Standing Firm for Freedom of the Press (A letter to Ann Telnaes)

I admire...

..you for standing firm for freedom of the press, despite being perched on the slippery slope of American descent into fascism and autocracy. Satire has always been and must remain a precious element of democracy and free speech. I saw this in the Soviet Union during the years when there was a short-lived flourishing of freedom. Please see the photo below from my collection of matryoshkas.

While it was once seen as sacrilege to depict Soviet leaders other than with the utmost respect, that changed under Gorbachev when artists started showing leaders as nesting dolls. But note, in the beginning the satire embraced Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev – and eventually Stalin. But even after Stalin became an acceptable target of satire, Lenin remained off limits for a while.

It was only later that you could pop open Stalin and find a little Lenin inside.

If either the story or the photo are useful to you in any way, please feel free to share/use.

Again, thank you for taking a stand. It matters.

https://AnnTelnaes.com

Dion Drew: An Amazing Man

On Flags and Fascism

I cannot continue to fly the Israeli flag.

With apologies to The Grateful Dead, ‘what a long, strange trip’ it has been since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. That is when I hoisted the Ukrainian flag in front of my house and put 200 little Ukrainian flags on my lawn with a note inviting neighbors to please take one if they wanted to show opposition to a ground war in Europe in the 21st century. Although they have faded now, they were all taken and planted around my neighborhood in Maryland.

I had offices in Ukraine before and after the break-up of the USSR, have travelled to many of the cities now devastated by war and had arranged for Western news crews to visit the now precariously operating nuclear power station in Zaporizhzhia.

While Putin denies complicity in the death of his most successful, outspoken, and globally recognized opponent, Alexei Navalny, Trump admonishes European nations to ‘pay their bills’ to NATO and invites Russia to invade those countries that do not. This bombast from the leader of a party once led by Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan is beyond bizarre. But it is equally mind-bending from a man who has rarely paid any of his bills with his own money but has instead masterfully extracted money from a seemingly endless stream of gullible investors, campaign contributors, students, and customers to pay his own bills. Whether his reduced bond will stand or fall remains to be seen.

As Trump’s fealty to Putin, and the Republican leadership’s fealty to Trump can no longer be a surprise, a speaker at the recent “Conservative” Political Action Conference (CPAC) takes us a step further into the theatre of the absurd. From the stage as part of a panel chaired by Steve Bannon. Jack Posobiec gleefully welcomed participants to “the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.” He went on, excitedly explaining that “we didn’t get all the way there on January 6th but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this…” He then holds up a cross on a necklace and Bannon responds, “Amen.” And this unabashed white supremacist and antisemite continues: “all glory is not to government; all glory to God.”

Last October I hoisted the Israeli flag after Hamas terrorists massacred and brutalized more than 1,000 Israeli citizens. Then I added the peace flag which was an ever-present symbol of the 1960s and ‘70s, often at Grateful Dead concerts. And then I cut the Israeli flag into tattered strips, reflecting what Israel’s current leaders have done to the moral fabric of the nation.

Then I added the Keffiyeh, the traditional head scarf that was worn proudly in the past by Palestinian villagers and farmers to distinguish themselves from more urban Palestinians (and to deflect sun and sand). Yasser Arafat the founding leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization brought the Keffiyeh into global focus and was awarded the Nobel peace prize alongside Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994.

When I added the Keffiyeh, I offered my neighbors an explanation, with a little note on the lawn: “If you are wondering, I would love to fly another flag that would let me distinguish the horrific suffering of the Palestinian people from the horrific acts of the Hamas organization.”

I posted another little note eight years ago, in November 2016, after Trump was elected -- but on twitter rather than my lawn: “We elected a fascist and are all now part of a reality TV show. Facts are props. Citizens are just viewers, audiences to be manipulated.”

While that tweet will continue floating around the digiverse, the Israeli flag no longer flaps in the Spring wind near my front steps.

Connections in a Fractured World: Vivek Murthy, Crimea, and Gaza

In a world that seems increasingly fractured, what connects us – as people, as teams and as communities? How well we understand the complexity of connection may hold the key to unlocking success.

For young kids at Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, a connection to the earth and to changing things for the better fosters a sense of connection, even as 4th graders. We worked closely with the CBS NEWS crew that produced this piece about this long-term client that was broadcast 240 times in 40 states in late October.

Hope for a better future, whether via individual opportunity or systems change, can also meet our species-level need to engage with others. Social science research makes clear that creating opportunities for other people is a twofer; the creator and the beneficiary both win. We worked for years with New York State’s first registered benefit corporation, Greyston Bakery. Dion Drew tells the story of Open-Hiring better than I can. (And a little bit of sugar helps too!)

From a bakery in Yonkers, NY, to a climate conference in Europe working to solve a common problem also enables people to live the experience of the whole being more than the sum of the parts. See the short film we executive produced.

Yet, despite years of successful collaboration between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs (through organizations like Seeds of Peace, New Israel Fund, The Jerusalem Youth Chorus and others), the Arab-Israeli conflict has bound them together in mortal combat. As David Shipler writes, “The two peoples are imprisoned by history”.

Root cause analysis of this seemingly intractable conflict is eerily similar in two respects to the war in Ukraine: property and religion. Jerusalem is claimed as the homeland by Jews, Christians, and Arabs. The prophet Mohammed is thought to have arrived there in the 3rd century C.E. Jesus is believed to have been a preacher or Rabbi in roughly 30 C.E. King David and King Solomon are thought to have ruled Palestine in roughly 1000 B.C.E. Sharing, or the inability to share, is yet another form of connection.

Also bound together by shared borders and history, the war that Russia initiated in Ukraine can be traced back to 988 C.E. when Grand Prince Volodymyr (in what is now Kyiv) embraced the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. In 1054 The Great Schism then solidified the split between the Church of Rome (Roman Catholicism) and the Church of Constantinople (Eastern Orthodox). From Tsarist times, the ‘gathering’ of all the regions embracing Eastern Orthodoxy (and eventually the Russian Orthodox Church) has been a spiritual quest for Russian leaders. And since even before the creation of the USSR, Russian leaders have been on an almost equally spiritual quest for a warm water port. Think Crimea. Think Jerusalem.

Enter Vivek Murthy. Born in Yorkshire, England, of Indian descent, who released in May of this year, “The Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” The essence of the warning is quite clear: “(s)ocial disconnection puts us at increased risk for depression, anxiety and suicide, as well as heightening our risk for stress-related physical ailments like heart disease, stroke and dementia.”

And a month later, his office released "U.S. Surgeon General Issues Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” It will shock no one that “(f)requent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.” The promise that Facebook dangles in front of us to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” may be no more than a hallucination of an oasis of peace appearing on the horizon in Sinai. Or could it be more?

Connections need to be managed. This is why counselors advise that there are three players in every partnership between two people: you, me, and the relationship itself. Intent and purpose are essential for successful connection. Misperceptions and competing narratives will lead to unhealthy connections – more traps than links. Whether you are managing a personal relationship, building a brand and protecting a company’s reputation, committed to better understanding the thinking and behavior of key stakeholders, or wrestling with why collaboration across departments often don’t work harmoniously; in all cases how well or poorly we manage our connections will determine whether they buoy or burden us.

Brittle Systems: Staying Connected in the Post-Pandemic Era

My experience this week at Heathrow is a small but telling example of the global risk many businesses face: multiple systems failing simultaneously. Solving discrete problems is what we do every day, at home and at work. Resolving the failure of a system is much more challenging. However, coping with the failure or near failure of interwoven and codependent systems can lead to catastrophic grid lock.

Heathrow reminded me of airports I used regularly running my business in the Soviet Union – minus the stray dogs and birds inside the terminals. In both settings people were working mightily to succeed despite multiple systems failures.

