Mitt Romney is Forest Gump

How must it feel to be Mitt Romney? His inability to inspire conservatives to embrace him must be intensely frustrating. This is the nerd who asks a pretty girl to the prom, and gets a response that if the following three guys don't ask, THEN she'll go with the nerd.

If you've seen Forest Gump, then you'll remember that Forest was in love with Jenny. Forest is Mitt, Jenny is conservatives. Forest was good for Jenny. Everytime we checked in on her, she was dating a musician, dating a biker, whatever - anyone but Forest. As much as she knew Forest was good for her, she ran after every flavor of the day.

Even after Forest and Jenny had sex (and conceived), Jenny took off for God-knows-where.

Well, eventually Jenny realized it was time to come home to Forest.

And then she died in his bed.

What does that mean? I don't know.

If I Were to Die Tomorrow...

I recently attended a national conference that had one excellent keynote address after the next. However, I took issue with one of the comments that a speaker made regarding the way you view your life.

The event happened a day after the death of Steve Jobs, and understandably it was on everyone's mind. The speaker referred to a suggestion I've heard many many times - wake up in the morning, and ask yourself what you would do differently if you knew that this was to be the last day of your life.

Coming on the heels of remembering the life of an extraordinary man, the message is clear - take a look at yourself in the mirror and change something. If you aren't living an extraordinary life now, you need to get on with getting on with things.

I really do understand the pursuit of excellence, but our society heaps a lot of unhappiness on people by helping them to understand what they aren't. I read a lot of self-help articles, and one gets hammered with this sort of advice in MBA school and through professional motivational speakers.

I believe something different - it takes a lot of work and introspection to truly appreciate what we are, what we contribute to our society, and to take great satisfaction in that. This doesn't suggest one doesn't strive to improve. But I think drawing a deeper, soulful look at what we often overlook - our impact on all of those around us - would ultimately lead to much greater satisfaction, happiness, and frankly increased motivation.

If I were to die tomorrow, it would be a damn shame. But I feel good about what I do, and I wouldn't do a thing differently.

Where is THIS in the management books?

I bet Tom Peters doesn't have these problems.

Its a Sunday morning here in Gaithersburg, Maryland and today I was to have an important phone call with a new, large potential client from Doha, Qatar. This project is intended to break new ground in our company and establish ourselves as important players in a new market. The phone call was to include my boss, and most of our client's Directors.

Sunday is the ideal time for me. Yes, 7:30am is early, but not for me - I love the mornings. The rest of the house was asleep, and just in case I asked my family not to disturb this call.

Someone forgot to tell the cat and dog.

At 7:15, I was all dressed in shirt, tie, and jacket (and jeans) and making sure I was online, skype working, etc. Winston, our cat, wandered in. Usually he wants a nice back rub and he'll leave me alone.

Not today. Today he wanted to play. He was bouncing around the office, jumping in and out of the carpet, and thumping around on the floor. I couldn't complete see him and but it made me smile. Its now 7:25

All of the ruckus coming from the cat woke up the dog. The dog needs to start his day with a backrub too, and can get pretty insistent about this. But instead, he decided to play with the cat. This eventually came around the desk where my Skype call was underway. Now 7:35

It turns out the source of all of this energy came from the fact that the cat brought me a gift - a live bird from outside. While my client is making points about sectoral studies and SWOT analysis, my cat is chasing after a bird and my dog is chasing the cat. Then the dog got the sent of the bird, and chased it under my desk. It was at this point that the dog wanted his ear scratched and the cat decided to kill the feather duster again.

Sufficiently excited, the dog started killing all of my wife's shoes again by shaking them violently in his mouth. That's when the bird disappeared behind my desk. All of this in my office.

This must be some sort of test of my ability to concentrate.

AMC TV Show "The Killing" Season One - A Review

I just got done watching "The Killing", a show that aired this spring
on AMC. I downloaded the season on Itunes, and provide a spoiler to
this review - I'm glad I did. There was a lot to like, and a lot I
think they could have done much better.

