The curse of regional alienation.

I wish my Vancouver friends could see this, the front page of today's online Toronto Star. Emphasis on "Toronto." Actually, I wish every Canadian west of Lake of the Woods and east of Cornwall, Ont. could see it. And, oops, they can - it's online. They can see it in Singapore!

I've grown up with regional alienation. the one scar on my otherwise charmed Canadian existence. It started when my Grade 12 classmate Ross Macdonald, native of Red Deer, told me emphatically that Easterners don't like Westerners, don't even care about them. Veteran magazine feature writer Harry Bruce, a transplated Nova Scotian originally from Toronto, wrote "What about us Down Easters? When Westerners express their anger about the 'East', they mean Central Canada. But the real East is the Maritimes. I guess we don't even exist. I'd rather we were hated, like Toronto, than not even exist!" Some Newfoundlanders, taking note of that, reminded Mr. Bruce that "Maritimes" is the term for Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEI. Bruce obviously didn't give a rat's ass for Newfoundland and Labrador, or he would have used the term "Atlantic Canada."

And so it goes. 

Joe Clark has said Canadians are most easily united in their hatred of Toronto. (The former PM is a native of High River, Alberta.) And Mordecai Richler, Montrealer incarnate, some 20 years ago threw up his hands and described Canada as nothing but a stewing pot of grievances.

Canucks just one win from Cup

 

I've lived in Hogtown, my birthplace, all my life. From age 4 on, when I became aware of the world beyond the nursery, I've loved every part of this country, sight unseen, hoping more than anything to someday see the Rockies, Cape Breton and the Calgary Tower.

I suffer acrophobia now, alas. But until about 25 years ago my object in visiting any new place was to climb to the greatest height in town. My proudest youthful accomplishment was a really stupid but exhilarating midnight walk with the aforementioned Ross Macdonald on the pitched roof of the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, along the line where the two sides of the pitched roof meet. Yes, we had been into the Black & White, and no, we meant no disrespect, only awe.

I don't imagine that all Americans harbor a resentment toward New York, or that Lyon schoolchildren are taught to resent Paris. And I don't know why one the defining aspects of my past 49 years has been knowing that people elsewhere in the country - and that includes fellow Ontarians - just instinctively hate my hometown.  

Also, I've never tried to fight it. People believe what they wish to believe.

Quebec City is one of those few places I love more each time I visit. Paris, not so much. The Quebec capital is 99% francophone. I am 99% anglophone. My Quebecois vocab is maybe 50 words. I love the sound of Canadien French. The way the sentences are constructed. The nuances. There is music in it.

I love the riverside jogging trails that wind through Calgary, a triumph of smart urban planning the likes of which are rare on this continent. I could go on like this all day. I could work for Tourism Canada. But that would mean working in an office, and thus a parting with the indispensible Gus.

And I can tell you, in those 49 years of my sentient life, post-toddlerhood, I have never heard a Torontonian bad-mouth "the West." I have seen a handful of Torontonians returned from Winnipeg with T-shirts bearing extraordinarily large images of mosquitos. I ask, and they say, "Well, I didn't actually see any, wrong season I guess." What they've wanted me to know is how incredibly friendly Winnipeggers are.

We know there is no "West," and no "East." There is Calgary, one of the world's three energy capitals. A very different place from Edmonton, which of course is more of a university and government town. Saskatchewan routinely elects socialist governments and, naturally enough, is the birthplace of Medicare. Which, because we do pay heed of things "Western," we rolled out across the entire country. The Alberta-born Reform Party, in its current incarnation as the Conservative Party of Canada, now rules from coast to coast. And the Official Opposition in the federal parliament, the NDP, also hails from the West.

Halifax is where many of our brave soldiers, since the Boer War, have had their last moments on home soil before heading off to war in far-distant lands. It's also home to more universities, per capita, than maybe any town in North America. Torontonians send their kids there because Dalhousie has a reputation of having the best law school in the land, among other virtues; and the small "boutique" Nova Scotia universities with their enrolments of 2,500 students have the comparative intimacy of high school yet with first-class graduate and post-grad faculty and dorm mates. I've had maybe 70 people over the years, some native to the place and others having visited from Toronto, tell me that if Cape Breton doesn't take your breath away, you've been dead for some time and should be interred.

I can't help it that Toronto is the financial and media capital of the country. It could be worse. London and Paris have that distinction, plus they're national capitals.