A common feature of systems failure is a disconnect between people with and people needing information. Communications collapses often go unseen until they spill over either into another business function or into the public domain. The most disturbing and compelling explanation of this may be Edward Tufte’s iconic analysis of how the likelihood of “O-ring” failure was missed in a jumbled PowerPoint slide before the Columbia shuttle burned on re-entry. (PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports)

Although inconsequential by comparison, massive crowding, low ceilings creating a cloud of noise, and awful or completely missing signage at Heathrow meant that hundreds of people in line for dozens of flights could not hear agents shouting. They were trying, in vain, to pull people who were at risk for missing flights from lines that started well outside the terminal building. While waiting, we asked ourselves numerous times: “What did she say, was that about Dulles or Dallas?” It should have been obvious to on-site managers that shouting indecipherable instructions in an overcrowded, international airport was going to fail, especially while competing with booming public address system broadcasts of clear but useless instructions about unattended bags.

We received repeated false assurances not to worry because there was a back-up plan -- to supplement the verbal communications with written signage. “We will come around with boards.” But just like the inaudible audio, when agents did finally mingle with the crowd, they were hugging the signs rather than raising them overhead. For different reasons, in instances, people with important information could not get it to people who needed it. The information was known, the users were known; they never connected.

Working around these communications failures, based on experience (always the genesis of workarounds), we managed to get into a short line to a check-in. But when it was our turn, the agent announced that she was closed, I flashed to a surreal scene decades ago in the Soviet visa office in Washington, DC. As I would talk to a consular office behind a glass partition, sliding papers and passports through a little metal tray. If a discussion was not to the Consular officers liking, s/he cut it off. Abruptly, by pulling a curtain down over the window. Conversation done. In this instance at Heathrow, again, information black out.

Despite these obstacles, we finally did make communications work. We told an agent, she found a supervisor, the supervisor phoned the gate, reached someone, received the correction information; they had just closed the gate. By definition, workarounds always come back at some point to rejoin the system that they were avoiding. They are detours, not replacements.

Next stop, customer service for rebooking and a place to stay overnight. Another system, equally brittle, equally on the edge of collapse, and also intertwined and codependent. As required by policy (a system of words), we were told that rebooking is done through a consortium of hotels that service the airlines. Booking a place myself was not an option – well, not an authorized option. She logged into the booking system. She emailed the system operators. No result from either. She emailed again.

While doing all this she was also regularly reaching behind her monitor into a tangle of cables. Since we had more than enough time together (way more!), I learned that this was to switch screens on her single monitor. Again, memories of what in Russia, in the 90’s, we called ‘sneakernet.’ Before networking software enabled multiple computers to share printers, we put together a manual mechanism. If you needed to print, you walked over to the printer and manually flipped a switch that enabled the printer to receive signals from a designated computer. In Russia. In the 1990s. And at Heathrow in 2022.

Finally, she called the consortium operator. After a brief conversation, the agent at the airline consortium for hotel booking hung-up on the airline customer service agent. A digital version of the shade being pulled down in the Visa office. Sensing that I was inside a system on the edge of collapse (as I was in the USSR when it did officially collapse), I mapped a workaround. Calling various airport hotels, I found one with an opening and booked a room. While the consortium booking system was still failing to generate the needed output (a hotel reservation), I let the agent know I had a room. Long story shortened; we then bartered my reservation for her authorization to rebook – which she shared with me by – wait for it – using my phone camera to take a picture of her computer screen.

In a sense, who cares about my experience at Heathrow? We all know airports are a mess. But the mess is much more important and bigger than my experience. Our systems today are so complex, human/machine interactions are sticky rather than smooth, and workarounds are fast becoming the norm. Fragile systems on the edge of collapse are incredibly risky. It’s unsustainable for business because, especially in tight margin sectors, you can’t keep sending flights out with seats empty because passengers could not get through the airport, then occupy a second seat on an additional flight, pay for overnight accommodations, and absorb the snow-balling transaction costs of all these adjustments – in addition to reputational costs.

Transforming systems that are fragile and critical and are regularly right on the edge of gridlock is one of the most critical and daunting challenge of the Post-Pandemic Era (PPE, again). Complex systems fail in complex ways. We cannot fine-tune or tweak our way out of this challenge. We must act.

First, systems thinking cannot remain the relatively obscure discipline that it is today. We need to pull systems training out of engineering schools and build it into our primary, secondary, and executive education institutions.

Second, companies need to come clean about the various systems used to shift costs to customers. We need to understand externalities. By way of a tiny example, the time has come to pull back the curtain on the façade of “your call is very important to us.” Companies have cut staff, reduced training, and invested in technology rather than people to reduce costs – maximizing benefits to owners and imposing costs on customers. As consumers, we have all become unwitting accomplices in shifting the cost of selling ourselves the services being offered. It’s a neat trick. But especially for companies with ethical pledges, commitments to socially responsible behavior, and a dedication to mission beyond profit the externalities charade needs to end.

Third, we need to study joints. Let it be the awareness that connection points between interlocking systems are extremely fragile. And when they fail, risks multiply. And fail they will. It is these in-between spaces, the joints that hold systems together, where failure is most likely. That is as true for O-rings on the Space Shuttle as it is for tiles in your bathroom, or the white space on organizational charts.

The handwriting is scrawled across the wall tiles. We have been warned.

Putin and Trump: At War with History

I have never been to the Russian Air Base on the Eastern edge of Ukraine in Millerovo, where attack helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and ground forces have begun the Russian invasion. The last time I was in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk (about 60 miles from Millerovo), I visited a military plant that was then converting to syringe manufacturing. I was with Yuri Shchekochikhin who represented the region as a member of Parliament.

Yuri is dead now; murdered by the Putin Regime for telling the truth. Perhaps the most courageous leader of independent journalism in the former Soviet Union, he was poisoned before either Anna Politkovskaya or Aleksandr Litvinenko. I’ve been reflecting on our time together in Ukraine and Russia, and as his host at my home when he first visited the United States. I will always remember his sweet incredulity that after I made a quick phone call to a local Chinese restaurant, a man on a bicycle arrived with dinner. Yuri closed his big round eyes and slowly shook his head in disbelief.

Over many years and more than a few vodkas, Yuri and I became friends. I remember him tugging at my arm in a Moscow hallway, excitedly explaining that he had interviewed the FSB agents (formerly KGB) who carried out the order to bomb apartment buildings in Russia - a false flag operation to garner support for military suppression in Chechnya. It was my turn to look at him, incredulous; ‘really,’ I asked? ‘How can you be so sure?’ He looked at me with his soulful eyes and short, cropped hair and leaned in: “They told me, the ones who did it; they talked with me, the agents; I interviewed them.”

In that same region of Eastern Ukraine that Yuri once represented, Russia has issued papers to nearly a half-million residents - officially identifying them as Russian citizens. If ‘provoked’ by some horrible slaughter of these innocents, it would not be the first time Russia sacrifices its own. Or as now seems equally likely, he may just recognize the two regions as part of Russia.

But really? Why, we ask? What is Putin thinking; what does he want that he is willing to risk so much? This is not fundamentally about his thinking but about the feelings deep in his Russian soul. He yearns not only for the warm-water port Russia has sought since Peter the Great (which he has now secured in Crimea). He is driven to repair a profound affront to Russian exceptionalism. His quest is to remake Kyivan Rus’ and repair The Great Schism - the spiritual and religious split in 1054 between Rome and Constantinople that has given us what we now understand as Eastern Orthodoxy in contrast to Roman Catholicism.

This is less about Ukraine as a runaway Soviet Republic, and more about Putin trying to roll back 1000 years of history. Comparatively, Trump is a piker. But the January 6th attack on the US Capitol was without question an attempt to rewrite American electoral history. Both these political strongmen understand that the power to rewrite history is also the power to shape the future.

