Blog

The Sunday New York Times business section recently (January 26, 2013) ran a piece by Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn entitled “Lincoln’s School of Management. “. Prof. Koehn has developed a teaching case on President Lincoln that she uses with mid-career students. In the Times article, in addition to her own discussion of Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, she reports on the response of her students to the Lincoln case.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks wrote to Prof. Koehn in an email that “Lincoln’s presidency is a big, well-lit classroom for business leaders seeking to build successful, enduring organizations … Listening, always being present, and authenticity are essential leadership qualities whether one is leading a country in wartime or a company during a period of transformation.”

Ari Bloom, “a strategic adviser to consumer-related companies and a former student of [Prof. Koehn] wrote to Prof. Koehn in an email that “Lincoln is striking because he did all this under extremely difficult circumstances … This is important in building a business because you have to listen to customers, employees, suppliers and investors, including those who are critical of what you are doing.”

And Kelly Close “founder and president of Close Concerns, a health care information firm” wrote to Prof. Koehn in an email that “being responsible for even a small company and all the people and issues involved in such management forces you to come to terms with yourself and whether you can rise to the challenge … [Lincoln] was able to do this in a way that amazes and inspires me.”

It appears that what Prof. Koehn does in her pedagogy is depict Lincoln’s leadership traits (“resilience, emotional intelligence”) and practices (“thoughtful listening and the consideration of all sides of an argument”) and draw specific leadership lessons from them. She then applies those lessons to her students’ context, for example “the ability to experience negative emotions without falling through the floorboards is vital to entrepreneurs and business leaders.” Finally, judging from the emails she quoted, she encourages her students to identify with Lincoln, thinking of their own challenges and struggles as comparable to his.

I think the identification of leadership traits and practices in an historical individual is an acceptable practice in management education. Drawing lessons from those traits and practices is also acceptable, with the caveat that traits and practices depend on context, so that traits and practices useful in one context might be problematic in another. What I find objectionable is the promotion of identification with Lincoln.

Lincoln was a political leader who faced an existential challenge to his nation. Even among political leaders, only a small proportion ever faced an existential challenge to their nation’s survival. The leap from government to business and from existential threats to business opportunities and problems is a metaphor too far. The emails Prof. Koehn quotes strike me as expressions of delusions of grandeur or managerial hubris, sanctioned by Prof. Koehn’s pedagogy. Business schools in general, and the Harvard Business School in particular, promote this sort of managerial grandiosity.

It seems to me that Harvard Business School’s emphasis on a reductionistic pragmatism, as taught by the case method, provides a particular ineffective template for public sector decision making. One need only think of George W. Bush’s failures as “decider” and Mitt Romney’s disastrous presidential campaign to recognize the shortcomings of that approach when applied to the public sector arena.

I would advise Prof. Koehn to continue studying Lincoln and mining his experience for valuable nuggets of advice for managers. But the strongest piece of advice I would give Prof. Koehn and her students is to respect both Lincoln’s genius and the uniqueness of his context and stop deluding themselves by over-reaching in their identification.

Structurally, Zero Dark Thirty rigorously follows the heroic fable pattern. It begins by replaying, over a dark screen, voices of people trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and it ends with a real-time reenactment of the moment of vengeance, the successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. But it takes a path that lacks the triumphalism of an equally recent movie about the CIA, Argo (2012), or a somewhat less recent movie, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007).

Zero Dark Thirty is ironic in the same way that “The Social Network” is ironic. The latter ends with the originator of Facebook alone, obsessing over the Facebook page of the woman who rejected him. Zero Dark Thirty departs from the archetypal heroic fable in several ways. It graphically presents the use of torture by the CIA and implies that torture contributed useful information, while also incorporating President Obama’s decision to order a cessation to torture. It is unsparing in its depiction of reversals along the way to victory, most notably a suicide bombing engineered by a false lead that wipes out a dozen key CIA agents in Pakistan. Finally, the key protagonist, a front line agent Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, shows, at best, relief at the outcome.

Zero Dark Thirty, in its desire to be topical, is based on what is necessarily incomplete information. It lacks historical perspective. Again, there is a contrast with both Argo (2012), which recreates the 1979-80 “Canadian Caper” and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), which, based on George Crile’s magisterial history, recreates the CIA’s initiative supporting the Mujahideen who drove the Soviets out of Aghanistan in the Eighties.

Zero Dark Thirty has been criticized by Senators Feinstein, Levin, and McCain as well as a faction with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for implying that torture was effective in ascertaining valuable intelligence. It has also been criticized by the CIA for exaggerating the importance of the front-line agent Maya and downplaying collaborative teamwork. These are claims that cannot be evaluated until more evidence emerges. The filmmakers, as is often the case, want to have it both ways: claiming the validity of their anonymous sources while also arguing that they have created a docu-drama, rather than a history, and so should not be judged on the basis of historical accuracy.

