Four smart guys look at the future of newspapers

David Warsh is somewhat optimistic:

Traditional print journalism, rooted in newspapers’ semi-monopolies on advertising and information, has been teasing apart, becoming dis-integrated, for nearly a century ever since the first radio station broadcast the news and accompanied it with “commercials.” The advent of television was another inflection point, but posed no threat to newspapers’ help-wanted and classified advertising; the advent of the Internet has been quite another matter. The best newspapers seem certain to survive the onslaught of the World Wide Web. Probably they will retain their primacy at the top of the explanatory chain their presentation can’t be beat; they come out only once a day; paper-and-ink corporeality means they can’t be changed; and printing presses, delivery networks and reputation all form formidable barriers to entry against competition. But newspapers of the future will be slimmed-down versions of their former selves, web-savvy, their print editions aimed mostly at elites.

Nicholas Carr is more pessimistic:

As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.

R. S. McCain is extremely gloomy:

You can talk about online news until you're blue in the face, but it won't change the fact that Americans now read much less than they once did.

What is happening to newspaper circulation is simply this: As older readers die off, they are not being replaced by younger readers.

The reason for that is that young people -- and by that, I mean, people under 40 -- don't read nearly as much as do their elders. And it has nothing do with print vs. online. If you are under 40 and reading news online, you are an exception, a rarity, among your peers.

Why has the reading habit declined among those under 40? First it was cable TV, then it was the VCR, now the DVD -- and you could add video games to that list -- the increased availability of on-demand video has accustomed young people to process information that way. Just as reading is habit-forming, TV is also habit-forming, and the TV habit has flourished at the expense of reading.

American Digest is as gloomy as McCain, but also wildly happy:

Of course, the real elephant drooling in the room of newspapers like the Seattle Times these days is "the forgotten reader." These are the potential readers who, because of the unremitting liberal tone and slant of the Times in both the news hole and on the editorial page, loathe the Times and the whole sector of Seattle society it represents.

Now you may say, in a town as overwhelmingly liberal as Seattle, "Screw those troglodyte, Republican morons!" Well, you can say that but then you will, sooner or later, fire 200 of your employees. And that will be only the start.

Why? Because in an "overwhelmingly liberal town" you are talking about, at most, around 55% of the potential readership that agrees with you. This means you are leaving about 45% of potential readership out of the equation altogether. King County has about 2 million people. That means that 45% of potential readership is not at all a trivial number, and yet the Seattle Times takes every opportunity to alienate them. Result: Mass sackings and many millions lost.

And yet the Seattle Times, as well as numerous other newspapers now dying in the US, never ever cops to its point of view as the reason why it is failing.

FWIW, I hope Warsh is right, but I fear that McCain is on to something when it comes to the death of reading.

I do disagree with one point he makes:

Having been in the newspaper business since 1986, I have unfortunately had a ringside seat to watch the industry's decline. And the reason I know that liberal bias is not a sufficient explanation for this decline is the fact that small "hometown" newspapers -- which have never reflected the liberalism that plagues the major metro dailies -- have suffered equally, if not worse, from the decline.

I’ve lived in a bunch of different places over the years. Some were liberal communities (Madison, Wisconsin) while others were conservative (Carlisle, Charlotte). In every city and town, however, the local paper was and is more liberal than the community it serves. In Madison, the papers were very liberal, Here in Carlisle the Sentinel is only a little to the left of center. This is a striking stance, though, in a community that voted for Bush 60/40 in two elections.


The fact that newspapers tilt left is not the only reason they are declining. For a large part of the market, however, it is a net negative. It is one more hurdle that they have to clear in order to convince the non-reader to buy their product.

The biggest problem is that technology and social trends have destroyed their raison d’etre. Much of the “news” that fills their pages is not NEW when the reader gets to it. It has been on cable TV, radio and the Internet for hours. The headlines are familiar while the wire copy adds little depth.

A newspaper might have value as a trusted aggregator of stories. It could deliver value by providing more depth than competing media. Both “solutions” run into internal barriers in newspapers, as they exist today. Their liberal tilt undercuts their trustworthiness so that many readers do not trust their news judgment. The endless rounds of cut backs in the newsrooms leave them with few resources to upgrade the quality of their content.

Perhaps their greatest weakness is that there are no great editors trying to create something new and better.

Readers are important, but advertising revenue is the key to newspaper viability. There are two areas the industry could address in order to shore up their long-term position.

