The Obama campaign ad is a one-minute distillation of the Obama campaign’s seventeen minute core video “The Road We’ve Travelled.” The ad starts with the calamitous economic situation before Obama took office – timing that was made very clear, and added that “some said our greatest days were behind us.” Since Obama took office, the ad tells us that “the auto industry is coming back, firing on all cylinders,” “America’s greatest enemy was brought to justice by her greatest heroes,” and 4.2 million jobs have been created. America is coming back. The ad concludes affirming that “you don’t quit and neither does he.”

There is an essential difference between this ad and “The Road We’ve Travelled.” The latter emphasizes the decisions Obama made such as bailing out the auto industry and authorizing the attack on bin Laden. This ad eschews presidential agency entirely, illustrated most clearly when it focuses on the Navy Seals who carried out the operation against bin Laden rather than the president who ordered it. Can we ascribe this narrative choice simply to avoidance of a complex message? Or do the ad’s creators assume that the audience need not be reminded of presidential decisions? I think there is another explanation: the ad’s creators chose to base their narrative on the mechanism of identification. The ad sets up a parallel between the struggling American middle class and the president who, with persistence and determination, is fighting on their behalf.

The “I’m fighting on your behalf” message failed miserably when adopted by Al Gore, but he was campaigning in what was perceived to be a prosperous time and could never make clear whom he was fighting against and why. But these are very different times and the nature of the struggle is much clearer. The ad thus represents the heroic public sector fable, juxtaposing national economic renewal with political renewal for a deserving president.

The Republican ad starts with the look and feel of an Obama campaign ad, so much so that it begins flashing a disclaimer that it was paid for by the Republican senatorial committee and was not authorized by President Obama. It starts by celebrating a president who brought us together, and then shows clips of Tea Party rallies. It then celebrates the end of dependence on American energy, and then shows a clip of Obama, together with former Brazilian President Lula Da Silva and current Brazilian President Dilma Roussef, expressing America’s desire to be involved in the development of Brazil’s offshore oil reserves. It juxtaposes the words “a president who will not rest” with photos of Obama golfing and fishing. And it proclaims “a president who consults with key decision makers,” and shows Obama together with Paul McCartney and his current sidemen but shows Obama saying he hasn’t had time to meet with the President of BP about the gulf oil spill. The ad then refers to the great challenges of a generation and shows Obama revealing which team he will support in the NCAA basketball finals. It concludes by contrasting Obama’s commitment to cut the deficit in half with Joe Biden stating that the government must spend more.

The ad comes across as satirical, but it introduces the themes that will be used in the more vitriolic attack ads that are sure to come. The first is hypocrisy, in that Obama promises one thing but ultimately does the opposite. The second is the corruption of celebrity, as Obama is seen enjoying golf, fishing, and basketball and schmoozing with entertainers.

Like the Democrat’s ad that elides the president as decision-maker, the Republican ad attacks Obama’s policies only tangentially, focusing its criticism on his personality. The implicit narrative is that of the lower left cell in the four quadrant narrative matrix. The country is suffering but Barack Obama is having a grand time enjoying the perks of being president.

Will this line of attack work? There are a variety of responses to the accusation of hypocrisy: it wasn’t Obama who chose disunity, but rather the Tea Party that chose discord; while energy self-sufficiency is a desirable goal, imports from friendly neighbours like Brazil (or Canada, for that matter) always help; and a temporary rise in the deficit is the consequence turning around the American economy.

I think there is widespread recognition, particularly in a republic that vests the offices of head of state and head of government in one person, that the president is a celebrity, and, to use Bill Clinton’s idiom of choice, necessarily “lives large.” Living large, however, does not necessarily mean living corruptly. Nor does it make it impossible for voters to identify with the president. I am, therefore, not convinced that Obama’s “living large,” at least as portrayed by the Republican Senatorial committee, will negate the feeling among voters that he understands, in a deep and emotional sense, their struggles. Furthermore, Obama has the advantage that Mitt Romney’s “Richie Rich” background and demeanour will lead many voters to conclude that he does not, even superficially, understand their struggles.

At this point in the campaign we are beginning to see how each side searches for the high ground and tries to push the other onto the low ground. Between now and November there will be a variety of events, in particular further indications of the performance of the American economy as well as the potential for an escalating economic crisis spreading from Europe, that will have great impact on the outcome. The challenge for each side will be how to integrate both pleasant and unpleasant surprises into its basic narrative.

The first question dealt specifically with a township in Ontario cottage country. The township was funding a public access computer room in the local library with a $60,000 grant from CAP and $20,000 in user fees, assessed at $ 1 per hour. The township’s year-round residents have income and education levels below the Ontario average, while its cottagers are much wealthier and more highly educated. The $60,000 grant represented less than 1 percent of the township’s budget. The alternative to library-based Internet is relatively expense satellite-based service, provided by either Rogers or Bell. The student is to imagine him/herself as a recent MPA graduate who works as township manager, and is asked to do a policy analysis for township council as well as design a public consultation process.

My first question of the students was what the objective of the program should be. A limited objective – essentially that of the CAP program – would be to provide Internet service for rural residents who have no other broadband access. The existence of satellite service would justify the township confirming Industry Canada’s decision by not replacing CAP with its own resources. A more ambitious objective would be to contribute to the quality of life in the township by ensuring that it maintained broadband Internet access. The latter objective is comparable to the justification some larger cities have given for putting in place infrastructure making the entire city a wi-fi zone. The essential point is that how you envisage the goals of public policy will influence your solution.

