October 2009 Archives
I have often felt a little envious of my professional musician friends. Not for the obvious reasons (getting to play in a band and get paid for it, or the accompanying status/sex-appeal), but because they had such a direct line to an audience's emotions. Writers can certainly influence a reader's emotions, but only by engaging the person's mind, first. The words have to be processed intellectually before they can be understood and felt emotionally. It's a quiet, thoughtful impact, even when it happens. A far cry from having an entire audience jump to its feet, almost involuntarily, and start moving in response to the rhythm, harmony, and energy issuing forth from the stage. A brilliant orator might bring an audience to its feet, but the response would be to an idea, even if the idea was emotionally expressed. And the crowd would know what it was cheering about. Ask someone why a piece of music moves them, and they will probably find it harder to explain. For music speaks to a place deep inside of us that feels more than thinks; that knows resonance without questioning the details; that can hear and be comforted by the outpouring of heartbreak and survival in a blues ballad without even knowing the words.
But some researchers suspect that music and words may be more closely linked than I ever would have thought. So closely linked, in fact, that the study of music may actually be able to help ameliorate the language deficits of children with dyslexia.
How is that possible? The exact mechanism of the process isn't clear yet, but researchers at Harvard University have apparently seen a correlation between early-childhood music training and "enhanced motor and auditory skills, as well as improvements in verbal ability and non-verbal reasoning," And that correlation, they say, is even more pronounced in children with dyslexia. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the researchers, told the Acoustical Society of America that the results "suggest that a music intervention that strengthens the basic auditory music perception skills of children with dyslexia may also remediate some of their language deficits."
Those results are also supported by another paper being presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting next week. Dr. Laurel Trainor and colleagues at McMaster University in West Hamilton, Ontario, have conducted several studies of children to gauge the impact of musical training. In one study, they compared two groups of children: one who were starting music lessons, and one who were doing other activities, like sports. They tested the electrical activity in the children's brains for a year and found that while both groups changed as the children developed, the children taking music lessons changed more ... especially in the areas "related to attentional processing."
"This is significant," Trainor wrote, "because it suggests a mechanism whereby music lessons could affect other cognitive processes, such as language and mathematical skills."
Now granted, music lessons involve a more focused learning process than simply sitting back and enjoying a collection of sounds. But there may also be a link between language and the evolution of music itself--which might help explain the ability of music to impact language processing.
"the avidity with which our auditory sense seeks to organize ambient noise into a meaningful acoustical pattern--a likely consequence of our dependence on language--could help explain our distinctly human musicality."
And a love of music is, apparently, a uniquely human trait. Other mammals, Angier notes, do not really appreciate music, despite the prevalent myth about music's power to soothe the wild beast. "If you give monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly," reported Dr. Josh McDermott of the Center for Neural Science at NYU.
A similar thought was put forward in an article last December in The Economist on the evolution of music. It explored various theories about why we like and react to music, from sexual selection to group and community bonding. The sexual selection theorists believe that expertise in music evolved because it provided a courting advantage, similar to a peacock's colorful tail--which would certainly seem to be true in terms of musicians' ability to get dates after performances, at least in the rock and roll world. Music may also have evolved as a way to bring groups together as a community.
But according to Dr. Steven Pinker, a language theorist at Harvard, our appreciation for music may have evolved as a side-effect of our focus on sounds--a focus necessary to develop a complex language. As the article put it, just as a body that's designed to seek sugar and fat for survival finds itself enthusiastic about cheesecake, even though cheesecake itself isn't required for survival, "a brain devoted to turning sound into meaning is tickled by an oversupply of tone, melody and rhythm." So in the course of learning to distinguish nuances of difference in tone, sound and shape of vowels, consonants, and complex verb forms, we may have developed a delighted appreciation for all sounds and tones.
But even if all those correlations and theories are true, they still don't fully explain why music resonates so directly and brings forth such a range of emotions in people. Why do particular musical sounds move us so? The sounds in a word--even a really good word like "inexplicable"-- don't have the same effect. Researchers are looking into that one, too. But perhaps it's because we have been surrounded by sound far longer than we have known words: Our mothers' heartbeats and swishing blood and fluid even before we were born. The singing of birds, rain on a tin roof, the creaking of a porch swing, or the rustling of leaves by a gurgling brook. The cry of another child, the terrifying crack of lightning, or the scary howl of an animal nearby.
In the end, maybe the reason we respond to music more viscerally than language is simply because music was actually the first language we ever learned ... before thought, before words, when emotion was all we knew.
Note: I will be offline for the next week finishing a book project, returning November 3rd.
(Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
On Friday, the latest biopic about Amelia Earhart -- this one a $20 million feature film starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere -- opens in theaters nationwide. As a woman pilot myself, I suppose I should be excited about having attention turned, once again, to one of our own. The fact that I'm not says nothing about my enthusiasm for women pilots or pioneers. It's just...enough about Amelia, already.
