It seems an author, James Frey, made up an "autobiography" and people believed it was his true-to-life personal story, or so my sources say who are following this story closer than I. Oprah then endorsed the book for her Book Club, only to find out later that it was a "manufactured" biography. At first I believed this furor to be a bit pedestrian; that is, until I read some of the pithy insights that raised a mirror to middle America. Why this scandal? Why the outrage? What exactly happened? Well ...
... there is something that sets Frey apart. That made it bad: He lied to Oprah. You lie to Oprah, you lie to America. Dig?
The Oprah empire taps into a distinctly white, bourgeois, female demographic. This is a demographic you've got to be careful with. Nothing too risque, political/satirical or intellectual really flies. It's got to be mainstream. Things can be sexual, violent or difficult as long as it's not political, intellectual or radical ...
I may not have read Frey (although I'm now curious) but I do know something about Oprah's demographic and how they think. I've had friendships with them, taken courses with them in university, worked with them and have family members in this demographic. They all enjoy the same thrills, especially the glossy pornography of confession in the commercially imagined "women's" culture ...
What Frey offended was not their sense of ethics, but their bourgeois relationship with human suffering and confession. For this audience, reading of the tragedy of Frey's (or anyone else's) life experience is a means to survey and "learn about" another human's darker moments from the safety of a Starbucks ...
- emphasis mine
An editor friend of mine observed that all Oprah has to do is endorse a book and she delivers an audience that makes almost any book a commercial success. What power! Personally, I can't think of anyone who else who can do that.
Oprah's credibility is what is at stake. At one time Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, and now that mantle has passed to a woman. Both she and Cronkite have been windows on the world, and part of the power of any source is that the news/report has been vetted - and in this case something slipped through.
However, there is more to it than that. Mel, the blog-post author, goes on to make two points,
Truth isn't always stranger than fiction. The "truth" of the human condition is old news. We know what we're capable of - it's there on the news every hour. So why are we such "confession" junkies?
putting this in perspective with an observation,
they are connoisseurs of confession. They indulge it high and low. From the chair-tossing excess of Jerry Springer to the tearful Princess Diana admitting to an eating disorder, it's all POP ( Pain on Parade ). I suspect that Frey, knowing what he knows about the market, catered a little to well to this audience - knowing full well that they would not accept a truthful account of his addiction because it would be too boring.
And it is interesting to me that Mel begins the blog by citing Gore Vidal. Some years back I recall Vidal gave one of his annual interviews with Dick Cavett, and Vidal said something like:
The title "guest" on television talk shows is a misnomer. The so-called guest is not really the guest at all. He's merely the stooge. The actual guest is the audience and it is they who are interviewed and their opinions are solicited on the topic.
And I suppose, if I think about Phil Donahue, I see that dynamic more clearly. Oprah is more subtle in how she does it - more classy (no offense to Donahue intended), but basically she is the interlocutor for a distinctly white, bourgeois, female demographic.
Alas, in this case, she ended up looking like she could be hoodwinked ... middle America won't stand for it. They may put up with the lies from crooked politicians ... they have come to expect it, and even have some sort accommodation with political lies ... but do not believe Oprah would ever lie - not to them.
There are limits and there is a point where a line is drawn.
Oprah happens to be middle America's litmus test for that.
And Oprah-gate spins on.
]]>Cities are unique. Many have a distinct character all their own - even small towns. To illustrate, a few from among the famous American ones: New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and a list of many more well known cities and lesser known ones. The list is legion.
Three college towns come to mind - Boston, Massachusetts; Saratoga Springs, New York; and Shepherdstown, West Virginia. At one time or another, I lived and worked in each.
Certainly other things were going on in a place that is town-and-gown, but a significant student population creates a unique business infrastructure.
Boston is the most famous of the three towns I mentioned and I will focus on it.
Rhetorical question: what if Boston's college population could not come back next term because all the universities and student housing was knocked out; we lose Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Northeastern, BU, BC, and a host of others. No students and no faculty.
A famous business executive once observed, "I'll make a deal with you. I'll give you the plants and equipment, production lines and inventory, and the blueprints - and I'll take the people - and in six months I'll put you out of business." Hyperbole, perhaps, but I got the point. People are not interchangeable commodities.