Democracy is resilient and can better withstand the forces of autocracy than can the valiant but vastly outmatched Ukrainian military. Democracy in America won’t just collapse like an apartment building.

But the marauders on the Capitol steps operating as paramilitary units (and equipped as such), Putin with control over a vast military and propaganda apparatus, and Trump in his pathological lying and fanaticism all share the same disdain for history when it stands in the way of their dystopian visions for the future. It was because of his hope for a better future that Yuri was determined to tell the truth. And alongside the catastrophe unfolding on the ground in Ukraine, truth itself has also suffered a terrible blow.

More than geography is at stake in Ukraine.

The Black Swan of Trumpist Insurrection, Part I

This would be my 2nd coup d’état. My first was in Moscow, when I witnessed Russian tanks opening fire on the Russian Parliament. Label attackers of the United States Congress what you will: terrorists, revolutionaries, insurrectionists, rioters, a marauding mob. Despite the Department of Defense characterization of this as merely a “first Amendment protest,” whatever we name it, this trauma has forever changed personal and global understanding of democracy in America.

Our mindset, the mental window that frames our understanding of the world around us, has cracked. The fight over how to understand what has happened is the battle for the future of the country. And in this, the war of words matters. Need we more proof than Trump of the power of language: “this is just the beginning,” “good people on both sides”? Calls for “unity” and “moving on” from criminals and the criminal minds that energize them are perhaps even more damaging to the nation than the tragic loss of life and the surrender of the Capitol. How we understand and internalize what happened becomes the reality we carry into the future.

Neural networks shape and reshape our minds. Our perceptions evolve, memories morph, patterns develop, and pathways become more fixed with repetition. Systems of behavior, habits, become harder to change. Fights over how to define a ‘new normal’ cause personal pain and stress systems that have not been designed to be resilient.

What we see and what we cannot see are products of our mindsets. The attack itself-- fomented by an unhinged, megalomaniacal, vengeful, and emotionally stunted con man—turned on the successful peddling of a myth about election fraud. Weaponized, that myth infiltrated the softened minds of fearful people looking for a villain. Any villain. Social media, of course, was just a delivery tool, the syringe that injected the poison.

Fear, collusion, and incompetence are a deadly combination. That we couldn't defend the Capitol from an insurrectionist mob was a failure not of intelligence but a failure to be intelligent. The handwriting was not on the wall but displayed as a flashing neon sign and announced in advance. There was time to design, produce and sell sweatshirts for Trump's "be there...be wild’ event! That a white mob would beat to death a Capitol Police officer on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in broad daylight was so outside the realm of the believable that flashing lights were not seen.

There is a system in America, a systemic ‘unseeing’ of our body politic’s birth defect. Systemic racism has enduring power because it is embedded in the frameworks of our mind. And because that has been true generation after generation, the social operating systems we have built reflect that mindset. And still, many of us remain ‘unseeing.’

The façade of ‘this is not who we are’ crumbled this week. The curtain has been drawn back for all Americans to see. As sure as the confederate flag was paraded through the Capitol, the plotters, their henchmen, and their apologists are now scrambling to whitewash this. The future of democracy in America depends on whether or not we permit them to airbrush this trauma out of our collective minds or redesign the social, economic, and political systems that we have built.

Middlemen or Distributors?

Council Fire *  

Now we all have personal experience with the collapse of supply chains: toilet paper, produce, meat, flour.  They are more fragile than we knew, for many reasons. Whether in conversation with my consulting colleagues at Council Fire or with my clients such as the Equitable Food Initiative, supply chains are front-of-mind – as they also are in many everyday conversations.

Supply chains manage ‘betweens,’ the spaces between activities that otherwise would be disconnected. They connect the farm to the packing house, packing to trucking, truckers to warehouses, and so forth. When working properly, these supply chains are tightly connected, like individual railcars that together make up a train.

While the couplings that keep a train together are obviously critical, do we need all the couplings in our supply chains? When families go berry picking on a local farm, there is no fresh produce supply chain. However, when a farmworker in New Zealand picks a kiwi for sale in Detroit, the chain is long and winding (more of a web than a chain, in fact).

Distributors and consolidators are either essential to keep supplies humming or they are middlemen squeezing growers or producers without adding enough value to warrant the cut they take. Especially today, they seem critically important. But as we rebuild, should they play the same traditional roles or not? Fishmongers are now making a go of it in the UK selling straight to customers at the dock; no distributors. Restaurants have become community pantries in the Washington, DC, area; new distributors.

Size and distance are dispositive. We can't have lobster in the winter in Oklahoma without a complex system of suppliers carefully coupled together. While most of us are not going back to the farm, or to lobstering, maybe the real innovation obscured by the much bandied about idea of ‘scale,’ is that smaller might be better than bigger. We misuse scale as a synonym for bigger, when it actually means proportional or appropriately sized.

As we rebuild better, size and distance must be central to planning. Going from the bedroom to the home office is a shockingly short commute for many people. And we don’t even need to embrace Small Is Beautiful as a principle to wonder; what really is the optimal size for the most efficient economic system?

Before we scoff at alternatives that emphasize regions and internalizing costs, sharing economic value more fairly and better alignment with our personal values, we would do well to remember that what is dismissed today as ‘unworkable,’ is tomorrow’s patent and next year’s most successful IPO.

Especially today, be careful betting against big changes.

------------

* Council Fire is a global management consultancy that helps purpose-driven organizations thrive by creating lasting economic, social, and environmental value.

What They Talked About in Helsinki.

Note: The fiercest competition today is for attention. More than any other, this is the market that counts. Dominate the market for attention and you wield a kind of power rarely seen across business, politics, and culture. As exemplified in the Trump Administration’s dizzying attacks, reality itself is under assault. The institutional cornerstones and conceptual underpinnings of democracy are profoundly at risk. Even as new revelations emerge every day, what we might call “The Helsinki Moment” is instructive. This dispatch thus looks somewhat wryly at change, shock, power, partnership and the limits we often place around our own imagination – of both the future and the past.

Helsinki was not an aberration. Trump is many things. Stupid is not one of them. It is time we stopped being shocked.

Trump and Putin share common goals and values: absolute need for loyalty, disdain for free and fair elections, willingness to use and discard people, and antipathy toward media. As has been well documented, they are also both vengeful, racist, misogynist bullies. They are united in a relentless drive for power amassed in all its forms: financial, institutional, political, and control of natural resources. The goal is clear: engineering the collapse of democratic institutions and societies around the world.

Trump is not so much Putin’s toady or agent as his enthusiastic partner.

The core topic in Helsinki was how well they are doing in this collaboration to bring forward their vision of a world run be authoritarian despots: elected, stable, geniuses as they fancy themselves.

The dust will not settle after Helsinki; and we will not return to the established norms of diplomacy, democracy, and allegiances. Helsinki was, rather, a harbinger of things to come. Trump is not going to now start reading briefing books; he is not going to repair relations with America’s allies of the last 75-years. Those relationships are finished.

Helsinki was intentionally announced publicly yet held privately to send myriad signals and warnings to foes as well as allies, to confidantes as well as would-be challengers. It was intended to and did serve to intimidate. And make no mistake, the reactions were carefully monitored – like political sonar, taking readings, to chart the next move. I spent 17 years working in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Union with major western companies; this is a well-honed technique.

Understanding Putin and Trump as collaborators allows us to bring more clearly into focus the likely discussion points in the Helsinki meeting. On foreign affairs, the Middle East, Syria, Iran and Israel’s regional capabilities were center stage with discussion of who can tolerate what levels of military intervention where; timetables and sequence of military and diplomatic actions; and possible puppets, spokesmen and how to sow division among opposition parties. There was discussion of the need to perhaps instigate an action just provocative enough to warrant a pre-planned response.

