Nevertheless, I grew up reading about historical figures like the Roman leader Cincinnatus who left his farm to serve in a leadership position, fulfilled his public responsibilities, and then returned as quickly as possible to his farm and his family.  George Washington was admired because he completed his two presidential terms, and then went back to his Virginia home.  Both of these leaders represented a set of values which placed public service above personal ambition.

My dad was a member of the International Typographers Union, which was noteworthy because it had term limits for union leaders.  I have also admired great companies like UPS because they have had implicit terms limits by enforcing early retirement rules for CEOs. I attempted to stay consistent with these values by retiring well before I could get drawn into believing that Pitney Bowes could not survive without me.

Public service has changed from a temporary service environment in which a very broad range of people are drawn upon for their expertise, their diverse perspectives, and their vision of the common good, to one in which a smaller, more ideologically rigid, less diverse, and more partisan group of people have established themselves as part of a relatively permanent government bureaucracy.  This is true of elected officials, appointed officials, government union leaders, and civil service managers.

Government at all levels has become like joining a fraternity in which there are vicious hazing rituals, exclusionary admission practices, and an isolation from people outside the fraternity once a member gets admitted.

This did not happen at once, but it’s time to take a brief look at where we are today.

Running for office or being considered for appointive office

A candidate for elective office opens himself or herself to every possible form of disparagement.  We need to be held accountable for our decisions, but the ability of opponents to disparage us or any member of our immediate and extended families without any accountability is outrageous.

This is an unintended consequence of a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision Sullivan vs. The New York Times, in which a plaintiff lost a defamation case because the Supreme Court held that, in the pursuit of free speech, defamation claims by “public figures” were subject to a much higher standard than claims by ordinary citizens. This much higher standard of liability made it almost impossible for public figures to sue those who disparaged them falsely.

The ability to “terrorize” someone running for office or being appointed to an office is far greater than ever.  The First Amendment framers could not fathom capturing an individual’s random remark with a digital video camera, posting it globally and permanently within seconds, and building a disparagement campaign around it.  In fact, dirty tricksters follow candidates to provoke them into intemperate remarks to post them online.

We have also created such a complex set of disclosure, campaign finance, and election laws that we have increased the cost of running a campaign exponentially, or even the cost of being considered for an appointive office. Incomplete, false, or misleading disclosures, especially of financial data, have been criminalized. What is disclosed becomes the raw material for further disparagement.

Much character assassination that occurs at the national, state, and local levels relative to government officials is a kind of violence, or, if not a directly violent act, an invitation to violence by others.

Throughout history, democratic societies have been served by the collective wisdom of imperfect people in an imperfect, but effective, system of government.  I worry about the effectiveness of a person whose life is so devoid of imperfections that he or she could pass through every conceivable public screen.

Being an elected or appointed government official

Even if an individual survives the rigors of either a political campaign or a high-stakes appointment process, we have made many incremental decisions that have crippled the ability of government officials to have a significant impact on the entities they lead.  Our civil service system, combined with collective bargaining for a sizable percentage of the government workforces, has created a long-term set of stakeholders that will outlast any elected or appointed official.

I strongly support civil service. The most compelling logic for civil service reform was to insure that government had a system for selecting as many jobs as possible on the basis of merit, not political affiliation, and that there be knowledge and experience continuity in the middle and first-line management ranks during senior leadership transitions.

The key to making civil service systems effective is that the system be designed to retain people with good experience, knowledge, and judgment, not to protect incompetent or even immoral managers from being terminated.  It is virtually impossible to take effective disciplinary action in any reasonable period of time against a non-performing manager in most governments.

If an elected or appointive official is blessed with competent and motivated people to make decisions and carry them out, that leadership cadre has very difficult obstacles in getting anything done. Requirements for open meetings significantly reduce candor required for good decision making processes to take place.  We do not share publicly every half-formed thought we have, especially on important issue.  We have private conversations with people until we have a good sense of what we want to say publicly.  The notion that even preliminary discussions must be in public is an over-reaction to the Nixon White House crimes, not a rational way to run government.

When I was growing up, we used to hear about decisions being made in “smoke-filled back rooms.”  Today, the back rooms may no longer be “smoke-filled,” but they exist, and they take place outside the regulatory reach of a government meeting.   Even in government, there needs to be a zone of privacy in which leaders can have small conversations in which they can formulate their policies and actions.

The other craziness with government is the obsession with process for its own sake.  Back in 1991 through 1993, I chaired a public-private task force appointed by Governor Lowell Weicker to implement the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments for large Connecticut-based employers.  The task force was filled with the best-qualified people, and it functioned very efficiently and completed its work within a relatively short period of time.