1. Develop better online advertising. One reason that web revenue cannot offset losses from the print side is that many advertisers cannot use it for brand marketing. The click-through, direct response model works great for cheap car insurance and male enhancement supplements. It is less effective for cars, beer, clothing, etc. As readers move to the web, some of the biggest advertisers cannot follow: they have to advertise in other venues.


It is incumbent on newspaper publishers to find and promote online advertising method/styles that will work for a wide range of products. Agencies will not do it because they are agnostic when it comes to media platform. If newspapers want better advertising they have to find and promote it on their own.

2. The self-referencing “professionals” in the advertising industry overvalue people like themselvesyoung, urban, single, childless, iconoclastic. They undervalue those who are different. Advertising spending is shaped by this prejudice. Marketers believe that commercials have to target young, hip influentials while older suburban consumers are a lost cause.

Newspapers and broadcast television are penalized because their readers/viewers are discounted. Agencies expect to pay less to reach an older audience.

There is very little hard data to bolster this advertising conceit. It makes sense for newspapers to attack this idea and demonstrate that their print readership is a valuable target market for a vast array of products.

They cannot expect the advertising industry to do it for them. That runs counter to the industry’s self-image. Further, it would also reveal the fact that the typical agency is a one-trick pony that hasa no idea how to reach people over 40.

See also:

The newspaper: Today and tomorrow

UPDATE: R.S. McCain comments further here.

The enemies of transformation

Interesting article on the barriers to corporate transformation:

Transform Your Company For Growth

Most efforts at transformation fail miserably. This unnerving and frustrating reality should not be a surprise--after years of pervasive "continuous improvement" programs, executives are reaping what they have sown. Their organizations, from executives down through the rank and file, have been motivated and compensated to focus on incremental improvement, measured quarterly and annually, along competitive performance parameters established years earlier.

To expect this system to create the breakthrough innovations that power transformation is simply unrealistic. Years of continuous improvement training have caused corporate innovation muscles to atrophy.

To ascertain the scope of the transformation challenge, our company, Innosight, surveyed more than 300 managers, directors, vice presidents, and senior leaders from a wide range of companies. We asked these practitioners whether their companies were walking the walk or just talking the talk around their transformation efforts. Did they have the necessary focus, tools and talent to drive meaningful growth from within?
Their answers are sobering for any executive telling investors about their deep commitment to "growth through innovation." Most survey respondents said their companies are struggling with transformation and they don't know quite what to do about it.

I took a crack at the subject here:

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable


Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (Part Two)


Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (III)

This sounds like an interesting book

The Lessons of Business History: A Handbook

Over the last few decades, business historians have generated rich empirical data that in some cases confirms and in other cases contradicts many of today's fashionable theories and assumptions by other disciplines, says Harvard Business School professor Geoffrey Jones, who edited the volume with University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jonathan Zeitlin.

But unless you were a business historian, this data went largely unnoticed, and the consequences were not just academic.

"This loss of history has resulted in the spread of influential theories based on ill-informed understandings of the past," says Jones.

For example, current accepted advice is that wealth and growth will come to countries that open their borders to foreign direct investment. "The historical evidence shows clearly that this is an article of faith rather than proven by the historical evidence of the past," says Jones.

Newspapers, mental blinders, and business models

My local paper is making some radical changes in what they do. The accent is on “local” with national and international news a secondary offering.

The editor put it this way in her Sunday column:

Starting Monday, local news leads off the paper, and national/world news will take the back seat.

Overall, that seems like a smart idea. It’s a solution media bloggers have been promoting for several years. It lets newspapers compete in an arena where they have a comparative advantage over cable TV and the internet.

Basic marketing stuff; reposition your product so you can leverage a competitive advantage. So far, so good.

If there is a worm in the apple, it lies in the mental blinders journalists wear, blinders that are rooted in the myths that adhere to journalistic culture. Simply put, what journalists do differs sharply from what they think they do.

That divergence shows up later in her column, in a throwaway piece of self-congratulatory boilerplate:

It’s not for nothing that some wise person said a long time ago that publishing a newspaper means inventing an entirely new product from scratch every single day. A car manufacturer can’t say that and could you imagine what it would be like to drive a vehicle produced that way? But you can’t imagine publishing a vital newspaper on an assembly line.

That sounds nice, but it is clearly untrue. Putting out a daily paper involves a lot of rote activity. Nor do readers expect an “entirely new product” each morning.

