July 2009 Archives
The town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin is not generally thought of as one of the innovative centers of America. Children's clothing, yes. Trucks? You betcha. But Oshkosh doesn't typically jump to mind as a powerful counter-argument to those who worry that the computerized, modern era has obliterated backyard tinkering, craftsmanship, and forward-thinking innovation.
Except for one week a year.
Each year, at the end of July, the Experimental Aircraft Association has its annual convention at the Wittman Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. 12,000 airplanes and hundreds of thousands of people attend, making the airport, for that one week, the busiest airport in America. Lots of private and commercial pilots fly in to the convention in standard general aviation planes that range from the 1920s to the latest and most current models. There are graceful biplanes that are as much works of art as machines of the air. There are WWI and WWII fighters, tiny little trainers, gliders, seaplanes, and huge military transports. But the show is also a hotbed of innovation and inventive craftsmanship; reassuring to anyone who wonders, or worries, whether we've lost that hands-on, Thomas Edison-like inventor's edge.
The "Experimental" Aircraft Association, after all, was founded to support those who wanted to design and build their own planes. Many of those innovators have gone on to produce and sell hundreds, or thousands, of standardized "kits" of their designs, which are then built by individual owners in their garages. Even in 2009. And the results are often far beyond what exists in "factory-built" airplanes. Some kitplanes go 200 miles an hour or more, on only a few gallons of gas per hour.
But really, the fun part; the remarkable part (and the most inspiring part), is seeing the vast array of new ideas made real in prototypes spanning a broad range of shapes, sizes and levels of complexity. To illustrate, here are just a few:
The ICON -- portable, light, amphibious sport fun
Park in your garage, take off from a runway, and land in the local lake for a morning of fishing--and look cool while you're doing it. ICON has high-tech design and looks, aimed at pilots who want a plane that's relatively simple but as modern-looking as their stereo systems. It's still in test flight, and the plane is limited to two passengers, and 120 mph. But it's clearly not your father's Oldsmobile.
Terrafugia--a high-tech flying car
One of the longstanding problems of using planes for transportation is that you arrive at a destination airport without a good way to get around on the ground. So ever since the early post-war era, designers have tried to figure out how to make a hybrid vehicle that would both fly and drive. Nobody so far has had a lot of success with the concept of a flying car (the requirements of the two types of transport are pretty different, after all), but a team of MIT engineers has entered the market with a high-tech design called the Terrafugia, which they call a "roadable aircraft." (Wings fold to drive on roads.) Will it work? Hard to say. It has flown, but it's had some problems in flight testing that the team is now struggling to work out. But it's a bold try at applying new technology to an old problem.
The Maverick -- a low-tech flying car
Innovation isn't purely the domain of high-techengineers, as evidenced by this bare-bones flying dune buggy. Designed by a missionary pilot named Steve Saint (author of End of the Spear), it's a grass-roots solution to a very common problem in remote third-world areas: washed out, impassable roads. As a dune buggy, it navigates rough dirt roads well. But if a driver encounters an impassable section of land or road, he or she can open a parafoil atop its long center pole, start the pusher propeller behind the buggy, get a 100-foot headstart, and literally "puddle-jump" the washed-out section. It flies 40 miles an hour (so it drives faster than it flies), and is simple enough to be easily repairable in the bush ... even by indigenous people with limited mechanical or pilot training.
The All-Electric Plane
The problems with an all-electric airplane are more complex than a hybrid or electric car, but there are several companies working on the concept. "It's the future," says Jeremy Monnett, whose Sonex company is working on the electric engine/aircraft pictured above. "It's not the near-term future, but it's definitely the long-term future. You know that Chinese saying about "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? Well, this is our first step." Sonex, a kitplane manufacturer, is testing the 55 kw (75 hp) brushless DC cobalt motor on an existing Sonex kitplane, but Monnett envisions the engine being used eventually to extend the flight time of a motor-glider design or power a much lighter, purpose-designed airframe. (Sonex is also working to develop a single-engine kit jet (see below). When? Ah. Well, when they find a new engine manufacturer, because the original supplier went out of business.)
The Vision Jet
But while Sonex is years away from a flyable, single-engine kitplane jet, Alan Klapmeier has one already flying. Klapmeier is the founder and mastermind behind the Cirrus Design Company (whose Cirrus aircraft James Fallows has written about numerous times). But not content to rest on his laurels, he's designed, and is working to market, a very sleek but practical single-engine, five+2-seat, factory-produced personal jet for the speed-seeking traveler.
Some of the ideas on display are astoundingly simple; others rely on sophisticated computer design and control. And they may not all work or prove viable, of course. The history of aviation, like any field, is littered with ideas that proved better in concept than in reality. But the EAA show is a reminder, once a year, that that the "old" backyard, hands-on, bold spirit of invention is still alive and kicking, even in the video-game and digital age. And that alone is worth something.