The task forces in which I participated over the last three years were larger, more cumbersome, and much less efficient or effective.  There was a much higher level of distrust and many more stakeholders felt that they had to be represented.  The groups became larger and the meetings degenerated from problem-analysis and problem-solving sessions to a series of speeches made by each participant.  The participants no longer saw themselves focused on the best outcome for the public, but for the group they represented and on whose behalf they were selected.

The other set of issues that make public service challenging were those associated with getting changes made.  We have made so many more processes subject to elaborate reviews, comments, and litigation challenges that it is extremely difficult to get anything done.

For example, we cannot renovate a bridge or road or rebuild it, even when it desperately needs renovation, without spending years studying the problem.  There has been a broad consensus for at least two decades, that the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River desperately needs rebuilding, but the processes for getting the work done are hopelessly complex and time-consuming.

We also overcomplicate what should be simple processes.  When I chaired the Governor’s Commission for Reforming the Connecticut Department of Transportation, I discovered that the State had made the hiring of an administrative assistant so complicated that the hiring manager had to interview all 28 qualified candidates, rather than the top 3-5 candidates.

Getting rid of non-performers is equally cumbersome.  My Reform Commission members who ran government agencies told me that the average time to terminate a non-performing civil service employee was 18 months, if the agency did everything perfectly.  This is ridiculous.

How do we solve these problems?

• Recognizing the problem is a start.  When good people are discouraged from joining public service, something is wrong.
• We should relook at every law, regulation, process, and procedure to determine whether it serves its intended purpose, and, if so, whether there are excessive side effects.
• We probably need to relook at the First Amendment, as it relates to the way the Internet and modern digital media amplify the effects of false statements, or even true, but misleading, statements.
• We need to retain the civil service system, but assess whether there is a point beyond which the protection of employment and of existing processes does not serve the ultimate merit-based system goal.
• We need a nationwide effort led by the President to rebuild trust among Americans.  Many dysfunctional processes are built on distrust.
• We need to reexamine campaign finance, election, and lobbying laws to see if they violate the rights of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights.  The Supreme Court case last year that struck down some campaign finance laws is a good start in provoking a national debate on the harmful effects of these laws.
• We need to reduce the criminally punishable financial disclosure and background questionnaire laws that discourage public service.

The significance of these images is that they seemed to convey a sense that Iraqis were ecstatic about the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.  Many commentators compared the statue toppling to the images of Berliners tearing down the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the Rumanians tearing down the statue of their totalitarian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.  However, whereas these other cases were largely spontaneous expressions of joyous citizens of Germany and Rumania reflecting their newly found freedom, the Baghdad celebrations were clearly premature and, as a result, reflected a strange mix of a few Iraqis, a few media people, and few military personnel.  The power of the images of Iraqis celebrating the American liberation by the symbolic act of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue may have kept Americans from questioning the wisdom of how the Iraqi war was conducted for quite a while.

Lest anyone think that staging of events to capture an iconic image is new, or was taken to a new level by the Bush administration, Maass pointed out that a media community hostile to President Truman edited the presentation of General MacArthur’s Chicago speech in 1951 after he was relieved of his command by Truman to make it appear that the attendees at his event were far larger in numbers and more enthusiastic than was the case.  Even the iconic photo of Marines planting the American flag at the top of Mount Surabachi on the island of Iwo Jima in 1945 was a restaging of the actual flag planting.

We need to understand that major media outlets, whether they are more traditional media like newspapers and magazines, TV, or billboards, or newer outlets like YouTube videos, Facebook postings, or web page posters, derive their impact from iconic images.  In fact, iconic images have a verbal equivalent in iconic quotes.  No one remembers much about many speeches given by political figures, but certain quotes stand out for their powerful simplicity.  Ronald Reagan’s famous line in his 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall contained many words and phrases, but what survives in memory is one challenge to General Secretary Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Iconic images and phrases end up crowding out everything that happens around them.  As Maass pointed out, this crowding out is not only relevant to the way people remember events, but it is relevant to how resources are deployed around an event while it is happening.  Many reporters assigned to Baghdad during the April, 2003, U.S. invasion commented that they were actually directed to redirect their efforts away from other time-sensitive and critical stories from the fighting within Baghdad, all of which arose from the U.S. invasion and which, cumulatively, would provide a more accurate and complete picture of the Iraq war than this one staged event.  That did not matter: to those who decided where reporters were expected to spend their time, it was more important not to be left behind in covering this one event than it was to report on the whole invasion.

As paid reporters decline in number, their productivity is determined by their ability to capture a single defining moment than to build a story from the ground up.  That’s fine, to a degree.  It’s great to find the defining moment of a bigger story; it’s bad journalism to force the creation of an event where none actually existed.