Amelia Earhart was a remarkable woman for her time. I give her a lot of credit for not wanting to be defined by her gender. She sent her husband a note on their wedding day informing him that she did not intend to stay faithful to him. That's not exactly standard. She took risks, which takes a certain amount of courage. She pursued feats of flight at a time when very few women did. All well and good.
But she was far from the only one, and far from the best at what she did. She was only the best known -- which was a feat, indeed, but one that was more the result of her husband's publishing and marketing savvy than an organic result of her own accomplishments. And on some level, I think a lot of women pilots chafe at the title of "most famous woman pilot" being conferred on a woman who, in the strictest reading of things, skimped on navigation preparations, got lost and crashed. Nobody bestowed that level of fame on the fliers who died attempting to span the Atlantic before Lindbergh.
But she was far from the only one, and far from the best at what she did. She was only the best known -- which was a feat, indeed, but one that was more the result of her husband's publishing and marketing savvy than an organic result of her own accomplishments. And on some level, I think a lot of women pilots chafe at the title of "most famous woman pilot" being conferred on a woman who, in the strictest reading of things, skimped on navigation preparations, got lost and crashed. Nobody bestowed that level of fame on the fliers who died attempting to span the Atlantic before Lindbergh.
But it's not just that. It's that there are so many other really accomplished women pioneers who get lost in Amelia's disproportionate shadow. Women in Aviation, International has a Hall of Fame that lists the bios of dozens of women who were Earhart's contemporaries. Interestingly enough, Earhart herself was not inducted into the Hall of Fame until five years after its inception, and her entry is not as compelling as some of the others.
Take, for example, the entry for Elinor Smith. Who? Right. That's the point. Elinor Smith soloed in 1926, at the age of 15, and three months later set an altitude record of 11, 889 feet. In 1927, she became the youngest licensed pilot and, at the age of 18, became the youngest male or female pilot to be granted an air transport license by the U.S. Department of Commerce. That same year, she set two endurance records, a refueling record, and the women's world speed record--that last one in a military airplane. In 1930, Smith was selected by licensed American pilots as the "Best Woman Pilot in America." During the Depression, she worked as a stunt pilot for the movies (no mean feat for a woman in those days) and did aerial fundraisers for the homeless and the needy. And, by the way, lived to tell the tale.
Or take Louise Thaden, who got a job as an office manager for Beech Aircraft in order to learn to fly, soloing in 1928. Later that year, she set the world's altitude record for women by flying above 20,000 feet -- the first U.S. woman to win that title. The following year, she set the solo flight endurance record and the woman's world speed record--the only woman to ever hold all three of those records simultaneously. The next month she became the fourth woman in the U.S. to get her air transport license, and later in 1929 she won the first Women's Air Derby--beating Amelia Earhart. In 1936, the year before Earhart's ill-fated world flight, Thaden became the first woman to beat all the men in the highly competitive Bendix Transcontinental Air Race, establishing a new transcontinental speed record for women and winning a Harmon Trophy--aeronautics' highest honor--in the process.
There were also women whose impact went far beyond record flights. Take, for example, Nancy Love. In 1942, long before Jacqueline Cochran achieved fame for her role in organizing and leading the Women's Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs), Love pulled together women who were already commercial pilots, with at least 500 hours of flight time, to form the precursor organization, the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). Love was the first woman to fly the P-51 and P-38 World War II fighters, as well as a B-25 and B-17 bomber. In 1946, she was awarded the Air Medal and a citation for her leadership in women flying military aircraft. If women can fly in the military today, it's in no small part because of Love, who first proved women were up to the task.
It's also because of women like Barbara London, who was one of Love's 28 recruits and who became the commander of the Los Angeles WAFS/WASP squadron. By the time the WASPs were sent home in December 1944 and forbidden to fly any more military aircraft (a very long story behind that one), London was proficient in every single Army trainer, bomber, and fighter we'd built--one of only two women to achieve that distinction. Devastated at being sent home, she signed up for the new Air Force in 1947, hoping for the chance to fly again. She stayed in the service for 20 years, hoping the rules would change, but they didn't change in time for her. She was allowed to wear her flight wings, but she was never allowed to fly. Undaunted, London started an air charter service on the side and taught both her daughters to fly. And one of her daughters, who learned a lot about persistence from her mother, went on to become the first woman pilot hired by Western Airlines. If I'm going to look for a role model for women, I don't have to look further than Barbara London.
The list goes on and on. From Bessie Coleman, who became the first African-American pilot in 1921 by traveling to France to take flying lessons, because blacks were forbidden to fly in the U.S., and whose answer to how she got past all the barriers facing her was, "I refused to take 'no' for an answer," the list of women pilots who persevered against all odds to open doors and achieve great things is long and distinguished. So is the list of sacrifices those women made. When I flew in my first and only transcontinental air race, in 1992, I met a woman named Ruby Sheldon, who was already elderly but still flying and grabbing hold of life with two hands. She told me in a matter-of-fact manner about how, in the post-war years, no companies would hire women as pilots. Unwilling to give up her dream of being a commercial pilot, she ended up flying cargo helicopters off of ice floes north of the Arctic Circle, because that was the only job she could find.