Note--offline: I'll be offline for the next week. Returning August 6th.
A number of years ago, I spent some time in Africa with members of the Kenyan Wildlife Service whose mission was to protect endangered and protected wildlife from poachers. The job was hazardous; poachers were generally armed and willing to shoot. And the penalties, if the poachers were caught, were severe. But, the KWS rangers said, it wasn't a clear case of good guys versus the bad guys. Yes, the poaching was terrible. And the big money it offered didn't even go, in most cases, to the hunters themselves. They might make $200 for elephant tusks that their "employers" would turn around and sell on the global market for many, many times that amount. "But it's hard to make the case that we need to preserve the elephants," one of the rangers explained to me, "to a Masai tribesman who is so poor that $200 could make the difference between his 6-year-old son living or dying. He's not going to sacrifice his son to save some wild animal." No, of course not. No parent would. Part of the challenge, then, was to try to convince the tribesmen that the tourism the elephants would bring to the area would provide as much or more income, at far less risk, than poaching.
It's a point that was highlighted earlier this week during Secretary of State HIllary Rodham Clinton's visit to India, when her upbeat comments about being partners with India in fighting global warming were countered, almost immediately, by Jairam Ramesh, India's environment and forests minister. The Indian minister said that India was not in a position to take on legally binding emission standards, and already had one of the lowest carbon emissions rates per capita, in the world.
Roughly translated, Ramesh was saying, pointedly, that the U.S. could well talk about reducing emissions, because it already had a developed and basically well-fed society ... a position it had attained because it didn't have to worry about carbon emissions as it developed. India, with a population of over 1 billion, a poverty rate (living on less than $1.25 a day) of somewhere around 40%, doesn't have that luxury. The rich folk can worry about saving the elephants; the poor have more urgent problems at hand. When most Indians can afford clean transportation, are well fed and safely above poverty levels, come talk to them about reducing emissions.
It's a point echoed in "Mr. Gore, Your Solution to Global Warming is Wrong," a feature in the current issue of Esquire magazine. Written by Bjorn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, the article offers an interesting perspective on the global warming debate. Or, rather, the global warming solution debate. Professor Lomborg does not believe that reducing carbon emissions will solve the problem, and argues that our focus on emission reduction is misplaced. In part because of the minor difference that approach is projected to have, over time, but also because of the punitive consequences of that approach for a large percentage of the world's population.
Global warming may harm your grandchildren's chances of survival in sub-Saharan Africa 50 years from now, but if you don't use that poorly maintained, diesel-guzzling truck you somehow got lucky enough to have access to, your children may die next week. And rather than investing billions in reducing carbon emissions, you'd much prefer the powers that be invested in mosquito nets.
When and how does that change? One way, according to Lomborg, is for the poor to become, well ... less poor. "Once a country achieves a certain standard of living, with their kids healthy and educated, citizens invariably begin to shift their focus toward the environment, and pollution starts to fall," he notes -- a dynamic known as the "Kuznets curve."
Consequently, Lomborg advocates a number of nutrition and economic initiatives that may not seem directly related to global warming, but could aid the effort by increasing the number of people with enough margin, or luxury, to care. Lomborg also argues that significant change needs to come from developing alternate fuel sources and eliminating the need for fossil fuel; an approach he believes would have a greater impact over time, and would also eliminate the punitive carbon-reduction-without-other-substitutes problem for the poor, or developing countries.
While eliminating poverty in the world is a noble goal, it might rate even higher on the challenge Richter scale than stopping global warming itself. Not that we shouldn't invest in mosquito nets, micro-finance and micro-nutrient initiatives. And not that we shouldn't, as a country that has more margin to play with, do all we can to reduce our carbon emissions. Just because the rest of the world isn't perfect doesn't excuse us from our own responsibility to be responsible.
But although Lomborg didn't explicitly make this point, it occurred to me that if the key to success is, in essence, to convince the Masai that they will economically benefit more by saving the elephant than killing it, there might be another benefit in his alternative fuels and technology approach. Investing in alternative fuels, versus focusing on carbon emission reduction, might reduce the punitive pressure on developing countries. But if there were somehow money to be made by alternative technology that could be developed, built, or somehow used to the profit and benefit of those people and countries, they might be more willing to work on keeping the elephant alive.
It's a complex issue, with more problems than answers. But looking at what would make the rest of the world want to get on board is certainly an angle worth considering in the debate.
