This book should be compared to David Callahan's "The Cheating Culture" (2004), reviewed here March 28, 2006.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Dov Seidman (CEO of LRN): "How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything", review
Author: Dov Seidman, with Foreword by Bill Clinton
Title: “How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything”
Publication: 2011 (Expanded edition, originally published in
2007), Wiley: ISNB 978-1-118-10627-2,
344 pages, hardcover (also e-book), 4 Parts, 12 Chapters, with a
Foreword, Preface (38 roman pages), Prologue, and two Afterword’s (“How’s
Matter”).
Amazon link:
Before I move on, let me note something about the format of
the book. There are multiple
introductions and epilogues, which I know a NYC literary agent with whom I
worked in the 1990s would have seen as unnecessary. Also, I get annoyed when books have small
roman page numbering for introductory material.
I say, make the title page as “1” and number on, so we can tell how long
the book is. With my own DADT III book,
the half-title page is page 1. The actual
text starts on p. 9. I call my opening a
“Foreword”, but literary agents prefer the term “Introduction”.
The author is CEO of LRN, which helps companies with
regulatory and compliance issues.
Seidman also has filed trademark litigation against yogurt manufacturer
Chobani, which I discuss on my Trademark Issues blog Oct, 6, 2014, over the use
of a common English adverb “How” as a wordmark.
This leads me next into noting that Seidman’s thinking and
ideas are a lot like mine, in my “Do Ask, Do Tell” books (three of them), but
he has made it less personal, more generic, and more suitable for commercial
use in a consulting business or as a motivational speaker. For example, he avoids all discussion of
sexuality, although he does recognize there is tension between the goals of the
individual (as Ayn Rand would see them) and the needs of the group.
I'll also add here that in 2003 I developed a certification exam for Brainbench on "business ethics", dealing with some of the issues in the book. One of the most controversial ideas them that I promoted was avoiding "conflict of interest", which is definitely a "How".
The difference between “What” and “How” comes up in systems
development. Back in 1979, a consortium
of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans tries to set up a combines Medicare system
project (“CABCO”), which I moved to Dallas to work for. The group used a project management system
called “Pride Logik” (rather like SDM70) with different phases. Phase 2 was the “What” (the input and output specification
for each subsystem), and Phase 3 was the “How” (Structured English, which would
lead to pseudocode). The project
stumbled and failed in 1982 over the inability of the sponsoring Plans to agree
on “the Whats”, not realizing that modern computing could allow users to
specify not only “the How” but even “the What”.
Seidman’s book is divided into parts related to change,
thought, behavior, and governance. Along
the way, he gives a lot of interesting anecdotes, starting out with
explanations of how “The Wave” self-generates at large sports events. He has some stories from his own business,
and some troubling examples of where entrepreneurs went wrong, as when a new restaurant
in Los Angeles was socked with frivolous litigation from a competitor over how
it had violated a local license.
The most serious point, in my experience, comes out of
transparency. In the past, gatekeepers
monitored information, which allowed individuals to lead double lives and keep
past indiscretions secret, often from future employers. Since the early-to-mid 2000’s (about the time
of Myspace, which preceded Facebook – and at one point Seidman makes the point
with the older Myspace, like he was Dr. Phil) employers have realized they can
check up on prospective and current employees online with search engines, often
pulling up information for the wrong person or getting misleading
impressions. In fact, reputation
management has become a whole industry, most visibly started my Michael Fertik
with his “Reputation Defender” (my own “BillBoushka” blog, Nov. 30, 2006).
Reputation goes global, but it used to be more dependent on family and social
station and connections in a community, the loss of which some commentators
like Charles Murray (“Coming Apart”) lament (March 14, 2012). Daniel Solove of George Washington University has also written about reputation (Jan. 12, 2008).
In his last section, Seidman categorizes different cultures
of management, starting out (after “anarchy”) with the purely authoritarian –
like the military. That culture
dominated early years of my own life, when we had a male-only draft. Most companies in my career followed “informed
acquiescence” but the most progressive – and I believe this includes companies
like Apple, Facebook and Google – use more self-governance. Actually, the idea of self-managed teams was developing
in the 1990s and was promoted at my own employer (USLICO-ReliaStar-ING-Voya) as
Team Handbook and then TQM (Total Quality Management, which he mentions by name
at least once). I’d say an earlier stint
in the credit industry (Chilton-TRW-Experian) as more like his “acquiescence”.