While some students were explicit in setting out the more ambitious objective, almost all the students chose to try to keep the computer room open with municipal resources. The facts of the case made that relatively easy. One alternative would be to pay for it with a small increase in property taxes. Because cottage properties are major contributors to the tax base, cottagers as well as locals would be paying for the computer room. A second alternative would be by increasing user fees. That could be done through a form of price discrimination, for instance selling low-price annual or seasonal passes (say $ 50 for the year) and increasing the single visit fee from $1 per hour. A third approach would be to look for a private sector partner who might be willing to pay some of the cost in return for the marketing opportunity.

The consultation question mentioned that the township manager’s report would be discussed and recommendation voted on at the township council meeting, but left open other forms of consultation, making clear that cottagers, as property owners, had the right to vote in municipal elections. I was disappointed that most of my social media-savvy students didn’t suggest posting the report on the township website well in advance of the meeting, encouraging online discussion, or facilitating an online town hall meeting.

The financial crisis question assumed that the Spanish government made a dramatic announcement of the currency conversion on New Year’s Eve, which happened to fall on a Friday. It froze all Euro deposits in Spanish banks and would convert them to pesetas when business reopened the following Tuesday. It also suspended payment of interest on Euro-denominated Spanish bonds and intended that, when the bonds were converted to pesetas and payment resumed, bondholders would take a 75 per cent haircut. The one Canadian chartered bank that had invested so heavily in Spanish bonds was National Bank, which has traditionally had a stronger regional Quebec focus than the others. The facts of the case were presented in a New Year’s Eve phone call from Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney to Prime Minister Harper. The student, cast as an adviser to the Prime Minister, was asked whom the Prime Minister should consult in formulating a response and posed three options: extending massive loans to keep National Bank afloat, temporarily nationalizing it, or trying to find another chartered bank to take it over. Finally, the student adviser was asked to outline how a decision would be announced and write the first paragraph of the speech or media release.

I expected that the Prime Minister would initiate secret but widespread consultation with the Government’s economic advisers (Bank of Canada, Department of Finance, Superintendant of Financial Institutions); with the banking industry and with National Bank itself; with knowledgeable sources on the ground in Spain, say the Canadian ambassador; and, given National Bank’s profile in Quebec, with the premier or Finance Minister of Quebec.

All the options are unpleasant. Bailing out the bank will be very expensive, even if the Bank of Canada monetizes the debt. Clearly, the management of this bank has made some major mistakes and deserves to be replaced or closely watched. Micro-management of business is not something that would appeal to the Harper Government, whether exercised as part of a temporary nationalization effected through purchase of equity or as conditions for a loan. A merger raises the question of which other bank would want to merge with the now-crippled National Bank. It might well be that the only way a merger could be achieved is if the federal government assumed the toxic assets. A merger also poses the problem of reducing competition as well as eliminating a Quebec-based financial institution, which the Government of Quebec would oppose. In effect, National Bank’s bet on Spanish bonds has given the Canadian financial system a gift of a huge lump of burning coal that, one way or another, will come to rest in the federal government’s lap. From the Harper Government’s viewpoint, a loan with numerous conditions attached is probably the least bad alternative.

Given the consequences major investments by Canadian banks in toxic overseas assets would have for the Canadian financial system and indeed Canadian society, one wonders about the Bank of Canada’s ongoing closed-door consultations with, and moral suasion upon, the banking system.

Because the matter is not yet a national crisis, an announcement would best come from the Government’s high profile financial spokesmen, Finance Minister Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. It would have to be made on Monday, before markets open on Tuesday. The media would undoubtedly have questions, so a press conference would be preferable to a press release. Finally, the statement should begin with the context and then move to the course of action the Government has decided upon.

To some extent, the question is posed in what economists would call partial equilibrium rather than general equilibrium. Spain’ sudden exit from the Euro zone would have consequences for the viability of the Euro itself and for the European economies as well. Better to reserve the Prime Minister for a response to the next phase of the financial crisis.

As the Chinese say, we live in “interesting times.” Surely, public management exams should be no less interesting.

The shared message is that Bob Rae was a failure as premier of Ontario. Both zero in on Ontario’s economic performance (job losses) and Rae’s policies (income increases and large deficits). The Conservatives conclusion: “If he couldn’t run a province, why does he think he can run Canada?” The Coalition’s: “If he gets the chance, he will do for Canada what he did for Ontario.”

The Coalition’s message is shriller, in both content and tone. The Conservatives refer to “the most job losses since the great depression,” while the Coalition is more explicit in its claim about causality: “he was the job-killing NDP premier who threw Ontario into the worst recession since the dirty thirties.” Its ad is also more detailed in its recital of tax increases, including gasoline, car tires, parking meters, insurance premiums, and photo radar; it would appear that the NCC is appealing to the same constituency that Rob Ford targeted in his pledge to end the war against the car. Finally, there is a marked difference in tone. The Conservatives’ ad is ironic and humorous – Bob Rae prime minister, funniest thing I ever heard. The NCC’s ad is urgent and alarmist – Bob Rae prime minister, scariest thing I ever heard.

