SPARK NEARER ULTOPTIMATE

China’s Three Gorges Dam and That Turkey Sandwich You’re Eating

TOM DURWOOD

 

A really big dam has risen half a world away. Its shadow is falling on your kitchen table, warns Evan D.G. Fraser.

Seven thousand feet in length and 610 feet tall, the colossal hydroelectric Three Gorge Dam across the Yangtze River in Province dam looms like a sentinel from another age. It signals that things are about to change, and that includes you.

 

“The Three Gorges Dam will shape the way we eat for the next generation.” Evan D.G. Fraser, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and co-author with Andrew Rimas of the brilliant book Empires of Food, is not exaggerating when he points to this single civil work as the marker of a new (and troublesome) era of food production. “Three Gorges represents the last gap of a vast market-driven system of food production,” he writes. “They are what urban societies create to feed themselves. In their simplest formation, they’re webs of farms and trails, rivers and vegetation, all of which function to deliver food from a piece of tilled land to a cluster of interested eaters.” And the entire web is already wobbling. The ingredients of that turkey sandwich you’re having for lunch may no longer be available, or affordable.

 

The Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River is the largest in the world.

For one thing, the weather is changing. For a second thing, cheap oil is gone. “We have made our food system dependent on cheap oil and good weather,” says Fraser, “both of which are unlikely to continue into the future.” 

 

He continues:

There is a pretty strong scientific consensus that the 2050s, 60s and 70s won’t have as good weather as the 1950s, 60s or 70s.  This worries me because the way farming systems have evolved over the past 100 years depends on good weather.  At the same time, we’ve created a permanent class of poor and economically marginalized people.  When the weather turns bad, I think that major parts of the world will become significantly less productive and the economically marginal people will not have the buying power to obtain the food they need to survive.

 

The dam is so big that the city of Shanghai, sixty miles away, is sinking. The artificial lake it creates will be visible from space. The dam was initiated by Mao Zedong as a monument to the magnificence of Communism; he wrote a poem about his vision of the project, “Swimming,” in 1956. Engineers who pointed out its unintended consequences were jailed. Today it pumps out eleven times as much electricity as the Hoover Dam. So a new cog has joined the global food system of food and water supply. And it is a system that is rotting, says Fraser. And, historically, wars sprout and empires fall when the food supply teeters.

 

The Chinese Academy of Sciences recently stated that, due to climate and population change, “cereal production . . . [will] fall significantly as the century progresses.” This is bad news for everyone, because the Chinese food empire, with its tangle of farms, warehouses, refrigeration cars, corn exchanges, cash registers, and frying pans, is hopelessly intertwined with the rest of the world.

 

The Three Gorges’ damming of the mighty Yangtze represents “a broken flow, leaving behind everything that’s ever gone before,” writes Fraser. “The Three Gorges Dam unveils a new world that stretches far beyond the cinder-block maze of Yichang.” You want to read Empires of Food to get the whole story.

 

Enjoy lunch.

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SPARK NEARER ULTOPTIMATE

American Villains

MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE HERO

How is an American villain different from a Russian villain, or a West African villain? What is “evil” to us? Why are some villains really powerful characters with deep grips on our imagination, and others just seem annoying? These may be worthy questions, since villains can make or break a story: “Each film is only as good as its villain,” declares film critic Roger Ebert. “Only a great villain can transform a good try into triumph.” Here are four ideas on the subject:

 

a) American evil is either human and social, or cosmic. American evil began with Ahab. Professor Lee Quinby has considered these questions in depth, and delivers a powerful answer — or certainly the framework of an extended answer — in her dissertation, Demurring to Doom: A Geopolitics of Prevailing. She considers two “entrenched” categories of evil that have dominated American stories from the beginning: the first is cosmic or apocalyptic evil, and the second is human-driven evil, which is particular and specific. The Terminator movies feature apocalyptic evil, while a villain like Doctor Octopus in Spiderman represents one man’s ambition and good intentions gone terribly bad. Harry Potter features both categories of villainy – Valdemort is an (English) example of apocalyptic evil, while the Minister of Magic’s villainy seems more rooted in his personal vanity.

 

Both of these contending categories of evil, she argues, are powerfully delineated in Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, especially in the character of Ahab, the villain of Moby Dick. Prof. Quinby also looks at President Franklin Roosevelt’s portrayal of poverty as human-made and socially alterable. As the nation struggled against the Great Depression, Roosevelt was trying to motivate his countrymen – “We can fight this,” he was telling us. “It is not our destiny to be defeated by poverty.” Both Roosevelt and Truman linked evil to social issues such as poverty, economic inequality, and the unchecked pursuit of profit.

