Wednesday, October 9, 2013

World Bank Blog: Why Influencing Leaders Requires a Willingness to Hug a Porcupine







Why Influencing Leaders Requires a Willingness to Hug a Porcupine


Sina Odugbemi's picture
Let’s be clear about this: to successfully influence leaders, that is, to have your views, your suggestions, your criticisms of their actions and so on, be taken seriously by them, you are not allowed to cheat. Cheat and leaders will ignore you. Worse, they will treat you with contempt. Above all, you will deserve their contempt.
The subject is important because a fundamental part of producing change is the ability to influence leaders…the leaders of the organizations you need help from, and the leaders of government at different levels without whose support very little can get done. I know this suggestion flies in the face of the current romance of the streets, of the current idealization of grass roots mobilization using cool new tools that magically launch revolutions, and produce wondrously effective pro-poor social and political change.
Now, I am a great believer in active citizens but I also know that real change is delivered by effective coalitions, and people in leadership positions are at the very heart of effective coalitions. It is the classic Inside-Outside strategy: leaders in government and leaders in civil society collaborate (sometimes quietly because of the exigencies of power play) to produce change.
In another life, when I was a newspaper pundit and editorial opinion writer, a number of leaders I interacted with taught me a simple truth. They were trying to describe to me which newspaper editorials or writers they took seriously and why. They laid out the tests they applied as follows:
  • Are you informed? Do you know what you are talking about?
  • Are you aware of the complexity of the decision-making context that the leaders in the arena are facing?
  • Do you factor that complexity into what you are proposing, or are you ignoring the complexity in order to fire off cheap shots, or urge upon them asinine courses of action?
They said to me that these tests are the reason leaders take very few activists, pundits and editorial opinions seriously.  But, you know, I firmly believe that similar tests are applied by leaders in different spheres of life…including where you work. Leaders everywhere, I am convinced, take very few people seriously.
The key lesson that I was taught is this: if you are informed, if you take on the complexity of the decision making context leaders are facing and still come to a different, perfectly feasible course of action, you will earn the respect and admiration of the leaders you are trying to influence, even if they don’t say so to you...or change course.
The reason for all this is simple. Leaders wrestle with complexity all the time. They have to embrace porcupines daily…and porcupines have those nasty erectile spines mingled with their body hair. Yet, these sorely pressed leaders often find that most of the people seeking to influence them, or those who simply blast them, are not interested in embracing porcupines.  They cheat. They simplify complex problems and then say: ‘It is simply really, Madame Prime Minister. Why don’t you do this or that?’

And why do people cheat? Because embracing complexity is hard; thinking is hard; and trade-offs are tough customers. It is a lot easier to cheat.
But leaders cannot cheat. They cannot duck complexity. They cannot avoid difficult trade-offs, competing principles, quarrelling allies, vicious enemies and so on.

I want to end with an example from the world of politics. In October 2012, the best-selling author, Michael Lewis, published a remarkable essay in Vanity Fair, the resultant of spending six months quietly shadowing President Barack Obama of the United States. The piece is titled ‘Obama’s Way’ and it contains the following glimpses into the realities of political leaders. Lewis quotes Obama saying:
  1. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made that decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.”
  2. “You’ll see that I wear only gray or blue suits. I am trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I am eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
Now, just think about what it would take to impress and influence someone only a small part of whose reality we have just espied.

Photo Credit: Mary Harrsch
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Monday, October 7, 2013

GCC to set up common water grid



Project to cost $10.5bn; desalination plants in Gulf of Oman

Gulf oil producers are planning to pump around $10.5 billion to set up a landmark common water supply grid to meet their fast growing consumption in the long run because of a rapid population growth and expanding non-oil sectors.

The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, which are the world’s richest in oil but poorest in water, have agreed to set up giant desalination plants in Oman to use water from the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman.

The project involves large pipelines that will link all six members and supply them with desalinated water in case of shortages in their existing desalination plants in the Gulf.

