Best of Times, Worst of Times...

One of my last posts prompted a reader to ask me to tell them about "the best of times."

Made me think quite a bit. My lifetime has been the best and worst of times.

My recent milestone is 70. Given that there were times I wondered if I'd live this long it is definitely a milestone. Not that I have ever had a really serious illness. I've had my bouts with things not very treatable that aren't serious, and a couple that were serious but treatable. I'm in fairly good condition for a (not quite) old fart. But I do spend some time reflecting back, as those who read this are well aware.

On my actual birth day The New York Times front page had stories on the Dieppe Raid and Guadalcanal. World War II was in full swing and the outcome anything but certain. Midway had happened, El Alamein was about to, Operation Torch was being planned, and Hitler was fully invested in Stalingrad. One was the high water mark for the Axis in the Pacific, one the beginning of the reverse in Africa, one the entry of American forces into the European Theatre of Operations, and the last the turning point of the German tide in the Soviet Union. The war was the worst of times of our era with its mass slaughter of innocents in death camps and under mushroom clouds. It was also the time of "the greatest generation" who answered the call and made the sacrifices to turn back the Axis.

I remember none of this personally. I think the first memory I have that still comes to mind as a visual picture was from the winter of 1945-46. My father had not been discharged yet and I remember the scene when we learned that my first dog had died. He'd been given to someone else after my father entered the service and my mother had gotten a letter about Bingo's death. My next vivid visual memory was three years later of a big snowstorm in the northeast.

After the war we were able to buy a house, thanks to the GI Bill. A couple of my uncles got their college degrees thanks to it as well.

The best and worst of times has to include the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan, back in the day when we seemed to realize that how other nations recover from the devastation of total war would make a difference to us. Even that scion of generations of military men, generally considered to be the most self-aggrandizing man ever to wear stars, Douglas MacArthur, oversaw a stabilizing Japanese occupation that enabled that country's successful emergence into the world community as a non-belligerent economic powerhouse. It has to include the UN, far from perfect but more effectual than its predecessor, and another step in trying to create the means for the nations of the world to work together.

And the man who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also integrated the military and became a model of a President beyond the expectations of him when he was named FDR's running mate. "The buck stops here," and he really seemed to mean it. Harry Truman was a real person and not the paper cut-out poll-shaped clowns we seem to have too much of today.

Jackie Robinson integrated the big leagues. The boys came home, including the ones who had left sports or Hollywood careers. But we still had Jim Crow in Dixie.

Shopping Malls and Levittowns and blooming of suburbia may sometimes seem like the worst of times in retrospect, but they gave returning vets and their families a piece of the good life and a pathway to better lives outside of city tenements that many had come from. Television (the best and worst???) began to couple us all together in unexpected ways, as Dave Garroway started our mornings and a couple of years later, Steve Allen ended our evenings.

We were terrified of the summer polio epidemics and the Jonas Salk gave us the vaccine. In most places public schools were okay though not everyone got access to decent ones. Even after the Warren Court gave us Brown v. Kansas, segregation continued through the structure of the neighborhood school system. While the Warren Court made other decisions that seemed blow away social cobwebs, Warren himself had been one of the drivers of the internment of Japanese who were American citizens during the war when he had been Attorney General of California.

It was an odd time of innocence, the Eisenhower years. Life seemed to be getting better and had the hope of getting still better, though there was much hidden from white middle-class suburban America. And it was the time of "duck and cover" as if one could somehow avoid kissing one's ass good-bye when the mushroom cloud arrived. In the fight with "godless Communism" we added "under god" to the pledge of allegiance and "in god we trust" as the motto on our money. Bishop Fulton Sheen was on TV and charming the ladies of his audience. (He's currently proposed for sainthood--I don't want to think about what his miracles were).

Hollywood had its black list as HUAC had its heyday, and some great movies: An American in Paris, On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, Streetcar Named Desire, Roman Holiday, Mr. Roberts. South Pacific played on Broadway.

