Sleeping with the Fish

Stanley Fish says we should get rid of honest leaders and replace them with ones who can "get the job done." I totally disagree. If it was just some guy on the bus saying that, I might ignore it - but Mr. Fish is an Opinion writer for the New York Times. He is speaking what many people are thinking, and even if my voice shakes, I must try to respond.

He speaks his mind in his column "Think Again" in his most current post "Integrity of Craft: The Leadership Question" (Dec 9, 2007).

And, to be fair, the ideas he proposes are mostly those of the famous historical contemporary of Christopher Colulmbus, an advisor to Western kings and author of "The Prince" , namely, Machiavelli. I link to the Wikipedia introduction because that article seems accessible and balanced and has good links to further reading. Quoting from it:

Machiavelli's best known work is The Prince, in which he describes the arts by which a Prince (a ruler) can retain control of his realm...

A careless reading of The Prince could easily lead one to believe that its central argument is "the ends justify the means" - ... that any evil action can be justified if it is done for a good purpose. This is a limited interpretation, however, because Machiavelli placed a number of restrictions on evil actions. Machiavelli does not dispense entirely with morality nor advocate wholesale selfishness or degeneracy. Instead he clearly lays out his definition of, for example, the criteria for acceptable cruel actions (it must be swift, effective, and short-lived). ...

While Machiavelli emphasized the need for morality, the sole motivation of the prince ought to be the use of good and evil solely as instrumental means rather than ends in themselves. A wise prince is one who properly exercises this proper balance. Pragmatism is a guiding thread through which Machiavelli bases his philosophy. The Prince should be read strictly as a guidebook on getting to and preserving power.... the ideal society is not the aim.

In fact, Machiavelli emphasizes the need for the exercise of brute power where necessary and rewards, patron-clientalism etc. to preserve the status quo. Machiavelli's assumption, that human nature is fundamentally flawed, is also reflected in the need for brute force to attain practical ends.

Reasoning from that, Fish concludes that:

Don’t blame [Katie] Couric for these softballs. They were devised, CBS News says, in response to prospective voters who are saying things like, “Our president has to be a person of integrity,” “morals, strong morals” and “character is everything.”

I beg to differ. Integrity — the quality of standing up for the same values in every situation no matter whom you’re speaking to — is probably not a qualification for navigating the treacherous and ever-shifting waters of domestic and international diplomacy. Morals strongly held may preclude the flexibility and compromise so essential to political negotiation. And if character were really everything, candidates would be judged by their relationships with family and friends (Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton might not fare too well if that were the measure) rather than by their ability first to recognize, and then to deal with, the many problems facing the nation....

“the question of who is the better man,” Hobbes says, “has no place in the condition of mere nature” — and everything to do with his political skills. ...

Is he good at the job? — does he have the aptitude? — is a more pertinent question than is he good?

So, although I disagree totally with Machiavelli, Hobbs, and Fish on this key point, I thank them for laying out the question so clearly.

I am always quick to point out in this weblog that things that look one way at one level look quite different at a different level, and we need to be careful and do a good search before we reach our conclusions. What looks "obvious" locally may not be obvious, or even correct, when viewed globally.

So, this is a fair question. Is it true that leadership does not require honesty and integrity?

Fish summarizes his argument (that I find captures the seductive Kool-Aid of this error):

Integrity — the quality of standing up for the same values in every situation no matter whom you’re speaking to — is probably not a qualification for navigating the treacherous and ever-shifting waters of domestic and international diplomacy. Morals strongly held may preclude the flexibility and compromise so essential to political negotiation. And if character were really everything, candidates would be judged by their relationships with family and friends (Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton might not fare too well if that were the measure) rather than by their ability first to recognize, and then to deal with, the many problems facing the nation.

So, what's wrong with that argument? Isn't Fish just being "practical" as opposed to some sort of idealistic "boy scout" approach?

Well, first, Machiavelli truly didn't care about improving the world. His work is indeed a guide to those who taste power, like the taste, and want more, regardless what the long-term consequences are of their reign of power.

And, to be fair, 500 years ago who was monarch and how they ruled did not have much impact on global warming or the fate of all mankind. Things were simpler. Mistakes were less important. At the end of a king's reign, the world was pretty much the same as it was at the start, and it was largely a question of who got to be king for that period.

