Pittsburgh to Erie Bike Trail

It's an exciting time for bike trails, they're sprouting up all around the country (generally the rail-to-trail variation). Here's a map of the proposed Pittsburgh-to-Erie Bike Trail:




There's a great trail website, and also a growing Yahoo Group.

This will be a great thing. It'll open up a lot of small communities to tourism, it'll make the overall network more valuable (there's a cross-Ohio trail under development that'll end near Erie), and it'll make Pittsburgh bicycling more visible.

Speaking of which (Pittsburgh bicycling), the Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen was held this morning, looks like they had nice weather for it. Photos will appear here.

"Roethlisberger" : Pittsburgh's Number One

Pittsburgh Schools Lead Nation In Ability To Spell 'Roethlisberger'

Way, way down at the bottom of the long, long list of things I am thankful for, I am thankful for the Onion:

"If you look at the data, our students were correctly spelling Roethlisberger only 43 percent of the time during the quarterback's rookie season," said Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl, who called the 2004 statistic an embarrassment. "In just five years, we have increased that number to 92 percent. That's 54 percent better than students in California, 35 percent better than those in Oklahoma, and 96 percent better than those in the Cleveland area, who tend to spell Roethlisberger by adding the letters 'u,' 'c,' and 'k' after the letter 's.'"

"The bottom line is the Pittsburgh school system is giving its students a leg up on the competition, not only in America, but throughout the world," Ravenstahl added. "Our kids correctly spelled Roethlisberger 12 times more often than all the students in Europe and Asia combined."

Hessians and Whores, Consultants and Contractors

I was not a very good student of history when I was young, and history is a lot like religion- if the last time you studied it you were in the 5th grade, then you probably are left with a 5th grader's perspective on the problem.

I first read about Hessians in 3rd grade, and here is what I remember: George Washington attacked the Hessians on Christmas morning while they were sleeping in their barracks after drinking on Christmas Eve. The Hessians were mercenaries, and the teacher explained that mercenaries were people who fought for pay; they didn't care about the issues, they just wanted to get paid. I remember thinking, stupid Hessians to get surprised like that.

When I was in 5th grade I heard about whores. I was hanging out on the corner and the older guys were referring to a whore, which their Brooklyn accent pronounced as "who-ahh". The next morning I asked my Dad, "what's a who-ahh"? He asked why I was interested, I explained, and then he said, "It's a lady who's not very nice. Leave it at that".

Sunday we went to my Aunt's house for a great big dinner - lots of relatives and kids, all in the big finished basement. I've always had a visceral dislike of screamers, and there were quite a few present. I was reflecting on how unpleasant this arrangement was, and there was an uncharacteristic silence in the roar. My Aunt started in with her shrill voice and I saw fit to announce, "Aunt ----, you are such a who-ahh."

This caused quite a commotion. I knew I needed to get out and started for the stairs, but my Dad got to me first and gave me some kinetic energy. I raced him to the front door but I had to stop to work the two locks, and he caught me and he was an instant from back-handing me when I said, "But you said..."

I am, to this day, amazed at his restraint. He put his hand down and said, "tell me exactly what you mean". And I replied, "You said whores are not-very-nice ladies, and you can hit me again but your sister is not a very nice lady!" He quietly told me to go wait in the car, and in a few minutes my family came out of the house and we went home. That night my Dad explained to me that there was more to it than he'd explained. His sister was, of course, a nice lady and a good Mom, maybe a bit loud. I thought I'd mention the story while we're on the topic.

Hessians and Whores are people that we pay to do ... essential tasks which we would normally induce others to do willingly. Relying on Hessians and Whores generally indicates that you're in a compromised, weak position, unable or unwilling to find support among your own people, so you're left to hiring mercenaries.

The Mercenary's Tale

Are mercenaries as reliable as having your own people willingly do these chores? Generally not. The role of the mercenary is not new, and neither are questions about their effectiveness and reliability. Niccolo Machiavelli dealt with mercenaries in The Prince, Chapter 12:

I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of (mercenaries). The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them because they always aspire to their own greatness; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined in the usual way.

And if you say that people will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to then the prince ought to go and perform himself as the captain, and the republic has to send its own citizens. Experience has shown that princes and their people make the greatest progress, and mercenaries do nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring down a republic armed with its own people, than it is to bring down one armed with mercenaries. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Switzers are completely armed and quite free.

And now I would discuss Italy, which has been ruled for many years by mercenaries. The first to use mercenaries was Alberigo da Conio. From the school of this man came Braccio and Sforza. After these came all the other captains who have directed the arms of Italy; and the result of all their valour has been that Italy has been overrun by Charles, robbed by Louis, ravaged by Ferdinand, and insulted by the Switzers.

