Malaysian Governance: It is a Najib-led ”Malaise System”, not the Malays

January 26, 2018

by S Thayaparan@www,malaysiakini.com

“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”

― Bertrand Russell

COMMENT | Malaysiakini columnist Thor Kah Hoong’s ‘It’s a malaise of the system, not Malays’, is a snapshot of what is wrong with the discourse in this country. Thor is a friend and this piece is not a rebuttal or anything like that, but I just feel I have to say a few words.

Saying not all Malays are lazy is just as meaningless as saying all Malays are lazy. Why? Because whether Malays are lazy or not is not the issue when it comes to discussing the system.

Let us say that the system of privileges actually benefited the majority of the Malay community. Let us say that Islam was applied “fairly” to all and we were all under the shadow of syariah law. Would this be an acceptable system? Would race relations in this country be better? Would it still matter if a Malay was lazy or not?

Okay, let us say that not all Malays are lazy. Would it make a difference if those not lazy Malays also supported Malay rights and believed that Islam should be imposed on all Malaysians because they believed that Malaysia was an Islamic state?

Really? It is time to revisit Dr Syed Hussein Alatas’ The Myth of Lazy Native, which is a serious rebuttal of Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma.

 

Is there really a difference between a “lazy” Malay who supports this system and a “not lazy” Malay who believes that the system serves a purpose? People love to talk about corruption as if, if there was no corruption, the system that enables a whole community to believe that they were the “masters” of this land and Islam defines their identity, would be okay. Get rid of MO1 (Malaysian Official 1), and that is the first step.

The first step to what? I made my case for voting and a two-party system, but the reality is that unless we change the system, unless a majority of Malays truly believes that the system is detrimental to all Malaysians, we will never be able to change anything in a meaningful way.

People blame the indoctrination programmes of the Umno establishment for destroying the Malay mind but seem oblivious that the opposition, in its current incarnation, is doing the same thing.

Rice Farming in Kedah–It is back beaking work–Is she lazy?

Some people like to use the lazy Malay/not lazy Malay argument as a means to introduce “class” into the discourse. In other words, the system disenfranchises a large section of the Malay community.

However, what it boils down to is the efficacy of the system and perhaps even utilitarian arguments, instead of the morality of the system. I am sorry it took so long to get here, but the system and the Malay community are not mutually exclusive.

Partisan politics in this country has reached ridiculous levels. There is a right-wing Malay website, which idolises Donald Trump, believes that Najib Razak should not give in to the “left” and quotes Western news sources about the evils of the left, which it equates with the DAP and Malay activists and politicians who do not subscribe to mainstream Malay dogma.

A cursory reading (and fact checking) of some of these sources the website quotes will reveal anti-Islamic writers who would most definitely laugh themselves into a right-wing hysterical fit, if they knew that a so-called right-wing Malay/Muslim site was agreeing with them.

Demonised as ‘liberals’

Never mind that there has always been agitation in the Malay community. However, mainstream Malay power structures post-1969 have done everything in their power to define the narratives in the Malay community. This is why when Malays who want to radically change the system stick their heads out, they are demonised as “liberals” and anti-Muslim.

They are not supported by mainstream Malay power brokers (establishment and opposition) or the mainstream of the Malay community. They are penalised because they are a constant reminder that the system and the Malay community could be mutually exclusive. They understand that beyond corruption and the Arabisation process, the Malay community is the system and this is deleterious for the country and the community.

I have attempted to make this point before. I get that most people are not interested but it is worth repeating – “I do not think that the problems of the Malays are that they are not unified; I think the problem of the Malays is that they have no real choices when it comes to ‘Malay’ leadership. Race and religion are the basis for all ‘Malay’ political parties and Malay politicians are hampered by these two imperatives – or so they say – which makes it impossible to have a greater Malay polity that is progressive and egalitarian.”

Now I know that I am going to get a lot of flak for this but it is true. The ideological and constitutional foundation of mainstream Malay/Malaysian politics is that the system and the Malay community are not mutually exclusive. If you support the opposition or you support the Umno establishment, then you support this narrative. Whether it is true is not the point. The point is that you are voting for political parties that define the system.

This is why a close friend of mine who is a Malay – which is important – told me that despite my exuberance for Harapan – a gross mischaracterisation I would argue – the idea of voting for Harapan is one of diminishing returns. In fact, he always sends me this YouTube video, whenever Harapan plays to script instead of deviating from it.

Now I am not saying that the non-Malays had no part in making this system but as recent events have demonstrated, most of us have very little intention of destroying the current system. Replacing Najib, in case you did not get the memo, is not destroying the system. It merely means we are setting the system back to its default setting.

Maybe this is why so many young people can’t be bothered to vote and many others who do not buy into the apocalyptic fantasies of the opposition can’t wait for this election to be over.

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S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy.

When Giants Fail

May 8, 2017

What business has learned from Clayton Christensen.

By  Larissa MacFarquhar

Clayton Christensen

You can tell from the way I speak I had a stroke about eighteen months ago. I’ve been learning how to speak English again, and you’ll see I still can’t come up with the right words sometimes.” The most influential business thinker on earth looked up and smiled apologetically. He stood with his hands in his pockets. His hair was neatly parted on the side. He was very tall. “I have a tendency to speak to the floor,” he said. “It’s because if I look at you, you distract me.”

Clayton Christensen liked to feel a connection with people he was trying to help, whether he was giving a talk in church or to a business group like this one, so it was too bad he had to look at the floor, but he would do his best. He was pretty sure he’d find the words, because he was going to tell a story he knew by heart. He had told it to thousands and thousands of people, ever since his first book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” came out, fifteen years ago. Yet somehow, and he was so grateful for this, still more people seemed to want him to tell it—seemed to think that the puzzle it posed, and the answer he’d come up with, would save them from ruin.

He pointed his clicker at the screen and the first slide appeared. “For those of you who haven’t made a lot of steel, historically there are two ways to make it,” he said. “Most of the world’s steel has been made by massive integrated steel companies. The other way to do it is to build a mini mill. In a mini mill, you melt scrap in electric furnaces, and you could easily fit four of them in this room. The most important thing about a mini mill is that you can make steel for twenty per cent lower cost than you can make it in an integrated mill. Now, imagine you’re the C.E.O. of a steel company somewhere. In a really good year, your net profit will be two to four per cent. Here is a technology that would reduce the cost of making steel by twenty per cent. Don’t you think you’d adopt it? And yet not a single integrated steel company, anywhere in the world, built a mini mill. Today, all but one of the integrated mills have gone bankrupt. So here is why something that makes consummate sense can be impossible for smart people to do.”

The question he’d begun with, twenty years ago, was: Why was success so difficult to sustain? How was it that big, rich companies, admired and emulated by everyone, could one year be at the peak of their power and, just a few years later, be struggling in the middle of the pack or just plain gone? He had initially assumed that technology moved on, and the older players couldn’t keep up. But when he began to look into it he found that this wasn’t so: as technologies grew more sophisticated, whether by small improvements or radical leaps, the established companies, with their well-funded R. & D. departments, nearly always led the way.

Some people thought it was a matter of bad leadership—stupid managers grown too cautious or complacent to change. But Christensen was a generous man; he didn’t like to call people stupid, and, besides, the very same managers who were being called stupid today had been called geniuses last week, when the company was doing well and they were doing exactly what they were doing now.

“In the steel industry, as in your industry, there are tiers in the market,” he said. “At the bottom of the market is concrete reinforcing bar”—rebar. “Anyone can make rebar, but steel used to make appliances and cars”—sheet steel, at the top of the market—“is really tough to make. In the beginning, the mini mills were making steel from scrap, so the quality was crummy. The only market that would buy what the mini mills made was the rebar market, because there are almost no specs for rebar, and once you’ve buried it in cement you can’t verify if it made them anyway, so it was just the perfect market for a crummy product.

“As the mini mills attacked the rebar market, the reaction from the integrated mills was, man, they were happy to get out of rebar, because it was truly a dog-eat-dog commodity, and why would they ever want to defend the least profitable part of their business when, if they focussed their assets on angle iron and thicker bar and rod, the margins”—twelve per cent—“were so much better? So, as the mini mills expanded their capacity to make rebar, the integrated mills shut those lines down, and, as they chopped off the lowest-margin part of the product lines, their gross-margin profitability improved.”

The first industry that Christensen studied was disk drives. He had started out in consulting, then co-founded an advanced-materials firm called C.P.S. Technologies, but then he decided to follow the academic track that led to his becoming a professor at Harvard Business School. Someone told him that disk drives were the fruit flies of technology: they were ideal subjects for studying evolution, because a generation in disk-drive technology was incredibly short. He saw that the companies that made fourteen-inch drives for mainframe computers had been driven out of business by companies that made eight-inch drives for mini computers, and then the companies that made the eight-inch drives were driven out of business by companies that made 5.25-inch drives for PCs. What was puzzling about this was that the eight-inch drives weren’t as good as the fourteen-inch drives—they had a lower capacity, and a higher cost per megabyte—and the 5.25-inch drives were inferior to the eight-inch drives. So why hadn’t the fourteen-inch-drive companies simply started producing eight-inch drives? It didn’t make sense.

Around the same time, Christensen happened to remember that in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, a neighbor had brought in a big, powerful steam shovel to build a bomb shelter in her back yard, and he thought, Gee, you don’t see those big excavators anymore—you only see hydraulic backhoes. I wonder if the same thing happened to the excavators as happened to fourteen-inch disk drives? Sure enough, he discovered that although the hydraulic backhoe was used only for tiny jobs when it was first introduced—it was so weak, and its reach so short, that the only thing it was better than was a man with a shovel—over the years it had got better and better until, at last, it put the big excavators out of business.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution characterized by Disruptive Technologies

In industry after industry, Christensen discovered, the new technologies that had brought the big, established companies to their knees weren’t better or more advanced—they were actually worse. The new products were low-end, dumb, shoddy, and in almost every way inferior. The customers of the big, established companies had no interest in them—why should they? They already had something better. But the new products were usually cheaper and easier to use, and so people or companies who were not rich or sophisticated enough for the old ones started buying the new ones, and there were so many more of the regular people than there were of the rich, sophisticated people that the companies making the new products prospered.

Another example he remembered from his own life was the transistor radio that Sony marketed in the nineteen-fifties. It was a terrible radio, you could barely make out the music for the static, and it had no chance of competing against the nice big RCA or Zenith consoles that middle-class families had on tables in their living rooms. But the transistors succeeded wildly at the bottom of the market, with the rebar of humanity: teen-agers. For teen-agers at that time, the alternative was nothing, and the transistor was better than that. Then, gradually, the transistors got better, and, by the time they got good enough to interest grownups, RCA and Zenith were too far behind to catch up. The same thing was happening now with phone cameras: when they first appeared, they took terrible pictures, but they were so convenient that people used them anyway, and over time they got better. Christensen called these low-end products “disruptive technologies,” because, rather than sustaining technological progress toward better performance, they disrupted it.

Christensen was himself a low-end kind of guy. He grew up poor, on the west side of Salt Lake City, which was the wrong side of the tracks. He collected paper tray liners from fast-food restaurants. For years, he drove a 1986 Chevy Nova that he barely fit in—there was a spot on the ceiling where his head would rub that always had a few hairs stuck to it. At home, he wouldn’t let food be thrown out: no matter how disgusting it had become, he would eat it, on principle. So if anyone was primed to be the champion of low-end products that triumphed because they were cheap and dumb and low-end people could use them, it was he.