There is one common thread to all these iconic images and the iconic words we remember most: they reinforce what author Dominic Tierney described as a “crusade” ideology deeply imbedded in American values,  culture, and history in his recent book How We Fight, which does an excellent job explaining why Americans do so well in wars like the two World Wars, the military conflict in the Civil War, and the first Gulf War, as well as the early stages of the Iraq War.  We are highly committed to getting rid of bad leaders and bad countries, and to winning military conflicts against other countries.  Iconic images and words are most effective in capturing this inherent quality of Americans.

Even the Truman-MacArthur conflict and the distorted coverage of MacArthur’s speech can be understood in this light.  MacArthur always said, “There is no substitute for victory.”  He wanted to fight the Korean War to conquer North Korea and defeating China decisively, whereas Truman, who wanted a more limited objective of protecting South Korea, considered MacArthur to be disobedient and insubordinate, and fired him.

On the other hand, as Tierney points out, Americans are uncomfortable with the nation building and reconstruction of a society that follows a war or civil conflict.  We have neither the patience, nor the skills, nor the values and culture to take sufficient charge of another society and impose the kind of centralized control over it that is needed for rebuilding.  We also expect quicker payback on efforts to spread democracy to distant lands. Positive iconic images are harder to find when we do positive nation building, but negative images are abundant.  Those who were alive during the Vietnam War can remember the many images of Vietnamese escaping American napalming efforts in villages, or the horrific image of a South Vietnamese police officer executing a suspected terrorist on camera.  These are the kinds of messy, unpleasant iconic images that accompany nation building efforts.  There are even messy iconic statements, such as the military officer who justified the destruction of a Vietnamese village with the statement: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

There is an interesting between our attitudes toward nation building and are attitudes toward controlled and centralized communications systems in America. I am reading a wonderful book called The Master Switch, which is about the history of mass communications technology from the invention of the telephone to the present day.  The book covers the evolution of the telephone, film, radio, TV, and Internet technologies.  In each case, experts predicted that the technologies would create positive impacts on freedom of expression, education, culture, and unifying societies and creating the potential for peace among nations.  In each case, there were significant periods of time during which these hopes were thoroughly dashed by the centralized control of these technologies.

For example, it is hard for people to think of radio broadcasting before the radio frequency spectrum was regulated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1934.  In the early days of radio, almost anyone could buy radio transmission sets and begin broadcasting on any frequency to anyone who had a radio receiver.  There were thousands of stations, many of which interfered with reception by other stations.  While there was a need for control of the broadcast spectrum, the effect was to concentrate control over radio transmission in fewer hands.

Outside the United States, control was centralized in national governments.  The BBC ended up building a powerful franchise based on a culturally uplifting programming, whereas radio became a powerful propaganda tool in Hitler’s Germany.  The BBC became much more of a negative cultural influence when it attempted to shut down “pirate” radio stations operating in the 1960’s just enough offshore to be arguably outside British government control.  These “pirate” stations were much more attuned to the emerging tastes of young people in the UK who wanted to hear music from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other groups, content not readily available on the BBC channels.

The Internet has been perceived as a very open communications medium, which is allowing individuals the ability to bypass government control of communications and the manufacturing of propaganda-like iconic images.  It appears to give individuals the ability to counteract government.  However, information technology and supercomputing give governments the ability to monitor and control decentralized communications in ways that were not conceivable with other communications technologies.  When my daughter studied in China in the Summer of 2009, her classmates were shocked to find that the Chinese government could not only block access to the American version of Facebook, which the government did not allow in China, but could also monitor the text of email messages to preclude students from commenting on Chinese government censorship.

The notion that individuals, governments, or any third party will have a permanent hold on communications and that there will be either a continuous and permanent move toward freedom or censorship is flawed.  There is a constant tug-and-pull between forces that want to blast away at centralized control and propaganda, and forces that want to control the chaos of decentralized communication.

However, over our history, we have lurched between wanting simple, orderly policies and values, such as the good, simple war provoked by an evil adversary and being highly distrustful of giving any centralized authority the latitude to impose our policies and values on a broad range of people, including our own citizens.

Understanding this about ourselves is most useful in thinking through modern day political issues.

Government officials have become more risk-averse over time, and less effective as a result, precisely because, in varying degrees, they are judged by different standards from private sector employees.  Over a decade ago, I had dinner with an executive who had been fired by the U.S. Postal Service, after he had worked in the private sector for a good part of his career.