The aspect of the movie that fascinated me most was the bureaucratic work of following sources that ultimately led to military action. Ann Hornaday, in the Washington Post, wrote “In many ways [director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal are] paying tribute to the kind of career officials and government bureaucrats that are so often ridiculed and scorned outside Washington. Zero Dark Thirty celebrates process, professionalism, and continuity of government that transcends partisan bickering and policy changes.” That statement would certainly appeal to the Post’s particular readership, but begs the question of how accurate the movie is about what it celebrates.

In focusing on the agent Maya, Zero Dark Thirty has followed a particular trope, namely that of the dedicated front-line officer who strongly holds a theory and ultimately convinces her initially skeptical colleagues that the theory is correct (comparable to reporters Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men). The CIA’s tradition of giving front-line officers of the Clandestine Service wide latitude, reinforces the trope.

Having myself celebrated front-line innovators (in Innovating with Integrity: How Local Heroes are Transforming American Government), I am particularly partial to that trope, but as someone who respects accuracy, I am troubled to read reviews mentioning that Maya remains under cover and that “Maya” was actually a male or a composite or a number of people. Obviously the choice of trope and actress – the talented and attractive Jessica Chastain – heightens the appeal of the movie. When more well-researched accounts of the hunt for Bin Laden emerge, we will have a better sense of the movie’s historical accuracy. In the meantime, we can ponder the moral questions it raises about the use of torture and appreciate the narrative it constructs about the efforts of a smart, dedicated, and compelling local hero.

In his review of “Lincoln” last weekend, New York Times critic A.O. Scott began by noting the “paradox that American movies – a great democratic art form, if ever there was one – have not done a very good job of representing American democracy … The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption of the Republic in action have all too rarely made it onto the big screen.” Scott’s assessment is that Lincoln is an exception. (To avoid ambiguity, I will use Lincoln to refer to the movie rather than the man.)

I agree with Scott’s overall observation and his evaluation of Lincoln. I will consider, initially, the nature of Lincoln’s depiction of the political process, and, ultimately, the type of political fable it represents.

Lincoln is presented as being based in part on Doris Kearn’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Team of Rivals dwells on Abraham Lincoln’s political courage in choosing a cabinet consisting of his political rivals, and his managerial skill in inducing his cabinet to function as a team, rather than, to quote Yes Minister, as “a loose confederation of warring tribes.” But the movie Lincoln devotes much less attention to President Lincoln’s cabinet than to one critical roll-call vote in the House of Representatives.

The issue was ratification of the thirteenth amendment to the constitution, which would unambiguously abolish slavery. President Lincoln felt the amendment was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation might be interpreted as strictly a wartime measure. By January 1865, when the amendment was being considered, the Confederacy had sent a delegation to negotiate an end to the war. Recognizing that the delegation would attempt in the negotiations to preserve slavery and that support for abolition would wane after the war ended, President Lincoln chose to ignore the southern delegation and to prolong the war and its suffering to achieve the principle for which the war had been fought.

The movie focused on the tactics used by President Lincoln, his cabinet and advisers, and the abolitionist leaders in the House of Representatives to win the necessary supermajority of two-thirds of those voting.

Some votes were won by patronage, for example promises of government positions made by President Lincoln’s advisers to lame-duck representatives. But patronage would not win all the necessary votes, and the president had to approach some representatives to argue his case on its merits.

A roll-call vote demands legislative debate, and Lincoln depicts a great deal of it. The abolitionist leaders, to win the votes of some representatives who were concerned about how the ending of slavery would transform American society, had to greatly restrict their stated vision. Thus, Rep. Thaddeus Stevens deprived the supporters of slavery of verbal ammunition by affirming that the amendment established no more than equality before the law for blacks.

The roll-call vote shows many Congressmen who had made their decisions (or their deals) in advance and calmly announce their choices. A few others were wrestling with their consciences right up to the moment of voting, and cast their votes under great duress, and are seen by their colleagues as either heroes or traitors.

Ultimately the Amendment passed, but with a minimal margin of two votes more than the required supermajority.

I can think of only one other movie that makes a legislative vote the focus of dramatic attention, namely Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Allen Drury’s novel, Advise and Consent. The issue was a critical one for the audience of the day – the stance to maintain towards the Soviets in the cold war – and the outcome was suspenseful – a deadlocked Senate, with the deciding vote cast by the Vice-President. While the cold war has rapidly receded into history, the Civil War will remain central to the American experience.