 

On the other hand, terrorism is today often portrayed as apocalyptic – a cosmic force, something we cannot prevent or understand. Movies like White House Down, Independence Day, Green Lantern, and War of the Worlds feature evil like this – a force you cannot really understand (but must defeat). Certainly the Joker in The Dark Knight is like this — he wants to bring general chaos to Gotham City for no rational reason. By contrast, the villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises had a specific human story behind his villainy. Jack Torrance, the bad guy in Stephen King’s The Shining, is an unlucky man controlled by a higher evil force.

 

b) American social evil is often hedonism. Because of America’s Puritanical streak, we tend to portray our villains as high-living creeps who transgress the work ethic. They are hedonistic – they enjoy material things way too much. They represent bad values. The Die Hard films, for example, feature villains who want to get ahead without working hard and playing by the rules – they want to cheat. That is why they are so despicable, and must be defeated at all costs. Corporate villains (Robocop) often fall into this category.

 

This is close to a class theory of villains – that bad guys are all upper-class, and represent the failed values of the rich, while heroes come from the working classes (the Green Goblin is wealthy, Peter Parker is middle-class).

 

Henchmen are minor villains and may not need a theory at all.

 

c) Each villain is simply the mirror image of its hero. Captain America is a strong smart hero (with no special powers) fighting for democracy, so the Red Skull is a strong smart Nazi (with no special powers) opposing him. That is why you can never switch villains – Lex Luthor does not fit against Luke Skywalker.

 

d) Any truly realistic story does not have a pure villain, only good characters who have made some bad decisions. An author named Ben Bova advises that, in real life, “there are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.” In Les Miserables, Jean Valjean turned to crime (he stole a loaf of bread) only so he could feed his family. Under this theory, only a weak story features a villain who is not at some point just like us.

 

YOU”VE NEVER HEARD A STORY LIKE THIS

Buried Narratives

SOME HEROES TAKE A LONG TIME TO EMERGE

“Easter morning, T/5 William E. Thomas and Pfc. Joseph Jackson.” March 10, 1945. 1st Lt. John D. Moore.

 

 

Graphic: San Francisco Chronicle

 

An historian named Dominic Capra writes that it takes a century for the full truth to come out. A battle, an election, a book – it sometimes takes the passage of time (a lot of time) for us to understand the real stories. This is partly because we see what we want to see, or what we are conditioned to see.

 

This general idea is illustrated by the story of Lieutenant John R. Fox.

 

In 1973, a woman named from San Francisco named Solace Wales was walking in Italy. She was walking along a hillside above a little town called Sommocolonia when she noticed a stone marker, half-hidden in the grass. Here is what it said (in Italian):

 

John Fox, U.S. Army Lieutenant, Dec. 26, 1944

 

She had no idea what it meant. Who was John Fox? What did he do?

 

She asked people in the town, and soon uncovered the epic story of Lieutenant Fox, and his remarkable sacrifice (see Medal of Honor account, above), and the larger story of the 92^nd Infantry. She could not find any mention of it in any history books. How was that possible?

 

Wales and her husband, both artisits, had bought a small vacation home in Sommocolinia. They asked their neighbors about Fox:

“He was one of the black Americans who died here back in the war,” came the reply. “They almost all died, you know.”

 

Why, wondered Wales, was there no American monument to Fox and his comrades? What had happened to them?

 

The short conversation set her on a two-decade search for answers. She started with the other villagers, gradually interviewing anyone who was old enough to remember the war and tape-recording their accounts.

 

Here is the text of John R. Fox’s Medal of Honor Award. It is a story like none other:

For extraordinary heroism against an armed enemy in the vicinity of Sommocolonia, Italy on 26 December 1944, while serving as a member of Cannon Company, 366th Infantry Regiment, 92d Infantry Division. During the preceding few weeks, Lieutenant Fox served with the 598th Field Artillery Battalion as a forward observer. On Christmas night, enemy soldiers gradually infiltrated the town of Sommocolonia in civilian clothes, and by early morning the town was largely in hostile hands.