His observation about being a government executive was that the highest risk situations for a government employee were either unwanted media scrutiny, the threat of a government investigation, or the threat of a Congressional hearing.  There was another long-term Postal Service executive who was fired a few years later because of a relocation package he received, which received excessive media scrutiny, even though it had been approved by the Postal Service’s Office of the General Counsel, its chief ethics officer, and the Inspector General.  One thing I learned about the Postal Service is that, after a 1992 scandal involving vendor-related events at the Barcelona Olympics, it operated at the highest ethical standards.  The firing was unfortunate, but the Postal Service apparently felt that it had to eliminate even the appearance of ethical problems.

The trouble with the Sherrod firing, as well as other incidents like it, is that as Mr. Jones put it most eloquently:

“Life inside the Beltway has become a combination of speed chess and Mortal Kombat: one wrong move can mean political death. In the era of YouTube, Twitter and 24-hour cable news, nobody is safe. Even the lowliest staff member knows that an errant comment could wind up online, making her name synonymous with scandal.

The result is that people at all levels of government are becoming overly cautious, unwilling to venture new opinions or even live regular lives for fear of seeing even the most innocuous comment or photograph used against them, all while trying to protect and improve the country.”

Not only is he right, but, unfortunately, the Sherrod incident will be remembered for a long time, and will affect behaviors all over all levels of government.  Government officials and employees will attempt to figure out not only whether what they said or did could get them into trouble, but whether someone could misinterpret and distort words or actions to hurt them.  They will refrain from doing or saying something, rather than doing something that needed to be done.

I had that experience a few times while I served as CEO.  It was unnerving.  People literally heard something different from what I said, and, on two occasions, an otherwise competent and well-meaning attorney told me that the company could get into trouble not only for what I said, but for what people incorrectly thought I said.

Having people live in perpetual fear is a bad way to run government, business, a non-profit organization, or any other grouping of people.  It is a bad way to force people to live their lives.  The notion that people should be held accountable for distortions that other people might create or project on to a situation is dangerous.

The Obama Administration has to realize that it did severe and probably irreparable damage to the effectiveness of government at all levels, and needs to pull back from knee-jerk behaviors based on appearing to defend the highest standards of ethics and race relations.  It actually achieved the opposite effect: individuals will be scared to talk constructively about race issues in situations in which a dialogue could help race relations.  Moreover, the impact will be felt in a wide range of other situations and on a wide range of other issues.

The President should take the step of framing how he thinks about the level of initiative he wants from government employees, and have a concrete set of actions, which he should announce in a prime time nationally televised address.  He should then follow through on his commitments, and make it clear to government employees that a misinterpretation and distortion by someone else will never again subject an employee to disciplinary action.

I may come across as an alarmist, but I really think this situation has far more serious consequences than might first meet the eye.

• Excessive benefits for government employees and their families;
• Excessively high payments to vendors; and
• Excessively high welfare payments.

I would also suggest that states, over time, because of well-intended, but poorly conceived, laws, substituted unproductive clerical and bureaucratic rules-oriented employees for those who did productive work.  For example, governments today very likely have more clerical and administrative employees, but lack skilled professionals of all kinds to manage projects and programs.  In schools, there are many more administrators and service employees relative to teachers than there were a generation ago.

Benefits

Let’s look at each of these quickly.  Retirement benefits ballooned out of sight everywhere in government for a simple reason:  they largely escaped capture in a current budget year’s presentation.  The private sector has had to account for the totality of pensions and retiree medical obligations on its income statement since 1992, but government, to this day, only has to account for the current year’s costs, not any portion of future year obligations.  Like the stock option grants given to executives of large companies, which appeared to be “free,” and which were abused as a result in the 1990’s and in the first half of the past decade, current year salary increases could be traded off for future year retirement benefits, and politicians could look good for “balancing the budget.”  In effect, they were mortgaging the future.

For example, in Connecticut, a state with about 52,000 state government employees, our future retirement obligations are over $40 billion, or almost $800,000 per employee, and the collective bargaining agreement that granted these excessive benefits started in 1997 and runs through 2017.  Governor Rowland was irresponsible in doing this, but few members of the public knew about it at the time because it did not show up in any income statement.

Vendor Costs

State and local governments routinely pay more for goods and services, despite their larger purchasing power.  The reason is that they have so much bureaucratic process built into procurement that many potential vendors refrain from doing business with them, and those that do add significant dollars to the bids to cover the additional costs of doing business.

When I chaired the Governor’s Reform Commission on the Connecticut Department of Transportation, we did a confidential survey of vendors, who told us that they routinely added about 25% to their normal prices when doing business with the State because they were paid later and had to spend more money complying with useless processes and rules.

Many of these processes exist either because of pressure from special interests, or because the State has been forced by its legislators to put into place processes to insure “fairness” in contracting.

Welfare Payments

I strongly believe that government needs to help its poorest citizens, but I also believe that governments do a very poor job managing the welfare payment and service processes.  I was on the board of directors of a small social services organization last year, and I was amazed at the degree to which the State government loaded this organization with requirements that added cost and actually made service delivery more difficult.

