60% of Lyndhurst GOP switching parties, 80% of Wall Street stays obtuse

The above visual is something I cobbled together a few years ago for a slideshow when my view of impending Republican doom wasn't very popular or accepted amongst many progressives.

If I was George Bush, I wouldn't want a second term. It will destroy the viability of a Republican President, and possibly his party, for 20 years.

My reasons were many, and mostly business-oriented for that talk, but the nugget is that you can't manage anything, country or org, that needs a pluralist buy-in and effort-share with techniques that divide and pit necessary skill against necessary skill, creating armies of short-term useful believers who'll frag each other at at the slightest provocation. The useful part of the previous sentence is that many of us don't even perceive that we're doing this dividing even as we do it. And It is a blight that finds it's way into management thought as well as politics, and it's really just sucky pretend-leadership that looks to buff a resume and leave a successor to clean up the wreckage.

The problem was and is that so many hopeful and ordinary folk are so vested and emotionally choked about what's happening--held hostage by a cardboard, R-complex-style patriotism or Jack Welch-ism--that they can't respond confidently in sensibly assertive, sustainable ways to those who know the limbic jiu-jitsu. We've all been there: The logical have no tools in a war of illogic. Call it shock-and-awe, the fog of war, or the strangling of the naively charitable.

The above illustrated flameout is a willful thing, pridefully powered and unstoppable until a rock bottom is hit and passengers are sacrificed, again, to a leadership thing, to anti-leadership really. Willful obtuseness married with greed for mattering will do that to people, leaders and followers, blameful and bystander, and it only gets worse when they congregate in groups. The anti-wisdom of crowds.

Politics NJ

In a rare shift in party affiliation, the entire membership of the all-Republican governing body in Lyndhurst will switch from Republican to Democrat tomorrow. Nearly 60% of Lyndhurst’s Republican County Committee will become Democrats too.

The party realignment, first reported in PoliticsNJ.com last summer, is far greater in scope than speculated. It represents, perhaps, the most massive shift in Party affiliation of elected and Party officials in a single community in one day. “It’s safe to say something like this certainly doesn’t happen in politics everyday,” said Lyndhurst Mayor Richard DiLascio.

Lyndhurst has long been considered a swing town in general elections over the last twenty years...

Lyndhurst. Lyndhurst, NJ. Reminds me of another *-hurst in New Jersey. Flammable gases and dead passengers. Colossal flimsy structures crashing to the ground... Lakehurst, NJ. Oh, the humanity.

Ah geez. I've slipped into disaster references, haven't I? But hyperbole seems to be the only way to shake the trees these days, doesn't it? What's up with that? Here's what's up with that:



Ahh. Truth seems to be that some--many, really--can't feel alive without "threat." In this vein, continuity, not conflict, portends metaphorical death. And getting the veins popping is symbolic of actually using your body for something, interesting, anything--even stupid somethings, interestings, anythings. It seems to be a pretty common syndrome lately...

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

Yeah, was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Floating back to Earth, the week brings us "news" that our credit problems extend to car loans and card issuers. Many who should (and do) know better are (acting) surprised.

It's worth melding the above Republican exodus with all the commercial paper going up in flames for one reason. They involve the same managerial death-wish courtesy of narrowband, narrow-interest knee-jerk thinking coming home to roost, all of it a selfish, subtractive defeatist interpretation of leadership. And this week we see Merrill and Citi "anti-leadership" in full bunker mode as a result.

Stepping back, you can see this story in full. Financial services saw all the Wild West fun that telcos and dot.coms were having in the 90s and they wanted some new frontiers too. (It really is simple as that no matter how many solemn powerpoints you've suffered through.) Our newish Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson was, back then at Goldman, one of those cowboys looking to test and shine his spurs.

[Update: I was asked about this today, 4-18-08 by a client who read the post and want's a flaming GOP tee-shirt (heee!!), and realized I'd forgotten to be as specific here as I was in our conversation: Paulson, Sandy Weill, Bob Rubin, Phil Gramm and others all were pushing for Deregulation in the 80s-90s, most damagingly maybe, the "adjustment" of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 to allow FIRE sectors to play in each other's back yards and back pockets. The ensuing history of heavy petting and unwanted pregnancies unfolds today...]

But when a Citi, CapitalOne, FirstAmerican or Countrywide models very large chunks of their offerings on digitally nano-slicing the idea of creditworthiness into "Yes" and "No" tolerances that only electron microscopes can see--entirely employment-volatile and paycheck-to-paycheck scary is maybe 30-40% of their business--there is no salient lesson for young business-people to absorb beyond the fact that a fast get-away car and a nimble PR firm are the only must-have tools. Say whatever you need to, take the money and run, and for God's sake, smile while your pants are on fire. It's not new. It was rubbish when we perceived it our own sketchy bosses, their ideas and our orgs back during the late-80s S&L goldrush. Now, it's rubbish that's ordained, theme-music-ed and pushed by CNBC and soon, Fox Business Channel.

But hey, forget about the Peter Principals, this false-mythology part really does impact us earthly humans too. Makes it hard to help organizations and systems become better, more resilient, more humanistically friendly. The pretend and looking away is killing us. Especially if you're in the business of Customer Advocacy or, to sound old fashioned, "Service."

How do you hand-hold a revenue stream to be siphoned? How do you sincerely, officially empathize with someone on the other end of that phone whom you know is fated--captured, really--to earn you more in late fees and fine-print penalties than they ever would via simple interest or more affirmativ transactions? It's unsustainable. But also, terribly calculated on the part of captains of certain ships who'd like to claim white-knighthood. "How can you be so obtuse?" Andy Dufresne asked the warden in the Shawshank Redemption. "It's hard, but the money soothes the pain" would have been a good answer. Henry Paulson, that Treasury Secretary, ex- of Goldman, understands money, and knows the markets' short-term profitable foolishness, and he remembers--he feels the markets' pain.

Hydrogen burns something awful. People have thresholds of bitten-lip pain. Lyndhurst. Wall Street. Humanity. Profit motive. What can you say in the face of being told up is down and foolishness is character and pay is for performance? What can you do as the institutions and establishments you've been told to respect fold in on themselves in pitiful parody?

If you're smart, you've retained your perspective and a comfy fiscal cushion. You watch and wait, while protecting your own compass from the desperate interference that's being transmitted via electrons and press kit. And it's never a bad idea to take notes...

We get so few eyewitness glimpses of mass delusion and self-destructive herd behavior that it's hard to know a Paradigm shift as it rolls over you. A good rule of thumb seems to be that it's losers have generally overplayed their hands. I suspect that 65 million years ago, twenty out of a hundred dinosaurs looked up and tilted their heads at the curiously bright object heading their way and getting larger. The other 80 percent kept munching the greenery: "It was none of my concern."