The integrated mills and the mini mills were happy with each other until 1979. “That was the year that the mini mills succeeded in driving the last of the integrated mills out of rebar,” Christensen said. “Bam!—the price of rebar collapsed by twenty per cent. It turned out that there was a subtle fact that nobody had thought about, and that is that a low-cost strategy only works when you have a high-cost competitor. As soon as the integrated mills fled upmarket, it was just low-cost mini mill fighting against low-cost mini mill. So what were these poor suckers going to do? One of them looked upmarket and said, ‘Holy cow, if we could make better steel, we could make money again!’ So they attacked the next tier of the market. And the integrated mills? Man, were they happy to wash their hands of that business. Because it was truly such a dog-eat-dog commodity business, and why would you ever defend a twelve-per-cent-margin business when you could focus your assets upmarket on structural steel, where the eighteen-per-cent margins were so much more attractive? And so the very same thing happened again. And as the integrated mills lopped off the lowest part of their product line their profitability improved.”

“I’ve grown numb to exclamation points.

Christensen didn’t blame big companies for moving upmarket. They had to grow a certain amount every year, so selling bad products at low margins (like rebar) was never going to seem like the sensible thing for them to do. And venturing into markets that barely existed (like teen-age radio consumers) didn’t seem sensible, either, because, without the benefit of hindsight, how could you tell the difference between a bad product poised to take over the nation and just a bad product? You couldn’t invest in every dumb thing that came along—you’d go bankrupt. The sensible thing for big companies to do was to pursue higher margins, or to wait until a new product’s market became visible enough to be analyzed and large enough to be interesting—but by then it was too late. Meanwhile, the big companies kept doing what they were supposed to, listening to their customers and improving their products in ways that mattered to those customers, until they had improved them too much, climbed so far upmarket that they sailed right off the upper-right-hand corner of the graph, adding more features and power and degrees of perfection than anyone could possibly use, and by that time the bad, cheap, low-end product had improved to the point where it could finally appeal to the big companies’ customers, and the big companies failed.

Israel –The Start-Up Nation of Innovators and Achievers

“Toyota did not come to America with Lexuses,” Christensen said. “They came with this rusty little subcompact in the sixties that they called the Corona. And then they went from the Corona to the Corolla, Tercel, 4Runner, and then a Lexus. General Motors and Ford were up here on the integrated-steel trajectory, making big cars for big people. They’d look at Toyota coming at them from the bottom and say, You know, we ought to go get those buggers, and they’d send down a Chevette or a Pinto. But why would they keep making little subcompacts when they could be making bigger cars for bigger people? It just made no sense.”

India is Looking and Acting East

After studying a few exceptions to the pattern of disruption, Christensen concluded that the only way a big company could avoid being disrupted was to set up a small spinoff company, somewhere far away from headquarters, that would function as a start-up, make the new low-end product, and be independent enough to ignore what counted as sensible for the mother ship. But truly independent spinoffs like these were rarely created. Why would you hire an entirely new staff—a new marketing department, for instance—when you already had a crackerjack marketing department that would keep costs down and margins up? And why would you open a new factory far away, where its managers couldn’t benefit from your expert advice? Now, having done his research, Christensen could tell you that getting away from your expert advice was exactly the reason that creating a spinoff was necessary. But why had so many managers, people just as smart as he was, failed to see what he saw? Why had they all fallen into the same trap?

After puzzling over this mystery for a long time, he finally came up with the answer: it was owing to the way the managers had learned to measure success. Success was now measured not in numbers of dollars but in ratios. Whether it was return on net assets, or gross-margin percentage, or internal rate of return, all these measures had, in the past forty years, been enshrined into a near-religion (he liked to call it the Church of New Finance) by partners in hedge funds and venture-capital firms and finance professors in business schools. People had come to think that the most important thing was not how much profit you made in absolute terms but what percentage of profit you made on each dollar you put in. And that belief drove managers to shed high-volume but low-margin products from their balance sheets, even though nobody had ever come across a bank that accepted deposits in ratios. This was why he called it a church: it was an encompassing orthodoxy that made it impossible for believers to see that it might be wrong.

Intel’s Innovator-in-Chief Andy Grove(1936-2016)

One of the first C.E.O.s to understand the significance of Christensen’s idea was Andy Grove, the C.E.O. of Intel. Grove heard about it even before Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” in 1997. Grove had sensed that something was moving around at the bottom of his industry, and he knew that this something was threatening to him, but he didn’t have the language to explain it precisely to himself, or to communicate to his people why they should worry about it. He asked Christensen to come out to Intel, and Christensen told him about the integrated mills and the mini mills, and right away Grove knew this was the story he’d been looking for. He had Christensen tell the same story to his staff, and “rebar” became a company mantra. Intel brought out the Celeron chip, a cheap product that was ideal for the new low-end PCs, and within a year it had captured thirty-five per cent of the market. Soon afterward, Andy Grove stood up at the COMDEX trade show, in Las Vegas, holding a copy of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and told the audience that it was the most important book he’d read in ten years. The most important book Andy Grove had read in ten years! A man from Forbes was in the audience that day, and in 1999 Grove and Christensen appeared together on the cover of Forbes, and things were never the same for Clayton Christensen again.

His timing was perfect: it was the turn of the millennium, dot-com businesses were springing up all over the place, Digital Equipment Corporation, a giant of the computer age, was disintegrating, and AOL was suddenly and inexplicably worth as much as Time Warner. Obviously, everybody had to be on guard, but against what? Into this chaos and uncertainty came Christensen, telling his story about the steel industry. Not only was the story convincing; it was also what anxious executives wanted to hear. After years of being told that smart managers succeeded and stupid managers failed, here was someone saying that smart people could fail because they were smart, because they did everything they were supposed to do. This was not only comforting; it also made the theory sound more counter-intuitive than it really was. In the end, after all, it was saying what every management theory said: managers failed because they did something wrong.

The other thing about Christensen was that his book wasn’t just for geeky staffers in strategic-planning groups. He was a master storyteller, and C.E.O.s learned through stories, they remembered stories, and they repeated stories to the people who worked for them. Within a year or two, Christensen’s theory of disruption was ubiquitous. Steve Jobs told people that he had been deeply influenced by Christensen’s book. Michael Bloomberg sent copies of it to fifty of his friends. Bill Gates complained that Christensen’s theory had become a required slide in every funding presentation, but he also invited Christensen to his house. The book sold half a million copies and kept on selling.

“Everybody talks about disruption now,” George Gilder, a technology writer and onetime business partner of Christensen’s, says. “Clayton inserted that word in the mind of every C.E.O. in technology. Everywhere you go, people explain that they’re disrupting this or disrupting that. Every big company now tries to disrupt itself all the time, and it’s not clear to me that it’s always a good thing—companies that have a good business may prematurely disinvest from it because they see this inexorable process that Clayton describes.”

“His ideas are pervasive,” Paul Steinberg, the chief technology officer of Motorola Solutions, says. “It doesn’t matter what industry, it’s almost like a universal law. I’ve had ideas of my own squished for just the reason he said they would be, so now that I’m in a higher position I realize there has to be a way of incubating those ideas or the company will perish. He scared the crap out of me.”

Christensen is a Mormon. There have been Mormons in his family on both sides for four generations, which is to say very nearly since the founding of the church. His great-grandfather on his father’s mother’s side, Hans Magleby, was a carpenter in a small town in Denmark who was converted by one of the earliest groups of Mormon missionaries to Europe, in the eighteen-fifties. He travelled to America and took a train to Iowa, which was as far as the railroad went. He couldn’t afford a covered wagon, so he made a handcart for his belongings and pulled it on foot a thousand miles to Salt Lake City. Utah had been incorporated as a U.S. territory only in 1850; when the first Mormons settled there, they were fleeing persecution in the United States, and the land was still part of Mexico. Most of the region was so dry as to be nearly uninhabitable, but Brigham Young sent new immigrants to farm the desert, and Magleby was sent to Richfield, a tiny outpost a hundred and sixty miles south of Salt Lake.

Christensen’s mother’s family emigrated from Germany and went to live on the prairie in Alberta, Canada, where Mormons had also settled in the nineteenth century. His mother, Verda Mae Fuller, attended Brigham Young University, in Salt Lake City. She graduated at nineteen and went to work as a scriptwriter for radio, and when television came to Utah, just after the war, she wrote and anchored a news show for farmers. She met Christensen’s father, Robert, at a church function. He worked at a grocery store, stocking shelves. They married and settled in an area called Rose Park. Their house was a small brick bungalow, like most houses in the neighborhood—they were starter homes for returning G.I.s, built right after the war. The women in Rose Park mostly stayed home; the men were mailmen, or plumbers, or worked at the oil refineries north of Salt Lake, or at Kennecott, the copper mill out in Magna.

When they had their first child, Verda Mae quit working for money, but she stayed up all night writing scripts for church productions or articles for church programs, and took care of the kids during the day. There were, eventually, eight kids (Clayton, born in 1952, was the second), and they ate like horses. Before a basketball game, Clayton would fill a mixing bowl with cereal, mashing it down to get more in. Verda Mae served a lot of defrosted meat pies, and she liked to say at dinner that she’d been slaving over a can opener for five minutes. But she was always busy, and if a kid needed something done she would usually tell him how to do it himself. When Clayton found holes in his socks in second grade, she said to him, “If I were going to fix this for you, this is how I’d do it,” and he followed her instructions.

Every election, Verda Mae and Robert went door to door with the kids, handing out flyers. They were practically the only Republicans in their district, and Christensen claims he didn’t know that “dumb Democrat” was two words until he was in high school. He subscribed to the Congressional Record in fourth grade, and posted a large chart on a wall of the basement to keep track of the votes of selected congressmen and all hundred senators. Both of his parents were active in the church. Robert served as a stake president, overseeing the affairs of eight congregations, and he brought his kids to work with him on the church’s hog farm—the church had its own welfare system for the Mormon poor, and part of that was raising hogs to supply pork to the bishop’s storehouse.

“I’ll bet a lot of people wish they had a royal palace to return to.”

Christensen was a good child. He was on the school newspaper and in the Key Club. He made all-state in basketball. He read the World Book Encyclopedia all the way through, from A to Z. In high school, he was voted student-body president, and so, one time, when the rough kids from his school beat up the middle-class kids from another school, he went and apologized. He wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, and got into both, but his mother wanted him to go to Brigham Young. Not knowing what to do, he fasted and prayed, and he discovered that God agreed with his mother. That wasn’t the answer he was looking for, so he fasted and prayed some more, just to make sure he hadn’t misheard or something, but he hadn’t, so he went to Brigham Young.

During his freshman year, he met his future wife, Christine Quinn. They were both wearing Sterling Scholar pins, which they’d won in a statewide competition in high school. She asked him what his category was, and he said, “Social Science,” and he asked her what her category was, and she said, “Homemaking,” and he snickered a little. Then she said, “How did you do?,” and he said, “Pretty well, I was the runner-up”—second in the state. “How did you do?” And she said, “I won.”