State Workforces

If I think back to the early 1990’s and my dealings with the State of Connecticut, it had highly competent employees.  Even today, those who work for the State are driven to do the right things for the public.  The difference is the mix of workers the State has today, versus what it had a generation ago.

My interactions with the State in the last few years in serving as a volunteer on transportation and health boards have caused me to interact in a different way from the way I did 10-15 years ago.  At that time, when I was dealing with the Department of Transportation, the people with whom I dealt were subject matter experts who were focused on the core mission.

Today, I am more likely to work with lawyers and other clerical and administrative people who are assigned to enforce compliance with an administrative process.  In my current assignment as Co-Chair of a Prevention Advisory Committee, I have observed many dedicated and highly intelligent State employees reduced to communicating frequently with highly energized and very smart volunteers about process requirements.  Whereas these employees used to be able to help, they are now forced into roles that turn them into a hindrance.

Her description of certain union positions rings true to me because I recall that the Stamford Youth Foundation (Stamford, Connecticut) could not staff the variety and volume of after-school activities that it would have liked because union contracts required it to pay every teacher for the extra hours worked after the regular school day.  This deeply bothers me.

I am not against labor unions, and I believe they serve a useful purpose in being a check-and-balance on abusive management behavior.  However, the notion that volunteerism must be stamped out if there is a worker ready, willing, and able to do the same job for market-rate pay is wrong-headed.

One of the fundamental issues in all societies is the question of when and how much someone should be paid for performing a task.  If we believe that every activity that is currently the subject of volunteer work, or perhaps below minimum wage work (like the cutting of a neighbor’s lawn by a 12-year-old wielding a lawn mower) should be converted into unionized, market-rate wage-driven work, we will significantly reduce the number and variety of goods and services we can offer to one another.

The one story in Malkin’s op-ed piece that particularly troubled me was the reference to a complaint by union officials against volunteer firefighters who built sandbag barricades to protect the city from record flooding. Ultimately, the reason governments at all levels are in deep financial trouble is that they have wildly overpaid unionized workers for relatively low-skilled tasks, or for tasks for which there should not have been premium pay.  As I have said in previous blogs, I do not blame the unions for trying to get the pay and benefits they received, but I deeply blame the government officials who caved in to these demands.

As a society, we need volunteerism at all levels.  There has to be a zone of activities that we will do without expecting to be paid by the recipient of our services.  This zone should include character-building community projects by such organizations as the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts, emergency services by first responders and other volunteers in the event of a disaster, and charitable work.  If someone wants to donate services, as my daughter does when she performs at senior citizens homes, she should be able to do so.  Taken to a logical extreme, the position attributed to SEIU and other unions would suggest that a unionized musician charging the senior citizen home market rates should have the exclusive right to deliver performances to senior citizens.  This is an outrageous position, and I hope our government officials never allow it to become the prevailing view.

Periodically, my lifelong decision to be an independent voter, rather than a registered Democrat or Republican gets reinforced. My independence stems from a deep distrust of a concentration of power or financial reward anywhere in our governmental, business, or non-profit sectors.

Recently, I have seen evidence of what happens when there is the following lethal combination of circumstances we have today:

• highly-concentrated government or business power,
• inattentiveness of the majority of the population,
• exceptionally high rewards from the exercise of concentrated power, and
• more power concentrated in ideologically-driven people.

The vast majority of Americans are unhappy and insecure with respect to the political and business environment in which they find themselves. 

Fiscal Irresponsibility at all Levels of Government

Without most of us noticing it, state and local governments, which are required to balance their budgets every year, have engaged in a massive transfer of wealth from the vast majority of their citizens to a relatively small, but exceptionally militant and well-organized group of state and local government employees.  I am not angry at the demands made by these employees in their collective bargaining negotiations, but am disappointed that elected officials have not only supported and caved in to those demands, but have also hidden the true costs of these actions from voters.

In Connecticut, for example, the present value of retirement benefits for state employees, including elected members of the executive and legislative branches of state government, is $40 billion as of the end of the 2007 fiscal year, and it is probably higher today.  For roughly 80,000 full-time employees, that averages $500,000 per employee at the time of retirement.  Although this money is paid over time, it is part of the long-term indebtedness of the state that crowds out the ability of the state to invest in roads, bridges, public transit, education, public health, environmental sustainability, public safety, and rebuilding of our cities, among the much worthier uses to which the money could have been put.