If none of these women's names are household words, it's not because they weren't worthy. It's because none of them had George Putnam as a husband.
Earhart is still an interesting study, as most record-setting adventurers are. Last month, in fact, Judith Thurman wrote a fascinating piece on Earhart in The New Yorker, worth the reading for anyone intrigued by the Earhart story. But if Thurman's sources are to be believed (and I think they are), Earhart's unfinished world flight was, in many ways, a poetic and appropriate ending for her life. For beyond a craving for adventure and attention, it seems Earhart was a restless dilettante, afraid of getting old and rarely finishing anything she started.
As for the great mystery surrounding her disappearance ... I don't know a lot of pilots who think it's such a great mystery. I've flown in the South Pacific. It's a horizon-to-horizon stretch of unmarked nothing. And in the 1930s, it was far easier to get lost and crash there than it was to reach any destination safely. Sir Gordon Taylor, one of my all-time flying heroes who made pioneering flights across the Pacific and surveyed air transport routes for the Allies in early World War II, wrote about the challenge of navigating the Pacific in his autobiography The Sky Beyond:
"To reach our destination and, in fact, to reach land at all," Taylor wrote, "[the navigator] had to be exactly right in the work that was ahead of him. ... When he has made his allowances for variation of the compass due to earth's magnetism, for deviation due to its effect through the iron in the aircraft, and for the drift of the air in which the aircraft is flying, he still has to contend with the fact that the pilot may not steer the course given to him."
Perfection, across 15 or more hours, is hard to accomplish. And imperfection meant that you died, because finding a lone aircraft in the Pacific is even harder than finding a lone island. On one of Taylor's flights, he reached the Hawaiian Islands with only five minutes of fuel left. On another, he never found the right island, and survived only because that flight left him enough fuel to return to a radio-equipped checkpoint behind him. And Taylor was a master pilot and navigator.
Why, then, do so many people still have such trouble accepting the overwhelmingly probable answer that Earhart and Noonan got lost, crashed, and sank with or soon after the plane? I suspect it's because we want so badly for them to have survived. We let go of our heroes, and all of the dreams we infuse them with, very reluctantly (as I've written about before, here and here). And in many cases, we like the fantasy possibilities better than the reality.
But it's time. Past time. Amelia Earhart was an interesting, adventurous, and accomplished woman who lived and died unconventionally. But so did many of her peers ... who had every bit as compelling stories and accomplishments. Instead of telling the same story over and over again, I wish someone would fund the telling of some of those other women's stories. "Barbara" might not have the same ring as "Amelia," but the story of her life--a woman without any power or money connections who became the best there was, then had her wings taken away, but got up off the mat again and made it possible for her daughter to succeed where she had been thwarted--is a movie I'd be far more interested in going to see.
Are print books really about to disappear, overtaken like horse-drawn carriages in the age of Detroit and the Ford Model T? Truth is, nobody knows. Nobody ever really knows what the future is going to hold, no matter how sure they sound in their predictions. Nevertheless, the point remains that a greater number of readers are switching over to ebooks in one format or another. So beyond the basic question of "will print books go away" (which I personally doubt, but again, nobody really knows the answer to), the questions I find more intriguing relate to if or how digital reading changes the reading experience and, perhaps, even the brains that do the reading.
Electronic readers like Kindle are too recent a development to have generated much specific, targeted research yet. But a montage of essays titled "Does the Brain Like Ebooks?" that appeared on the New York Times website this week offered some fascinating information and viewpoints on the subject. The collection had contributions from experts in English, neuroscience, child development, computer technology and informatics. And while the viewpoints differed, there was some general consensus about a few points:
1. Clearly, there are differences in the two reading experiences. There are things electronic books do better (access to new books in remote areas of the world, less lugging around, and easier searching for quotes or information after the fact). There are also things print books do better (footnote reading, the ability to focus solely on the text at hand, far away from any electronic distraction, and--oh, yeah. No battery or electronic glitch issues.)
To those factors, I would add two more: First -- I think it's important to remember that Kindle doesn't actually give you a book. It gives you access to a book. For people who don't want to cart around old volumes or make multiple trips to the library, that might be considered a good thing. But at least one potential downside to this feature became painfully clear to many Kindle readers this summer when Amazon reached into its customers' Kindle libraries and took back two books for which the company realized it did not possess the copyright. Ironically, the books were by George Orwell -- including 1984, his book about the perils of centralized information control. Access goes both ways.
