I’m going to violate my own conventional practice and quote in full an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Suzy Welch, the widow of former GE CEO Jack Welch, and a management prof:

To everyone who sent me the article reporting General Electric’s sale of Crotonville, the longtime learning center that was the pride and joy of my late husband, Jack Welch, I’d like to thank you for the ugly cry. It is indeed the end of an era: one when companies and employees were on the same team.

That’s done and over, isn’t it? Today, companies and employees are each in a boxer’s crouch, glaring across the ring.

I wonder sometimes what Jack would make of my M.B.A. students—not to mention Generation Z in general—who view every employer with a gimlet eye. They aren’t only thinking, “How are you going to help my career?” or “How much will you value my ideas?”

They’re thinking, “How fast are you going to chew me up and spit me out? Because that’s how it works now.”

In too many cases, they aren’t wrong. No one works at one company for very long anymore; that’s a given. We all know the reasons: changes in tech, economic shifts, demographic trends, the zero-sum zeitgeist. A friend, a Sloan graduate, just hit nine years with one company, a big e-commerce platform. She told me she’s considered a lifer and something of a freak of nature.

Crotonville was a shrine to such “freaks,” people who so bought into the company’s values that they considered it an honor to be invited to an off-site program where they got to talk about those ideas even more than they did at work.

Crotonville was based on the notion that you could love your company. And your company could love you. I remember those days with bittersweet nostalgia myself, but this seems like a laughable notion in 2024, doesn’t it?

Early last semester, I invited Emily Field to present to my class at New York University on managerial skills. She’s a McKinsey partner and a co-author of “Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work.”

During the Q&A, a student asked about motivation. After Ms. Field’s reply, which I agreed with, I added, “Look, what Emily is saying is that managing people is hard, because to do it right you have to authentically care about them. On some level, management is an act of love.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Ms. Field said. We both looked up to see 60 mortified faces. Hands shot up.

“You need to keep boundaries at work.”

“You can’t trust your boss.”

“Companies don’t love you, they use you.”

For a few minutes, Emily and I were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We stood our ground, but I left class shaken. For the rest of the semester I continued to make my case—that companies and their people are one and the same. Or they should be. Work is better that way—more productive, interesting, effective, enjoyable. Jeepers, it’s more fun.

Yes, fun at work. Imagine that.

Gen Z can’t, it seems. Work is what you do when you can’t be doing what you want.

Handshake, a job site solely for college students and recent grads, recently conducted a survey of 2,500 undergraduates. When asked for their definition of career success, 78% of Gen Zers named sustaining a work-life balance as their top choice. Dead last was “advancing to a senior role,” at 40%.

This trend has reverberations through corporate America. At Brunswick, where I’m a senior adviser, we’re used to clients presenting all sorts of strategic problems. Lately, “employee engagement” has topped the list again and again. Here’s another data point: In 2023 a Gallup poll found that Americans are unhappier at work than they’ve been in years.

Crotonville wasn’t built for times like these. That would have made Jack sad.

I thought you might find it interesting. Did Crotonville close because it was no longer useful, because it was too expensive, or GE’s management no longer saw the use of it?

My wife managed to capture a picture of Jack in motion and I thought I would share it.

The editors of the Washington Post are alarmed about the return of measles to the United States:

This year is not yet one-third over, yet measles cases in the United States are on track to be the worst since a massive outbreak in 2019. At the same time, anti-vaccine activists are recklessly sowing doubts and encouraging vaccine hesitancy. Parents who leave their children unvaccinated are risking not only their health but also the well-being of those around them.

[…]

According to the World Health Organization, in 2022, 37 countries experienced large or disruptive measles outbreaks compared with 22 countries in 2021. In the United States, there have been seven outbreaks so far this year, with 121 cases in 18 jurisdictions. Most are children. Many of the outbreaks in the United States appear to have been triggered by international travel or contact with a traveler. Disturbingly, 82 percent of those infected were unvaccinated or their status unknown.

As the passage quoted above makes clear they lay the blame for the outbreaks solidly on those avoiding vaccinating their kids and the “anti-vaccine activists” sowing doubts.