Connecticut is not unique in this regard.  Virtually every state has some astronomical retirement benefit obligation, as amply demonstrated by a report of the U.S. Government Accounting Office, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08317.pdf

How did this happen?  Our elected officials are generally well-intentioned individuals with a desire to serve the broad public interest.  However, when confronted with well-organized public employees’ unions who want increases in pay and benefits, it has been far easier to concede on long-term benefits than on short-term pay increases, since the long-term benefits are not required to be reflected in annual state government  income statements.  I do not blame the unions for demanding these benefits, or even the elected officials for agreeing to them, but I believe that the public has been relatively disengaged for too long in monitoring issues like this.

On Monday, July 20, both Houses of the Connecticut General Assembly voted on straight party lines to override Governor Rell’s veto of a well-intended, but flawed, health care bill called the SustiNet bill.  Although the bill had many great features and was supported by many great leaders, one of its fatal flaws was the creation of a health policy board specifically designed to exclude many critical stakeholders, including large employers, insurance companies, hospital leaders, and pharmaceutical companies, all of whom should have been part of the board. 

In effect, the General Assembly, through amendments to the original legislation, set out to create a highly unrepresentative policy board on one of the state’s most critical competitiveness issues.  Until after this bill passed both houses of the General Assembly the first time, few business leaders were even aware of its existence, much less its damaging terms and conditions.  I wrote an Op-Ed piece in the July 19, 2009, Hartford Courant expressing my opposition to this legislation as enacted, specifically, in part because of whom it excluded from the health policy board, and called some of our elected representatives.  While I obviously did not succeed, I did my best to make sure that elected legislators knew how I felt.

Too many business leaders believe that they can escape fiscal crises and problems in their headquarters states by leaving those states, but we are increasingly coming to realize that there is no place to which to escape.  The federal government will end up bailing out state and local governments, as it has done with significant chunks of the stimulus legislation, and all of us will pick up the tab.

The answer is not to replace the incumbents, whether they be Democrats or Republicans with other incumbents, nor is it to have term limits (which I support for other reasons.)  The answer is a more continuously engaged and active citizenry, particularly in the business community.  Too many major CEOs and other senior executives think of themselves as world citizens who have little connection to the communities in which their companies have major operations.  Too often they delegate management of government affairs to specialized legal and government affairs professionals.

If we are to constrain the absolute power of government officials and the special interests to which they cater, we need the check and balance of continuous engagement by a much larger part of our citizenry.  As travel writer Rick Steves stated in his book Travel as a Political Act,

“Whether you’re a mom, a schoolteacher, a celebrity, a realtor, or a travel writer, it’s wrong to stop paying attention and let others (generally with a vested interest in the situation) make political decisions for us.  Our founding fathers didn’t envision career politicians and professional talking heads doing our political thinking for us.”

Although I do not plan to go as far as folk singer Arlo Guthrie and become a member of either party, I agree with his comment in the interview entitled “Just Folk” in the Sunday, July 26, 2009, New York Times:

“I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because, to have a successful democracy, you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably…We needed a loyal opposition.”

To put it simply, if we are to avoid the corrupting effects of concentrated power, we must take back that power from those who have it.  I do not believe those with power today are bad people.  In fact, I have much in common with their goals, and believe them to be decent people who want to do the right thing.  However, without checks and balances, everyone, including me, is highly likely to make significant and bad decisions.  We cannot let that happen.

This is the second year of the campaign, and it has shown me not only the power of these handwritten letters and cards for those receiving them, but for the senders and the people who have volunteered to get them to the recipients.  Today, we desperately need to come together and connect emotionally.  The fear that the economic crisis has caused in many people has had the effect of making them suffer alone, and of making them believe that they are powerless to help themselves or others.

This campaign has the effect of enabling those who write the letters to feel that they can help someone else, and those who receive to feel that their service is appreciated by others.  Those who wrote the letters and cards last year commented that the effort to pour their hearts and souls into their messages was liberating and energizing.  Recipients felt like they had many people supporting them.

This is a value for physical mail that cannot possibly duplicated in an electronic medium. Aside from the evidence that a person sending a personal letter or card has invested money and time beyond what would be required in an e-mail, there is greater and more power from something tangible that comes to us in atoms versus bits.

One of my executive assistants Connie Telesco actually began years ago to send cookies, cakes, pies, and other items she had baked to those serving overseas.  But even those who just send letters and cards can create something very personal in the words, graphics, and choice of writing materials they use.

Recently, I read a very insightful book about communications entitled Buyology by Matthew Lindstron. Although the book was intended to be focused on the way in which different marketing approaches affect our brain and central nervous system, one of the most powerful messages in the book is that those communications that call upon our senses of touch, smell, sound, and taste are more powerful than those which rely heavily on the sense of sight.