Kefauver and McCarthy held their respective series of hearings, the one on organized crime, and the other on communist infiltration of the army. Estes made two failed runs for president and Joe McCarthy got censured by the Senate and died of hepatitis, presumably due to alcoholism. Was there ever a better moment than Joseph Welch's ringing denunciation " Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

Oddly, McCarthy begat the Kennedy careers, and we got Jack as president to end the Ike era--with The Bay of Pigs and Vietnam along with him. Father Joe's strategy for getting one of his sons into the Whitehouse required establishing their anti-Communist bona fides. Tailgunner Joe provided the opportunity. We have had a national delusion about JFK. Probably meaningless to anyone under the age of 50, but there were all those fantasies about Camelot. The fantasies may have been the figurative best of times, but Kennedy was no great shakes as a President. He got no landmark legislation through Congress, got us thoroughly enmeshed in Vietnam, and had to be forced to take on Civil Rights. On the plus side was the crisis management of the Cuban Missile Crisis which was probably handled as smartly as could have been. Getting shot kept his various peccadilloes from being exposed in his lifetime, and pretty much assured that Johnson could get major legislation done that wouldn't have stood a chance otherwise.

So yes, there were some good things even though right at the moment we seem bent on enabling our own demise. I am glad to have lived when I did. I suspect I wouldn't care much for when some of our chickens come home to roost. 

I'll Lean Out. Thanks Anyway.

Okay, I already had enough of Sheryl Sandberg. It's been less than the appointed 15 minutes of fame and she's wearing her welcome out. Not that very many of the "ain't I wonderful and here is what you can learn from me" books have a shelf half-life of more than six months before they hit remainders.

Her message: confidence is everything and maybe luck and collaboration have a little something to do with it. At least the case made in her appearance on "60 Minutes" was that women, who often attribute their success to hard work, luck and contributions by others, get overmatched in the competition for the top jobs by men who attribute their successes to their own superior skills.

Alas, it is probably true and the corollary to "nice guys finish last." Confidence and scotomas about one's own flaws trump honesty about team efforts and good luck or good timing. I have worked with a few people, at least one a woman, by the way, whose greatest asset was the ability to talk a good game and to commit to and pursue a course of action by generating press rather than making a considered analysis. One of these people hired a succession of competent number twos that were promptly deskilled and made miserable. Another has run up a career of ever increasingly impressive jobs, each held for something like one to two years, and if you read their LinkedIn profile is apparently god's very own gift to the enterprises the person has graced for those brief tenures. Worth noting is that their LinkedIn profile should be put up for a Pulitzer for fiction writing.

There is a lot of evidence that arrogant self-promotion and absolute lack of self-awareness is found in abundance in the C suites, along with some pretty egregious behavior. Case in point, Jack Welch's affair with one of his biggest promoters who lionized Welch in the pages of the Harvard Business Review. The behavior of some of our most lauded male political figures is yet more evidence. The affair de Petreus, another. The anointed ones are exempt from the moral strictures the rest of us accept. "The rules don't apply to us," is what they seem to be saying. Implied is the "so screw the rest of you." Which some of them do in fact. Lest an old friend take this personally, I am not talking about out of the norm relationships that don't have to do with power and arrogance.

Now I suppose you could just attribute this to the rants of a less than wildly successful old fart, but I think it is worth musing on a couple of additional thoughts. First, that Ms. Sandberg is probably right that a little less deference and a little more assertive self-promotion would not hurt women aiming to crack through the glass ceilings, even at the risk of being labeled with the "B" word. Think about that moment in the long battle for the nomination in 2008 when the eventual winner asserted that Hilary "was likeable enough." Would the comment reversed have had anything like the same edge?

But second and certainly more important, can we continue to afford a world which privileges arrogant self-confidence over quiet collaborative competence? It's a crowded place. Three or four times more crowded than it was only fifty years ago. Free booting pioneers and unfettered adversarial market competition probably made some sense when exploration and discovery were the order of the day. Now the stakes are higher and combination and consolidation makes a mockery of market competition as a governing force—dominant enterprises and coalitions can skew the rules in their own favor—and arrogant, confident, and amoral leaders have a tendency to exploit rather than serve.

Stepping from the shade of the forest into the harsh light of the savannah may have imposed one set of biological imperatives, but a world prone to catastrophic breakdowns and ill-understood complex system interactions that make it hard for us to see when we are fouling our own nest would suggest a change of those imperatives is in order.

So Sheryl, by all means promote the success of your gender, but wouldn't it be a shame if the female leaders ended up being no different that the men who preceded them?