Category: Books

Officers Used to Learn from Trial and Error in Training Their Units

(p. 156) In the army, wartime experience is considered the best possible teacher, at least for those who survive the first weeks. Wong found another good one–the practice junior officers get while training their units. The decisions these officers have to make as teachers help develop the capacity for the judgment they will need on the battlefield. But Wong discovered that in the 1980s, the army had begun to restructure training in ways that had the opposite results.
Traditionally, company commanders had the opportunity to plan, (p. 157) execute, and assess the training they gave their units. “Innovation,” Wong explained, “develops when an officer is given a minimal number of parameters (e.g., task, condition, and standards) and the requisite time to plan and execute the training. Giving the commanders time to create their own training develops confidence in operating within the boundaries of a higher commander’s intent without constant supervision.” The junior officers develop practical wisdom through their teaching of trainees, but only if their teaching allows them discretion and flexibility. Just as psychologist Karl Weick found studying firefighters, experience applying a limited number of guidelines teaches soldiers how to improvise in dangerous situations.
Wong’s research showed that the responsibility for training at the company level was being taken away from junior officers. First, the time they needed was being eaten away by “cascading requirements” placed on company commanders from above. There was, Wong explained, such a “rush by higher headquarters to incorporate every good idea into training” that “the total number of training days required by all mandatory training directives literally exceeds the number of training days available to company commanders. Company commanders somehow have to fit 297 days of mandatory requirements into 256 available training days.” On top of this, there were administrative requirements to track data on as many as 125 items, including sexual responsibility training, family care packets, community volunteer hours, and even soldiers who had vehicles with Firestone tires.
Second, headquarters increasingly dictated what would be trained and how it would be trained, essentially requiring commanders “to follow a script.” Commanders lost the opportunity to analyze their units’ weaknesses and plan the training accordingly. Worse, headquarters took away the “assessment function” from battalion commanders. Certifying units as “ready” was now done from the top.
The learning through trial and error that taught officers how to improvise, Wong found, happens when officers try to plan an action, (p. 158) then actually execute it and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Officers who did not have to adhere to strict training protocols were in an excellent position to learn because they could immediately see results, make adjustments, and assess how well their training regimens were working. And most important, it was this kind of experience that taught the commanders how to improvise, which helped them learn to be flexible, adaptive, and creative on the battlefield. Wong was concerned about changes in the training program because they squeezed out these learning experiences; they prevented officers from experiencing the wisdom-nurturing cycle of planning, executing the plan, assessing what worked and didn’t, reevaluating the original plan, and trying again.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Video Games Tap into an Ancient Way to Process the World

(p. 30) “What looks like escapist fun is actually deep concentration,” [Greg Toppo] says of the increasingly sophisticated video games that now occupy a major role in popular culture. “What looks like a 21st-century, flashy, high-tech way to keep kids entertained is in fact a tool that taps into an ancient way to process, explore and understand the world.”
. . .
As the parent of a young child, I began “The Game Believes in You” thinking of video games as a kind of menace. I finished it believing that games are one of the most promising opportunities to liberate children from the damaging effects of schools that are hostile to fun.

For the full review, see:
KEVIN CAREY. “THE SHORTLIST; Education.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., APRIL 19, 2015): 30.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 17, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Toppo, Greg. The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Trade, 2015.

Common Sense “Rules” Often Contradict Each Other

(p. 43) The world we face is too complex and varied to be handled by rules, and wise people understand this. Yet there is a strange and troubling disconnect between the way we make our moral decisions and the way we talk about them.
From ethics textbooks to professional association codes to our everyday life, any discussion of moral choices is dominated by Rules Talk. If we’re asked to explain why we decided to tell the painful, unvarnished truth to a friend, we might say, “Honesty is the best policy.” But if we’re asked why we decided to shade the truth we might say, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s clearly not a rule that is telling us what to do. Both maxims are good rules of thumb, but we don’t talk about why we picked one and not the other in any particular case. “Better safe than sorry.” But “He who hesitates is lost.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” But “Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.” When we hear the maxim, we nod. End of story. It’s as if stating the rule is sufficient to explain why we did what we did.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

The Bureaucratic Absurdities of Socialized Medicine

(p. 13) Reading “Do No Harm,” Henry Marsh’s frank and absorbing narrative of his life in neurosurgery, it was easy to imagine him at the table. The men, and increasingly women, who slice back the scalp, open the skull and enter the brain to extract tumors, clip aneurysms and liberate nerves, share a certain ego required for such work. They typically are bold and blunt, viewing themselves as emperors of the clinical world. Marsh adds irony to this characterization, made clear in the opening line of the book, “I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing.”
. . .
Britain’s National Health Service is a socialized system, and Marsh chafes at new rigid rules imposed by its administrators. He is particularly incensed by a mandatory dress code: Neurosurgeons are subject to disciplinary action for wearing a wristwatch. There is scant evidence that this item contributes to hospital infections, but he is shadowed on ward rounds by a bureaucrat who takes notes on his dress and behavior. The reign of the emperor is ending, but Marsh refuses to comply and serve as a myrmidon.
Clinical practice is becoming a theater of the absurd for patients as well. Hospital charts are filled with N.H.S. forms detailing irrelevant aspects of care. Searching for a patient’s operative note, Marsh finds documentation she passed a “Type 4 turd.” He shows her an elaborate stool chart “colored a somber and appropriate brown, each sheet with a graphically illustrated guide to the seven different types of turd. . . . She looked at the document with disbelief and burst out laughing.”