Christine had grown up not far away, in Bountiful, but their families were as different as two families could be and still be Mormon. His family was, as he put it later, an affiliated group of individuals. His father, for instance, was very loving, but came to watch him play basketball only twice. This had always seemed just fine to him. His parents never pushed their kids to do anything in particular. Christine’s father, on the other hand, was an ex-Army officer, and his kids were expected to excel at whatever they did. When it came to extracurricular activities, the Quinns moved as a pack. If one Quinn had a swim meet, the thirteen other Quinns would be there in the stands, cheering the family cheer. When the two oldest Quinn boys played baseball, their father coached the team, three of the littler Quinns were bat boys, Mrs. Quinn sold Sno Cones to raise money for the league, and Christine, the eldest child, got trained as a scorekeeper.

Christensen found this continuous togetherness overwhelming, but he figured that he and Christine could do things their own way. Then, a week before they got married, he was driving her home, and she said, “Don’t you look forward to when our kids are playing ball and you’ll be the coach?” And he said, “But I don’t want to be a coach.” And she said, “What do you mean? My father was always the coach.” He said, “Well, my dad was never my coach and he was a great dad. I don’t have to be the kind of father your father was.” She said, “Stop the car, I’m getting out.” And so it came to pass that when they had children, five of them, he was their basketball coach, and he was a Scout leader for twenty-five years, and, in the merger of the Quinn-Christensen company cultures, the Christensen culture was entirely obliterated—which, he discovered, suited him just fine.

In his last year of college, Christensen won a Rhodes Scholarship, and he went to Oxford to study econometrics. Being a Mormon at Oxford, it was soon clear, was going to be extremely inconvenient. He had already served a two-year mission to Korea, and thought he was certain of his beliefs, but now he decided he’d better figure out for sure whether his was the true church. Each night at eleven, he knelt down and told God out loud that he needed to know whether the Book of Mormon was true. After praying, he sat and read one page, and then he stopped and thought about it. Then he knelt and prayed out loud again, asking God to tell him whether the book was true. Then he read another page. He did this for an hour each night for many weeks.

“One evening in October, 1975,” he wrote later, “as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.”

After that day, his faith grew steadily stronger, and God granted him special powers. He healed the sick. He spoke in tongues. He saw into the future. Over the years, as he became aware that some Christians didn’t think that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was really Christian, he spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between what he believed and what other sorts of Christians believed, and he concluded that Christianity had taken a wrong turn sometime in the first century or two after Christ. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he imagined that the early Christians had got impatient with their growth rate—converting people one by one was too slow—and so they had gone on a mergers-and-acquisitions binge. But, as with any merger, this process involved negotiation and compromise. “They went south to Egypt,” he says, “and in that merger the Christians said, ‘Man, this is gonna be complicated, because we have one god and no rituals to speak of, and you guys have multiple gods and lots of rituals.’ And so in the end they settled on one god with lots of rituals. Then they went over to the Greeks, and this was a tough one, because the concept of God as Christ taught it was that God exists within the universe, but the Greeks thought that God existed above the universe, and in the negotiations Christianity adopted the Zeus view of God.” These negotiations culminated in the fourth century, at the Council of Nicaea, where under the orders of Constantine a group of bishops voted on what would henceforth count as Christian orthodoxy. Fifteen hundred years later, the Latter-Day Saints, Christensen believed, had restored the true early Christian tenets, the ones that had come straight from Christ, such as the belief that there is a mother as well as a father in Heaven. But mainstream Christianity was a synthetic religion, its god a synthetic god.

“One of the big fast-food chains was trying to beef up the sales of its milkshakes,” Christensen said, pointing his clicker to call up another slide. “These were sophisticated marketers. They had developed a profile of the quintessential milkshake customer—actually, I fit right in the mold. People like me gave them very clear feedback, and they would improve the milkshakes on those dimensions, but this had no impact whatsoever on sales or profits.”

After the success of his first book, many companies had asked him to teach them how to avoid being disrupted. He decided to start a consulting company, Innosight, which would dispense advice based on his theories. (One C.E.O. who never asked for his help, despite his admiration for “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” was Steve Jobs, which was fortunate, because Christensen’s most embarrassing prediction was that the iPhone would not succeed. Being a low-end guy, Christensen saw it as a fancy cell phone; it was only later that he realized that it was also disruptive to laptops.)

“We decided to try a different approach, which was to ask, ‘I wonder what job a customer is trying to do when he hires a milkshake?’ We stood in one of their restaurants for eighteen hours one day and took very careful notes on what time each customer bought a milkshake, what was he wearing, was he alone or with other people, did he buy other food with it or just the milkshake, did he drink it in the restaurant or go off with it? It turned out that nearly half the milkshakes were sold in the very early morning. It was the only thing the person bought, and he was always alone. He always got in his car and drove off with it.

“We came back the next day and confronted these people as they came out of the restaurant, surreptitiously holding their milkshakes. And we asked them, in language they could understand, ‘What job were you trying to do that caused you to hire that milkshake?’ It turned out that they all had the same job: they had a long, boring drive to work, and they needed something to do while they were driving. One hand had to be on the wheel, but, jeez, somebody gave me another hand and there isn’t anything in it. And I’m not hungry yet but I know I’ll be hungry by ten o’clock. So what do I hire? If you promise not to tell my wife, I hire doughnuts a lot, but they crumb all over my clothes and they’re gone too fast. I’ve hired bagels, but they’re dry and tasteless, so I have to steer the car with my knees while I put the jelly on, and if my phone rings I’m in big trouble. But, let me tell you, this milkshake is so viscous that it takes twenty-five minutes to suck it up that little straw. And you can turn it sideways and it doesn’t fall out!

“Once you understood what job the customers were trying to get done, how to improve the product became clear: you make the milkshake even more viscous. You stir tiny chunks of fruit into it, not to be healthy, because they didn’t hire it to be healthy, but to make the commute more unpredictable—they’re driving along and—upp!—a lump of fruit. And you move the dispensing machine to the front of the counter and give people a prepaid swipe card so they can just gas up and go.”

This insight—that people go looking not for a product but for a solution to a problem they have—was not original to Christensen. The late Theodore Levitt, of Harvard Business School, liked to quote to his students the adage that a person doesn’t want a quarter-inch drill; he wants a quarter-inch hole. But Christensen’s milkshake experience was such a satisfying illustration of this idea, and the idea itself, which he dubbed “jobs to be done,” meshed so well with his personality, that it soon took its place alongside the disruption of the steel industry as part of his repertoire of lessons.

Christensen’s personal experience of products was one of prelapsarian simplicity: he had a need—a job-to-be-done—so he searched for an object that would help him meet that need. He understood that other people’s experience of consumerism was more complex than his own, involving nuances of status and imitation and manufactured desire, and his theory could accommodate that—your job could be to appear more high-class to your peers, for instance. But Christensen was a man of function, not form. He loved machinery, he loved to see how things were made and problems solved. Every Christensen family vacation included a trip to a local factory, and it was usually Christensen’s favorite part of the trip.

“Duh!

One recent Christmas, Christensen gave Christine, among other things, a homemade book in which he had pasted photographs of all the things he had bought her or the household over the years which she had made him return to the store. One of the Christensen traits that had stubbornly persisted in him, despite years of training and negative reinforcement, was that, when it came to products, he had no interest in perfection. He was a man of the good-enough dishwasher, the good-enough chair, the good-enough floor. For him, a good decision was a made decision. Christine, on the other hand, was still a perfectionist Quinn. And so, over the years, chairs that he’d fixed had had to be reupholstered, dishwashers that he’d bought had had to be disconnected and replaced, lighting fixtures he’d thought were just fine had to be unhooked and sent back.

Clayton and Christine

In December of 2009, Christensen and Christine were in Washington to see the Christmas lights on the Mormon temple on the Beltway. In the middle of the night, he felt pain in his back. At the hospital, doctors found three large tumors. He was told that he had a follicular lymphoma that was likely to be terminal. He was fifty-seven years old; his father had died of lymphoma at forty-nine. He said to God, “I think I have probably done things in my life that you wanted me to do. And if in your judgment there’s more work that needs to be done on the other side, I’m happy to go. And on the other hand if I can be more useful by staying in this side, my preference is to stay.” He said of this time, to Forbes, “I felt good. I don’t think that it was in any way depressing.”

Christensen tears up easily, but he cries mostly in gratitude. When he received his diagnosis, he was calm. “What would be depressing is if I’d spent my life to that point on things that didn’t matter,” he says. “But I felt that I could look back on my life and think about lots of folks that I helped become better folks. And I’ve tried to be as good a man as I could be.” He had always tried to help people, whether through teaching, or consulting, or helping out with money, or signing up every week he could in church for good deeds. He would miss his family when he was dead, but he’d see them again in Heaven. In the scale of eternity, it wouldn’t be long. The important thing was that he was right with God.

When Christensen’s mother, at the age of eighty-two, was told that she was going to die in six weeks, of pancreatic cancer, she was excited. Not resigned but actually excited. She said, “Clayton, do you know how long it’s been since I saw your father, or your brother Milton?” (Milton, her third child, had died, of a blood disease, when he was eleven. Clayton was thirteen.) She had lived a good life. She looked forward to the future.

Mormons believe that family is for eternity, and that in Heaven they will be together with their relatives as they were on earth. They believe that after death they will grow to resemble their heavenly parents as children grow to resemble earthly parents, until eventually they become gods. Even so, when Christensen told Christine about his conversation with God she said, “Wait a minute, you don’t go across town without us talking about it, and you’re suggesting a transfer to another sphere?”

She wasn’t surprised by his tranquillity, however. Two years earlier, they had been in Montreal over a weekend for a large church gathering. Christensen was then one of the Seventy—he was responsible, along with a few others, for the Mormon church in the northeast quadrant of North America. At three in the morning, he felt a terrible pain in his chest. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, because that would ruin the meeting the next day, so he knelt down at the side of the bed and said to God, “I have a problem. Whatever this is, could you please make it go away?” The pain did go away, so he went back to sleep, and he didn’t mention it to Christine. They went home. The day after that, he was raking leaves in their garden when he felt the pain again. He realized he was having a heart attack, so he fetched his briefcase on the chance that he would have time to get some work done, and then he told Christine that she needed to drive him to the hospital.

That can only come from commitment to Education

Christensen’s initial cancer diagnosis turned out to be incorrect. His lymphoma was a type that responded well to treatment. He underwent four months of chemotherapy and was declared to be in remission. Three months later, he had a stroke. He was giving a talk to a church group one Sunday in July when, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped making sense. He opened his mouth and things that sounded like English syllables came out, but they were not words. After the stroke, he lost almost all his language, but he worked fiercely for twelve hours a day to get it back. Christine was always there helping him; it was difficult to be so dependent on people. One night, he set his alarm for two in the morning so that he could leave the house alone, and drove to a twenty-four-hour drugstore, just to practice buying something, but he couldn’t find the words.

Little by little, he got his language back, except now he had to think about every word he used, and at the end of the day his brain hurt. Even after eighteen months, he often made mistakes. He would substitute words that rhymed: he said “store” instead of “shore,” and “bake” instead of “make.” He often mixed up “wife” and “mother.” Giving a talk at church, he had said “Saviour” when he meant to say “Satan.”