Its a homicide detective show, spread over a season - no longer
groundbreaking stuff. There's some sort of effort to have twists and
turns, but a lot of them felt contrived. I don't know that you need to
shock your audiences to tell a great story - see the Wire for great
storytelling of what is often the inevitable. (The police hook onto a
drug gang, by the end the police arrest the drug gang. Surprise!)

One thing I loved about the show was a hidden commentary that ran
throughout (until it was clumsily mangled in an effort to have a
surprise finish) - and that was family; more importantly losing
family. The theme meshed well with the dark rainy setting that was
supposedly Seattle (it doesn't rain like that, it mists usually in
Seattle).

Of course, we have our grieving family and we watch the toll the death
of their 17 year old daughter takes on them. We have two detectives,
each of them is losing family (or contemplating family they never
had). We have a "family" of politicians coming and going; and here and
there we get a glimpse of another dysfunctional family from time to
time. We got hints of a crime family, and a Somali community as well.

What I thoroughly enjoyed was the de-layering of the two detectives
and the father of the grieving family; the producers gave hints that
there was real depth to the problems these characters faced, and that
these problems were deeply rooted. The only great mysteries left
behind in this show (to me) were not "who killed Rosie Larson?"; but
the very mysteries that brought mainly three characters to where they
are today.

As further illustration that the plot (or the lack of a good one) was
not central to my opinion of the show, I felt the most compelling
episode by far was the one in which the two detectives drive around
the whole show looking for her son. That episode was an exquisite
plunge into the depths of human frailty and closets of skeletons.

I felt the acting was pleasantly understated which I much prefer. I
didn't like the female lead detective all that much, I loved the male
detective, and I had mixed emotions about the family. I just wish the
other characters could have been interesting enough to judge the
acting.

What I didn't like: unfortunately quite a bit:

1) The politicians were sooooo stereotypical, flat, lifeless, and
uni-dimensional. We spent enough time with them to get to know them -
and there was nothing there to know. In the final episode, the mayoral
candidate finally sheds some light on the mystery of his deceased wife
- and promptly kills the mystery, or at least the desire to know
whether there was a mystery. Blah

2) The Muslim terrorist angle was so gratuitous and unnecessary. It
was plain silly.

3) There were a lot of complaints about the continuous closeups of the
murdered girl's mother. Way too much time was spent on her, were the
complaints. I think she did an interesting job as an actress, but the
problem was it never went anywhere. It more looked like a graph of a
heartbeat than a character's arc. She was grieving when it started,
she was grieving when it ended. I'm not saying she shouldn't be,
but.... ooo kaaaa - we get it already

4) The final episode brought happy little endings to deep interesting
stories. Blah.

5) Virtually anyone that wasn't one of the detectives or the father
was simply uninteresting and stereotypical. I understand the problems
caused by the Wire to have developed some 30+ characters and the toll
that takes on the viewers, but seriously I could have handled a bit
more, particularly as slowly as they chose to develop the main
characters

My understanding is that there will be a second season. The good - I
would imagine we will learn more about our protagonists; the bad, we
have to continue this "Who killed Rosie Larson?" through a bunch more
contrived twists and turns until virtually every character introduced
on the show is a suspect at one point or another.

I will be there to watch the second season - but the show better have
its "A" game on. If you have the time to watch the first season I'd
encourage you to buy it and do it.

Alternative Fronts

I have, like everyone else, versions of my resume in Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx), Microsoft Word 2003 (.doc) for the technically challenged, .pdf format, and .txt if I need to upload it somewhere. But I recently saw a resume done completely in flash and it inspired me to look at alternatives to the standard.

