August/September 1996 by SPAN magazine

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he United States is India's largest trading partner, accounting for nearly 14 percent of this country's foreign trade. The U.S. is also India's largest foreign investor, accounting for about 26 percent of investment approvals. I'd like to share with you a few thoughts on trade and investment, which are going to playa more and more important role in our bilateral relations as India continues with its economic reforms. A few weeks ago a distinguished American economist,W Bowman Cutter, spoke at New Delhi's Rajiv Gandhi Foundation on the subject of trade and investment. Cutter, until recently deputy assistant to President Clinton for economic policy, is now a managing director of the venture capital firm of Warburg, Pincus. He is a recognized expert on trade, investment, financeand on public policy in these three fields. Actually, I should use the word "field" because one of the main points of his speech was that all three of these entities are now very closely related. As we move toward the 21 st century, we are seeing an evertightening linkage between trade and investment; they cannot and should not be distinguished. Today trade and investment compose one system of "global enterprise." Similarly, global enterprise and finance are becoming intermingled at every step. Cutter cited how some types of foreign investment such as franchising involve "a very complex exchange that intermingles services, goods, trade and finance to such an extent that segregation is simply impossible." Today, a government's trade and investment policies have to be consistent. A country will not attract direct investment if its trade is not open, and it will not have available value-added trade if investment in the financial sector is not open. A second factor dramatically changing the global economy, said Cutter, is "the information technology revolution" which is reducing the cost of transmitting information (telecommunications) by about 20 percent a year. By the first decade of the 21 st century, the cost of telecommunications may be almost free. And this means that more and more information will be driven into every exchange our economy deals with. A third dramatic change is the new public policy perspective. The rise of information technology means the rise of financial markets of a truly global scale. Today this means global allocation of capital; in the future it will mean the global exposure of risk and productivity differences. In other words, we're moving away from a world in which most financial flows were bureaucratically administered in one way or

THE

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another-either by governments, by international financial institutions, by major banks or by major corporations. We're moving toward a world wherefinancial flows are purely subject to market variants. In "finance," the big revolution is the change from bureaucracy to market. As the U.S. and India work together in the global economy, both governments are realizing the onset of the revolutions mentioned above. We are all beginning to realize that in the 21 st century it will be more difficult for nations to choose which markets they like and which they dislike. We will have these choices less and world, exports, imports and investless. In an integrated ments are all part of the same process. Goods flow in, a manufacturing process is applied to them, information is added to them and they flow out. What does this new integrated global economy imply for India? First of all, India should involve itself in the OECD's investment policy process and in the WTO's telecommunications and financial sector negotiations. These issues are intrinsic parts of the global economy. India cannot and should not regard these issues as being only in the province of the developed economies. Secondly, the way global markets are evolving is in India's interest. What do I mean by this? Portfolio flows and direct investment are driven by the interests of millions of investors with ample capacity to meet India's and direct investment needs. Even India's coninfrastructural cerns for equitable growth can be imparted by an entrepreneurial capital system. Since 1970, the U.S. has created about million jobs, more jobs than any other economy in the world. As America's big companies are downsizing, all these new jobs have come from middle-sized and small companies-and from the capac- . ity of our financial system to fund and finance those companies. More than any other economy in the world, the U.S. economy is being fundamentally changed by the nature of its financial system. The same could be true for India. There are no artificial barriers in the mobilization of the investment India requires-or in India's capacity to function as a central part of the world economy. India's economic future is dependent entirely upon India's capacity to see, as soon as possible, the world not as it used to be but as it is becoming. â&#x20AC;˘

closerby 2001 if two of computer science's most ambitious rivals, Douglas Lenat and Rodney Brooks, achieve even a fraction of what they propose. While most researchers are advancing toward building a truly intelligent machine in tiny hops, Lenat and Brooks are vying to make a great leap. Machines as smart as Hal have been the grail of computer scientists since the days of the Univac. Artificial intelligence would extend the power of the human mind just as machines multiply the power of the body. Computers would become our omnipresent personal physicians, investment wizards, legal counselors and tutors.Getting to know us, they would tailor information to our interests and arrange entertainment for our delight. They would be savvy management consultants, constantly seeking and analyzing data on markets, the economy, the competition. They would help earn us billions. But like Hal, which not only talked and thought but also murdetously connived like a human, true AI would raise profound and unprecedented issues. Could we trust smart machines that operate largely on their own? Should seemingly conscious pieces of equipment be accorded inalienable rights? Would it be cruel to turn them off? Says Lenat: "AI would be a change probably as fundamental for our species as the development oflanguage." Lenat and Brooks are chasing after Hal much as archrival explorers Amundsen and Scott raced to reach the South Pole at the turn of the century. Lenat's approach involves nothing less than

Two ambitious rivals are the leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) research in the U.S. Rodney Brooks (above, left) has built a humanoid robot named Cog (far left) that "will learn by interacting with people-just as babies do. " Douglas Lenat (above) is developing a massive digital "knowledge base" of the things that most people know. The system, called eye, aims at teaching a machine common sense-one of AI's toughest challenges.

trying to solve one of computing's toughestchallenges-teaching a machine common sense. Sponsored by a high-tech consortium in Texas, he has spearheaded development of a massive digital "knowledge base" of the things most people know. Called Cyc (as in psych), the system may become smart enough to expand its

knowledge by combing texts automatically. Says Lenat: ''I'm really hoping that around six years from now, Cyc would have the resources and know-how that the typical person has for getting information." The ultimate result: The thing would bootstrap itself to the Hal level. Coming at Hal from a totally different direction, Brooks launched a five-year project to build a humanoid robot that will learn by interacting with people-just as babies do. Called Cog, it was inspired by Brooks's pioneering work at!YiIT on insect-like robots-mechanical creepy-crawlies that display uncannily complex behavior despite their simple electronic brains. One robot, designed for the military, is an ingenious kamikaze device: Shaped like a big crab and crammed with plastic explosives, it's meant to crawl in shallow waters near the beach, probing with leg feelers for mines. Finding one, it digs in nearby, and then boombye-bye, mine. Cog will have little knowledge to start with but will be equipped with motor and sensor systems that let it learn by touching, seeing and hearing. "Intelligence cannot be separated from the subjective experience of a body," Brooks and colleague Lynn Andrea Stein declared in a paper proposing the humanoid. Forget pumping encyclopedic knowledg~ into a box. Cog's "intelligence will be grounded in computation on sensory information." There's a good chance neither Brooks norLenat will get close to Hal-the scarcity of funding for high-risk R&D could cripple the projects even if they beat the technical odds. Still, the work is already defining the far-out frontier of computer science. Says Randall Davis, president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence: "AI has always had high aspirations. Doug and Rod are leading the charge." Barreling down an Austin freeway in his Mazda RX-7 coupe, Lenat suddenly has to brake behind jammed traffic. The radar detector is buzzing furiously-it senses the law up ahead and is too dumb to realize the car has slowed to a crawl. Lenat flips it off. A plump, impatient man with a taste for loud shirts (and cars), Lenat shifts gears and complains about the state of AI. Hal-like computers, he says, "would fundamentally change the whole nature of existence. But AI is filled with little bump-on-a-Iog projects that couldn't possibly lead there." What sounds like self-promotion is probably true. Excitement in the field of AI peaked in the mid-eighties with the advent of expert systems, hailed by one breathless enthusiast as "machines who think." Hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital and shareholder equity poured into startups with names like Symbolics, LISP Machines and Gold Hill Computers. By 1990 came a shakeout, as even the most avid brain ware advocates had to admit that their work wasn't leading to Hal. Companies that survived, such as Gensym and HNC Software, earned commercial respectability by avoiding hype and building programs limited to static crannies of knowledge. Expert systems now handle such workaday tasks as assessing insurance applica-

tions for the mortgage unit of GE Capital, patrolling banking data forthe U.S. Treasury Department and enabling photocopiers built by Japan's Mita Industrial Co. to diagnose their own glitches. According to Tribeca Research in New York City, nearly $1 billion worth of expert systems were deployed in 1994-a pale shadow of what AI was expected to be. The systems themselves remain idiot savants-if you enter "he died" when a disease-diagnosing program asks for a patient's pulse,it blithely goes on asking about other life signs. Lenat, 45, has spent the past decade hammering on the hobgoblins of little electronic minds. His Cyc program now knows an extraordinary number of ordinary things: that mothers are older than their children, that exercise makes people sweat, that death has a profound effect on a person's health. While few AI experts think Cyc will achieve the cognitive awakening Lenat envisions by 200 I, it may soon have down-to-earth uses that go far beyond ordinary expert systems. Born on a powerful engineering workstation, Cyc has gotten smaller as it has gotten smarter, and now fits on a laptop. Lenat recently formed acompany to develop applications, including a system that will answer managers' questions by scouring corporate data in ways that would ordinarily require hours of help from human computerjocks. Cyc was launched in Austin under the auspices of Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp. (MCC), the granddaddy of American high-tech consortiums. U.S. computet companies' founded MCC in 1982 as the nation's answer to Japan's vaunted Fifth Generation project-a government-industry collaboration aimed at jazzing up computers to the Hal level. Admiral Bobby Inman, former director of the National Security Agency and the consortium's first leader, recalls how hard it was to attract a prestige artificial intelligence project: "I had trouble finding anyone who wasn't pursuing mundane things." Then he heard that a rising star at Stanford had proposed a system spanning "human consensus knowledge." Bingo. Lenat, the California dreamer, got a jaw-dropping call: Come to Austin and see what $25 million over ten years can do. Lenat had aimed high from an early age. Hired at 15 to clean a college lab's animal cages for the summer, he taught himself to program its computer and was promoted to nerd. Majoring in math at the University of Pennsylvania, he took an AI course and had what he calls an epiphany: "The professor asked me a question in class that I was unprepared for, and Ijust made up something that was obviously double-talk. But he didn't know the difference. I thought, 'What a great opportunity-a field where almost anything you do is pioneering work.' " Lenat's horizons expanded quickly at MCC. Like Hal, Cyc would enable computers to converse with people. It would translate languages. Cyc-enhanced word processors would alert writers to holes in their logic. Expert systems hooked to Cyc would no longer come off like idiots on topics outside their domains. Cyc would let home computers build detailed profiles of their owners. At some point, Cyc would expand autonomously to become a kind of Renaissance mind, capable of making scientific discoveries.

In 1984, Lenat and his team set to work. Trying to get a grip on what Cyc would need to know, the team scanned the Yellow Pages for names of things, took field trips to stores and pored over do-ityourself manuals. They read tabloids: "We asked ourselves what we know about the world that makes us disbelieve a story about a B-52 being spotted on the moon," says Lenat. The deepest problem was obvious from the outset: how to make Cyc's knowledge complete enough so that its version of the everyday world wasn't just a caricature. Lenat's team spent three months mulling a single line picked at random from an encyclopedia: "Napoleon died in 1821; Wellington was saddened." Says Lenat: "We diagrammed the concepts you need to answer questions that the average person could handle about that sentence. 'Did Napoleon hear of Wellington's death?' Well, no. 'Did Napoleon do much after 1821?' No. 'Did Wellingto!1 know who Napoleon was?' It was like an unraveling spool of yarn. We had humongous pieces of paper filling whole walls."

"Artificial intelligence would be a change probably as fundamental for our species as the development of language."