“I’ll just tell you a silly story to illustrate what’s going on.” Christensen had received a visit from an official at the University of Phoenix. “He said, ‘Clay, we’ve read your stuff, we’d like to record one of your best lectures to show to our students.’ So I went to our dean and asked him if he thought I should do this, and he was just incredulous, he said, ‘What’s going to happen to your brand?’ But I said, ‘It’s the low end today that is the mainstream tomorrow,’ and he said, ‘Well, fine.’ “

This particular low-end product had been an obsession of Christensen’s for some time. Years before, he had become fascinated by Howard Gardner’s theories about multiple intelligences and different ways of learning. Christensen thought in visual terms—he found language ambiguous, and didn’t feel that he really understood something until he could draw it as a graph. But he had learned from editors who begged him to remove the graphs from his books that this was not true of everyone. He realized that, whereas in a regular classroom students could learn only in one way—the way the teacher taught them—online learning offered students who thought differently from their teachers a way to get help. What’s more, recorded lectures and online learning were much cheaper than teachers in a room, so they had the potential both to bring otherwise unavailable courses to underfunded schools and to disrupt not-underfunded schools, like Harvard. Few people at the not-underfunded schools agreed with him—they couldn’t imagine that an online course could ever be as good as the old-fashioned kind. They didn’t realize that a low-end product didn’t need to be as good as a high-end one to drive it out of a market.

“Harvard won’t allow you to record in their classrooms, so these guys booked a beautiful auditorium in the Institute for Contemporary Art,” Christensen said. “Behind me was this massive bay window, and you could see the whole harbor. The guys had told me, ‘We’ll have forty or fifty students so you don’t have to present to an empty room.’ So I showed up about ten minutes early, and I looked out at the students, and, oh, my gosh! These were beautiful people! I went and asked one of them, ‘What school do you guys go to?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we’re not students, we’re models.’

“So I did my best, and about a month later the official came back and asked me, ‘Have you ever seen Clay Christensen teach?’ And I said, ‘Actually, no.’ He showed me the video. Holy cow! Clay Christensen was unbelievable! There was not a single word that didn’t need to be there”—they’d all been edited away. “And then, instead of this boring PowerPoint slide about the steel industry, theirs was three-dimensional and dynamic, and they even had music, so when the mini mills went up into the sheet-steel market the music came to a crescendo! I’m not kidding. It was fantastic! So I said, ‘Jeez, how many of your students are you going to show this to?,’ and he said, ‘Well, we’re thinking we might show it to all hundred and seventy thousand of them.’ And I said, ‘Oh. I thought Harvard was one of the bigger business schools in America, and we bring in nine hundred a year.’ And I thought, There is a concept that we used to hear about years ago, and it’s called scale. Ever heard of it? Oh, my gosh. And yet we feel no pain.”

Some people said that Christensen was a man with a hammer to whom everything looked like a nail. But he wasn’t the only one who saw nails everywhere. Not long after “The Innovator’s Dilemma” came out, Christensen got a call from William Cohen, at that time the Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, who asked him to talk to him and his staff about his research. Imagining a few second lieutenants and interns, Christensen was startled to see, upon entering Cohen’s office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, and their Under-, Deputy, and Assistant Secretaries, all waiting to hear him. Bewildered, Christensen told his story about the integrated steel mills and the mini mills, until the chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupted him and said, “You don’t have any idea why you’re here, do you?” Christensen admitted that he didn’t, and the chairman explained that, for him and his staff, the Soviets were sheet steel, terrorism was rebar, and they needed to figure out how to reconfigure their organization to capture the low end of the market. (Later, the government decided to set up an independent spinoff terrorism branch, in Norfolk, Virginia.)

“The strangest part was that I just had my soothing cup of camomile tea.

At one point, it was suggested that Christensen try to apply his theory to health care. Along with two doctors, he spent several years studying the problem. He concluded that in many ways health care was like the steel industry, but before the mini mills got good enough to make I-beams and sheet. Big hospitals were like integrated mills: they could do everything that could be done, because they had the best equipment and the best-trained specialists, but they were very expensive. Each patient was different, and required a different combination of resources. As a result, very little could be routinized, and the difficulty of managing all those thousands of unpredictable combinations resulted in layer upon layer of expensive administration.

He realized that some medical problems were complex and poorly understood, and needed to be diagnosed and treated in big hospitals by expert doctors. But many others were very well understood, their care had become routine, and they did not need experts or fancy equipment at all—they could be managed in some cheaper venue, such as a clinic or a doctor’s office. As medical science advanced, more conditions would become amenable to routine treatment, and expensive hospital care could be restricted to fewer cases. Just as the low-cost mini mills had pushed the integrated mills out of the steel market, low-cost clinics could disrupt the hospitals.

That was what ought to happen, he believed. What would happen would depend upon insurance companies and regulations. As long as hospitals were paid by the procedure, they obviously had no incentive to leave the simpler treatments to clinics. And as long as hospitals competed with other hospitals for patients they would continue to add ever more facilities, growing ever more expensive: in health care, because of the perverse incentives that insurance put in place, competition actually raised prices rather than lowered them. There needed to be some kind of integrated managed-care system where insurance and hospitals worked in concert, such as Kaiser Permanente in California, where doctors were employees of the system rather than independent operators. That gave the system an incentive to keep patients healthy while treating them as inexpensively as possible.

Applying his ideas to health care and education was exciting, and Christensen started a think tank, Innosight Institute, to keep that work going. But what he felt he had been put on earth by God to do was help people become better people. He decided to write a book (with two co-authors), “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” in which he applied his theories about how good companies lost their way to a discussion of how good people lost their way.

At his business-school reunions, he had talked to people whose careers had turned out to be boring or without purpose but who found themselves held captive by their expensive lives. He had seen people who had been through one divorce, two divorces, whose kids were far away or no longer spoke to them. And he had seen something that shocked him deeply: two members of his Rhodes class had been prosecuted for criminal behavior, one for insider trading (the charges were dropped), the other for having sex with a teen-ager; and a business-school classmate who had seemed to him a good man who loved his family, Jeffrey Skilling, the former president of Enron, was now divorced, had lost a son to a drug overdose, had been jailed for public drunkenness, and was serving a twenty-four-year prison term for financial felonies.

How did this happen? Each year, he saw wonderful, bright young people sit in his class and then graduate full of hope for the future. Many of them came to talk to him about decisions they were contemplating—what job to take, where to live, what most to value. None of them planned on failed marriages or lost children or meaningless lives. And yet each year some of these bright young people, almost all of them meticulous planners and careful analysts of risk, set themselves on courses that would lead them to ruin.

Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn’t done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families—only to find that by then their families were gone. Christensen had made a pledge to God not to work on Sundays, and a pledge to his family not to work on Saturdays and to be home during the week early enough for dinner and to play ball with the kids while it was still light. Sometimes, in order to keep these commitments, he would go to work at three in the morning.

Another thing he worried about in both businesses and families was outsourcing. Look at Dell: over the years, the company had outsourced more and more of its manufacturing to a company in Taiwan—its returns increasing each time, as it focused on higher-level activities like design and marketing—until in the end the Taiwanese firm started making its own computers for less money. When he thought about Dell, he thought about how, when he and Christine were first married, she had made most of the family’s clothes, and they had picked apples and made applesauce, and picked tomatoes and made tomato sauce, but then store-bought clothes and applesauce and tomato sauce became so cheap that it seemed crazy to keep making them at home. Luckily, they had bought two wrecks of houses and fixed them up themselves, so there had always been Sheetrocking or plastering or painting to do with the kids, but he knew that most of his students would consider this a waste of time. Wanting their children to spend their extracurricular hours in the most profitable way, they would pay for lessons and smart, enriching activities, and they would outsource the low-end, dumb tasks like mowing the lawn and mending clothes, and the children would grow up without knowing how to solve practical problems by themselves, or do something they didn’t enjoy or thought they weren’t going to be good at.

He worried most of all about his students’ integrity. He told them about Jeff Skilling, but the thought of prison was so extreme he could see that most of them dismissed it. They didn’t seem to realize how easy it was for a good person (and he believed that almost everyone started out good; Mormons don’t believe in original sin) to make one tiny, unimportant compromise after another, until he was too compromised to find an honest way back. He told them about how at Oxford he had refused to play basketball on a Sunday, even though it was the national championships, because he had promised God he wouldn’t; and how much pressure his coach and teammates had put on him to compromise just that one time. Later, he realized that if he had said yes that time he would have had no standing to say no another time, and what he learned—one of the most important lessons of his life—was that it was easier to do the right thing a hundred per cent of the time than ninety-eight per cent of the time.

He had talked for more than an hour, and at the end of the talk several people asked him questions. He told each of them that they had asked a great question, and if they noticed that he said that to everybody, well, it didn’t matter, because he always meant it. He urged them to be in touch.

“If I can ever be useful to you, oh, my gosh, what a magnificent company,” he said. He looked up and smiled again. “If you ever need somebody to bounce an idea or two off, it’s the only way I can ever learn, if folks like you would give me a chance to think things through, so I would love to talk with you,” he said. “Thank you so much.” ♦

Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/14/when-giants-fail?mbid=nl_Sunday%20Longreads%20(27)%20A&CNDID=49438257&spMailingID=10960669&spUserID=MTg4MDU2MzU5MDA5S0&spJobID=1160452337&spReportId=MTE2MDQ1MjMzNwS2

Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line

August 7, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-research-and-corporate-lobbying.html?

WASHINGTON — As Lennar Corporation, one of the nation’s largest home builders, pushed ahead with an $8 billion plan to revitalize a barren swath of San Francisco, it found a trusted voice to vouch for its work: the Brookings Institution, the most prestigious think tank in the world.

The new $100 million office of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington. Credit Greg Kahn for The New York Times

“This can become a productive, mutually beneficial relationship,” Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president, wrote to Lennar in July 2010. The ultimate benefit for Brookings: $400,000 in donations from Lennar’s different divisions.

The think tank began to aggressively promote the project, San Francisco’s biggest redevelopment effort since its recovery from the 1906 earthquake, and later offered to help Lennar, a publicly traded company, “engage with national media to develop stories that highlight Lennar’s innovative approach.”

And Brookings went further. It named Kofi Bonner, the Lennar executive in charge of the San Francisco development, as a senior fellow — an enviable credential he used to advance the company’s efforts. “He would be a trusted adviser,” an internal Brookings memo said in 2014 as the think tank sought one $100,000 donation from Lennar.

Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.

Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

Similar arrangements exist at many think tanks. On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns.

“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.

Washington has seen a proliferation of think tanks, particularly small institutions with narrow interests tied to specific industries. At the same time, the brand names of the field have experienced explosive growth. Brookings’s annual budget has doubled in the last decade, to $100 million. The American Enterprise Institute is spending at least $80 million on a new headquarters in Washington, not far from where the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a $100 million office tower.

The shift has occurred as non-profits in general have been under increasing pressure from their donors to meet specific goals. But for think tanks, that pressure can threaten their standing as independent arbiters in policy debates in Congress, the White House and the news media.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the greatest generation, in the post-World War II era of philanthropy, where they said, gosh, ‘Here is $1 million; spend it how you wish,’” Kimberly Churches, the Managing Director at Brookings, said in an interview.

Think tank executives reject any suggestion that they are tools of corporate influence campaigns and say they are simply teaming up with donors that have similar goals, like helping cities with economic development.

