| U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci managed to stir up virulent anti-Americanism in Canada today by claiming that Canadian officials who are critical of the U.S. president and its policies should be muzzled, and issuing veiled threats of recriminations for Canada’s ‘disappointing’ lack of support for the war. He was speaking to a business group in Toronto and elaborated afterwards for the news media.
It’s hard to understand how an ambassador could commit such a colossal diplomatic blunder. The reaction to the threats and bullying was immediate, with call-in phone lines swamped with callers mostly suggesting he was way out of line, and some suggesting he be recalled or expelled. The House of Commons immediately overwhelmingly voted to reassert its opposition to the war, and Prime Minister Chretien defended the right of officials ‘in an independent and free country’ to express their opinions, and reminded everyone that Canada has been and is now very active in the fight against terrorism and programs to rebuild Afghanistan. If Cellucci was under orders from Bush to bully Canada into joining his tawdry list of half-secret ‘coalition of the willing’ countries, it backfired horrifically. What will these clowns do next to further alienate the rest of the world and isolate the U.S. completely? You can probably tell I’m p****d off. |
March 26, 2003
U.S. ‘DIPLOMACY’ HITS CANADA
March 25, 2003
HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL ACTIVIST
 The title of this Weblog is How to Save the World. Although the title is intended to be ironic, the number of Googlers that land here after typing in those five hopeful words attests to the fact that a lot of people want to do something about what they think is wrong with the world. And notwithstanding my earlier post about our human tendency to procrastinate, I’ve spent the lion’s share of my business life in one Change Management capacity or another. So I have learned a few things about how to get things done. I thought I’d share them today.
Activism is Change Management writ large. Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable:
The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don’t bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter’s book, since that’s what it’s focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. Not only does it entail these eight steps if it is to have lasting impact, the steps must be done in precisely this order . Let’s use environmental activism as an example, since Elizabeth May of the Sierra Club of Canada has writen a wonderful primer called How to Be an Activist that essentially uses this very process. If you want to tighten restrictions on clear-cutting forests, you need to first get people to believe the change is urgently needed, by showing compellingly the dire consequence of inaction. Then you need to persuade some people with significant power (influence, wealth, media access, reputation, and exceptional ability to articulate, fundraise or organize all being relevant types of power) to get on board. The vision you must then create should be a realistic but glowing story or snapshot of the future where the change you propose has been implemented (or a devastating portrait of the future if it isn’t). That vision must be communicated by using the media (press releases, press conferences etc.), public speaking opportunities, weblogs, even phone-in shows – anywhere lots of people can hear your message. Empowering others then requires organizing, lobbying, and making it easy for people to implement, or help you (by signing petitions, giving you money etc.) to bring about the change. The easier you make it for petitioners, politicians, reporters and other ‘helpers’ to do what you want, and the more you do for them to make it easy, the more likely it is they will support you, or at least not get in the way. Most important changes take time and sustained effort, and since people have short attention spans and can get discouraged easily, short-term wins (such as a temporary injunction on clear-cutting, in our example) are essential to sustain momentum. Consolidating your wins (such as getting the restriction on clear-cutting written into law, or at least government party policy), and institutionalizing the change (e.g. ensuring the new clear-cutting restrictions are enforced, and the new law is difficult to circumvent or overturn), are the final two essential steps to achieving an enduring change. This is not for the faint of heart or the lazy. This requires a lot of up-front and continuing research to acquire the facts (know-what), the skills (know-how), and the contacts (know-who ) needed to bring about the change. The internet is a great research resource, but as Elizabeth points out it’s not enough and sometimes the telephone is both more effective and more efficient. As Michael Moore’s unfortunate speech at the Oscars illustrated, sometimes how you do things is as important as what you do to bring about needed change. Here are Elizabeth’s useful hints for how to conduct yourself as an activist:
This may seem simple and obvious. It is, and it works. The reason you don’t see huge grassroots changes being wrought every day is human nature: The road to success is grueling, and long, and sometimes frustrating (ask Erin Brockovich). It takes unusual endurance. Last word is Margaret Mead’s: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Post-script: The photo of the butterfly, the symbol of change depicted at the top of this post, is from the Causes of Color exhibit on a remarkable site called WebExhibits This site has some breathtaking studies that can change the way you think about ordinary things. |
March 24, 2003
INCREDIBLE
 Other anti-war bloggers seem to be doing a fine, and extensive, job of commenting on the war. I’d decided to focus my attention on correcting misinformation, but there is so much of it out there that it’s almost easier to list what is credible and corroborated. Almost all of the early reports and predictions have turned out to be either completely false or wildly exaggerated:
My only other thoughts on the war so far: Admiration for the ‘unembedded’ press: Their courage and the value of their independent reports is amazing. And dismay at the uselessness of the ‘embedded’ press: Even the once-proud BBC crew are reduced to repeating military press releases and ooh’ing and aah’ing at the pyrotechnics in the distant sky. And Kevin Sites’ blog was shut down by his own bosses at CNN. Don’t get me wrong. The examples above are disparaging of the Western propaganda machine and the toothlessness of most of the Western media in the face of it. But as Dear Raed reports, the misinformation being fed to Iraqis by their government’s propaganda machine is just as incredible. But we don’t get to see much of it. |
TO BE NOBODY BUT YOURSELF
 With all the propaganda and groupthink swirling around, we sometimes need to be reminded that dissent and critical thinking are not only commendable and healthy, but essential to personal growth and social progress. Rayne has described a recent situation where it was very uncomfortable having a different point of view on the war from a friend’s, and Kriselda has described the insidious effect of groupthink in her Third Wave post. If you’re against this war, I’m sure you were tempted to go mute after reading about the spike in popularity for the Iraq war (once it became clearer that war was inevitable, and more likely that our side would ‘win’), or after learning that a third of American voters still believe despite all evidence that Saddam and Iraq were somehow responsible for 9/11.