 

Commencing with a heavy barrage of enemy artillery at 0400 hours on 26 December 1944, an organized attack by uniformed German units began. Being greatly outnumbered, most of the United States Infantry forces were forced to withdraw from the town, but Lieutenant Fox and some other members of his observer party voluntarily remained on the second floor of a house to direct defensive artillery fire. At 0800 hours, Lieutenant Fox reported that the Germans were in the streets and attacking in strength. He then called for defensive artillery fire to slow the enemy advance.

 

As the Germans continued to press the attack towards the area that Lieutenant Fox occupied, he adjusted the artillery fire closer to his position. Finally he was warned that the next adjustment would bring the deadly artillery right on top of his position. After acknowledging the danger, Lieutenant Fox insisted that the last adjustment be fired as this was the only way to defeat the attacking soldiers. Later, when a counterattack retook the position from the Germans, Lieutenant Fox’s body was found with the bodies of approximately 100 German soldiers.

 

Lieutenant Fox’s gallant and courageous actions, at the supreme sacrifice of his own life, contributed greatly to delaying the enemy advance until other infantry and artillery units could reorganize to repel the attack. His extraordinary valorous actions were in keeping with the most cherished traditions of military service, and reflect the utmost credit on him, his unit, and the United States Army.

 

The full story of Solace Wales, John Fox, and the remembrance of the 92^nd Infantry is written in an excellent article by San Francisco Chronicle writer Frank Viviano (July 13, 2000), “Almost Forgotten Heroes: Italian town honors black GI’s who were shunned by their own country)”. Here is how Frank Viviano begins his account of this buried story and how it was uncovered: “It has taken five decades of stubborn efforts by the battle’s few survivors, and 20 years of research by a Bay Area woman who accidentally stumbled onto their tale, to fill in the empty page in that history.”

 

In every war, there is a ratio of personnel to combat personnel: in World War II, it was 8:1. That is, for every eight people in the military, one actaully fired a weaon, The rest were support (ditch diggers, truck drivers, laundrymen, chefs, etc.) or adminstrative. Because black soldiers in World War II were viewed not quite as “full” soldiers, they mostly served in support roles. Very few black soldiers got to actually fire a weapon: John Fox was one.

 

Here is how they were greeted when they arrived in Italy to fight the Nazis:

“I did not send for you,” Gen. Edmund Almond, the white commandant of the 92nd Division told his African American junior officers after their disembarkation in Italy. “Your Negro newspapers, Negro politicians and white friends have insisted on your seeing combat, and I shall see that you get combat and your share of casualties.”

 

Ouch. Is it any wonder that zero Medals of Honor were awarded to black soldiers for World War II? It was only thirty years later that this oversight was corrected.

 

Just under 1 million black soldiers served in World War II. Among those who saw combat, nearly a quarter were killed or wounded. They captured twice as many enemy troops as their own numbers.

 

Yet when the official books were closed on the war effort, not a single African American had been presented with the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest commendation for valor. Black soldiers, the conventional wisdom ran, had “melted away” during major offensives.

 

The phrase came from an offhand remark in 1945 by Truman Gibson, the War Department’s special assistant on Negro Affairs. For half a century, his words were the standard assessment of African American military performance in World War II.

 

John A .Fox was awarded his Medal of Honor in 1972, twenty-seven years after his heroic deed. Spike Lee made a 2005 film, Miracle at Santa Anna, loosely based on the incident.

# # #

TWO PREVIOUS SCENES

A Little Backstory

IN THE ONGOING DRAMA BETWEEN CHINA AND AMERICA

Two episodes can remind us that the complex, through-a-glass-darkly relationship between China and America didn’t begin with the Beijing Olympics.

 

Some time ago, a prominent American Presidents visited China – Tientsin and Peking to be exact – and was asked to settle a thorny issue between China and its Asian rival, Japan. In 1877, Ulysses S. Grant had just left the White House when he embarked on a two-year trip around the world. He and his small entourage were received with great ceremony in capitals across Europe. In March of 1878, they arrived in Peking, where General Grant met the Chinese Viceroy and politician Li Hung Zhang. Here is how J.F. Packard describes their first meeting in his epic account, Grant’s Tour Around the World:

 

The Prince saluted General Grant in Tartar fashion, looking at him for a moment with an earnest, curious gaze, like one who had formed an ideal of some kind and was anxious to see how far his ideal had been realized.