Some reviewers have question why, if the movie that focuses on the ratification vote, Director Steven Spielberg began with a gory battlefield scene (reminiscent of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan) and ended with the pathos of Lincoln’s assassination and the rhetoric of his second inaugural address (reminiscent of the final scene of Schindler’s List).

Is this another example of what Spielberg’s critics consider to be his over-the-top emotionalism? Should he have dispensed with scenes that appear to have been intended primarily to open the tear-ducts?

I believe these scenes are integral to the movie’s character as political fable. In a sacrificial fable, the protagonist suffers in order that the political order be renewed. Evoking the suffering of fallen soldiers, as was done in several places in the movie, is appropriate. The burden of responsibility markedly aged Lincoln towards the end of the war. The passions aroused by the Confederacy’s virtually unconditional surrender should have been expected to inspire assassination attempts that, without anything approaching modern security, would succeed. Depicting President Lincoln’s personal sacrifice was thus entirely appropriate.

Finally, I thought that the lead actors – Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln), David Strathairn (Secretary of State Seward), and Tommy Lee Jones (abolitionist leader Thaddeus Stevens) – were all excellent, and provided entirely credible and sympathetic portraits of historical individuals acting in situations of deep intellectual challenge and emotional conflict. Playwright Tony Kushner’s screenplay was thought-provoking in its rhetoric, and perhaps too much to be comprehended in one viewing on the screen. I look forward to reading it in the future, with the same attention I would give to Shaw’s Saint Joan or Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. And I look forward to using Lincoln in my course to illustrate the mixture of ideals, ambitions, and pressures that motivate political decisions.

When my twelve year old son and I entered the theater for the matinee showing of Argo last Saturday, his immediate observation was that “everyone here is probably old enough to remember the hostage crisis.” Despite his ageist attitude, he enjoyed Argo tremendously. So did I.

In its essence, Argo is a story of heroic public servants. The protagonist, CIA “exfiltration expert” Tony Mendez has the unenviable assignment of smuggling six American diplomats who are talking shelter in the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor’s residence out of Teheran while 52 of their compatriots are being held hostage in the American embassy.

Mendez approached his assignment with creativity: coming up with the idea that the six diplomats would assume identities of the Canadian crew of a Hollywood sci-fi movie intended to be filmed in Iran. Mendez and his CIA colleagues showed their expertise in making sure every detail was covered the story they spun and identities they created. Mendez was bold, in that, when his superiors decided to scrub the mission while he was on the scene in Teheran, he took the initiative and went ahead with it anyway. (This last aspect somewhat strains credulity, but even if exaggerated, it detracts little from Mendez’s overall heroism.)

The six diplomats were also heroic in that, despite doubts about the plan that they heatedly expressed, they flawlessly assumed their parts as Canadian film crew (Mike McEwen from Trawna, eh) and gave the correct answers –at gunpoint – to the Revolutionary Guards at Mehrabad Airport.

The plot moves along quickly, with just the right mix of humor about the fictitious sci-fi movie and tension about whether Mendez and the six diplomats can implement a bold plan in which failure would mean certain imprisonment and possible execution.

This is very much an instance of the heroic organizational fable. Mendez succeeds, and is recognized the Clandestine Service’s highest honor, given in a secret ceremony, of course. The organizational consequences are all redemptive. The six diplomats regain their freedom. Their escape was presented by President Carter as one of the rare bright moments in the Iranian hostage story. “The Canadian caper,” as it was called here, was certainly a feel-good story, but it didn’t give then Prime Minister Joe Clark enough bounce to win the 1980 election campaign.

In a classic example of “where you stand depends on where you sit” journalism, Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian broadcaster-writer of Iranian descent, criticized Argo in the Globe and Mail last Saturday for what he called “an unbalanced depiction of an entire national group” with “hordes of hysterical, screaming, untrustworthy, irrational, bearded and lethal antagonists” with “not one positive Iranian subject in the entire story.”

As has been pointed out by several who commented on his column, Gomeshi has the facts wrong. For instance, the Iranian housekeeper at the Canadian ambassador’s residence had figured out who the ambassador’s mysterious guests are, but when approached for questioning by the Revolutionary Guard, she refused to blow their cover. As a consequence, as soon as Ambassador Taylor returned to accolades in Canada, she left for Iraq as a refugee.

Ghomeshi also misses the point that the movie was portraying the Iranians as they were perceived by the CIA agent and American hostages, and they can be forgiven for seeing little nuance or ambiguity.