On the latter point, McLuhan said it best:

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

On the production side, Scott Shane of The New York Times offers a decidedly unheroic view of his craft:

A typical daily reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day.

From this perspective, the problem for a local newspaper editor is very similar to those faced by a manager of an industrial concern. In a nutshell, how do you manage a group of employees doing boring work for low pay so that you can make a product customers will pay for?


See also:

The newspaper today and tomorrow

UPDATE:Robert Stacy McCain lays out the grim economics of the modern newsroom:

Honing the ax

The real value of simplicity

Analysis of Paralysis

If your strategy doesn't help employees act, it's not a strategy.

"Keep it simple, stupid." That's the advice every executive has received on how to share strategy with employees. The subtext is often, "Keep it simple, because your people are stupid." But you don't need to embrace simplicity just so your people can comprehend your message. The point of simplicity is more fundamental: Simplicity allows people to act.

This might be the the number one cause of strategic failure in business. A major reason for this is the overly intellectual approach that B-schools take toward strategy.

See more here:

GWB and his MBA


Waiting for our Clausewitz


Clausewitz (II)

Marketing malpractice

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on the troubles at Wendy’s.

AFTER DAVE ($)
How Wendy's Faltered, Opening Way to Buyout

The latest wave of TV ads for Wendy’s leave me scratching my head. The slacker/stoner dude in red pigtails looks like he belongs in a Saturday Night Live parody of Wendy’s, not in a real commercial. There is smart edgy and then there is stupid and pointless pretending to be edgy. Apparently, the people at Wendy’s and at Saatchi and Saatchi cannot distinguish the two.

The commercials are more than bad. They consciously mock the pillars of the Wendy’s consumer image. Hence, they undermine the brand.

The mind boggles. Companies spend millions to build a brand. Then there is Wendy’s which spends millions to destroy a brand that was cultivated over thirty years.

The CEO is now “embattled”. Big surprise. You have to wonder about her leadership ability and basic people skills. What kind of idiot approves an ad campaign that mocks a family member of the beloved founder? A family member, moreover, that the company is named after.

Diseconomies of scale

Originally posted 7-24-04

While we often read about economies of scale, we probably should pay more attention to the diseconomies of scale.

When a solid sphere doubles its radius, its surface area increases 300% while its mass goes up 700%. The same ratio seems to affect organizations. As they grow, the center becomes more remote from the surface-the part that actually is in contact with customers, competitors, and new technology. The gravitational pull of the increased mass draws more and more efforts inward where they focus on internal processes, procedures, rules, expenses, and politics.

Internal forces soon overwhelm the organization's ability to respond intelligently to external events. As Jack Welch puts it, the company "has its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer." An odd posture to be sure since as Peter Drucker has preached for a half-century "the only profit center is a customer whose check hasn't bounced."

Costs Versus Expenses

It is counterintuitive to include expense control as one of the driver's of diseconomies of scale. How can saving money be bad?

There is a big difference between costs and expenses. Accountants, for example, rarely quantify the costs (in lost revenue) of inertia, strategic indecision, or product delay. They can easily calculate money saved using less expensive materials, but they rarely capture the erosion in brand equity which results from using inferior materials. Accountants are willing to spend time to save money even though we know that is usually better to be first to market.

If effective employment of intellectual capital is the key success factor in the new economy, then should training and education be an expense or investment? And where do most accounting departments put it?

Furthermore, most cost containment exercises are Mickey Mouse. They focus on little items like office supplies, travel, and training budgets. As such they are Band-Aids and placebos. Managers get to feel like they are doing something while big issues are ignored.

Moreover, an expense focus is a continuation of a nineteenth century mindset. It presumes that customers are grateful to have something rather than nothing. But the days are long gone when the typical customer will happily lineup for black Model T's simply because they are cheap. We have, as consumers, come to expect more choices and new products. Squeezing out expenses threatens a company's ability to compete on these other dimensions customers care about.

But what's the first lever executives reach for when trying to improve profits?

For 40 years after the end of Prohibition Schlitz was America's best-selling beer. Then they decided to change the formula so it would brew faster (i.e. cheaper). The new formula changed the beer's taste and customers deserted in droves. By 1984 nobody drank Schlitz anymore.

Notional Benefits, Real Problems

Take this everyday example of the center becoming a drag on performance.