While I don’t disagree with that I suspect there are other factors as well. Among those are the degree to which the public health bureaucracy has undermined itself. It only takes one lie to undermine confidence and during COVID the public health bureaucracy lied to us at least once. Furthermore they oversold the effectiveness of vaccinations, partly out of ignorance, partly out of good intentions.

Additionally, I don’t believe that most Americans understand that measles hasn’t been wiped out (like smallpox) but that materially universal vaccination against it prevents it from spreading. Measles can’t be wiped out until it’s wiped out everywhere and that appears very unlikely at present.

Finally, the strategy for dealing with anti-vaccine activists’ “sowing doubts” is through reasoned discourse and evidence rather than censorship. Censorship can come right back at you.

After reflecting on Iran’s attack on Israel over the weekend, I arrived at some possible conclusions.

The first, widely lauded in the West, is that Iran’s missiles and drones aren’t as good as Israel’s anti-missile defenses.

It is being reported that U. S., British, Jordanian, and French aircraft took part in the defense against the Iranian attack. If true, it suggests one of two things, either a) those countries have been defending Israeli airspace for some time or, more likely, we had good intelligence about the actual timing of the Iranian attack.

We have also learned that Iran can attack Israel pretty much any time it cares to. We have suspected that for some time but this attack confirms it.

There are some other things we haven’t learned. We haven’t learned, for example, that Iran has “shot its wad”, as an old Navy friend of mine used to say. Maybe it has maybe it hasn’t.

Iran’s reported foreign reserves of $75 billion could pay for a lot of missiles and drones. Therefore we haven’t learned that Iran will not engage in attritional attacks against Israel.

We haven’t learned whether Israel required U. S., British, Jordanian, and French support to repel the attack.

We haven’t learned whether Israel would be as successful in defending against simultaneous missile and drone attacks from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and maybe even Iraq.

I am hearing some assertions that this attack demonstrates that we need to “isolate Iran”. I have few ideas on how that might be accomplished. It is my understanding that 90% or more of Iran’s oil exports go to China and I am confident that China and North Korea will continue to be delighted to sell missiles and drones to Iran. Not to mention those they produce domestically.

We haven’t learned (yet) whether Israel will respond to the attack. I suspect it will.

What else have we learned or not learned from Iran’s attack on Israel?

I found Joachim Klement’s analysis of the pragmatic effects of the Trump era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 on business tax rates distressing, to say the least. The short version is that the effects were to increase taxes on many more companies, mostly small companies, than it decreased them for:

In the end, companies that are barely profitable and often have years when they make a loss were the big losers of the tax reform. Large corporations did just fine while small business owners got to pick up the bill.

I have made no secret of my opinion of corporate income taxes: I think they should be abolished. Increase the personal income tax to make up the difference in revenue if you will. Better yet abolish the income tax entirely in favor of a prebated value-added tax, prebated at different rates based on income to assure progressivity. Corporate income taxes are too inefficient and, as Mr. Klement’s analysis supports, can be used as a weapon by big companies against their smaller competitors.

I see some common threads running through the pieces I have been reading today. The first is that I don’t see proper consideration being given to the possibility that there are some people who want to wield power over others not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. That is not original to me. It has been said by philosophers and psychologists over centuries.

The second is just how devoid of pragmatic considerations so much of the policy discussions are. It is an increasing Aristotelian world. Things are right or wrong, black or white, good or evil. There is insufficient consideration to whether the policies being proposed are effective or ineffective.

Update

I neglected to mention the third common thread I’m seeing: everything is being viewed through the prism of domestic politics. Does it help Trump/Biden or hurt? Republicans or Democrats? The actual value of policies gets short shrift.

I found this conversation between Yascha Mounk and Vinay Prasad at Persuasion about the U. S. policy response to COVID-19 thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

I just want to be clear: My criticism is not a referendum on your involvement in all this, it’s not about your article, which I think was perfectly reasonable to have written at the time. And it’s really a criticism of the people who are in charge of the policy. I think Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci were aware that many scientists disagreed with their point of view. They held zero debates on the topic. They refused to entertain those opinions. We have emails from Francis Collins saying, when he read the Great Barrington Declaration, “We need a quick and devastating take-down” of this. He didn’t write an email saying, “Maybe we should have some public discussions and put these on YouTube and let people hear the pros and cons to this.”