There are many great quotations, from Thomas Jefferson and Einstein and Morley to Chomsky and Mamet and Rushdie and Voltaire that can give us courage to continue to express dissenting views dispassionately. When I lose heart, I take inspiration from CEM’s 1970s-era New Yorker magazine cover (reproduced above left), and from the following lines by poet e e cummings. to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, |
March 23, 2003
A WEBLOG-BASED CONTENT ARCHITECTURE FOR BUSINESS
| In a previous post, The Weblog as Filing Cabinet, I proposed that business weblogs could be used to codify and ‘publish’, in a completely voluntary and personal manner, the individual worker’s entire filing cabinet. The key advantage of providing such a capability is vastly increased access to, and sharing of, a company’s knowledge. This post outlines a content architecture that could enable this to occur.
This architecture would have two principal components: The Enterprise Content Architecture and the Desktop Content Architecture, which are illustrated below. The Enterprise Content Architecture would operate as follows:
The Desktop Content Architecture would operate as follows (many commercial weblog tools offer this functionality):
The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog’s ‘subscription’ functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog’s publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company’s networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual ‘content’ whatsoever. Each employee thus defines his or her own taxonomy (the same way each employee currently decides how to organize and index his or her own filing cabinet and My Documents folder). Each employee defines his or her own communities (by who is included in the BlogRoll), so communities truly become self-organizing and self-managed. Culturally, these two features of a weblog-based content architecture are hugely advantageous, because they turn control over the management and sharing of knowledge to individual employees, allowing them to organize knowledge in accordance with their personal mental models (the way they think and learn), and allowing them to retain pride in and responsibility of ownership of their personal knowledge ‘stocks’. The advantages of this architecture are therefore:
As weblog tools become more powerful and flexible, open sourcing of weblog add-ons increases, and RSS and XML technologies advance and become standard, the justification for migrating centralized knowledge management systems to a weblog-based architecture will grow more compelling. In the meantime, leading-edge knowledge organizations need to be piloting and experimenting with such architectures, if they don’t wish to be left behind. |
WRITING BETTER
 Cartoon: Lee Lorenz, New Yorker Magazine One of the main reasons people maintain blogs is to learn to write better. We gauge our success by:
A comment I have received several times is that my writing is too ‘dense’. That is, my posts are too long-winded and rambling, and my sentences are too long and convoluted. This is fair criticism. Complexity is often the enemy of brevity and conciseness. But excess verbiage and unfathomable prose can also indicate fuzzy thinking or laziness. In business, you learn that improvements can only occur if you recognize and articulate the problem, and then design, assess and follow actions to address it. So it is in the business of writing. And in blogging, you have ample chance to practice improving your writing skills. You run the risk, if you do not do so, of entrenching bad habits. So if your writing is too dense, you should:
If instead of being dense, your writing suffers some other frailty, such as being vapid, or anemic, or turgid, or strained, simply amend the above steps appropriately. When you no longer need to improve, we’ll tell you. |
March 22, 2003
THE BOX (NEW FICTION)
| Just completed a new short story called The Box , about coping with mental illness. It’s in my Stories file here . |
March 21, 2003
FRIDAY FIVE: ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE
| I’m getting a lot of traffic today courtesy of the Friday Five folks, since they’re using my five questions this week (thanks guys, I’m honoured). So it’s only appropriate that I provide my answers:
1. If you had the chance to meet someone you’ve never met, from the past or present, who would it be? “A human being is part of the whole, which we call the call the ‘Universe’: a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest?a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its astonishing beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation, and the foundation for inner peace.” 2. If you had to live in a different century, past or future, which would it be? |
‘SEARCH SALON BLOGS’ TOOL NOW UP
| Scott Rosenberg thought my idea for a Search Across All Salon Blogs tool was a great one, but said Salon doesn’t have the resources right now to host it on Salon’s Home Page. So I’ve put it up on mine, as you can see on the right, underneath my Search Site bar. It seems to work fine – I tested it with ‘post-modernism’ and all the right blogs showed up in the search results. Try it out yourself, and if you like it lift the HTML and put it on your own site (don’t forget to substitute the references to my masthead, and my blog URL, with your own).