“We do not compromise our integrity,” said Martin S. Indyk, Brookings’s Executive Vice President. “We maintain our core values of quality, independence, as well as impact.”

But he acknowledged that the arrangement to appoint the Lennar executive as a senior fellow had created the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” And he said that Brookings, in the interest of transparency, had recently decided to prohibit corporations or corporate-backed foundations from making anonymous contributions.

At think tanks like Brookings, the majority of reports and events, with titles like “Five Evils: Multidimensional Poverty and Race in America” or “India at the Global High Table,” have no obvious link to corporate donors.

Still, the benefits afforded to corporations looking to cloak themselves with the authority of think tanks are strikingly evident, according to a review of documents from more than a dozen institutions.

The likely conclusions of some think tank reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete. Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports. Donors have outlined how the resulting scholarship will be used as part of broader lobbying efforts. The think tanks also help donors promote their corporate brands, as Brookings does with JPMorgan Chase, whose $15.5 million contribution is the largest by a private corporation in the institution’s history.

Despite these benefits, corporations can write off the donations as charitable contributions. Some tax experts say these arrangements may amount to improper subsidies by taxpayers if think tanks are providing specific services.

“People think of think tanks as do-gooders, uncompromised and not bought like others in the political class,” said Bill Goodfellow, the executive director of the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “But it’s absurd to suggest that donors don’t have influence. The danger is we in the think tank world are being corrupted in the same way as the political world. And all of us should be worried about it.”

A group of Democratic state attorneys general is investigating whether Exxon Mobil worked with certain think tanks in past decades to cover up its understanding of fossil fuels’ impact on climate change, in part by financing reports questioning the science, a suggestion the company rejects.

Executives at Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and other think tanks say they have systems in place to ensure that their reports are based on scholars’ independent conclusions.

“We strongly believe in our model of seeking solutions to some of our country’s most difficult problems,” John J. Hamre, the chief executive at C.S.I.S., said in a written reply to questions. “We gather stakeholders, vet ideas, find areas of agreement and highlight areas of disagreement.”

Yet researchers at think tanks are seeing corporate influence firsthand. Rachel Stohl, a senior associate at the Stimson Center in Washington, said she had been quizzed by potential donors as she tried to raise money for research on the military’s use of armed drones.

“‘Are you going to say drones are bad?’” she recalled one potential financial backer asking. “‘We are not interested in funding something that says drones are bad.’”

Donations and Rewards

The confidential Brookings spreadsheet had an unassuming title: Corporate Overviews Tracking. It listed nearly 90 corporations, from Alcoa to Wells Fargo, providing a glimpse of the vast electronic file that Brookings maintained on donors and prospects, and the benefits it might offer.

The database, along with thousands of pages of emails, solicitations for money and memos on meetings with corporate officials, highlighted Brookings’s practice of assuring that donors would see results from their contributions.

The Brookings Institution, which operates on a $100 million annual budget, twice what it was a decade ago.Credit: Greg Kahn for The New York Times

The files included company priorities and a tally of donations. General Electric wanted to fund work on rail networks and clean energy programs — both critical parts of its business — and Brookings then featured G.E. executives, joined by officials from the White House and Congress, at events that focused on these industries.

In 2004, Brookings established its Metropolitan Policy Program, devised to stimulate economic growth in cities. As the country was emerging from recession, Brookings bolstered its ties to corporate donors in 2010 by naming Marek Gootman, a lobbyist from Patton Boggs, as its first director of strategic partnerships. He was assigned to work with “a national network of elected, business and civic leaders engaged in city and metropolitan area policy development and implementation.”

From the start, the program blended a variety of insights on urban matters, including from corporate, nonprofit and government sources. And Mr. Indyk noted that any reports issued were made public.

Donations to the program exploded, from $4.3 million in 2005 to $12.5 million in 2013, nearly 20 percent of Brookings’s overall program spending that year.

K.K.R., after starting special funds around 2010 to invest in real estate and other infrastructure projects, donated $450,000 to Brookings, some of it as the institution agreed to set up meetings for a top K.K.R. executive with community leaders in Philadelphia and Detroit, where the company was considering real estate projects. Brookings separately produced a report, published on K.K.R.’s website, promoting one of the company’s infrastructure projects in New Jersey, after the company executive suggested such a piece.

In advance of a 2014 event Brookings officials attended with corporate executives including Henry R. Kravis, a co-chairman of K.K.R., one memo marked as confidential noted: “K.K.R. has given a total of $350K to Brookings. Last gift came in on 3/27/2014 for $150K to Metro; Henry has donated $75K to Brookings, most going to the individual unrestricted fund.”

The tally demonstrates the important distinction that Brookings makes between “unrestricted” donations, which the think tank can spend on any research, and project-based funding restricted to specific topics that the donor has a particular interest in.

Lennar joined Brookings’s Metropolitan Leadership Council, established for the program’s top donors, in July 2010. That month, the company won approval to redevelop Hunters Point in San Francisco, turning the area into a more than 700-acre mix of housing, education and commercial development.

Brookings would later name the project one of the three most “transformative investments in the United States.”

The San Francisco project generated controversy from the beginning, with critics concerned about toxic waste left by the former Navy shipyard.

Lennar joined with Brookings as protests were escalating in 2010. One complaint, filed by area residents with the Environmental Protection Agency, said the San Francisco Health Department was “conspiring with Lennar Corporation to conceal the health threats of asbestos-laden dust.” The company was busy at the time looking for investors to help it complete the project, known as the San Francisco Shipyard.

A spokesman for Lennar, Glenn Bunting, disputed claims that the company had donated to Brookings out of self-interest — and said the alliance was not related to the protests.

“There was nothing needed in the way of assistance for Lennar to ‘buy’ from Brookings,” Mr. Bunting said in an email. Brookings, though, continued to promote the project.

“San Francisco’s Shipyard project is both physically and economically transformative for the Bay Area and globally significant,” Mr. Katz, the Brookings vice president, said in a news release issued by San Francisco’s mayor in 2011 as Lennar’s hunt for major investors intensified. “This project promises to set a new paradigm for successfully conceiving, financing and delivering transformative infrastructure projects in the United States.”

Follow-up memos were more explicit: Brookings, as it sought an additional $50,000 from Lennar in 2014, said it was prepared to “use our convening power, research expertise, network connections and knowledge of innovative practices to help further drive the ultimate impact and success” of Lennar’s project and to “provide public validation of San Francisco’s efforts through national and local media coverage.”

The think tank soon delivered.

Mr. Katz made appearances alongside Mr. Bonner, the Lennar executive, to promote the project to government officials and business leaders in California. In 2014, around the time the think tank sought an additional round of money from Lennar, Brookings invited its new nonresident senior fellow, Mr. Bonner, who has a master’s degree in architecture and is a former government planner for several California cities, to appear at an event at its headquarters.

“I am working in San Francisco in a fabulous property,” Mr. Bonner said at the event, referring to Lennar’s Shipyard project.

In March, at an international conference of real estate developers and investors in Cannes, France, Lennar sponsored a session in which Brookings researchers helped the company highlight the Shipyard.

“Kofi is what I would describe as the quintessential city builder,” Julie Wagner, a Brookings nonresident senior fellow, said as she introduced Mr. Bonner at an event where projects with no connection to donors were also featured.

At least some of the $400,000 Lennar has donated to Brookings since 2010 has come from its SunStreet Energy division, which sells rooftop solar systems, at the same time that Brookings’s metropolitan program has published research on the rooftop solar industry.

Martin S. Indyk, the Brookings Institution’s Executive Vice President, said the think tank’s collaboration with Lennar to redevelop Hunters Point in San Francisco reflected a shared goal to revitalize cities. “We do not compromise our integrity,” he said. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Mr. Indyk said the collaboration simply reflected shared goals of revitalizing cities. Brookings scholars promoted other real estate projects, he said, involving local governments, universities or even developers that were not donors — including one in Detroit backed by Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, and one in Seattle backed by Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft.

But Mr. Indyk acknowledged that naming Mr. Bonner, who declined to be interviewed, a Brookings nonresident scholar had “created the impression that because Lennar was giving money, he was getting the title.” His post, which was unpaid, was not renewed.

Hitachi has been another large donor to the metropolitan program, giving a total of $1.8 million to Brookings over the last decade, according to Brookings documents. The think tank reviewed the company’s corporate marketing and sales strategy targeting the United States, an internal memo shows. Brookings also organized public events that featured top Obama administration officials and allowed Hitachi executives to promote their products.

“Metro has held nine meetings and several conference calls in the past six months with executives from Hitachi’s water, transportation and data business lines and are collaborating more fully on defining what it means to be a ‘Smart City,’” a confidential Brookings memo said.

Officials at Brookings said they had not lobbied for Hitachi, and they provided examples of reports that they said included conclusions challenging the company’s position. “Helping a corporation’s for-profit agenda is not in any way our agenda,” Ms. Churches, the Managing Director, said.

Yet Ms. Churches also said the contract language with donors like Lennar and Hitachi was “inelegant,” although not improper. When asked if the documents read like a fee-for-service agreement, she said, “It could be misconstrued.”

Mr. Indyk said Brookings had recently changed its policies so that “today, there is no way in which those words would be used in our documents.”

‘Growing the Economy’

When JPMorgan offered a major donation to the metropolitan program in 2011, Brookings created the Global Cities Initiative, complete with a new logo that called it a “joint project of Brookings and JPMorgan Chase.”

The project was premised on a common interest between the bank and the think tank. Brookings wanted to promote economic growth in cities by encouraging international trade, and JPMorgan wanted to gain new business by offering loans to companies in the same markets.

In contract documents, Brookings emphasized that it would control the conclusions of its reports and said it would “not directly or indirectly communicate with any party” to help get JPMorgan business.

Mr. Indyk and executives from JPMorgan said the company and the think tank simply agreed on a worthy agenda.

“This was about growing the economy, and we are incredibly proud of the results of this initiative,” said Peter Scher, the head of the corporate responsibility program at JPMorgan. “We believe it’s had a huge impact in more than 30 cities that are involved.”

At the same time, hundreds of pages of memos — status reports to JPMorgan, internal reports by Brookings staff to prepare for meetings with top bank executives, and formal documents soliciting more money — make clear that Brookings saw the Global Cities Initiative as a branding effort that could help JPMorgan bankers bolster their standing in cities.

“Bottom line: Growing metro economies is good for the nation and for JPMC; also, many U.S. cities are JPMC clients — motivation to support them and their clients,” said one Brookings document dated July 2011, as officials from the think tank met with top bank executives to discuss a planned donation that eventually totaled $15 million.

The Global Cities Initiative, another document written by a Brookings senior fellow explained, “must mean a marriage between JPMC corporate interests” and “Brookings continued thought leadership.”

JPMorgan, in a document dated a month before the agreement was signed, said the pending donation to Brookings “deepens/extends relationships with important client base among business and civic leaders both in the U.S. and abroad.”

And Brookings was ready to do its part.

“Our events, which in part target these audiences,” said an internal 2014 Brookings memo, referring to the Global Cities Initiative and federal and state leaders, “have yielded 100+ media hits, with 97% of them referencing GCI and 90% referencing JPMorgan; by the end of this year, we will have held events in 13 domestic markets and 9 international markets.”