The organization decides "leverage its buying power" to reduce costs. At the outset, everything sounds great. Centralized buying promises increased profits because costs will go down while responsiveness and quality will not change one iota. With great fanfare, a new purchasing process is put in place and new experts appointed to oversee it. But the benefits are only notional.

The purchasing staff quickly makes suppliers aware of the new decision criteria. The latter get with the program and focus on delivering low costs. Quality service and responsiveness usually suffer because they are less quantifiable than price and because the purchasing unit is too removed from the action to gauge the non-quantifiable dimensions of the product. (If they can't graph it, it doesn't exist).

Often, the central buyers become an internal police force- shoving standardization on diverse business units so that order quantities can be increased and inventories managed more efficiently. But standardization can create products that fail in the marketplace because they are neither fish nor fowl.

GM experienced this when they consolidated platforms. In theory this allows multiple divisions to utilize the same basic components with immense savings in research, engineering, and tooling. The result was the Cadillac Cimmeron-a Chevy Cavalier with minor changes and a high price. Not only did it flop in the marketplace; it inflicted grievous harm to Cadillac's image as a premium product. Even today, standardization has created look-alike models which have strong appeal to no particular segment. GM sales are lackluster. They keep losing share.

Ford faced similar dilemmas as it pursued the white whale of the "world car"-a single model that can be sold in dozens of countries in great quantities. But the Ford Escort was too bland and under-powered to sell at a profit in the US. At the same time, it was too large and expensive to be successful in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Centralization also creates political problems. Like courtiers around the throne HQ staffs create suspicion between the center and the market frontier. They usually have influence, sometimes they are responsible for some expense lines. But they do not have responsibility for any whole project. The line managers, who do have that responsibility, have to deal with the marketplace and the central staff. No surprise, often the latter gets the most attention.

Peter Drucker has written of management's "degenerative tendency" to focus on internal and operational data, to the exclusion of the more important and more strategic information about customers, competitors, and technology. Centralization and defused authority feed this tendency and exacerbate the problems it causes.

Sales versus relationship marketing

David Maister discusses the critical differences:

Fat Smoker Principles: Build Relationship Plans Not Sales Plans

A puzzle with a purpose

Rob at Business Pundit asks little question that is more important than it first appears:

During World War II, statistician Abraham Wald tried to determine where to add extra armor to airplanes. Based on the patterns of bullet holes in returning airplanes, he suggested that the parts not hit should be protected with extra armor. Why?

Fad-surfing and corralled rebellion

One of the big banks I worked for built a brand new campus for our division. At the time, we were growing but faced many strategic challenges: aggressive competitors were forcing prices down, our credit management area was struggling, our cost structure was higher than the industry leaders, and we were “blessed” with antiquated IT systems.

Yet for six months the new campus was the hot management topic. There would be no offices. Just small cubicles with low walls and lots of open space. There would be all these tables and the tables had rollers so people could just slide them together and collaborate. That was going to spark creativity and innovation and make us a great company.

The whole thing looked like a giant call center that was having a yard sale.

After it was completed, senior managers and visitors came by for tours. They admired the radical design and heard about all the benefits. This was The Bank of the Future. No hierarchy. No department boundaries. Easy collaboration. The dawning of a new age.

Unfortunately, the radical space did not help us address the strategic issues. Competitive pressures increased; credit problems got ugly. Still, we got a fair amount of publicity for our innovative office design. Executives were always happy to talk about that.

The same thing happened with Chiat/Day, the advertising agency. There was a time when they got more press for office space than they did for the ad campaigns they produced for clients.

During the dot-com boom, corporate types were inordinately proud of their internet rebels. All sorts of stodgy companies started bragging about their counter-cultural web geeks housed in funky spaces. For those who did not want to buy their own rebels, consultants like Scient were happy to rent them out.

Much of the impetus for this behavior was just the usual cluelessness and fad surfing. A lot of it was PR: “ACME Widgets isn’t your father’s boring old widget-maker. We get the Web. Look! See there? Our web-designer has a shaved head and wears a nose ring. Check out the goth chick who does our online advertising.”

I think that something else was happening as well. Dig a little bit and you can see the denial hiding behind the radicalism. Executives realized that their company needed to change. They sense that real change, fundamental change, is hard. So they opted for something softer. They would do something that appeared radical, but they would fence it off from the rest of the company. Or they would make dramatic changes but only in superficial matters like desk arrangement.