Speaking of Ottawa, and what travel writer Jan Morris describes as the most beautiful ensemble of government buildings in the world, and the tulips, and the winter commuters skating to work on the Rideau...As I said, I could go on.

The Canucks might win the Cup. I hope they do. I'm mostly just thrilled they made the finals. And the day they did, the other five Canadian NHL teams having fallen short, that very day the Vancouver Canucks became "Canada's Team."

Toronto is highly populated with diehard fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Red Sox, the Rangers, the Lakers, Manchester U, U Conn, Michigan State, Britain's Premier League, Portuguese football clubs and Kolkata cricket teams.

But in the biggest moments, we root for the last Canadians standing. Every Olympic rower hailing from Drumheller and every Canuck defenseman.

I feel these are words being cast to the winds. But some "Westerners," convinced that the world for Torontonians is bordered by Mississauga and Oshawa, will know that at least one person is telling you that isn't true.

I have visited your towns and cities, your farms, neat as a pin and with the Maple Leaf flying proudly out front, I've seen the brightly colored row houses of St. John's, the immense shipyards in Saint John, the racoons that gather each night outside the front door of the five-star restaurant in Stanley Park, hoping for scraps.

Come to where I live and see for yourself what we know of you.

These days, the 47 TV sets at Wayne Gretzky's downtown, one of the biggest sports bar in town, are tuned to the great Canucks-Bruins contest. As they are at the small, 20-seat Brazil sports cafe in my west-end neighborhood. Two of my greatest women friends, one on my street and one on Salt Spring Island, pull out their Canadiens jerseys when their native Montreal is Cup-bound, and also on the first day of the season. And draping balconies at several apartment tower near me in High Park is the remarkable flag Christopher Pratt designed for Newfoundland and Labrador. Which also is on display in the "flag room" of my apartment. (I collect flags.)

"The West wants in" was the rallying cry of the Reform Party at its founding in 1987. The West has always been in. Settling it was the first order of business of this new confederation, lest the Yanks snatch it from us, John A. Macdonald's abiding fear. The West has always mattered, just as preserving and strengthening the "French fact" on this continent has. Were we ever prouder of our country, we in Toronto, than the days when Newfoundlanders took homebound Americans off their planes diverted on 9/11 from U.S. airspace that had been closed and brought them into their homes? Hadn't these travelers been traumatized enough, the Newfoundlanders thought, without having to sit in a fuselage on an alien tarmac for who knew how many days? No one asked them to do it.

We take our money in Toronto and invest it in shares of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. and Montreal's Bombardier Inc. It was the massive, Toronto-based Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board that financed the start-up of WestJet Airlines Ltd.

I met WestJet founder and then CEO Clive Beddoe a few years ago in the Star's editorial board room, with its expansive view of the Toronto skyline. And his first words, spoken through a scowl, were, "So this is the centre of the universe." The centre of the effing universe, I'm sure he meant.

As if Beddoe had never been here before, hadn't come here for the money to get his airline off the ground. Hadn't inspected every inch of Pearson International, which handles half of Canada's air traffic, in advance of negotiating landing slots and hangar space. Again, it was another of those occasions when I didn't try to fight it. I imagine Beddoe felt like a humbled supplicant having to come East for money.

Well, grow up, I felt like saying.

When you're financing a mining play in the Amazon, you must go to Sao Paulo for the money. If your geologists outline a zinc formation 100 km southwest of Alice Springs, which is to say, the middle of effing nowhere, you then have to go to Sydney or Melbourne for the money. Dallas-based Exxon Mobil Corp.'s bankers are in New York. (There are no major Texas banks; they were all wiped out in the oil-price crash of the 1980s. There is precisely one major bank west of the Mississippi, Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco.) The German commercial money is in Frankfurt, so that's where you go to fund your Munich-based start-up. Alberta once had two "Schedule A" commercial banks -the first-rank designation - in the 1980s. They each failed through rank mismanagement after a brief life, as Oklahoma City's leading lender did at about the same time.

These are facts of life. We concentrate excellence: finance in Zurich and Tokyo; drugs in New Jersey London, France and Switzerland, energy in Calgary, tech in Waterloo, Ont. and Silicon Valley, fashion houses in Paris and Milan. And Tobasco sauce on Avery Island, La. The money that finances that activity is merely stored in Manhattan for a time. And then, as needed, it goes from the New York, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Toronto banks to where it's needed. To finance Athabasca and the Calgary-based oil plays in Yemen, Kazakhstan and the North Sea.