Trump was also no doubt cautioned to manage his open disgust for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and to not be too hard on Putin’s all-important Gazprom – the global tentacles of which are essential to Putin’s apparatus.

On trade, aluminum, oil and natural gas figured prominently. Various commitments were made to ensure the ongoing allegiance of oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska. Putin also pointedly reminded Trump that the global price of oil determines the state of the Russian economy. The stability and vulnerability of stock exchanges was also likely discussed – as these centralized markets are a juicy target. If one aims to shift the concentration of wealth on a global scale, well-timed stock market manipulation can accomplish quite a lot.

In the same vein, intelligence and propaganda was a theme threaded through the entire meeting. Putin shared some of his more refined propaganda techniques and urged Trump to develop a bit more patience -- to reduce his vulnerabilities, to manage some of his impulsivity. But Putin was sure to feed the American president’s ego with praise and admiration. Putin’s ability to read Trump’s body language (crossed arms, upraised eyebrow, tilted head) no doubt helped him find the right combination of ego-stroking and unsettling bluntness. Once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent.

Although not explicitly discussed, there was also clear recognition of the critical need to control data, access communications infrastructure, and manage the media. The combined power of post-Soviet intelligence operations, the porous security safeguards around US social media, and Trump’s power to access government databases was referenced as a key strategic asset of this new collaboration. Satisfaction was expressed at the prospect of a unified Russian/American monitoring, surveillance, and tracking system. With both leaders sharing a common desire to extract revenge against those who cross them, the energy around this unparalled capacity was palpable.

Putin no doubt praised Trump for conducting the various tests, for floating various trial balloons, such as encouraging the killing of journalists, not commenting when it happens, and maintaining ‘plausible deniability’ throughout. The use of ICE as a never-before seen U.S. internal security force was discussed and Putin provided suggestions and guidance to Trump for how to allow other figures to have just enough oversight that they can become targets of blame if things get out of hand. Trump expressed relief that the horrific images of kids in cages had vanished from the pages and screens of American media.

Trump complained mightily to Putin about the American judicial system continuing to be an obstacle in his efforts to rule -- as if a King or a Tsar, by proclamation or tweet. Putin praised for managing Justice Kennedy’s departure, keeping largely unnoticed connection to the critical Duetsche Bank loan by Kennedy’s son when Trump badly needed a billion-dollar cash injection. While the question of Trump pardoning himself was danced around, there was clear acknowledgement by both leaders that it was important to preserve the facade of an independent judiciary. Trump asked Putin if he wasn’t impressed also that the justice department switched direction just this month so that 501(c)4 organizations like the NRA no longer need to reveal donors. A knowing wink was exchanged.

Around guns and violence, they joked about how fun it would be to go hunting or at least to a shooting range, maybe bring some sexy girls, some vodka and beer, and have a little respite from the stress of leadership. But they moved on, speaking of girls; Butina. It was a good ploy, they agreed, to throw her away and see how the various institutions in the US responded, to garner intelligence on how much Mueller really knows. They considered if it would be needed to engineer some kind of quid pro quo personnel trade. Trading a girl who offered sexual favors to gain access in return for protecting Ambassador McFaul would be a delicious way for Trump and Putin to smear the good name of a diplomat – and yet appear that Trump was protecting him. Snowden was also briefly mentioned.

How to manage key assets was discussed extensively. And as part of a designing a pretext for announcing a joint Russian/American intelligence operation, various risk scenarios were reviewed. The pros and cons of creating and planting evidence, or digital footprints that would warrant investigation in Montenegro, or one of the Baltic states or in Ukraine/Crimea was also discussed. What would be the right level of crisis to engineer such that it would not spin out of control but be sufficient to further justify the collaboration?

Trump complained that he was beginning to be uncomfortable with the dance around election manipulation; if the hijacking of the 2016 election actually happened, then it might well be traced to someone ‘other’ than the Russians. Putin signaled empathy and understanding, agreeing that this trope might need to be refreshed as Trump has indeed referenced “other” quite a lot in this context. He promised to have his “boys” at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg look into some new messaging options that might reverberate well in social media.

Plans for hacking the 2018 elections were discussed and Putin thanked Trump for sending the Republican delegation to the Kremlin. Trump sought advice on the November 10th military parade in Washington, coming so soon after the elections on the 6th. Would it be too much for Putin to visit Washington and also view the parade with Trump? To what extent should Trump explicitly call for his base of armed supporters to descend on Washington to celebrate the mid-terms and militarize the Capitol? Acknowledging that this might be too “Soviet-like,” they agreed to wait a bit before deciding.

Near the end of the extended private meeting, Putin asked after Trump’s children and Melania’s health. With his arm a little too tightly around Trump’s shoulder, and in rather good English, Putin repeated his past reassurance; ‘I have no plan, absolutely no plan, to let the media know that we really did hack the election. No plans whatsoever.’

And thus, he reminded Trump that the compromising material he has is not sexual but existential. Putin can declare Trump a ‘loser.’

Jonathan J. Halperin managed a strategy and communications company in the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union for 17 years.

On Purpose and Profit

Much has been written since Peter Drucker observed that “profit is not the purpose of business, but rather the test of its validity.” Yet, many corporate leaders still wonder both what purpose looks like operationally and whether it really generates value.  Recently, a host of firms have sought to unpack this challenge: from E&Y(link is external) and Accenture to Sustainable Brands, Conscious Capitalism, Ogilvy, and the Arthur W. Page Society.

For some executives, the sustainability agenda and its cousin, corporate social responsibility, remain challenges.  For others, carbon disclosure remains problematic.  But if Unilever CEO Paul Polman is right that purpose-driven brands within Unilever’s $61 billion ecosystem are growing “50% faster than the rest,” then brand managers, board members, investors and executives all need to quickly get their heads around this next phase of corporate evolution.

To advance the conversation, let’s first take a quick look in the rear-view mirror to understand how we arrived where we are today.

• In 1602 the Dutch East India company was chartered and granted a trading monopoly across a vast area of the Indian Ocean and southern Africa.

• In 1811 New York State passed the first statute facilitating the formation of limited liability manufacturing operations, a landmark event in defining corporate form.

• In 1889 Andrew Carnegie published “Gospel of Wealth,” imploring his wealthiest peers to share their wealth to improve society – a precursor to the 2010 Giving Pledge launched by Bill Gates and others at the urging of Warren Buffett.

• Fast forward to 2012 and Greyston Social Enterprise becomes the first “benefit corporation” to be registered in New York State, identifying Open Hiring™ as the social mission that it would pursue on par with its fiduciary responsibilities.

While humans have been bartering and trading for a very long time, corporate form as we know it today is relatively new.  And the current way we practice philanthropy in the United States is also a modern construct.  The typical pattern involves, first, the accumulation of great wealth through commerce and then some of that wealth being returned to society to meet various social needs.

It is this fundamental sequencing – extraction of profits followed by giving back – that is challenged by purpose-driven corporations.  In the case of Greyston, the scale of profit-taking is moderated by balancing the necessity to not only generate profits but to also achieve a social purpose at the same time.  Benefit corporations bring purpose inside the corporation, thus fundamentally changing its culture.

Greyston’s two-part mission is to create thriving communities and produce delicious brownies. To this end, it operates a world-class bakery in Yonkers, NY, baking 35,000 lbs. of brownies a day for Ben & Jerry’s, and for sale in retail markets.  The kicker is that the Greyston bakery production line is staffed entirely of people brought into the mainstream economy through Open Hiring™.  Anyone who wants a job is offered the opportunity to experience the dignity of work at Greyston: no questions asked, no resumes, no references, no background checks. (Please see this link for more on our work with Greyston).