Adroitly spinning around from a workstation at MIT, Rodney Brooks twists a lever that lowers his chair seat about 15 centimeters before explaining why "brains in a box" like Cyc will never cope with the world'sl blooming, buzzing confusion. Like many archrivals, he and Lenat have a lot in,common: Both are prickly, witty former boy scientists who never lost the sublime ambition of youth. Yet it's hard to imagine two thinkers more opposed. Lenat's premise is that our mental magic springs mainly from so-called symbolic knowledge-things that can be written down. Brooks is inspired by how the enchanted switchboards in our heads actually seem to work. Brooks contends that machines can build up smarts through real-world encounters. The self-styled bad boy of robotics, he shook up his field by designing machines that handle such challenges as following a person around a cluttered lab without getting busted or stuck. Unlike robots of previous generations, Brooks's don't need central control programs. Instead, their brains are networks ofmicroprocessors that run many relatively small programs at once. Nicknamed behaviors, the programs do their own things but also interact. Each is dedicated to a special function, like moving a leg. They cooperate through a layered control structure-information that helps guide the leg behaviors might trickle down from a

higher-level behavior dedicated to. avoiding walls. One of the lab's shoebox-size robots flailed its six legs chaotically when first turned on. But within minutes it taught itself to walk as its behaviors began working in concert, guided by sensors that gave negative feedback when the robot was sitting on its artificial butt. Chalk one up for Brooks's "bottom up" AI, which asserts that big knowledge bases aren't required for complex activity. In 1990, Brooks cofounded a company, IS Robotics, that has hatched dozens of bugbots under government and industry contracts. They are designed to go after problems like a gang of angry ants, patrolling nuclear plants' plumbing or exploring the lunar surface. The company is the birthplace of Ursula, the mine-clearing robot under development for the U.S. Navy. (The Navy would probably do well to keep Ursula off tourist beaches, lest she mistakea sunbather's boom box for a mine.) The bottom-up approach has become AI's closest thing to radical chic during the past few years. Brooks's students began wearing buttons with the slogan FAST, CHEAP A D OUT OF CONTROL. But the guru felt something was missing. Says he: "On January 12, 1992, the day when Hal was switched on in the movie, we had a zeroth birthday party for him at my house, with cake and champagne. But I realized there was no Halon the horizon. That was very sad. Itgot me to thinking, What would it take to make aHal?" Cog was concei ved. Aiming to twit Lenat, Brooks initially proposed naming the project Psych !, but cooler heads prevailed. Even so, many of AI's mainstream thinkers greeted the idea of a humanoid with scornful skepticism. Asked to estimate how far Brooks's bottom-up approach would go with Cog., MIT's Marvin Minsky, one of the field's senior statesmen, replies: "Don't you mean bollom onl y?" Lenat, for his part, snorts at his ri val's idea: "Brooks is just fooling himself if he believes insectile behavior is going to magically scale up into useful cognitive problem solving." But Brooks has somecompe'lling arguments for his strategy. Over the eons, he notes, evolution has retooled primitive organs for increasingly complex functions-that's how brains got bigger. Much of the brain's machinery of higher cognition may actually be ancient sensory and motor systems, says Brooks. The cerebellum, a region near the base of the brain, is crucial for muscle coordination. Yet studies of brain activity using high-tech scanners show that the cerebellum also plays a role in higher functions: "When you ask people in brain scanners to think of verbs, suddenly the cerebellum lights up. It looks like evolution has reused the motion machinery for thinking of verbs." Brooks is betting that his team can build a robot that will likewise "evolve" higher functions with experience and eventually do interesting things that would be impossible to spell out with rules. On a typical day in Cog's prenatal life, its anatomy is scattered around a lab resembling a TV repair shop-a skeletal arm here, a hand there. Students huddle over them intensely, like young surgeons preparing donor organs for implantation. In another room Cog's adult-size torso is bolted to a metal stand, awaiting the operation. Cog's brain, a computer with scores of microprocessor chips, is far too big for its human-size

head, so it is several feet from its body. Activating the robot's circuits from the computer, a student watches as Cog's sagging trunk snaps to-uh-oh, suddenly a spark flashes in the robot's lower body. He hits Cog's big red "kill" button. But it's too late. The smell of burnt insulation fills the air. Oh, well. At least the pain circuits aren't installed. It won't walk-it actually will be a half-humanoid, fixed at the hips. It hears with microphones and sees with cameras. Its hand-it has only one so far-is covered with pressure sensors for a rough sense of touch. Eventually it may have a touch-sensitive membrane for skin. While playing midwife, Brooks stays at arm's length from these "gruesome engineering details." Says he: "My grad students won't let me touch the hardware. I'd break it." rooks, 40, grew up in Adelaide, Australia. From an early age, he was fascinated by robots and spent hours "making lillie circuits with wires and light bulbs and stuff. But I never could do the mechanical stuff well." His best effort was a wheeled turtle he cobbled together at age 16. It rolled around, bouncing off walls. After earning a PhD in AI at Stanford, Brooks joined the faculty at MIT, and now hecan marshal grad students to build his robots. Says Brooks: "I just do the programming." People will be of great interest to Cog, designed as it is to do baby-like exploratory things, like reaching out for a rattle dangled by someone nearby. Some of its software behaviors will probably specialize in spotting faces amid the stream of data gushing from its cameras. Meanwhile, neck- and eye-moving behaviors might gradually learn to keep moving faces and objects in view. Certain behaviors would have priority-such as one that would give Cog the sense that punching itselfin the camera is a no-no. Like people, Cog wiIIprobabl y have competing drives-a preference for fi xating on talking heads might be counterbalanced by a novelty-seeking behavior to prevent obsessions. Cyc's mind, meanwhile, has expanded in a warren of offices at MCC jammed with hacker accoutrements-rows of workstations, half-swigged Cokes, plastic pigs on a coat rack. The Cyc tcam over the years has usually numbered'about a dozen people, mostly recent college graduates in fields from math to botany. Lately the squad has bulked up Cyc's knowledge on business-related topics for what promises to be Cyc's first real-world application-the program that will help managers find quick answers to what-if questions. Says Nick Siegel, an anthropologist who joined Cyc in' 1988: "We're not abandoning the grander scheme, but our approach right now is ruthlessly practical." No one knows how many bits of knowledge Cyc needs to achieve Lenat's grand vision-a few years ago, he and a colleague stated in a research report that the goal was about 100 million axioms, which is more than 200 times Cyc's size today. As Cyc's rules proliferate, a big problem gets bigger-plucking relevant ones out of the mass. When asked whether pigs can fly, humans instantly zero in on relevant jnformation in their memories, ignoring all the rest. Expert systems substitute computers' raw speed for this uncanny selectively-chess-playing programs, for example, may analyze thousands of possible

board positions before moving, exploring countless dead ends a human chess expert wouldn't even consider. Similar brute-force methods won't work with Cyc-even the speediest circuits would bog down combing its myriad rules. Besides, Cyc tends to get hung up on subtle inconsistencies when it considers too many rules at once-something like the confusion a toddler might feel when told both that Dracula isn't real and that Dracula has very sharp teeth.

YC has tricks to minimize these headaches, chiefly the organization of its knowledge into contexts-groups of rules about things such as modem Western medicine or workplace behavior. Some of the Cyc team's innovations have been copied by AI firms, promising larger, smarter expert systems. A prototype application developed by Cyc's programmers indicates its potential to address the growing problem of "data mining": sifting gems of knowledge from heaps of computerized information. The application retrieves photographs from a database of pictures by reasoning about simple written descriptions of them. When asked to show people at risk of cancer, it pulls up a shot captioned "picture of a girl lying on a beach" after drawing on its knowledge of how people dress at beaches, exposure to the sun and the risk of skin cancer. To make such inferences, Cyc consults a knowledge base containing some 400,000 bits of conventional wisdom, ranging from general concepts about time and causali ty to specific details about animals and furniture. Most are expressed as if-then rules of thumb. Example: If a person has a sore throat, it hurts when the person swallows. Such rules, of course, don't al ways apply, which means Cyc sometimes leaps to wrong conclusions-or is simply baffled. When the photo-finding program was first asked to show pictures of hearts, it retrieved all the images of animals in its collection-it figured they were fair game because it knew they had hearts. The glitch was fixed by adding a rule that animals' vital organs don't show unless they are severely wounded. Cyc will always be fallible, acknowledges Lenat. But "if it saves you money in the long run, it's worth having even ifit makes a lot of mistakes. People make mistakes too, but we don't shoot them or sue their parents." All the same, Cyc itself remains an endangered species of one. The project has yet to deliver on Lenat's dreams. Corporate sponsors, including Apple Computer, have mothballed plans to use Cyc. Tom Bonura, a senior scientist at Apple, labels Cyc "a noble experiment." Another corporate collaborator, who declined to be named, complains: "The depth of knowledge advertised to be there almost never was." As sponsors' frustrations mounted in recent years, he adds, a joke about Lenat's upbeat progress reports made the rounds: "Question: What machine does Cyc run the fastest on? Answer: An overhead projector." The Cyc team shifted into high gear more than two years ago in hopes of wlOning further grants when the project's ten years were up. "We were killing ourselves trying to create a pale shadow of what had been promised," says Ramanathan Guha, a programming whiz from India who joined the team in 1987 and ended up

coleader. Hopes crashed last fall when Microsoft, another sponsor, dropped plans to use Cyc. Guha, now at Apple, says Cyc may prove useful in commercial applications like data mining, but "the goal of creating a system that would exhibit real common sense failed." None of this fazes Lenat, who blames administrative snags: high overhead rates at MCC that made sponsors feel they didn't get their money's worth (which is true), and the not-invented-here syndrome that undermined support at sponsor companies (which has some truth). Right now, Lenat maintains, Cyc is smart enough to start earning its keep. In 1994, he started a company, Cycorp, to let it do just that-and to help keep the research project alive. Cycorp's main client is a drug company that wants an expert system with common sense to help knit together thousands of databases, vastly speeding up efforts to fetch and cross-reference information. About Cyc's ultimate prospects, Lenat is as buoyant as ever: "I'm becoming more optimistic now than I was when I started. In 1984, I thought we had a one percent or two percent chance of radically changing the way the world works. I now think it's about 50-50."

"Intelligence cannot be separated from the subjective experience of a body."

Cog has money troubles too. So far Brooks has funded the robot from "unrestricted grants" tied to other projects. But the timetable has stretched, and he estimates that he needs about $6 million over five years to show what,his brainchild can do. With no near-term practical applications, the project is a hard sell with funding agencies. "There will be spinoffs, butI can't give you a commercialization plan," Brooks says. "That would narrow the thinking too much." The thinking at this point is anything but narrow. Daniel Dennett, a Tufts University philosopher and mentor to the Cog team, has even proposed that the robot might someday have a semblance of consciousness, raising sticky issues about its rights. He doesn't suggestthatCog will be humanly consciousjust that its behavior may make it hard to dismiss the robot as unconscious, in the way that lower animals muddle that issue. Says Dennett: "If the best roboticists can hope for is to create some crude, cheesy, second-rate artificial consciousness, they still win." Such machines might be no match for the fictional Halbutmaybe they'd be nicer. 0 About the Author: Fortune magazine.

David Stipp is a BaSIOn-based senior writer for

Gives "Made in India" a Whole New Spin

wasn't t his square jaw or the tipped fedora accenting his hooked nose that made Dick Tracy America's ace comic-strip cop. The infatuation was with his wristwatch, which served as a two-way radio, until urbane and gutsy James Bond blasted his way into our imagination. Once again-sorry 007-it wasn't his smooth ways, on and off the job, that set millions of pulses racing, but his briefcase packed with high-tech tricks. Now it's time to move over, Roger Moore. Make room for Roger Fordham, Motorola's main man in Bangalore. With the marvels of electronics firmly established as magic at our fingertips, the next step is even smaller smart products that combine a variety of functions, says this sandy-haired, soft-spoken managing director of Motorola, quite at ease in his elegant corporate chambers, dressed in a button-down pink pinstripe shirt and blue Dockers. "We're talking about the integration of various products," explains Fordham, as he plugs an FM radio, the size ofa fingertip, into an ear. "Imagine a single pocket device that can serve as a pen, recorder, pager, cellular phone, notebook computer. ..." Go ahead and imagine. But you won't have to do it for long. Motorola-the world's largest provider of cellular telephones, pagcrs and two-way radios, and a leader in the semiconductor industry-is rapidly turning futuristic fantasy into real ity, and a lot of it is beginning to happen right here in India. Motorola's powerful new StarTAC fold-open cellular phone, smaller

than a pack of cards, puts the world right in your pocket. And the new Tango pager not only flashes you a message wherever you are, but also enables you to reply to messages instantaneously by selecting one of scores of preprogrammed, stored responses. Indeed, by integrating various technologies, this year Motorola introduced a lifesaver in the 1996 Lincoln Continental, America's favorite luxury car. If you're stranded, in danger, lost or need emergency attention, all you do is press a button and the Lincoln RESCU system (for remote emergency satellite cellular unit) beams your vehicle's exact location via satellite to an operator who puts you in touch with the nearest police or emergency service within seconds. Meanwhile, Motorola's advanced pagers and portable twoway radios are already rolling out of its manufacturing plant in "Electronics City" near Bangalore. At its stylish offices-glistening with granite, glassed-'in catwalks and spacious rooms with a maze ofmodular workstations-just around the corner from the Bangalore Oberoi, Fordham presides over one of Motorola's main divisions which has 350 employees and is growing. In fact, Motorola-ranked among the United States' 100 largest companies, and which raked in more than $27 billion in worldwide sales last year-has a presence in more than 100 countries but has only four software centers-in Adelaide, Singapore, Beijing

and, now, Bangalore. And Bangalore is the only one of them to have achieved the Software Engineering Institute's highest award for capability and performance, the "SEI leveI5." India figures high on Motorola's global expansion charts not just because of its enormous potential customer base but also "because it has quality schools and produces excellent engineers," says Fordham. "Bangalore has long been a center for scientific research and development and there's a very definite computer culture in place here." As the world, and Asia in particular, surges into the communications era and the arena of economic growth, "one of the bylaws at Motorola is that we have to be near our customers and think global," the managing director explains. His own global experience with Motorola since 1982-in