I did a Google search on Flash Resume, and a few sites came up, nothing overwhelming. However there were two that I liked. One is called VisualCV. It looks an awful lot like a paper format which doesn't entirely excite me. Its got some neat feature on it to allow you to add on a few things you couldn't to a paper resume. I've done about half of it so far (its slow) and I'll probably finish it up. I'd be surprised if it gets much use. You can see it here. or the not too intuitive http://www.visualcv/nye43d0

The other thing I found - and this didn't come off the search, someone recommended it. Its at http://about.me. This is GORGEOUS done right, and you can randomly flip through profiles (and feel green with envy) at what someone who knows something about graphic design can do with this. I think this is the perfect front page for an electronic resume, and while it inhabits a different space than your cv up in the cloud or wherever, I absolutely love the combination of simplicity and potential beauty. I made my page at the much more intuitive http://about.me/marcshiman.

Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan Evalulation

I just spent the morning reading something that theoretically took 2 years to research and write. I find that a little hard to believe. The report frequently cites newspapers for its quantified facts and reports "conversations with officials" as fact. Stated differently, I now better understand Administrator Shah's dissatisfied with the current state of evaluations.

Besides lacking any specificity, this thing is just full of contradictions. It sure looks to me like it took the evaluators two years to find the supporting information for the Senators' pre-conceived notions. Some of the contradictions are a bit laughable.

Sustainability:

- "According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product (GDP) is derived from spending related to the international military and donor community presence"

and then

- "Focus on Sustainability."....The Afghan Government must have sufficient technical capability and funding to cover operation and maintenance costs after a project is completed.

If the foreign community is outspending the whole rest of the Afghan GDP by a factor of 32 times, the notion that somehow Afghan Government revenues are going to rise by a factor of say, 2000% over the next couple of years in order to take over these projects is pure science fiction. Ain't never gonna happen. There is no "sustainability" when foreign governments pump billions of dollars into poor countries. (The report actually used the word "Pump")

I don't mean to be simple-minded - but handing out money isn't usually a sustainable activity. It can't be made sustainable. "Sustainable" and "winning the hearts and minds" have no business being in the same zip code, never mind the same report.

Composition of Spending

- "After 10 years and roughly $18.8 billion in foreign aid..."

- "The US strategy is focused on building the capacity of the Afghan Institutions to deliver basic services. The State Department and USAID are currently spending approximately $1.25 billion currently on such efforts"

- "The State Department and USAID are spending approximately $320 million a month on foreign aid in Afghanistan...."

- "Roughly 80 percent of USAID's resources are being spent in Afghanistan's restive south and east. Most of the funds in Afghanistan's south and east are being used for short-term stabilization programs..."

These numbers don't add up well at all - but what bothers me is this - The US strategy is capacity building. But the vast sum of our resources is going elsewhere. That's just poor strategy execution. The rest of the money goes "to winning (buying) the hearts and minds of the Afghan people"

And Mr. Afghanistan Assistance Evaluator - how is our strategy doing? How well have we built the capacity of the Afghan Government? I can't seem to find this in your report. Is the problem that the Washington Post hasn't done this research for you yet? If you really want to effectively evaluate a program, you MUST ask whether or not we are achieving our strategy. Or am I missing something?

Its the Contractors Fault

- "By contracting with US and international contractors at western prices (the "primes") donor funds can be lost to corruption.....

against

The third most corrupt country in the world, trailing only Somalia and Myanmar is Afghanistan - Transparency International.

Apparently the Foreign Relations Committee feels that if US contractors were a country, they would be more corrupt than Afghanistan. Better to just deposit billions of tax-payer dollars in Afghanistan Government bank accounts and hope for the best, I guess. The Kabul Bank is cited for "massive fraud" (syphoning off 5% of the nation's GDP for shareholders). But it was Deloitte's fault for not reporting it! Better we put billions (that is billions with a "B") through institutions like the Kabul Bank than through companies like Deloitte given the comparison of the two offenses, concludes our Foreign Relations Committee.