(Photo: Flickr User Artbandito)
(Photo: Flickr User Artbandito)
In the 40th anniversary coverage of the moon landing, we will undoubtedly hear the word "heroes" used ... more than once ... to describe the astronauts who performed those early space flights. But are they, or were they, really heroes? With the splashy sensationalism of 24-hour television coverage, the term "hero" has become so overused that it's all but lost its once-significant meaning. Not that there aren't true heroes still in the world. But it was interesting to read a statement by Michael Collins, the command module pilot of Apollo 11, which he released in lieu of individual media interviews this week.
Forty years ago, Collins said the earth from a distance appeared "Small, shiny, serene, blue and white, and FRAGILE." Asked if he thought it would look the same today, he said:
In the statement, Collins talks about being honored to be a part of Apollo 11, and the perspective it gave him on the Earth. But he also talked about being irritated by the "adulation of celebrities and inflation of heroism" in American culture.
"Heroes abound, and should be revered as such," Collins said. "But don't count astronauts among them. We work very hard, we did our jobs to near-perfection, but that was what we had hired on to do. In no way did we meet the criterion of the Congressional Medal of Honor: 'above and beyond the call of duty.'"
Collins is not the only professional to voice that opinion. Talk to most astronauts, test pilots, of even U.S. Airways' Captain Sullenberger (of Hudson River fame), and they will protest that while they may have accomplished great feats, those achievements--and whatever attendant risks they carried--were fully within their job description; not "above and beyond," and not deserving of the term "hero."
It's an interesting dynamic--the pull between the media or public's rush to label someone a hero, and, at least in some cases, the person's own reluctance to accept the title. But it also raises the question: what kind of actions DO qualify as "heroic?" And who gets to decide who fits in that category?
In the ancient Greek myths, a hero was a demi-god; the offspring of both a god and a mortal. In the epic hero journey tales (think: Odysseus and Luke Skywalker), a hero is an ordinary human who chooses, or is thrust into, a journey that tests and teaches them. Initially brash or naive, an epic hero slowly learns through trials, challenges, mistakes and effort, so that by the end of the journey, they acquire an unassailable and "heroic" wisdom, power and strength. In more modern days, a hero has come to mean someone who, in the face of great danger and cost, not only shows the character traits of a fully-developed epic hero, but also risks or sacrifices self for the sake of others, or a greater good.
But somewhere in there, I think Collins is right. Too often we blur the line between actions and traits that are admirable, and those that are truly heroic. (I wrote a piece last winter that explored this point more fully, especially with regard to Capt. Sullenberger, that can be found here). Wesley Autrey, who left his children on a subway platform and threw himself on the tracks to save the life of a stranger who had fallen off the platform in an epileptic seizure, clearly fits the criteria for a hero. So do all those in combat or disaster zones who risked or sacrificed their own lives for the sake of others. Or even civil rights workers like Congressman John Lewis, who risked their lives for the sake of justice.
But in all those situations, the actions took the person out of what was expected of them, at great personal risk or sacrifice, for the sake of others. An astronaut, by comparison, is expected to take on the risks of space travel, and accomplish the goal of the mission. Just as a pilot is expected to bring an airplane down safely, even in an emergency, and a member of the military is expected to take on the risks of combat and act with courage and honor.
And yet, to listen to the TV, everybody in any kind of risky or challenging job is a hero. And the public is quick to agree. Why is that? Are we just hungry for role models in a cynical world? Or are we, and the idea of heroism, being exploited for the purposes of drama, news sales and ratings? Perhaps part of the answer is a little bit of both.
But part of the answer also may be that we're just mixing genres of heroes. An epic hero, after all, can be anyone, in any walk of life, who bravely faces what is thrown at them, attempts to learn from the challenges they have to overcome, and in the process exhibits courage and honor, and acquires wisdom and strength. Epic heroes are often a quieter sort than the "risk and sacrifice" medal-winning hero. They don't make for splashy news stories. But they are equally important, and certainly more plentiful in the world.
So Michael Collins is right when he says he's not a hero--at least in the way the media too often uses the term. He was an accomplished professional who did his job extremely well, and we are extremely proud of him, and the rest of the crew, for that. But that doesn't mean that Collins isn't a hero at all. I was intrigued by another part of Collins' statement, about what his space travels had taught him about Earth:
"I really believe," he said, "that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogenous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."
"Yes, from the moon, but appearances can be deceiving. It's certainly not serene, but definitely fragile, and growing more so. when we flew to the moon, our population was 3 billion; today it has more than doubled and is headed for 8 billion, the experts say. I do not think this growth is sustainable or healthy. The loss of habitat, the trashing of oceans, the accumulation of waste products--this is no way to treat a planet."