"A country as culturally diverse and as large as India has customers with unique needs, sty les and cultural nuances, and we're sensitive to that." -Roger

Fordham,

Managing DirectOl; Motorola India Electronics Pvt. Ltd.

his native Britain, followed by the U.S. (Phoenix, Arizona) and Australia (Adelaide), before moving to Bangalore in early 1996-comes through in his accent that's underlined by a cadence of Aussie. For good measure, the affable, unassuming Fordham ("Roger" to all, except the security guard to whom he is "Mister Rojar") epitomizes Motorola's egalitarian ways and a discernible mood of mutual respect all across the ranks. Humble beginnings haven't swelled Motorola's corporate head and its rags-to-riches story reflects the entrepreneurial spirit of America. It began back in 1928, when two brothers-Paul and Joseph Galvin-bought out the bankrupt Stewart Storage Battery Co. in Chicago. Total assets: $565 in cash, $750 in tools and five employees. The first week's payroll was $63. The Galvin Manufacturing Corp. got down to the business of designing a battery eliminator that would allow battery-operated home radios to operate on regular household electricity. Soon, Galvin was raking in close to $300,000 a year in sales, but as battery-operated radios became obsolete, it eliminated the battery eliminator business. The Galvins remained undaunted; they moved on to develop the. world's first car radio and named it Motorolalinking the idea of the motor car with the Victorola radio. In

1936, Motorola developed the Police Cruiser, an AM auto radio pre-set to a single frequency to receive police broadcasts, and in the 1940s came up with the "walkie-talkie" and two-way FM "Handie- Talkie" radio that was vital to battlefield communications in World War II. In the mid-' 50s Motorola developed a new radio communications product-the pager-and a few years later soared into space. On its flight to Venus in 1962, the spacecraft Mariner used a Motorola transponder to span 86 million kilometers. It would go on to supply radio equipment to the Galileo, Magellan and Hubble space telescope missions, and Motorola's equipment aboard Voyager I enabled it to send pictures of Saturn to Earth overa distance ofl.6 billion kilometers. In 1969, when astronaut Neil Armstrong immortalized his "giant leap for mankind," it came through loud and clear via a Motorola transponder, and his lunar landing probably was viewed on a Quasar, America's first all-transistor color TV set, manufactured by Motorola. By 1980, seven years before Motorola made its last automobile radio, the company was back into cars, this time with electronic engine control modules to help with fuel efficiency and to control emissions. In a sense, Motorola had come full circle. But not everything the communications giant touched turned into profits. For example, in 1948 its automatic pushbutton gasoline car heater flopped, its eight-track tape players didn't quite capture the stereo market and its first color TV came up short because of technical problems, a high price tag and failure of broadcasters to offer adequate color programming. In the face of inexpensive and stylish competition from overseas, Motorola eased itself out of transistor and car radios and TV. However, instead of retreating into retirement it leap-frogged into the ultimate transistor-the microprocessor. In 1990, Motorola's third-generation 32-bit microprocessor-which contained 1.2 million transistors and could process 20 mi IIion instructions per second-was adopted by more than 100 commercial customers, many of them competitors, for their products. And the company's Satellite Communications Division started developing the Iridium satellite-based communications system linking 66 small satellites in low Earth orbit designed to cover every spot on the globe. "When you consider that the mind-boggling state oftechnologies today might appear to be the ultimate but in fact represents just the beginning of the possibilities ahead, it gives you new appreciation of what the human mind is capable of," says Fordham. And that-human talent and the endless capabilities of the human mind-is what Motorola considers to be its most valuable asset.

1. Motoro/a India offices in Banga/ore are housed in an imposing new building called "The Senate. " 2. Piyush Dikshit (center) leads a team that prepares data communication software for networks used by business and service organizations. 3. The test/ab has direct satellite up/inkingfaGilities with other Motorola offices around the world. 4. Secretaries share a light moment. Informality and a spirit of camaraderie mark Motorola office operations worldwide.

5. Project manager Utpa/ Chatlopadhyay !foreground) poses with his software team in the second-jloor lobby.

India's Largest Telecom Exporter An Interview with Amit Sharma, Chairman of Motorola India by Krishan Gabrani The telecom powerhouse Motorola has been variously described as a company that "almost everyone loves to love, "as the "best- managed company in the world" and as an "icon ofinnovation. " Heading this telecom giant in India is the 45-year-old Amit Sharma, vice president and executive director of Motorola's international operations, South As ia. Sharma, a graduate of IIT Kharagpur, worked with DCM and Hindus tan Lever before he lelifor the u.s. in 1982. There he earned an MBA from the Wharton .School and a master s degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, and worked for suchfirms as McKinsey and GE Capital. In 1992, Sharma planned to come back to India. And come back he did, but as chairman of Motorola s operations in this country. As he says: "While I was making up my mind about coming back, I got this job with Motorola, and here I am. " SPANs Managing Editor interviewed the suave and soft-spoken Sharma in his office at Best Western Surya hotel in Delhi.

QUESTION: It's a truism that modern telecom is vital to a country's economic development. How is Motorola helping India upgrade its wireless base? AMIT SHARMA: I genuinely believe that what we as a company are doing here is not just relevant but is critical to India's economic development. If you want to count yourself as an industrial power, it's not possible without having a modern telecom infrastructure in place. That is well established. Now, if you look at India's telecom sector and compare it with some of the developing countries, what we see is that, not to talk of countries like Malaysia, we lag behind even countries like Mongolia. If you are way behind, the only way to catch up in a hurry is by using wireless communications. In fact, it's not only a way of catching up, it is actually a way of leapfrogging. In the West, they have invested literally hundreds of billions of dollars in wires in the ground. The rate at which they can adopt new technology is constrained by the fact that they have this huge investment to recover first. So, there's a paradox: the countries that have weaker tele-

com infrastructures, using the latest technology, can today quickstep into the future. There's no reason why five years down the road India would not have, say, a better tele.: com infrastructure, at least in the cities, than many European countries have. The key thing is that wireless is easy to deploy and it is much more versatile and reliable. We are now at a situation where you can call up today and have a telephone delivered tomorrow, and it always wor~s. It doesn't matter whether there's rain or not. There's no line to repair. And if a wireless phone doesn't cost you much more, why wouldn't you have it? Wireless phones will permit us to go from, say, India's present one percent penetration of phones to six percent, which is the Asian average, in five or so years. Moreover, even if you had unlimited money and resources, there's no way India can wire up 40-50 million homes. I genuinely believe that our technologies are particularly relevant to India. So, it's good to be in a position where what you are doing is not just good for the company but for India as well. Obviously, ifwe succeed, we sell more.

Does the fact of your being an Indian help in your dealings with the authorities here? SHARMA: That is interesting. Being an Indian you understand the situation better and, therefore, you can calibrate the pace of things, calibrate achievements better. In: terms of credibility with people here, however, it takes time. It becomes more of a personal issue. The fact that you are an Indian. doesn't automatically give you credibility. It certainly isn't an automatic acceptance and nor should it be. I absolutely do not believe that people who go abroad are any smarter or better than the people who stay behind. The fact that I got a degree from Wharton, I don't think that puts me ahead of somebody who got a degree from 11MAhmedabad. In the telecom field in India, however, one thing that does make a difference is that there's not much ofa telecom base here. Not very many people with experience in the industry. So when you're looking for someone who has worked in the telecom industry, more often than not you find people who trained and worked abroad.

What is so unique about Motorola that it has become the stuff of industrial legend? SHARMA: One thing that is unique is that Motorola is also one of the world leaders in semiconductors. Ultimately, if you look at any electronic device, the guts of the equipment, the performance, is really captured in the chips. If you are in the business of making chips, a leader in making chips, you can innovate at a level that others possibly cannot. We spend almost ten percent of our revenues on R&D. The people manning our R&D efforts are the key to our innovations, to our success; they are a highly energized and motivated lot. Time after time we have come through with fundamental breakthroughs that the rest of the world copies. We are constantly renewing our technologies, our processes. We make pagers, and then we ask ourselves: What do we do next. So, we come out with two-way pagers. When you get a message on the pager, it's not just enough to read your message and say: OK, the office is calling me. You may need to respond to it, which is what our twoway pagers do. You simply punch a button and send a message back saying: Yes, I can make the meeting or I can't make it. People are realizing how useful pagers are. It's the most convenient way of keeping in touch with your employees on the move, be it your driver or salesperson. That's why it has changed, in such a short time since its introduction, from being a sort of prestige device to something useful.

What about your flagship product, the cellularphone? SHARMA: More than ten years ago, our cellular phones were a bit unwieldy. Our present generation of cell phones, however, are literally pocket-size and yet the battery life lasts almost three days. Our new cell phone is this size. [Sharma shows me their latest model, StarTAC, and you indeed marvel at its size; it is smaller than a pack of playing cards. It weighs a mere 88 grams, and fits snugly into your pocket. Motorola hopes to market a Variant of this in India by December.] Six months ago this model won an award for being the world's lightest, highest -featured ce llular phone. In essence, there are three factors that are important in a cell phone. The first is the

size and weight; it should be easy to carry. The second is the battery life; you want it to be working when you need it. The third is reliability; you don't want to miss making or receiving a call. The ability of each of these three factors is a trade-off. Small phones mean less power, less power means you lose calls. The real revolution in our new cell phone is its being able to perform without compromising on anyone of these factors. In fact, the performance of this model is slightly better than those of our other models. Its computing power is roughly equivalent to an IBM 486 computer! This is where every once in a couple of years Motorola proves its leadership. We make a thing and then a few years down the road we take itto the next quantum leap.

But in India cellular phones are still quite expensive. SHARMA: Yes, but only the top-of-theline models. By this December the low-end phones will cost around Rs. 10,000. Next year they will probably be down to Rs. 6,0007,000. This is quite reasonable considering the convenience, the reliability it otTers.

Motorola has achieved what is perhaps the world's ultimate in quality controlabout 3.5 defects per million. How doyour pager factory and software center il1 Bangalore compare with your other manufacturingfaciiities worldwide? SHARMA: Our Bangalore software center is the highest rated software center in the world outside the U.S. and the quality of pagers coming out of our Bangalore factory is as good as anywhere else. We have the same manufacturing standards here as we have anywhere else in the world. One measure of our quality is that from zero exports two years ago we are today India's largest exporter in telecom. Last year we exported Rs. 2,000 million worth of pagers and software, but mainly pagers. Our Bangalore facilities are doing so well that Motorola is thinking of investing another $100-$150 million overthe next five years. One of the issues that keeps coming up in my discussions here is what contributions are we making to the country? I think there are three main matrices to our contributions. The first is technology transfer. We have set up a

state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, and not a screwdriver assembly, in Bangalore. The second is exports. As I said earlier, last year we exported software and pagers worth Rs. 2,000 million. Finally, when you look at it in terms of job creation, today we are almost 1,000people; in 1992 we were barely 200. As an aside, let me add here that we also have made a beginning in assisting the Indian research institutions. Earl ierthis year, we donated some state-of-the-art equipment and money to IIT Kanpur to set up a lab to train students in semiconductors. We are also supporting advanced training in telecom in Pune. We also fund scholarships at universities in Indiaand the U.S., but mostly in India.