So, yes, Machiavelli is probably right on the issue that, in the short run, people who abruptly cheat and lie and steal have an advantage over those who are honest or worse, who are gullible and made no provision that their leader was lying to them and simply out to consolidate his own power.

But, that is only part of the picture, and we need the rest to see what's happening. How does this strategy play out in the long run?

First, the expectations of a leader are a strong shaping force on everyone being led. This is the whole core of management's "Theory X" (people are bad) versus "Theory Y" (People are good). In fact, research shows, you get a self-fulfilling prophecy either way at least in the corporate world. If employees or coworkers or students are treated as if they are evil and stupid, they will justify your expectations - but, paradoxically, if they are treated as if they are good and competent, they will also justify your expectations.

That's what leadership is about, within the organization - setting a tone for how everyone else should behave. And research shows that it is a very powerful tone indeed, at least within the corporate world. We need to look at how strategies play out at different scales and try to sort out what is noise or accident of perspective, and what is the underlying reality. So, what happens in the corporate world is relevant to thinking about the nation-state world. In fact, as huge global corporations get to the size of small countries, or larger, the two worlds merge.

So, what corporate model do we like? Enron?

Well, again the question gets down to : Is it ok if the CEO is a crook, so long as they are very effective crooks and making money for us while they're getting rich themselves? Obviously some people think so, and have no difficulty investing in, say, Tobacco companies and other Merchants of Death, so long as there is short-term profit in it. After all, they may reason, "God is dead, Hell doesn't exist, it's OK to kill millions of people a year for profit as long as no blood actually gets on my hands, and besides, look, we're getting away with it, you idiots!"

I guess they do reason that way, in fact.

But this "getting away with it" part needs some further thought.

The merchants of sub-prime mortgages also thought they were "getting away with it" and, to some extent, they may in fact have ripped off several hundred billion dollars and stashed it safely offshore and left the mess were all in now for everyone else to clean up.

As I said above, the consequences of these actions are getting larger and larger. This isn't arguing over who rules some mud huts and peasant farmers in a 40 square mile kingdom anymore. This latest rip-off threatens to bring down the entire world economy, and the ripples and after-shocks are still reverberating, with daily news that "the worst is yet to come."

So, here's a news flash. Sometimes the consequences of our actions are delayed.

In fact, I was having a rant about that in the car yesterday with my wife as partially willing audience. It seemed to me (still does) that many policies, like say the Federal Reserve's management of interest rates, are based on what's visible today, not on what's been already set in motion that hasn't yet come home to roost.

Like gasoline prices. Suddenly, as it becomes clear Christmas shopping isn't going to be a joy to investors, the price of gasoline falls a quarter a gallon, despite tighter world supplies. Well, it's a little late for that. That should have been 4 months ago. This is like driving a car by not starting to slow down for a turn until you get even with the road you want to turn onto, and then hitting the brakes and turning the steering wheel -- you're going to overshoot and end up in the adjacent yard, at best.

Because some things take a while to have effect, we learn the hard way from experience that we need to have some "lead time". Things have delayed effects. We know that, sort of, even if we mostly keep forgetting it and learning it again the hard way. The time to work on that term-paper is 3 weeks before it's due, not the night before it's due. But that's "hard" to do, for humans, and mostly the lights are on all night, again, every term, every paper, as we repeat the same mistake over and over again.

On a national level, the US seems to have nurtured many foreign leaders with the mental model that crooks are ok if they're our crooks -- Sadaam Hussein, Noriega, Osama Bin Laden come to mind to name a few. Then after we've funded and supported them and they turn out to, well, be thieves and terrorists, we turn around and spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to undo that choice, and make another just as bad, based on this Machiavellian model of life.

Morality aside, it seems to be a very inefficient process that keeps breaking down. And it's a very expensive process, in dollars and lives, or entire cultures and civilizations.

But morality is largely the present reminder of lessons we learned once long ago, and will learn again in the future if we don't listen now. Morality is a way of trying to protect ourselves, not from the bad other people in the world, as Fish describes, but from ourselves and our tendency to take the easy road, the tempting short-term gain that we will regret in the morning.

So, back to the core question. Is it possible to be both honest and strong? Are we stuck forever having to pick between honest wimps and dishonest strong men for our leaders?