Second ... one of the writers of the Times essays, Prof. Alan Liu at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that he didn't think anyone really made serendipitous discoveries while browsing the shelves of a physical library (so losing a physical library wouldn't be a loss, at least in that sense). Perhaps not, because most people go to libraries with specific search goals in mind. But bookstores, on the other hand ... there I'd disagree. I often browse the aisles of my local bookstores, just to see what's new and what might catch my eye. Most of the books I buy, in fact, are items I discovered while browsing ... something that, ironically, electronic "browsers" do not allow.
Browsing, to my way of thinking, is what I do in Filene's Bargain Basement. The clothes there are a jumbled mass. So even if you go in looking, potentially, for a shirt, you might end up with a pair of slacks that just happened to be hanging nearby. Same with a bookstore. Same, in fact, with the print version of the New York Times I get every morning. I scan the pages just seeing what might catch my eye to read. Sometimes it's a photo that catches my eye, sometimes it's a leading paragraph, sometimes it's a headline, and sometimes it's a callout. Or, sometimes, I'll be reading one article and another on that same page will catch my attention--one I never would have sought out on my own. And my knowledge and understanding of the world is far better and broader for all those serendipitous juxtapositions.
Electronic media and browsers have many good qualities, but they're lousy for that kind of unspecific window shopping. Browsers don't browse. They help you do specific searches. Looking for a black coat, or that article Sam Smith wrote two months ago on synthetic sneaker soles? The internet is great. Not sure what you want? Heaven help you. So to lose physical collections of books, either in stores or on individual bookshelves, would make it harder to make those delightful side discoveries that take us out of our narrow fields of focus and interest and, potentially, broaden our minds.
2. In the case of adults, we probably process information similarly in both electronic and print formats ... with two important distinctions. The first distinction is that electronic books, with hyperlinks and connections to a world web of side-roads, offer far more distractions to the reader. In doing a research paper, this can be useful. But it also offers temptations to divert our attention from a deeper immersion in a story or text that our brains are poorly equipped to resist. (Apparently we change tasks, on average, every three minutes when working in an internet-connected environment.)
"Frequent task-switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read," cautioned Sandra Aamodt, the former editor of Nature Neuroscience and another of the Times essayists.
The second feature of electronic reading, which may compound this first effect, is that there is evidently something about an electronic medium, with its "percentage done" scale and electronic noises or gizmos, that makes us crave and focus on those rewards. Which is probably why electronic games are more addictive than board games. After a couple of rounds of solitaire with real cards, I'm done and ready to move on to something else. But I removed the solitaire software from my computer almost 20 years ago when I realized that I couldn't seem to tear myself away from it, once I started playing.
Is our comprehension and, more importantly, what Proust apparently called "the heart of reading"--"when we go beyond the author's wisdom and enter the beginning of our own," as one of the essayists, put it, impacted by a heightened drive to make progress through a text? If so, that would be a bad thing. So it seems a point worth studying further.
3. Most adults, however, at least have the ability to process longer and deeper contemplative thoughts from what we read, even if we don't always exercise that ability. But according to Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and child development specialist at Tufts University, that ability to focus attention deeply and for a concerted length of time is learned, not innate. Children apparently have to develop neural pathways and circuits for reading, and those circuits are affected by the demands of the reading material. Chinese children learning a more symbolic and visual language, for instance, develop different circuits than English-speaking children.
So electronic reading ... especially with hyperlinks and video embeds and other potential distractions, could potentially keep young readers from developing some important circuits. As Wolf put it in her essay:
"My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps videos (in the new vooks). The child's imagination and children's nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. the attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."
Interesting enough, the one computer scientist in the group was of the opinion that the best use of electronic books and capabilities was to enhance print books, not to replace them. But it's all interesting food for thought ... and, hopefully, more research as electronic readers find their way into more households and hands.
(Photo: Flickr/oskay)
"It seemed like a good idea at the time."
This sheepish and quintessential explanation of really bad ideas put forth into the world was uttered, I'm sure, by the backers of the Ford Edsel, New Coke, Clear Beer, OK Soda, and numerous other marketing fiascos. It was also undoubtedly mumbled by publisher Katharine Weymouth, or whoever in the Washington Post marketing department came up with the quickly-retracted idea, this past summer, of charging advertisers up to $250,000 to mix with the newspaper's editors and administration officials.
However, as Politico reported at the time, Weymouth said that the paper, which lost $19.5 million in the first quarter of the year, would "begin to do live events in ways that enhance our reputation and in no way call into question our integrity."
All well and good. Lord knows, the publishing industry is in a combination of flux and freefall these days, with all sorts of new ideas being generated to attract readers and income, from non-profit news gathering to restructured revenue models that are far more multi-media and complex. And nobody's quite sure, at this point, how it's all going to settle out.
But not every idea is a good one.
Take this email I received last week from the Washington Post, headlined:
I'm guessing that I received the email because I've signed up to get daily news headlines and links sent from the Post to my email account. Perplexed, I scrolled down past this lively cartoon television set dressed in a suit and holding a microphone:
to see the following invitation issued to me and, I assume, everyone else on the Post's mailing list:
Where to start?