The principle that has guided them has been, first, to lower the credit of infantry so that they might increase their own. They were unable to support many soldiers, so they were led to employ cavalry. Affairs were brought to such a pass that, in an army of twenty thousand soldiers, there were not to be found two thousand foot soldiers.

They did not attack towns at night, nor did the town garrisons attack encampments at night; neither would they campaign in the winter. All these things were permitted and devised by them to avoid both fatigue and dangers; thus they have brought Italy to slavery and contempt.

Mercenaries are not going to put themselves at risk for the client; their priority is (first) to look out for themselves and (second) to keep their good thing going. The only people who'll give their all for an organization (country or company) are people who have married their futures to the organization (ie, citizens, career employees).

Modernity: Consultants and Contractors

In the modern world, of course, we never use mercenaries (except for in Afghanistan and Iraq, where we use Blackwater and Halliburton). Today, rather than Hessians, organizations use Consultants and Contractors to do the things that they should rely on their own people to do.

Consultants

Consultants are generally hired by management to do something they don't understand or can't deal with. Often, the consultant is a hired gun brought in from the outside to reduce headcount, or replace the company's people with other mercenaries. The consultant's highest priority when they get inside the business is to identify their next consulting opportunity. They have completely different priorities than management, and yet often management hands over the reins to them.


Of course, when I talk about consultants I don't mean the people on consulting teams - the one or two grey-beards who understand the business, or the half-dozen fresh young graduates who make and mouth the powerpoints - I mean the corporations who pretend to be honest brokers but who are really there for the money, and for next year's money, too. If the consultant's idea doesn't work, they do a study (billable hours, of course) and discover: the fault is elsewhere! The organization is resistant to change!

Contractors

Contractors are mercenaries who are brought in to do parts of the work that the population used to do - in the work environment, they replace a portion of the workforce. Contractors will say that this allows the Company to "focus on their value-adding core competencies", but the employees that remain will tell you that it's a headcount game that replaces a full colleague with a limited contractor, who has their own priorities and expectations.

Please do not confuse what I'm saying with an ad hominem attack on individuals who work as contractors. Pursuing my "whore-metaphor", the John is the organization who has a need they cannot satisfy, and the Whore is the Contractor (the corporation) that offers to do certain things for certain prices, knowing that there's an upsell and a re-sell (and maybe a cross-sell) in the near future. The John suspends his own disbelief to convince himself that this is going to be the real thing, and becomes invested in the "good or better" narrative. The Contractor is going to take the agreed price and discover more and more needs which all must be filled, and maybe find some jewelry in the process.

I'd like to revisit Machiavelli: you're never going to get mercenaries to give you the same performance as your own self-motivated people.

---

Here's this week's example, all from the national news outlets: The Story Behind the Flight-Plan System Crash. At one time, the air traffic system relied on a robust, redundant series of dedicated phone lines that had backup power supplies, backup routers, etc. This 24x7, bullet-proof system was a crown jewel, and it was not inexpensive.

A Consultant suggested Uncle Sam could save money using Contractors and off-the-shelf systems. In 2001, the Bush Administration gave a Contractor (Harris) a $2.4 Billion dollar contract to run the Federal Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI), and they're responsible for keeping the system working.

When the system went down on Nov.19th, it took hours for Harris' technician to drive out and replace the network card that caused the failure. If it hadn't been an outsourced system, it would have been fixed in minutes.

Of course, the contractors aren't taking any blame. The press releases blame the outage on old equipment, but the real blame should fall on the decision to outsource maintenance of a critical system.

If this was an in-house system, accountable people would have gotten the system back online within minutes, and there would not have been a national impact. As an outsourced system, the Contractor has a cost motivation to keep staffing trimmed, and is committed to the contract more than to the organization's mission.

Most of the nation's airline system was delayed because of a Consultant's idea and a Contractor's priorities. Neither will be held accountable. Let's pay attention before the whole business goes over to the Hessians and Whores.

A Failure We Might Learn From

I believe in studying failure rather than success. My favorite wall poster (I have a copy both in my office and in my home) is Minart's chart depicting Napoleon's failure in Russia. Napoleon was such a smart guy, and yet he projected himself directly into this whopping failure.

As I've written before in my review of "The Logic of Failure" (excellent book, btw), there's a lot of failure out there and it's often well documented.

