Dan Erwin

Bret Stephens, Formerly WSJournal, Now NYTimes

The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it.  Abbie Hoffman

Consistently, Bret Stephens has knocked out some intriguing and illuminating opinion commentaries. Saturday's post on The Trump Presidency: 'No Guardrails," is another of those not to miss. He ticks off today's analogy to the lack of "guardrails," quoting an article from the Wall Street Journal attempting to locate the source of the moral chaos that had engulfed America in 1993. The editorial response was that "Certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct."

Stephens, an Israeli hawk and a conservative, is neither a political naif nor a prude. And the question he asks is how his Republican party members went the way of moral and political chaos. Like the 1960s Democrats, he argues that part of the problem is indebted to professors, politicians and journalistic commentators who said that the their actions were understandable and justifiable. 

Stephen's article was initiated as a result of Scaramucci's outburst of expletives. Stephens makes clear that, of itself, it is insignificant, but it also represents what this administration is and will continue to be--with "the blessing of an intellectual class that has done as much to betray honorable conservatism as the liberal intelligentsia of the sixties did to betray honorable liberalism."

Commentary is here.

Why You Need to Think and Talk on Two Tracks (Part One)

One of the most difficult problems with collaborative conversation is staying on track. Smart people inevitably get waylaid by tangential ideas that are suggested by their meeting interactions. That’s precisely why many think that team meetings are such a waste. Yet solutions and decisions in today’s business world inevitably require conversations to gain the buy-in of diverse teams and multiple business disciplines.

One underlying limitation business groups face is that few participants have a good handle on sequencing ideas. We used to think that software coders, who constantly work with digital sequencing, should be able to manage linkages. We’ve found, however, that the majority of technical people are unable to make the transfer of digital sequencing to conversational sequencing. Those with an extensive background in the liberal arts are able to sequence conversations fairly well, but most technicians, lacking the arts background, have a great deal of difficulty sequencing conversations. Add the sequencing difficulties to the highly analytical nature of development and conversational misunderstanding becomes the status quo, costing business billions of dollars and sometimes costing jobs for the less capable. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos deals with this problem by forcing all his senior team executives to write out their proposals, using a format forcing reasoned linkages and sequencing in six pages prior to every team meeting. The first 30 minutes of each meeting is spent reading the proposals: then they’re ready to converse...

Thinking:It's Not As Easy As You Think (Part 1)

  
            Nothing is as frightening as ignorance in action.  --Goethe

Nearly a year ago, after reading our blog, Habitual Striking vs. Mindful “Stucking,” one of our regular blog readers asked a formidable question: “So how did you learn to think?” Business people spend a great deal of their time thinking about how to solve problems and make decisions. Furthermore, thinking was at the center of Dan's business as a consultant. That meant it needed to be spot-on and really smart. As a result, his thinking was driven by a mish-mash of psychological issues: fear, insecurity, curiosity and a profound need to achieve.  But our answer to that reader is formidable, not least because of very human weaknesses, but also because business thinking about problem solving and decision making have gone through a number of stages over the past fifty years.  

More than that, effective thinking is really hard, even for scientists and philosophers...