At times, Brookings officials seemed worried they were not doing enough for the bank.

“No one wants to create overt marketing opportunities for JPMC, but we need to carve out roles and thought leadership opportunity for market presidents,” said a 2013 Brookings memo, referring to a dinner with the bank’s executives. “We need to do a better job tying it back to JPMC.”

It remains difficult to assess whether the relationship helped the bank’s business, but Mr. Scher said that was not the goal.

“If the Global Cities Initiative strengthens the economic competitiveness of cities, it’s a win for small businesses, job creation and everyone involved in these communities, including us,” Mr. Scher said in a statement.

Donations from the corporations to Brookings are tax exempt based on the premise that the think tank’s work benefits the public good, not a company’s bottom line.

But two lawyers who specialize in non-profit law — Miranda Perry Fleischer, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, and Clifford Perlman, a partner at a New York-based firm — said Brookings’s agreements raised questions.

“Tax deductions are subsidies that are paid for by all taxpayers,” Ms. Fleischer said. “And the reason the subsidy is provided is that the charitable organization is supposed to be doing something for the public good, not that specifically benefits the private individual or corporation in the form of providing them goods or services.”

Mr. Indyk said that opinion was “totally unfounded,” noting that Brookings had retained its own lawyers to review the documents and found no problems.

“Brookings’s conclusion that all of these activities it engaged in with these donors primarily benefited the public rather than the donors is consistent with the applicable federal tax standards,” Douglas Varley, one of the lawyers for Brookings, said in a statement.

Close Partnerships

Other think tanks have been even more closely aligned with corporate agendas.

FedEx teamed up with the Atlantic Council — a think tank that focuses on international relations, with annual revenue that has surged to $21 million from $2 million in the last decade — to build support for a free-trade agreement the company hoped would increase business.

Six months before the Atlantic Council report was issued, FedEx and the think tank worked on plans to use the report as a lobbying tool.

“The impact and reach of the report would be maximized by a rollout event” including a “public report launch with member(s) of Congress from one of the relevant committees,” said a two-page summary drafted by the Atlantic Council months before the study had been completed.

FedEx and the Atlantic Council, working with the European American Chamber of Commerce, also told companies being asked to participate in the study that the goal was to “emphasize the positive impact that a comprehensive agreement would have on American and European small businesses.”

When the report came out in late 2014, its conclusions mirrored arguments FedEx had been aggressively pushing on Capitol Hill, including recommending a reduction in trans-Atlantic tariffs and allowing more duty-free shipments.

An executive vice president at FedEx, Rajesh Subramaniam, attended an event at Atlantic Council headquarters in Washington to celebrate the release of the final report. So did a key supporter, Representative Erik Paulsen, Republican of Minnesota.

“This is very exciting,” Mr. Subramaniam said at the event, referring to the potential for more trade. “The upside opportunity is quite large.”

Frederick Kempe, the Atlantic Council president, said that FedEx had donated just $20,000 to help fund the effort and that the staff at the Atlantic Council had handled the research.

“There is no doubt the work of think tanks has more credibility than the work of lobbyists, but the only way we preserve it is through intellectual independence,” Mr. Kempe said.

‘We Do Not Lobby’

A Predator drone manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. General Atomics helped fund a study that led the United States to ease restrictions on sales of drones to governments overseas.Credit.Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

General Atomics, the California-based manufacturer of Predator drones, had a clear problem. Prospects for sales were falling as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wound down. The company wanted the Obama administration to change its policy to allow for sales to other countries, a lucrative proposition.

“When the budgets are going down in the U.S., you would like to be able to export more,” Frank Pace, the president of the company’s aircraft systems group, told a Reuters reporter in late 2013 at an air show in Dubai.

At about that time, the industry turned to the Center for Strategic and International Studies for help, providing money that the think tank used to conduct a study on drone policy, including exports.

While defense contracting giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have cumulatively donated at least $77 million since 2010 to two dozen think tanks, disclosure records show, General Atomics’s contribution to the Center for Strategic and International Studies was quite small — in the tens of thousands of dollars.

C.S.I.S. set up confidential meetings at its headquarters with company representatives, inviting top officials from the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, the State Department and the office of the defense secretary, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Times through open records requests.

“Our series will be unique in convening a much broader group of stakeholders than is typical,” Samuel J. Brannen, the think tank’s lead scholar, wrote in an email to Aaron W. Jost, one of the State Department officials in charge of regulating drone exports.

As a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies did not file a lobbying report, but the goals of the effort were clear.

“Political obstacles to export,” read the agenda of one of the closed-door “working group” meetings organized by Mr. Brannen that included Tom Rice, a lobbyist in General Atomics’s Washington office, on the invitation lists, the emails show.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, drone makers that were major C.S.I.S. contributors, were also invited to attend the sessions, the emails show. The meetings and research culminated with a report released in February 2014 that reflected the industry’s priorities.

“I came out strongly in support of export,” Mr. Brannen, the lead author of the center’s study, wrote in an email to Kenneth B. Handelman, the deputy assistant secretary of state for defense trade controls.

But the effort did not stop there. Mr. Brannen initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations, which also included setting up a new Pentagon office to give more focus to acquisition and deployment of drones. The center also stressed the need to ease export limits at a conference it hosted at its headquarters featuring top officials from the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps.

Mr. Brannen, who has since left C.S.I.S., declined to comment. The think tank insisted that its efforts to influence administration policy were not lobbying.

“C.S.I.S. will not represent any donor before any government office or entity, including congressional lawmakers and executive branch officials,” Mr. Hamre, the Chief Executive, said in his statement to The Times. “We do not lobby.”

One thing is clear: The result was a victory for General Atomics.

In February 2015, almost one year after the C.S.I.S. report was issued, the State Department announced a clarification of its rules, easing final approval that month for General Atomics’s long-planned sale of unarmed Predator drones to the United Arab Emirates, the first such sale to a non-NATO nation. The think tank report was just one of many voices pushing for the change.

A State Department spokesman said that while the government officials involved in the review had received opinions from think tanks and industry officials, “at the end of the day, this is a considered U.S. government policy.”

Huntington Ingalls Industries had an equally clear objective: to create an elaborate public relations and lobbying campaign to convince Congress that the nation needed to confront an emerging threat from China by building more nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — at a cost of about $11 billion each. The clear beneficiary? Huntington, the lone builder of the ships.

As part of a broader communications effort, Huntington helped finance a think tank report that enhanced the company’s argument for more funding. Bryan McGrath, a former naval officer who had commanded a guided-missile destroyer, approached Huntington Ingalls and offered to write a study on a fee-for-service basis as a private industry expert. The company turned down his offer.

Later, after he had joined the Hudson Institute and helped create the Center for American Seapower, he approached Huntington officials again, and they were interested.

“A think tank has more prestige,” Mr. McGrath said.

Huntington Ingalls paid $100,000 to fund the work, a critical commitment for Mr. McGrath, who said he was paid by Hudson only if he could successfully solicit donations to support his research. Mr. McGrath said he had always been a strong proponent of aircraft carriers — so the company was not buying his opinion.

“The Hudson Center makes no secret about being very pro-sea power,” he said. “If a company came that wanted us to write a piece that advocated for something other than that, the answer would be no.”

In exchange for Huntington Ingalls’s support, company officials were given regular briefings on the research and the opportunity to suggest revisions to early drafts, Mr. McGrath said.

“We have an iterative process already laid out in which we will sit down with them and go through drafts and discuss where we are going,” Mr. McGrath said. He added that he had not accepted all of the company’s suggestions.

The report was released in October at the Rayburn House Office Building. Mr. McGrath received an introduction from one of the industry’s most important boosters, Representative J. Randy Forbes, Republican of Virginia, the chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees the Navy.

The report did not mention that Huntington Ingalls had helped pay for it. Asked about the failure to disclose the contribution, John P. Walters, Hudson’s chief operating officer, called it a mistake. The report was subsequently revised — months after it was released and the congressional event held — to disclose the donation.

A second industry-funded report, prepared by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, came out a month later with a similar urgent call for more money to build more ships and to base more ships abroad, although it did not mention that it had been funded by the Navy League of the United States, a nonprofit group whose large corporate donors include Huntington Ingalls.

“This report is yet another important tool for Navy Leaguers to use in the field when educating local leaders and lawmakers,” Skip Witunski, the Navy League president, wrote to the group’s members late last year.

The strategy — lining up think tank reports as lobbying tools that echoed each other — was backed up with a series of letters to the editor, dozens of posts on Twitter and Facebook, and op-ed pieces.

Mr. McGrath said he, too, wondered if this storm of industry-funded work might be threatening the integrity of the process. “I see a lot of stuff that comes out in Washington,” Mr. McGrath said, “and I got to scratch my head and say, ‘That guy must be on the payroll.’”

Brooke Williams is a reporter at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which collaborated with The New York Times on this series. Audrey Stuart contributed reporting from Cannes, France. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Fix The Education System and Stop Talking Politics

July 22, 2016

COMMENT: Mr. Ng, you are being very generous in praising Rural Development Minister Ismail Sabri for making a self serving remark on the quality of our graduates.

My friends and I have been discussing this matter over many years. What makes him special to deserve your praise? He just stated the obvious and what is worse he is part and parcel of the very corrupt UMNO system that sought to produce Malay graduates who are mediocre and weak so they can be cadres to serve  and perpetuate the UMNO patronage system.

There is no political will to deal with this serious national crisis. Employing foreign consultants to produce glossy reports with buzz words and worn out cliches will not help us. Ask former Minister of Education and sacked Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin what he did with the Educational Blueprint he commissioned when he was in power.

Let us not waste taxpayers money when there is no will to fix the system which has failed to produce employable graduates. So stop heaping praise on this minister who is part of this malaise. You are only compromising your integrity.–Din Merican

by Scott Ng

http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com

There must be the political will to recognise the failures of the system and to address them.

It’s been a long time since a cabinet minister issued a statement that no reasonable person can find fault with. And of all people, it was Rural and Regional Development Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob who surprised us this week when he said something worthy of applause.

Ismail did right in ticking off university graduates for expecting the government to hire them. As it is, we already have a bloated civil service, and continuing to spoonfeed so many school leavers and university graduates is just not a viable option.

But then again, it is because our education system spoon-feeds our children that they cannot stand on their own when they go out into the working world. Ismail was probably being too idealistic when he said that “the government provides people with an education so that they can become those who provide others with jobs.”

Our education system doesn’t place enough emphasis on leadership, let alone creative and critical thinking and soft skills like public speaking and other forms of communication. As many graduates have found, the working world is quick to disabuse them of the notion that their grades mean anything more than ink scrawls on paper.

Employers look for more than just a 4.0 GPA. They want people who are problem solvers, who are capable of leading when necessary and who can communicate effectively.

The argument around education gets very politicised on the issue of employability, especially when it comes to English proficiency, but it cannot be argued that we severely lag behind in recognising the importance of soft skills in the professional world.

There is, indeed, a lack of urgency in addressing the problems in our education system.We certainly cannot continue to spoon-feed our students. They must be taught to fish, not just to eat. Not only must the education system teach them employable skills; it must also instill in them the belief that education must continue throughout one’s lifetime. Our education system must in fact teach them how to keep on educating themselves once they leave their institutions of learning.