There are, absolutely, many talented thinkers and writers out there who simply haven't been discovered by the mainstream media outlets yet. I find wonderful writing on individual websites and in small publications every day. So if the Post wants to bring some of those voices into the fold, or give new writers a chance, I'm all for it. It's the approach that disturbs me.
Reality show entertainment, for better or worse, is here to stay--for at least the foreseeable future. It's cheap to produce, and there seems to be a market for the competition and contestant hope/humiliation/victory stories it provides. (Even if some of the drama is artificially created, as I discussed in a previous post.) But no matter what else reality shows are, they're entertainment. And not even high-level entertainment, at that.
Much criticism has already been leveled at the field of journalism for leaning too far toward entertainment, especially in the realm of cable television; of caring more about the entertainment/sensation factor than a serious dissemination of information, news, and analysis. But, you know, that's TV. Print journalism--especially print newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have tried to hold themselves to a higher standard. Or so I thought. Certainly I know journalists at all those publications who take their job of researching, analyzing, and writing complex and important stories very seriously. They work hard at their craft, and try very hard to get it right.
I'm sure some would beg to differ, but to my way of thinking, if a paper wants people to take its content and writing seriously, turning the recruiting of new writers into a hyped reality-show entertainment contest seems like an appallingly bad idea. It certainly doesn't seem like an event that "enhances the Post's reputation." And I'm not even sure what it does for the paper's integrity.
I'll even go out on a limb and wager that the paper's editorial director didn't come up with this plan because nobody could figure out a better way to find new columnists. Just off the top of my head, I can think of several better ways to find new writers and give them a chance:
1. Actually advertise for the position, even if it's unpaid.
2. Ask the paper's current editors and writers what writers, blogs, websites, or other sources they read and respect, and recruit from there.
3. Sift through the writing of laid-off journalists who would give a lot for the chance to write for the Post, but wouldn't on their worst day submit themselves to a reality-show humiliation experience. There are a lot of talented people on that list.
4. Ask interested readers to submit 10 sample columns, and select the gems that shine through.
Clearly, the Post isn't doing this as the best way to get good writers on the staff. It's an entertainment/buzz ploy. But even on that front, I"m not sure the Post's reality show will be all that entertaining. Typing isn't much to watch. And if I want to see pundits go after each other, I can turn on CNN or any other cable station and watch polished professionals in the ring.
But the biggest question I have about this new marketing approach is how its advocates think it fits with the paper's identity. What, exactly, is the Post trying to market itself as? Is it a serious news publication that we're all supposed to read for its high-quality, professional reporting and analysis? If so ... this contest doesn't exactly burnish that image. If the paper wants to be a hip, fun, entertaining, and light-hearted good time ... well, this fits, but I'm not sure "writing lite" is what Ben Bradlee or Katharine Graham spent all those years trying to achieve.
The world is changing, and so is the publishing industry. But chasing younger, hipper trends isn't always a successful strategy--especially for a product whose success has been built on something more long-lasting, mature, and revered than the youth vote. Just ask the folks who came up with New Coke.
In the 1840s, a French economist named Frederic Bastiat wrote:In the economic sphere, an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen. There is only one difference between a good economist and a bad one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those which must be foreseen.
In layman's terms, this is the law of unintended consequences, and it plays out, like Murphy's Law, in more spheres than just economics. And while not all unintended consequences are negative, we notice most when an attempt to improve something ends up with an unexpected counter-effect. The saying "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" refers not only to those who think of doing good but don't act, but also those who think they're acting to a good end but end up causing harm.
The conundrum of the law is that, in many cases, the two types of effects are too closely linked to separate out cleanly. Eliminating the unintended negative consequence would require eliminating the positive effect, as well.
The first time I went to Sudan, for example, I interviewed aid workers and pilots who were flying relief supplies into regions of the country that had been decimated by 18 years of civil war. Without the supplies, people would die. But the local population had also grown dependent on the handouts, and some of the aid was being stolen by troops and helping to support continued fighting. What do you do in a situation like that? In that case, the need to stave off death by starvation was deemed more important than the subtler problems of stolen food and long-term economic impact.
But the issue gets stickier when the "seen" effect isn't addressing a need that's quite so dire or immediate. Take the case of a second-hand bookseller in Salisbury, England who claims he was put out of business by Oxfam--a non-profit organization that, ironically, was one of the organizations sending supplies into war-torn Sudan.
Oxfam does a lot of good work in the world. The United Nations camps for Darfur refugees I visited a couple of years ago in eastern Chad had been set up and were being run by Oxfam personnel who were sacrificing a lot to be there. Doing that work, of course, requires money. U.N. contracts supply part of the organization's operating budget, but Oxfam also relies heavily on charitable donations. According to a recent New York Times article on the subject, Oxfam also receives $500 million a year in support from the British government. Like many chartitable entities, from Goodwill to local hospital foundations, Oxfam also runs a series of shops where it sells donated goods. The proceeds help to support its development and aid programs around the world. It's a win-win for everyone -- donors get a tax break, starving children in Africa get food and clean water.