It is widely believed that the Conservatives’ attack ads on Michael Ignatieff were very effective. The assertion that “he didn’t come back for you” ads created a narrative that contrasted enormous personal ambition (Ignatieff’s return to Canada after thirty years away solely because of his desire to be prime minister) with a ruinous public policy of tax increases under an Ignatieff Government. The Rae attack ads have the same narrative structure, but will they be equally effective? Viewers might remember that Rae was premier long ago and that, during that time, all of North America was in a recession that, the NCC’s claims to the contrary, Rae did not cause. While Ignatieff’s ambition was portrayed as over-reaching, Rae’s is the natural, and appropriate, ambition of the leader of an opposition party. Finally, there is the matter of intentions. Why was Bob Rae raising taxes? Even the NCC wouldn’t claim it was for his personal enrichment.

One perhaps unintended consequence of the Conservatives’ attack ad is that the Liberals launched an immediate appeal to party members for funds to counter the ads, and very quickly raised over $ 250,000 in donations from 4000 members.

After the launch of the NCC’s ads but before the launch of the Conservatives’ ads, the CBC’s George Strombolopolous interviewed Bob Rae about the attack ads. Rae made several thoughtful points. Consistent with the political maxim, “if he says you’re fat, you say he’s bald,” Rae reminded us that there are clips and transcripts available of Stephen Harper’s speeches and articles when he was director of the National Citizens’ Coalition: Canada is a northern European welfare state, people are unemployed only because they want to be, build a firewall around Alberta.

Rae presented a somewhat mixed message in the interview. On one hand, he said that “one of the biggest mistakes we make in politics is allowing other people to define us and then letting that stand” and that “there are a lot of things I did as premier that frankly I’m very proud of.” But then he said that he didn’t think “if he says you’re fat, you say he’s bald” politics is very productive.

So this leaves open the question of what to do in response to political attacks or, more concretely, how the Liberals should spend the $ 250,000 they just raised.

The Liberals could use the money to attack Harper, not for what he said and wrote in the past, but for what he is doing now – gutting the environmental review process or knowingly downplaying the cost of the F-35 fighter aircraft.

Rae could also expand on his statement about the things he did as premier that he is proud of, and doing so could create a teachable moment. (Unfortunately, the Liberal Party website, in its profile of Bob Rae says only that he was premier of Ontario between 1990 and 1995, perhaps not wanting to remind readers of his change in affiliation.) Rae’s 1996 memoir “From Protest to Power: Personal Reflections on a Life in Politics” does go into some detail about the accomplishments of his government, particularly in terms of helping some firms (Algoma Steel, Spruce Falls Pulp and Paper, De Havilland Aircraft) survive the recession and using the government’s capital budget to maintain employment.

Looking back over the last two decades, there are several comparisons that could be drawn between the Rae and Harper governments’ economic policies. Rae took office just as a recession hit North America. If any one Canadian was to blame for the 1990 recession, it would have to be Bank of Canada Governor John Crowe for his high interest rate policies. Rae no more caused the recession of 1990 than Stephen Harper caused the financial crisis of 2008.

The responses of the Rae and Harper governments to the recession were quite similar. Both bailed out major employers that were near bankruptcy. Both used capital spending to maintain employment. (Economic Action Plan meet Jobs Ontario.) Both oversaw major deficit increases. Both restrained public sector salaries, though the Rae Government preferred salary restraint to layoffs, while the Harper Government is delivering both. The Rae Government increased taxes, in part in response to its critics in the business community, while the Harper Government has kept taxes constant or cut them slightly in the last few years.

If Bob Rae wanted to remind people of recent political-economic history, he might also say a few words about Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution. Harris defeated Rae on a promise of tax cuts and spending cuts. He delivered the cuts, but also brought Ontario a deterioration in the quality of public services, public sector labour unrest, alternative service delivery by unqualified private sector agents (the cause of the E coli outbreak in Walkerton), and costly privatization (Highway 407). Criticism of the Harris Government is also a criticism of its ministers, three of whom – John Baird, Tony Clement, and Jim Flaherty – now occupy .senior portfolios in Harper’s Government. Flaherty often would like the electorate to forget that he was a particularly avid Common Sense Revolutionary.

Bob Rae’s current hesitation in engaging with his political past might be the result of his uncertain political status as interim leader. If he were no longer the leader, he would be free of expectations; if he were the leader, he would have to engage with it, because his political past would continue to be the focal point of Conservative attacks.

I think it would constitute a teachable moment for Canadians if Bob Rae were to explain what his record reveals about the pressures all governments face in economic crises, and the similarities of many of their responses, regardless of political ideology. And it would be a good thing of public discourse about economic policy was conducted on a higher level than the over-simplifications of 30 second Conservative attack ads. Perhaps Rae will still seize the teachable moment.

First, both led off with good news. The federal government used the rubric of Jobs, Growth, and Long Term Prosperity, and is continuing to use the Economic Action Plan brand, over three years after it was introduced as the response to the 2008-09 financial crash and recession. Indeed, most of the document was about the government’s new spending initiatives and only in the last third are budget cuts discussed. Its spending initiatives over the next two years will total approximately $ 2 billion. We can consider them as being funded by the $ 5 billion in cuts to be achieved over the next three fiscal years. This is in keeping with my co-author Allan Blakeney’s approach of “putting government through the wringer” at the start of a new mandate so that the savings can be redeployed to new priorities.