I don't know the rest of the details of Collins' life to judge for sure. And we ought to be careful in how broadly we apply the term hero, in any genre, lest we diminish its meaning for those who are truly deserving of the title. But given that Collins started out as a cold war warrior, it would appear that Collins' journey ... like those of all great epic heroes ... was indeed one of learning, and that the learning and expanding of perspective has continued in his life. Which is to say ... despite all his protestations, the irony may be that perhaps Collins has something of a hero about him, after all.
07/17/09 9:06 AM
Fence Wire, Flying Bedsteads and 36KB: What Got Us to the Moon
It's easy, once things become commonplace, to forget how extraordinary they once were. When Lindbergh flew to Paris, the whole world stopped to cheer. Now thousands of people jet back and forth everyday. Some 2,000 people have now reached the summit of Mt. Everest. And almost 500 people, from 39 countries, have flown in space. Which undoubtedly explains why I'm hard pressed to name even one of the astronauts who blasted off in the Space Shuttle Endeavor on Wednesday.
But every now and then, a moment catches us unaware, jolts us out of our complacency, and makes us feel the full wonder and impact all over again. I had one of those moments in 2002, when I spent a week covering a small sailplane event at Barron Hilton's desert ranch in western Nevada. A dozen of the best sailplane pilots in the world were there, along with several of Hilton's fellow aviation enthusiasts. And among the guests were two of the Apollo astronauts--Gene Cernan and Bill Anders.
One night, after our host had gone to bed, a small group of us took our drinks outside to look at the stars. Hilton's ranch is in a remote valley, and he owns most of the land for miles in every direction. So the night sky was unblemished by human light.
For a while, we all just stared up at the sea of stars surrounding a partial moon. Stare long enough at a sky layered thick with stars, and you can get dizzy from the simultaneous closeness of their light and vastness of their reach. But after a few minutes, in the same way as someone might look at a photo of Rome and point out the hotel where they'd once stayed, Gene Cernan gestured to the moon and mentioned something about where, on that surface, he had been. He and Bill Anders compared notes for a minute. And then Cernan pointed to the left of the moon, to a star. "Hey," he said. "And that's ... (whatever its name was)." He and Anders began pointing to and naming other stars. Someone in the group asked how they knew all those star names. "They're the ones we steered by," Cernan said, simply. And then to explain, as if he were giving a tourist directions to a local landmark ... "you turn right at Maple, go straight until Main" ... he gave us all directions to the moon.
What struck me most was that he talked about the route the way a local would, with a sense of familiarity about the twists and turns involved. And the star points with a casual ease of knowledge that no one who hadn't been amongst them ... detached from Earth, navigating across an unknown sea of space ... ever could have mustered. With a sharp jolt, it hit me that I wasn't just in the presence of NASA astronauts. I was in the presence of space travelers. Two of a tiny number of humans who had actually seen the Earth get small in the distance behind them, and then had to steer by starlight, across cold reaches of space, to find their way home again.
And in that moment, the Apollo program, and all that preceded it, became once again something breathtakingly astounding, wondrous, and surreal.
Looking back at all the celebratory news coverage, it seems almost a forgone conclusion that the moon program, and Apollo 11, would be successful. But behind that public end result was an extraordinary effort that reached so far beyond the possible or known that it easily could have ... and perhaps by all Vegas betting odds should have ... failed.
I have, in my office, a 10"-thick, 3-ring binder titled "NASA Launches Since 1958." (A shorter summary version of it can be found here.) It lists every launch NASA conducted, whether to test equipment, launch scientific instruments, or put humans into space. And it makes for fascinating reading. The main rocket booster for the Mercury program (the original astronaut effort) was the Atlas rocket. And from 1959-1962, more than half of the Atlas rockets (or Atlas combination rockets) NASA launched malfunctioned or exploded. One out of two. The failed rockets just didn't happen to have people on top of them. One notable Atlas-Agena rocket booster malfunction resulted in its payload--a probe to get data about the lunar surface--missing the moon by a staggering 22, 862 miles and ending up in a solar orbit, instead. The understated comment in the "remarks" section notes "TV images were unusable."
In the early days, communication systems were also limited and unreliable, requiring cumbersome back-up strategies and an extraordinary level of innovative thinking. On a test flight of the Saturn V vehicle that would launch the Apollo spacecraft, for example, the phone lines to the remote western Australia tracking station of Carnarvon went down. (NASA set up a worldwide network to keep track of the launches and keep in touch with the astronauts at all times.) Undeterred, the Australians sent launch times and data back and forth to the station over more than 1,000 miles of the Outback--using the top wire of cattle ranchers' fences as a makeshift telegraph wire.
