkisethian — (photo/Susan Melkisethian)

Everyone will agree that Edward Snowden had something of a peak year in 2013.

Yesterday, when Professor May was interviewed on NPR about his op-ed, John Hockenberry mentioned Snowden in his introduction, noting that he may never have “another change the world moment” like he had in 2013. But when he got into his Q&A, Hockenberry thought it was at least “conceivable” that Snowden could “acquire an influence that could give him as big a year, say in 10 years, as he had this year.” May disagreed, noting that the American government will never let it happen, a point he elaborated upon in his op-ed.

Snowden’s actions, regardless of whether one supports them or not, have had a prodigious impact on the debate about privacy in the United States and will likely continue to do so. They have had roughly the impact that Snowden wanted them to have. That is, they have altered how many of us think about our relation to the government and to our own technology, and because of this, they infuse this period of his life with a luminescence that will always be with him. He will not forget it, nor will others.

There is an assumption I would like to make here, one that I can’t verify but I think is uncontroversial. It is very unlikely that Edward Snowden will ever do anything nearly as significant again. Nothing he does for the remainder of his life will have the resonance that his recent actions have had. The powers that be will ensure it. And undoubtedly he knows this. His life will go on, and it may not be as tortured as some people think. But in an important sense his life will have peaked at age 29 or 30.

I don’t know about that.

Like many of you I am “at 6s and 7s” about Edward Snowden, and like most of you l viewed his “Alternative Christmas Message” this week in the hope that it would help me sort through my impressions. I realized that while I had seen his picture a thousand times, I had never heard his voice. Indeed, almost no one had.

Was his message “Hyperbole? Self-marketing?” Hockenberry wondered in his interview. Well, maybe. But then again, maybe not.

The part of me that believed Snowden had spoken a kind of truth to power that no one else had dared to speak could find both sincerity and conviction in him and in his words. That part of me believed him when he said that he repeatedly raised his concerns about the extent of surveillance with his superiors. Only when they did nothing, did he turn to the press to find out whether the rest of us would see the stakes involved in the same way that he did.

So as we hear Edward Snowden’s voice and tally the costs (if any) of 5 months of asylum on his face, it’s equally hard to believe that he’s already begun his slow descent into irrelevance. We will keep talking about how much privacy we are wiling to sacrifice to be safe because it is one of the great conversations of our age. More than anything, it is Snowden’s continuing willingness to contribute to that conversation and our continuing engagement with his thoughts and actions that will determine the pitch of his trajectory.

Was it a good year, a peak year, or a way-station to irrelevance? It comes down to the same two factors for all us: our willingness to keep raising our voices and the connections we forge with others by doing so.

As I watched Edward Snowden’s counterpoint to the Queen’s Annual Christmas Greeting, I was pretty sure of one thing:

He, for one, doesn’t think that his peak year is behind him.

Between a Practical and an Enriching Education

November 24, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The cultivation of your mind & spirit and your preparation for a job are always in tension in higher education.

With a crippling recession and the rising cost of a college degree, there seems to be a higher emphasis than ever on vocational training. But even with more internships and technical apptitude, the last half-decade of graduates are still struggling to break into the job market. Indeed, liberal arts champions are noting that narrow training for specialized jobs is leaving those students who don’t manage to land one largely unqualified to do anything else.

Broad. Specific. Enriching. Practical. Critical thinking. Hands-on learning. The best education is equal parts creativity and application, learning how to identify a problem and then trying to solve it, discovering unexpected abilities at school while refining developing ones on the job.

It is unusual for one educator to draw so much of his energy from these tensions, but that’s what Sebastian Thrun seems to be doing.

Thrun is the co-founder of Udacity, one of the young companies that is beginning to turn the bricks & mortar approach to higher education on its head. Massive open on-line courses (or MOOCs) are the vehicle. In a post a few weeks back, I discussed one of the recent directions they have taken: a collaboration between national employers like UPS and companies like Thrun’s to jointly develop “niche certification programs” that will give students an affordable shot at an available job and employers a qualified applicant pool for unfilled positions.

This could be just another way for enterprising employers to cultivate a roster of applicants for cherry picking. But from another perspective, it could be more of a win-win. As observers like Andrew Kelly have noted, most of those taking MOOCs today are either in traditional degree programs or have gotten their degrees already. Because these certificate programs are building on the broad base of a more traditional education, the too-narrowly-focused student becomes less of a concern.

For his part, Thrun seems to be motivated instead of discouraged by the vocational detour MOOC providers like his are taking.

His vision, and that of other innovators in on-line education, was to bring practical as well as enriching learning opportunities to everyone who was too poor or too busy working to pursue a traditional degree—a potentially transformative global vision. Unfortunately, very few of those sigining up for a MOOC actually complete the course today, even with “really good” teachers, regular mentoring and the promise of low-cost college credit. But the apparent fact that the market for the first wave of MOOCs is smaller than Thrun (and others) expected is only causing him to double down on his efforts to meet the broader need that’s out there.

Why is that? I think it’s because the animating principle is Thrun’s own curiosity, his own appetite for learning.

We pursue most vigorously what we embody, or as Thrun prefers to describe it, what he wants for his son.

I hope he can hit the workforce relatively early and engage in lifelong education.

Instead of four years in college, what Thrun envisions is an on-going shuttle between theory and practice, discovery and pursuit, critical detachment and engagement—exactly what he is doing to unlock the full potential of MOOCs.

It is an education that is supple enough to nurture your basic qualities of mind while also helping you to develop skills that will help you keep up with the accelerating pace of workforce change (what fellow entrepreneur and Linked-in founder Reed Hoffman calls “the continuous start-up of you”).

Watching Sebastian Thrun as a teacher, an innovator and a father is to catch a glimpse of what this vision of lifelong learning could look like for you and me.