 

The two got along well. Li Hung Zhang was one of the first Chinese leaders to welcome Western influences. He was able to think of China’s common good in the face of both the modernity and foreign influence which assaulted what was in many ways still a medieval culture. The Viceroy was “not afraid of railways and telegraphs, and anxious to strengthen and develop China by all the agencies of outside civilization,” according to Packard. He sought Grant’s advice in many matters (civil war among them). Zhang asked Grant to serve as arbiter over a dispute between China and Japan as to the conservatorship of the Ryukyu (“Loochoo”) Island Kingdom. What was Grant’s advice? According to John Russell Young, another biographer of the world tour, General Grant argued “that China and Japan should make such sacrifices as would settle all questions between them and become friends and allies, without consultation with foreign powers.” Do not borrow from European nations either, he added. General Grant said that incurring debt was to be avoided at all costs. “Loans from foreign powers were always attended with danger and humiliation.” Interesting advice, in light of the billions of dollars in American debt which China currently holds.

 

In his excellent book A Partnership for Disorder: China and America in World War II, Scholar Xiaoyuan Liu reminds us of a second episode in our mutual history. One lesson we can draw from it is just how much disastrous misunderstanding over vital global issues can take place in a very short time.

 

He spotlights a moment in recent history when America and China were very much partners. Professor Liu details how the two victorious allies made grand plans to take over Japan’s Pacific empire at the end of the World War II, and how those mutual plans fell apart. One of the partnership’s false assumptions, according to the author, was the idea that a government can speak for an entire nation. China’s representatives did not speak for a unified China; civil war was threatening, and soon China would fall into a four-year abyss of hellish change. Asia would not be the same. America was left with an inflated plan for the Pacific region that bore little relevance to political realities.

 

Chiang Kai Shek comes off as particularly hapless regarding his assessment of other cultures: We have nothing to learn from the Japanese, he said, for “their goods are too cheaply made. The Americans are too fancy, the British too slow. Germany is the only country from which we can learn something.” Too ‘fancy’? I can see FDR being thought of as fancy, but what about TR? Woodrow Wilson? Abraham Lincoln?

 

America was equally bewildered by China, and somewhat clueless as to the Middle Kingdom’s internal realities. Here is FDR’s grasp of internal affairs within China: “I think we are going through a transition period, especially the part relating to North China.” This “transition period” would, of course, turn out to be the rise of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party that still rules China today. Professor Liu praises FDR’s acumen but criticizes him for being cautious in acting “ahead of events.”

 

If all this sounds familiar, it should. America is today deeply involved in the exact same kind of bewilderment at internal affairs of other nations. It seems to be part of global life. Americans may need to remind themselves that China’s history is nothing like American history. It is easy to see today’s industrialized China and forget how very different our 20th centuries were. Recalling episodes in our mutual past can help remind us of the different paths we have taken to modernity, and how easy it can be to make mistaken assumptions.

# # #

SPARK NEARER, ULTOPTIMATE

The Changing Vampire

EACH GENERATION HAS A NEW VERSION

Why do we like being scared by vampires so much?

 

“Every age embraces the vampire it needs,” writes author Nina Auerbach in her book
Our Vampires, Ourselves. Vampires were extremely alien and extremely deadly monsters when they first appeared in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.” Bram Stoker would not recognize the friendly teen vampires (like Edward Cullen in the “Twilight” series) of today. Why have we changed the way we imagine vampires? What is their basic appeal? Here are four concepts that have been applied to this topic:

 

1) Vampires are all about religion – specifically, all the bad things that happen if society strays away from the Church. Vampires are sinners, vampires are our or lost fallen brothers who live lives with no moral meaning. Vampires are so compelling, this theory goes, because represent pure Godlessness. Since they are the counter- religious devils, they can be warded off with Bibles, holy water, and crosses. Closely following the ritualistic life of the Church enables us to avoid becoming vampires.

 

In recent years, the traditional vampire has changed to reflect America’s complex association with these principles.

 

2) Vampires represent our anxieties about sex. They are figures who act out our combined thrill and fear about coming of sexual age. The Bram Stoker Dracula reached its popularity at the height of the Victorian age, when sex was hidden beneath prim attitudes and layers of formal clothing. That Dracula would appear suddenly in the open window of a pretty teenage girl’s bedroom, and attack her in her bed. Yikes ! The idea of a monster representing repressed sexuality would certainly appeal to Sigmund Freud.

He wrote, “All human experiences of morbid dread signify the presence of repressed sexual and aggressive wishes, and in vampirism we see these repressed wishes becoming plainly visible.” We are afraid of our own powerful desires. The idea is that if vampires win, then we face a society where our own sexuality runs wild.