As for the high-tech systems that allowed the Apollo astronauts to operate their spacecraft and navigate to the moon and back ... the Apollo computer was digital, but it had a whopping 36KB of memory. Think about that. We went to the moon on 36K. A simple email message today can take up more computer space than that. On the plus side, the computer had a mean time between failures of more than 70,000 hours. (This reliability led NASA to later use the computer to control the first digital fly-by-wire aircraft without any mechanical back-up.) But because of the limited memory, the interface of the Apollo computer (shown below) was primitive. Every word command had a code number. So, for example, to open a valve, the astronaut would hit "verb," then the number for the word "open," then hit "noun," then the code for the valve he wanted open, and then hit "enter."
But wait, there's more. That famous moon landing? The one where Neil Armstrong realized, as the automated landing system brought the lunar lander close to the surface of the moon, that the intended landing site was full of boulders, and so grabbed hold of the manual controls and hand-flew the lander to a better landing site, with only 30 seconds of fuel remaining when he landed? How did he get the confidence to do that at all, let alone the skill to do it so flawlessly? By flying this:
Officially called the Lunar Landing Training Vehicles, but unofficially called the "Flying Bedsteads," these contraptions allowed the Apollo astronauts to practice free-flying a vehicle that behaved (through the ingenious combination of a vertically-mounted jet engine and numerous small jet thrusters) just like the lunar lander would in the low-gravity environment of the moon. The LLTVs were so squirrely and unstable that three astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, had to eject out of them when they went out of control. But Armstrong reportedly credited that experience with giving him the confidence to hand-fly the lander on the moon.
There are dozens and dozens more stories like these, tucked in the annals of NASA's history books. But the point is, the moon landing wasn't just remarkable because of its overall and lasting challenge. Viewed in light of how rudimentary our technology was at the time, and how many bullets we dodged--through innovative thinking, exhaustive effort, blissful ignorance, and pure, blind luck--the achievement becomes almost unbelievable. And yet, it happened.
On December 21, 1968, Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, aboard Apollo 8, transformed the human race from a planetary species to a race of space travelers. And on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins set out to explore, on foot and in person, another body in the cosmos. We may do that again, and one day it may even become commonplace. But we will never again do it for the very first time.
In recognition of that fact, NASA is replaying the entire audio tape of the Apollo 11 mission, in real time, over the course of the next 7 days. You can tune into it here. And on Monday night, at precisely 9:56:20 pm Central Daylight Time, you can hear Neil Armstrong say, once again, "That's one small step ..."
Consider the obstacles. Consider the lack of knowledge and technology. Consider all that went wrong along the way. And then listen to the recording, in light of those reference points. And perhaps, if the stars line up just right, you might find yourself feeling the true wonder of it all--either for the first time, or all over again.
There's been a lot of discussion, as Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings have gotten underway, about the idea of judicial "neutrality." Sotomayor has argued that every person's perspective is influenced by their life experiences, and that as a Latina woman, she brings not only a different, but also a valuable, perspective to the Court. Some opponents have argued that her frank admission of that influence and perspective make her unqualified as a judge.
I've never met Sonia Sotomayor. I can't see inside her head. But for the past 20 years, I have worked as a female journalist and writer in the field of aviation--a field that is not only 94% male, but has maintained that percentage, unchanged, for the past 50 years. (The percentage of female commercial pilots within that 6% has increased over time, but the overall male/female ratio has remained pretty constant.) And that experience has taught me a lot about "norms", assumptions, lenses, and bias.
I remember reading somewhere that power politics are always better understood by those on the bottom than those on the top. A large part of the reason for that is, if you're in the majority of a system, industry, or group, surrounded by people who share your experience and views, the world as it is doesn't look out of place, manufactured, or tilted in your favor. It looks normal. But if you're a minority, you are always aware that your experiences, view and perspective are different. So you can't possibly mistake any of that for some kind of accepted norm or pure, objective truth.
But whether we see it or not, we all are a product of our experiences, and those experiences give us a particular set of lenses through which we view the world. They influence how much weight we give to different factors in an argument, and what we tend to believe, out of what we're told. A friend of mine recalls an old General Electric training film, apparently produced in the hopes of improving tolerance across widely varying age groups in the company's workforce, that was called "We Are What We Are Because of What We Were, When." Which is to say, if your formative experiences were the Depression and WWII, it left you with a different set of lenses, sensitivities, and beliefs than if you grew up in the tumultuous 1960s.
Likewise, someone who grows up in an immigrant family, scraping to maintain a small business, will intuitively understand the challenges of that situation better than someone who was born into money and privilege. A woman who walks through the world her whole life aware of her vulnerabilities will intuitively understand another woman's fear of sexual assault, pregnancy, or abuse far better than she can intuitively understand a man's fear of being falsely accused of having a role in those things.