The Canucks got where they are playing as a team. Oddly, that's something that "teams" frequently don't do, undermined by superstars playing their own game or by rampant resentment in the clubhouse. 

Canada is a team that predates Confederation, fighting off Benedict Arnold's attack on Quebec City and the Yanks' 1812-14 assault on Canada East and Canada West, as they then known. We are a team among ourselves, Manitobans shoulder-to-shoulder with New Brunswickers in pioneering advanced medical treatments and higher crop yields. And that enables us to team more effectively abroad with other nations in humanitarian, peacekeeping, combat and scientific missions. I have a Montreal friend nominally based at a French-language university who routinely is teamed with fellow biologists in Dunedin, New Zealand and the University of Illinois.

Hating any place in yournative or adopted homeland is not a good plan - for you or your country. Actually, hating any place on the planet is a dubious proposition. Maybe that's why I don't fight it. I won't object, at least in person, to denigration of my hometown for fear of giving angry voice to a lifelong frustration. There will be no harsh words from me about fellow Canadians of goodwill. I know they must have reason for feeling as they do, and I respect that.

But do know that what you say of my beloved hometown hurts, it surely does. Hurts every bit as much as your sense of being ignored by mine. Heck, it hurts me to hear that Chicago is corrupt to the core. Have people who say that seen the Wrigley Tower or the city's "front lawn," and have they spent any time in Lagos - or Newark? And do they know the mountains Cory Brooker moved turning Newark in the right direction?

I thought it facile when first I learned of how IBM founder Thomas Watson erected plaques bearing the single word "Think" throughout the offices of the International Business Machines Co. I was wrong. If we don't starting thinking more about our prejudices, and how we undermine ourselves by harboring and giving voice to them, we'll have to start making signs.

It is about you.

David Brooks, whom I swear emerged from the womb at age 37, on the unique challenges facing today's college graduates, in a column headlined "It's Not About You":

Especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

My parents' generation bequeathed to me the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean War, McCarthyism and 1950s conformism. If Dubya had not been installed in the presidency by a party-line vote in the U.S. Supreme Court (yes, America has a partisan high court; the Founders messed up on that one), American youth today would be inheriting budget surpluses "as far as the eye can see," as even conservative economists described conditions in the late Clinton years. So let's make that GOP "elders," since my generation of elders in this country has bequeathed to our kids fiscal prudence, an appreciation of positive reinforcement, an insistence that they can master any vocation for which they have a passion and willingness to persist, and the widest choice in history of higher-education options, including those that find them taking some of their studies overseas. We do expect them to buy their own first cars. Preferably fuel-efficient ones.   

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

Well, there are baby boomers and there are baby boomers. As there are Indianans (Cole Porter) and Indianans (Dan Quayle). "Follow your passion." A novel exhortation, yes, to those unfamiliar with Thoreau (who took it to extremes, admittedly, ending his experiment as a hermit at Emerson's insistence) and Walt Whitman. Oh, and the New Testament, which so often implores us to find truth through self-knowledge. Yes, chart your own course, not that of the crowd mania (the recent one on Wall Street, for instance). Find and read Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye and other books banned by the school board. If memory serves, women not long ago were quite specifically instructed in the courses they were permitted to take - nursing, teaching, child care, cooking and reshelving books at the library. Thanks to Betty Friedan and the Internet, young women today know they can chart whatever course engages their passion, be it corporate CEO or astronaut. My Baby Boom values are civility, non-violent dispute resolution, shame and a search for means of atonement over what earlier generations, in which Brooks finds virtue, did to our First Nations and Japanese internees. Also getting salt out of my diet, in order to be less of a burden on a healthcare system we all pay for.   

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Having just read Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, I can confirm that the must-read healthcare-system reformer, who still finds time for surgery (Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital), believes that being an effective medical practitioner always means being part of a team. At a minimum, in family practice, the team is doctor and patient, the patient's family, friends and coworkers, and the specialist caregivers to whom the doctor makes referrals. It means scrapping and re-writing the rules of hidebound institutions. It means discarding regimented practice, and following checklists that are constantly revised as teams and individuals experiment with higher levels of efficacy. In some ways, one now suppress oneself more than ever, rather than tell the racist or gender-offensive "joke," or jump the queue at Jack in the Box, or steal the cash and condoms from Dad's sock drawer. For not a few young people today this is liberating, not having to act on a dare that for whatever reason always involved misbehavior.  

