Incompetence

The internet is full of conspiracy theories. When something goes wrong, I tend to reach the opposite conclusion – there has been a cock up.

The conclusion comes from years of experience. I have witnessed stunning incompetence and its consequences, time and again. I have also witnessed a few conspiracies, but these are few and far between. Unless certain conditions are in place, cock-ups are much more likely.

We are woefully qualified for many of the things we need to achieve in life. Most of us have little clue how to manage our personal finances. Even more basically, we try to achieve dating, sex, marriage and parenthood despite overwhelming incompetence for all these key skills. I look back at my lifetime performance in all of these areas and cringe in shame, and I have no reason to believe that I am much worse than the average in most of them.

It is worth trying to understand why we are so bad at these life skills, our primary purpose really if we want to perpetuate our species. We start we a big advantage, namely that evolution has honed our abilities over time. Wow, we would be even worse if it wasn’t for that large tailwind.

I am not sure if they form a good hierarchy, or are complete or not independent, but I have come up with five basic explanations for incompetence. The first is exclusion: the pool of people who get a chance to try stuff is too small and poorly selected. This one applies much less to all the relationship and procreation stuff, but looms large in business and politics. Until very recently, the only people deemed worthy to manage a country were the eldest sons of the ones who already did it. That is not a great selection process.

The second great impediment to competence is the absence of information and training. It is amazing that we receive a hundred pages about operating a dishwasher, yet we are made a boss or a husband and just have to do our best. Much of our education is largely irrelevant to real life. I studied for three years for a degree from which I don’t believe I have ever subsequently used anything learned.

The third impediment is dogma. Life is too complex not to make simplifying assumptions, but many of these become outdated and dangerous. A lot of dogma comes from religion. Now just how valuable was your religious upbringing when it came to dating, sex or marriage? There are some good principles in there somewhere, but shrouded in a lot of stuff that only harms us.

The fourth impediment is more technical; it is the whole morass of roles and motivations. In any endeavor involving multiple humans, there are likely to be unclear goals and roles, and a whole series of individual motivations. Even in a partnership between two, such as a marriage, this is a minefield. In a corporation of 100,000 employees, with shareholders, suppliers, regulators, customers and other stakeholders, what is achieved is a complex web that usually resembles incompetence.

The fifth impediment is what Harold MacMillan termed events. Beautifully aligned teams with clear roles usually collapse under the pressure of time or some crisis. Pressure can bring out the best in us, but usually it just demonstrates our crass incompetence. This can be comical – I have recently enjoyed binge watching the various series of Armando Iannucci, notably The Thick of It. I love this sort of British humour. The characters generally also support another of my experiences, that most of us are well meaning and doing our best, but that pressure leads us into unedifying places, and, once we have been there once, it is hard to escape. Most people who we are tempted to think of as evil are usually just normal people who have been caught out by incompetence and then get stuck.

This supports the wonderful Peter Principle, that people tend to rise to their level of incompetence. In many ways we should really celebrate this, because back in the days of impediment one, most people did not rise at all. But nowadays promotions are available (sometimes even to women, foreigners, Catholics and commoners), and we can climb until we fail, and then stop and make everybody else miserable. In business, I certainly did, across multiple dimensions, though a breakdown then offered me a route down the other side of the mountain that is closed to most.

Looking through the five impediments helps us understand how humanity has made so much progress in recent times. Exclusion is still strong (how many Papua New Guinea people run Fortune 500 companies?), but diminishing every year. Education and information have improved markedly, even if we have a long way to go. One of the strongest features of young people today is their willingness to ask and explore and to display their own vulnerability; Youtube is a wonderful thing. Dogma is still a major problem, in business, families, politics and everywhere, but much less so than fifty years ago.

We still struggle mightily with the fourth and fifth impediments. In many ways they have become worse. The penchant for flat organisations and the emphasis on agility, together with the decline of career loyalty, all beneficial in some ways, have made the daily life of many business managers almost unmanageable, with no downtime, endless e-mails and meetings, and a constant web of stakeholders and politics.

We reach our Peter Principle point more reliably now as a result. For me, my Achilles heels included lack of stamina and a tongue lacking control. I became tired and undisciplined. Unlike many, I loved the complexity and the line management, but they defeated me all the same.

I witnessed extreme examples of this modern type of incompetence in Shell. The worst was a mid career external hire, a lovely man but utterly unequipped to handle his role. All five curses were evident. He was selected quickly and narrowly, with a dogma that he had to come from a consumer company and to utter the word customer in every sentence, quite a feat I can tell you. This guy reminded me of Peter Sellers in Being There, another wonderful example of British comedy of the absurd. Once on seat, he lacked information he needed while being surrounded by information he could not process, was immediately a hostage to the motivations of others, whether benign or malicious, and destroyed by the mildest of crises. Still, he lasted six months because the senior manager who recruited him could not face the public ignominy of admitting his own failure.