Yes, our government wants to put Billions with a "B" of taxpayer's dollars through the third most corrupt country's budget (something we completely lost control of once done) rather than run it through American contractors because the contractors are difficult to manage.

My Recommendations

The report has some of its own recommendations - here are mine

1) If your strategy is to build the capacity of the government, then use the money for THAT.

2) Once you decide to focus on capacity building, measure that. This report makes absolutely no effort to measure the effectiveness of the US Strategy in Afghanistan.

3) Winning (Buying) the hearts and minds doesn't work. Stop it. If France came over to a poor community in the USA and handed out food, medicines, and Fiats would everyone suddenly become French?

4) Trust the people who have been doing this for 50 years. We have made mistakes over the years, but we've learned. I can't say this for all of the actors in Afghanistan, and I certainly can't say this for the newly formed, very corrupt Afghan Government.

Shame on the Foreign Relations Committee

USAID and its implementing partners have lost over 370 personnel in Afghanistan over the last 7 years

Administrator Rajiv Shah, Ninth Annual Princeton Colloquium to address ‘‘Rethinking U.S. Foreign Aid and Policy,’’ Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, April 9, 2011.

Turkish: We've lost Gorgeous George.

Brick Top: Well, where'd ya lose him? He's ain't a set of car keys, is he?

From the movie "Snatch", 2000

Buried deep in a footnote in The Foreign Relations' Committee's evaluation of foreign assistance in Iraq is the fact that 370 people lost their lives defending the principles of the United States through peaceful interventions. As one who works in the same profession in another country that puts me at risk of "getting lost" on a daily basis, The Foreign Relations Committee's evaluation of foreign assistance in Iraq is deeply offensive.

Let me begin by paying tribute to my fallen colleagues - a tribute our Senate has never even thought of paying - by suggesting these heroes' without guns contributions will never be forgotten by the small community of us that invest our lives in our neighbors' development to the benefit of the United States of America. Not a single one of these 370 lives came home in a flag-draped coffin; not a single one received a hero's welcome; none of us go on NBC during a football game to call our families over Thanksgiving.

If it were just the single wording of "...lost over 370 personnel" that was wrong with this report, this post would not be necessary. But the audacity of this Committee mentions this figure in the context of a report in which they refer to the contractors that employee these people as essentially more corrupt than the Afghan government (ranked the 3rd most corrupt country in the world behind Myanmar and Somalia), and describe many of the experts themselves as "expensive", "difficult to supervise", and "believing their allegiance is to the Afghan Ministry rather than the US Government".

At one point, this report cites the following editorial content from the Washington Post "There are a thousand Defense Department personnel for every one USAID employee around the world....inadequate civilian capacity means more American soldiers deployed and, regrettably, more dead and wounded". May 3, 2011.

So... what are we saying here? There should be more civilians deployed so they can die rather than our soldiers? Shall we deploy more unarmed and under-protected civilians in danger zones so that we get our armed and armored soldiers out of harm's way?

Senator Kerry, how can you and your senatorial colleagues have the bare audacity to bury AID worker's collective sacrifice to our country in a footnote in the same report you chastise them? This is frankly insensitivity of the grossest sort.

New Phrase: "Capacity Construction"

I've been thinking (despite the inherent dangers) and I feel that we should look at a new phrase: "Capacity Construction". We have long used the phrase "Capacity Building", but to me that doesn't describe what we really want to do. "Building" suggests to me showing up, putting some blocks on top and going home. "Construction" suggests building to a plan with a vision and a conclusion.

Whether I like it or not, the final two months of the Tatweer Project will come down to writing, writing, and more writing. Of course, its a project that demands it, and there is so much to be learned from it. Its actually a really great time for reflection, but reflection without writing it down anywhere is somewhat useless.