Not that we can't cross those bridges, or get beyond our own lenses. And just being part of a particular group doesn't mean you share the same lenses (think Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas). But the bottom line is, there are some viewpoints that, for reasons of our background, personalities, experiences and beliefs, we intuitively understand and resonate with. Others, we have to work to understand. And succeeding at that cross-understanding is tougher than we sometimes give it credit for being.
The first step in that process, however, is recognizing that there is work to be done; that the lenses through which we intuitively react to and interpret facts, events, and situations, are not objective and clear. And at least Sotomayor recognizes that her lenses exist. The notion that a human can read the facts of a legal case, compare it against the words in a 200-year-old document, and then simply analyze or rationally deduce a single clean, correct answer is idealistic at best, and disingenuous, at worst. It avoids taking responsibility for our intuitive resonances and filters. It also avoids acknowledging the need to balance those subjective filters by making a concerted effort to see not only the words and facts, but the words and facts as they might appear through a different set of lenses.
After all, if truth and justice were easily discernible through logic and careful, objective reading of facts and application of precedent, the Supreme Court wouldn't need nine justices. One would do. There are nine because it's understood that little in the realm of human endeavor is simple, clear, or objective. Least of all humans.
The second step in that process, however, is actually seeing the world, or particular situations, through someone else's lenses. And that's hard to do without having some diversity in the group. At the same time as stepping into a male field taught me very quickly that my own perspective on the world was not the only, or even dominant, one, I know my presence there has helped some men to view situations or issues differently than they did before. And I'd like to think we're all the wiser for it.
The most stunning fact I discovered in the many obituaries written this week about former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was that he'd studied philosophy as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Stunning because it means that underneath the number-driven economic theory and modeling he learned and practiced after that, he actually had the knowledge that could have saved him the tragic and flawed miscalculations for which he is best remembered, and least forgiven.
How so? Because no philosophy student could have avoided the study of Aristotle. And the elements of McNamara's tragedy--both his fatally flawed thinking, and the antidote that could have countered it--stemmed directly from Aristotle's work.
In McNamara's defense, I'm not sure I'd have seen the connection so quickly, even though I, too, studied Aristotle in college, if I hadn't gotten a refresher course on the subject a couple of weeks ago. My refresher was courtesy of Tony Golsby-Smith, a teacher, Aristotelian scholar, and CEO of the 2nd Road training and consulting company, who electrified a Design Management Institute conference last month with his ideas about redesigning business thinking. Golsby-Smith argued that the reason many businesses don't do better at innovation or effective strategic thinking is because they focus too much on analysis, and too little on rhetoric--both subjects that Aristotle explored at length.
"The western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle," Golsby-Smith argues. "Aristotle conceived two thinking systems, not one. We made the mistake of just buying one, and then allowing it to monopolize the whole territory of thought. We should have bought both and used them as partners." The first thinking system, which laid the foundation for western scientific thought, is what we generally refer to as deductive reasoning, analysis, or "logic." (If a=b, and b=c, then a=c.) The second thinking system Aristotle discussed was a more open-ended process of supposition, hypothesis generation, and argument, which he called "rhetoric."
Analytic logic--the rational, numbers-based analysis that McNamara prized and clung to so fiercely--has a lot of appeal, Golsby-Smith points out, because it holds "the promise of certainty and control." And it has an important place in the world. "The logic road underpinned the era of science, the era of science delivered us technologies, and technologies made the industrial revolution possible," Golsby-Smith says. "The industrial revolution delivered us untold wealth and capitalism, and sitting at the end of this beneficial trail lays modern management and its strategic processes, deeply indebted to the logic road."
The analytic method worked well for McNamara in terms of making Ford Motor Company processes and the Defense Department more efficient, which undoubtedly reinforced his belief in the approach. Unfortunately, as McNamara and many businesses have discovered, the logic road has its limits. The control and certainty it promises do not always materialize. But that, Aristotle would say, is because the analytic method is only the best way to truth in domains where things "cannot be other than they are" (e.g. natural science). There is only one answer, for example, to why a leaf is green. So a deductive, analytic approach to discovering that answer makes sense.
When it comes to planning for the future, or making decisions in domains where things can be "other than they are," Aristotle believed rhetoric was far more useful than analysis. "Humans have never predicted the future by analyzing it," Golsby-Smith says. Designing effective strategies for the future--especially in areas involving potentially irrational human actions and reactions--requires imagining various scenarios and perspectives on the truth, and then making judgments based on the persuasiveness of each one.