You have worked in India llnd the U.S. How wouldyou compare the working environment in the two countries? SHARMA: I think the key difference is that the U.S. market, or for that matter the Japanese market or any other free market, is very competitive. You can read about itsitting here, but it's only when you work in those markets that you realize what a truly competitive market is. In India, because of the way we have evolved, competition has been limited. Because competition has been limited, much of the skills you acquire in a truly competitive industry or environment are more or less lacking here. That's the key thing in terms of working overseas. There are no entry barriers in these economies. There's no notion of licensing. You don't have to apply to anyone to get into business. If you have a business plan, you go to a bank, a private investor ora venture capital fund and borrow money. In a truly competitive market, the opportunities are not limited by capital, but only by your imagination. If you have a good idea, somebody will . finance you. Let me give you an example. Netscape didn't exist just five years ago. Today it is worth $4 billion. By and large there's always money for good ideas. India has made a great leap forward, but there's a lot more to go. We need to further deregulate, decontrol, cut the red tape. The natural instinct of Indian entrepreneurs and the Indian professional will take this country to the top ranks in the world. The more you unshackle the economy, the more you'll see people's enterprise coming to full bloom. 0

Craig McCaw Sees an Internet inthe Sky The cellular pioneer has conceived a whole new way to deliver the Internet, using hundreds of satellites. Some think he's crazy. McCaw breaks a long silence to explain his vision. few days after he sold McCaw Cellular Communications to AT&T, Craig McCaw went fishing with Bob Ratliffe, a longtime friend who headed up public relations at the cellular company. The moment was one of triumph, or so one might have thought. The AT&T deal had made McCaw ridiculously wealthy, for one thing. Perhaps even more satisfying was its vindication of all the risks he'd taken in pulling the cellular business out of its iow-tech backwater and turning it into the growth engine of the telecom industry. McCaw had a slightly different reaction. "Well," he said to his friend, "I guess my career is over." It wasn't. Now that the clouds have cleared from his sky, McCaw, 46, has decided to create a celestial counterpart to the Internet, the burgeoning network of networks that carries ever greater streams of digital data and sound and pictures back and forth around the globe. The hunger for that kind of exchange seems certain to grow, overwhelming the ability of communications companies to bury fiber beneath the streets ofthe world's cities and throughout the neglected but populous hinterlands.

McCaw wouldÂˇ put this power to interact within reach of everyone on Earth within a decade, and satisfy the world's craving for communication. He. would remove the penalty from location. McCaw hopes to achieve this by creating a constellation of840 satellites that will gird the planet at low altitude, like a rotating coat of chain mail, transmitting signalsÂˇ from any point on the planet to any other with the speed and capacity of fiber-optic cable. He calls the venture Teledesic. Others call it crazy, offering up the same kind of scorn McCaw received before, when he hocked himself to the gills to buy cellular phone licenses. McCaw was right then. If Teledesic succeeds, he can repeat his trick, and transform telecom again. AT&T paid $11.5 billion for McCaw Cellular in 1994; in 15 years, some telco may fork over many times that amount to buy Teledesic. This time around, McCaw is setting out with a pretty respectable backer. Bill Gates has invested over $10 million of his own money in Teledesic. Though Gates is bullish on the technology, the clincher was McCaw himself. "I wouldn't have invested in Teledesic unless Craig was involved," Gates says. "Craig is an amazing person. He thinks ahead of the pack and understands

the communications business and where it's going better than anyone I know." As with cellular, the technology behind Teledesic is not rocket science. Says Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, chief scientist at Bell Labs: "Nothing here violates the technology boundaries as we know them. They're not asking for mental telepathy or antigravity. Launching a low-orbit satellite has certainly been done for generations, and the idea of mass manufacture applied to this kind of technology seems perfectly straightforward. " What makes Teledesic so breathtakingly audacious is McCaw's vision, the breadth of what he wants to do with this technology. The cellular business, by comparison, was simple-just a more convenient way to use an old and familiar service. Teledesic puts a new spin on a new set of services, and it inherits all the uncertainties that shroud the Internet: How many people will use it? What will they use it for? What will they be willing to pay? Yet McCaw seems to embrace this kind of wracking uncertainty. It was, after all, his choice to descend from the pinnacle of his industry and become, once again, a guppy swimming among whales. Just as the cellular business once pitted him against the deep-pocketed Baby Bells, so his satellite

venture will face him off against giant communications outfits with their own satellite ventures: Motorola, Hughes, AT&T, Lora!. McCaw doesn't call attention to this contest with Gargantua. Asked what he's been up to at the beginning of an interview, he makes a little joke about himself. "I'm just a retired communications executive," he says. Indeed, in the year and a half since he ceded control of the company he founded, McCaw has exhibited some of the traits of the no-longer-gainfully-employed. He is an avid aviator. He takes an active interest in environmental and civic affairs. And although he is now one of AT&T's largest individual shareholders, he has refused to take a seat on the board because he can't stand going to the meetings. Yet in other ways he has been laying the flagstones for his next walk into the pantheon. The AT&T deal made $2.3 billion for McCaw and his three brothers, and he has used some of his money to invest in a variety of startups. He doesn't need the cash these enterprises might bring; what he wants is a career. cCawis an intensely private, elusive man. At times he flashes a playful and gently self-deprecating sense ofhumor, but for the most part he speaks carefully and with great concentration. His thoughts often seem to progress in a nonlinear fashion, which McCaw says stems from dyslexia. He will shift from o~e thread of a conversation to another, to a third, then back again, intertwining the ideas like strands of a rope. He has difficulty absorbing lengthy written documents and usually avoids them. That leaves time for him to do what he prefers anyway, which is to think and to stand back and take in the big picture. Dyslexics often succeed in the arts and in fields where spatial representation is important. Winston Churchill was thought to be a dyslexic. So was Albert Einstein. Charles Schwab and Thomas Watson, Jr., are among the dyslexics who have excelled in business. Though it's a myth that dyslexics universally see things in reverse, McCaw gives flesh to the metaphor, saying that he is good at seeing circumstances from the other per-

son's point of view, or at least in a different way from most. That helps him do what great entrepreneurs do, which is not to invent but to see the hidden value of an idea already in plain sight, a value that seems obvious as soon as it is given voice. McCaw didn't discover wireless communications-he was merely the first to truly understand what it was worth. McCaw says he misses McCaw Cellular; itwas the only place he ever worked. But he feels the time was right for him to go. He describes himself as a risk manager, the mediator between the economic realities of the marketplace and the wild-eyed crazies who hatch futuristic schemes. He considers himself much better at starting things than running them once they get big.

Developing countries may use Teledesic in areas not served by a regular telephone network or even by electricity.

McCaw believes neither individuals nor technology alone drives major change. Instead, he says, "you arrive at moments in time when an entrepreneur, a technology and the needs of people coincide. You get serendipity every once in a while. You try to be willing to accept it when it works in your behalf." It hasn't always worked for McCaw. He missed his first chance to ride the Internet wave, for example. He recalls: "Two or three years before the Netscape IPO, Steve Jobs came to Seattle and we were just chitchatting. He said, 'The Internet is it. I think it is the greatest change coming in computing.' And I thought, 'It sounds great. How do we buy it?' Well, it wasn't quite that easy." McCaw did look into buying a piece of one or another of the companies that connect users to the Internet, like DUNet, but thought they were all overpriced. "And they weren't," he says. He

pauses. "It was a focus issue. We were winding down McCaw Cellular, and I suppose that was part of the excuse." Now he thinks he has a better way oflinking the Internet and telephone networks around the world. Serendipity is calling again, and this time he wants to be ready. eledesic is only the most extreme example of the new wave in communications satellites: the launch of low-flying constellations rather than high-flying solo birds. A low orbit means that a signal needs less time to make its trip from Earth. But the lower the orbit, the greater the number of satellites necessary for global coverage. With half a dozen low-orbit projects in the offing besides Teledesic, aerospace companies are preparing to feast. Amy Sayre develops new space business for Boeing, which is bidding for the right to build and launch Teledesic's satellites. She says, "The only thing we know for sure is that the market is either huge or very huge. It will be $25 billion ~ year from now until 2005, excluding the military and Teledesic. If you count in Teledesic, the numbers skew." Teledesic differs from the other schemes, most of which have a head start, because of its size and because it seeks to resemble the terrestrial Internet. The earthly analog of Motorola's Iridium project, for example, is cellular telephone service. Its 66 satellites will let people in places where no cellular system exists talk using small hand-held phones. A 28-satellite system called Orbcomm will do the same for places without paging. Teledesic won't be much help to Himalayan trekkers who want to call in rescue helicopters with a cell phone. Rather, it will cater to computer users wishing to send and receive data at high speeds, especially those who live in remote areas. Teledesic will bring them a chunk of radio spectrum meaty enough to deliver a videoconference or a high-speed data dump. They will pay for the service only for as many seconds as they need it, and at a price comparable with a high-speed hookup over the regular phone network. They will also have to buy or rent an antenna and a signal decoder that plug into their computer or telephone.

Teledesic may make traditional telephony more widely available as well. Developing countries might use it in areas not served by a regular telephone network or even by electricity. McCaw says they could install solar-powered pay telephones in the center of remote villages, for example. Whatever the application, end users won't pay Teledesic directly; it will contract with local telephone companies that wi IImarket the services. Clearly, McCaw has an idea of who will use Teledesic. The open question is who will want to pay. Estimating the demand for telecom services in the developing world is enormously difficult. In Latin America, for instance, a lot of people buy satellite dishes to pull in TV signals. But that may not mean they're ready to buy phone service. As Boeing's Amy Sayre says, "You might see an ancient pickup truck with a satellite dish in the back, but that could be someone's life investment. A satellite phone might not be next on their list." As for the rest of the world, skeptics point out that phone companies in Europe, Japan and North America are laying on more and more fiber and wireless capacity every year. The better and brawnier the -network on the ground, they say, the less the need for a celestial supplement. Teledesic President Russell Daggatt disagrees. He says, "I'm more concerned that there won't be enough fiber in the ground." Teledesic alone won't have the capacity to carryall the world's high-speed traffic. It is counting on growing fiber-optic networks in the developed world to create and meet demand for highspeed services. Teledesic would fill in the blanks everywhere else. McCaw believes that the phenomenal growth of the Internet proves the market for Teledesic. "The revolution is here," he says. "People need high-capacity networks to homes, to remote locations, to farms, to villages that have never had fiber and won't fora long time. It's pretty obvious that there's a need, and that demand will bui ld." He is supported by Intel CEO Andy Grove, who says that the biggest obstacle his company faces is the shortage of bandwidth, and that satellites can help fill the need relatively quickly. One of his most pressing, if not frightening, preoccupations is finding investors.

McCaw is talking to telecom service companies around the world, looking for Teledesic's first major corporate partner. AT&T Wireless Services, as McCaw Cellular is called today, inherited a small piece ofTeledesic. But McCaw is not keen on seeking more money from Ma Bell. He says: "AT&T can't own too much of it. We need global partners, because it's a global project. While it may have some American ownership, we can't appear to be a mere. shill of the American industrial establishment. We've got to cooperate with everybody in the world." eledesic seems a very small operation with much to do and little leeway in the schedule. Plans call for a first satellite launch in 2000, just four years from now, and the launch of all 840 satellites over the following two years. But Teledesic has not yet settled on satellite design. It has not developed the software that will control the network. It hasn't decided how to transmit signals from satellite to satellite (it must choose between radio waves and laser beams). Nor has it lined up launch facilities, a major consideration given that Teledesic will need as many satell ite launches in 2000 and 2001 as the rest of the world combined. It's hard to imagine anyone tolerating uncertainty with as much cool as McCaw.