 

Bela Lugosi in an early portrayal of Dracula

The original Dracula (like sex in the Victorian era) was not seen much – the story carried on all around him, but the monster himself only appeared briefly and violently. Edward Cullen’s scare factor is much lower – he is more like a misunderstood boyfriend. Now we are comfortable with the whole notion of sex, so our vampire monster is part of the everyday world. In the Twilight stories, we chat with the moody young vampires in our school cafeteria, we go to parties at their house. The vampire figure has changed from a ruthless bloodsucking villain to a romantic figure who displays feelings, fears, hope, dreams and sadness.

 

In this light, Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows how far society has come. Instead of playing victim to her sexuality, the modern woman (who is liberated from her fear of sex) is the one best equipped to destroy the monster.

 

3) Dracula represents invasion. In a recent dissertation, associate professor Gensea Carter offers the theory that the original Dracula was a powerful foreshadowing of the real-life horrors of World War I.

 

Carter sees the novel’s depiction of a siege of vampirism descending on England as a glimpse of the mechanized warfare that would soon kill an entire generation of Englishmen. Stoker’s outrageous scenario — that a monstrous foreign entity (from the Austro-Hungarian Empire) invades innocent England using unforeseen, forbidden tactics to slaughter her citizens – came horrifyingly true less than two decades later.  Count Dracula’s speech, dress and mannerisms were all really weird and really “foreign.”

 

“Questions of invasion, identity, and war were entangled in a dramatic story about vampires feeding on women and children in London,” writes Carter. She proves her thesis with a close examination of Stoker’s research. Magazines of the times were using pretty monstrous rhetoric to express fears about Germany’s aggression. Stoker, she suggests, simply capitalized on these anxieties – and that is why English readers found the story so frightening. When Dracula asks, “What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” Carter sees him as a clear expression of Germany’s thirst for global domination.

 

4) The vampire character is a way to explain people and situations that did not comply with social expectations. This is the thesis of Jennifer Fountain’s recent dissertation, The Vampire in Modern American Media. “In Romania,” she writes, “women who resisted performing traditional duties — caring for the family, tending crops — were thought to be vampires. Likewise, vampires were also blamed for the spread of the plague throughout Europe. When greeted with disturbing, unexplainable phenomena, it was easier to blame events on vampires than to live with the unknown.” Under this theory, the teen vampires of Twilight might represent drug addicts – members of society we cannot really figure out or accept.

 

 

 

SPARK NEARER, ULTOPTIMATE

Four Theories of Zombies

WHY ARE THEY SO POPULAR?

The lively zombies of “I am Legend” (2007) are never clearly visible.

 

The zombie is one of our most enduring monsters. Why do we keep telling stories about dead people who come back to life? We see a wide range of them, from the super-slow and easily-killed (Night of the Living Dead) to the fast-moving and super-powerful (I Am Legend, the 2007 version). What is the deal with zombies? Here are four thoughts on the answer to that:

 

1) Zombies are a warning to us: stop living mindless lives of consumerism! They are so scary because they represent an exagerrated nirror image of us – a fear of what we ourselves are becoming. Zombies remind us that most of the time, we’re just mindless drones, plugged into our earphones, eating prepared foods, shambing on treadmills that go nowhere, shopping for clothes to go shopping in, etc.

 

“Zombie movies force us to figure out what, if anything, differentiates us from the monsters on the screen,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in a recent Discover magazine article, “What You Can Learn from Zombie Movies: Lessons on science, consumerism, and the soul.” Zombies force us to confront ourselves. “What is life? Why does it depend on killing and consuming other life? Does this cruel reality of survival have any intrinsic meaning?

 

2) Fear of infection: zombie-ism is AIDS in disguise. The original concept of corpses coming back to life sprang from accounts of poisoning in the Caribbean. Poisons derived from certain frogs could induce a corpse-life state, and buried Haitians woke up and came “back to life” in several cases. In other cases, “the individuals who had been branded zombies by terrified peasants turned out to be victims of epilepsy, mental retardation, insanity or alcoholism,” according to Bernard Diederich in his Time magazine article, “Do Zombies Really Exist?” The medical records of rural doctors show plants and toads that produce “hallucinogens, powerful anesthetics and chemicals that affect the heart and nervous system,” writes Diederich, and fish that contain a deadly nerve poison, tetrodotoxin.

 

Diseases can do these same things to us, and the modern plague is AIDS. It can turn perfectly healthy people into zombie-like creatures in a matter of months. While we may be able to cope with this in our conscious minds, our subconscious is going nuts! Zombie movies are our subconscious nightmares of infection jumping onto the big screen.