One of the first signs of aging is a tendency to libel the young. The kids are all right. The pundits need to get out more.

 

That certain look.

The NYT notices that disgraced pols all have that certain look:

 
Clockwise from top left, Representative Anthony Weiner of New York, former Gov. James McGreevey of New Jersey, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York, former Representative Eric J. Massa of New York, President Bill Clinton and former Senator John Ensign of Nevada. (AP)

 

Why the GOP must whack Obama-clone Romney.

Did you know we have Mitt Romney to thank for Staples? Which his Bain Capital grubstaked? Where I shop maybe twice a week.

Thanks, Mitt. He really is a job-creator, that one. A minimum-wage, skeletal benefits, high staff turnover job creator, but still...

Romney is so similar in past positions to Obama - on everything from "Romneycare" when governor of the Bay State to his support of the historic 2009 Obama stimulus - that the GOP base will upchuck next year as all the Obamaclone details surface.

Hence, Mitt has to go. Yes, he's the slick frontrunner, wisely focusing on job creation at a time of 9.1% unemployment. Yes he boasts a rare GOP resume of genuine accomplishment, financing the launch of a gazillion companies. Trouble is, he's so mainstream he's not even Obama-lite. Why, he's a carbon copy of the 44th president!

New Republic points out the obvious:

Romney is evidence that Obama's policies -- on economic stimulus, health care, the auto bailout, and pretty much everything -- are anything but the extreme socialism they now portray them as. His nomination would undercut their claims daily, and demonstrate it is the GOP, not Obama, that is proposing a radical new direction for the country. That's why they can't nominate him.

Which means the one candidate - Jon Huntsman possibly excepted - who can match Obama for deep-voiced gravitas on the stump, who's actually done something substantial with his life (fabulously successful businessperson, then rescued the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics - you know, the Games that Utah bribed the IOC voters to steal from honest wannabe hosts) will be torn to shreds by his own party.

This is win-win-win for Dems.

If Romney doesn't get the nod, Obama ducks whom I regard as his biggest threat. Possibly in favor of yet another Mormon (Huntsman). If Romney manages to grasp the brass ring, he'll be so battered from the nomination process the Dems can run an endless loop of all the horrid things said of him by fellow Republicans. (Think JImmy Carter in 1980 afterTed Kennedy was through with him.) That'll be the loop they play when not running the endless loop of all the Romney flip flops. (Think "I was against it before I was against it" John Kerry.)  

Much as I agree that pundits need to stop taking seriously the likes of Bachmann, Newt, Cain, Palin et al, those folks will all be taking pot shots at any GOP moderate with a chance at the nomination. (I know, I know, the last GOP moderate was Everett Dirksen. I meant what today passes for a GOP moderate.)

Among these warthogs will be Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich-11-Livonia, Wayne; shown left), who's already defining Mitt as Barry's ideological twin:

Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama are not rivals, they’re running mates...In the area of cap and trade, the President and Mr. Romney both believe in climate change. In the area of health care, both the President and Mr. [Romney] believe in comparative effectiveness research and government controlling the supply of health care. What you see in the area of the Wall Street Bailout, both Mr. Romney and President Obama believe that the bondholders and shareholders on Wall Street should be held harmless, with no restructuring, no downsizing, no management changes, no equity, and no preparation for future to get capital flowing back again.

You guessed it, McCotter, attacking Romney this week just as Mitt was setting foot in the Wolverine State, has said he is "seriously considering" a presidential bid of his own. Yet another marginal candidate whom pundits shouldn't waste ink on. But Thaddeus will be shoulder-to-shoulder with Bachmann & Co. armed with decomposing fruit for any nomination-headed Republican not intimate with the "I'm with stupid" T-shirt crowd. 

Related

Why Republicans must destroy Romney. (Jonathan Chait, New Republic)

The Romney Death Watch. (Jonathan Chait, New Republic)

What Republicans would sound like if they told the truth. (Ezra Klein, WaPo)

The unavoidable thing about Republicans: They like nonsense. (Jonathan Cohn, New Republic)

McCotter for President! (Mike Flynn, Cert. Wgnt., Andrew Breitbart's Big Government)

 

Apparent flameouts we have known.