One thing he's betting on is that digital technology will continue its furious advance. His staff was about to spend half a million dollars to start writing software to control the satellites. He stopped them. "I mean, half a million dollars in software?" asks McCaw. "And spend five years writing it? It will be out of date before we get it done." McCaw will leave the job till later, when he can better estimate what hardware will be available to run the software that will run his satellites. For now, McCaw wants Teledesic to focus on what may be its toughest job: figuring out how to build all those birds.and get them up without breaking the bank. Following Motorola's lead with Iridium, Teledesic is completely rethinking the way satellites are manufactured, transforming the processfrom a craft to mass production. Says Jim Geros, business development manager for Boeing's defense and space group: "Today you have lots of engineers in bunny suits praying to one satellite. Teledesic can't do that, or they'll never hit their cost target." The target is $5.5 million per satellite-way under the $1 00 million it can costto build one of to day's big communication satellites, and about half what Iridium is planning to spend. Smiling broadly, Geros calls the goal "a big challenge. But I won't say it's not achievable." The bunny-suited guys adopt a worshipful attitude because a whole universe of

revenues can ride on the $100 million object they are fashioning, and it must be almost as perfect as God. Teledesic, instead, will build satellites the way a company like Gateway makes personal computers-screwed together from components by many different manufacturers, tested quickly and launched. McCaw expects that speed to beget imperfection. But if it works as planned, Teledesic, like the Internet, will be almost self-healing. When a computer relaying traffic on the Internet fails, or when a backhoe severs a fiber-optic line, the Internet instantly reroutes traffic over alternate routes. Teledesic's fine-meshed web of satellites will perform the same feat. Like a self-sealing tire, it will continue to roll even ifaholeappears. nce again, McCaw has a grander vision than anyone else in telecommunications. As he talks about his scheme, he seems to be wrestling with the social changes that might ensue if all the world is put within instant reach. McCaw's speech is laced with an idealism that seems quite sincere. He believes, in essence, that communications can help even out economic advantage. McCaw puts it like this: "Here's a poor village in Guatemala. They have solarpowered electricity; they have television; they see our riches and they want them. But where they are, they cannot have them. They don't have communications, and they don't have the tools to make money. Yet they have crops or they weave blankets, things that could be quite valuable if there were not so many middlemen, if they could essentiall):' be a part of the world market." If that becomes possible, he argues, indigenous societies will be able to survive, rather than disintegrate as young men and women leave to seek work in the city. United Nations figures show the world's urban population swelling by 168,000 every day, and with mass migration come scary consequences. "Whenever you add urban infrastructure, you ultimately destroy everything that came before," says McCaw. "It's like dragging the plague around behind you. The beauty of electronic technology, unlike cars and freeways, is that we can resolve prob-

lems that are completely intractable when you move people physically. Moving electrons gives us flexibility." One could argue with McCaw about the blessings that access to global communications will bring to the world's poor. Even ifit eliminates some middlemen, it can't guarantee that more money will reach indigent farmers. But there's no question that doing good works goes beyond rhetoric for McCaw. He has invested millions in a campaign to turn a run-down industrial area of Seattle into what would be one of the largest American urban parks created in this century. Take his approach to dealing with the international agencies that regulate radio spectrum. McCaw has lobbied the develop-

For his Teledesic project, McCaw is seeking global partners, "because it's a global project. While it may have some American ownership, wecan'tappearto beamere shill ofthe American industrial establishment." ing world with the acumen of the best Beltway insider. Until last year, United Nations rules would have prevented Teledesic from using the frequencies it needs. Says McCaw: "We had to know where the regulatory side was. Otherwise we couldn't afford the risk. As business people, we're not completely crazy." He and his team flew around the world, courting business leaders and government officials of the developing world. Eventually he accumulated enough support to win a crucial voteatthe U.N. last year. In the end, rather than being warring parts of the same body, McCaw's idealistic soul and business head coexist quite happily. McCaw believes that technology can enslave, and as a humanist, this pains him. He says: "In the Industrial Revolution, hu-

man beings were literally just a commodity, chewed up and spit out the other end. Essentially we served machines. It was probably the lowpoint inhuman value." He candidly admits that the technology he evangelized is guilty of sins, too: "Though the good was greater, a lot of bad has come from cellular. There's still too much indiscriminate access to people throligh telecommunications." But there it is-an opportunity that excites his entrepreneurial instincts. People, after all, will pay to get their privacy back. McCaw says, "We crave control over our circumstances. And we will pay disproportionately for it." He explains that he would like his satellites to distribute software programs to help users control the torrent of information. He goes on: Alexander Graham Bell put cotton in the ringer of his phone. The system is really dumb. Anytime someone sends an electrical burst down the wires, all the phones in your house ring." McCaw wants to make the system smarter, so that it knows who is calling, and for whom. He would sell the valve to turn off the acid rain, even as he seeds the cio1;lds. Teledesic goes far beyond what people usually think of as a risky proposition. It could end up a catastrophic failure or a heroic success, or merge with another satellite scheme, or quietly disappear. As John Pike, a satellite skeptic at the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists, says, "1 think it is extremely unlikely that Teledesic is going to happen or make any money. On the other hand, if it does happen and does make money, it will make a preposterous amount of money." Most men would be cowed by all that uncertainty. McCaw bears it contentedly and is happy to work far from the public eye. A few months ago, he did make a rare public appearance at a Federal Communications Commission hearing in Washington, D.C., to speak about future uses of the radio spectrum. Press coverage was thin, or at least discreet; no one accosted him. He started by introducing himself. "I'm just a retired communications executive," he said. Everybody laughed. 0 About the Author: Andrew Kupfer is a staff writer with Fortune magazine.

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While conventional businesses prance around with preunique needs, styles and cultural nuances, and we're sensitive to that." tense, regimentation and the stifling protocol of hierarchy, at Motorola~where all its 142,000 employees are on a He adds that while sales of Motorola pagers and cellular first-name basis~the emphasis is on appreciating and nurphones have been fairly good in India, "they can be better." turing the individual which then spawns a feeling offamily That should come with more exposure and when the value and camaraderie. and virtues of high-tech's capabilities become a part of Since 1947, its employees have been participating in mainstream thinking. its profit-sharing program, and the liberal pension plan allows Globally the cellular phone market has skyrocketed from any employee who has put in 23 million subscribers in 35 years to retire at close to 1992 to 85 million in 1995, full pay. and the paging market has alMany employees have put most tripled to 95 million Motorola is keen on in decades at Motorola and a subscribers in the same penumber of them have more riod. This points to a huge developing self-help and than one memberofthe family growth potential well into outreach programs in villages working in the company. the next century. and underdeveloped areas, Remarkably, despite the comFordham observes that in pany's size, no employee with developed markets paging through community more than ten years of service has become a valuable sergroups. can be released by the comvice for consumers and for pany without the concurrence businesses as costs come of the chairman of Motorola. down. However, in counThe flexibility and infortries such as India and mality extend to the absence of a dress code, Fordham says. China where the demand for communications facilities "It depends on you and where you're based. If you're meetfar outstrips supply, paging functions as a basic communications tool. ing important customers or are posted in a place like London, you're in ajacket and tie. If you're in Phoenix, you Meanwhile, Motorola's sales have soared from $16.96 can come in wearing shorts." billion in 1993 to more than $27 billion in 1995, and it At Bangalore, the youthful staff is largely attired in smart pushes ahead in innovation and development. casual, with a smattering of jeans and sneakers. Soon, you'll be "dictating" your notes directly to a Free counseling and subsidized wellness clinics and computer. Or writing a message~even in 13,000 child care are offered to employees. And each year, every Chinese character-s~that can be directly input into a Motorola employee is expected to take a minimum of 40 standard desktop or laptop computer. Or snap your mihours of instruction in personal and self-development crocassette recorder directly into a fax machine. skills to stay current and feel productive in a changing You'll be entertained, use the "telephony"~the marworld. riage of television and telephone~or work with interacBack in 1966, Motorola invested more than $40 million at tive and other Internet media services, all through your its corporate headquarters in Schaumburg, near Chicago, in TV set via ultra-high speed systems piped in through what has become the in7house Motorola University. While your existing TV cables. the university has developed a massive amount of training "All that is no longer on the distant horizon," says and skills-development programs, employees can also opt Roger Fordham. "It's already happening at breakneck for specialized courses offered elsewhere. speed. The electronics and communications revolution Priding itself as a progressive and a good corporate isjust beginning." neighbor, the multinational is keen on developing selfAnd if you pause long enough to realize that a lot ofthe help and outreach programs in villages and underdeproducts and developments that are beginning to make veloped areas, working through community groups as life easier, more productive and enjoyable are being crewell as on en\\ironmental issues from which Bangalore, ated by brains in Bangalore, the "Made in India" tag once one of Asia's most beautiful cities and now choking finally takes on a whole new meaning. 0 with pollution, can soon expect to benefit. While India is a relatively new pin in Motorola's manuAbout the Author: Vinod Chhabra, an award-winningjournalfacturing map, expansion is on a fast track, says Fordham. ist with Hearst Newspapers in New Yorkfor 23 years, is afre"Personally, I'd like to see us opening up manufacturing quent contributor to SPAN. He now divides his time between his near Delhi. Every country~and certainly a country as culrole as copublisher of Today Magazines Group in Florida and as turally diverse and as large as India~has customers with president of Asia America Marketing in Bangalore.

An Interview with Suresh Rojpol

All About the American

Informal, intense and with an aura of intellectualism, Suresh C. Rajpal could passfor a university professor. But he is very much a corporate man with a penchant for details and endowed with an incisive mind. Rajpal, president of Hewlett-Packard India Ltd., is the current chairman of the American Business Council (ABC), an apex body of u.s. companies doing business with India. With his transnational academic orientation-a graduate in electrical engineering from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi and MBA in international marketing from the University of Toronto, Canada-Rajpal has worked his way up the corporate ladder. He is exposed to the organizational values and practices of the West, yet still rooted in the traditional ethos of India. In an exclusive interview to SPAN, Rajpal speaks at length about the proactive role of ABC in the Indian context, India as an outsourcing center and investment destination, human dimensions of the corporate endeavors and a host of other related subjects.

JOSEPH THACHIL: What is the role dural hassles which we face on a day-to-day basis while doing business in India. These and objectives of the ABC in this critical economic phase that India is going are many minor issues such as classificathrough? tion of a particular product at the time ofimport. Import duty levied on these items very SURESH RAJPAL: First, let me explain what ABC is. It is a vol untary organization much depends on the classification under of over 150 U.S. corporations and their afwhich it belongs. Since there are a mindfiliates engaged in all sectors of trade and boggling numberofitems in the import basket, there could be instances when these are investment between India and the United States. ABC is affiliated with the U.S. not properly classi lied. There could also be Chamber of Commerce. Our primary obsituations when a new product which is to be imported doesn't figure in any of these jective is to promote trade and investment in India. Having said so, I would like to catclassifications. We periodically discuss egorize our role into three broad categories: these issues across-the-board with the con(a) promotional, (b) proactive and (c) probcerned government authori ties and seek lem-solving. I shall explain these in detail. their clarifications. We promote networking and information sharing through our regular speakers' proHow effective are these interactions? gram which includes U.S. and Indian corRAJPAL: I must say that these periodic porate and government leaders. We draw on interactions are very effective and construcmembers' hands-on experience to brief ti ve. I am happy to point out that at a "fast new companies exploring business oppor- . track" meeting with M.R. Sivaraman, then Union revenue secretary [now with the tunities in India. Yet another area of our activity is to have dialogue with the World Bank], we could get quick decisions Government of India and the state governon a number of issues which were pending for a long time. I was particularly impressed ments on business issues including foreign direct investment, trade policies, proceby his proactive disposition and quick decidural bottlenecks and the like. We have sion-making powers. These interactions are three types of membership. Corporate very useful; they help in resolving various members are U.S. corporations and their af- procedural hassles in areas like telecom, finance, power, roads and ports. These are the filiates in India, in which the U.S. corporaareas where the Indian Government would tions are a principal shareholder and/or have overall management control. In the like the foreign direct investment to flow in in an increasing manner. event of a U.S. corporation having multiple businesses and/or offices in India, it shaH You mentioned the proactive role of the be entitled to nominate nonvoting memABC. Is it a sort of lobbying for policy ber/s. These are called additional members. Individual members are those who are en- changes? RAJPAL: Let me make it clear that polrolled by invitation in furtherance of the overall objectives of the organization. icy decisions are entirely the prerogative of a sovereign government which evolves the How does the ABC deal with problems of policy through a process of informed dethe American companies if they have any? bates and discussions. Legislations and RAJPAL: There are a number of proceguidelines governing its industry, trade and

Business Council economy are formulated through discussions in the Parliament, assemblies and through the media. An organization like ours generates intellectual inputs to help the policymakers and others to discern the pros and cons of each economic issue. These critical inputs we give are based on our global experience in running business enterprises. In a way, our dialogue with the government resembles that of the apex business organizations like FICCI and CII. Let me take an example. We sensitize the government about the need for import duty reduction to bring down the project cost, abolition of octroi, which leads to traffic delays and wasteful expenditure due to higher consumption of petrol while the vehicles inch through the roads, and introduction of value added tax (VAT) in order to obviate the cascading effect of the indirect taxes. I do not think these issues which we take up are different from the ones taken up by CII and FICCI. ABC also plays a crucial role in facilitating cross- fertil ization of ideas and concepts on business and economic matters through our speakers' program. The speakers mostly are management experts, economists, professionals in various disciplines. Theirinteractions with Indian businesspeople, policymakers and intelligentsia throw up many interesting points and concepts.