So as I'm going through all that we achieved in this giant capacity building project, I thought about the nature of projects that contain capacity building components - usually add-ons to some other activity that ensures sustainability. You build some schools, you teach other people to build schools. You open new agriculture markets, you show people how to open agriculture markets. Your main objective isn't to build capacity, and it isn't a clearly articulated portion of a larger overall plan to build capacity.

Tatweer had a blueprint for capacity construction. Delivering a training class was done as part of a much larger scheme to get a Ministry to function on its own. We were in the capacity construction business.

A path of Illusion

I found a bunch of paths to write about, and this is one of my favorite.

Obviously, the fall colors are stunning. The mountains ahead are breathtaking. It seems as if you can see forever as the day is clear.

The path is quite rocky though. If you have ever walked on such a path, you'll know that you have to move carefully so as not to injure yourself. You have to concentrate on the path and look down as you walk. You can stop to admire the scenery, but when you are moving you have to be careful.

You know where this path is going. Its headed for the mountains. Even though it seems you can see the mountains, they still remain a little mystical. You know when you reach them - and climb them - you can look down at the valley and all its magic and colors. Its hard not to have a sense of anticipation as you prepare yourself for the climb. The power of the mountains!

This is a way of lot of people choose to lead their lives. They live in a world of beauty all around them, but aspire for more. They choose a hard scrabble path to reach greater heights, and have to ignore the magic that is their journey. The golden grass set against the fiery red leaves are your children growing up, your spouse succeeding professionally, and just the wonderment of being alive.

To the left of the path is a slope downward, deeper into the valley. Its a sharp slope, something difficult to climb out of. We consciously fight the urge to stay on the path, imagining that those mountains are inaccessible from the floor of the valley. Clearly some people choose to leave the rocky path and choose to immerse themselves in the beauty that is all around them - you can see that from the two houses in the valley. These could be the metaphors for the retired stockbrokers - turned - innkeepers,

The power and the majesty of the mountains entices many to stay on the hard journey to the top. While you can see where you are headed, its still something of a mystery. However, as you get closer, the colors begin to fade. and the greyness takes over. If you get so far as to scale the hills into the mountains, you have to look back to see what life you've just lived.

Most literature suggests that you should live life in one of two places - either look ahead at your goals and live life for the future. Others suggest you look down at your feet and live for the present. I believe in the beauty of the journey.

I gotta get this off my chest - The Value of a College Degree

Over on LinkedIn.com, there's a group formed by a blog called Resumes Not Required. A question - a loaded question - was posed asking whether the reader would hire someone without a college degree. The implication was that since several dot com multi-billionaires don't have college degrees, that college is overrated.

There are a whole host of things that irritate me about this post and the rest of the dialog. Suffice it to say you can go to the board yourself and find all of my rantings and ravings.

But here's what is really bothering me: This is part of a trend in the United States that really bothers me. The George W. Bush / Sarah Palin "Plain Talk", make fun of the northeastern democrats with the big college degrees is a really scary trend in our country. While we struggle daily with our national competitiveness, some of our nations leaders (yes, I shuddered a bit at the thought), suggest that an education is not only unnecessary, but its a bad thing - something that makes it difficult for one to have a simple view of things.

This is so wrong on so many levels. One of the things that set our country apart in the 18th and 19th century from European powers at the time was the innovation of the state school - a institute of higher education designed to ensure that a university education was not only for the elite and that the masses now had access to lead the same lives of intellectual pursuits and leadership.

As I work in developing countries, I meet thousands of 20-somethings that would have loved to get an education in one of our state schools (never mind the Ivy League). And here I am in a thread arguing that even though Halle Berry got rich without a college degree, there is still value to the education universities provide!

Repeatedly, posters discuss the skills you learn in college and how they don't lead to improved performance on the job. YOU DON"T LEARN SKILLS IN COLLEGE. You don't learn Microsoft Outlook, you read Shaw. You don't learn to fill out DHL customs forms, you study comparative religion. You don't study French, you study French literature. You build a foundation for a deeper, richer life.

I fear this national trend. Really.