Comparisons with two other films come to mind. Charlie Wilson’s War also told the story of a heroic CIA agent, Gust Avrakotos, who worked with Congressman Charlie Wilson to arm the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russian invasion. This story, however, ends with an ironic twist, in that the mujahideen eventually morphed in the Taliban.

The King’s Speech was another heroic tale of national revival, in which, with the assistance of his speech coach Lionel Logue, King George VI overcomes his stutter and becomes an effective spokesman for the nation during World War II. The King’s Speech was the big winner in the 2010 Academy Awards. IMDB showed that the King’s Speech received 231,000 votes, averaging 8.2 out of 10. So far, Argo has received 19,000 votes, averaging 8.4. So opinion of the film-watching public suggests that it stands a good chance of winning the award for best picture.

That, of course, depends on the competition, and it appears that a very strong competitor will be Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, to be released later this week. As an adaptation of Doris Kearn’s book Team of Rivals, I’m looking forward to a movie that portrays cabinet meetings. Shades of Yes Prime Minister? That will be the topic of my next blog post.

I continue scanning the cinema for new films about private sector managers, to be analyzed in the book I’m writing or discussed in my course on narratives. There have been more than a few inspired by the economic crisis, the most compelling of which is Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary Inside Job. The latest to hit the screens is the drama Arbitrage, the screenplay and directorial debut of Nicholas Jarecki.

The title Arbitrage is misleading. Arbitrage involves taking advantage of price differences that exist in two or more markets to strike profitable deals. Economists generally approve of arbitrage, because arbitrageurs’ trades will eliminate those inefficient price differentials. The key character in Jarecki’s Arbitrage, hedge fund manager Robert Miller (played by Richard Gere) is however a fraudster, pure and simple. He has secretly invested $400 million of his firm’s assets in a Russian copper mining venture that he says is immensely profitable, but he cannot get any of his money out. Attempting to sell his firm, he borrows $400 million from a fellow hedgie to temporarily plug this hole in his balance sheet. He has a potential buyer, but to consummate the deal he must mislead both the buyer and the regulators. On the personal level, behind the façade of a happy marriage – his wife Ellen, is played by Susan Sarandon – he has a mistress, a young French art dealer for whom he provides an tony apartment.

The precipitating event: Miller escapes his sixtieth birthday party at home to visit his mistress and then takes her on a late-night drive. Tired from his hot sexual encounter, he rolls his Mercedes, killing her and injuring himself, visibly but not seriously. Miller embarks on an instant cover-up, calling in a favor to help him escape the accident scene and, when an NYPD detective begins an investigation, Miller denies any involvement in the accident. So Miller’s criminal fraud accompanies his commercial fraud.

Miller is yet another exemplar of the corrupt financier, a well-known character in financial fables. As played by Gere, he is handsome, charming, smooth, and determined. But he lacks the near-frenetic energy, ambition, and bombast of Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, still the paradigm of this character. Miller is attempting to liquidate his firm for a mere half-billion to have a more quiet life – a lack of ambition that pales in comparison to the grandiosity of Gekko’s greed. We can’t imagine Miller giving a “greed is good” speech, because he is a much more shadowy and private character. I don’t think Miller will resonate with audiences the way Gekko did, and the movie stands or falls on how Miller is regarded.

Miller ultimately succeeds in selling his firm to another hedgie, played by the assuredly uncharismatic if not downright unattractive Graydon Carter, definitely a face made for radio. Miller’s criminal fraud is another matter. Much of the movie deals with the investigation of the accident. Miller beats the first rap, as his clever legal counsel has the charges against the accomplice who spirited him away from the scene of the accident withdrawn. Miller faces a more serious challenge in that his wife, who is well aware of Miller’s philandering, especially on the evening in question, presents him with a one-sided separation agreement, and threatens that if he will not sign, she will go to the police to destroy his alibi.

The movie ends without showing how Miller will respond to this dilemma. In terms of the four organizational fables I often discuss in this blog, Arbitrage presents itself as an example of the ironic fable, in which the protagonist Miller enriches himself at the expense of the purchaser of his firm and indulges himself to the disgrace of his family. The movie’s ending raises the possibility of it being an instance of the retributive fable in that, if Ellen Miller stays firm in her resolve, Robert Miller will end up either in jail, or a free man, but without his millions. Either way, he will be brought to justice and the moral order restored.

My initial judgment, on first viewing Arbitrage is that I will mention it in Enterprising Fables, the book on private sector narratives, as one narrative instantiating the rogue financier genre. But it is unlikely that I would use it in class. The financial chicanery is not particularly complex or enlightening, so students learn little about the financial sector. Miller is far from the most compelling of the rogues. And too much of the story revolves around his attempt to conceal the tragic consequences of his marital infidelity.