When we communicate with cards, letters, baked goods, and small gifts, we connect far more with recipients than if we send e-mails or even present recipients with the most technologically sophisticated multi-media web site.  There is something very primal in our responses that we may not even fully understand consciously, but that has a strong effect on how we feel about what we receive and who sent it to us.

Recently, I conducted a Webinar on the Future of Mail sponsored by the Global Envelope Alliance I did not choose to make predictions on the future of mail, but rather to talk about why mail can have a bright future if we focus on its advantages.  By far its most sustainable advantage is its ability to help human beings who cannot be in each other’s presence connects and helps one another emotionally.

I hope that everyone reading this blog will choose to participate in the Holiday Mail for Heroes program, which you can learn more about by going to www.redcross.org/holidaymail.

The article also referred to New York City’s law requiring disclosure of calories on the main menus above the counter, and noted that San Francisco also will implement calories disclosure legislation.

A second article, dated July 30, also in The Wall Street Journal, entitled “San Francisco Votes For New Tobacco Rules” reporter Ann Zimmerman describes San Francisco’s proposed law to ban tobacco sales at pharmacies. An article in the Journal the day before, also written by Ann Zimmerman, entitled “Drugstore Tobacco Sales Under Fire”  summarizes arguments from opponents of the legislation that suggest that the legislation will have little impact on smoking rates and will force retailers to deny members of the public something they want.

The fundamental divide between supporters and opponents of these kinds of legislation is whether changing the environment in which people shop and seek out restaurants will make a significant difference in public behaviors.  A recent book entitled Nudge, co-authored by Professors Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, makes a compelling argument that the environmental cues given to people matter greatly.  In their view, the government always is creating a “nanny state” environment.  The only question is whether it is a healthy or unhealthy environment.

While nutrition education certainly makes a difference, as Melinda Beck of The Wall Street Journal in her July 29 column entitled “On the Table: the Calories Lurking in Restaurant Food,”Dr. Brian Wansink of Cornell University, in his great book Mindless Eating, clearly demonstrates that how much we eat and what we eat are highly influenced by what is available, affordable, accessible, and abundant.

With respect to tobacco products, the easy availability in pharmacies has two behavioral effects: it makes access to tobacco easy, and it sends a symbolic message that tobacco usage is not as risky to health as we know it to be.  Pharmacies have a branding as places to which one goes to buy products that enhance health, not places that destroy health.

I commend Wegman’s, the grocery chain based in Rochester, New York, my hometown when I was growing up, which announced recently that it will stop selling cigarettes in its stores. While some individuals will stop going to Wegman’s because it refuses to sell cigarettes, I would assume that it will gain credibility as a grocery retailer firmly committed to health.

These legislative measures will not solve the problem of unhealthy behaviors, but they certainly are a step in the right direction.

• Most people who work in dedicated offices are not in those offices most of the time.  They either travel, attending meetings outside the office or in another part of their office building, go to a cafeteria or restaurant for lunch, or are away on vacation or for holidays.  Yet we give them exclusive right to use that office when they are employed in a particular position.
• Most of our household possessions are similarly unused most of the time.  We buy expensive athletic equipment that occupies space in closets or unused rooms.  In fact, many people use only a few of their rooms in their home most of the time, and many people have homes they use only a portion of the time, and the very wealthy have multiple homes, each one of which is in use only at certain times.
• Much of our public utility capacity is built for peak or near-peak load, and is underutilized the rest of the time.

The challenges in addressing this wastage are to figure out why it exists and what workable solutions exist for it. Interestingly enough, the use of the Internet for both voice and data communications is an improvement on telecommunications that both reduces wastage and improves redundancy.  Historically, both voice and data were carried over dedicated lines intact from origin to destination.  The Internet introduced the idea of breaking apart voice and data transmission into packets which could travel over multiple paths and be re-assembled at the destination.  In essence, the Internet created a far more efficient use of resources than the traditional dedicated land-line.

• For each of the wastage areas I describe above, there are emerging solutions:
• For automobiles, there have always been public transportation, taxi, bicycle, pedestrian, and rental car alternatives.  However, a company called ZipCar  has introduced a new solution: a car that can be rented for a short trip, left in a parking lot, and picked up by another person for another flexible, short-duration rental, thereby keeping it continually in use.
  For office space, Cisco, among other companies, has introduced broad-based hoteling for the vast majority of its headquarters employees, and other companies, like Pitney Bowes, have used hoteling for contractors, field employees, and temporary workers.  Hoteling means that someone coming to the office occupies the first available office, not the same office every day.  Technology enables this to be non-disruptive, and the hoteling approach enables a business to provide space for a population that is far less than its total population on any given day.
• For other possessions, like athletic equipment, there are used equipment firms, and there are some rental facilities, but what is lacking is a ZipCar-like alternative which allows that equipment to be used for only a few hours for a very low price.