As I said, clues to the answer to this may be in the corporate sector, not the history books. Large corporations are larger than small countries now, with larger budgets and way more power.

So, forget the nation-state level for a moment and ask the same question about or corporations. Is our only choice for CEOs Rambo-style crooks with big whips, or honest wimps who won't be able to hold the center in place?

Here's the issue: This is another one of those scale-sensitive thingies that look different depending on how far back you stand. It's like the cornstarch vat that is a solid if you run fast and a liquid if you move slowly. We need to pull out tools that work when both ends are true.

In the short run, a person who suddenly cheats may have a huge advantage over one who doesn't. This much is obvious. And often they are not "caught", much to our frustration.

But, the devastation doesn't need anyone outside to catch it to work, because it is self-working. Once you pull out the safety pins, it starts picking up speed downhill on its own. Believing that cheating works, what will they do? Well, they'll do it again, of course. And again. And again. It will become a lifestyle, and they'll shift around their rationalizations to adjust to it.

And, like a cancer, it will start growing in size. First some small cheat. Then if that works, a larger one. If that works, a larger one, and so on.

In fact, this describes a pathway known in game theory as "The gambler's ruin." Abandoning internal self-control, the person will start cheating more and more, on more things, in more ways, each time shifting their attitude a little more to make this behavior seem more justified, always seeking new evidence to support their conclusion that "everyone does this", etc.

But, God aside, the rest of the world is not dumb. People see. People know. Things start to show more and more, to be more and more brazen and self-justifying. Things one thought had been successfully covered up come back to light. People who have been cheated, annoyingly, get upset and start comparing notes.

But, again, the destruction doesn't come from without. It comes from within.

Increasingly convinced that "everyone does it", the cheat will now start to expect that every person they meet is similarly motivated and trying to rip them off while keeping a smiling face. Life becomes increasingly filled with enemies everywhere, on all sides. No one can be trusted. Everyone is plotting your destruction.

And, God forbid you succeed at cheating and acquire a lot of wealth. The more wealth you squirrel away, the more it will attract people who want to take it away from you. You end up only associating with crooks-like-you, now being persuaded that "everyone does it."

In fact, almost every large-scale con man I can recall, when finally caught, says something like "Everyone does this. Why are you picking on me?" Their world, in fact becomes a living Hell, filled only with people out to destroy them.

I've discussed my "vertical loop" model of any cybernetic being. This is the fundamental requirement of being adaptive and surviving in a changing world.

This loop is broken by distrust and paranoia, believing that every person who disagrees with you is trying to "bring you down", labeling them "enemies" and dismissing their comments and advice as mere efforts to destroy you or make you look bad. The upwards pathway breaks down, and news of reality can no longer reach the top.

Now things start to pick up speed downward. Detached from reality, it still becomes clear that "things aren't working." Orders are given but the results aren't what were expected. Clearly, this is due to enemies within, as opposed to being mistaken about the situation. Enemies are purged, reducing dissent, increasing distance from reality.

Things start to spiral downward, out of control despite, or in fact precisely because of the misguided efforts to achieve control and reduce dissent. In the corporate world, this is about where the CEO takes the $100,000,000 in stock options and quits. Stupid company. Totally unmanageable. Filled with crooks and idiots. Good riddance.

So, back yet again to the core question. Is it possible to be both honest and strong? Are we stuck forever having to pick between honest wimps and dishonest strong men for our leaders?

The question comes down to this: define "strong."

Is "strong" being able to rip-off your friends and potential allies whether they aren't looking or are? Is that "strong"?

Or is "strong" being able to get past the temptation to take a short-term gain and the attached long-term loss, and instead select the short-term loss with the long-lasting, long-term gain?

I know MBA's in this country are into short-term gain and damn the consequences. I've seen them, I've got the degree, I've taught them. I used to run the Cornell Go club, where "Go" is a board game with white and black pieces, called "men" that form "armies" and try to take over the whole board. This game was required knowledge of all the Samurai warriors in Japan, long ago, as it requires learning the trade offs between short term material gain and long-term positional gain.

I could always beat MBA's who predictably always went for the short-term highly-visible material gain, (taking pieces) as opposed to the long-term positional advantage of getting some advance army in the right place that will matter later on -- when it will be too late to move there.