The project includes three stages, the first of which will cost around $2.7 billion and involves linking regional countries with a pipeline network while the second phase will cost nearly $four billion to construct a plant in Sohar on Oman’s coastline overlooking both seas. The third phase includes the construction of another desalination station in Ashkhara in Oman at a cost of about $3.8 billion.

“This project is in line with a decision by the GCC heads of state at their meeting in Riyadh in mid 2012,” Bahraini Minister of Water and Electricity Abdul Mohsen bin Ali Mirza said in remarks published in regional newspapers.

He said a feasibility study bid has already been awarded to King Abdullah for Research and Strategic Studies in Saudi Arabia at a cost of SR12.5 million.

Officials said the project would rely on water from the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea outside the oil-rich Gulf to ease reliance on desalination plants in the Gulf due to rapid growth in consumption in member states.

In a recent study, a US research firm warned that regional states could face a serious water supply shortage because of a rapid growth in domestic demand due to a large increase in their population, steady expansion in their economies, the long summer season, and lack of awareness about rationalization of water consumption.

 “Excess water consumption has become a serious issue in the region. GCC residents and businesses have disregarded the consequences of their water usage to enjoy benefits more common in countries with ample rain and overflowing aquifers. But with the population of the GCC increasing in excess of two cent a year, it is a real challenge,” Booz & Company said.

According to the report, desalination station provides more than two-thirds of the potable water used in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, and will continue to play a huge role in the GCC’s water development efforts.

But it warned that desalination carries enormous economic and environmental costs. Despite a more than fivefold improvement in efficiency since 1979, the $one it costs to desalinate a cubic meter of seawater is still a relatively expensive way of producing potable water, it said.

“Moreover, seawater desalination is an energy-intensive process, consuming eight times more energy than groundwater projects, and accounting for between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of energy consumption in the GCC. This adds to the problems of energy intensity already plaguing the region,” it said.

The report estimated that GCC countries, which control 40 per cent of the world’s oil, would invest more than $100 billion in their water sectors between 2011 and 2016.

It said some of these investments will be in improved desalination technologies, which could involve solar energy or new ways of filtering out salt or making it evaporate.

A recent official study showed people in the UAE are the world’s largest water consumers, with the average per capita consumption standing at 364 litres per day, more than 82 per cent above the global average individual demand.

Demand for water in the UAE, the second largest Arab economy, totalled around 4.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2011 and is projected to nearly double to nine bcm in 2030 because of high consumption and population growth, said Mariam Hassan Al-Shanasi, undersecretary of the ministry of environment and water.

She estimated per capita water demand in the country at 364 litres per day compared with a global average of nearly 200 litres per day.

Black Press Business/Economic Feature. Week of October 6, 2013


Black Press Business/Economic Feature                              Week of October  6, 2013
BUSINESS EXCHANGE
By William Reed
Get a Job

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” – Steve Jobs

When you were growing up, were the conversations at your house centered on concepts about business, or more along the line of “go get a job?”  Entrepreneurship is not a subject that is discussed regularly around the dinner table in African-American homes. There’s a lack of business traditions among African Americans and a paltry record of entrepreneurial successes.  Smaller probabilities of having self-employed parents, demographic trends and discrimination are primary reasons for the limited level of entrepreneurship in contemporary African-American communities.

American Blacks must cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit independent of politics and who occupies the White House.  The low historical rate of African American entrepreneurship is a well-known fact. The100-year-old, discrepancy between Black and White entrepreneurship levels could be eradicated within a few generations if more African Americans embraced and practicedentrepreneurship.  More Blacks have to get a better grasp of concepts such as capitalism and entrepreneurship.

Some Blacks equate capitalism to racism; but the truth is the free market system isn’t racist and is the best provider for Americans of all races. Capitalism is the social system under which the American economy operates. Under this structure, the means for producing and distributing goods (the land, factories, technology, transport system etc.) are owned by a small minority of people with a motive to make a profit.

Entrepreneurship is an employment strategy that can lead to economic self-sufficiency. Self-employment is a vital facet of the United States economy.  Entrepreneurship has been a means for the economic advancement of numerous ethnic groups.  Take note of most of the merchants in areas populated by Blacks. 