And while you’re at it, feel free to lift the Candle for Peace gif as well. If you’re new at this stuff, save your Home Page template somewhere first in case you accidentally do something disastrous and need to restore it (speaking from experience here). And thanks to Google, for making this so easy and for its continuing strong support of the blogosphere. |
THE WISDOM OF CONTAINMENT
 Since I wrote the article A Man Consumed with Rage I’ve been thinking about what will happen to Bush when that rage is quenched. This utterly simplistic and single-minded demagogue has given us no clue about what he’s going to do about the total shambles he has created in two short years:
My growing sense is that, just as he doesn’t care about massive opposition to his war, or opposition to his extremist right-wing domestic social and political agenda, he doesn’t care about any of these issues. His father, much wiser, more diplomatic and shrewd than he is, nevertheless lost his re-election bid. Winston Churchill, who was worshipped as a hero during WW2, lost his re-election bid in peacetime. Just as Saddam is making his last stand, content to die a self-perceived martyr, I think Junior knows full well he won’t win again once the realization of the horrendous damage he has done to America (exemplified by the bullets above) hits the American electorate. Shock and Awe isn’t just a plan for a fast and devastating war to achieve one single purpose, it’s the blueprint for a president who knows he will have no second chance to achieve his obsessive goal of revenge against the Arab world for 9/11 and revenge against the Clinton Democrats for their hugely successful ‘liberal’ transformation of America. He’s blowing his whole wad now. This behaviour is entirely consistent with a psychopathic personality. Like a thief in a jewelry store, the objective is to smash and grab as much as possible and run, and then rationalize, lie, blame others and do whatever needs to be done to avoid the consequences of the crime. Psychopaths are good at this — they are often very intelligent, highly respected people whose zeal and guile can attract devotion from others, some to the point where the followers will take the blame for the psychopath’s actions (Tony Blair, Colin Powell, are you listening?). Psychopaths make powerful cult leaders. They surround themselves with the loyal and like-minded (just look at the savagery and sameness of Bush’s inner circle). The good news, and the bad news, is that the jig will soon be up. If Bush ‘wins’ the Iraq war quickly, he will have to either face the problems above or create another crisis, and then manufacture consent for another misadventure to distract attention from these issues. But history has shown that people grow weary of war quickly, and beyond Iraq and perhaps North Korea, domestic support for further campaigns will rapidly wane. And if the Iraq war drags on or produces huge civilian casualties, that distaste will set in even faster. Under either scenario (and psychopaths are good at studying scenarios) the endgame is near, likely before the November 2004 election. If the economy or the war goes especially badly, or if the dirty tricks like those played on the EU lately can be attributed to Bush, then impeachment could bring the end of the nightmare even sooner (Nixon also showed signs of psychopathy). So what is to be done? Confronting psychopaths can be extremely dangerous, since they can rationalize taking any means to their obsessive ends, and they strike out when defied or challenged (ask the French). Waiting for Bush to self-destruct is an option, but just as Saddam left a million landmines when he knew he was beaten in Kuwait, the costs of waiting out a retreating, beaten Bush might be huge, and the destruction could linger for decades. The damage of Bush’s deficits and environmental pillage are already going to take generations to undo. As in any protracted siege, the best strategy is probably to be selective and focused, and choose one’s battles. Filibustering the nomination of lifelong extremist court appointees is probably a wise choice of battle, as was the defeat of the proposal for Alaskan wilderness drilling. Democrats deserve, for once, credit for their stand on these two important issues. Ironically, perhaps the best strategy for dealing with Bush is the strategy that pacifists proposed in dealing with Saddam: Not a bloody confrontation, not appeasement, not sanctions that just hurt innocent victims, but a constant and close watch to disarm him before he inflicts further ruin. Until he self-destructs in the coming months, George W. Bush needs to be contained . |
