Dan Erwin

Best, Most Hilarious, Politico Introduction of Mayor Pete Buttegieg

I couldn't stop laughing when Buttigieg introduced himself this way: "This is the only chance you'll ever get to vote for a Maltese-American, left-handed, Episcopalian, gay, war veteran, mayor millennial." Now that's what I call authenticity.

Here's how Andrew Sullivan compared Buttigieg to Trump:

Trump would be the oldest president in history at 74; Buttigieg would be the youngest at 39. Trump landed in politics via his money and celebrity after years in the limelight; Buttigieg is the mayor of a midsize midwestern town, unknown until a few weeks ago. Trump is a pathological, malevolent narcissist from New York, breaking all sorts of norms. Buttigieg is a modest, reasonable pragmatist, and a near parody of normality. Trump thrives on a retro heterosexual persona; Buttigieg appears to be a rather conservative, married homosexual. Trump is a coward and draft dodger; Buttigieg served his country. Trump does not read; Buttigieg does. Trump’s genius is demonic demagoguery. Buttigieg’s gig is careful reasoning. Trump is a pagan; Buttigieg is a Christian. Trump vandalizes government; Buttigieg nurtures it.

To put it simply, Mayor Pete seems almost designed to expose everything that makes the country tired of Trump.

Doing a Better Job with People Analytics

There are some jobs that you just can’t trust algorithms to do. Yet more and more organizations are trusting algorithms to make their people decisions. Yet, writing in the Sloan Review, Wharton’s Cade Massey makes what to me is an obvious point. Objective distance is overrated. Although many in artificial intelligence think you can reason better when you’re uncorrupted by the subjective, that doesn’t follow in many people decisions.

The facts are that when you’re dealing with hiring, developing managing and trying to retain people, the better approach is about relationships and trust. That doesn’t mean you need to ignore those algorithms, but that you need to work them in tandem to people. For some analysts, “networking is not only uncomfortable, but dubious.” This mindset can be a real handicap. Being a loner eliminates the safety net of both information and goodwill. And like it or not, sometimes when you’re let go, it’s not about your skills, but about the good will and relationships you’ve failed to create.

I’ve used Richard Burt’s seminal studies on networking for years—and found that it’s applicability in organizations is profound. Decades of research reveal that people gain professional benefits –including both formal and informal power—from the quality and size of their social network—their relationships. I put “quality” first in that sentence, because some confuse size alone with the power of their networking. Quality is usually more important than size. But don’t confuse your algorithmic brain with the total of reality. Algorithms ain’t everything. And being a loner will inevitably get you the short end of the stick, and sometimes serious trouble..

The Trouble with Saints

If you’ve read sociology, you’ve probably read Max Weber. Weber (1864—1920), one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, is the update to Machiavelli. Weber's brief pamphlet, Politics as a Vocation, is the best prescription for politics, especially the politics of the past two years. So, I was both amused and delighted by a brief article in the 1/24 issue of The Economist on Max Weber’s enduring wisdom. Lecturing in the midst of German turmoil of 1918, The Economist emphasizes how his insights still make sense of politics.

Germany was in a far worse state than our Trump world. Rival Berlin factions battled for power in the streets. Several leaders were murdered. On January 28th of that year, Max Weber lectured liberal students “On Politics as a Vocation,” one of the most important contributions to modern political theory, as valuable a map to the contemporary political landscape as it was 100 years ago. (The thirty-page pamphlet is available free on the web, via Google.)

Weber was contemptuous of leaders solely determined to stick to their principles, whatever the consequences. “This ethic of conviction was the hallmark of saints, pacifists and purist revolutionaries...

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

Lifelong Learning for Lifelong Employability

What’s the best way to go about business learning and stay abreast of constant change and new developments? In the February issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, Beth Davies and colleagues go beyond my question and focus on learning for lifelong employability. They set up their conclusions by distinguishing between the skills people have and the actual skills companies need. Then, of course, they add artificial intelligence into the mix, making for an absolutely superb analysis of human competitive advantage and the tools necessary for lifelong learning.