The Ontario Budget, more ambiguously titled, “Strong Action for Ontario,” is dealing with a more challenging fiscal situation. Nonetheless, the budget led off with an affirmation that the government would not reverse its signature initiatives, such as full-day kindergarten, a reduction in class sizes in elementary school, and the 30 % tuition reduction for college and university students.

In discussing restraint, the federal government is being vague to the point of being disingenuous. Little detail is provided about many department’s cuts, and in many instances the government is claiming that they can be achieved through back-office economies, such as consolidation of support systems and improvements in IT. The implication of this claim is that standards of service to the public will not deteriorate.

The Ontario government is also somewhat vague in places, for example about how modernizing the Ontario Lotteries and Gaming Corporation and optimizing the revenue potential of the LCBO will lead to its expected revenue increases, or about how it will ratchet down the annual rate of increase in its health budget to a mere 2.1 %.

In the federal government, concerns have been raised that combining a major budget cut of $295 million for the Correctional Service of Canada and a commitment to build no new prisons with get-tough-on-crime legislation will lead to more crowding and more violence inside the prisons. Cuts to training and counseling programs inside the prisons will likely lead to increased recidivism. In two other areas facing major cuts, the CBC and External Affairs, it has become clear that there will be considerable deterioration in the nature of the outputs delivered.

Let me be clear. I am not arguing that the federal government should not be making cuts. I am rather arguing that it should not be disingenuous in claiming that all the cuts can readily be handled through the elimination of slack and increasing back-office efficiency. Some of the cuts will result in reductions in front-office service and programs, and the government should have been more transparent about that. Mr. Flaherty delivered the good news on budget day, but the bad news will be trickling out for months and even years to come.

The Harper government’s credibility in this budget is not being helped by the Auditor General’s report on the procurement of F35 fighter aircraft, in particular the implication that ministers have been knowingly using costing that is grossly underestimated.

The second similarity between the federal and Ontario budgets is that both governments will be relying on their public servants to deliver the savings. While some instruments of government, most notably communications, rely primarily upon politicians, the budget involves program delivery, and that is primarily the work of public servants. Reducing spending while maintaining capacity will depend on the public service’s sense of professionalism, willingness to go the extra mile, and capacity to innovate.

Finally, a word about the budget politics of Ontario’s minority government. The Conservatives, by staking out their position of clear and vigorous opposition to the budget, have foregone any influence over it. Their eyes are on the next election, in which they hope to position themselves as the one party unequivocally in favour of economic growth as defined by their support for reducing the corporate income tax rate, and will label the Liberals and NDP as two peas in a tax-and-spend socialist pod. The NDP doesn’t want an election, but wants to be able to tell its supporters that it improved the budget. The McGuinty Government would like to accommodate the NDP as long as it can maintain a credible fiscal framework of gradually eliminating the deficit. My expectation is that all three parties will get something from the budget debate: the Liberals and NDP a wanted deal that averts an election, and the Conservatives a platform for the next election.

Please use borins@utsc.utoronto.ca.

Many thanks.

I enjoyed Footnote because it deftly mixes the comic with the tragic consequences of this lie, and I strongly recommend it, especially to academics. Two aspects of the story particularly appealed to me.

The difference between the two Professor Shkolnicks was more than generational. Eliezer Shkolnick was a rigorously scientific philologist, carefully scrutinizing minute textual inconsistencies to determine the origins and intertextual relationships of different versions of the Talmud. Uriel Shkolnick was a popularizer who interpreted Talmudic themes in a modern cultural context, a man who was quick with an opinion or a soundbite. Eliezer was a humanist-scientist; like an archeologist, he was using scientific methods to enhance our understanding of the past. Uriel was what we in North America call a “public intellectual” (a term not used in the movie, however).

One of the perpetual tensions in academe is between those who see themselves as scientists and those who see themselves as public intellectuals. Scientists are deliberate and even sometimes hesitant because they want to gather and evaluate all the data before presenting their conclusions. And the conclusions are always open to the possibility of revision on the basis of new data. Public intellectuals are good at quick pattern-recognition, and can always express themselves articulately about the latest trends in their area of expertise and its relevance to the wider society. Scientists see public intellectuals as shallow and self-aggrandizing. When I was studying economics at Harvard, one of the best-known public intellectuals in Cambridge was Lester Thurow, then dean of the Sloan School at MIT. I remember that among the scientists he was referred to as “less-than-thorough.” Public intellectuals, on the other hand, see scientists as timid, blinkered, and boring.

Footnote had two visual images that struck me as emblematic of the scientist. Eliezer Shkolnick always wore headphones when he wrote or studied, so as to shut out the outside world. His academic colleague and head of the selection committee for the Israel Prize, Yehuda Grossman, had a massive brow that was always deeply furrowed, perplexed by the puzzles he was trying to resolve.

The selection committee was where the ethical dilemma marking this moral tale began. When the committee discovered that Eliezer, rather than Uriel, had been notified, they could not decide what to do, so for some reason they consulted Uriel. As a former administrator, I think consulting Uriel was madness. Decision makers should never be in a position of conflict of interest and should recuse themselves in such situations. Consulting Uriel put him into a double conflict of interest – with respect to himself and with respect to his father. But bad administrative practice created the ethical dilemma, and hence was essential to plot development.