Ninety-nine times out of 100, Blacks patronize merchants that are from outside of our race.  Entrepreneurs drive America's economy and account for the majority of our nation's new job creation and innovations.  America's 25.8 million small businesses employ more than 50 percent of the private workforce, generate more than half of the nation's gross domestic product, and are the principal source of new jobs in the U.S. economy.

An entrepreneur is a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture. Although forms of business ownership vary by jurisdiction, several common forms exist: A sole proprietorship is a business owned by one person for-profit.  

A partnership is a business owned by two or more people. 

The three typical classifications of for-profit partnerships are general partnerships, limited partnerships, and limited liability partnerships. A corporation is a limited liability business that has a separate legal personality from its members. 

Corporations can be government owned or privately owned, and corporations can organize either for-profit or not-for-profit.

Starting a business is a lot of work.  The hours are long, sacrifices are great and you are confronted with new problems and challenges every day.  The nature of being an entrepreneur means that you fully embrace uncertainty and are comfortable following your heart and intuition. Those who succeed do so because of their unwavering belief in the endeavor they have initiated.

What are you leaving your children? 

More Black parents need to be in a position that they can “leave the business” to their children. If we concentrated and worked hard, the 100-year-old discrepancy between Black and White entrepreneurship levels that many call “racist” could be eradicated.  More of us must embrace “Black Capitalism” to build wealth through the ownership and development of businesses.

 Prominent Black Capitalists include: Booker T. Washington, who was an early leader at theTuskegee Institute, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Robert Reed Church, a wealthy African American, founded the nation's first Black-owned bank in 1906, Solvent Savings. 

 - William Reed is publisher of “Who’s Who in Black Corporate America” and available for projects via theBaileyGroup.org


Friday, October 4, 2013

Training Opportunity: October 24, 2013. Hagerstown, Maryland. RAPID Psychological First Aid Training

RAPID~PSYCHOLOGICAL FIRST AID 

The Johns Hopkins Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center and the DHMH Office of Preparedness and Response are pleased to offer the Johns Hopkins~RAPID Psychological First Aid Workshop. It is a 6-hour, interactive training that provides non-mental health professionals with the concepts and skills associated with Psychological First Aid. Utilizing the RAPID model (Reflective listening, Assessment of needs, Prioritization, Intervention, and Disposition), this specialized training provides perspectives on injuries and trauma that are beyond those physical in nature. Additionally, the RAPID model is readily applicable to public health settings, the workplace, the military, faith-based organizations, mass disaster venues, and even the demands of more commonplace critical events, e.g., dealing with the psychological aftermath of accidents, robberies, suicide, homicide, or community violence.


DATE:  October 24, 2013


TIME:  9:00am - 4:00pm (registration begins at 8:00 am)

LOCATION: Best Western Grand Venice Hotel, Hagerstown, MD 21740

ACCOMMODATIONS: 


For those requiring overnight accommodations, a room rate of $65.90 is being offered.

REGISTRATION:  

https://trams.jhsph.edu/trams/index.cfm?event=training.catalogDisplay&trainingID=660
Additional Details Can Be Found Here:  http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-public-health-preparedness/training/calendar/index.html

CONTACT INFORMATION:  


Katurah Bland, 443-287-6735/kbland@jhsph.edu
Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness
615 N. Wolfe Street, Room E7037
Baltimore, MD 21205
prepared@jhsph.edu

-Or -



Clifford Smith, 410-767-5266, clifford.smith@maryland.gov


Thursday, October 3, 2013

Cultural Competencies\Cultural Differences. How Culture Molds Habit of Thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/science/how-culture-molds-habits-of-thought.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