Imagine being in the senior leadership team of a company like JC Penney, one of many on a doomed road marked by potholes. You were probably a good store manager, or more likely a buyer or designer. Because of that you were promoted to lead a huge dispersed team of such experts, something you hate and for which nobody trained you. You have to deal with an agenda of constant meetings with people in financial and other disciplines you do not understand, many recruited in panic or actively subverting whatever strategy exists, one that changes each time a new leader or banker appears with their hopeless dogma. This situation is not as uncommon as you might think, and slightly less exaggerated versions inhibit almost everybody once they progress beyond managing a simple business unit.

We should recall all this whenever we are tempted to assign conspiracies. Another example is the movie Vice, about Dick Cheney and the George W Bush administration. True, the piece has some villains, though mainly they are misled by dogma and some political greed. However, the overwhelming sense is of incompetence, with all five pitfalls in evidence. My guess is that when the dust settles on the Trump presidency and the intelligent histories are penned, it will likewise be the breath-taking incompetence that shines through.

What can we do? Well, in most situations we now have some sort of merit-based selection and plenty of information, when we care to find it. Over time society will become better at sorting the information to be more useful. Dogma is always dangerous, so individually we must challenge our assumptions and collectively listen to outliers such as whistle-blowers.

The challenges of roles, motivations and time pressure will not reduce any time soon. Individually, we are smart if we work out our limits and try to stick to them. Most of my most fulfilling experiences and ones where I was able to best use my strengths have been in challenges where these dimensions were rather controlled. I think I can administer a choir rather well. I can manage a team so long as the day to day pressure is limited and the role includes idea generation. I managed a post-merger integration rather well, because the politics and roles and goals were clear and shared.

Collectively, let us challenge these fads towards complexity in business and excessive control spans, and champion good line managers. Scale is good when there are machines, but usually a hindrance with people. Bet on companies that understand this.

But probably I have missed the point hopelessly. If I have, don’t suspect any conspiracy because you won’t find one. It will be just another of my many cock ups. 

Mortality in the USA

One of the most startling and under-reported trends over recent decades has been in US life expectancy. There has been remarkably little attempt to discover the root causes for the trend. If we knew the causes we might be able to reverse it, and other countries might be able to avoid the same declines – after all what happens in the US today often spreads around the world tomorrow.

The data are clear, albeit frustratingly limited. The only reliable comparisons I could find were with other OECD countries. In 1950, the USA was in the leading group for men and women, and whether measuring life expectancy at birth or at a later juncture. By 1990, the USA had slipped to the bottom of the pack. By 2010, a gap had opened up to make the US an outlier. And since then others have continued to move forward while the US has actually gone backwards – for three years in a row, for the first time in a hundred years. The trend is large and sustained, and robs a typical American of maybe five years of life compared with what might have been expected in 1950 (compared with others; in absolute terms life expectancy in the US has increased).

When I try to read up about causes, I find proximate answers and a few theories, but not enough analysis. The three proximate answers for the period since 2010 are obesity, opioid overdoses and suicide. All of these can and should be worked on, but there are also deeper root causes behind all of those symptoms.

Such analysis is not simple, which might start to explain why I can find so little of it; scientists don’t like such uncertainty in their papers. Such analysis that I do read is often hopelessly biased – for example starting with an all-encompassing hypothesis about a healthcare system, guns, race, and so on. So I am tempted to bring in my own experience, which does include living in the US and many of the stronger performers. But I have to recognise that my personal dataset is tiny and hopelessly biased as well, across many dimensions. Still, the question is so important that even biased hypotheses must be better than nothing; at least these can inform more research over time.

Obesity might be the most important factor, because it started to become a problem in the US around the time the trends turned negative, and remains much more prevalent there than anywhere else studied. But what are the root causes of US obesity?

The obvious place to start is diet, and the most obvious culprits are fizzy drinks, fast food and processed food. This leads us immediately to large corporations looking for high margins and locked- in customers. They have success lobbying lawmakers to permit unhealthy recipes, follow misleading marketing practices, and take advantage of poorer people in under-served neighbourhoods, including their schools.

Then we can expand into exercise. Here, we have a bifurcated society. In the US, a lot of people exercise furiously and work hard to maintain a body shape that is so healthy that it is actually unhealthy. They are always at the gym or on their Peloton or in their jogging shoes. Then there is everybody else, whose exercise consists of tiny walks between air-conditioned homes, cars, workplaces and malls. Some cannot afford a gym, others cannot offset their awful diet even if they try hard, and once somebody starts to fail the path to recovery becomes harder – exercise is really hard for fat people. It is telling that New York City is the least obese in the US. It is because we all exercise a bit in our daily lives, walking to the subway for example.