Uriel’s arguing that his father should nonetheless receive the prize, and the selection committee’s agreement, set in train a series of painful consequences. Without spoiling the plot, I can say that it brought conflict and sadness, rather than joy and naches, to the entire Shkolnick family and, despite the selection committee’s cover-up, the truth came out.

Mark Twain wrote that “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Footnote argues that this adage applies even to what we call white lies or diplomatic lies. If these lies concern a matter of ongoing importance, they will have consequences. Lies beget cover-ups and cover-ups beget investigations and investigations beget exposes. So, for me, Joseph Cedar’s moral tale provides additional support for the hypothesis that, in academic administration as well as in research, honesty is the best policy.

The authors of Strategy Safari, whom for brevity I will refer to by the first letter of their surnames as MAL, had a terrific idea. Strategic management is a field that tolerates a great deal of diversity in substantive focus and methodological approach. They divided the field up into 10 “schools,” or conceptual approaches, and provided a portrait of each, outlining the major authors and their works, summarizing its major assumptions, critiquing it, and then offering an assessment of its contribution. The ten schools are indeed very diverse, the set of authors surveyed for each school extensive, the critiques pointed, and the assessment of contributions usually fair-minded.

Unfortunately, there are a number of features that detract from Strategy Safari’s value as a textbook, particularly for undergraduates. MAL did not state clearly at the outset Strategy Safari’s objective or its intended readership. Because the publisher makes available an instructor’s manual and set of powerpoints, we can infer it was intended as a textbook. If undergraduates are the target audience, then MAL tried to pack too much into the treatment of every school, for example beginning the chapter on the positioning school with a nice-to-know nine page (pp. 89-97) discussion of military maxims. As a consequence the book often reads like a literature review aimed at doctoral students. MAL could have satisfied both audiences by discussing each school in terms of one or two foremost scholars (Porter representing the positioning school) in the core of each chapter and relegating the literature review to an appendix to the chapter.

A book like Strategy Safari is most effective if it illustrates the ten different schools with compelling case material. Unfortunately, the case material is often far from compelling. The major case in the instructor’s manual is “Robin Hood,” a based-on-a-true-story case about a mediaeval rebel, aimed at students who have had no prior exposure to strategy. The chapter on the entrepreneurial school, for example, incorporates Mintzberg’s studies of strategy making from the 1930s to the 1970s in Steinberg’s, a Montreal-based supermarket chain, and Canadelle, a Montreal-based manufacturer of what were once called “foundation garments.” Given Mintzberg’s long career at McGill, it may well that in empirical research, as in real estate, nothing propinqs like propinquity. Nevertheless, these particular examples now appear as dated exemplars of the “Duddy Kravitz school of entrepreneurship.” (Personal disclosure: my students had no idea whom I was referring to but older readers might.)

In MAL’s version of the entrepreneurial school, strategy making is centred in the CEO. That was certainly true for the Duddy Kravitz school of entrepreneurship, in which most of the employees were unskilled laborers making minimum wage. But that is far from the situation at high-tech or Internet startups, where most of the employees are skilled professionals. Contrast the number of Microsoft millionaires with the number of Steinberg millionaires. So being out of date has consequences for the conceptual framework developed.

MAL would have stimulated much greater interest on the part of my students if they had chosen leading-edge contemporary firms (Apple and IBM are two obvious ones) and applied the different schools to the evolution of each. Indeed, this is what my students are doing in their papers.

This approach of applying different conceptual lenses to an empirical context, be it an institution or a sequence of events, has a distinguished precursor: Graham Allison’s deconstruction of the Cuban Missile Crisis to illustrate his three models of decision-making. Allison had the advantage that even though the Cuban Missile Crisis happened half a century ago, its world-in-the-balance storyline continues to stimulate interest, in a way that is not the case for Sam Steinberg (or even, had Mintzberg studied him, Sam Bronfman).

Mintzberg is well known for his advocacy of emergent strategy, discussed at length under the rubric of the learning school, as well as for his critique of strategic planning, the core of his chapter on the planning school. I find the former very convincing but the latter much less so. Mintzberg’s critique of strategic planning was published in 1994 and took aim at large scale corporate strategic planning exercises conducted in the 70s and 80s. Since then the importance of information as a factor of production has become obvious. Information is all that many leading-edge companies (Google, Facebook) now produce. Technology enables companies to capture vast amounts of information about their customers. Data base management and spreadsheet software have become vastly more powerful.

The public and non-profit sectors have also made great strides in generating and using information. Examples that come to mind are performance management systems in the public sector starting with Compstat and finding more recent expression in NYC’s Mayor’s Management Report, the US Government’s data.gov initiative to make public sector data bases available for citizen use, and the Gates Foundation’s emphasis on generating data and using it to evaluate its programs. Metrics matter more than ever before.

MAL summarize their critique of the planning school with the italicized statement “Because analysis is not synthesis, strategic planning has never been strategy making” (p. 81). For them, the analysis of data is fundamentally different from the creative synthesis expressed in the choice of an organizational strategy. I would put it differently. Synthesis follows analysis like the left foot follows the right (a claim MAL makes about the relationship between strategy and implementation). There is a constant interplay between the generation and analysis of data and strategic choice. Mintzberg’s 1994 book was titled “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” but its sequel could well be titled “Planning Reborn as Metrics.”