So, they'd win a piece, win a few pieces, win a piece, etc. as I put out bait and led them down the garden path. Then, as the game came to a close, they'd lose everything and be amazed. How did things change "so suddenly?" was their response. Well, nothing changed suddenly. They were making those trade offs, maximizing the present at the expense of the future, when, Oh my God, time passed. Suddenly, who could have predicted it, it turned into the future that they had been busy gutting in order to have a better life that was now in the past. They had done such a good job of undermining and selling out their own future that it was trivial to wipe them out, once it arrived.

In my mind, "strong" would mean understanding that some present pain and self-control is needed to reach a desired future state, and being able to discuss this honestly and bring about agreement by the crowd that this hard, up-hill trade-off is what we are all willing to do, and then doing it. Strong like Samurai Warriors, less concerned about instant gratification and more concerned about where this will all turn out.

Not "strong" like a warrior who can win every battle, and still manage to lose the war.

But, it is true that this kind of "strong" I advocate isn't entirely a property of a person - it's an emergent property of the whole system. Individuals are weak in all sorts of ways, and always will be. I've reflected on that before. You can't select a leader, put them in an isolated office, and walk away. It's more a leadership-facilitated-group-strength that is the goal, with the "leader" at the center of the group, strong enough to be humble and overcome the usual temptations and sources of blindness, the usual ways that power leads to corruption and corruption leads to global collapse.

This isn't a blind boy scout model, it's a fully-eyes open model knowing full well what humans are capable of, on both the upside and downside, and knowing full well and never forgetting for a minute that "I am weak but we are strong" -- that is, able to seek advice, able to hear advice, able to accept advice even if it is locally unpleasant.

It seems to me precisely that a person of integrity and honesty is the empty canvas on which such group power can be sketched and fleshed out and emerge, over time. Some one who sincerely believes this is about "us" not about "me", but isn't so silly as to think everyone shares that view.

There is no reason on earth that I can see
that "we" cannot always be made stronger than "me".

Any strategy that is based on activities that break bonds between people, instead of building them, seems like ultimately a losing strategy, when faced with some other opponent who has figured out how to build social bonds.

There is no way that any selfish guy we put in power will remain "our" selfish guy. By definition, we just selected someone who doesn't believe in "us". On some corporate or nation-state scale, we'll just replay the Saddam Hussein theme song over and over again -" put them into power, boost them up, hey what the hell they're turning on us, send in the army and try to undo what we just did, by, oh, I know, putting a different crook into power, boosting them up, hey what the hell, etc. etc etc."

Hello?

To quote the movie "Evolution" I think we have found that "Kakaw Kakaw" doesn't work.

Mr. Fish, I believe, is all wet.

And unable to see the water.

A few more "victories" like the last few, and we'll lose the entire game, like my MBA's.

I, personally, would prefer a leader, at any level, who was perfectly honest about what they wanted and delivered on that promise, and who could deliver because the honesty gave them a group emergent power of trust that wasn't possible to the proud-to-be-a-crook alternative. I'd prefer someone who was human, knew they were weak, and made up for it by drawing out and drawing on the power of the rest of us on a daily basis.

I'd prefer someone who could listen over someone who was so busy talking they couldn't hear me, or someone so proud of their perfection that they can't take advice.

No single person can lead any large organization any more - corporate or nation-state or cultural. They've become too big, too complex, too confusing, too interactive. We need leaders who know how to consult more than ones who think they have wisdom cornered, because whatever they know today, even if it's right, won't still be true tomorrow.

The whole beast has to be adaptive, and that means cybernetic, and that means a vertical loop, and that means honest listening at the top. I can't understand how any other model of governance could be stable over time in a rapidly changing world where humans are frail and subject to temptations, but the stakes are high and mistakes are increasingly costly.

I agree entirely with Fish that a leader has to be practical and pragmatic - I just disagree as to what reality they have to be practical regarding.

In the world I see, we desperately need to rebuild social bonds and overcome fragmentation. We need more transparency and honesty. We need to invest in long-term relationships, not gut them.

The power to lead is not invested in any man or woman -- it's invested in all of us working as one.

I don't know who those leaders will be, but I feel confident that they will not be guided by Machiavelli. If Machiavelli is the best we can do, we should just close the shop.