What are the promotional activities of the American Business Council? RAJPAL: As a promotional body, we seek to channelize larger quantum of American. investment to India and facilitate two-way trade. Since 1991, India's rating among the American businessmen and investors has undergone a dramatic transformation. Since then, the inflow of investment and trade have increased. Many projects are in the pipeline. For instance, an

important U.S. multinational, the name of which I cannot reveal now, will shortly invest in India about $1.5 billion. From the forum of ABC, we are continuously sensitizing American corporations about the latent potential of India, its continental market, large reservoir of technical and skilled personnel, competitive wage structure and the like.

"A number of MNCs operating in India have not repatriated a penny so far. They have been investing in India on a continuous basis." Is the ABC a rallying force for motivat-. ing the U.S. corporations to get involved in the social and philanthropic sectors in India? RAJPAL: This is an important area of our activity in the ABC. We periodically chat with members about the need for their involvement in social and philanthropic ac~ tivities. Many of them are already involved in socially relevant activities. I must place on record the valuable advice and guidance which we receive from time to time from Ambassador Wisner in this regard. His wise counsel and commitment to take the U.S.India economic, political and cultural relations to a higher orbit of existence are moti vating factors in getting oursel ves identified with the social problems ofIndia. Inspired by his advice, ABC is formulating an action-frame to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Indian Independence to get ourselves more integrated to the social development of the country.

ByJOSEPHTHACHIL

What are the beneficial spin-offs of the MNCs' investment in India? RAJPAL: India is a capital-scarce country. In order to achieve the required rate of eight-nine percent growth in the economy and to generate employment on a large scale, India requires larger inflows of investment. Also, investment brings cultures together. Let me take an example. Total quality control is an integral management philosophy and operating methodology in most American companies. The worldwide exchange of methods, techniques and practices help the hostcountry's corporations to learn these techniques. Now you can see a large number ofIndian companies have already got ISO certification, which signi lies that they have created systems within themselves for total quality control. Many of the companies are in the process of acquiring the certification. This is a good pace of development given the fact that some four years back, there were only three or four Indian companies which got the quality accreditation. Also, tie-ups with the MNCs can enhance the export performance of Indian companies. The large marketing network ofMNCs could help the Indian firms to make solid forays into exports.

Of late, there has been some criticism of MNCs in a section of Indian industry. How does the ABC propose to deal with such misgivings? RAJPAL: I thought that the debate is over. I do not think there is any fundamental perceptional cleavage between Indian and foreign companies. The misunderstanding could have cropped up due to generalization of an isolated event or due to, what we say, a communication gap. I know a number of MNCs operating in India that have not repatriated a single penny so far. They have been investing in India on a continuous ba-

sis. Of course, their husiness operations are profit-oriented but they have a long-term vision, and in the process these corporations nurture Indian markets which, in tum,create more employment, income and better quality of life. There are solid examples as to how the potato and tomato cultivation by an MNC has benefited the farmers, generated moreemploymentand improved the lifestyles of the people in rural areas. I do not know how much profit they are repatriating every year. What are likeLy areas of conflict injoint-venture agreements? RAJPAL: This subject is dear to my heart. I have leetured on this issue at various fora. A conflict situation can develop due to a variety of reasons. The contractual terms may be vague and the time frame ofthecontract may not be specified properly. Yet another problem, which I feel is the most important, is that an Indian company tying up with an MNC may often have to deal with second or third layer of management. Let me explain this more candidly. MNCs have got multibillion dollar global operations and the Indian operation is one among their many business pursuits. Therefore, the chiefexecutive of the MNC may not be the nodal point for discussions and interactions with the Indian joint-venture partner; it may be somebody lower in the ranks, perhaps a person looking after some specific division. It is possible that the nodal person assigned to deal with a joint venture abroad may not share a macro vision of the chief executive. His interest tends to be speci fie, maybe focused on the interest of his division. Quite often, I find that the Indian partner wants to establish contacts only with the top executi ve of its foreign JV partner, which is very difficult. This leads to frustrations and conflicts. My suggestion, thereFore, is that the Indian partners should be sure about the persons whom they have to be in touch with in their day-to-day operations at the time of signing the agreement. Have a cordial understanding with him and as we proceed further and the contractual obligations of the joint ventures are fulfilled, the venture

"Since we only have one competitor, we should be able to finish in the top two. " Drawingby

Services, Inc.

itself will grow in size and stature leading to harmony and understanding. I have yet another suggestion to make. This relates to the "level-playing field," a phrase often used by Indian industry. It is a fact that when it comes to mobilizing resources, an MNC can do it with considerable cost advantage. A foreign company can borrow from institutional sources abroad at a rate of six to seven percent. But in the case of Indian companies, they have to pay a hefty rate of interest ranging from. 21 percent to 23 percent while borrowing from financial institutions and banks. These are the areas where the Indian Governmeill should give focused attention and Indian corporates should be allowed to source their fund requirements at the prevailing rates abroad. There is aLso an apprehension which is voiced by the industry associations and the press.that Indian managers with MNCs operating in India are given stepmotherLy treatment when it comes to the question of heading the company. Is it true? RAJPAL: I would say that it is a completely misplaced apprehension. I am an Indian and the chief executive of HewlettPackard's Indian operations. There are so many like me heading the Indian operations ofMNCs. There is no discrimination whatsoever aboutthe salary, perquisites and the like. lam getting as much as an American or

Bj-itisher would get if they occupied my chair. The salaries and other perquisites are decided by the business skills, your achievements, and have nothing to do with your color or country. You would be interested to know that since HP started the Indian operations, so far only three foreigners have been appointed and very recently one person has gone back on another mission. Whereas in China, there are still 55 foreigners working. There is a growing appreciation of the competence of techn.ocrats, managers and skilled persons of India. CouLd you teLLus something more about Hp, its corporate objectives, size, line ofproduction? RAJPAL: HP is one of the world's largest computer companies. The compan'y had a net revenue of $25 billion in its 1994 fiscal year. Nearly 70 percent of its business is generated outside the U.S. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company employs approximately 98,000 people. It designs, manufactures and services electronic products and systems for measurement, computing and communications used by people in industry, business, engineering, science, medicine and education. We have manufacturing bases in Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and the U.K. What are the corporate objectives of HewLett-Packard? RAJPAL: The corporate ohjccti ves, organizational values and practices of HP have led to its being ranked among the first ten companies recognized for top-quality manufacturing operations. Our corporate objectives are shaped around intrinsic values of trust and respect for individuals, focus on a high level of achievement and contribution, conduct of business with uncompromising integrity, achievement of common objectives through teamwork and encouragement of flexibility and innovation.

When did your Indian operations commence? RAJPAL: We began our direct operations in India in November 1989. This job brought me back to India after 25 years. Our mission objecti ve is to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction, quality and business ethics while contributing to India's technological, economic and social needs. Keeping with our objectives, HPI continuously brings to India technologies based on an understanding of our customer needs. We have direct access to more than 12,000 products. We have offices in six Indian cities-Bangalore, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Madras, Mumbai and New Delhi. Our India manufacturing operations and software development are based in Bangalore. We also have ajoint venture in manufacturing established in 1991 with Hindustan Computers (HCL) where HP owns 26 percent. You must have somefocus areas of your Indian operations. Ifso, what are they? RAJPAL: The first is customer satisfaction, the second, quality assurance and the third, to catalyze innovation and R&D. HP has been consistently ranked as one of the leaders in customer support and satisfaction in several leading market surveys. In India, we have made significant investment in our customer services. We attend to the customer needs and problems on a 24-houra-day basis. Total quality control is an integral management philosophy and operating methodology in HPI. Right from its inception, the HP India manufacturing operation in Bangalore has scrupulously followed worldwide HP tenets of total quality standards. I am happy to observe that our uncompromising attitude toward quality has had a favorabl~ effect on many Indian compaOles. We also focus on R&D. Each year, our company invests about eight percent of its net revenue in R&D worldwide, which is roughly over $2 billion a year. In India also, we give considerable importance to R&D which we feel is the most important tool to achieve competiti veness. Another important aspect of our operation is the measurement of staff satisfaction on a regularbasis. We have developed a ma-

trix for measuring such attributes. In our Indian operations, we find staff sati sfaction is very high-74 percent. That is the reason why we are successful in retaining the staff. I have worked with HP for almost 28 years. The company looks after you well-your interests and your creative pursuits. You are assured of a good working environment. We even have a booklet, Passport to Success, which is given to each employee. Their performance is evaluated on a regular basis. They are given valuable gifts for achieving certain grades. What are your social outreach programs in India? RAJPAL: It is a very interesting question. Let me first of all deal with HP operations the world over and then corne to India in particular. Because HP considers science and math competence vital in preparing people for the future, it is among the leading contributors to education. HP donates around $65 million every year toward corporate citizenship. Of this, for education alone, we set aside more than 80 percent of the funds. Corning to India, we are involved in philanthropy and education in a big way. Recently, we distributed artificial limbs to around 50 handicapped children in Bangalore. We donate equipment to IlTs in furtherance of our objectiveÂˇ to aid and develop higher education in the country. We are also closely associated with the CRY project in India which is targeted at helping the handicapped children. We give top priority to environment and poll ution control. As an integral part of our operations, we are heavily into comprehensive health-care programs. HP's medical group offers over 350 services designed to achieve one common goalimproving the quali ty of patient care at an acceptable cost. The range includes patient monitoring systems, ECG recorders, ultrasound imaging, etc. Would you like to comment Oil conflictillg views amollg differellt sections of Indialls on the opening up of the consumer goods alld insurance sectors to foreign companies? RAJPAL: I read these things in the newspapers. I am not trying to enter into a

controversi'al debate on it since much has been said and written about it. In a country like India, where there are 900 million consumers, is it not our duty to provide them with quality products? There are many Indian producers, whom I know of, who give utmost importance to quality in the consumer sector. But there is no denying that we are still lagging behind. With thefusion of technologies and concepts from all over the world, with minimal improvement in the technology and by toning up the working environment, we can give quality products to the teeming millions. Let me turn now to insurance. There were protests from the trade unions about opening up this sector. But interestingly; I read in the newspapers the views of the insurance users-that is the consumers. They want competition in this sector because they say quality of the service is pretty bad. Mind you, these are the responses of the citizens which we have to pay heed to. Another charge is that consumer sector is a lowin vestment and high-profit area. Butone has to see that many MNCs in this sector are not repatriating profits. They are plowing them back into new investments. There is also another dimension-job generation. The consumer sector can create millions of jobs in India and can considerably enhance the quality of life. Do you perceive Illdia as all economic superpower five yearsfrom 1l0W? RAJPAL: I have tremendous faith in the latent potential of India and the competitiveness of its people across the spectrum. Now there is a momentum. The maze ofbureaucratic delays and red tape are gradually being phased out. Some of the progressive state governments such as Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka have taken proactive steps to catalyze the industrial development. In some states, the investors are being given a red-carpet welcome. The others will have to fall in line with this trend sooner or later, and I have no doubt that India will become an economic powerhouseby20100rso. 0 About the Interviewer: Joseph Thachil is the editor of Skyflier magazine alld a Fee/ance economic write/:

I It ain't the thingsyou know that getyou in to trouhleit's the thingsyou know thatain'tso! -WILL

Ppointing key players to a management team is a lot like moving chess pieces: one blunder can cost you the entire game-and virtually every gaffe springs from faulty evaluation of the candidate at the time of hiring. Realizing the stakes, some people make a determined effort to recruit "clear winners." Paradoxically, even this apparently positive approach can get just about anybody into serious trouble. Otherwise intelligent hirers get so hung up on hiring winners that they put charisma before honest-to-God competence. I remember one particu~ larlyvivid example: A major heavy construction firm poached a competitor's second-incommand to become CEO. He looked great-immaculate and commanding, proud and patrician-had a wonderful resume and came highly recommended by a prominent headhunter. His first decision, however-and just about the only one he ever made-was to erect an exorbitant private office suite with a Caligulan lavatory set-up, which he disappeared into for hours at a time, emerging mostly to head for the first tee at his golf club. His reluctance to make any kind of executive decision sent the company to the brink ofbankruptcy! Whatever was the fellow's problem? His hidden defect lay in his inability to make an executive decision in the absence of the security blanket of his former CEO. He could proffer the

â&#x20AC;˘ â&#x20AC;˘ Even the sharpest executives can fall prey to the five deadly fallacies of management evaluation.