For the full review, see:
JEROME GROOPMAN. “Consider the Comma.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 13.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 21, 2015, and has the title “‘Do No Harm,’ by Henry Marsh.”)

(p. C6) Amid the life-or-death dramas of neurosurgery in this book are some blackly comic scenes recounting the absurdities of hospital bureaucracy in the National Health Service: not just chronic bed shortages (which mean long waits and frantic juggling of surgery schedules), but also what Dr. Marsh calls a “loss of regimental spirit” and ridiculous meetings, like a slide presentation from “a young man with a background in catering telling me I should develop empathy, keep focused and stay calm.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “From a Surgeon, Exhilarations and Regrets.” The New York Times (Tues., MAY 19, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 18, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: In ‘Do No Harm,’ a Brain Surgeon Tells All.”)

The book under review, in both reviews, is:
Marsh, Henry. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

More Detailed Rules Reduce Ability to Improvise, and Result in More Deaths

(p. 41) How do wildland firefighters make decisions in life-threatening situations when, for instance, a fire explodes and threatens to engulf the crew? They are confronted with endless variables, the most intense, high-stakes atmosphere imaginable, and the need to make instant decisions. Psychologist Karl Weick found that traditionally, successful firefighters kept four simple survival guidelines in mind:
1. Build a backfire if you have time.
2. Get to the top of the ridge where the fuel is thinner, where there are stretches of rock and shale, and where winds usually fluctuate.
3. Turn into the fire and try to work through it by piecing together burned-out stretches.
4. Do not allow the fire to pick the spot where it hits you, because it will hit you where it is burning fiercest and fastest.
But starting in the mid-1950s, this short list of survival rules was gradually replaced by much longer and more detailed ones. The current lists, which came to exceed forty-eight items, were designed to specify in greater detail what to do to survive in each particular circumstance (e.g., fires at the urban-wildland interface).
Weick reports that teaching the firefighters these detailed lists was a factor in decreasing the survival rates. The original short list was a general guide. The firefighters could easily remember it, but they knew it needed to be interpreted, modified, and embellished based on (p. 42) circumstance. And they knew that experience would teach them how to do the modifying and embellishing. As a result, they were open to being taught by experience. The very shortness of the list gave the firefighters tacit permission– even encouragement– to improvise in the face of unexpected events. Weick found that the longer the checklists for the wildland firefighters became, the more improvisation was shut down. Rules are aids, allies, guides, and checks. But too much reliance on rules can squeeze out the judgment that is necessary to do our work well. When general principles morph into detailed instructions, formulas, unbending commands– wisdom substitutes– the important nuances of context are squeezed out. Better to minimize the number of rules, give up trying to cover every particular circumstance, and instead do more training to encourage skill at practical reasoning and intuition.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Why I Will Never Write for the New Yorker

(p. 18) Norris is a master storyteller and serves up plenty of inside stuff. When Mark Singer wrote an article about the cost of going to the movies and buying refreshments, the editors cut his reference to Junior Mints. As one editor intoned, “A New Yorker writer should not be eating Junior Mints.”

For the full review, see:
PATRICIA T. O’CONNER. “Consider the Comma.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., APRIL 19, 2015): 18.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date APRIL 14, 2015, and has the title “‘Between You & Me,’ by Mary Norris.”)

The book under review, is:
Norris, Mary. Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Empathy for the Absent

In Practical Wisdom the authors argue for empathy and against rules. There is something to be said for their argument.
But we tend to empathize with those who are present and not those we do not see or even know.
For example in academic tenure and promotion decisions, slack is often cut for colleagues who already have their foot in the door. We know them, their troubles and challenges. So they are tenured and promoted and given salary increases and perks even though there are others outside the door who may have greater productivity and even greater troubles and challenges.
Charlie Munger in an interview at the University of Michigan spoke of how hard it is for physicians to hold their peers responsible when they are incompetent or negligent. They have empathy for their peers, knowing their troubles and challenges. And Munger also says few physicians are willing to suffer the long-lasting “ill will” from their peers who have been held accountable. They do not know so well the patients who suffer, and one way or another, the patients are soon out of sight.
Just as in academics we do not know so well the students who suffer; or the able scholars who suffer, standing outside the door.
Following rules seems unsympathetic and lacking in empathy. But it may be the best way to show empathy for the absent.