In short, they would corral the rebellion while they talked of revolution. That way, they never had to change much of anything that really mattered. All the while they could reassure each other that they were bold, and innovative, and cutting edge.

The mark of a great editor

In his book Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe describes the birth of a new, soon to be famous magazine. In 1963 Wolfe was working at the New York Herald-Tribune and was a part-time writer for its Sunday supplement, Today's Living. The new magazine began with an impertinent question by its editor:

Look… we're coming out once a week, right? And The New Yorker comes out once a week, right? And we start the week the same way they do, with blank paper and a supply of ink. Is there any reason why we can't be as good as The New Yorker? Or better? They're so damned dull.

The supplement changed its name to New York. While it may not have challenged The New Yorker for prestige, it was a remarkable success. It survived as a stand-alone magazine after the newspaper folded. It ran some memorable pieces including Wolfe's masterful "Radical Chic". It certainly was not dull. (The New Yorker tacitly recognized New York's advantage on that score when it made Tina Brown its editor.)

Felker, then, succeeded and his success grew from his willingness to ask an impertinent question.

It is a lesson G.B. Shaw understood very well:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

All progress depends on the unreasonable man. Sometimes I think that one of the key problems for the MSM is that the top editors and executives are exceedingly reasonable men and women. They recognize the hard realities of declining readership and flat revenues. They have accommodated the bean counters and recognize that resources are scarce. Most importantly, as all reasonable people know, fewer resources mean lowered ambitions.

Only an outrageously unreasonable editor like Felker would dare challenge The New Yorker on a shoe string budget. Of course, only an outrageously unreasonable editor could create a new, successful magazine out of the ashes of a dying newspaper.

The hidden path to innovation

This is one of the most interesting articles i've seen on innovation.

The Weakest Link

by Nicholas G. Carr

A product’s vulnerabilities can point the way to lucrative new business opportunities.

When you think of modern aircraft, you think of big things: massive turbine engines, great expanses of sheet metal, elaborate electronic and hydraulic systems. Yet it was a very small thing — a two-cent piece of rubber — that played a crucial role in determining the shape and speed of today’s planes. And the story of that piece of rubber reveals an important lesson about the path of technological advances and the focus of business innovation.

An important and overlooked part of strategic planning

David Maister: Are We In This Together? The Preconditions For Strategy

Managers build their plans and strategies on the assumption that people in their firm are ready and willing to be team players, acting collectively to create or achieve something in the future.

The truth, however, is that these attitudes cannot be assumed to exist. In fact, they may even be relatively scarce. In many firms — perhaps even most — these preconditions for strategy may not exist.

It is hard to identify and create buy-in for what “we” (i.e., the firm) should do if there is no strong sense of “we” — a mutual commitment and sense of group loyalty and cohesiveness. Similarly, it can be meaningless if the members of the firm are not committed to go on a journey together into the future.

Useful creativity

This book looks like a real winner.

Lightning in a Bottle: The Proven System to Create New Ideas and Products That Work

The authors are consultants and their website offers a capsule case study that makes for interesting reading

Going by my own experience, a great deal of wasted effort could be saved by their methods.

I once worked for a company that wasted nine months and big consultant fees brainstorming and refining new growth strategies. The “consensus” altenative was to enter a huge new (to us) market. The problem was that the market had entrenched competitors and slim margins. (But it was huge!)

A majority of the management team kept gravitating to that alternative as a solution for all our growth challenges. It took eight months to bring the real finance professionals into the loop. Once they crunched the numbers, the idea was dead.

The company wasted two strategic planning cycles because of their dilatory ways. In the first one, the mesmerizing idea of a huge new market kept them from dealing with the root problems in their core markets. The second cycle became a mad scramble to find a way to meet the profit shortfall created when the root problems worsened and the new growth failed to materialize.

MacArthur said that “councils of war breed timidity”. In business, this timidity can hide behind a mask of bold future possibilities. Brainstorming becomes a means to avoid confronting the hard realities of the present.

GWB and his MBA redux


Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants writes:

George W. Bush is the first president to have a master's degree in business administration. Let's hope he's the last.

I like President Bush, and I support most of what he’s trying to do. But I'm amazed, astonished and appalled by the stumbling, bumbling way he often goes about it. The friends as well as the critics of this administration have reason to wonder whether these guys can organize a two car funeral.

RTWT.

