I saw the movie Up in the Air recently, and, aside from experiencing it as a first-rate piece of entertainment, I found it to be subtle and brilliant in addressing issues I confront in my life.

In it, George Clooney plays an executive named Ryan Bingham, who works for a company that enters into contracts with large employers that have neither the will nor the skill to handle mass terminations themselves, so they outsource them to Bingham’s firm.  The subject matter is painful because the devastation of losing a job has hit so many households. I had this type of experience back in1978 when my law firm told me I would not be offered a partnership.

However, the more interesting aspect of the movie is the way Bingham leads his life.  He travels over 320 days of travel a year, and has built a life in which he gets treated exceptionally well by airlines, hotels, and other service firms, and he has temporary relationships on the road that require no deep emotional commitments.  He has successfully avoided having to deal with the messiness of a family life or maintaining a substantial home base.  In fact, his one-bedroom apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, appears unoccupied, because it is so sparsely furnished.

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My wife Joyce and I celebrate our 31^st wedding anniversary on February 10.  This anniversary is more special than the 25^th or the 30^th, not only because it means that I have had one more wonderful year of marriage, but because of what the number “31” symbolizes about our marriage.

Baskin & Robbins has gotten the public to patronize its stores because it has offered 31 different flavors of ice cream.  The 31 flavors attempts to capture the full range of the public’s potentially diverse tastes for ice cream.  In addition, many flavors come and go over time.  So the 31 flavors reflect both diverse and changing preferences.  Baskin & Robbins has stayed in business because it consistently has reinvented and recombined flavors to appeal to new generations of ice cream lovers.

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I have often been described as a visionary, one who sees things before others do.  It’s a very astute characterization. Being visionary does not always mean being correct, although I have been more right than wrong, but it does mean that the more my assessments and forecasts vary from how others see the world, the more stressful and difficult it is for me to persuade them.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, frequently dramatized the message that people who saw the world differently from others often experienced difficulty and, in some cases, tragedy.  Two of my favorite episodes that made this point powerfully were “Terror at 20,000 Feet” starring a young William Shatner as an airplane passenger who sees gremlins trying to take apart an airplane wing while the plane is in flight, and “The Howling Man” in which an American is recounting a story to his housekeeper about why he is imprisoning a man whom he says is the devil.  In both cases, the passenger and the American seem psychotic and their perspective is disregarded.  In both cases, at the end of the show, they are proven right.

Thankfully, no one has ever accused me of being psychotic.  Unlike the William Shatner character, I did not get carted away in a straightjacket, and, unlike the American in “The Howling Man” the consequences of others not believing me did not result in the devil being unloosed upon the population.  Nevertheless, my experiences have been challenging.

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I am going to make some end-of-the-year observations about the way I see the political system, the economy, and our society evolving.

Many elected officials do not have the political will to address fundamental structural economic and political issues.  We built an economy after World War II promising middle class wages for all Americans, but without the foundation of skills and educational capabilities to make such promises sustainable.  Public sector labor unions and unions in heavily politicized private sector industries like the automobile industry, successfully negotiated collective bargaining agreements allowing people with very low skills and educational attainment to secure middle class wages and benefits, and protections against downsizings, even as our economy has had to become more globally competitive.

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Although I usually post a blog on a public policy issue, this end-of-the-year blog will be a combination of personal, public policy, and business observations. The one thing I can say with certainty is that 2009 evolved in a very different way from what I expected when I stepped down from the Executive Chairman position at Pitney Bowes a year ago.

The only thing that happened as I anticipated was that I would disengage emotionally from Pitney Bowes very rapidly, because that is who I am.  Once I leave an organization, I leave with fond memories, great friendships, and insights of lifelong value, but I leave the organizational responsibilities completely behind.  I am not a person who is nostalgic about what I once had or did, and this was no exception.  Other than that, everything that happened was either a surprise or a disappointment.

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In the Monday, November 23, Wall Street Journal , reporter Melinda Beck recounts a number of our successes in improving public health in an article entitled “20 Advances to be Thankful For.” Among the advances she highlights are:

• The fact that we had the same number of traffic fatalities in 2008 as we had in 1961, which is remarkable considering the significant increase in the driving population, the number of cars on the road, and the number of miles driven;
• The 50% decline in trans fats in packaged foods since 2006;
• The fact that 71% of our population lives under either a state or local ban on smoking in workplaces and/or restaurants and bars; and
• The fact that the percentage of secondary school that no longer sell soda, candy, or high-fat snacks have each risen to 64%.

I zeroed in on this article for two reasons:

• It reminds us that we are doing many things well as a society, even though the media often choose to focus on things that are going wrong.
• More importantly, there are multiple success stories from which we can learn how to improve overall population health.  Government intervention was a factor in every one of these cases, but it was not the only factor.  There were many forces, including private sector advocacy groups, that influenced human behavior for the better.

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A lot has been written about Ken Lewis, the Bank of America CEO, since he announced his decision to retire the week of September 28. Many of the commentaries on him were highly critical, including one included in the Sunday, October 3, New York Times business section by Joe Nocera entitled “Incompetent? No, Just Not a Leader.” Nocera contrasted Lewis, whom I succeeded as Chairman of the National Urban League Board of Trustees in 2002, and who was an exceptionally capable chairman, with his precedessor at the Bank of America, Hugh McColl, whom he described as “born to be a leader.”  I disagree fundamentally with the “born leader” theory.

Every leader does some things very well, and other things less well.  Whether he or she succeeds depends on two factors:

• How well do the capabilities required for a leadership position match the leader’s capabilities?
• How well did the leader either adapt or complement his or her capabilities in areas in which he or she was deficient?

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In the September 7, 2009, issue of the New York Times, reporter Michael Lud wrote an article entitled “Out of Work and Too Down to Search On,” which essentially made the point that the economic environment is so bad that many people stop looking for work.

Unemployment is psychologically devastating.  I know: I was unemployed for several months in early 1979, when I left my law firm and was trying to secure another legal position.  I was asked to look for another job because I was told I would not be made a partner.  My stay on the unemployment rolls was brief, but terrifying.  As a result, I empathize with anyone who has lost his or her job.

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Every so often, I go back and reread a book I liked a lot.  Recently, I re-read a book by Bill Russell, my favorite all-time athlete, entitled Russell Rules.  To me, Bill Russell is the greatest team sport athlete of all time, simply because his teams won the most championships. As a college player at the University of San Francisco, he was the star of two successive NCAA championship teams.  He was a star on the 1956 Gold Medal Olympic team.  As a Boston Celtic, he played for 13 seasons, and the Celtics were champions 11 of those years, including 8 in a row between 1959 and 1966.  In the two years the Celtics did not win, he was injured in the championship series against the St. Louis Hawks in 1958, and lost to one of the great teams of all time, the 1966-1967 Philadelphia 76ers led by Wilt Chamberlain.  Michael Jordan may or may not have had better talent as a basketball player, but even his record was not as exceptional in terms of helping his team win championships.

The reason I think Bill Russell is sometimes not rated as highly as Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, or  even Shaquille O’Neill by many experts is the way he went about winning.  In chapter 5 of Russell Rules, he refers to the value of “invisibility.”  The way he characterizes it,

“Invisibility opens doors, creates opportunity, where none seemed to exist before.  When we are unseen, we have an enormous advantage in moving in, doing things we wish or need to do, and in the process, to change the very dynamic of existing, seemingly closed, patterns.”

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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.