But here's the sticky part. Oxfam has opened up 130 used book stores around Europe, which bring in a reported $32 million a year ... and are competing with small, mom-and-pop used booksellers in the same neighborhoods. Oxfam has renovated, clean, and similarly-designed and decorated storefronts ... which it can afford to invest in, because it has government support, volunteer workers and tax-deductible, donated products. So it has a market advantage because of its special status as a non-profit organization--an advantage that at least a couple of booksellers claim has put them out of business.
The Oxfam spokesperson quoted in the Times article seemed a tad insensitive, at best, when he shrugged and quipped "Independent candle makers don't have the business they once had either. And if someone's business model is so marginal that an Oxfam shop opening nearby decimates it, then we are not the problem." This, mind you, from an organization that deals almost exclusively with people around the world whose "business models" are so marginal that they would not survive at all without outside assistance.
Marc Harrison, a former Catholic priest who had to close his second-hand bookstore when he couldn't pay his mortgage this past summer, accused Oxfam of "destroying lives here to save them elsewhere."
It's true, of course, that Oxfam's proceeds go to a good cause, instead of personal pockets--although part of its operating budget is the salaries of its worldwide personnel. It's also hard to argue that a former priest who has to close his second-hand bookshop because he can't pay his mortgage is a greedy capitalist. I would wager, in fact, that one doesn't open a second-hand bookstore for the golden profits it's going to garner, any more than people open animal shelters for the good, easy money involved. It's more about preserving something considered precious and finding orphans good second homes. And while the world is not fair, and businesses often have an edge over a competitor because of more favorable loan or other business terms, the Oxfam case does seem to represent particularly unfair competition.
It's an argument that has been raised before, in many different sectors. In trade negotiations in the aerospace industry, Boeing argued that Airbus had an unfair edge because of its government subsidies; Airbus argued back that Boeing had benefitted from NASA's research, which was a subsidy of a different sort. And NASA itself has been accused of unfair competition in soliciting new business to try to shore up its ever-changing and unsteady Congressional funding. NASA had always allowed private corporations to use its test facilities for a fee, but the fee used to be less than what other commercial test centers charged, because much of the overhead was covered by civil-servant salaries. Private industry objected, and NASA ceded the point, changing to a system of "full cost accounting" which put its costs at a more comparable level to that of private entities.
But it's easier to make those adjustments in a field where business is done by contract pricing. It would be harder to implement that kind of "level-playing-field" shift in the used bookstore market. The used clothing industry--also populated by many non-profit organizations--has a small commercial component, as well, but most for-profit "consignment stores" (the upmarket term for a used clothing outlet) tend to be pickier about the quality of their products to differentiate themselves from the everyday thrift stores. They also offer donors a piece of the profits, to lure customers who might otherwise donate the clothing to a non-profit outlet.
Perhaps booksellers could follow the same model, although the profit margin may not be big enough for that to create much incentive in the used book industry. But regardless, the question of non-profits generating funds through commercial means--while a staple of support for charitable organizations for many years--can sometimes unintentionally cross into some muddy, gray areas of commerce, fairness, and collateral damage. Successfully navigating the lines between good works, self-sustaining funding, and commercial competition and rights is a tough challenge. And a solution that preserves the good benefits while avoiding the negative side-consequences may prove as elusive in Salisbury as it did in Sudan.
Non-profit organizations do a tremendous amount of good in the world. But just as with the work they do around the world, the irony remains that a good intention, and even really good work, can sometimes carry with it "unseen" and unintended consequences. At home, as well as abroad.
(Photo: Flickr/greencandy8888)
(Photo: Flickr/greencandy8888)
At first glance, I thought that Alan Deutschman's new book, Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders, was an exercise in belaboring the obvious. Just as Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink can be reduced to "trust your gut," I thought Deutschman's premise that top CEOs and leaders need to "walk the walk, not just talk the talk," was too obvious to warrant repeating, let alone spend 176 pages discussing at length. But after reading both the book and the business section pages over the past few days, I've decided I was wrong. On two fronts.First, it appears that Deutschman's premise about the importance of management being authentic, honest, and not asking anyone beneath them to meet any standard or make any sacrifice they're not prepared to meet or make themselves is clearly not as obvious or widely understood as I once might have thought. Take yesterday's column by David Carr of the New York Times about the management at the Tribune Company arguing to a bankruptcy court--after leading the company into bankruptcy (in no small part because of a badly-conceived, heavily-leveraged purchase that left the company saddled with debt) and depriving more than 2,000 employees of jobs-- that the managers should be awarded between 45 to 60 million dollars in performance bonuses. The bonuses are necessary, the company's lawyers argued, because getting a company out of bankruptcy is hard work, and "not being rewarded for hard work and hard effort is demotivating."