Last year i wrote this about Bush and his training at the HBS:

The last couple of years of any administration are difficult. The habits of mind that GWB formed at HBS might make his especially difficult.

This is one of those times i wish i had been wrong.

See also:

The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy

David Maister on changing minds

My experience has been that those who seem to like my work most tend to be people who already share my underlying assumptions (about professionalism, people and passion, to name only three things.) Those who do NOT share my assumptions do not seem to appreciate my work, and neither read my work nor hire me for consulting or seminars. I tend not to have the chance to engage in debates with those I would most like to reach - those who do not share my world view and might benefit from considering it. And, of course, vice versa.

RTWT here.

Related:

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable

Part I
Part II
Part III

Knowledge management waves the white flag

The December Harvard Business Review runs a brief piece on knowledge management titled What’s Your Return on Knowledge?

KM once promised gargantuan cost savings and enormous gains in productivity. The kind of thing that corporations are good at measuring. But now, the bloom is off the rose and the KMers do not like those hard numbers that determine the ROI of their panacea.

Leaders of the knowledge-based organizations that have the most vibrant KM programs approach the measurement problem by accepting soft indicators that knowledge management is earning its keep rather than demanding hard numbers that may be misleading. They do insist that the programs be evaluated, but they accept anecdotes about successful (or failed) knowledge reuse, stories of productive (or unproductive) collaborative projects, and surveys of employee and customer satisfaction as the best indicators of value.

Program evaluation by anecdote. At the same time consultants are scrutinizing marketing programs in great detail with hard numbers, their brethern want their pet internal projects to get by with soft metrics.

One more example of the problem noted in #8 below.

Rerun Season

Originally posted Wednesday, August 06, 2003

The Meaning of Defeat and the Utility of Victory

An interesting discussion on US military prowess and how it shapes post-war outcomes is going on. It was kicked off with this post by Vodka Pundit and then this response by One Hand Clapping.

I find myself agreeing with Vodka Pundit when he says:

Need to understand why West Germany gave up on Nazism? Because it got every single one of their major cities reduced to rubble, courtesy of the 8th Air Force and the RAF.

The high price Germans paid for Hitler's adventures drove a wedge between the Nazis and the German people. It was not just that the Nazis were evil (Germans managed to ignore that in 1941), it was that they betrayed the German people and allowed them to be crushed, starved and raped.

But he loses me when he writes

Want to know why West Germans feared Soviet tanks? Because they saw firsthand what Patton's tanks could do.

Sorry, the Germans feared Soviet tanks because they had firsthand knowledge about the Red Army. They saw more Russian tanks than American tanks. Berlin, after all, did fall to Zhukov, not Patton.

OHC rightly points out that the

Fighting the modern way is certainly not more difficult than before. It is not easy - Stephen is right that war is never easy - but to imply that this year's Iraq campaign was somehow more difficult than, say, the Normandy invasion or the Battle for Manila is just plain wrong. America's modern way of war enables us to defeat the enemy much faster than ever, and there is no way that means war is more difficult than it was, oh, at the Battle of Gettysburg.

But modern US commanders do face one factor that was not present in World War Two or the Civil War. Patton and Nimitz did not have worry about the political fallout of operational victory. During the August 1944 breakout, the German army tried to escape from the Falaise pocket before Allied armies encircled them. Tactical air power and artillery pounded the retreating Germans. Yet there was no domestic outcry in the US about the uneven combat with a retreating enemy. This is in stark contrast to the "Highway of Death" hysteria in 1991.

The American way of war calls for the deployment of overwhelming firepower at the decisive point to win rapid victory with a minimum of casualties. That used to mean American and civilian casualties. Today it means enemy combatants as well. This is a complexity the World War Two and Civil War generals did not face.

OHC also writes that

The Iraqi soldiers who survived the war this year are not claiming that they were not really defeated. Many of them have been beaten by the US twice - 1991 and 2003. They know they were beaten badly and could not have prevailed even with better generalship. Modern technology enabled us to defeat Iraq's military without killing enormous casualties among Iraqis.

As i read this i was reminded of an incident Col. Harry Summers related in On Strategy. After the ceasefire in South Vietnam, an American officer said to an NVA officer, you never defeated us on the battlefield. His counterpart replied, that is true, but it is also irrelevant. (Paraphrasing from memory here).

Victory on the battlefield does not automatically mean that we gain our strategic objectives.

