Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

(written 11/3/03) As long as I’m ranting about politics, it’s time for Howard Dean to get the hell out of the race for the Democratic nomination while he still has credibility, and throw his support to Clark. If he were serious about the priority being to get Bush out of office, that’s what he would do. Why do I say this?

It’s simple electoral politics. Southern states won’t vote for a damn yankee, New England, upper crust liberal. Period. End of story. Dean can’t win a general election against Bush. Same goes for Kerry, Lieberman, Kucinich and the rest. As my friend from Atlanta used to joke, “I didn’t know DamnYankee was two words until I was in high school!” Since JFK, no Democrat has won the presidency without being a Southerner (LBJ, Carter and Clinton), and the ones that were New England liberals were subject to the worst landslides ever recorded (Dukakis anyone?). JFK is an exception, but he barely squeaked into office, and wouldn’t have been elected if Mayor Daley hadn’t rigged Chicago (see Ted White’s The Making of the President 1960 for details – I’m going off somewhat foggy memory here). In fact, if I remember correctly, JFK’s election was the event that turned southern states away from their traditional Democrat leanings and made them the staunch Republican stronghold they are now.

The only Democratic candidate with a chance is Clark, because he has the Southern gentleman thing going for him, and because he can pound Bush for being a Commander in Chief who ducked out of military service into the National Guard. I’d love to believe that people nationwide will realize the tremendous damage Bush has done to this country in the last four years and rationally vote him out of office, but since my state just elected Schwarzenegger as its governor, I have to believe that most voters vote by instinct. And expecting southerners to vote against instinct to elect somebody who’s definitely not one of them seems unrealistic. Clark needs to be the Democratic candidate. Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if Karl Rove (Bush’s political advisor) were doing his best to support the Dean campaign. There could be absolutely nothing better for the Bush campaign than a Dean candidacy. Rove would tear Dean apart. Anyway. These are the things I think about…

(written 7/30/03) I’m reading a book on the history of anarchism (Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements, by George Woodcock), because I’ve been interested in the political concept of anarchy for a while, but didn’t really know anything about the historical and theoretical tradition of it. Plus the book was only a couple dollars at the used book store. Anyway, the book references an interesting quote by Thomas Jefferson:

The influence over government must be shared among the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates in the ultimate authority, the government will be safe; because the corrupting of the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth.

It’s interesting because it’s no longer true. In his time, reaching the entire electorate was impossible, due to travel and communication constraints. But with the introduction of mass media, it’s trivial for someone to “corrupt the whole mass”, and within the private resources of many people. Well, okay, some people.

This is one of the things that disturbs me about direct democracy – it’s far too easy for the electorate to be swayed on many issues by propaganda. Heck, I freely admit that most of the time I don’t know what the “right” answer is on several of California’s ballot propositions. So I’m dependent on trying to pluck the truth out of the TV ads and other propaganda going back and forth. It’s a crazy system, and has led to the crushing deficit facing the state government, because the propositions have limited their discretionary spending to such an extent that they can’t even make sensible choices any more.

I guess I’m not sure what my point is. Except that that quote is interesting. It makes one wonder whether Thomas Jefferson would even recognize our government today as a “democracy”.

(written 9/25/03) I’ve been starting to read more blogs recently, including VentureBlog, Corante and that of my friend DocBug, and I figure it’s time for me to start posting thoughts on the web again. We’ll see how long this lasts.

The post in particular that inspired me to post was over at Corante, by Clay Shirky (who wrote a really great article on the perils of grouphood that introduced me to corante in the first place). In this article, Shirky makes the claim “Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity”.

I’ve been thinking about process recently, as I’ve gone from working at a freewheeling startup to working at a larger, established company with a process for everything. Every decision is accompanied by reams and reams of paper. We even had to be trained on the processes so that we could understand what was going on. It’s crazy.

In light of that, I like Shirky’s statement a lot. It’s clear that many of the processes that have been put in place are to correct mistakes that were made in the past. It’s a way of institutionalizing knowledge gained. And that’s a good thing. But when the processes ossify and get in the way of the main objective, which is to build great products, then it seems like more reflection is necessary. In other words, when the process becomes the end, rather than the means, it’s time to re-evaluate the process.

I’d even extend Shirky’s statement further. Process is a way of covering your ass as a manager. If you go “by the book”, then you can’t be criticized, even if the book tells you to do something patently stupid. As people used to say, “You’ll never get fired for buying Microsoft” (or IBM before that).

As in all things, there has to be a balance. Process is a good guide to the past, to what has come before. But it should not limit what can be done in the future.