Their analysis of the necessary tools for adult learning (andragogy) covers the most salient issues from learning research.

1. Relationships help in learning by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system conserves energy, slows the heart rate and lowers the blood pressure particularly after fight or flight responses. But under the pressure of business learning, relationships stimulate this “calming down” system, enabling people to process new ideas and learn more effectively than when working alone.Largely, I’ve found, it was because of traditionally competitive relations that only began to break down in the 1980s and ‘90s. In spite of the hullaballoo about AI, I’ll bet the majority of organizations are still in the middle ages regarding learning and development—except, that is, for technology groups...

Plainly Corrupt or "Legally" Corrupt?

Recently a delightful, young Middle Eastern couple and their small children moved into my apartment building. Like a number of new residents, they are exceptionally well educated. He, for example has a PhD in health economics from an American University. Both worked for a few years at well-known Silicon Valley corporations, but are here for further education.

Knowing my background, the young man and I sat down to talk about some linguistic rules. He was searching for day care for his younger daughter and wanted to know what he could and couldn’t say in an interview. And how best to find out whether a given school center would be best for his daughter. It’s rare for an international to ask about linguistic rules, so his questions of me were not only unusual, but especially astute.

After I laid out some protocols and suggested several different ways to gain as much information as possible for his decision, we got to talking about...

Walking in the Snow Like a Penguin

Tom Sacco shot me this cartoon, reminding me that walk like a penguin also needs to be added to walking in winter.

Thanks again, Tom.

How to Walk Safely in the Winter

I would never have thought about this except that one of our new apartment residents is from Louisiana. She’s terrified about driving in the snow and ice and just as frightened by walking. But I found her response to Minnesota winter just hilarious. Her brother recently flew in from Louisiana, landing on one of the coldest days thus far—minus 25 degrees—told her that she needed to come home. “Minnesota is uninhabitable. Why would anyone want to live in this country?” I gave her a few suggestions about how to walk in the winter--and especially how to deal with driving when you're sliding around.

For those of you, like me, who enjoy winter and snow and like to take an occasional outdoor walk, here are a few tips for safe walking.

--Dress in layers. At 20 below I’m comfortable in a t-shirt, regular shirt, hoodie and my lightweight Patagonia winter coat with hood. Some of my friends wear longies underneath their pants along with warmly lined boots, but I’ve never found them necessary.

--Cover your extremities. If it’s below zero, you may want a warm mask or big scarf to cover your face..

Functional Vs. Dysfunctional Anger

Over the years I’ve met with clients and business people who were resistant to working with a colleague because he or she was an “angry asshole.” But when I analyzed their statement by talking to other colleagues, I found that so-called “angry” people were a very mixed bag. Their anger differed significantly. It took me awhile to figure out that some anger served a useful purpose and some did not. But that the differences are rarely clear to most people. What I learned was that it was often helpful and enlightening to push back on “useful” anger, but that I was liable to get burned by another person’s anger.

Intuitively, I could usually figure out the anger that was being displayed, knowing whether to charge ahead or back off. Furthermore, in my seminary studies (1960) I had stumbled across a very insightful statement by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable and crimes unchecked.” That single statement had caused me to rethink..

The Impeachment Process Is Worthwhile--Even If the Senate Refuses to Impeach

Though this historical review of the impeachment process won’t be published until the March edition of the Atlantic, all of its subscribers received a copy of Yoni Applebaum’s intriguing study a full month early. Applebaum, the senior editor for politics at the Atlantic, has all the right credentials—if that matters to you--including Columbia, a Brandeis PhD and teaching at Harvard. Obviously, an attempt to get the public thinking, I noticed a number of reviews of the study just a day after its publishing.

Because of the fiasco with Clinton, many legislators are wary of moving to impeachment. But the real worth of Applebaum’s review is to limit Trump’s power. From the initial pages of the review, Applebaum argues that the most serious charge is the attack upon the “bedrock of American democracy.”

Here then, are the five arguments Applebaum lays out in support of impeachment...