Success, on the other hand, is talked about more but often wrapped in myth and obscurity. Success sells - if you look at the "management" section at a bookstore, there's a lot more "success stories" then "debacle diaries™". It seems like nobody succeeds because of "good luck", usually success is driven by the right blend of personal virtue, a shoeshine, and a ready smile.

Curiously, a lot of failures are attributed to "bad luck" or to other people, and very few failures are assigned to personal flaws, hubris, or bad decisions. You'd think that luck would have a balanced 50/50 impact, but in the literature it seems like luck only causes failures. Anyway, I like to study failures. Here's a true story of a failure from this week's news:

In 1995, a registered nurse named Susette Kelo bought a small, pink, 100-year old clapboard house in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London, Connecticut. New London was (and remains) a deteriorating town that has seen a long time pass since its glory days with the whaling industry. A big fiscal problem for New London is that most of its land is held by three tax-exempt colleges.


Hoping to improve the city, New London created a "New London Development Corporation" (NLDC) which planned to seize a 9-acre neighborhood in order to induce Pfizer to develop a 26-acre industrial park. Pfizer would also receive an 80% discount on their real estate taxes for 10 years.

Under the threat of seizure, most homeowners sold to the NLDC. Seven homeowners resisted the seizure in the courts. Susette Kelo became the spokesman for the holdouts, who argued that eminent domain was appropriate for public works — highways, trains, and public health — but not for economic development.

In Kelo v. the City of New London, a 5-to-4 Supreme Court majority opinion held that promoting economic development met the “public use” clause of the Fifth Amendment and supported the condemnations. The NY Times editorial board, by the way, really liked the Supreme Court decision.

In a dissenting opinion Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded.” Justice Clarence Thomas called New London’s plan “a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation.”

The houses were destroyed, the families forced to move, and the neighborhood was erased. A local citizen bought Kelo's condemned house for $1 and moved it to another location, where it now bears a sign indicating its provenance:


This is what the peice of land that Kelo's house occupied now looks like:


After the houses were destroyed, nothing happened. No R&D complex, no gentrified condos, no influx of high-net-worth PhDs. Nothing. This week brought news from Pfizer:


Pfizer announced this week their intention to abandon the project and close the offices it has in New London; the homes were razed but the research park and office complex was never built. What happened? There was a change; Pfizer acquired Wyeth for $67 billion, and the NewCo had surplus office space. The corporate priority had shifted. They didn't need that land anymore. From the NY Times:

For its part, Pfizer said it had no stake in the outcome of the Kelo case nor any interest in the development of the land that was acquired by eminent domain, according to a statement provided by a spokeswoman, Liz Power.

Remarkably, Pfizer's exit from New London is synchronized exactly with the expiration of their tax discount. Where are they going? Across the river to Groton, where the discount persists.

From the 11/13 New York Times:

From the edge of the Thames River in New London, Conn., Michael Cristofaro surveyed the empty acres where his parents’ neighborhood had stood, before it became the crux of an epic battle over eminent domain. “Look what they did,” Mr. Cristofaro said on Thursday. “They stole our home for economic development. It was all for Pfizer, and now they get up and walk away.”

I mention this for at least these reasons:

• I really am a student of failure, I think failure teaches more than success.
  
• I think this shows what happens when you deal with Corporations. With businesses you can do your due diligence and rely on them; there's often a real person who's name is on the shingle. Generally people are trustworthy if you build the deal right. Corporations, on the other hand, are amoral legal entities chasing continually evolving definitions of profitability, strategy, and their market. Businesses have skin in the game; corporations don't. I'd like to restate this into an expression you may see here again: Business people good; corporations bad.
  
• I think this shows what happens when Government (in this case, the City of New London) set up quasi-agencies to do hard things. Government is accountable; the voters select the players, and the voters will fire them at the next election if they screw up. The development corporation had the opportunity to take action at no personal risk, without accountability, and - by the way - they're only successful if change happens. That's a recipe for a crapshoot, and usually these situations are not amenable to those odds.
  
• I see echoes of USAirways in this.
  

Consigning Ayn Rand to the Dustbin of History

I believe I am now done with Ayn Rand, but before consigning her to the dustbin of history*, I'd like to present a light-hearted retrospective of her work, lest we be all sturm und drang .



It's just ludicrous to me that people would justify dismantling the world's finest air traffic control system based on Ayn Rand's thoughts -- and if this is the best justification they could identify, then perhaps there really isn't any justification for it.

I'm going to stop beating this dead horse now, and move on to discussing the corporate greed and practical implications of Corporatizing the ATC system.

* that's a quote from Trotsky, I thought it was appropriate.