Town-and-gown. Take all the professors and students from Boston's institutions of higher learning and replace them with different people. Would those be the same cities?
During the Professional Football League (NFL) players strike some years back, the Owners tried to replace the players with "scabs" and play the games. Was it the NFL? Few fans thought so.
People say New Orleans will be rebuilt. Perhaps the geographic location might and the city might be called New Orleans, but it will not be the same place.
A city's population is an organic part of the city. Fearing that I sound like Chance Gardner, I will say: a city's buildings and physical aspects are merely a trellis. The people are its blossoms and the living structure.
I did not do much playing when I traveled to New Orleans. It was usually on business related to health care. I had friends in whose real life homes I stayed - not just the glamor of Bourbon and Royal Streets or tours through the Garden District.
The sense I got was I was in an ethnic city - predominantly black - but as Joe Cahn says of New Orleans, "we're only geographically south. We don't speak 'Southern.' Most of us sound like we're from Chicago." Not entirely true, but Joe was making a point. The city is unique.
America has lost something and we don't even know it. We talk about $200 Billion as if money could solve it.
Money alone will never buy back what once was and if the continuing Disneyfication projects and talk of trailer towns for the disenfranchised turns into reality, New Orleans will cease to exist, except as a shadow if itself and our nation will be the poorer for it.
]]>The cost to rebuild the city is estimated at $200 billion. My own estimate the actual cost will be several times greater. Why? Because the $200 billion will only return the city to a shadow of what it was.
New Orleans was one of America's most unique places, and it is that very uniqueness that is now under threat - but I will blog about that a bit later.
One of the first questions a business person asks is about profit. If your business is not making money, the IRS will call it a hobby - not-for-profit organizations not withstanding.
The interest rate is complex, but the rate is tied to profit.
There is a term, return on investment, which many of us have heard and which can be done on a massive scale - including for cities such as New Orleans - but they can also be done on the city and dwelling you live in. For example, there is some likelihood our home could be hit by a fire, or flood, or be burgled - so many of us take out homeowners or renters insurance. We might get money, but if some precious heirloom is lost, the "replacement," or the impossibility of it, goes beyond money. But we all know this and I make the point only to suggest that this kind of thinking is not alien to most people.
If a city such as New Orleans will be hit every hundred years by a hurricane carrying at least the power of Katrina, we know that every hundred years, or so, Americans will be revisiting the problem, and if not New Orleans, then in some other town or city. I was truly moved when I viewed Fatal Flood shown on "American Experience" series. The copyright says 2001, but it is a chilling parallel to what happens in the Delta. This was 1927 and led to a mass exodus of people, many of them black, to Chicago and elsewhere.
Destroy a city or region with flood waters and the displaced people move and send a ripple through the nation. Having a dust bowl that destroys once-fertile lands, and another migration begins.
I am amazed to hear there are voices that say let New Orleans die. Others predict a new New Orleans, New Orleans 2.0, I guess. Their vision is a shadow of the old one - part of the Disneyfication of America. I devote another blog to this, but the character of the city was due in large part to its ethnic composition and to shift that balance will mean the end of New Orleans, even if its successor is built on the same spot and bears the same name.
The fact remains that when a massive of people are displaced, they will seek shelter, jobs, and lives somewhere and all of American society will be affected.
I would say more, but will close on the example of the city of St. Louis. The Army Corp of Engineers predicted a hundred year flood of the Mississippi River that would effect St. Louis and they build a levy to withstand it. In recent years that levy was put to the test and had the river risen just one more foot, St. Louis would have been hit. Some called the original project a wasteful boondoggle, but when waters came to within a foot of the levy top, people wondered if it had been built high enough. St. Louis survives.
We can't protect all places against all things, but at the same time playing Russian roulette with cities and a shell game of shifting populations is not the only alternative.
Now is the time to invest in our cities and ourselves and though the people may seem far away, in our nation every more interconnected through the internet and other modern means, we come to know - they're just our neighbors and what happens to them happens to all of us.
We saw the banner after 9/11 "We're all New Yorkers, now." We need another banner and it should read, "We're all New Orleanians, now."