We need to think differently about assets.  We need to be less focused on owning and more focused on using.  We also need to recognize that a used asset may have enough value that we do not need to buy something new.  Finally, we need to dispose of what we do not need so that others can use it while it still has value.

Our society has a lot of capacity to reduce the cost of living by defining our needs more precisely.  I grew up in a working-class household in which my parents were experts at finding used items, re-using materials for other purposes, and taking something seemingly without value and finding a way to give it value.

The golf clubs I used when I was growing up were bought at a Salvation Army store and were so old that they had wooden shafts.  My first suit was given to me by a cousin who had torn a pant leg on the trousers.  My mother got the trouser re-woven and I wore the suit for years.  My parents used torn tee-shirts as cleaning rags, and used body lotions as mosquito repellants.  Vinegar was used to absorb cigarette smoke because we could not afford more expensive air cleaning systems at our home.

Today, the media is highlighting how desperate the lives of many people are, and they are right.  But we could do these individuals a great deal of good by giving them access to necessary goods and services in a less expensive way.  For many goods and services, this is a far better alternative than moving production and service operations offshore to create a lower-cost version of a new product.

While the story is a tragedy, it brings to mind the urgency of focusing on teaching all Americans financial literacy. The National Urban League and its affiliates have specific financial literacy programs, specifically focused on first-time home buyers. Operation HOPE, headed by the very impressive John Bryant, is specifically focused on broad-based financial literacy. These are great programs, and they provide individuals with good nuts-and-bolts tools. Other notable mentions on behalf of the National Urban League in partnership with Honda amid the turbulent economic climate include their offering of personal financial management classes. The acclaimed “Know Your Money Program” seeks to provide economic empowerment and financial literacy to those individuals in communities seeking to change the attitudes about money and money-management. The program is highlighted in this Honda Blog post.

The story also suggests something else, which goes beyond literacy. We all get tempted to try to achieve our financial objectives by being more aggressive and taking higher risks than we should. Most of us resist the temptation most of the time, but some of us fall into the trap of trying to get richer more quickly than low or moderate-risk investments will allow. As cited in this Revolution blog, with 2008 becoming a financial turning point for millions, new financial decisions have become an imperative.

When I was young, one of my favorite TV comedy shows was The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason played a bus driver named Ralph Kramden living in a dreary one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with his long-suffering wife Alice. The timeless humor from that show came from plots which, week after week, had Ralph get victimized by some get-rich-quick scheme.

My parents would talk with me and my siblings about the lessons from that show:

• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

• If something promises a bigger payback than normal and seems too good to be true, it probably is not true.

• Unless you understand what you are investing in, don’t invest.

I never violated all those rules, and, therefore, did reasonably well with investments in my adult life, although, as a former CEO of Pitney Bowes, I have put a lot of my eggs in one basket, Pitney Bowes. However, when my wife and I lived in New York in the mid-1980’s, we took the profits from my wife’s successful real estate partnership, and invested them in two real estate deals. We were tempted to take more risk to get more return because we did not have quite enough saved to make a down payment on a home. We also failed to understand how dependent these deals were on the then-current tax laws, which changed a few months after we committed to the investments. We lost everything we invested in the two deals, and we did not save up enough to buy a home until 1994.

However, there were two differences between us and the woman featured in the article:

• We did not put our entire life savings into one investment, and we had to certify that we could afford to lose everything. I still had Pitney Bowes stock and some other assets.

• I was 39 years old and still on the upward trajectory of my career when we had these losses, so I had the opportunity to recover from my mistakes.

The woman featured in the article was 74 years old, and probably has little ability to recover from her losses. In this respect, financial counselors could have helped this woman. They would have told her that, at 74 years of age, she should invest conservatively, and accept lower investment returns. Whether she would have taken their advice is unknowable, but it is mystifying to me why the Wall Street Journal would not have taken the opportunity to talk about the basic investment principles she violated.

Perhaps there should be a law that requires a court approval for someone over a certain age to commit the entirety of their net worth to a single transaction, and there should be a certification that a person is not committing all assets. That age could be based on whether the individual has retired from active employment. I am normally not paternalistic, but I feel differently about older people who are at a stage in their life at which they cannot recover from having lost everything. It’s worth thinking about. This is also why Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake is rallying for the call to improve financial literacy that will essentially aid Americans in making better informed financial decisions at an early age, so that they are better prepared to navigate through the financial marketplace as they get older, as cited in this Wall Street Journal Blog: Real Time Economics.

We require people to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets, and we are debating health care reform proposals that would insure that individuals cannot be wiped out by medical bills. We owe older Americans a similar vigilance on highly-risky financial investments.