Of course, imagining valid alternate futures, from different perspectives, also requires an ability to see things from a point of view other than your own ... culturally and psychologically. Which is something humans are notoriously poor at doing, especially across international boundaries. But it appears that McNamara never even made the attempt. Part of the reason might have been his previous analytic successes. But he was also a product of his time. The analytic, scientific approach was coming into full bloom in the early 1960s. The space and computer ages were beginning, technology was giving "efficiency" a new level of importance, and science was the new frontier--even in business. (In 1959, the Ford Foundation released an influential study advocating a more "scientific" approach to business education.) And yet there were others, even at the time, who saw what McNamara failed to see.
There's no lack of lessons to be drawn from the tragedy of McNamara and Vietnam. But certainly one of them ... a lesson Golsby-Smith is intent on conveying to as large a segment of the business world as possible ... is the importance of both of Aristotle's roads to truth. As Einstein himself once said, imagination can sometimes be even more important than knowledge.
At first pass (so to speak), the linebackers of the National Football League and the CEOs of corporate America might seem to have little in common, other than larger-than-average paychecks. But a recent article written by Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, argues quite convincingly that they share more than most of us would think. And, more importantly, that the NFL has some very important lessons to teach American business leaders.
Personally, I'm impressed that a Canadian-born, Harvard-educated economist even thought to employ a football analogy to explain how flawed economic theories about compensation and investment contributed to the recent melt-down on Wall Street. More impressive still is that his basic argument, and the economics behind it, is so easy to follow, once you view it in football terms.
Martin's argument goes like this: both the NFL and publicly-traded companies operate in two different worlds. First, there is the real world. In football, that's where the players play real games, with real touchdowns, and games are won and lost. In business, that's where real products and services are developed, produced and sold. The second world is the world of expectations. In football, this is where bookies establish "point spreads" for each upcoming game, so people have to bet on not just whether or not a team will win or lose, but by how much. That way, a strong team isn't an easy-win bet. You have to bet whether or not the strong team will exceed expectations (the point spread) or not. In business, the "expectations" world is called the stock market. Like point spreads, stock prices are based not on actual product sales or performance, but on expectations of a company's future performance.
The problem with expectations, and especially rising expectations, is that at some point, they become impossible to sustain. Martin gives the example of the New England Patriots, who in 2007 did not lose a single regular-season game. As a result, the point spread for their 14th game, against the New York Jets, was "a record high of 24.5." The Patriots won the game, but only by 10 points, thus winning the game in the real world, but failing to beat the spread in the expectations world.
Fortunately for the Patriots, the NFL compensates its players and managers based only on real-world results. Not only are they not compensated on beating the spread, they would be banned from football forever if they ever dared to bet money on whether or not their team would do so. Why? Because if they stood to gain from fluctuations in the expectations world, they might be tempted to throw or fudge the real game for their own financial remuneration. The integrity of the game would be compromised.
(You see where this is going, right? Like I said, it's really easy to follow, when you look at it in football terms.) In the business world, on the other hand, CEO pay has become more and more closely linked not to real-world results, but to the company's performance in the expectations (stock market) world. (Martin points to three flawed economic theories to explain how and why that evolution occurred, but the gist is that it was decided that CEOs needed to have their interests more aligned with the "principals" who invested in the company, and compensating executives with stock, or based on stock performance, was seen as a good way to make that alignment happen.)
But one of the problems with that approach is that expectations have an insatiable and ever-growing appetite (as the Patriots' rising point-spread demonstrates). A company might develop a very successful product, raising the stock value "x" amount. But once that product is launched, and the stock adjusts up accordingly, the success of that product, while perhaps profitable and stable over the long-term, isn't enough to drive the stock up further. So other strategies are needed to keep up the pace--and satisfy new stockholders, who bought at the higher price. As a result, executives are tempted (or pressured) to make decisions that aren't necessarily good for long-term stability or profitability, but which increase the next quarter's stock price.
And yet the expectations keep rising, and the math gets harder and harder to manage without big risks, or increasingly creative approaches to bookkeeping. And that's even without the concerted efforts of executives and hedge fund folks to drive prices up or down for their own profit.
In short, Martin suggests that the common sense that led the NFL (and most, if not all, professional sports) to prohibit players from betting on their own games should be adopted by the corporate boards of America, as well. Speculation is all fun and fine, as long as it's not linked to, or able to influence, the real game being played. Compensation to executives, Martin says, should be completely separate from stock market performance, and compensation to investors should be in the form of "dividends plus appreciation of book value of equity in the long run."
"The true key to long-term sustainability," Martin argues, "is building customer and employee bases that enable long-term profitability. If we are to emerge from the current mess, executives must switch their focus entirely to the real market and completely ignore the expectations market. Management should not, and in fact cannot, protect the interests of those who buy shares on the open market at prices that are purely a function of expectations."