New York Times Articles

How Culture Molds Habits Of Thought

By ERICA GOODE
Published: August 08, 2000

For more than a century, Western philosophers and psychologists have based their discussions of mental life on a cardinal assumption: that the same basic processes underlie all human thought, whether in the mountains of Tibet or the grasslands of the Serengeti.
Cultural differences might dictate what people thought about. Teenage boys in Botswana, for example, might discuss cows with the same passion that New York teenagers reserved for sports cars.
But the habits of thought -- the strategies people adopted in processing information and making sense of the world around them -- were, Western scholars assumed, the same for everyone, exemplified by, among other things, a devotion to logical reasoning, a penchant for categorization and an urge to understand situations and events in linear terms of cause and effect.
Recent work by a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, however, is turning this long-held view of mental functioning upside down..
In a series of studies comparing European Americans to East Asians, Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things: they think differently.
''We used to think that everybody uses categories in the same way, that logic plays the same kind of role for everyone in the understanding of everyday life, that memory, perception, rule application and so on are the same,'' Dr. Nisbett said. ''But we're now arguing that cognitive processes themselves are just far more malleable than mainstream psychology assumed.''
A summary of the research will be published next winter in the journal Psychological Review, and Dr. Nisbett discussed the findings Sunday at the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association in Washington.
In many respects, the cultural disparities the researchers describe mirror those described by anthropologists, and may seem less than surprising to Americans who have lived in Asia. And Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues are not the first psychological researchers to propose that thought may be embedded in cultural assumptions: Soviet psychologists of the 1930's posed logic problems to Uzbek peasants, arguing that intellectual tools were influenced by pragmatic circumstances.
But the new work is stirring interest in academic circles because it tries to define and elaborate on cultural differences through a series of tightly controlled laboratory experiments. And the theory underlying the research challenges much of what has been considered gospel in cognitive psychology for the last 40 years.
''If it's true, it turns on its head a great deal of the science that many of us have been doing, and so it's sort of scary and thrilling at the same time,'' said Dr. Susan Andersen, a professor of psychology at New York University and an associate editor at Psychological Review.
In the broadest sense, the studies -- carried out in the United States, Japan, China and Korea -- document a familiar division. Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more ''holistically,'' paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more ''analytic'' in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic.
In one study, for example, by Dr. Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda, a graduate student at Michigan, students from Japan and the United States were shown an animated underwater scene, in which one larger ''focal'' fish swam among smaller fishes and other aquatic life.
Asked to describe what they saw, the Japanese subjects were much more likely to begin by setting the scene, saying for example, ''There was a lake or pond'' or ''The bottom was rocky,'' or ''The water was green.'' Americans, in contrast, tended to begin their descriptions with the largest fish, making statements like ''There was what looked like a trout swimming to the right.''
Over all, Japanese subjects in the study made 70 percent more statements about aspects of the background environment than Americans, and twice as many statements about the relationships between animate and inanimate objects. A Japanese subject might note, for example, that ''The big fish swam past the gray seaweed.''
''Americans were much more likely to zero in on the biggest fish, the brightest object, the fish moving the fastest,'' Dr. Nisbett said. ''That's where the money is as far as they're concerned.''
But the greater attention paid by East Asians to context and relationship was more than just superficial, the researchers found. Shown the same larger fish swimming against a different, novel background, Japanese participants had more difficulty recognizing it than Americans, indicating that their perception was intimately bound with their perception of the background scene.
When it came to interpreting events in the social world, the Asians seemed similarly sensitive to context, and quicker than the Americans to detect when people's behavior was determined by situational pressures.
Psychologists have long documented what they call the fundamental attribution error, the tendency for people to explain human behavior in terms of the traits of individual actors, even when powerful situational forces are at work. Told that a man has been instructed to give a speech endorsing a particular presidential candidate, for example, most people will still believe that the speaker believes what he is saying.
Yet Asians, according to Dr. Nisbett and his colleagues, may in some situations be less susceptible to such errors, indicating that they do not describe a universal way of thinking, but merely the way that Americans think.
In one study, by Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Incheol Choi, of Seoul National University in Korea, the Korean and American subjects were asked to read an essay either in favor of or opposed to the French conducting atomic tests in the Pacific. The subjects were told that the essay writer had been given ''no choice'' about what to write. But subjects from both cultures still showed a tendency to ''err,'' judging that the essay writers believed in the position endorsed in the essays.