Guess the subjects of these death notices, written four years apart:

As impressive as he can be intellectually, [  ] has proven time and again to be a terrible manager.  He proved it as [  ], inciting personalities against each other when unity was needed, and he has proved it again as a candidate.  The devastating effect on the range of organizations he has built has yet to be felt—but the next fundraising effort with his signature, even after the campaign is folded, is likely to fall flat with the donor base that once believed in him. -Benjamin Domench in the right-wing Washington Examiner

__________________

On Tuesday, [   ] parted ways with his longtime aide and engineered a dramatic shake-up of his presidential campaign team as he sought to reverse a...downward spiral that has left him short of cash and struggling for support. The stunning developments unfolded quickly yesterday morning after [  ] and campaign manager [   ]...issued terse statements announcing their departures from the [  ] camp. Their exits came after several tense meetings before and after a recent trip...in which [  ] expressed dissatisfaction to his high command over what he regarded as mismanagement of operations and excessive spending in the face of weaker-than-projected fundraising. -Dan Balz and Anne Komblut, Washington Post

You've guessed by now the first paragraph describes the apparent flameout of Gingrich. The second, from July 2007, chronicles the apparent flameout of McCain. McCain of course regrouped, it was Rudy who self-destructed, and the world was introduced to Sarah Palin. (Thanks John, she's the gift that keeps on giving.)

Gingrich is like the roaches, he'll be around long after the rest of us are gone.

He might soon reverse himself, taking back his defiant insistence that he's still in the running sans staff, and drop out of the race well before his warchest is depleted. I expect Gingrich is only in this thing for the same reason Trump was, to promote himself - specifically the Gingrich Inc. web of lucrative publishing, video, speeches and other ventures.

But contrary to obits of recent hours, we most certainly will have Newt to kick around for many years to come. A good thing for Dems, and it helps keep the serial philanderer off the streets.

 

Enjoy your weekend.

 

 

 

 
"I could do without these commutes." (Getty Images)

 

In IMF contest, a pseudo anti-status-quo opts for the status quo.

It's unlikely Trevor Manuel (left), the former South African finance minister, would have won the IMF's top post against prohibitive favorite Christine Lagarde, his French counterpart.

But we'll never know. More important, we've lost the chance to determine the support worldwide for a first non-European head of the International Monetary Fund.

Manuel was set to announce his candidacy today, with the backing of Pretoria (a pre-condition for candidacy, which explains why Gordon Brown's not in the running - a petty David Cameron refused to nominate his rival in the last British election).

But in recent hours, developing world nations threw their support heavily to Lagarde, and Manuel has taken himself out of the running. The non-support for Manuel conspiculously includes representatives of South Africa's fellow African nations, Tunisia, Cote d'Ivoire and Democratic Republic of the Congo among them. And Brazil, whose economy now exceeds Canada's in size, also threw its considerable weight behind the Lagarde candidacy.

Lagarde is highly qualified for the IMF post. Plus, it's good to see a woman, at last, heading this hugely important agency. And it's a nice irony that a woman succeeds a DSK accused of sexual assault. 

Plus, with Hillary Clinton's heavily rumoured interest in heading the World Bank, there's a chance both of the world's humanitarian and financial assistance agencies will, for the first time, be headed by women. (The World Bank job has always gone to an American.) Clinton and the White House today denied the U.S. secretary of state "is pursuing" the job, hardly a Shermanesque denial of interest, and in my books clear evidence that she does wants the post and is testing world reaction to the idea.

Not that anyone's asking, but Clinton I think would be a fine selection for the post - though yet another American. Social-justice issues have been the chief animator of Clinton's life since she graduated Wellesley. While First Lady, she had the guts to give a speech in Beijing condemning that state's suppression of women. Most recently, she's been sure-footed on the Arab Spring. In a testosterone-charged administration, it was the trio of Clinton; Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador; and Samantha Powers, the anti-genocide expert, who provided the forceful leadership on Obama's options and sucessfully pushed for America's last-minute intervention to prevent a near-certain genocide in Libya.

Still, this IMF development is not a happy one. Manuel is highly regarded. DSK's flame-out unleashed commentary worldwide, among wealthy and poor countries alike, that now, finally, was the time to break the obsolete tradition of these two jobs being monopolized by Europeans and Americans.

