Month: March 2019

I wrote my dissertation about President Dwight Eisenhower. I looked at who controlled access to the President, and I gained some insight into who saw him and why. In the process, I concluded that, contrary to the “avuncular-golfer” image he had, Ike was far more involved in the direction of the activities of his administration than what he was given credit for.

I gave no thought to publishing my work as a book. Two years later, a prominent political scientist at Yale wrote his book, Hidden Hand, about Ike’s presidency that changed academic thinking about it. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda” went through my mind when I saw that the Yale guy and I had reached the same conclusion. But, as I counsel my dissertation students these days, the purpose of a dissertation is to get a degree, and I did.  On the whole, it worked out well for both the professor and me.

Ike’s leadership style came back to mind recently. Because I will be teaching the Leadership and Governance class to M.Ed. students for a seventh time, I have been thinking about leadership intermittently as I prepare the course.

When we attend the symphony, we usually arrive in time for the pre-concert conversation with the concertmaster, the conductor, and the principal soloist. It is my 30 minutes of music history each time. Recently, the conductor noted, in a timely coincidence, the many different approaches to conducting and then said, “the problem for some conductors is that they conduct when they don’t need to be conducting.”

He explained. Working with any professional orchestra, especially a good one like the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, the conductor can assume that every musician is talented and skilled, in his or her own way, an excellent musician.  In most pieces, some instrumentalists, like those playing the oboe, bassoon, or clarinet, are often soloing. They are capable of reading the musical notation provided by the composer.

The wise conductor lays out a vision for the performance and trusts that the individual members of the orchestra will, to the best of their abilities, play the music in a manner consistent with the vision. The conductor might need to be more explicit with the violin section where a dozen or more virtuosos are playing together, but once the conductor has said what he or she wants, he or she can expect to get it.

Then, at the performance, the conductor sets the tempo and gets out of the way of the performers doing their best.

Successful professional baseball managers share the understanding that the success of the team depends upon individual players doing their best. Teams don’t catch fly balls or hit home runs; players do. Such managers are keenly aware that some of their players might earn 10-15 times what the manager does in a year because someone with money has judged that the skills and talents the player possesses are worth the money. The great managers assess the personalities and the talents of the players they have and mold the team’s character and approach to each game according to the skills and talents each player represents.

If the orchestra plays well, if the team wins game after game, their leaders will be recognized. They do not need to call attention to themselves; the attention comes with success.

Some years ago, a student in the M.Ed. program, who is now a good friend, when I asked her why she thought the class she was taking with me seemed to be working better than another class, replied “you trust the room.” On reflection, I have considered that a high compliment.

The “room” was, indeed, populated with twenty-five active educational professionals who had leadership experience themselves and/or had experienced multiple leadership styles in their careers. Trusting the room meant mining the wisdom already present and then figuring out a way to bring the many contributions together in a manner that left everybody, the students and me, feeling like our time together that day was well-spent. In effect, I was playing conductor.

People of a Certain Age, in your experience, haven’t some of the best leaders been those who trust the followers, who don’t crave the attention and personal adulation, who might seem the “avuncular golfer” but in fact are the hidden hand?

Somebody has created (surely not us!) a society in which those in power, or wishing to be, worry daily about being seen and heard by as wide an audience as possible, supported by media, social and otherwise, who demand comments and reactions. That propensity for pointless noise inures many, who respond by tuning out the noise. That, in turn, causes those wanting attention to work hard at the 10 second sound bite, hoping to bust through our information-fatigue. “Where’s the beef?” is not just an historical relic of a political quip (borrowed, of course, from a TV ad for a fast food restaurant).

 In politics, it might not be possible to be just a hidden hand anymore.

“That leader is best when others hardly know that he exists” counseled Lao-Tse.

I believe him.

I wish others did, too.

Daniel E. White

April 1, 2019

M

One of the many virtues of baseball is that scorekeepers and statisticians keep track of errors.  I have written before about the forgiving quality of the batting average; hit safely only three of ten times and you will likely end up in the Hall of Fame, having failed the other seven times.

The margin of errors for errors is less generous. Say, 100 balls are hit to me over a several game span. If I successfully field 97 of them, I probably keep my job. But, oh, the cost of those errors!

When you make an error in front of 50,000 fans, you have no place to hide. The scoreboard will record a large “1” under the big “E” that comes after your team’s name, and everyone knows who committed the error. When statistics are published at the end of the year, yours will include all of those awful moments of embarrassment you experienced in front of all those fans.

Yet, hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the game in which you committed the Big E, and no one will remember your error.

The news in the past few years has been teeming with stories about errors, usually mistakes made by this person or that who is in the public eye. Frequently, these mistakes happened years ago, often in youth, when making mistakes, and hopefully learning from them, is almost an expectation. Like the statistical summary of a player’s career, the record of mistakes seems, to some, to be a permanent stain on the offender’s character. Make a mistake in behavior or attitude or belief, and thereby be disqualified for public trust for the rest of your life.

What poppycock! Those who would so censure have forgotten that “to err is human,” and that there is a following clause in that quote: “to forgive, divine.”  And It always makes me wonder about just how stain-free the accuser might be.

As teachers, we wanted our students to do well but also counselled them that mistakes created opportunities to learn. I hired a math teacher once who had earned his degree from Claremont McKenna College in English Literature. He had started as a math major but changed when he failed Differential Equations.  He was a terrific math teacher because he knew about making mistakes, and the kinds of concepts and functions that trip up students. (I now understand why math teachers always wanted students to “show their work.”)

The current Paragons of Perfection, 21^st Century Inquisitors, will not allow for the real-life equivalent of the ninth inning home run to mitigate the effects of the error.

They fail to remember that the best biographies of our pantheon of heroes and heroines are not records of perfect lives. They describe what happened, and what happened after mistakes were made. Likewise, stories abound about convicts who reform to have lives of productive service to others and drunks who sober up to help others refrain from becoming drunks.

I am certain that I have “gotten away” with a few mistakes, like driving after having too much to drink. Few people around me as I was growing up did NOT repeat a joke that would be judged ethnically or sexually inappropriate these days. Fewer still raised any objection to such a joke being told in the first place.

The mistake most egregious is the mistake of not owning up to one’s mistakes.  That ranks right up there with the mistake of not allowing for mistakes to be only one part of one’s life story.

People of a Certain Age, in looking over our lives, aren’t we able to see mistakes we have made? One can hope we’ve “made a few, but then again, too few to mention,” as Sinatra sang. But how realistic is that? Aren’t we lucky that our mistakes have not ended our useful lives?

To be clear, there are mistakes that are more than indiscretion, that really do reveal something about a person’s character. We call these mistakes “crimes,” or even, in a religious sense, “sins.” Reasonable people should be able to make reasonable distinctions. 

In response to crime, people “pay their debt to society.” Regarding sin, people “atone for their transgressions.” Our formal systems have provided for the mending of one’s ways, the ninth-inning home run a factor or not. It remains to be seen whether or not the court of public opinion is so willing to accept that people can change their ways. To reject the notion that people can change is to undercut the beliefs of most of the major religions in the world.

Few baseball players have given up their careers because they committed an error. Players who commit a lot of errors might be less desirable to have on your side, but if those players hit lots of home runs and have high batting averages, they can probably still enjoy a respected career. To be sure, their career stats will always have that column marked “E,” but that is one of many columns.

I wouldn’t mind living in a society where the sum of one’s actions at the end of one’s life would allow for mistakes, a life of service to others serving as the ninth-inning home run.

Daniel E. White

March 18, 2019