In codifying this duality of profit and purpose as equally important we enter an entirely new stage of corporate evolution.  Purpose is where self-interest and service meet.    Survival of the fittest, in the jungle, and profit maximization, in competitive markets, have in common what Chris Houston identifies as the fatal flaw of panarchy.   In his provocative book, For Goodness Sake (with Jordan Pinches), Houston extrapolates from systems analysis and ecology to set forth the panarchy principle: any system designed exclusively to optimize just one variable is self-limiting precisely because single variable optimization eventually destabilizes the system.

BCorps are among a few new forms of corporate structure designed to transform business from the inside, rather than through external regulation. These new corporate forms are early efforts to rewrite the rules and codify the opportunities and obligations for corporations to create value for everyone, beyond returns for shareholders. Tempering short-term profit maximizing behavior with the creation of long-term social value benefits may enable capitalism to avoid panarchy.

Such mission-drive corporations now operate in the US across virtually all sectors of the economy – from brownies to banking.  The Co-CEO of Beneficial State Bank, Kat Taylor captured the importance of this evolution in her remarks congratulating Greyston on its 35-year history as a purpose-driven commercial bakery: “I know there’s this popular notion that somehow the capital markets were put here by some cosmic force, and they’re perfect and universal and they always produce the right outcomes.  But they’re actually just a series of rules that we human beings wrote….”

While legal license to operate is still granted through government agencies (as it was in 1602), the more important and broader issue for companies today is around social license to operate.  When the purpose and behavior of a corporation is fundamentally extraction – mining the environment, harvesting time and talent from employees, maximizing profit over all else, squeezing suppliers and vendors – then it is not surprising that over time discontent bubbles forth.  When the richest 10% of the population own 88% of global assets (according to Credit Suisse), the system spawns the seeds of its own destruction.

Minimal licensing requirements, social and regulatory, will not going to forestall short-term profit taking or panarchy.  Licensing is, after all, the low bar of corporate behavior.  Rules requiring placards in elevators, anti-discrimination posters in break rooms, safety codes on wet floors are the absolute minimum.  “Do no harm” may be a useful guide for doctors, but does not take a business very far forward in pursuit of higher social purpose.

Beyond licensing and compliance, and recognizing that competition is fierce, how then are corporations finding competitive advantage in purpose – and simultaneously redefining what it means to be a business? Watch this space.

Trust and Risk: A Key Challenge for Today’s Leaders

Five years ago today, as the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown were still emerging, The New York Times published my letter observing that “trust comes not from repeated and paternalistic proclamations of success, but rather from the humble admission of mistakes followed by demonstrable changes in behavior and attitude.”

Trust remains at the core of business success. For leaders it is essential - but elusive. Frustratingly, it is often easier to see trust as it slips out under the closed doors of of the executive suite amidst a swirl of headlines about food safety, burst pipelines, boycotts, shareholder resolutions, or the defensive cover-up of what might have been a manageable error.

Trust is hard to measure; it doesn’t sit on anyone’s dashboard next to sales and safety data. Yet it is interwoven with brand value, organizational culture, recruitment and retention, license to operate, regulatory challenges, risk management, public affairs and so forth. Needed throughout an organization and across key relationships, it is rarely owned by a singular leader or department.

Part of the challenge of trust is that it cannot just be created and distributed at will. A “trust initiative” is a bit like the suggestion box that appears in the midst of controversy; too little, too late. I cannot create trust by myself. It is bestowed on me and my organization by others. Trust rests in the attitudes and actions of other people. I can build muscle mass by working out alone; to garner trust, on the other hand, I need other people working with me. The trust a business enjoys is essentially on-loan from vendors, colleagues, customers, investors and other stakeholders.

• Greyston Bakery, for example, has a huge cache of trust among critical stakeholders who believe in the mission of this pioneering benefit corporation that is the sole supplier of brownies to Ben & Jerry’s – and is widely recognized for its open-hiring program. Monetizing that trust is a welcome but tricky challenge for its top leaders.

• ExxonMobil, on the other hand, suffers from a huge deficit of trust and hauls that liability around as burden in every aspect of its business despite engineering prowess and cash-on-hand beyond compare. Long a target for members of its founder’s heirs, for its unwillingness to disclose information related to climate, the company now faces not only the Rockefellers as disgruntled investors but also a suit filed by Attorneys General from sixteen states.

How leaders and organizations behave clearly influences trust. Take food, beyond brownies, for example. No one would willingly eat food from a person or organization they did not trust. Chefs, thus, enjoy tremendous trust. Many have thus emerged as not just magnificently trained cooks, but as leaders in the efforts to improve the quality, access, and nutritional value of the food we eat – whether in restaurants, schools, corporate cafeterias, or airports. But as Chipotle has had to learn repeatedly, once trust is breached repair can be very costly.

When we trust fully, we put risk aside. But when we trust less than fully, risk re-enters our thinking and takes center-stage. Even if we don’t fully realize it, the questions we pose to ourselves in an instant are a form of risk assessment:

• Does that vendor seem reliable?

• How long has that food been sitting in the display?

• I am buying that line of argument; do I know enough?

In the developed world, we don’t want to think about eating as a risky activity – which it has been for most of the course of human civilization and still is for many with limited financial resources. When consumers call for “local” food, when shoppers search for food labelled “organic”, when survey respondents state a preference for “natural” products, and when millennials read labels to see if a product contains ingredients they cannot even pronounce; all of this is, at root, a search for trust.

If risk is the intersection of probability and consequence, then trust is a traffic circle that needs to be navigated with a clear realization that the views and actions of other players may be more important to our success than how we alone steer. To navigate this space, a few guidelines:

• Find the people who trust you least. Don’t try to change their views. Let them be scouts to help you identify vulnerabilities. Listen actively.

• Transparency is only half the story. Before looking for kudos, take responsibility and fix problems – and make sure the fixes are full rather than partial patches.

• If a problem is hard to fix or will take a long-time, be forthright and explain the situation.

• Be authentic when a partial fix is just that; don’t position a bandage as if its brain surgery.

• Manage trust like any other asset, but remember you don’t own it outright; it is a joint venture with stakeholders.

What Does Change Look Like?

Across the American presidential campaign landscape, change might look like a neo-fascist with a toupee, a scrappy septuagenarian democratic socialist, or the familiar face of a woman who might become our first female president.  Quite a spectacle we present to the world.

Off the campaign trail and within the US government, change is both afoot and being cemented as fast as possible. As the game-clock winds down, officials are working both to drive change quickly and to solidify progress already made. As discussed by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at a recent White House gathering, Tomorrow’s Table, revitalizing local and regional agricultural systems is not just about food and farming but about the American way of life: core values, tradition, and community.

Part of America’s greatness surely stems from what Alexis de Tocqueville described in 1840 as an American propensity to “seek each other out and unite together to … found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries … [and] establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method.” How we fund these quintessentially American activities, now understood as philanthropic endeavors designed to enhance the public interest, has changed dramatically. For example, Mark and Chan Zuckerberg recently announced that their charitable work would be funded and carried out through the “donation” of $45 billion to a limited liability corporation rather than a nonprofit.

As a trustee of the comparatively microscopic Marcus Foundation, I am very pleased that we will be joining forces with dynamic philanthropic leaders within the Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Funders group. While grants of necessity often go to discrete projects at specific organizations, foundations do have the leverage to advance collaboration around systemic problems and opportunities.

Whether in food or water or the search for climate stability, business too is adapting to and in some cases leading change. At the 2016 Investor Summit on Climate Risk, business leaders did not gather at the UN to hear Michael Bloomberg talk about philanthropy but rather about business opportunities in the transition to a low-carbon economy – which also explains why the event was sponsored by JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, KKR, and Deutsche Bank (among others).

Participating at the United Nations in the Investor Summit on Climate Risk
as Secretary General Ban Ki-moon addresses
the audience of business and public policy leaders.