When the Korean subjects were first required to undergo a similar experience themselves, writing an essay according to instructions, they quickly adjusted their estimates of how strongly the original essay writers believed what they wrote. But Americans clung to the notion that the essay writers were expressing sincere beliefs.
One of the most striking dissimilarities found by the researchers emerged in the way East Asians and Americans in the studies responded to contradiction. Presented with weaker arguments running contrary to their own, Americans were likely to solidify their opinions, Dr. Nisbett said, ''clobbering the weaker arguments,'' and resolving the threatened contradiction in their own minds. Asians, however, were more likely to modify their own position, acknowledging that even the weaker arguments had some merit.
In one study, for example, Asian and American subjects were presented with strong arguments in favor of financing a research project on adoption. A second group was presented both with strong arguments in support of the project and weaker arguments opposing it.
Both Asian and American subjects in the first group expressed strong support for the research. But while Asian subjects in the second group responded to the weaker opposing arguments by decreasing their support, American subjects increased their endorsement of the project in response to the opposing arguments.
In a series of studies, Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Kaiping Peng of the University of California at Berkeley found that Chinese subjects were less eager to resolve contradictions in a variety of situations than American subjects. Asked to analyze a conflict between mothers and daughters, American subjects quickly came down in favor of one side or the other. Chinese subjects were more likely to see merit on both sides, commenting, for example, that, ''Both the mothers and the daughters have failed to understand each other.''
Given a choice between two different types of philosophical argument, one based on analytical logic, devoted to resolving contradiction, the other on a dialectical approach, accepting of contradiction, Chinese subjects preferred the dialectical approach, while Americans favored the logical arguments. And Chinese subjects expressed more liking than Americans for proverbs containing a contradiction, like the Chinese saying ''Too modest is half boastful.'' American subjects, Dr. Nisbett said, found such contradictions ''rather irritating.''
Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Ara Norenzayan of the University of Illinois have also found indications that when logic and experiential knowledge are in conflict, Americans are more likely than Asians to adhere to the rules of formal logic, in keeping with a tradition that in Western societies began with the Ancient Greeks.
For example, presented with a logical sequence like, ''All animals with fur hibernate. Rabbits have fur. Therefore rabbits hibernate,'' the Americans, the researchers found, were more likely to accept the validity of the argument, separating its formal structure, that of a syllogism, from its content, which might or might not be plausible. Asians, in contrast, more frequently judged such syllogisms as invalid based on their implausibility -- not all animals with fur do in fact hibernate.
While the cultural disparities traced in the researchers' work are substantial, their origins are much less clear. Historical evidence suggests that a divide between Eastern and Occidental thinking has existed at least since ancient times, a tradition of adversarial debate, formal logical argument and analytic deduction flowering in Greece, while in China an appreciation for context and complexity, dialectical argument and a tolerance for the ''yin and yang'' of life flourished.
How much of this East-West difference is a result of differing social and religious practices, different languages or even different geography is anyone's guess. But both styles, Dr. Nisbett said, have advantages, and both have limitations. And neither approach is written into the genes: many Asian-Americans, born in the United States, are indistinguishable in their modes of thought from European-Americans.
Dr. Alan Fiske, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that experimental research like Dr. Nisbett's ''complements a lot of ethnographic work that has been done.''
''Anthropologists have been describing these cultures and this can tell you a lot about everyday life and the ways people talk and interact,'' Dr. Fiske said. ''But it's always difficult to know how to make sense of these qualitative judgments, and they aren't controlled in the same way that an experiment is controlled.''
Yet not everyone agrees that all the dissimilarities described by Dr. Nesbitt and his colleagues reflect fundamental differences in psychological process.
Dr. Patricia Cheng, for example, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that many of the researchers' findings meshed with her own experience. ''Having grown up in a traditional Chinese family and also being in Western culture myself,'' she said, ''I do see some entrenched habits of interpretation of the world that are different across the cultures, and they do lead to pervasive differences.''
But Dr. Cheng says she thinks that some differences -- the Asian tolerance for contradiction, for example -- are purely social. ''There is not a difference in logical tolerance,'' she said.
Still, to the extent that the studies reflect real differences in thinking and perception, psychologists may have to radically revise their ideas about what is universal and what is not, and to develop new models of mental process that take cultural influences into account.

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