No kidding. As Carr says, tell that to the 2,000 journalists and other Tribune personnel whose reward for hard work and hard effort was the elimination of their jobs.
The stunning obliviousness of the Tribune management reminds me of a definition I heard a long time ago for "chutzpah": someone who kills his or her parents and then pleads mercy from the court because he or she is an orphan. Run a company into bankruptcy, and then plead with the court that running a bankrupt company is hard, so you need extra money to do it. That takes ... well, chutzpah. Among other things. Not to mention the fact that $60 million (if all the management performance numbers were met) would give every laid-off staff person $30,000 a year. Think of the products the Tribune could actually produce for that amount of money.
Compare that, for a moment, to some of the military and business leaders Deutschman uses as examples--from Alexander the Great, who took more hits on the front line than any of his soldiers, to Norman Schwartzkopf, who insisted that officers in his command eat the same food and meet the same fitness standards as the troops they commanded. Or Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, who Deutschman says made every employee, including himself and his entire top management team, take every 10th day off without pay, rather than laying off any employees in the recession of 1970.
Another point Deutschman makes is that a great leader has, in the words of Urban Meyer, head football coach at the University of Florida (where Tim Tebow plays), "the ability to make the level of play of everyone else around him better." Again, a seeming statement of the ridiculously obvious. But consider this piece on Bank of America's outgoing CEO (and former chariman) Ken Lewis, who announced last week that he was retiring--although he said he'd stay on through December because a successor wasn't waiting in the wings. And why wasn't a successor waiting in the wings? Because, according to the article's author, Joe Nocera, Lewis "brutally fired many of the firm's most talented executives, seemingly afraid to be surrounded by potential successors."
So, Lewis wasn't well liked, or good at nurturing or inspiring good performers around him. But not every leader has to be liked to be successful, right? Possibly. But they have to be respected, at least. And ... oh yeah, successful. But during Lewis's tenure, he also made a series of less-than profitable business decisions and purchases, including the purchase of the notorious mortgage disaster known as Countrywide Financial, not to mention the Merrill Lynch mess, that caused the stock to return negative 13 percent while he was in charge.
And yet, Nocera reported, Lewis has taken home $60 million in compensation over the past three years. Clearly, the idea that a good leader--one worth compensating obscenely well-- should be someone who not only exceeds expectations but also inspires better performance in those around him and sacrifices with the troops, is not a patently obvious or well-understood idea at the top levels of Bank of America. Or among executives at any number of other financial institutions and corporations who have spent the last year boggling many people's minds at their capacity for tone-deaf and enduring senses of entitlement. So much so that the entitlement-laden gestures and complaints aren't even eyebrow-raising to many people at this point.
So maybe the more interesting question is: Are these executives beyond hope? Are really great leaders born, and these executives simply don't have what it takes? Or, even if great leadership traits can be learned, are they traits we have to learn in childhood, not at age 55? Or can they be rehabilitated into better behavior and leadership?
Deutschman doesn't get into whether leadership traits are innate or acquired. But he does sketch out, at the end of his book, some traits that he believes are essential in a great "leadership personality": focus; empathy; relentless authenticity; belief not only in themselves, but also in others and in change itself; resilience; and dogged persistence.
Another person's list might differ. But I found the list interesting food for thought. For one thing, "empathetic" isn't generally the first word we hear when Wall Street and corporate titans are described. Brilliant, focused, ruthless, sharply analytic, and relentless, yes. But authentic and empathetic ... not so much. That might explain a lot. (Also ironic to see empathy given such big play in a business book, after all the argument about it in Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings.)
But just for argument's sake, let's say Deutschman is right, and the traits he lists really are the essential pre-requisites for a great executive or leader. Can they be taught in business school, or in a business setting? Or do we simply have to start looking for a different kind of leader in the first place?
Evolutionary psychologists are only beginning to look at how individual personality traits may evolve (as opposed to more basic domains of survival, sexuality, parenting, community, cooperation and aggression). But a recent paper on the subject by David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Austin, noted that "virtually all personality characteristics ... show heritabilities in the range of 50% and substantial cross-time stability, even over spans of decades."
Which still leaves 50 percent, of course. And education and training can certainly help strengthen or mitigate someone's natural tendencies. After all, belief in a person's ability to change is, itself, one of the traits Deutschman says great leaders possess.
On the other hand, if the traits Deutschman lists as important really do have a significant genetic component, and personality traits have substantial stability over time, then it might not do troubled executives much good to read Deutschman's book. But even if that's the case, it could still prove useful to the rest of us ... if only in underscoring the seemingly obvious fact that we might want to give a little more attention to the personality traits of who we hire to run things. Walking the walk, it turns out, is a lot harder, and rarer, than one might imagine.
