Over the past few years I have been dismayed commercialization of so many aspects of our lives, access to health care and higher education are two such examples. Daily I read in the newspapers or hear on the radio stories of individual greed at the expense of large portions of society – whether it be someone like Bernard Madoff who defrauds people and institutions of the financial resources, or researchers who falsify data and lie about their research findings to personally benefits from their deception to politicians who put self-interest and ideology before the welfare of the people they serve.  Where is the awareness that these short-term gains comes at the expense of the long-term future of our society. Where is the moral and political leadership necessary to change this trend?  Whenever I reflect on these questions I always think of the challenge the Tragedy of the Commons described by Garrett Hardin in Science (1968).

Having spent over 40 years teaching in higher education I believe that part of the solution to the problems we face as a society is to prepare the next generation of leaders from the population of students current attending our colleges and universities today.  We can not ignore the natural order, as Bernard Baruch would ofter say, that the current generation of leaders will pass away and be replaced by a new generation.  I believe it is my responsibility and the responsibility of my colleagues in the higher education field to prepare our students for this task.  But how do we accomplish this?

It seems to me that history has much to teach us about leadership and values and challenges we face as individuals grappling with finding our place int he world.  The legacy of those who came before us and the lessons we can learn from their experiences should not be lost.  Over the past few years I have come to gain a great deal of respect for Bernard M. Baruch, the speculator, philanthropist and statesman that Bernard M. Baruch College is named after.  I recently came across Baruch’s discussion of the lesson he learned when he began to turn his attention to public service.  He wrote the following in Part II of his Autobiography The Public Years

The problem of conflict of interest is a serious one which frequently bedevils Washington in its efforts to recruit able men into government service. No man can serve two masters; no honorable man would try.  A representative of business who betrayed the government would never get another play in business. But many men, ready to serve the government faithfully, are unable or unwilling to divest themselves of financial holdings as a price of service.  To some it constitutes a sacrifice – or a penalty.  Actually the problem of conflicting interests is not so much a matter of the securities in a man’s portfolio, but of his integrity and open-mindedness.  The honest and enlightened man in public will put the government’s interest above all others, no matter what his personal financial interests are or may have been.  The dishonest or narrow man will not be made otherwise by temporary disposal of his holdings.

In the Spring of 2011, Andrew Revkin, NY Times Environmental reporter and author of the Blog Dot Earth made a presentation before a group of Climate Change Professionals from Australia, CHina, Indonesia and Japan participating in a State Department Program at Baruch College.  He talked about the impact of the Tsumani that had hit Japan a month earlier and told the story of the ancient stones that recorded tsunamis that occurred in the past.  I have copy the following piece from the story that appeared on his blog;

I encourage you to read “ Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors,” a haunting and fascinating Associated Press story by Jay Alabaster describing centuries-old stone tablets warning of coastal tsunami risk that dot the Japanese coast ravaged by the great earthquake and resulting waves on March 11th.

This is an example of how “disaster memory,” conveyed from generation to generation, can — at least for a time — limit losses from inevitable, but rare, calamities. The inscription inscribed on one stone was quoted in the article:

High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants…. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.

In some parts of the world, tsunami warnings have been passed down through oral traditions. That is the case on Simeulue Island in Indonesia, which was struck by the extraordinary Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004.

Revkin hypothesizes that humans forget the past after about 50-70years.  Imagine the pain and suffer that we might avoid if we honors those who past down our history from generation to generation.  In some cultures they are called wisdom keepers.

If you are interested in reading more about Andrew Revkin’s views click on the links below.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/limits-to-disaster-memory-even-etched-in-stone/?ref=tidalwaves

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/disaster-memory-and-the-flooding-of-fukushima/?ref=tidalwaves

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/on-pinwheels-networks-and-resilience/?ref=tidalwaves

Legacy is not restricted to the past – we have a responsibility for the legacy we will leave our children and grand children’s generation.   What will it be?

Stan Altman

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For the last 100 years we have developed organizational structures based on the assumption that specialization is the most efficient way of producing goods and services. By concentrating all one’s efforts on a limited number of activities, it is assumed that one becomes better and better at performing the associated tasks.  The model T-Ford production line is an early example. Today we see it in all aspects of our lives -  the medical profession, higher education, government agencies, the communications industry, etc. The metaphor for this specialization is a silo – in management terminology this describes a structure incapable of communicating with its surroundings.  Wikipedia describes silos as:

“…management systems where the focus is inward and information communication is vertical. Critics of silos contend that managers serve as information gatekeepers, making timely coordination and communication among departments difficult to achieve, and seamless interoperability with external parties impractical. They hold that silos tend to limit productivity in practically all organizations, provide greater opportunity for security lapses and privacy breaches, and frustrate consumers who increasingly expect information to be immediately available and complete.”

In an era of rapid change like we live in today, successful organizations and individuals will be those capable of managing communications and coordinating activities across the artificial boundaries silos create.  We know from the study of systems that breaking a system into its component parts may make it easier to study each part separately but it loses the all important interaction that occurs between the parts, often leading to unintended consequences that surprise us.

“The term Streisand Effect is applied to the internet phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to censor or remove a certain piece of information (such as a photograph, document, etc.) instead causes the information to become widely known and distributed.^[33] The fact that a piece of information is being restricted assigns to it a previously nonexistent value in the eyes of the public.”

Developing the ability to “systems think” – to see the entire system and explore the interactions between its component parts is a skill taught in most leadership development programs.  Without it, it becomes difficult to solve today’s complex problems.

In the 1960s I was fortunate to work briefly with a historian studying Pearl Harbor and why the United States failed to detect Japan’s attach.  There was information available to the military services of unusual activity by the Japanese navy.  However, each service only had a piece of the information and because each service worked in its own silo, the total picture available to the US was never assembled and the event of December 7, 1941 became history.

To explore how this could happen, the historian designed the following simple experiment  He had members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Military Services sit in a separate room and gave them a map of an imaginary continent with boundaries drawn for 8 countries. Each map had one of the countries named – the task was for the 8 players to fill-in the name of all 8 countries.  What my colleague did not tell them was the orientation of each map was different. Communication took place via a conference call.  After about 1 hour the players were scream at each other, each believing they were right about the location of their country.  It was only after they were given an additional piece of information “are you sure you are all seeing the same thing?” that they were able to solve the task.  A key lesson learned – be sure that everyone is talking about the same thing.

In a world were information is available anywhere around the world, research activities and findings that can inform others work, often remains in a silo. Like the experiment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complex problems that extend beyond national boundaries fail to be addressed because those affected never see the whole picture – it is as though each effort is a piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle and only by assembling the puzzle by bringing together information and people working on related activities can we see the whole picture.

My involvement in the US State Department’s Climate Change Professional Fellows program has shown me, once again, the power of bring together people from diverse backgrounds with unique perspectives working on a set of common problems.  Ideas emerge and information is shared creating new information that none of the participate had anticipated.  Finding ways to share information, ideas and build virtual networks among researchers and practitioners with common interests, different skills and perspectives working on similar or related problems provide opportunities for solving today’s challenging proble

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The Arts expose each of us to the ambiguity and uncertainty of life – it is this very fact that makes life so rich and full of possibilities. Living within a “pre-defined” view of the world filters out much of life possibilities, including possibilities we would have considered impossible.

Six Americas - different mental models about the importance of climate change

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