Worthy reads: Disaster and overlooked leaders, trustfunders in politics

Hither and yon, some articles worthy of your attention:

Manasclerk: For Alan: Sitting Here In Chocolate, Wasting Precious Time, Which I Have Too Much Of Anyway:

The news that I learned from the experts at the conference was dissettling, and perhaps it plays a part. I think it does, maybe, but I'm not sure. It turns out that if you are Modes 6-8 (forgetting Modes 9+ as being worthless to work), if you do not get "tapped" by upper management to join the executive suite to learn its ropes by the time you're 30 or so, you never will be. You have the capacity to do upper level work but you don't have the capability. What they recommended was to identify these high modes early and attach them to a mentor high up as "staff officers". The younger ones then get to see how to do the upper level work but aren't really doing it.

Of course, that just creates immoral or amoral leadership who has no idea how things get done or made. They have no moral compass.

And if you don't get tapped, you're absolutely, without a doubt, screwed. You are so, so very screwed. You're stuck doing work two levels beneath your capacity, moving from one lower level job to another, always succeeding in many ways at the same time that everyone sees you as a failure.

Unfortunately if I were going to create a Great Leader (not a refernce to Kim Il Sung) I would do the latter process rather than the former. It has to do with disasters and Sherman.

"Levels" and "Modes" refer to concepts in Requisite Organization management theory. Your level is your capacity to manage complex tasks and large organizations and make long-term decisions. Level 1 is getting and completing an assignment today. Level 9 is positioning a multi-national corporation for success over the next half-century. One's level grows over time, and your mode is the level at which your capacity plateaus; the higher the mode, the steeper the climb. In this article, Manasclerk cites Gen. William Sherman as a high-mode individual who wasn't "tapped" -- identified by the powers-that-be as a future leader worth cultivating. Gen. George McLellan was the golden boy, but Sherman and Grant succeeded where he failed:

How did [Sherman] do it? He did it because he'd been kicked in the teeth a good bit over his brief life (he was only 40 when war broke out). And because, in the disaster of the war, the powerful lost their power because they could not confront the brilliance of the Southern tactics.

The man who has it all, who is all success, is not the Great Men of the Civil War. It's Gen. George Brinton McClellan, the man who Pres. Lincoln fired for not being willing to fight the war. McClellan had the "tap" that escaped U.S. Grant and even moreso did not land on Sherman. McClellan had been chosen as the Next Great Man by the West Point chiefs and military leadership. He ascended and by the time of the war, he was the Next Great Thing. The Great White Hope. Take a look: he was John Kerry....

McClellan couldn't prosecute the war. It seems like he too much to lose if he lost. Too much prestige.

For Grant and Sherman, it was time to shine. They saw the disaster as not that complex, not a threat. It was an opportunity. These guys had absolutely nothing to lose. Sherman had been shunted off to Louisiana. I grew up there and J lives there: it's not the place you go to make a name for yourself unless you are a populist politician with a penchant for fraud. These guys were nothing, nothing to the powers that be at the time, at least. And they kicked ass. The South is always thought of as having the most brilliant generals. So why didn't they come out to fight Sherman on his march to the coast?

Manasclerk believes that it's the overlooked high-moder, the sort of person he describes elsewhere as a hidden high-potential, that will come to society's rescue in the wake of cataclysmic upheaval:

Were you to be "tapped", as the experts say is necessary for high moders to succeed, you would only serve the power structure. Because the tap did not fall on you, you have the ability to rise to the occasion of a disaster. You can join with the others to create a new world, to respond to evil or evil circumstances.

Michael Barone: The trustfunder left: Barone, author of The Almanac of American Politics, notes the rise of a new force in American politics, wealthy leftists who feel no particular allegiance to America:

Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.

These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism....

Where can you find trustfunders? Not scattered randomly around the country, but heavily concentrated in certain areas. Places with kicky restaurants, places tolerant of alternative lifestyles, places with lots of art galleries and organic food stores and Starbucks competitors. The heaviest concentration is in the San Francisco Bay area, which, Kotkin says, has the largest percentage of trustfunders of any major metro area in the country....

The political map shows the trustfunders' impact. So, I suspect, would an analysis of the sources of the vast amounts of money that flowed in through the Internet first to Howard Dean and then to John Kerry and to outfits like moveon.org.

The good news for Democrats is that they have found a new source of votes and money. The bad news is that an important part of their core constituency has the characteristic that the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ascribed to the press, "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."

Hat tip to RedState writer Adam C.

Chez Joel: Hello Sabbath: Joel Helbling notes that management gurus are beginning to stumble upon the Biblical insight that human beings need time of strict rest and disengagement from work in order to be fully engaged. He quotes physiologist Martin Moore-Ede, president of Circadian Technologies and author of The Twenty-Four-Hour Society:

At the heart of the problem is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our man-made civilization and the very design of the human brain and body...Our bodies were designed to hunt by day, sleep at night and never travel more than a few dozen miles from sunrise to sunset. Now we work and play at all hours, whisk off by jet to the far side of the globe, make life-or-death decisions or place orders on foreign stock exchanges in the wee hours of the morning. The pace of technological innovation is outstripping the ability of the human race to understand the consequences. We are machine-centered in our thinking--focused on the optimization of technology and equipment--rather than human-centered--focused on the optimization of human alertness and performance.

UPDATED 2020/01/02: I came back to fix dead links and decided to fill out and publish this hitherto unpublished entry, which was little more than links, with blockquotes and a bit of commentary. One of the links I found interesting back in August 2005 has been excluded from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at the author's behest, so I can't tell you more than I noted at the time: "Is it nobler to buy from the local mom-and-pop store than from Wal-Mart? Julie Neidlinger has some thoughts from the plains of North Dakota." There was also a never-consummated outbound trackback to huffingtonstoast.com, a hilarious spoof of HuffPo that, alas, has also been excluded from the Wayback Machine.