Readers familiar with Duddy Kravitz will also recall the adage “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” MAL included many instances of what they felt were spoonfuls of sugar: cartoons to start each chapter; the extended safari metaphor, which incorporated poetry and designated an animal to refer to each school; and a plethora of conceptual diagrams. For me all of these intended spoonfuls of sugar were, to use another metaphor, rococo ornaments that made it hard to see the structure of the intellectual edifice MAL were trying to build. I thought the cartoons were sometimes not relevant to the chapter, the safari metaphor was overwrought, the poetry was too cute, and the diagrams were imprecise and unclear (such as those on pages 79, 34, 162, 202, 225, 342, 344, 349, 384, 386, 391). I would add that I think one problem afflicting the entire strategic management field, and not just MAL, is the overuse of unclear conceptual diagrams.

To conclude: MAL would do much better to cut to the chase, base the exposition of each school on a small number of key writers, use up-to-date examples and carry them through the entire text, relegate the extensive literature reviews to appendices to each chapter, and be much more sparing in their use of cartoons, metaphors, and diagrams.

This brings me to Kiechel’s The Lords of Strategy. Keichel was not trying to write a textbook, but rather what he called a “secret intellectual history of the new corporate world.” By that he meant he was trying to tell the story of the academics and practitioners, particularly consultants, who developed the field of strategy management beginning in the mid-60s. Kiechel believes that many of these people, for example Bruce Henderson of the Boston Consulting Group, are not well known in business circles, but their stories would be of interest. Unlike MAL, who dealt exclusively with ideas, Kiechel organized his book around the three foci of ideas, organizations, and people. Thus, not only do we learn about the BCG growth-share matrix, but also about the early days of BCG and how the consultants developed it. Similarly, we learn about Michael Porter’s intellectual journey back and forth across the Charles River (between HBS on the right bank and the Economics Department on the left) and how it led to his theory of strategic positioning. Kiechel thus was following the practice of intellectual historians, not only writing about disembodied ideas, but also dealing with their originators and their organizational context. The overall verdict of the students, which I share, was that it served as a valuable supplement to Strategy Safari, and made the material come alive.

I offer two minor criticisms. As might well be explained by Kiechel’s Harvard degrees, career at Harvard Business Press, and HBP’s publication of the book, there was a strong emphasis on Harvard as academic institution and Boston-based consultants (Boston Consulting Group and Bain Associates) as practitioners. Perhaps it was a bit too Harvard or Boston-centric. Second, Kiechel’s writing is often ironic and subtle, for example his chapter on strategic management and the financial crisis of 2008-09. The argument goes back and forth for several pages before Kiechel concludes that strategic management was partially responsible. While there is nothing wrong with irony or subtlety per se, in a classroom context, a more direct statement of the argument would have been preferable.

No texts are ever perfect. The students and I worked hard to master both Strategy Safari and The Lords of Strategy. And we learned a lot about strategic management in the process. Based on the high caliber of the presentations I have heard, I am looking forward to receiving the students’ papers. And these books will be least partially responsible for this outcome.

My late co-author Allan Blakeney took the view that the start of a mandate is the optimal time to “put the government through the wringer” to identify major budget cuts. Building on Blakeney’s lived experience as well as the Harper Government’s intentions, I decided to have the students in my University of Toronto-Scarborough public management class simulate the Deficit Reduction Action Plan. The eleven spending departments we simulated were asked to find $5 billion in savings from their operating budgets (exclusive of transfer programs) that totaled $80 billion. These cuts would be implemented in the 2012-13 fiscal year.

The last time we did this type of simulation exercise, we had the Ontario Government cutting $ 3 billion (see “Simulating the Ontario Budget Process,” my post of March 10, 2010). But in this case, we permitted revenue increases as a way of meeting budget cuts, and roughly $ 2 billion was derived this way, through partial privatization of the LCBO and an increase in hydro rates. This year’s simulation was tougher, because the ground rules assumed that a severly conservative government would not resort to “tax and spend,” but would prefer only to cut.

What, then, emerged from the simulation?

The first part of the simulation involved written submissions from the operating departments. They initially proposed a total of $2.4 billion in cuts, approximately half of total required. Some departments in the simulation (DIAND and DND) offered major cuts at the outset while others (HRSDC and Industry Canada) offered up very little. The second part of the simulation was a 2 hour Treasury Board meeting with the spending departments, chaired by the Treasury Board team (which included the Minister of Finance, President of the Treasury Board, and Secretary to the Treasury Board), to consider the proposed cuts and find additional ones. Given the two stage process, the spending departments had a variety of strategies: offer substantial cuts in the written proposal but then firmly resist additional cuts at the meeting; offer some cuts in writing (say 2-3 %) and keep others in reserve; or argue, both in the written proposal and at the meeting, that the department had taken large cuts the previous year or its work was too important to offer up anything more than token cuts.