If the government truly wants our graduates to begin fending for themselves and to be competitive, then it must recognise that the modern world demands more than just good grades. The government must have the political will to recognise the failures of our education system and to address them.

Obama’s Vietnam “Legacy” Trip: A Reality

May 23, 2016

By Greg Rushford

Air Force One touched down yesterday evening in Hanoi. The White House and influential Washington think-tank scholars are spinning President Barack Obama’s three-day Vietnam visit as a “legacy” moment, validating the president’s “pivot” to Asia. Expect much warm talk of how America is forging ever-closer economic- and security ties with a modernizing Vietnam. Expect the usual heartwarming television images of happy people -including peasants toiling in lush rice fields, wearing their iconic conical hats.

Don’t expect any admissions from Vietnamese Communist leaders of the suffering they continue to inflict upon some of their country’s best citizens. As former prisoner of conscience Cu Huy Ha Vu rightly notes, today’s Vietnam is “a kleptocracy.” Intrepid pro-democracy advocates stand in the way.

Courageous men like Dang Xuan Dieu, Ho Duc Hoa, and Tran Vu Anh Binh, three of Vietnam’s 100-plus current political prisoners. They languish behind bars, while some Washington insiders have averted their eyes.

Some of those insiders are Southeast Asian analysts who work inside the gleaming $100 million headquarters of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, just a few minutes from the White House – and who have undisclosed sidelines as business consultants. They know that to speak forthrightly on Vietnam’s shameful human rights record would threaten their easy access to senior communist officials. Their corporate benefactors who depend upon that political access to win lucrative business contracts in Vietnam could lose the big bucks.

Ernest Z. Bower President & CEO, Bower  Asia Group,  is widely recognized as one of the strongest proponents for close ties between the United States and Asia. In recognition of his work, the King of Malaysia has awarded him the Darjah Panglima Jasa Negara (PJN), pronouncing him holder of the title Datuk in Malaysia.  The president of the Philippines also awarded him the rank of Lakan, or Commander, for his service to the Philippines.  Ernie is currently the United States Chair of the Advisory Council on Competitiveness for the Vietnamese Prime Minister and serves on the boards of the Special Olympics, American Australian Education & Leadership Foundation, the Institute for Religion & Public Policy, the United States-New Zealand Council and the Board of Advisors of the United States-Indonesia Society.

Moreover, Vietnam’s Ambassador to the United States has a team of $30,000-a-month Washington lobbyists on his payroll. Their assignment is basically not to let awkward questions about political prisoners interfere with enhanced U.S.-Vietnamese commercial- and security ties, especially the sale of lethal weapons to fend off Chinese maritime intimidation.

One wonders what Dieu, Hoa, and Binh, locked away in their cells, would have to say – if they were free to speak. Dieu, a devout Catholic citizen journalist, has been imprisoned since 2011. He committed the “crime” of exercising free speech. Dieu has been living “in hell” – beaten, humiliated, and treated like a “slave” for refusing to wear a uniform with the word “criminal” – his brother has told Radio Free Asia. Hoa, also a blogger whose crime was his free speech, has been incarcerated since 2011. Binh, a songwriter, lost his liberty in 2012. His crime was writing music that offended the Communist Party. While Binh’s term is scheduled to end next year, Dieu and Hoa could languish behind bars until 2024.

All three men are associated with the Viet Tan, a U.S.-based political party that is highly effective in using the social media to advocate democratic freedoms of speech and assembly. The Viet Tan reaches a wide audience, both inside Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. For its skilled high-tech advocacy, the Hanoi’s feared Ministry of Public Security brands Viet Tan as a “terrorist” organization.

Binh, Hoa and Dieu were amongst a group of 17 political prisoners who have been represented by Stanford law professor Allen Weiner, a former high-powered U.S. State Department official. Weiner won a United Nations panel determination that his clients – all either Viet Tan members, supporters or friends – had been unjustly imprisoned. While 14 of Weiner’s clients have been released, that’s unfortunately not quite a happy ending. “Some of those who have been released, however, continue to suffer severe harassment and intimidation at the hands of the Vietnamese security services,” Weiner reports. “They continue to pay a heavy price.”

That’s the sort of glaring injustice that no credible analyst of today’s Vietnam would want to downplay. Meet CSIS Asia analyst Murray Hiebert (pic  above)- a man who doesn’t deny that Vietnam has human rights issues, yet is careful never to use clear language that would anger senior Vietnamese officials.

Nine months ago, I brought Allen Weiner’s brave clients to Hiebert’s attention, asking if perhaps this would be an opportunity to highlight the injustice by holding a public forum. The CSIS analyst brushed off the inquiry – at the time I had not realized that CSIS has never held such an event. He also declined to say whether he agreed with Hanoi’s characterization of the Viet Tan as a “terrorist” organization.

(The White House and State Department are better informed than CSIS. Not only do they respect the Viet Tan for its peaceable advocacy, but Obama’s national security officials have maintained close ties with the Viet Tan leadership. Radio Free Asia reported that on May 17 representatives of the Viet Tan, along with other respected Vietnamese pro-democracy advocates including Boat People SOS and Vietnam for Progress, were briefed on Obama’s upcoming Vietnam trip in the White House on May 17.)

A few weeks ago, Hiebert once again did not respond to a request to be interviewed on the imprisoned Viet Tan supporters. I then tried to register for a May 17 press briefing that Hiebert and two other CSIS scholars held on the Obama visit. I had hoped to ask about Binh, Hoa and Dieu. But CSIS spokesman Andrew Schwartz – who also had not responded to a recent e-mail inquiry – denied me admission, asserting that the event was “oversubscribed.”

While the briefing room was indeed rather crowded, even full, according to people who were present, Schwartz found room for Vietnam Television. VTV is a Hanoi-controlled media tool that the Communist Party finds useful for spreading the party line. These days, VTV’s best “scoop” has been in warning Vietnamese independent journalists – and specifically the Viet Tan – to stay away from linking corrupt communist officials to a Taiwanese steel mill that somehow obtained environmental clearance to discharge toxic wastes into the sea, which has resulted in a massive fish kill.

(At the May 17 CSIS briefing, a Television Vietnam correspondent asked if the next American president would continue Obama’s “pivot” to Asia – which at least drew laughter. It is perhaps also worth noting that while “journalists” from Vietnam Television are welcome to peddle their propaganda in the United States, authorities in Hanoi continue to jam Radio Free Asia’s Vietnamese language service. And while the BBC is free to broadcast its English-language programs in Vietnam, the BBC’s celebrated Vietnamese Language Service frequently has run into problems.)

As it turns out, CSIS has a history of making life uncomfortable for guests at the think tank’s public events who might pose awkward questions. On May 24, 2015, former political prisoner Ha Vu angered the Vietnamese Ambassador to the U.S., Pham Quang Vinh, by asking how Vietnam justified persecuting its political prisoners. Vinh, visibly upset, retorted that Vietnam has no political prisoners – which was pretty rich, considering that at that moment, the ambassador was busy trying to avoid making eye contact with one of Vietnam’s most famous political prisoners.

Moreover, CSIS analyst Hiebert, who chaired the panel, did not challenge the ambassador’s absurd claim. (The CSIS event discussed a study on U.S.-Vietnamese relations that Hiebert had co-authored; that study had not disclosed that the Vietnamese government had secretly financed it, Hiebert subsequently admitted to me.)

And last July, Hiebert went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate Vietnamese security officials when Communist Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong spoke at CSIS. Hiebert summoned a guard, escorting Dr. Binh Nguyen, a prominent Vietnamese-American physician, from the premises. Hiebert apologized to Binh, who had been invited, but said that the communist security officials insisted that she be ejected (for details see: How Hanoi Buys Influence in Washington, D.C., www.rushfordreport.com).

Turns out that there are other reasons to doubt Hiebert’s independence. While his official CSIS bio does not disclose it, Hiebert is also a senior advisor to a prominent business consultancy, the Bower Group Asia.

Conflicted interests

Hiebert’s boss at CSIS, Ernie Bower, runs the Bower Group Asia. “Our clients include the world’s best global enterprises,” the BGA website proclaims. “We understand the nexus between politics and economics.” Bower has more than 60 employees in his Washington, D.C. headquarters and in 21 Asian countries (including Vietnam). Another CSIS analyst, Chris Johnson, is a BGA managing director for China. Like Hiebert, Johnson does not disclose his business affiliations on his CSIS website.

Bower, who formerly chaired the CSIS Southeast Studies chair, responded angrily last year when I asked him which was his real day job: CSIS or his business consultancy. He said he was “saddened” that I had suggested he appeared to have conflicts of interest. But perhaps aware that others might also wonder, Bower now identifies himself on the CSIS website as a “non-resident” advisor. The chair remains vacant. CSIS spokesman Schwartz and John Hamre, the think tank’s CEO and one of Washington’s most acclaimed fundraisers, have not responded to persistent inquiries to explain the apparent conflicts.

Here’s how the conflict works:

At CSIS Hiebert has advocated the TPP trade deal. The Bower Group is actively seeking TPP business.

Hiebert has strongly contended that the U.S. lethal arms embargo on Vietnam has outlived its usefulness, and should be lifted. Lockheed, which wants to sell Hanoi its P-3 Orion and C-130 Hercules surveillance planes, has a seat on Hiebert’s CSIS board. So does Boeing, which has been peddling its P-8 Poseidon military surveillance aircraft in Hanoi. Imagine how the giant defense contractors would feel if the money they dole out to CSIS would be used to shine a spotlight on issues involving corruption and human-rights abuses in Vietnam.

Coca-Cola, a Bower Group client, got into Laos a few years ago, thanks to Ernie Bower’s understanding of “the nexus” between business and politics. Coke also has a seat on the CSIS Southeast Asia Board.

Chevron, another major CSIS benefactor, also has a representative on CSIS’s Southeast Asia board. Hiebert authored a November 2014 column for the Wall Street Journal defending Chevron in bitter litigation the oil giant had in Indonesia. In his column, Hiebert identified himself only as a CSIS analyst. Then Ernie Bower got busy on the Bower Group’s Facebook page, touting the Journal piece: “BGA’s Murray Hiebert provides much-needed analysis of the court case against Chevron in Indonesia” in the Wall Street Journal. [Full disclosure: I have been an occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition for more than two decades.]

In recent months, Hiebert has been quoted widely by major news outlets including CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, Forbes, Politico, the Financial Times, the Washington Times, and the Voice of America – always only identified as a CSIS analyst. Readers would not know that Hiebert also works for a business consultancy. They would not know that corporations that fund Hiebert’s CSIS programs have serious financial interests at stake.

One wire-service report that quoted Hiebert about Vietnam’s new top leadership was picked up by the New York Times in April. This gave Ernie Bower another opportunity to twitter to his clients about how “BGA Senior Advisor Murray Hiebert” had made the pages of the Times.

And earlier today, CNN quoted Hiebert’s approving views of enhanced U.S. weapons sales to Vietnam, identifying him only as a CSIS scholar. Viewers were not aware that this “scholar” is funded at CSIS by major U.S. defense contractors, and has taken money from the Vietnamese government for co-authoring a study that called for the lifting of the U.S. weapons embargo to that country. Nor would viewers know that Hiebert also works for the Bower Group, which also touts its interest in facilitating arms deals.