 

3) Zombies represent our collective guilt over all the dead people we could not save.

Those 55 people killed in a bombing in the Middle East you heard about on the radio this morning, the thousands of refugees starving due to that African rebellion, the schoolchildren lost in that Chinese earthquake or the typhoon in Indonesia – we do not forget these images. This theory holds that we actually record these reports of terrorism, famine, disease, and warfare, all the innocent people whose deaths we see on television – we just push them down into our subconscious. We carry around a dim memory of all those faces beyond our reach. In the “night of the living dead,” they come back for us. We are revisited by the forgotten.

 

4) Zombies represent the erasure of “borders.” Civilization depends on clear boundaries – between nations, between home and school, good and bad, between the living and the dead. This concept emphasizes our fear that we have lost control of modern life – planes are crashing into buildings, the family unit is falling apart, our jobs are moving overseas, our friends’ disembodied faces appear on our computer screens, babies can be manufactured in test tubes. Where are the borders, people?

 

The zombies therefore represent our worst fear – that the line between the living and the dead is now erased. All borders are meaningless. All rules are gone. Zombies stand at the gates of lawlessness.

 

 

 

 

LEADERSHIP: ISRAELI MILITARY AND INDUSTRY USE THIS

The Flat Org Chart

MAYBE YOU SHOULD, TOO

 

Israeli solder and tank in Gaza Strip. Photo: Xinhua

Every organization has a leadership style, and a structure. Many companies have a “chain of command” structure, with wisdom and decisions coming from the top down. Follow the orders from your superiors.

 

Would you like to be able to disagree with your boss? Tell your commanding officer he’s dead wrong and then show the regiment that your idea is better? That is the reality of the Israeli military, where a “group command” concept has taken hold and seems to work well.

The study of leadership is an inexact science – we are not really sure how it works, and leadership can be tricky to teach. Most courses mention several different styles of leadership. Here is how a motivational writer named John Gardner breaks them down:

 

Telling (high task/low relationship). This style or approach is characterized by giving a great deal of direction to subordinates and by giving considerable attention to defining roles and goals. Subordinates are viewed as being unable and unwilling to ‘do a good job’.

 

Selling (high task/high relationship). Here, while most of the direction is given by the leader, there is an attempt at encouraging people to ‘buy into’ the task. Sometimes characterized as a ‘coaching’ approach, it is to be used when people are willing and motivated but lack the required ‘maturity’ or ‘ability’.

 

Participating (high relationship/low task). Here decision-making is shared between leaders and followers – the main role of the leader being to facilitate and communicate. (Hersey 1984).

 

Delegating (low relationship/low task). The leader still identifies the problem or issue, but the responsibility for carrying out the response is given to followers.

Now we have a new model of leadership to consider: the “flat org chart” model where no one is in charge, and everyone is. Rather than showing a hierarchy of rank, this model has everyone on the same level. This is a model that begins in the Israeli military and carries over to Israeli businesses.

 

In their excellent book, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, Dan Senor and Saul Singer describe how Israeli regiments argue and exchange opinions openly, until the best idea emerges – regardless of whether a private, a sergeant, or a general thinks of it. The group therefore always has the benefit of the best procedure. Senor and Singer write about a “can-do, responsible attitude that Israelis refer to as rosh gadol. In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into rosh gadol – literally, a ‘big head’ — and those who operate with rosh katan, or ‘little head.’ Rosh katun behavior, which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility, or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way … It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy.”

 

A volleyball coach who asks her team what is going wrong and how to fix it is asking for rosh gadol decision-making.

Does this work? It seems to. The rosh gadol approach breeds success not only in the Israel military, but in Israeli commerce: even though it is a tiny, war-torn nation that is mostly desert, Israel has more successful start-up ventures than all the nations of Europe put together. Soldiers graduate from the military to become managers and business owners who are driven to overcome obstacles and develop solutions. The “flat org” breeds a risk-taking state of mind, in which willingness to try is everything, and failure is a badge of honor. As one analyst puts it, “When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week.” It helps that Israel is a nation of immigrants: the authors’ theory is that immigrants has risked everything to come to a new country, so they are natural entrepreneurs.

 

Assignment. Please write a 300-word essay showing how this “flat org chart” style of leadership might work (or flop) with one of your sports teams, or in a classroom, or in another leadership situation. When would it tend to work, and when would it flop?