So Manuel had a decent shot, at least to put in a credible showing. But the same developing-world nations that have led what has seemed like a decades-long crusade for a non-European to finally head the IMF - who understands from personal experience developing-world issues - have at the first opportunity of a viable non-European candidate thoroughly rejected that chance.

Who knows, with Manuel in the race, Lagarde might have merely eked out a victory. And that alone might have broken the anchronistic means by which these agencies heads are chosen. Lagarde's successor would surely have been the first non-European.

But, turns out this isn't the issue for developing-world nations they've long said it was. I'm sure we'll hear in days to come all manner of reasons why Manuel's fellow Africans, among others, feel Manuel lacks Lagarde's credentials. Hogwash.

Running South Africa's finances post-apartheid has been far bigger a challenge than anything Lagarde has dealt with. They're equally qualified, and the developing world nations, in near unanimity, rejected one of their own even before balloting could commence. My best guess is that Pretoria's in bad odor with other certain African countries, or that countries like Brazil have decided that if the job can't go to a Brazilian, damned if it'll go - or nearly go - to another developing world country.

In any case, the less-developed nations have just scored an own-goal. 

 

Enjoy your day.

 
(AP)

 

How did this get published? (In the Harvard Business Review?)

I wish b-schools didn't feel the compulsion to publish high-profile management magazines. There should be a law: you can publish an alumni-affairs journal, but don't even think of passing off a periodical as a compendium of modern management wisdom.

1. Most business-school faculty moonlight as corporate directors and consultants. So that's a whack of interesting and important companies your esteemed journal can't comment on for obvious reasons of conflict of interest.

2. This especially applies to the name over the door. Neither the visionary genius nor consuming immorality of the benefactor who paid for the b-school's digs can even be hinted at in the school's external journal without triggering uproarious giggle fits. Someone should write a story on how the University of Richmond hasn't renamed its Robins school of business, given the role of an ethically challenged A.H. Robins Co. in the deaths and injuries to thousands of women caused by that firm's Dalkon Shield IUD. But someone other than a Robins faculty member will have to write it.

3. Those who can't write teach. To paraphrase FDR's father on the superior ethics of Republicans, I'm not saying all lousy writers are teachers. But all teachers are lousy writers. There are just enough exceptions to the rule to allow for the justly influential writing of academics like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich in the MSM. But more's the pity since it opens the door to academics who couldn't write a compelling sentence even with the inducement of free Super Bowl tickets.

4. The b-school journal's editor - what a thankless job - is obliged, notwithstanding the above, to publish impenetrable works by the faculty. This is a political affair, of course. The editor can dress things up with a Q&A with Paul Volcker or Bill Gates, but to spare an uptick in unruly faculty meetings the rest of the book must be taken up with the dry husks of faculty contributions. University politics are more bitter than other varieties because, as it has often been said, so little is at stake.  

5. B-school academics, in particular, are generally five years behind the curve. That management principles might be teachable and a field of academic inquiry is itself a novelty, dating in North America to the Amos Tuck school at Dartmouth, founded in 1900. (Harvard mulled that over for eight years before deciding to follow suit.)

Universities for the most part began as divinity schools, where commerce was, if not an evil influence on the soul, something to keep far distant from. At Ivy League schools and their equivalent in other countries, this sense of business grubbiness remains, and the MBA mill on campus is to be taken seriously only as a pleasing source of cash flow.

And there's not a little good reason for that. B-school faculty either are folks who've never launched a business or met a payroll, or, conversely, are retired CEOs unacquainted with advanced teaching and academic research methods, whom the world was beginning to pass by even in their last years in the corporate corner office. (The late Citibank chairman Walter Wriston got it right about the sell-by date for corporate directors, since there comes a point when "So many things we 'know' are no longer true.")

Thus I have read recently in glossy b-school journals that design is important in business. Apparently the things you make should be well-designed if one expects success in the marketplace. Who knew?

Charles Revson latched onto that truth in the 1940s. ("We sell hope in a bottle," he said. From which it follows that the container must be as seductive as the fragrance). At GM, Alfred Sloan conquered half the U.S. auto market as Detroit's first CEO to have his firm's design chief (Harley Earl) report directly to him. That same design epiphany came to Steve Jobs when he switched majors to calligraphy at Reed College.