We will continue that discussion next week at a meeting in Washington, DC, of corporate EHS and sustainability directors, exploring the extent to which the Paris climate agreement portends fundamental shifts not just in policy but also for business. A coalition of global business leaders led by CERES was key to the ambitious agenda that came out of the Paris talks.

If energy – whether measured as kilowatts or calories – has always been central to the human condition it may be premature to declare the end of the fossil fuel era; but clearly we are at the beginning of the end of that era. Fundamental chemical and geologic forces at work behind the climate instability we are now experiencing will continue to unravel life as we have come to know it in recent times.

If our canine friends can sense physical earthquakes before they happen and detect explosives in suitcases, surely we should be astute enough at the pinnacle of the food chain to detect the tectonic shifts taking place within the ecosystems on which all life depends. Colony Collapse Disorder has decimated honeybees, a critical natural pollinator of everything from cucumbers to watermelons. And while they have inhabited the earth for some 300 millions years, the decline in frog and other amphibians has accelerated at alarming rates, with more than 150 species extinguished in the last 20 years and declining populations among nearly 2,500 species of amphibians.

Reaching “across the aisle” in Washington to get things done has been a truism of American politics for many a generation. Today the aisle has become a chasm.

While American history may be rich with acts of independence, our future is more likely to be effectively secured through outrageous acts of interdependence – be they within bio-diverse regions where stakeholders compete and species are threatened, along global supply chains, in partnerships between incumbent actors and entrepreneurial start-ups in the food sector, or among philanthropists and investors.

A Tough Year Is Ahead For Chipotle

Jonathan J. Halperin quoted in Forbes  (January 6, 2016).

A Tough Year is Ahead For Chipotle

Full-text of the article appears below.

The fallout from Chipotle Mexican Grill’s food safety woes continues to grow. On Wednesday the company revealed in an SEC filing that it had been served with a subpoena by a federal grand jury looking into a norovirus outbreak at a restaurant in Simi Valley, Calif. The number of people infected at the location was discovered by county investigators to be larger than initially reported, as Food Safety News reported last month.

The news of the subpoena, which is in connection with an investigation being conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations, comes as Chipotle warned investors that it expects to report a same-store sales decline of 14.6% for the last quarter.

Chipotle shares plunged 5% on Wednesday to close at $426.67. While the consensus opinion on Wall Street is guarded – 18 analysts have a hold on the stock, according to Reuters — five still rate it a buy, including Credit Suisse’s Jason West.

Morningstar MORN +0.00%’s R.J. Hottovy believes the shares are undervalued, but warns, “I certainly would be cautious heading into 2016.”

Communication is one part of Chipotle’s current problem as executives have struggled to get their arms around this issue, working with the Centers for Disease Control and the Food & Drug Administration. According to a December 20 report by the CDC,  53 food poisoning cases in 9 states have been linked to 2 strains of the bacteria E. coli spread at Chipotle restaurants. Compounding the company’s woes were reports of illnesses in the California and Boston areas linked to norovirus (Forbes food safety contributor David Acheson deconstructed the issues back in December).  Management closed and sanitized restaurants in states affected after the outbreaks, followed by the company announcing it was implementing new food safety practices. Founder and co-CEO Steve Ellis apologized to consumers and proclaimed that Chipotle would be “the safest restaurant to eat at.”  The FDA or CDC has yet to pinpoint the source of the E.coli outbreaks.

In mid-December, though, customers still appeared to have faith:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 829 adults found that 62% would continue to eat at company restaurants, while 23% said they had visited the chain less often. Yet if more reports pop up, how long they will continue to choose Chipotle is questionable. But industry is turning out to be less forgiving: a recent cover story in Bloomberg News took a tone that typically hasn’t been used when covering the company many credit with creating the new restaurant model for sating the current (and next) generation’s cravings while disrupting the overall fast food landscape.

So what are the company’s best next steps? Says Morningstar’s Hottovy, “Certainly both CEOs could be doing more. The biggest issue they are facing is there still isn’t clarity on what is happening. … I think they could be doing things better, but at this point the options are limited.”

Going forward, Jonathan J. Halperin, President of Designing Sustainability notes that one step Chipotle can take to troubleshoot future problems involves aligning its core operational and safety practices with its current (and innovative) business model.

If you look at its 2014 annual report, the company acknowledges they are doing things differently by stating: ‘We may be at a higher risk for food-borne illness outbreaks than some competitors due to our use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation.’ If Chipotle is going to continue to provide an alternative model to processed, industrial food, it needs to also be at the forefront of creating systems to support that new approach, such as offering its employees paid sick days.”

He concludes: “Chipotle and its customers are now paying the price for leadership not having made that connection for 20-years before offering paid sick-leave in 2015.”

- Nancy Gagliardi

Where’s The Pork?

Chipotle lost about one-third of its pork supply early in 2015 and signs popped-up in roughly 500 restaurants announcing that “carnitas” was unavailable. From the corporate HQ, PR Director Chris Arnold positioned his company’s handling of this supply shortfall as evidence that it stands behind its brand that promises “food with integrity.” Indeed, Chipotle did the right thing by deciding to curtail purchases from a supplier that violated its animal welfare pledges and in refusing to substitute substandard product to make up for that shortfall. (See Jonathan J. Halperin's interview in Forbes, Chipotle's Pulled Pork and What It Means For The Company And The Industry, January 16, 2015.)

But, without questioning the sincerity of either Chris Arnold or CEO and founder Steve Ells, I think there is more to this story than they are sharing. The real risk for Chipotle here is not so much a short-term sales dip or supply-chain headache, but rather that it is drawing down its supply of customer good-will and brand integrity. And Chipotle deserves credit for changing (some might say, creating) the fast casual food sector by selling not only great taste but also an ethos of responsibility from farm to table.

In a wired world that accentuates the truism that information abhors a vacuum, the fact that Chipotle won’t really say what pledges were violated leads to speculation. Was it farrowing crates or slatted floors as some analysts have surmised? Something else entirely? Only Chipotle knows; and they are not telling.

Given its deserved reputation as an industry-leader, Chipotle likely won't take as much heat around this as it otherwise would, but for one-third of its pork supply to dry-up in an instant raises questions about the scale of the problem. If it is, in fact, traced back to hard infrastructure and facilities construction at a major supplier, rather than a temporary failure to abide some specific procedure, this raises further questions. Chipotle asserts that the problem was detected in a “routine audit.” How often are suppliers subject to audits? Who conducts them? One has to wonder why the problem was not identified before it put 30% of the supply at risk.

Chipotle’s rapid expansion and success hold important learnings for other companies. There is a huge amount of information fuzziness around the whole notion of standards: who sets them, what they require, and how much they matter. Customers are right to be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. Most well-defined are government statutory and regulatory requirements companies must comply with for their business operations. Less tightly defined are specific codes set by individual companies that their suppliers must abide.  Even less stringent are standards that companies require suppliers to meet; these are often more vague, especially as to how suppliers demonstrate compliance. More vague are aspirational, often undefined, principles such as Chipotle’s concept of “responsibly-raised” animals. At the lowest end of the spectrum are unsupported claims and pledges of evolutionary progress toward “better” or “equitable” or “humane” or “natural” treatment of animals.

When Chipotle itself is not fully forthcoming, there is a hollow ring to its request that we respect its choice not to “waste resources reporting, but rather spend them on doing the right thing.” This reluctance to share information has irritated institutional investors and a shareholder resolution was submitted last year calling on Chipotle to publish a sustainability report.  The resolution was supported by about 30% of its shareholders.