From diet and exercise we can expand into healthcare. Good healthcare can turn people around from a lifestyle prone to obesity. In the US, many have little access to affordable healthcare, while the rest of us are peddled a whole set of dodgy solutions designed mainly to offer profits to healthcare providers.

Are there root causes behind these root causes? People in the US moved from being under- to over-nourished within just a couple of generations, which predisposes obesity; this may be especially true of African-Americans. Then there is urban design; I tried to walk in Houston, but failed, owing to an absence of navigable sidewalks. People are now living in places with climates that don’t suit an outdoor life. We can also posit that long working hours and terrible childcare squeeze out time for cooking or mild exercise for all but the wealthy.

Drug overdoes, and specifically opioids, have overlapping and distinct causes. The most obvious culprits are the under-regulated pharmaceutical companies, egged on by lawmakers eyeing their lobbying dollars. The Sacklers deserve their comeuppance - it would be good if it were extended to all the lawmakers tainted by their money.

But why are people seeking so many painkillers in the first place? One cause might be obesity, and all of the root causes of it. But there might be other explanations, including stress from tough lives and unfulfilled expectations. It is striking how regional the opioid epidemic is, and most of the afflicted areas seem to be communities that have lost major employers and have a feeling of decline. With such a wide geography, the US is especially susceptible to creating such places, especially with local and state tax bases playing a bigger role than federal ones.

Suicide is even more prone to an analysis that stops at the proximate level. It is fair to look at the availability of guns and pills and the lack of societal support for those under extreme pressure. Addressing suicide success rates can surely help, because studies show that the urge to take one’s own life is often fleeting and may never return if once thwarted.

But how are there so many desperate people in the first place? And surely for everyone one person that attempts a suicide there must be a hundred who are depressed or otherwise seriously unfulfilled. A society with increasing rates of suicide must be hiding a lot of unhappiness.

Here we can circle back to inequality of opportunity, racial and other disparities, and also lifestyles with terrible childcare and few opportunities to recharge. We can add in social media, but the US is hardly unique in that one. But perhaps we have to cast the net even more widely?

There are many possible culprits; sadly the US is an OECD outlier in many areas, at the wrong end of the spectrum. Maternity deaths, road deaths, violent deaths, chemicals in the air or food, and incarceration all spring to mind. There is also the non-compliant spirit that came with the pioneers, which hampers vaccination programs and other civic benefits. But I have two personal favourite theories.

The first is the so-called American dream. The US is one of the most socially immobile rich countries, but the idea persists in the culture that you can achieve anything if you try hard and trust to God or some other benefactor. People watch LeBron on the TV and hear about his money, and somehow feel that such stories are widespread and can apply to them. Ambition can be a great thing, but this notion causes people to be reckless in their abandonment of common sense or studying and in their investments of time and money. When disappointment usually follows, lives can be easily ruined.

The second is serious debt. It is so easy to fall into debt here. The average family has eight credit cards – all opportunities to fall prey to debt. Commercials mislead and hide mountains of small print, and deferred payment is a universal marketing tactic. Peer pressure abounds. The financial sector holds many people captive, and such lives can easily spiral downwards.

The American mortality trend is important; it reverses a previous pattern and could be replicated elsewhere if the root causes are misidentified. It deserves more serious attention, not just a load of partisan theories (like some of mine), or bland scientific studies that essentially claim that people die because they stop breathing. It must be more complex than something like race, because that was just as much of a problem back in 1950 when the US was doing well. No doubt the science will catch up soon; I hope so, and will follow it with interest.

Earth's Shifting Centre

Over the New Year, I was lucky enough to spend an extended break in Dubai with my daughter and her husband. It was lovely to have all our kids together in one place for a week, a rare treat nowadays. It was a joyful time in every way, as well as a great opportunity to read, observe and reflect.

Dubai has truly become a global village. What I love the most about living in Queens is its stunning diversity – within fifteen miles I can find almost any culture or cuisine on the planet, and we are all tightly packed and creating new fusions all the time.

But I think Dubai has Queens beaten on the diversity front. Walking around the packed fountain outside the Burj Khalifa, I heard more languages and observed more skin tones and dress styles than I typically do in Queens, and somehow the blending seemed even stronger there than here. And I think the diversity is more complete and more representative. In Queens, we have everything, but with whiter and western cultures rather over-represented. In Dubai, the mix more accurately reflects the global population, with a lot more Chinese, Indians, other Asians and Africans than the pale skinned. Of the continents, only South America seemed less present, and, as any Riskplayer will tell you, South America has a smaller population than most other continents.