ROGERS

soundest of advice to a chief yet lacked the inner resources to ever become one. Such tip-of-the-iceberg cases (I can think of many, many more, and I' m sure you can, too) point to the fact that: Successful hiring is less a matter of spotting winners (the authentic of whom usually have a panoply of offers from which to choose) than of dramatically improving the risk/reward ratio on every hire by meansof negative selection. It is vital to scrutinize systematically every serious contender-especially the charismatic favorites-in order to identify (and likely appoint) the candidate least likely to fail. This might not sound like heroic advice, but believe me, those who ignore itdo so at great peril. Unfortunately, even though most hirers may grasp the relevance of negative selection, many still fall prey to five pervasive fallacies of management evaluation. 1. The fallacy ofinterviewer insight. An old saying has it that "every man complains of his memory, but no man complains of his judgment." This is nowhere more true than in an interview situation, where even sophisticated executives tend to overrate vastly their ability to interrogate a candidate and reach valid conclusions. When it comes to conducting employment interviews, most managers simply do not know what qualities they are looking for and, consequently, seldom have any clear idea of what questions they should be asking. Thus, even ifthey happen to ask a pertinent question, they rarely know how to interpretthe answer. A further vital point is that no one, however well qualified, can accurately evaluate the subtleties of human behavior based solely on one interview. Much more is required.

2. The fallacy of continuing success. Conventional wisdom has it that "Successful people go on being successful." While this sounds like common sense, it is the very nub of the Peter Principle, which, you will remember, says that managers inevitably rise to their "levels of incompetence." In fact, those who rise to positions that they lack the competence to handle are usually promoted on the basis of their past successes. What is overlooked in considering such successes, however, is that they are often totally irrelevant to future promotion. The key point to note is that a record of prior success may well have already brought the candidate to his or her "incompetence threshold"-the point beyond which he or she will be destined to fail iffurther promoted! 3. The fallacy of group insight. It is often believed that errors of hiring or promotion may be minimized by subjecting candidates to interviews by many people, or even to group interviews. The rationale is that if two heads are better than one, then many heads result in ultimate wisdom. How much value there is in this approach depends upon the . qualification of the members of the committee; mere size means nothing, for as Emile Zola once noted, "Even if 50 million Frenchmen say a foolish thing, it is sti II a foolish thing." Unless at least one of the interviewers is blessed with special insight, the whole exercise is likely to resemble the blind leading the blind, for experience reveals that the combined judgment of lay interviewers is often worse than the individual opinions of the members. Furthermore, group interviews-"beauty contests" as they are sometimes called-heavily favor extroverted candidates, who tend to be highly adept in such encounters, winning approbation and praise for imagined personality strengths while actually

diverting attention from indices of personality weakness. 4. The fallacy of objective reference checking. References proffered by a job candidate are always likely to be biased in his or her favor. Obtaining accurate references from past employers has also become increasingly difficult because fewer past employers are willing to disclose adverse information concerning any prior employee. This is nowhere more true, of course, than with a candidate suspected of willingness to cause trouble. It must also be remembered that, even with the best will in the world, most referees are inadequately

qualified to form an opinion as to the likelihood ofa candidate's success in a new and more demanding role. A referee may be trusted to verify the facts of a candidate's past employment. Beyond that, however, most opinions usually need to be discounted. 5. The fallacy of scientific testing. Psychological testing has a very real part to play in management evaluation-as I very well know because this is a key part of my livelihood-yet it has failed to provide the panacea promised in its 1950s heyday. The problem with most popular forms of psycHological testing offered to indus-

try is not merely that the results are highly unreliable but that sophisticated test-takers become adept in faking "correct" answers, thus attaining "executive profiles." Are any tests reliable? Yes. Experts agree that "projective tests" (like the famed Rorschach Inkblot or the WarehamMcMurry Incomplete Sentence Blank) that call for the candidate to reveal his personality by psychological projection can be invaluable when properly administered and analyzed by a qualified practitioner. However, because these tests call for skilled interpretation, they have not enjoyed wide use. In all, testing is an art and not a science.

The only reliable way to evaluate a person for employment or promotion is to apprai~e the whole person. This entails collecting key biographical data and full details of relevant work history, talking to and evaluating the comments of past superiors, administering and interpreting valid psychological instruments, and obtaining measures of values, goals, work-habits, judgment, people skills and leadership, as well as maturity and ability to function under pressure. Remember this: the more information you collect, the more accurate your evaluation will be. Ifat the end of the evaluation process you have that funny feeling that you still don't really know the candidate, then you can be pretty certain that some key piece of the puzzle is missing. Go back and find it-if you can't, then forgo the hire. 0 About the Author: John Wareham is founder and chief executive of Wareham Associates, a human resourcesjirm specializing in leadership search, assessfnent and development. He is author of several books, including The New Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter.

The Art of Business The world of commerce can learn useful lessons for solving business problems from the artists, says the author, who is a senior corporate executive as well as a part-time painter.

ommenting on the power of communications unleashed by digital technology, Eastman Kodak CEO George Fisher recently said: "Voice is very slow. The eyes are very fast in taking in information. The optimum way of getting information into the brain is through the eyes." Reading his words, it occurred to me that, in a fast-moving world of novel change, who absorbs the world through his eyes more adeptly than the artist? Painters, after all, have always interpreted the world and communicated it back to others; the tradition dates as far back as cave-wall images. As a part-time painter(in oils, watercolors and pastels), I realized that there are lessons to be learned from artists, lessons useful in the world of commerce--right-brain truths for left-brain problem solvers.

Simplicity Leads to Longevity In painting, the simplest image or technique is often the most enduring-an O'Keeffe flower, a Monet haystack, a Hopper lighthouse, a Cezanne bowl of fruit, a Maynard Dixon desertscape. Longlife-cycle products have this in common with paintings. There is elegant simplicity in products with enduring sales-a pair of Levi's blue jeans, a bar of Hershey chocolate,

a bottle of Budweiser beer, a Polaroid camera, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a "Tom Morris" Stickley chair, a roll of Scotch tape. Simple design, ingredients, packaging, availability and function are evident in all. No great oil painting is simple to create,just as a Polaroid camera or bottle of Budweiser is not simple to build or brew. What is simple is their fundamental design harmony. and the clear way in which this simplicity plays true to consumers' needs.

Perspective Shapes Vision If you stand about 15 centimeters from a painting-such as an Impressionist landscape by Howard Chandler Christyyour experience of it will be 180 degrees different than if you viewed it from three meters back. Up close you see only brush strokes and paint textures; you sense the emotions the artist may have felt in painting it. Back three meters you see through a wideangle lens, the harmony of the colors, the balances in the image, its horizon-key features and grand sweep. Corporations struggle to pinpoint their vision-what it is and what it could be. Perspective is critical, just as to the artist. When you paint, you do it up close, but you see it from up close and from farther back. Corporations must look to their leaders for

perspective on their balance, their grand sweep and scope, their harmonious parts. Yet this viewpoint lacks texture and emotion; to incorporate these elements requires the perspective of those nearest to customers, suppliers and markets. These are the up-close brush strokes that help shape the complete picture farther back. Watching those who paint, you'll notice they constantly shift from up close to far back, framing their image in both lenses. Without the dual perspective, you fai I to see the whole image or its integrating potential. General Electric utilizes work-out sessions in order to shape its vision from above and below-a search for perspective worthy of emulation.

Color Lends Vitality Nature represents a blend of color; in fact, it is rare in nature to ever find pure black-the absence of color-since some light almost always exists. French Impressionists removed black from their palettes to more truthfully represent light in their art. In combination, color lifts ordinary paintings to art. The plein air painters of the 1920s, '30s and '40s in California brought a whole range of spectacular color to their paintings. They imbued the hiHs with purples, the meadows with gold, the coastline with silvery blues, the poppies, lupines and

STAND BACK: A vieweJ; needs distance to appreciate Forest Clearing With Cottage by Howard Chandler Christie. Up close,you see only brushstrokes that shaped the painting (inset). This dual perspective is important/or corporate vision.

BOLD EXPERIMENTATION: Artists like Jackson Pollock, whose painting Guardians of the Secret is shown above, and Wassily Kandinsky, whose Twilight appears at right, were alwllys doing bold experimentation, which is vitlll for companies as well.

other wildflowers with oranges, reds and deep pinks. They enhanced the 1ife they saw in front of their easels. Corporations can likewise enhance their realities by looking at the diversity of their employees as their palette. How can diversity of age groups, personalities, skill sets, ethnic backgrounds, genders and aptitudes be blended for creativity, fresh ideas and uniquely mixed collaborations? Unilever

and ASEA Brown Boveri embrace this idea, mixing diverse managers and employees around the world; from this blend, they have developed successful operations in every major city around the globe.

Bold Experimentation Energizes Every new school of painters is enormously energizing to its adherents. Each believes it is the "new genesis," pushing

small-a camaraderie of six, eight or ten revolutionaries pushing the boundaries of art. New industries are driven by bold experimentation in small clusters-biotech, software, radical new materials and information-highway pioneers. They push forward the new, even in the absence of a road map--and disconnect with the old. It seems to me that on a company level, revolutionaries in teams are accomplishing the same things at Rubbermaid, 3M, Chrysler, Texas Instruments and elsewhere. Small, energized teams doing bold experimentation without clear pathways-those elements would be instantly understood by the Jackson Pollocks and Wassily Kandinskys of the art world.

Capture Fleeting Opportunities

back the status quo. Classicists are replaced by Impressionists, who are replaced by Fauvists, Expressionists, Abstractionists, Surrealists and so on through time. Like all innovations, new painting schools come in waves, creating excitement, revolt and eventually imitation. Each is marked by bold experimentation, sometimes incomprehensible to defenders of the old style. And in almost every case, these movements start

When first learning to paint, I believed that a painter should first draw his imagery on the canvas and then, as a second step, paint it in. As I grew in understanding, I saw the flaw in my thinking: Artists paint what they see-drawing as they see it-with the brush loaded with often-unforgiving paint (especially watercolor!). Business is in the same position. Opportunities are fleeting-like the changing light that must be put down on canvas before the shadows move. Businesses do not have the time to draw in their image first and then paint it as a second step. A corporation must move with more sureness to capture opportunity, and it must absorb the risks that accompany swiftness of action (look at the speed with which Chrysler brought its Neon conceptcarto a successful reality). Constantly testing markets or technologies often entails more risk than venturing forth and plunging ahead. It is sometimes more valuable to streamline your ability to learn "in motion" than it is to study things too long. Motorola isn't hesitating to go forward with the sure-footed belief in a wireless world, and Corning is doing likewise in fiber optics-capturing opportunities as they appear like a painter rushing to capture his diminishing sunlight.