Clausewitz wrote that "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will" . In Iraq I, our victory compelled the Iraqi's to leave Kuwait and also allowed us to destroy much of their WMD program. However, in Iraq II, we have the much more difficult challenge of creating a functioning polity that is stable and somewhat liberal. Decisive military victory against Saddam's conventional forces was a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve this.

One factor needed is a patriotic rallying point for Iraqis that is untainted by the Saddam regime. In West Germany, for example, Adenauer was an anti-Nazi and thus an acceptable politician to lead them during and after the occupation. Perhaps more important, though, were the officers who tried to kill Hitler in 1944. Though they failed, they preserved the "honor" of the army. A German patriot could admire their bravery, repudiate Hitler, and still take some pride in his country's history.

DeGaulle and the French Resistence served similar roles in the restoration of French pride and confidence. French soldiers helped liberate Paris and that helped ease the pain of the defeat in 1940 and the shame of Vichy.

After the Civil War, Robert E. Lee served a symbol for reconciliation and stability. The North and South could agree that he was a good general and honorable man. By accepting defeat and repudiating guerrilla war in 1865 he brought the bloodshed to an end and opened the possibility for a better civil society in the post-war South. Unfortunately, there was a shortage of Adenauer-types to lead the states and insufficient troops to police the occupied South.

At this point, unfortunately, we don't seem to have either type of rallying point in Iraq. They are beaten, liberated, and occupied. But all of that is due to an external power. I worry that if a heroic, patriotic figure emerges, he will do so by fighting or opposing the US. Sort of the way the Communists emerged in China and Vietnam as both anti-colonial and anti-Japanese.

See also:

"Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory "

The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy

Assessing presidential legacies is risky. They evolve over time as events unfold long after the actors leave the stage. Ronald Reagan’s legacy was in doubt when he left office in January of 1989. The collapse of of the Soviet Union and then the performance of the military in Gulf War I ratified his most controversial foreign policies and turned a former actor into a visionary statesman.

Often legacies hinge on decisions that have little to do with the matters that leaders are most remembered for. Lincoln is the Great Emancipatorthe man who ended slavery after a terrible war. Yet he is remembered as such only because he found Grant in 1863. With Grant he got Sherman. Grant was the strategic genius who won the war, but Sherman was the general who took Atlanta in 1864 and secured Lincoln’s re-election.

It is quite possible that without Sherman’s victories Lincoln would have lost to McClellan. We (in the North) might remember Lincoln as the divisive, ineffective bumpkin whose ineptitude and meddling wasted hundreds of thousands of lives in an ill-considered war that ruined all chances of a political settlement.

The Bush-Rumsfeld years hinge on two similar failures. First, they could never define the strategic-military key to the situation in Iraq. They never found the equivalent of Vicksburg and Atlanta: those battles that made victory inevitable. Second, Bush never found his Sherman or Grant: the generals who could win those decisive battles.

Those two tasksdefining the key to victory and finding the men to win it-- are crucial but they are also inter-related and messy. Roosevelt found Marshall and it was with Marshall’s advice that he forged the grand strategy for World War II. Lincoln shuffled through a half dozen generals before he found Grant. Churchill appointed and relieved more than that before he found the right men and had them in the right place.

Bush has been notably quiescent on that score. He stuck with Rumsfeld and Rice and treated his military commanders as though they were interchangeable functionaries.

That, too, may be a result of his MBA training. Harvard case studies are big on analysis and decision. They ratify the conventional wisdom and promote a safe uniformity of opinion. What they do not do is capture the importance of the singular individual. A good pre-HAPW MBA will select Bradley over Patton every time; Grant and Sherman will never make the cut if a Burnside or McClellan is available.

See also:

Eating our seed corn

Peters vs. Drucker: Genius and mediocrity

Tom Peters unleashes on on Peter Drucker. I knew they had different views on management, but i was surprised at the depth of the animosity on display here.

I'm of two minds about this post. I'm surprised at the dour cynicism of Drucker's comments. At the same time, his idea that schools exist to make the mediocre more competent has an element of truth. It is not so much that A, B, and C are mediocre people. Rather, A, a salesman, is not a numbers whiz (except when it comes to quotas and his bonus). On his own, he is unlikely to become a star financial analyst nor is he interested in becoming one. However, with training and education, he can become more adept at reading income statements, marketing reports, etc. Increasing his competence in those areas makes him a better salesman and raises his value to his company.