It also has been brought my attention the Academy that ethical considerations sometimes enter into business decision-making, or should do, insight gleaned from liberally quoted articles about the BP's Deepwater Horizon crisis in the Wall Street Journal, with a helpful reminder that even Adam Smith warned of the treachery of merchants in congress assembled. (Just as every self-respecting poli-sci professor on the topic of U.S. history is obliged to quote de Tocqueville.)

6. Businesspeople, of course, famously lack a sense of irony. Bill George (shown left), now holding down an academic chair at the Harvard MBA mill, for a decade ran the medical-equipment giant Medtronic Inc., based in Minneapolis. He has devoted his second life to managerial integrity, and his illuminating insights on this subject appear in his books, the MSM and, of course, the Harvard Business Review. But never does George's prose rise above Golden Rule platitudes. Never does George write of the chicanery afoot inside Goldman Sachs, which would be a real lesson in ethics, because George is a director of that firm.

More conspicuously, George has nothing to say on the topic of Medtronic, which since his departure about decade ago has run up one of the most impressive records of consistent unethical behavior among its Fortune 500 peers. It's rather like a veteran Grand Dragon of the Klan now preaching on racial harmony without reference to the legacy of the drop-sheet wearers or their more fashion-forward skinhead kin.

And now to the question in the headline of this post, inspired by an article in the latest Harvard Business Review headlined "The Wickedness Behind Most 21st-Century Leadership Failures."

Ah, finally, a relevant b-school journal article that calls it like it is! But no. The author, a Harvard faculty member of course, is deeply confused, mistaking "wickedness" for the knotty everyday problems a businessperson confronts. The first line of his article contradicts the desperate efforts of an HBR editor at a catchy headline for prose as dense as concrete: 

It's not typically the wickedness of leaders (or of boards, for that matter) that gets companies into trouble. It's their failure to effectively manage the wickedness of the problems they face — problems that resist obvious solutions. Wicked problems are being tossed up by the exploding complexity of our modern world — complexity originating from the increasing interconnectedness of everything we do. Not only are there more of these problems, but the degree of their wickedness is increasing. The race is on between the complexity that is confronting organizations and their ability to respond to it. Leaders are behind and need to catch up.

The hallmark of a wicked problem is that it cannot be reduced to a single-cause explanation. Complexity arises from the interconnections between things — how parts within a system interact via intricate feedback mechanisms.

By the author's definition, the challenges posed by globalization are a form of wickedness. Also supply-chain snafus, the refusal of Marketing to talk with Engineering, the price war ignited by a rival, and whether we should take this austerity thing to the max and no longer water the lawns at the risk of becoming known as the enterprise whose facilities all are located on patches of yellow acreage.

I suppose it's gratuitous to add that the author is identified as an erstwhile executive at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Great White North counterpart to Citigroup. Which is to say, each firm is distinguished mostly by its ability to find and fall into open manholes, and with remarkable consistently. (Every eight years, like clockwork.) Just as it would be gratuitious to note that the only MBA among American presidents (Harvard, no less) is George W. Bush.

I mention this only because, again, the lack of relevance here - or revelation - is too often a characteristic of what business-school faculty have to say. Muddled thinking. Lack of clarity of expression. A disconnect from the "real" economy and the business world. Which is why MSM business journals - Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek - so often run articles on the disdain, bordering on contempt, that CEOs have for b-schools and their output.

One thing business schools do have in common with the larger academy is resistance to change. "It requires all the effort of moving a cemetary to effect change at the university," a former University of Toronto president said. You could also say this of healthcare, the Church of Rome, and until the Grim Reaper began pounding rather than tapping on our door, the newspaper industry.

I suppose if they put me in charge I'd scrap the flagship b-school journal, if not the school itself, and use the funds to ensure that a well-rounded liberal arts education was more widely available to aspiring students in financial need. Matt Barrett, whose CEO tenure at Bank of Montreal was marked by 10 successive years of increased revenue and profit, was often given to saying his ideal hire would be a college graduate steeped in Chaucer and Emily Dickinson.

"It is far more important that a student graduate from university having read Dante… than understanding the practice of double-entry accounting," said Barrett, who after ramping up BMO's profits went on to do the same at the larger Barclays PLC of Britain.

 

Weinergate.

As you know, I try to give these matters a wide berth. The agonizing 10 days of denials by the congressman for NY-6 did put me in mind of an outburst by an indicted Chicago alderman who's name I've never been able to run down:

I deny the allegations and I defy the allegators!