I think there were plenty of people at the time who were opposed to these measures. Jeff Flier and I wrote some articles critical of this early in the pandemic saying that we need to listen to scientists from different points of view and we need to think about all the negative consequences of lockdown. We had data from China very early on that it essentially had no lethality in young people. There is a rate of death in people under the age of 18, but it is so fleetingly low it makes no sense to restrict their movements and restrict their school given the value of school. But the bigger point is that it seems like Monday morning quarterbacking because the people who set the policy squelched all attempts at any dissenting opinion and did not allow the public to hear the points of view of people who disagreed at the time.

I don’t entirely agree with their remarks. In some cases I think they’re being too lenient and in others too critical. Additionally, I think they ignore the “Politician’s Syllogism”. As an example of “too critical” IMO I believe they’re too critical of the shortcomings of facemasks as a strategy. As I said from the start, I suspect that there are differences between the use of masks in a healthcare setting and their use in, say, a grocery store not to mention on the street or on the beach.

As an example of “too lenient”, I have very strong opinions of appointed officials who lie knowingly to the American people. I think they should be punished very harshly.

I particularly found this assessment of the futility of our initial efforts interesting:

Could this disease ever have been contained? Maybe, but only if China had been cooperative early in December of 2019. I think by January and February, the horse was out of the barn. It’s a highly contagious virus. It had seeded the entire globe. By March, I think we had widespread transmission in every continent. And so I think containment was always not possible. There are some people who believed in Zero-COVID even in June and July in 2021. They thought we could stop all transmission. I think that was incredibly naive. COVID-19 has animal reservoirs; we had data that it infected the majority of white-tailed deer, for instance, in Michigan. It’s affected other animal species. Containment, I think, was not an option from the moment in which US policymakers took it seriously.

I understood that containment was futile the first time I saw a group of five or six Chicago police officers huddling together closely without facemasks of any kind or any attempt at “social distancing”. When the enforcers of public order aren’t maintaining that order among themselves, it’s all just kabuki, just for show. It’s abusive.

Well over 60 years ago my mom planted jonquils at our house on Winding Brook. After she died and her house was sold (a story in itself), one of my siblings considerately dug up some of the bulbs and sent them to all of us. As you can see my mother’s jonquils are flourishing in our yard now.

When my wife and I die I hope that someone digs them up and sends them to one (or more) of my nieces and nephews or their children.

The news of the day is that Iran has fired (they say) 300 missiles and drones at Israel. The world is on tenterhooks waiting to see whether and how Israel will respond. A few observations.

To my eye President Biden has seized the worst of his possible courses of action. After telling the Iranians not to attack Israel which they went ahead and did anyway he apparently is telling the Israelis a) we stand by them and b) don’t retaliate against Iran. It combines futility with the impression of weakness. Better by far just to maintain a low profile. I recognize that such a course is counter-intuitive for a politician.

Any notion that the Gulf States will come to Iran’s aid should Israel counter-attack is far-fetched in my opinion. The Iranians are only slightly less popular than the Israelis.

The thought patterns behind both the Israeli and Iranian courses of action elude me. Did the Iranians really think they could supply and support Hezbollah and Hamas in their attacks against Israel without Israel attacking them? Did the Israelis really think the Iranians would not react to the Israeli attack on their consulate in Syria? I suspect that the irony of their responding to an attack on a diplomatic office with a massive retaliation is lost on them.

Did the Israelis really think the Iranians would not respond to the attack on its Syrian office and the deaths of several high-ranking officers? What are both sides thinking now?

And what would the effect of an attack like Iran’s against Israel be on American military bases and cities? Would we fare as well as the Israelis have?

Update

The estimates of the costs of Israel’s defense last night are around $1-$1.3 billion while the cost of Iran’s attack are estimated at a fraction of that. Should Israel counter-attack, I suspect that tells us something about the nature of that counter-attack.

On the positive side it will be a lot easier for the Biden Administration to justify giving Israel defensive weapons to aid in its missile defense that offensive weapons to use against Hamas.