Sustainability reporting clearly has limits in terms of its usefulness to drive transparency and change behavior. But there is also a minimal threshold for reporting. For a company that has aggressively positioned itself as different and better, the refusal to share important information that is clearly material to its business operations tarnishes its reputation as a change-leader. There is a temptation to give Chipotle a pass in this situation and shift the focus to the laggards in the food sector (such as Koch Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride and Walmart). However, there is value for the food sector as a whole to focus on important issues when people are paying attention. It may not be fair, but people do pay attention when leaders stumble; it’s the price of leadership. Witness Brian Williams’ disastrous stumble.

Based on last year's shareholder resolution calling for greater transparency, it seems likely that this year even more than one-third of Chipotle’s shareholders will want to know what happened to one-third of its pork. While the supply problem will surely be managed, the disclosure issue may be more important.

Icons Die Hard

“Fresh as the month of May” is how Philip Morris introduced the iconic Marlboro Man in 1955, based on a photograph of a real cowboy from Life Magazine. The actor who originally portrayed the Marlboro Man died from emphysema in 1987. As the debate over the health impact of cigarettes began in earnest in the early 1990s, the intended association between smoking and healthy individuals living close to the land and enjoying glorious sunsets ran off the rails.

I thought of this while reading about the sharp 3rd quarter decline in earnings at both Coca Cola and McDonalds – two other global icons. According to the annual Interbrand survey, Coke’s scripted red lettering and McDonald’s golden arches rank as the 3rd and 7th most recognizable brands in the world.

As such, they are both just shy of the “Mom and apple pie” pantheon of sacrosanct American untouchables. Coca Cola spends almost $3billion annually to secure that place; McDonald’s spends about $1billion per year. (For context, $1billion is about $2.7million every day or $114,000/hour). Nonetheless, as AdWeek tells it, “…McDonald's reported a 3.3 percent quarterly profit decline, marking its worst performance in years, while Coke's profit dropped 14 percent with a continuing decline in North American sales during the same period.”

A McDonald’s “quarter pounder with cheese and bacon” contains the same amount of sugar (12g) as half of a Hershey’s chocolate bar (24g). A 12oz can of Coke serves up a whopping 39g of sugar. And consumption of added sugars, for which there is no Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), is increasingly clearly associated with rising rates of Type II Diabetes, Fatty Liver Disease and Metabolic Syndrome. It is also increasingly understood to be addictive and at the levels at which we are encouraged to consume it is potentially toxic as well.

Among the trip-wires that ultimately led to the downfall of the global tobacco giants (at least in the developed world) two stand out as ominous warnings for the beverage and sweetened foods sectors. First, it emerged that the companies had--but hid--the word’s best research on nicotine addiction and were ‘spiking’ their products to make them even more addictive. Second, it was not just that people were getting sick and dying from smoking cigarettes, but that they were using tobacco products in exactly the manner intended by manufacturers.

Soon there was no place for the executives to hide.

I don’t think Muhtar Kent, Coca Cola CEO, or Indra Nooyi, his counterpart at PepsiCo, are trying to kill people. I think they want to find a way out. I think they know they are in trouble. I think they want to preserve their branded icons. I don’t think they know how to satisfy the voracious appetite of mainstream investors for ever rising profits while also making substantial and healthy changes to their product mix. They need help to really innovate not just delay, deflect and distract. The innovation needs to be systemic to address the underlying problem; the business model that has returned enormous short-term profits to shareholders is over the long-term causing a public health disaster. Tweaking the amounts of sugar and tinkering with the product mix won’t cut it.

I thus had to shake my head in dismay when reading that in response to declining sales, still according to AdWeek, “[Coca Cola’s] recent acquisition of Monster Beverage Corp. underscores a strategy to diversify into the market of highly caffeinated drinks for youth.”

Refreshing as the month of May.

Are Borders History?

From earthquakes and mudslides in Chile, Japan and California; from droughts across America’s fruit and vegetable heartland; to flooding in Pakistan and creeping lava in Hawaii as well as a smoking volcano in Iceland; from killings in Ferguson, Missouri, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; from the collapse of the state in Libya and the rise of the Islamic State across the Middle East; from Gaza to the Golan Heights one could be forgiven for feeling that things are coming unstuck.

Borders certainly are not the sacrosanct demarcation lines they once were – whether in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East. The Ebola virus crisscrosses borders largely unchecked from Guinea to Sierra Leone, from Liberia to Senegal and Nigeria. The traditional models of ensuring border security, public health, economic stability, and food distribution are under immense stress.

While NATO leaders plan for deployment in the future of a rapid deployment force to protect Eastern Europe, Russian boots on the ground have made a mockery of the border with Ukraine. Claiming a common cultural and linguistic identify with the eastern region of Ukraine that trumps international borders, laws, and principles, Russian leaders have “torn up the international rulebook…” according to NATO Deputy Secretary General Ambassador Alexander Vershbow. And Russia, “one of the most powerful nuclear nations,” as its current autocrat has thought necessary to remind everyone, becomes ever more mired in its own special form of historical dementia. Ever afraid of being encircled by enemies and cut-off from the world, Russia again has used brute force to enlarge its borders, creating a buffer zone of discontent people – thus guaranteeing that its greatest fears will come to pass. Unable to manage itself in the present, Russia calls upon its history and thus condemns itself to a future of endless struggle and strife.

The old story, about Brezhnev’s recurring nightmares still resonates. As Russians would tell it, Brezhnev awakes with a start, sits upright in bed, sweating, as he looks into Red Square and imagines a Pole eating Matzo ball soup – with chopsticks. Putin, perhaps, dreams instead of “New Russia,” Novorossiya, but his thinking is as old as Mother Russia herself. His mental map is from the age of Kievan Rus’ and Prince Oleg in the 9th century.

In other ancient lands, the new “Islamic State” has emerged as if from the ashes of death and destruction in Syria and the fragmentation of Iraq. While its brutality is positively medieval, its grasp of social media is very 21st century. And like Russia’s Putin, the “Islamic State” seeks to legitimize brutality with the patina of history – in this case the 7th century origins of a caliph as “the commander of the believers.”

In Russia, history has always been malleable. I was in Moscow when high school history exams were cancelled. After a spasm of truth-telling during the brief period of openness known as “Glasnost” it was clear that the answers provided in the history books that were used all year in schools were wrong – and there was thus no way to grade the exams.

Yet this sweep of human history, over thousands of years from caliphs and princes to social media and satellites, is but the blink of an eye against the slow tectonic rumblings of earthquakes and volcanoes. Whether continents or borders, customer relationships or supply chains, little is as fixed as we might like to think. Things change, always. Good news for cartographers -- and people and businesses leaning into unknown futures, respecting, but not trapped by history.

2014 A Happy New Year

I am comforted by the awareness that changes we dismiss today as inconceivable are often viewed by historians as having been inevitable.

A Happy New Year might thus include news of the following momentous changes.

• Following in the reconciliation footsteps of Nelson Mandela, President Salva Kiir of South Sudan and his former Vice President Riek Machar reach an accord to prevent this newest of nations from sliding into tribal anarchy.

• Noting that even Al Queda can apologize and take responsibility for being in the wrong for allowing one of its own to attack a hospital in Sanna, Yemen, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney apologize to the American people, admitting that they were in fact grievously wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

• In a surprise announcement in Davos, CEOs Paul Pohlman (Unilever), Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), Larry Page (Google), Mark Parker (Nike), Sam Walsh (Rio Tinto) and Norbert Reithofer (BMW) confirm rumors that beginning in 2016 they will base executive pay, including their own, not only on financial performance but also on sustainability achievements.

• Following copy-cat revelations in China and Brazil from whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, the permanent members of the UN Security Council announce that they have begun implementation of a global intelligence gathering consortium to combat terrorism; and in a stunning move Republican leadership in the Senate vows to push for quick passage in the U.S.

• Finding common purpose in sustaining the long-term vibrancy of American democracy, Bill Koch, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Robert Reich (Board Chair of Common Cause) call for an end to all private funding for U.S. political campaigns.