A little digging illustrates how Bower mixes his CSIS affiliations with business. In 2014, for example, Bower opened some important doors in Washington to a Manila wheeler-dealer named Antonio “Tony Boy” Cojuangco. Tony Boy also sits on CSIS’s Southeast Asia board. Bower brought him to town as the head of an “eminent persons” group – such flattery can go a long way in certain Asian circles.

CSIS arranged appointments for the Filipino eminences in the White House, the Export-Import Bank, on Capitol Hill and of course at CSIS headquarters, where they had a scheduled appointment with the think tank’s president, John Hamre. That was during the day. That night, the Bower Group hosted a lavish dinner for Tony Boy and his associates at the posh Jefferson Hotel. Bower, Hiebert, Chris Johnson, and other CSIS/Bower Group operatives were present. To judge from photos I’ve seen, it was a good night all around, lubricated by bottles of Pomerol. (Hamre has not responded to repeated requests to comment. On the CSIS website, the CSIS head asserts that some unnamed journalists who have questioned CSIS ethical practices have ignored evidence to the contrary that he has provided.)

Agents of Influence

Speaking of influence peddling, if one looks closely, the Washington lobbyists on that $30,000-a-month retainer from Vietnamese Ambassador Vinh unwittingly illustrate how the official spin surrounding the Obama visit to Vietnam doesn’t tell the whole story.

The most recent foreign agent’s disclosure form that the Podesta Group has filed with the U.S. Department of Justice lists some of what the firm did to earn its $180,000 for the last six months of 2015. One is left wondering exactly what the lobbyists did to earn their keep.

The lobbyists disclosed only seven meetings, mostly with congressional aides. The only elected representative who met with Podesta representatives was Matt Salmon, an Arizona Republican who is retiring from Congress at the end of this year.

Rep. Salmon had already met with Vietnamese Ambassador Vinh earlier in the year and had been to Vietnam in May. The congressman already had supported an enhanced U.S.-Vietnam trade relationship.

Do the math: $180,000 for seven meetings. That’s about $25,000 a meeting, throwing in about 50 e-mails and five phone calls that the Podesta lobbying form mentions. David Adams, the Podesta lobbyist who has been working to facilitate the Obama visit to Vietnam this week, is a former close aide to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. Asked what he had really done to each the money, Adams declined to comment.

This week, when the television screens show images of happy Vietnamese peasants with their conical hats, toiling in their rice paddies, think of David Adams. The average Vietnamese citizen would have to work 13 years to earn enough money to pay for just one $25,000 Podesta Group meeting with congressional aides.

From the days of French colonialism to the present Communist kleptocracy, the Vietnamese central government has always stolen from its poorest people.

Ambassador Vinh’s lobbyist Adams proudly styles himself as a part-time “gentleman farmer” in Virginia’s wine country. Wonder what those Vietnamese peasants would say, if they knew that their stooped labor is helping subsidize such a lifestyle?

Innovation, high performance and diversity

February 23, 2016

Innovation, high performance and diversity :Putting the puzzle pieces together

by Juliet Bourke*

*Ms. Bourke is a Partner in Human Capital at Deloitte. She brings over 20 years’ experience in human capital, management, and law to her work and is an internationally recognised author and speaker on the workplace, cultural change, leadership, and diversity. Ms. Bourke has received a number of awards for her leadership, is a member of Deloitte Australia’s Diversity Council, sits on the Australian School of Business’ HR Advisory Board, and has been listed in the Who’s Who of Australian Women since 2007. Juliet holds Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws, and Master of Laws degrees. You can follow her @JulietBourke.

 

Juliet Bourke previews insights from her new book “Which two heads are better than one? How diverse teams create breakthrough ideas and make smarter decisions.”

The discovery of DNA, the breaking of the German Enigma Code, the development of the Black-Scholes Options Pricing and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Seemingly disparate moments in science, war and economics – but there’s a unifying theme.

The DNA scientists came from the diverse disciplines of chemistry, biology and physics. The Enigma Code breakers comprised linguists, mathematicians and scientists. The Black-Scholes model blended economics, mathematics and heat transfer physics. Darwin, a geologist, relied heavily on Gould, an ornithologist, to understand the significance of the birds he had collected from the Galapagos Islands.

These all exemplify the insight Frans Johansson explored in his best- selling book, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough insights at the intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures. Each of these innovations sits at one, or more, of Johansson’s intersections and created a step change in our modern world. Applying the picture puzzle metaphor to Johansson’s insights,  diversity and team performance, the picture’s central image emerges. But the boundaries and background need to be filled in.

We can complete the picture if we can incorporate more of what we now know about the effects of gender and racial diversity on team dynamics, and the value of integrating individual’s different thinking models.

And if we can see the diversity picture more clearly, we can more confidently answer leadership questions such as: What mix of people enhances the performance of boards and executive teams, once capability has been established?

Smart teams: What makes them smart?

Consider this: In one corner, a small team easily completes a set of simple cognitive tasks set by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tasks involve “visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective judgements and negotiating over limited resources”. As soon as the simple tasks are completed the teams move onto solving other more complex tasks. In another corner, a different small team is still struggling with the same simple cognitive tasks. The researchers repeatedly saw this scenario confirmed during their observations of 699 people working in groups of two to five people.

What differentiated the groups? Why was one group ‘smarter’ than another? It wasn’t so much the individual intelligence of each of the group members, although that was important. Professor Woolley and her colleagues found that the smarter teams possessed collective intelligence, and it could be predicted by three factors.  The first factor was, the degree to which team members were socially sensitive, i.e their ability to read social cues such as when someone was perplexed.  The second factor was the degree to which the group practiced speaking in turns or was dominated by a few loud voices. Lastly the third factor was whether the group included women. The inclusion of women was important not because the women were extra smart, or had access to gender specific knowledge, but because women scored slightly better on the social sensitivity test.

This is an intriguing result, and one which helps to complete the picture by putting into place another of the diversity puzzle pieces.

Gender diversity makes a difference to team performance, but not simply because it ensures a team is accessing a broad pool of talent. Woolley’s research alludes to a more subtle value: gender diversity helps improves team dynamics.  This conclusion is supported by the work of other academics.

London Business School Professor Gratton and her colleagues found that feelings of psychological safety and experimentation were optimal in a group with 50:50 gender ratios. They found that the self-confidence of team members was optimal when the gender ratio was 60% women to 40% men. University of Illinois Professor Fairburn found that small groups of men and women were 9% more likely to transfer smiles between each other than all male groups. This is significant because mutual smiling promotes feelings of social bonding. And quite obviously, positive feelings of social connectedness are conducive to people sharing information, which in turn enables more thoughtful decision making.

Racial diversity: another piece of the puzzle

In small clusters of six, stock market traders in Singapore and Texas are deciding whether to buy or sell shares. Their task is to “calculate accurate prices for simulated stocks”  over ten trading periods that each last two minutes. After 2,022 market transactions, Columbia University Professor Levine and his colleagues  observed that some of the clusters only made a few pricing errors and traded accurately about 65% of the time. However, other clusters regularly overpriced, created pricing bubbles and traded accurately only 40% of the time.

What was the difference between the clusters of traders? Once again there’s a diversity connection: the successful Singaporean and Texan traders featured multi-ethnic/racial groups, not homogenous ones. With this the researchers concluded that visible racial diversity triggered stimulated uncertainty, bringing “cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation”.

With this yet another part of the puzzle falls into place, this one relating to racial diversity.

Other researchers support this connection between racial diversity and behaviours such as curiosity and listening. Conversely, those studies also show that visible similarity stimulates feelings of comfort, confidence and assumptions of like-mindedness. Feelings which lead to faster, but ultimately sub-optimal, decision making.

Mental Models

Our own leadership and diversity research reveals a final puzzle piece: Namely individuals tend to over-emphasise one or two ways of solving problems, and to under-weight other relevant approaches. More disturbingly, we found that collectively 75% of senior leaders tend to spend much more time defining the outcomes they want to achieve and debating options (classified as the two dimensions of “outcomes” and “options”), and comparatively less time discussing risks, the implications for staff and customers, the process of implementation, and the evidence to justify and measure a solution (classified as the four dimensions of “risk”, “people”, “process” and “evidence”). Why? Because as individuals they were more likely to think that those two approaches were more important than the other four. And when the group was dominated by leaders with that bias, they formed a voting block which quietened the voices of leaders who approached problem solving in a different way.

Why does it matter? University of Michigan Professors Hong and Page calculated a 30% error rate when problems are solved via the application of one dominant approach – and conversely a 100% accuracy rate when five different approaches are applied.  This is not to suggest that collecting a widely diverse set of approaches is optimal; there is a ceiling. Too many approaches and a group will lose productivity as they spend time understanding another team member’s point of view.  Indeed, Hong and Page calculated that when nine approaches are considered, value starts to erode and the accuracy rating drops to 90%. In sum, Hong and Page defined the optimal number of problem solving approaches as between five and eight.

Our research confirms that of Hong and Page. When we have worked with leadership teams to deliberately attend to six more balanced approaches to problem solving (outcomes, options, people, process, risk and evidence), groups report that by reducing blind spots they were able to develop more robust solutions. Moreover, followers report greater faith in the ultimate solution.

The final word

So where do these puzzle pieces leave us in relation to the bigger picture? Johansson had already given us clarity about the importance of disciplined diversity to team performance. A central image. With these other studies we can lock in more of the indistinct background of racial and gender diversity, and even some of the smaller pieces about individual mental models. Together they form an interesting and realistic picture of how diverse teams deliver superior performance. A picture that is more nuanced than much of what is said about the nature of diversity and the inter-relationship between various elements.

Armed with this knowledge, diversity is no longer a puzzle. It is something leaders can pursue with great clarity, assurance and vigour. And with that, the likelihood that boards and executives will make smart and innovative decisions more consistently. Of course there’s more to be said about how inclusive leaders lead diverse groups to maximise their potential, but getting the who right is foundational.

Juliet Bourke is the author of “Which two heads are better than one? How diverse teams create breakthrough ideas and make smarter decisions” forthcoming February 2016 (Australian Institute of Company Directors).

Footnotes:

^[1] Johansson, F., (2004) The Medici Effect: Breakthrough insights at the intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

^[2] Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., and Malone, T, W., (2010) Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the  performance of human groups, Science, Vol 330, pp. 686-688.

^[3] Gratton, L., Kelan, E., Voigt, A., and Wolfram H.J., (2007) Innovative potential: Men and women in teams The Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business, London Business School. 

^[4] Levine, S. S., and Stark, D., (2015) Diversity makes you brighter. Op Ed. New York Times, December 9.

^[5] Levine, S. S., Apfelbaum, E. P., Bernard, M., Bartelt, V. L., Zajac, E. J. and Stark, D., (2014) Ethnic diversity deflates price bubbles PNAS Early edition, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/18524 retrieved 19 November 2014.

^[6] Hong, L, Page, S. E., and Riolo, M., (2012) Incentives, Information and Emergent Collective Accuracy, Managerial and Decision Economics, Vol 33, pp. 323-332.

^[7] Bourke, J., and Dillon, B., (2015) Fast forward: Leading in a Brave New World of Diversity (Customers, Ideas and Talent) Future Inc, Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand.

http://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/human-capital/articles/creating-high-performing-leadership-teams.html