If that sounds radical or impossible, stop and imagine, for a moment, NFL owners arguing that part of the players' pay should be linked to how the bookies make out on each game, instead of just playing full-out to win the best game they know how to play. In the real world. And for keeps.
The best version of Martin's article is in the most recent Rotman Magazine, but unless you already subscribe, there's a fee to download it. (Raising another interesting question about how academic journals still routinely charge to view content, even as more "mainstream" media outlets have failed to make that model work.) But the Financial Times carried an abbreviated version of the article in a recent issue that can be viewed for free. Well worth reading the latter, if you can't justify, or get hold of, a copy of the former.
There is no lack of contributing culprits, factors, or causes when it comes to the current financial crisis. But one particular thread that's intrigued me from the start is the role that bold, arrogant, or naive (depending on your take) attitudes about risk played in the calamity.
It's a theme that's received new attention with the publication of Gillian Tett's book Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. According to Tett (and many others), it was the idea that risk could be eliminated (or diluted so much that it wouldn't matter anymore) that fueled the innovative securitized debt and derivative schemes that resulted in such a breathtaking global disaster. The system came apart when the housing bubble burst because all sorts of players had extended themselves far beyond what would have been considered prudent, or even possible, without the magical, disappearing risk trick that J.P. Morgan's financial whiz kids devised.
Other writers, including Tett, can get into the exact details of how that played out far better than I can. But what has struck me since I first heard about how these bankers decided they could, as one reviewer put it, "defeat the banker's oldest foe--the danger that borrowers will not repay their loans," is the thought that all of Wall Street's risk-takers should be required to learn to fly small airplanes. For if they did, they'd learn that risk, like gravity, can only be negotiated, not eliminated. And that one gets overly bold and audacious about their ability to ignore, out-scheme, or beat the immutable powers of nature and physics--risk included--at their peril.
Risk, for a pilot, is an ever-present and formidable opponent that faces you down in a three-dimensional chess game every time you climb into the cockpit. Flying a small airplane, without all the back-up systems and performance of a large airliner, is not a matter of bold audacity. In fact, there's a well-known saying in aviation: "There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots." Survival in the sky is a constant dance between immutable forces of nature (gravity, drag, winds, weather) and the plane and pilot's ability to navigate skillfully through that gauntlet. And if you judge that balance incorrectly, and fail to give risk its due respect, there's no bailout available. The consequences are unforgiving, life-threatening, and final. No numerical wizardry can outfox a strong downdraft, counter a low gas tank, or perform a magical pull-up after a badly-planned low show-off pass.
Any number of young guns begin their pilot training with the idea that they can outmaneuver the elements better than their elders. But few pilots get through even their initial pilot training without experiencing at least one moment of truth when they miscalculate the risks or forces at play, and end up scaring the daylights out of themselves. Something about the realization that you can actually kill yourself doing this activity tends to sober most pilots up a bit. Those who don't sober up tend not to live that long.
What's particularly helpful about flying for teaching a respect for risk is not just that the consequences are physical, but that they follow so quickly after a bad or overly risky decision or approach. Years don't unfold before you learn the downsides to your arrogance or misjudgment. And the consequences don't happen to other people while you continue to fly merrily along, undisturbed and well-compensated.
Not that pilots are immune to the lure of new innovations or the seductive idea of conquering risk. The advent of glass cockpit technology (computer screens in the cockpit that allow moving maps, terrain, traffic, and weather information to be clearly displayed and updated), and the Cirrus Design Corporation's famous all-airplane parachute, have lured more than one pilot into a false sense of security. But the sky, and the laws of physics, are stern and swift correctors to any overly bold thoughts. The Cirrus planes had a higher level of accidents than other models, when they first came out, until pilots realized that the new equipment hadn't eliminated risk, after all, and they still needed to exercise serious and prudent judgement, even with the new technology and tools.
Having flown small airplanes for 20 years, my respect for the ubiquitous and constant presence of risk, and its always-attendant consequences, is almost part of my basic DNA. Some pilots manage risk better than others (hence the still-present pilot-error accident rate), but nobody could ever convince me that any new technology--financial tools or strategies included--could ever truly conquer or eliminate the demon of risk.
So I can't help but wonder ... before they gamble with other people's money, in situations where consequences are often long-term, distant, and impersonal ... what would happen if we required all of Wall Street's risk-takers to actually learn something about the nature of the beast first? In a setting where the consequences for hubris, arrogance, or misjudgment would be real, immediate, and personal? It might not prevent another bubble of reckless, over-confident behavior or thinking. But it might leave an impression on enough of them to mitigate the excess inclinations of the others who, like the doomed flyer Icarus, believe they can fly to any heights without peril or care.
Lane Wallace