• Recognizing the immensity of the self-inflicted economic damage that ripples through the economy from hunger and poverty, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi announce a determined bi-partisan effort to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour.

• In an equally unexpected outpouring of bipartisan concern for the future of the country, House and Senate leaders pass of a carefully constructed carbon tax that is progressive, avoids stranding assets, and creates a truly level playing field; the US Chamber of Commerce and ExxonMobil push for passage, arguing that a stable climate is essential for long-term business investment.

• In response to questions posed to President Putin at the Sochi Olympics, he admits knowing next to nothing about the other twenty thousand prisoners he released along with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the members of Pussy Riot.

• In a continued effort to introduce competition in the energy sector, House Energy Committee Chair Fred Upton (R-MI) and his fellow Michigan Representative, Democrat, John Dingell, propose legislation to repeal the Price-Anderson act, which indemnifies the nuclear power industry for any losses exceeding $12.6 billion.

• And in a stunning announcement cheered by consumers around the world Samsung, Apple, Google and Microsoft agreed to provide their unique mobile applications and services via a common platform and with fully compatible plugs, cords, and charging devices.

Hope springs eternal. Happy New Year!

Facts -- Not What They Used to Be

The story of hunger in America is quite instructive, and as the radical right plays financial chicken with the federal budget and the good faith and credit of the United States, 47,000,000 citizens wonder where they will find their next meal. In an America where compassion remains a core value, this is only possible because people have differing visions of reality.

For those in denial of the problem it is impossible to accept that Mitt Romney’s moochers and cheats deserve anything at all, much less a government hand-out. They are an undeserving and unmotivated underclass, so unworthy as to be dispensable. They are unseen and unwanted, a blemish on America the Beautiful. They are the proverbial “other,” perceived as so unlike “us” that they can be subjected to denigration, harassment, and denied basic human dignity and respect.

And facts, the stock and trade of those who would have us address this problem, rarely penetrate this emotional veil. The more facts disseminated the more the veil closes, the more overwhelmed people become, the more people close ranks and invest more deeply in self-reinforcing stereotypes about “us” and “them.”

Story-telling and personal inspiration, however, can pierce this veil of denial. And for that reason I continue to feel privileged to be involved with A Place at the Table, the film that puts a new face on hunger in America. The sheer emotional power of the film shatters the ‘us/them’ dichotomy and speaks to a more basic sense of human empathy. Whether leading a discussion around the film earlier this year in Denver (below) or showing a clip from it next week at the James Beard Foundation Conference in NYC, I believe in the power of story telling to drive transformational social change.

It is one thing to deny this or that fact in an ocean of information. But it is quite another to look someone in the eye who has been without adequate food for months or weeks and challenge their experience. The words and images of SNAPAlumni are poignant and inspirational, personal and evocative.

They demand that we act to strengthen our communities and our nation by bringing an end to hunger in America. Let us get on with it, now. Where is hunger in your world?

What Does 48 Million Hungry People Look Like?

48 million Americans struggle with hunger. 48 million names. 48 million stories. How have we let this happen? America's better than this.

“Pandora’s Promise” – Can it Be Kept?

Robert Stone has produced a provocative and important new documentary on nuclear power that was screened this week at the Sundance Film Festival. But as important as it is, Pandora’s Promise is a film that in its current configuration undermines itself.

Stone sets out to document how the dangers of our unstable climate have pushed him and a set of people featured in the film to revisit their long-held opposition to nuclear power and instead embrace fourth generation nuclear, or Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology. Fourth generation nuclear may indeed offer safety improvements over current operating nuclear reactors that are fundamental game changers. But the credibility of that notion is called into question by other aspects of this movie that is at once passionate and heartfelt and very unsatisfying.

The cast of characters chronicled throughout the movie are not only never identified in terms of who they are or what they do, but also engender little empathy or interest as they tell their stories. They are clearly sincere in their various professional assertions and descriptions but they lack depth. We learn almost nothing about them as people in the course of the movie; it is almost as if they are actors playing themselves rather than real people telling real stories.

And some of the assertions and scenes strain the limits of credulity. Michael Shellenberger, never identified beyond his description of himself as an environmental activist, voices what he claims is a common view -- that he was stunned to learn that background radiation exists naturally on earth and is not purely a human creation. Really? Perhaps he will say more about this during his scheduled appearance on The Colbert Report on Monday, January 28th.

And a few scenes also look like they might have been staged. Do scientists visiting the exclusion zone around Fukishima really collect radiation data wearing radiation suits with no head covering or breathing apparatus? Are they partially suited to make the point that suits aren’t really needed at all or conversely to show brave scientists doing what it takes to get important health data? Or is it just to add dramatic tension to the film?

But more important than these small items, the movie seems to cherry-pick and even distort data to about nuclear power, past and present, to make the case for its future. I posed a few questions about this. The movie claims, correctly, that Chernobyl claimed only 28 deaths due to Acute Radiation Syndrome and drums home the authenticity of this data point with a ponderous parade of acronyms over the highlighted line from the international report coordinated by WHO ("Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts"). But there is no mention made – other than to skewer Helen Caldicott – of equally well-documented facts such as the following from a WHO overview: Health Effects of The Chernobyl Accident.

• “A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident…. [And] 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children ….”

• “Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators.”

• “The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime.”

In the same way the film passes over these facts, it presents a compelling but fatuous claim that all the waste generated by all commercial nuclear reactors from 1958 to the present day could be stored on a single football field. I asked about this after the screening and the very vague and dodgy answer only confirmed my suspicion that this benign metaphor obfuscates more than it educates. To begin with, physical size is not the right way to measure nuclear radiation. It is like a doctor talking about big and small pills rather than doses and efficacy.

But so be it, if size is to be our unit of measure. There are 72,000 tons of commercial nuclear waste in the U.S. stored either as fuel rods immersed in water or in dry cask above-ground storage at some seventy-seven sites in thirty-five states. Leaving aside the considerable scientific debate about using short-term techniques for long-term storage, there is no way reactor waste stored in this manner can fit on a football field.

So a sleight of hand is needed to justify this claim. The calculation seems to be based on the quantity of isolated hot nuclear pellets in the abstract. In reality their intense radioactive power is only contained by surrounding them with zirconium shielding and immersing them in tanks with re-circulating water and additional chemical coolants. They exist only within this waste containment system. Thus, the actual combined footprint of the four spent fuel waste pools at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, for example, measured 48m x 31m. Waste from this one plant alone would thus stretch about two-thirds of the way across a football field and from one end- zone to midfield.

Joined on stage Thursday by two characters from the film – Gwyneth Cravens and Richard Rhodes -- Robert Stone seemed, to his credit, to be uncomfortable with they way both totally failed to answer my questions about thyroid cancer and the football metaphor. Gwyneth Cravens clearly did not want to answer the question of how the football calculations were arrived at and stumbled through a basic explanation of techniques for storing nuclear waste. And beyond waxing rhapsodic about the lofty intentions of the first prime minister of Belarus, Vyachaslaw Kyebich, Rhodes spoke not at all to the results of extensive international medical research on the health effects of Chernobyl – admittedly an area outside his considerable expertise on the history of nuclear weapons.

These serious flaws in Pandora’s Promise undercut its credibility. While it is true that fear of radiation and short-term cancer vastly exceeds documented deaths from commercial nuclear accidents, that fear has been fanned not just by environmentalists and the media – which the movie happily indicts – but by a culture of secrecy, dissembling and false assurances propagated for decades by the nuclear power industry.

We have been promised energy “too cheap too meter” since the dawn of the nuclear age. Perhaps fourth generation nuclear power is a key piece of the puzzle to ensuring climate stability for future generations. But before citizens or policymakers agree to let Pandora out, her promise is going to need to be documented with much greater credibility than is offered by the unidentified characters in this movie.