Pugilists and Statesmen

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Ads are being run against de Santis; he voted, they claim,   to increase the retirement age amidst other possible solutions.   He, like Ryan, are youngsters pushing their elders off cliffs; of course, some   might see politicians manfully taking on a long term problem.

These ads may be effective but with them mere discussions become toxic – the opposite of a statesman’s approach    Bush began with a high-powered, sensible committee; 9/11 intervened. Maybe they would have come up with nothing but it remains the problem it was well over twenty years ago.   How many policy debates follow the same pattern?

The problem is the context as well. Trump is pursued by truly demonic (and unconstitutional) opponents.   Ones who have sold us out for a few gold pieces to the environmentalists, the communists, the totalitarians, the. .   .    While they   take pleasure in making our futures carless, gasless, air conditionless, they embrace nihilism.   Indeed,   half the country seems in an intense sado/masochistic relation with their overlords.

In a petty way,   this ad poses a dilemma.   Our positions imply to the simple minded that either

a) we buy into the least statesman-like and most perilous of positions about our future in that policy area,
or
b) we buy into the most aggressive, constitution-be-damned, politically motivated of our opponents clown shows.
Neither has our long-run interests in mind; both personalize and trivialize policy in an increasingly serious world.

I had hoped de Santis would run and Trump wouldn’t:    I’d assumed Trump wouldn’t naturally take a statesman’s approach, more likely a pugilist’s, during the fallow period.   There was hope:   once elected he sometimes made good choices not traditionally considered winners.   But this toxic perspective that will affect him as well as de Santis, making a good solution less likely.   Surely no solution leaves the system untouched.    Well, probably the Democrats have one – print more money.

Worth Pondering

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All the risks you didn’t take come and take their revenge.
–Anna Gát, @TheAnnaGat, at Twitter

 I’m reminded of a passage in Walter Miller’s great novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz:  

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

(I had a Worth Pondering series that ran for several years, but didn’t keep it up for some reason.   Think I’ll restart it, using new items as well as posts from the archives.)

Experience Is A Dear School…

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… but fools will learn in no other, as the old saying has it and ‘dear’ in this sense means ‘expensive’. From all reports concerning the marketing debacle over Bud Light beer, the marketing executive responsible, one Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid is about to learn one of those very dear lessons. When someone sits down to write a history of bad marketing decisions in modern times, this is going to be one of the more spectacular chapters. Amazing that someone so expensively educated in the marketing trade could fall so spectacularly flat-footed. Somewhere back in the mists of time, someone must have imparted the wisdom that alienating the old core market for your product before appealing to the new core market was a bad move. A very bad move.

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Book Review: Father, Son, & Co, by Thomas Watson jr (rerun)

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(Today marks the 59th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM System/360 series)

Buy the book:  Father, Son, & Co

When Tom Watson Jr was 10 years old, his father came home and proudly announced that he had changed the name of his company. The business that had been known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company would now be known by the grand name  International Business Machines.

“That  little outfit?” thought young Tom to himself, picturing the company’s rather random-seeming collection of products, which included time clocks, coffee grinders, and scales, and the “cigar-chomping guys” who sold them. This was in 1924.

This is the best business autobiography I’ve read. It’s about Watson Jr, his difficult relationship with his father, the company they built, and the emergence of the computing industry. It is an emotional, reflective, and self-critical book, without the kind of “here’s how brilliant I was” tone that afflicts too many executive autobiographies. With today being IBM’s 100th anniversary (counting from the incorporation of CTR), I thought it would be a good time to finally get this review finished and posted.

Watson’s relationship with his father was never an easy one. From an early age, he sensed a parental expectation that he would follow his father into IBM, despite both his parents assuring him that this was not the case and he could do whatever he wanted. This feeling that his life course was defined in advance, combined with fear that he would never be able to measure up to his increasingly-famous father, was likely a factor in the episodes of severe depression which afflicted him from 13 to 19. In college Watson was an indifferent student and something of a playboy. His most significant accomplishment during this period was learning to fly airplanes—-”I’d finally discovered something I was good at”a skill that would have great influence on his future. His first job at IBM, as a trainee salesman, did little to boost his self-confidence or his sense of independence: he was aware that local IBM managers were handing him easy accounts, wanting to ensure success for the chief executive’s son. It was only when Watson joined the Army Air Force during WWIIhe flew B-24s and was based in Russia, assisting General Follett Bradley in the organization of supply shipments to the Soviet Unionthat he proved to himself that he could succeed without special treatment. As the war wound down, he set his sights on becoming an airline pilotGeneral Bradley expressed surprise, saying “Really? I always thought you’d go back and run the IBM company.” This expression of confidence, from a man he greatly respected, helped influence Watson to give IBM another try.

The products that Watson had been selling, as a junior salesman, were punched card systems. Although these were not computers in the modern sense of the word, they could be used to implement some pretty comprehensive information systems. Punched card systems were an important enabler of the increasing dominance of larger organizations in both business and government: the Social Security Act of 1935 was hugely beneficial to IBM both because of the systems they sold to the government directly and those sold to businesses needing to keep up with the required record-keeping.

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