The Treasury Board team did an excellent job running the meeting, so much so that they seemed to be channeling the spirit of the Chretien Government’s program review. They emailed the spending departments to announce that they had the firm backing of the prime minister for the $5 billion target. (As there was no role of prime minister in the simulation, this claim was incontrovertible.) They encouraged the departments that had offered up big cuts at the meeting to put the heat on the departments that were resisting and they told the departments that were resisting that they had better come to the meeting with some proposals. They managed the meeting so as to achieve their objective. They started with the departments that had offered the big cuts, thus highlighting their exemplary behaviour. There was no daylight between the Finance Minister and the President of the Treasury Board. They ran a tight meeting, giving ministers no more than a minute for interventions. The Secretary of the Treasury Board announced the running total frequently enough to create a sense of urgency. By the end of the two hour meeting, the departments had agreed to cuts totally $4.2 billion. The sense of momentum in the meeting was palpable and had the meeting gone on beyond the two hours of our class time, they would undoubtedly have reached the $ 5 billion total. In this case, the Treasury Board team made the last $ 800 million in cuts unilaterally.

The simulation, as an exercise in group dynamics, was a great success. It was also a success as a learning exercise, because it forced all the students to drill down into the federal estimates for the last two years. Some students made arguments against cuts in 2012-13 because departments had already taken major cuts in 2011-12. Other students used the information about strategic outcomes provided in part 3 as the basis of their decisions.

Nonetheless, there was some ambiguity about what was meant by cuts. For example, should a department be permitted to argue that it had experienced major cuts last year because of the scheduled expiry of Economic Action Plan programs? Does a reduction in last year’s planned spending increase qualify as a cut this year? In the real world, these issues would have to be adjudicated by the Treasury Board subcommittee at the outset, something our abbreviated process did not encompass.

At the end of the exercise, cuts of between 4 and 8 per cent of the departmental budgets were made. Substantial cuts fell on areas that are generally not considered to be priorities of the Harper Government: environment, arts and culture, and support for the universities. But what seems appropriate and feasible when discussed in a cabinet board room has a way of leading to raucous protest when it hits the “Canadian street.” (Personal disclosure: I was Scholar-in-Residence in the Ontario Cabinet Office in summer 2003, the last days of Harris-Eves Common Sense Revolution, and I remember watching from the Whitney Block almost daily protests on Queen’s Park Crescent below, a process I began to refer to as “the citizenry coming to express their gratitude.”)

We now await the Harper Government’s budget to be delivered on March 29. We’ve been informed that the projected deficit of $31 billion will shrink to a more manageable $25 billion. Finance Minister Flaherty has told us not to expect “intricate details” of budget cuts and we’ve heard hints of an early retirement program intended to thin the ranks of the Public Service of Canada by 30,000, in effect spreading the pain around without cutting particular programs. So perhaps the students of my public management course are, contrary to the usual expectations of the political preferences of twenty-somethings, the real “severe conservatives.”

In 2010, Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician of Canada, resigned over the cancellation of the compulsory long-form census. Sheikh had advised against making the long form voluntary, and it appeared that for him the final straw was that his political master, Industry Minister Tony Clement, publicly misrepresented his advice.

Earlier this week, Gary Webster, Chief General Manager of the Toronto Transit Commission, was dismissed by a 5-4 vote of his nine political masters. In his case, the precipitating incident was that at a TTC meeting held in public he gave a professional opinion supporting the expansion of light rail transit, thus contradicting Mayor Ford’s position that only subways should be built. The TTC held an in camera meeting concerning Webster, and Ford’s supporters, holding the majority, were able to dismiss him.

Both men, based on their professional training, spoke what they considered to be truth to power. In both cases, their political masters refused to accept their advice.

Sheikh had fulfilled his obligation as a senior public servant to give his best professional advice to his minister. Notice that he did this confidentially. When his advice was rejected, he could have stayed on to implement the voluntary survey, making it as representative as possible. I would assume that the public misrepresentation of his advice by his minister was what led him to feel that the relationship of trust was destroyed and hence decide to resign.

Undoubtedly Webster gave his advice about transit expansion to his political masters in private prior to the public meeting. Giving his advice at the public meeting was, in effect, a political act. He conceivably could have pulled his punches, dissembled, or even reversed himself. To his credit, he did not. He said in public what he said in private. One could argue that one purpose, perhaps the main purpose, of the public meeting was to create a justification for firing Webster.

It is nonetheless gratifying that Webster was dismissed without cause. To dismiss him with cause would have required the commissioners to assert that agreeing with the mayor about policy issues was a requirement of the Chief General Manager’s job, and even the mayor’s supporters did not make that assertion.

If we are now in an era in which some politicians are demanding “faith-based policy analysis” then it is gratifying that there are at least a few public servants who are willing to publicly reject politicians’ ideological conclusions that contradict professionals’ evidence-based policy analysis.

What have been the personal consequences for Sheikh and Webster? Sheikh is now an Adjunct Professor and Distinguished Fellow at Queen’s University. He was embraced by the professional community for whose values he put his career on the line. In Webster’s case, because he was dismissed without cause two years before his planned retirement, the financial consequences will be minimal. I hope that he does not slip into a silent retirement, but continues to speak out on transportation policy issues.

We may over the next while see more resignations of senior public servants who disagree, for professional reasons, with political decisions. Public resignations at least have the benefit of stimulating public debate. (One can think here of Keynes’s resignation from the Treasury over German reparations after World War I and his publication just a few months later of the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace.)