]]>There will be an endless number of post-mortems concerning the tragedies that befell the residents of New Orleans last week. More important are the actions, if any, which may result from them. In this regard, can lessons learned in the private sector be brought to bear in minimizing the suffering and damage from inevitable future calamities?
Professor Heskett invited responses and I answered, in part:
...there is a deeper lesson and that is one of investment to prevent disasters in the first place. A large firm is well aware of the human capital and material assets within the perimeters of its fences. It does not take long for the finance committee to run a return-on-investment analysis of operating safely or know that safeguards are part of the cost of doing business, and that industry has a moral responsibility to those who work on-site. There was a saying at [DuPont]: "You are safer inside the plant gates than outside."
Someone forgot to do the return-on-investment, and we as a nation will now pay a pretty price, not only monetarily but also emotionally. This has driven home an important lesson that as a people I pray we don't soon forget.
Thus the basic question: given the likelihood, have we truly weighed the cost of being ill-prepared?
Slightly edited by the publisher, my reply was ePrinted in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge. I highly recommend "Working Knowledge" as an excellent source of views by business people reflecting many diverse opinions.
I attach the full version of my reply below.
Business tends to maximize its available resources on a minimum set of objects. Government distributes its limited resources over a broad range of objectives.
Prior to HBS, I spent several years in manufacturing at one of the world's largest chemical firms*, and disaster drills and disaster preparedness was part of our responsibility. I chaired the site's Disaster Control Committee, so I empathize with how industry can take a proactive stand. As on-site managers, our main concern was to contain a disaster and prevent the loss of life. This meant localizing damage: shutting down processes, securing tanks that might rupture, moving people to safety if there was a threat of toxic release or accidental detonation, and sending crews in to neutralize potential hazards.
In case of disaster, as Area First Aid Warden, my immediate responsibility was to get a head count and render what aid I could until help arrived. Always, help was on the way. Every equation had that in it. Yet, I still get a queasy feeling, remembering in memory the great steam whistle's mournful dirge tolling out the disaster call.
These drills were on a plant of 500 workers who could call in assistance from the local community. What if it is 500,000 people and is just one city in a large region that is also hit? What happens when the call for help goes unanswered? What if no one comes to do a head count, and there is no Area First Aid Warden to find out if you are alive or dead or MIA?
The tragedy of New Orleans is that no one came. Industry protects its assets and knows where its people are: That's part of staff management, disaster or not. But if someone is unemployed, old, sick, or otherwise disenfranchised, who comes to get them? Do they have visibility? Who has written the evacuation plan to help those most in need? Who can enforce it? Who will enforce a city-wide disaster drill every six months? On site we marched the workers out the front gate, hopefully to safety. How can a city of a half million free citizens be made to do that? And are the city limits the realistic perimeter?
But there is a deeper lesson and that is one of investment to prevent disasters in the first place. A large firm is well aware of the human capital and material assets within the perimeters of its fences. It does not take long for the finance committee to run a return-on-investment analysis of operating safely or know that safeguards are part of the cost of doing business, and that industry has a moral responsibility to those who work on-site. There was a saying at the chemical firm: "You are safer inside the plant gates than outside."
The lesson of the New Orleans disaster is that some people fell off the radar because they weren't part of "the plan."
Someone forgot to do the return-on-investment, and we as a nation will now pay a pretty price, not only monetarily but also emotionally. This has driven home an important lesson that as a people I pray we don't soon forget.
Katherine Lawrence (HBS MBA '76)
COO
Ping Vision
I wrote thus on September 7, 2005. What I did not wish to say so early and while the responders were still the throes of events, is that something truly becomes a "disaster" when people are unable to deal with events.
Surely man is puny in the face of a category four hurricane, but a line is crossed when a system breaks down.
A minimalist strategy, by definition, spends the minimum amount. Surely we cannot defend completely against absolutely anything, anywhere. On the other hand, a disaster of large proportion hits an entire nation, not just a region and as a nation what we might wish to do is to look closer at how many we could have saved and what the cost would have been?
We are paying the price now, even if New Orleans is never rebuilt. The question I feel freer to ask now - was the savings in not being prepared worth it?
I doubt it.
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* I did not mention DuPont by name in the "Working Knowledge" article, but DuPont is probably the safest industrial place to work in the world. I plan a future blog on this topic.
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