I can remember, as a boy, being very concerned about my
father’s ideas over authority, and the idea of doings something “just for
authority”. My father had a little “proverb”
or inevitable aphorism, that is, “to obey is better than to sacrifice”. That’s because, in his world, and really for
a lot of people today in a universe of gross inequality, if you don’t step up
to what you have to do, “sacrifice” can really happen and it can get ugly. I talk about that in the “Epilogue” of the “non-fiction”
part of my DADT III book.
I can provide a particular perspective on when “How”
matters. Think about the way we got
grades, and in my era, avoiding the draft, or at least getting used as cannon
fodder in Vietnam, depended on academic records – that’s the whole moral debate
over student deferments. But if you
cheated on a test, that was no good. I
remember that, in my senior year of high school, a girl thought I had cheated
on a government test because I had predicted that the teacher would ask about “institutionalism”
on a test. Well, he did, but I had simply put 2+2
together and predicted it. She was
wrong, but the unfounded accusation did hurt my reputation a bit.
Fast forward a few decades, to the time my mother passed
away at the end of 2010. I’ve written in
my DADT III book about the seven years living with her, in her (not my) home
after I returned from Minnesota in 2003, when I was already 60 myself. People put a lot of pressure on me to become
more “emotionally” involved and more assertive with health care providers than
I was. This was disturbing. I felt a bit like a parasite, the way the
Left Wing sees it. I did land rather
well. I am financially stable enough now
NOT to have to look at hucksterism to
stay afoat in my own retirement, but I didn’t exactly “earn it”. (That’s a line from “The Proles”, my
underground novel some people know.) But
I get threatening proposals from people to give up my own ends and join them,
or else, because inheriting wealth is not quite morally legitimate as a “How”. But is telemarketing more legitimate?
Or back up to 2005, when I was substitute teaching. Again, I would sometimes be confronted with
disciplinary situations that required more intimacy than I was prepared to
offer (as a never married, childless, older homosexual man, used to double
lives). But my undoing was my own
transparency, the way one particular web posting of mine had been
(mis)interpreted, as connected to other events (when it wasn’t).
And I can back up to the mid 1990s, to another HOW. I was working for a life insurance company (USLICO) that specialized in selling to military officers. I had started working on my first DADT book, which would deal, in large part, with the moral controversy associated with the debate over gays in the military, following Bill Clinton's proposal. I felt that publication would constitute a conflict of interest, because it was no longer a legitimate "HOW" for me to earn a living from a source connected to the military if I wrote about it. So I arranged a transfer to Minneapolis in 1997.
There is something to say about work habits – HOW you do the
job is important so that you know that you did it right and that the customer can
depend on what you did to work after you’re gone. In information technology, following security
procedures to the letter is part of the expected “How” now, but this has
evolved over decades. (In fact, some
hierarchal separation of functions, which Dov sees as divisive, is necessary
for security in some workplaces.) My
father’s prescription for “how” was “formation of proper habits” and even “learning
to work”.
There’s another reason, however, that “WHAT” matters. In these days of equality and individual
rights, the purposes that one has in mind for one’s own freedom do eventually
matter to others. This was an important
idea in that troubling early period of my college days, including the “hospitalization”
at NIH in 1962. But one’s desires and
fantasies, if they surface, can indeed create contradictions.
So while others would barge in on my life and concern
themselves with “what” I wanted, I could rightfully ask, “WHAT do you want from
me?” Sometimes it seemed like it was
surrender of the self and submission to their purposes, their authoritarian
structure. That sort of thinking is what
ISIS uses to recruit teens now. (“Why
are you sitting around when we are attacked?”)
Shame itself comes full circle.
This book should be compared to David Callahan's "The Cheating Culture" (2004), reviewed here March 28, 2006.
This book should be compared to David Callahan's "The Cheating Culture" (2004), reviewed here March 28, 2006.
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