If public resignations of senior public servants are an expression of a professional consensus of opinion, then it would be appropriate for their professional communities to support them, in terms of both the issue and the provision of some kind of position, say at a university or a think tank, from which they can remain actively engaged. This certainly was the case for Sheikh and I hope it will also be the case for Webster and indeed for future senior public servants who are willing to speak truth to power, regardless of the immediate consequences for their careers.

Flash of Genius tells the story of Robert Kearns, a Detroit engineering professor who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, patented it, negotiated with Ford about manufacturing it for their cars, and then discovered that Ford stole the technology. Ford installed it in the early Seventies, and the invention was soon copied by the rest of the industry. From that point on, Kearns decided his life’s work would be suing the automobile manufacturers, sometimes with counsel, sometimes representing himself, sometimes doing all his own research, and sometimes having help from his children. Kearns was ultimately successful, winning a total of $ 40 million from Ford and Chrysler for patent infringement.

Being an individual plaintiff in civil litigation against a large institution with deep pockets is deeply frustrating, as the institution’s standard practice is to stall and take advantage of the law’s complexity. Did Kearns waste the last three decades of his life in litigation? Would have been happier, if not wealthier, if he kept inventing? Kearns, however, saw himself as a champion of individual inventors fighting for just compensation from the large corporations that need their inventions. (Personal disclosure: I was part of the Heather Robertson vs. Thomson Corp. class action that won compensation for freelance authors for the republication of their articles in electronic databases, a fight similar to Kearns’s.) For Kearns, it WAS all about the money.

The Soul of a New Machine tells the story of a group of young programmers and engineers that developed a late Seventies leading edge minicomputer, Data General’s Eagle project. Kidder explained the technology, got close to the individuals on the team, and presented the process by which they built the computer. From “signing on,” agreeing to work virtually around the clock without overtime pay or stock options, to the ultimate launch of the computer, it emphatically was not about the money.

In his conclusion, Kidder writes:

… a group of engineers got excited about building a computer… What’s more, they did the work, both with uncommon spirit and for reasons that, in a most frankly commercial setting, seemed remarkably pure. (p. 272)

The book’s most-quoted passage is:

… yet more than two dozen people worked on it overtime, without any real hope of material rewards for a year and a half, and afterwards most of them felt glad. That happened largely because [project manager Tom] West and other managers gave them enough freedom to invent, while at the same time guiding them toward success.” (p. 275)

What strikes me re-reading the book thirty years later is that for West’s group, building the computer became an end in itself. The computer ultimately was successful and it added considerably to Data General’s bottom line, but the team shared little of the rewards. Ironically, they were working at the same time that Gates, Allen, and Ballmer were launching Microsoft and Jobs and Wozniak were launching Apple. What some people then grasped more clearly than others was that the personal computer industry would create untold wealth, and those who realized it first grasped the most wealth. (That is the story told in Pirates of Silicon Valley, which I discussed in my post of last Dec. 17.)

Gates and Jobs and their partners worked just as hard as Tom West’s two groups – the software designers who called themselves the Micro-kids and the engineers who called themselves the Hardy Boys – but they also had a clearer vision of how their creativity could be lead to huge financial rewards. It turned out to be the micro-computer, not the mini-computer, that would become the most profitable market segment.

By the dot-com boom a little more than a decade after the Soul of a New Machine saga, the IT industry was full of people who were in it primarily for the money, and who had no interest in the beauty of brilliant software writing or technical design. But that’s another story.

Both of the texts appeal to me, but in different ways. Flash of Genius was not a box-office or critical success, primarily because it was a complicated courtroom battle in which the intended heroic protagonist was a quirky and difficult man. Its great virtue, however, is that it made an honest effort to portray the creative process, something that is rarely done in film. The movie managed to show us how an inventor thought in terms of a metaphor (intermittent wipers working like the blink of an eye), how that inventor was obsessed with solving his intellectual problem, how the inventor designed his solution using well-known electronic components (capacitors, transistors, and resistors), and how he kept trying different combinations of the components until one clicked. In the courtroom battle, Kearns made the point about originality cross-examining one of Ford’s expert witnesses, asking whether there was any word in Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities that would not be found in a standard dictionary.

Kidder’s book is a model of clarity in defining and discussing assembler language, machine language, chip design, and showing how the minicomputer combined all these complicated elements. What appealed to me more, however, was Kidder’s role as first-person narrator and participant in the story. After gaining access, Kidder became so closely identified with the design team that he could not portray himself as a silent and unseen observer. Indeed, Kidder’s mere presence was part of manager Tom West’s way of motivating his team:

[West] welcomed a journalist to observe his team, and how it did delight him when one of his so-called kids remarked to me, “What we’re doing must be important if there’s a writer covering it.” (p. 275).

Kidder came to know the team member’s so well not only by watching them at work, but by relaxing with them. The portraits of the team members, for example on a sailing trip with West, are detailed and sympathetic. So it was entirely fitting for Kidder to write in the first person, providing observations of the process and of the characters in his own voice on the basis of his own experience. This intimacy makes it a rewarding experience to reread The Soul of a New Machine three decades after its original publication.

To return to the title, when someone in investment banking says it’s not about the money, recent experience has shown it most definitely is about the money. With technology, it’s not so obvious. Sometimes it actually wasn’t about the money. Regardless, the relationship between creativity and monetary reward continues to perplex and fascinate.