The book mentioned is:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

The interview with Munger is:
Quick, Rebecca (interviewer). “A Conversation with Charlie Munger.” University of Michigan Ross School of Business, Sept. 14, 2010.

Early Standard Oil Executive Preserved Shakespeare First Folios

(p. 17) “The Millionaire and the Bard,” by Andrea Mays, is an American love story. It is the engaging chronicle of a sober, hard-working, respectably married industrialist of the Gilded Age who became obsessed with the object of his desire. Though generally frugal and self-­disciplined, he was willing to pay extraordinary sums in order to put his hands on his mistress, to gaze at her lovingly and longingly, to caress her. To possess her only once was not enough for him; he craved the experience again and again, without limit.
. . .
I am, as readers have probably surmised, speaking of the peculiar passion of book collecting. The lover in question was Henry Clay Folger, who made his fortune as one of the presidents and, by 1923, the chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York. And the beloved, which he pursued with unflagging ardor, was a single book: “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, Published according to the True Originall Copies.” Printed in London in 1623, seven years after the author’s death, it is the book known to all lovers of Shakespeare simply as the First Folio.
. . .
Andrea Mays is a professor of economics, and the great strength of her book is an unflagging interest in exactly how Folger played the game.
. . .
Rarely has a mad passion brought forth such a splendid and enduring fruit.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN GREENBLATT. “In Love with Shakespeare.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 22, 2015, and has the title “‘The Millionaire and the Bard,’ by Andrea E. Mays.”)

The book under review, is:
Mays, Andrea E. The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Under Perverse Institutions, It Takes “Canny Outlaws” to Do What Is Right

Practical Wisdom is a hard book to categorize. It is part philosophy, and one of the co-authors is an academic philosopher. But most of the book consists of often fascinating, concrete examples. The examples are usually of perverse institutions and policies that create incentives and constraints that reward those who do bad and punish those who do good. The authors’ main lesson is that we all should become stoical “canny outlaws” by finding crafty ways to do what is right, while trying to avoid or survive the perverse incentives and constraints.
Maybe–for me the main lesson is that we all should get busy reforming the institutions and policies. But whether their lesson or my lesson is the best lesson, their book is still filled with many great examples that are worth pondering.
In the next few weeks, I will be quoting several of the more useful, or thought-provoking passages.

The book discussed, is:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Genius Physicist Dyson: Global Warming Is a Religion Where Belief Is Strong, Evidence Weak

(p. 8) On to controversial topics: What books would you recommend on climate science? On the relationship between science and religion?
On climate science, I recommend “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” by Bjorn Lomborg. On science and religion, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” by William James. Lomborg is an economist, and James was a psychologist. Both books were written by skeptics, with understanding and respect for the beliefs that they were questioning. The reason why climate science is controversial is that it is both a science and a religion. Belief is strong, even when scientific evidence is weak.

For the full interview, see:
“Freeman Dyson: By the Book.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., April 16, 2015): 8.
(Note: bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 19, 2015.)

The Lomborg book recommended by Dyson, is:
Lomborg, Bjørn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Ed Telling’s Band of Irregulars Had the Freedom to Perform

(p. 482) . . . Bill Sanders, Charlie Bacon’s replacement as the head of corporate personnel, . . . had once served Telling in the East despite having hair that flowed far below his ears. Sanders had grown his hair out in order to irritate an old-school store manager who exercised his sovereign rights by refusing to hire any man not sporting a crew cut. The fact that Telling never told Sanders to cut his hair was an early indication to others in the East that Ed Telling was much more interested in people who could do the job and who exhibited a healthy contempt for the status quo than he was in appearances.
. . .
(p. 492) It was more than dumb luck that his band of loyalists happened to include several supersensitive and insecure men, some deeply religious men, some obsessively ambitious men, several quite short men, and others, from secretaries to former window-dressers, who never fit into the status quo until Ed Telling discovered them and helped them flourish among his private band of irregulars. Along the way, the Eastern Territory troupe was joined by others. Whether they were bright-button kids from Utah itching to accomplish an act that truly counted on a large scale, or frustrated wordsmiths so enamored of the metaphors of power that the practice of management appeared to them in Biblical panoramas, they all had a part. All irregulars were welcome, and in his quiet way Ed Telling played them all. Telling could sense through instinct which people were willing to submit and which ones were willing to fight. Far from being unaware of his motivational skills, Telling would on occasion call Pat Jamieson into his office after one of his managers left, then convey to Pat the elliptical words he’d uttered to the manager, and predict the number of days it would take the officer to come back with the problem ironed out. He was rarely off by more than twenty-four hours. He said his management style involved giving subordinates a great deal of freedom, “the freedom,” he called it, “to perform.”

Source:
Katz, Donald R. The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears. New York: Viking Adult, 1987.
(Note: ellipses added.)