Photo Credit: Flickr User lumaxart
Every strength has a flip side, as my mother always says. The same communication trait that makes it easy for me to write volumes of words also means that, at times, I talk an awful lot. Someone driven to excel may also drive everyone around them nuts with their singular focus. A tendency to take bold risks can lead to astounding success ... or reckless disaster. And according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, that interconnected relationship between strength and weakness may exist in the field of creativity, as well--in the rather scary form of an actual genetic link between high levels of creativity and mental illness. The idea that highly creative people have more than their share of depression, alcoholism, and other psychological issues or struggles is not new, and anecdotal examples are legion. Van Gogh cut off his ear and suffered depressing visions before finally committing suicide. The writer David Foster Wallace (who gave such a sharp, witty, irreverent and highly memorable commencement address to Kenyon College graduates in 2005 that the Wall Street Journal even saw fit to reprint it) committed suicide last year at the age of 46. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other writers, artists, and creative individuals have also taken their own lives. And that doesn't even get into the much larger group who created wonderful works of art and brilliance even as they battled serious and debilitating depression or other problems.
There are also numerous examples of more technically-inclined geniuses who have struggled with demons of madness. A new graphic novel/comic book called Logicomix delves into the world of the real-life mathematicians who relentlessly pursued a quest for logical certainty in mathematics throughout the 20th century. (A New York Times review of it can be found here.) One of the book's themes, aside from the pursuit of logical perfection, is the mathematicians' struggles to ward off mental illness. One of the logicians, Bertrand Russell, apparently claimed that it was only his love of mathematics that saved him from suicide--although two of his children developed schizophrenia and killed themselves. Another logician, Georg Cantor, died in an insane asylum, and a third, Kurt Godel, became so paranoid about being poisoned that he starved himself to death.
What causes these brilliant, creative minds to fall into such dark places? Does obsession with an idea--a common trait in those driven to pursue its exploration and expression, whether in words or formulas--somehow disconnect us with an important perspective or grounding that a more balanced focus provides? Or are brilliantly artistic or creative people actually predisposed to mental illness?
Possibly the latter, according to just-published research conducted by Hungarian psychiatrist Szabolcs Keri. (You can access the Psychological Science article here, although there's a charge to view it.) In order to explore a possible genetic link between creativity and psychosis, Keri focused his research on the T/T variant of the Neuregulin 1 gene. Neuregulin 1 plays a role in a variety of brain processes, including development and strengthening communication between neurons. But the T/T variant of the gene has also been associated with a greater risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Keri's research study was admittedly limited. He interviewed 128 study participants, all of whom had "high intellectual and academic performance." The group was divided by genotypes (variants) into three groups: T/T, C/T, and C/C. Keri found no difference in the groups on the basis of gender or IQ. But he found a distinct difference when it came to scores on creativity tests. The T/T group scored significantly higher in terms of creativity; almost twice as high as the C/C group in some categories.
Why would the T/T group score so much higher on creativity? It may be that the "reduced cognitive inhibition" associated with that variant allows for more creative mental wanderings in more ways than one. A terrific imagination can also lead to terrific nightmares. But what I found particularly interesting was Keri's thought on why the species would retain a gene variant that caused such big problems. According to Darwin, after all, a gene variant that led to debilitating disorders should die out. And yet, the T/T gene variant persists.
"Why are genetic polymorphisms related to severe mental disorders retained in the gene pool of a population?" Keri asked. "A possible answer is that these genetic variations may have a positive impact on psychological function."
The sword, in other words, might have two sides. Creativity is good for advancing the species, even if it sometimes leads to madness. That kind of evolutionary trade-off also doesn't seem to be unique to the neuregulin 1 gene. Research published this past June by John McDonald, chair of the Biology department at Georgia Tech and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute, raised the possibility that the same characteristic that allowed human brains to develop so much bigger and faster than other primates may also be the reason human cells are more susceptible to cancer.
"The results from our analysis suggest that humans aren't as efficient as chimpanzees in carrying out programmed cell death. We believe this difference may have evolved as a way to increase brain size and associated cognitive ability in humans, but the cost could be an increased propensity for cancer," McDonald was quoted as saying.
In a ideal world, the strengths could be separated from the weaknesses, and a perfect species could evolve. But the same law of unintended consequences that plagues so many advances we make, from increased longevity leading to overpopulation problems and antibiotics creating super-resistant bacteria to computer-controlled systems becoming more vulnerable to viruses and hackers ... may be just a continuation of a dichotomy that's been playing out in our DNA for centuries. Our strengths create potential vulnerabilities. There is a dark side to The Force.
A military person would call this phenomenon a "reverse salient." A practictioner of Taoism would say it's the balance of yin and yang. My mother would simply say it's the way of the world. But if these researchers' hypotheses are correct, it means that growth and creativity are important enough to the species that nature has decided they're worth even the ravages of cancer and mental illness to preserve. And that, itself, is a thought worth pondering.
(Photo: Flickr/Eddi 07)
(Photo: Flickr/Eddi 07)
Lane Wallace
