I was going to post another blog today until I saw the Van Jones Op-Ed piece in the Sunday, July 25, New York Times entitled “Shirley Sherrod and Me.” Not only do I agree with his conclusion that the Obama Administration decision to fire Ms. Sherrod was wrong and destructive, but it might have been one of the most harmful actions the Obama Administration has taken on any issue.

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.

I am a big fan of Thomas Friedman, so I avidly read everything he publishes.  In the April 4, 2010, Sunday’s New York Times, he published an op-ed piece entitled “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His main argument:

“Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts.  They come from start-ups.”  Will start-ups address our structural unemployment problem?

Yes and no.  They will be a great solution for well-educated, enthusiastic young people who are currently unemployed and perhaps discouraged about prospects for jobs and careers.  Without some additional interventions, they are not a good short-term or even medium-term solution for older workers who have lost their jobs at big companies or government agencies.  As the former CEO of a big company and the current chairman of one start-up business, Dossia, and a board member or investor in several other start-ups, big company or government and start-up jobs and work situations are radically different.

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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 was struck by the parallels between a story published this past week and an event I recalled from the recent baseball Hall of Fame voting.  The story appeared in the Saturday, January 9, article in The New York Times entitled “Unions Rally to Oppose a Proposed Tax on Health Insurance.”  The event was the beginning of free agent negotiations between Marvin Miller, the lawyer for the Players’ Union, and the baseball owners in the 1970’s, an event discussed at some length this past week as commentators correctly noted that the Hall of Fame voters’ decision to deny Miller admission is a grave injustice.

What do these two situations have in common?  In both cases, a party to a dispute values continuation of the status quo and control more than they do economic benefit.

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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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In the Saturday November 21 New York Post, reporter Michelle Malkin writes a scathing op-ed piece on the Service Employees International Union,  entitled “The Union That Hates the Boy Scouts.“.  The major point of her piece is that the SEIU strongly opposes volunteer work in many communities, because they believe that volunteer work takes paid work away from union members.

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.

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During the course of determining whether I should invest in a documentary film about dogs, I gained some quite interesting insights into the potentially new role dogs can play in our health care system.  Because dogs have a sense of smell that is 40 times as acute and discriminating as that residing in humans, some researchers have explored whether dogs can detect diseases as accurately and reliability as much more expensive technologies, with no need for invasive and time-consuming diagnostic processes.

Two organizations, the Pine Street Foundation in California and the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, have each done reported studies which have concluded that dogs can reliably detect various kinds of cancers, such as prostate, breast and skin cancers, because tumor cells give off different odors from regular cells.  It will be quite interesting to determine whether their reliable detection is such that they can detect the presence of these diseases even earlier than more high-tech alternatives like 64-slice CT scans or MRI’s or nuclear magnetic resonance systems.  Dogs apparently have demonstrated as well that they can detect the imminence of an epileptic seizure minutes before the individual subject to the seizure has any symptoms.

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Both Gladwell and Colvin understand that great talent, by itself, is insufficient.  Both extol the value of sustained practice and discipline, with Colvin describing that sustained effort as “deliberative practice.”  Gladwell goes a step further and identifies environmental and marketplace conditions that enable some individuals and organizations to succeed when others of comparable talent and discipline fail.

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The June, 2009, issue of The Atlantic Monthly had a provocative article entitled “Do CEOs Matter?” by reporter Harris Collingwood. What prompted it was the recent story about the leave of absence taken by Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and the stock market reaction to stories by Jobs’ health problems.

As a former CEO, and as a student of leadership in business and other sectors of our country, I believe that individual leaders matters at all times, but in varying degrees at different times and under different circumstances.  Certainly, at particular points in an organization’s history, there are crises that demand unique leadership capabilities.  For example, I cannot imagine that IBM or Xerox would have survived the threats to their survival in the 1990’s without the inspired leadership of Lou Gerstner and, in Xerox’s case, the inspired leadership of my good friend Ann Mulcahy.

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On April 6, I had an opportunity to speak on The CEO Show with Robert Reiss. I shared some ideas for how small to medium-sized businesses can improve their customer communications and take advantage of valuable marketing opportunities. I also reflected on some strategies I used as CEO, and discussed how Pitney Bowes is working to evolve, adapt to change, and enhance the “customer experience” through innovation.

I enjoyed this interview very much. Please click below to listen to the recording.