In Dubai, they have worked out what a Global Village they have, and, true to form, exploited it in the form of a recently opened huge leisure area that is actually called Global Village. Think of Disney’s “it’s a small world after all”, multiply it by a hundred, take away the US-centricity, add in shows and displays, and include stall after small of naked commercialism and you can picture the Global Village. The commercialism was jarring, but I had to admire the ambition and execution – it was a fine day out for young and old, rich and poor, and it was the commercial aspect that made it affordable.

I had been a bit taken aback by some attitudes of Americans when I said I was going to Dubai. There was a bit of “why would you want to go there” in some reactions, which I found a bit surprising. I could only assume that there had been some subtle putting down of the place in some shows or TV or just popular chat.

It was only after spending time in Dubai and thinking about it that I reached a hypothesis to explain the negative attitudes. Perhaps more than anywhere else, Dubai exposes the great US delusion that it is the centre of the world. Dubai does everything the US does, only better.

How tired I get when some lazy sports commentator in the US claims that the world is watching some minor game in a sport that nobody else even plays. How angry I get with Time magazine when they publish a list of the world’s 100 most influential people, claiming over half to be from the US. This same delusional arrogance extends to claims about Times Square neon and fireworks, or Las Vegas glamour.

Forget about it! All of those claims are humiliated by Dubai. It is larger, grander, smarter and cleaner in all dimensions. Everything is sparkling, functional and exciting. Our son is training as a civil engineer and I could see his eyes light up and his brain start to whirr: why should I spend the next forty years patching up tired infrastructure in the US when I could work in Dubai? It is a fair question.

I think that is why there is some denial about Dubai. It is OK to accept that London, Paris or Rome has the edge for culture, history or romance, but the American psyche still needs to own bigger and grander and gaudier. And such a claim is no longer tenable.

Of course, everything that Dubai is today is likely to be China tomorrow. China is developing fifty Dubai’s. While in Dubai, I read and Fareed Zakaria’s The Post American World, which only supported what I was observing with my own eyes in Dubai. The book felt a little dated even though it is only eight years old, and of course since then the US has taken all the responses suggested in the book and done precisely the opposite.

Dubai is still growing at an incredible speed. Everywhere you look in all directions you see cranes and construction. There is a cycle of supply over-responding to demand that leads to rebalancing every so often, and just now rents and occupancy are down because too much has been built too quickly, but there is no denying that the mid-term trend is for more growth.

It is the finest embodiment I have seen of the strategy of “build it and they will come”. At first blush, who would want to come to the boiling desert where nothing grows? Well, create infrastructure and attract commerce, and come they will, and keep coming. My daughter and son-in-law have a fine life there, and countless others can improve their prospects there too.

Dubai is an interesting case study in a human-envisioned paradise, having developed with few constraints or legacy. I am impressed by the urban planning and focus on leisure and communications. I am a little depressed by all the shopping malls, but then perhaps it is like Global Village; build it and they will come, but add in lots of advertising and commerce to make it affordable.

It would be good if Dubai could showcase the way forward in some new areas. I would love to see more care for the environment, and more in the way of education and culture (the Louvre in Abu Dhabi I a fine building with a reasonable collection, but hard to appreciate amidst the crowds of selfie-takers). 

An example of innovation could be in how the world uses unmanned vehicles. For me, they are a great opportunity to re-envision mass transit. Dubai has a fine metro system, but it has only two lines, so people choose to drive unless they live and work very near the stations. So why not have unmanned pods, on the ground or floating, doing milk rounds from the stations to nearby apartment blocks? It is feasible already, and Dubai has everything needed (space, technology etc.) to make it work.

Another way to look at Dubai is as a place only for the agile, in my agile-rooted model of humanity. Everybody goes to Dubai to make something more of their life and to provide for their families. It is hierarchical - Filippinos provide human services and Indians heavy construction work – and while conditions for those groups can be seen as exploitative, the net result is usually a better life than they came from with more opportunity.

A place with only agile tends to optimistic and forward-looking, and that is an important part of the economic model. There is little need for welfare, or elderly healthcare, because the old simply don’t live there. In Long Island it seems almost every business is about keeping old people alive. That is hardly an engine for development.

Finally, the Zakaria book and some time in Dubai pose questions about political models. It hardly warms a liberal heart to see giant posters of an unaccountable sheikh everywhere and to understand that criminality is low only because anybody can be deported, anytime. But we also must recognise that our liberal hearts are challenged in the west too, with politics for sale and rigged, failing markets. I am not sure we can claim anymore that our way is always best for development and innovation: the story of Dubai and the emerging story of China rather give the lie to those claims.

The centre of humanity is shifting, and it is exciting, and plain for all to see in places like Dubai. A China with twenty Dubai’s (and, one day, an India too) might seem a frightening prospect, but we might also see it as a wonderful one, if we learn to embrace it and help to shape it as benevolent supporters of humanity rather than sit bitterly on the sidelines with our denial, arrogance, military belligerence and pointless protection. I for one say – bring it on.