Accept Multiple Realities All of us carry around preconceptions that govern our behavior. When first paint-

ing, an artist often expresses these in traditions of reality-blue skies, green grass, brown earth, yellow suns, gray rocks. Once you immerse yourselfin galleries, you discover that a sky can be every color of the rainbow; a sun can be brown, orange or pink in addition to yellow; a snowfall can be blue or even black. A Richard Diebenkorn streetscape does not need proper angles to seem vital and real. An Ernst Ludwig Kirchner portrait uses no color that resembles skin: Its vivid blues and yellows express emotion rather than appearance. Rockwell Kent painted ice that feels cold yet isn't always the color of ice as we know it from our freezer. Painting is not photography. Preconceptions often represent blockages to a painter. Corporations in the current era face the conundrum of conflicting realities. Managers always talk about a "reality check," but I ask; "what reality?" Is the traditional assembly line the only way to build cars? No-we are finding multiple manufacturing realities such as work cells and agile teams. Are stores the only way to sell mass consumer goods? No-catalogs and the Internet are viable marketing tools. Are offices the only places to work? No-the number of telecommuters is rapidly growing. What is reality in banking? A building

SIGNATURE STYLE: Weather Side by Andrew Wyeth captures the personality of a house, a classic style of the artist. Corporate identity must be equally distinctive.

with tellers, an ATM, a home computer with a modem or something else? Companies are often better off thinking more deeply about human needs than current or conventional realities. Microsoft should concentrate on evolving software needs rather than on whether these needs are best delivered by a computer: Developing realities such as interactive television may be a preferred carrier for Microsoft's future products. Hewlett-Packard looks for new human needs from the intersection of computing and communications-and then tries to put current realities on the back burner as it shapes new ones. All painters know realities shift, and the best painting they will ever do is always the next one-a future reality.

The Fulfillment of Process Painters are judged by their finished works, which hang in galleries, collections, museums and homes. While recognition is key to painters-we all crave acceptanceit is not the reason we paint. We paint for personal joy and a sense of fulfillment. Many painters do so until they can barely hold the brush or see the canvas, as was the case with Georgia 0' Keeffe. Some paint under the most miserable of conditions. For instance, Canada's Tom Thomson painted his landscapes outdoors in the face of raging thunderstorms, in heavy brush, in a swarm of mosquitoes-all to capture the lakes and trees of Canada's magnificent Algonquin region. His paint often froze in winter and had to be heated on an open fire to flow on a winter day. Increasingly, after 24 years in business, I am more aware of the power of human fulfi IIment as a driver of worth. The subjective side of work-the why of fulfillment--is perhaps more rewarding to people than its objective side-what is done and what results from it. The work process itself provides its own satisfaction, impetus, patterns, frustrations and joys. Executives hone their problem-solving skills on the objective "how" of work. They seek out the purposefulness of work, trying always to cut redundancy, to reengineer lowvalue-added activity. But a great executive has empathy for the subjectivity of workeven as he may be driving to change it. He

understands that those people performing low-value work often cannot see this themselves, focused as they are on performing it as an artist is on the pull ofa painting. Just doing it gives them self-worth. Truly great executives can demonstrate empathy and deep respect for the dignity and worth that emanates from work, and can demonstrate this to those they leadeven as they push for greater efficiency. Stanley Gault achieved this decidedly tough balance between empathy for his workers and urgency for changing business practices, first at Rubbermaid and then at Goodyear.

The Value of the Teacher Artists as a group can fall into two broad categories: those who are individualists and those who are themselves fine artists but also great teachers. Paul Gauguin was the quintessential individualist-he cared little for teaching others to paint, focusing entirely on self-expression. He was a great painter, but he got along poorly with almost all those who touched his life, including his family, to the point that he exi led himself to the South Pacific. William Merritt Chase was, like Gauguin, a painter of huge talent, but he was also a brilliant mentor whose influence was intergenerational. His many students became fine painters and in turn influenced a third generation of artists. Richard Earl Thompson, one of the celebrated American Impressionists of recent times, was taught by Frederick Grant, a fine Chicago painter and a student of Chase. Business leaders face this same choice. Some opt for making their individual mark, as did Lee lacocca, a virtuoso who did not train another CEO or presidentto follow him at Chrysler. Others seek broad-ranging influence. While great executives in their own right, as Chase was a painter, they also play the teacher-developer role. Bob Galvin Sr. is like this at Motorola; William McKnight's influence at 3M, conveyed through his values, teachings and choices of people, spans three generations of management. Who makes the greater contributionthe artist-virtuoso or the artist-mentor? If maximizing shareholder value over the

longer term is the key goal, perhaps this must be judged by the successful transfer ofleadership. IfI were an investor, I'd admire the virtuosos but bet on the teachers. Gauguin's work is a shining star, but Chase's influence represents an entire galaxy of stars.

By Your Signature You Are Known Painters have two signatures-their name and their style. A Robert Henri or Andrew Wyeth has an unmistakable look. Often a painter's written signature can be missing, but his visual signature is obvious-a Joan Mir6, Marc Chagall or Piet Mondrian. Industry follows suit. Corporations are brands with brand signatures. Sony's brand is distinctive, as is the subtly designed look of its electronic stable of products. The Wall Street Journal has its unique masthead and a distinctive copy style. It is as instantly recognizable as a Joseph Turner sunset. Corporations think long and hard about identity and image-their signatures. What makes them unique? With Matisse it was the way he painted pure colors, straight from the tube with a light touch. Signatures can create great market presence and globalize the economics of the firm. Nestle is a classic example of this: It has connected its signature of quality and wholesomeness with numerous food categories. Corporate identities, like human integrity, are sustained by consistent patterns of positive behavior. A company that understands the essence of its identity is also more sensitive to al igning itself with business practices, acquisitions, alliances or products that can destroy it. Firms that seek unrelated diversification squander their identities on false synergy. Those that place results above methods risk disgracing their corporate identities. Gucci once licensed its signature to all sorts of low-end firms, whose quality pulled the Gucci name into the mud. The goal is not just to be famous-since infamy can be a close-by cousin. The goal is to paint the canvas distinctly, so that you are proud to sign it. 0 About the Author: Al/anJ Magrath is director of corporate marketing services at 3MCanada Inc.

Closing the

Books A once devoted reader arrives at the end of the story.

everal years ago, a man I knew, an assistant professor of English at an Ivy League university, decided to scrap his library-a gesture that at the time did not properly impress me. What interested me were the books themselves, as I was one of those invited to plunder the novels, biographies, anthologies of plays and poetry, works of criticism, short-story collections, a sampling of history and philosophy-exactly what you'd expect from a lifetime ofliberal-arts collecting. The reason he gave them away, and the reason I didn't catch on to what was really happening, is that he had been offered ajob inHollywood. The money was the usual ridiculous amount by any standard but Hollywood's, and the man had a family to support. I figured that he was merely switching careers and the books were extra weight, intellectual baggage he wouldn't need out there. Still, I should have realized that something else was going on. Leaving academia doesn't require leaving one's books behind, nor does quitting teaching necessarily suppose a disaffection with literature. Indeed, given what English departments are like these days, it may actually attest to a love of books. And though the professor in question wasn't happy with the direction that literature studies were taking in the seventies and eighties, this was not the reason he gave up teaching. Other professors of English find the current theoretical and political atmosphere disagreeable without running off to the hills, Beverly or otherwise. They stick it out because literature, despite what many of their colleagues profess,

remains for them the artistic form in which im individual's awareness oflife encounters its fullest expression. So it wasn't just dissatisfaction with the academic scene that prompted this man to empty his bookshelves. Despite his professional gripes, he was looking forward to a successful career. He was not much past ~O, he already had one book to his credit and was contributing artic les and book reviews to leading newspapers and magazines. This is no small point. His work was showing up in places where most English teachers would give their eyeteeth to appear. But he chose to give it up; he chose Hollywood over both the academic and the literary life, and the point I had missed was not that he was switching careers but that he was switching identities. He had stopped living for literature, and literature in turn would no longer provide him with a living. At the ti me, such a feel ing-or rather loss of feel ing-for books was unthinkable to me. After years of bumming around and working at a variety of blue-collar jobs, I had begun to do some editing and writing myself, and though I was never in the thick ofthings-being part of neither the neoconservative crowd at Commentary and the New Criterion nor the liberal crowd at the Village Voice and the New York Times-I kept up with developments in the academy and publishing alike. Gradually I, too, began reviewing for half a dozen newspapers andjournals, and bookshelves had to be builtto accommodate the titles that came my way. I didn't keep every book that landed on my desk, and every so often I would weed out the unwanted or unread, but the idea of seeing my books scattered on the floor or dumped unceremoniously in boxes for others to cart offwas unimaginable. Now, however, in my mid-forties the idea is

not so ridiculous. For some reason or conflation of reasons, I no way that now seems almost mythical, when the bond between life longer care so much for literature, and certainly even less for the and literature was a fact that brooked no dispute among men and women of letters. People may not have read as if their lives literary life. This may not strike many people as a statement fraught with depended on it (as the poet Adrienne Rich would have us believe drama, but for someone who grew up in a bookish household, she did), but books did matter for Mark Pattison, Matthew Arnold, whose first friends were those he could discuss books with, and for Virginia Woolf and Lionel Trilling in a way that is alien to most whom the writing and teaching of books always seemed an incontemporary readers. Fifty years ago a different set of expecevitability, a loss of interest in literature is no less a palpable sensatations were in place: "It was as if we didn't know where we tion than falling out oflove. To be and then not to be in love is to ended and books began," Anatole Broyard recalled of his life undergo some radical change in personality. Not only do we expein Greenwich Village. "Books were our weather, our environrience the loss of connection to another but something is also missment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became ing in one's relation to oneself. In some ways, the person one used them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our to be is now gone. histories .... Books gave us balance .... Books steadied us .... They What I used to be is "literary," by whieh I mean something both gave us gravity." specific and at the same time indefinable. Superficially, it betokens a familiarity with the usual suspects among Dead White hat literary person has not felt the' same? Like Males (and a few Females), a familiarity that makes it possible to Broyard, I grew up inside books. In my parents' home and in the homes of my childhood friends, the recognize a poet or novelist by virtue of his or her music, syntax, European masters-Goethe, Schiller, Balzac, rhetorical flourishes or subject matter. At the very least, it means Dostoevsky, Tolstoy-were revered as commentators on the sobeing able to locate a poem or prose work within a 50-year period. cial and human condition (the two being, in fact, one). I read as a When I was in college, friends would choose a book at random, matter of course; it was nothing to read six novels a week when I keeping the cover hidden, and begin to read from the middle, omitting only proper names. Those of us who grew up reading the Great was 14; I probably thought everyone did. And I continued reading at this clip even while in college, or traveling, or hanging ceilings (and not-so-great) Books usually managed to guess the author corat the Charleston Navy yards. rectly. We recognized the muIt was only when I began sic without knowing the name of the composition because reviewing books on a regular basis in the early 1980s that we took for granted a writer's I found I had to cut back. Notesingularity; distinguishing betaking, thinking and writing tween John Keats and John take time. Still, I read more Clare was as natural as distinthan I was paid to read, if only guishing between types of because a reviewer's responsiflora, and those incapable of noting differences in techbility extends beyond the book nique and level of skill evenat hand. And as happens to all novice reviewers, the glow tually dropped away. soon faded from seeing my Surely some act of nature is name in print. But something at work here, a predisposition unexpected also happened: my simi lar to perfect pitch anq the desire to read faded as wellability to think musically. But almost to the vanishing point. ifbeing litâ&#x201A;Źrary is an accident These days, the newspaper, of birth, it is also subject to "Books were our weathel; our environment, our clothing. two orthree magazines and the life's accidents, which can eiWe didn ~simply read books; we became them ... occasional thriller are all that I ther thwart or stimulate it, and can manage. Recently, I tried rereading Henry James's The this is where a definition of "literary" becomes tricky. It's easy Ambassadors, a novel that I admired when I was in graduate enough to say that books are important, but what exactly does this school, but put it aside after three pages. It was as ifI'd forgotten mean? Just how necessary are Proust, Henry James, Joyce, Dante, how to swim, or, ifnot quite that, as ifreading it wasn't worth the Baudelaire, Wordsworth? Has reading them truly affected the effort. Nor does it seem worth the effort to peruse the various course of my life in anything but a professional sense? Although a book-review sections, literary journals or publishers' catalogs, all of book may sometimes overwhelm the idealistic or easily impressionable (Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther led to a spate of which at one time were pabulum to me. Even bookstores are not the magnets they used to be, not even secondhand ones, which for suicides after its publication in 1774), does literature-with the any real lover of books are what the sirens were to Odysseus. As exception of the Bible-really affect our dealings with others? for reviewing, the idea of writing about another contemporary There was a time not so long ago when books were essential in a

novel or work of criticism has about as much appeal as spending a night in a bus station. In short, I am out of it: I don't give a damn who or what gets published these days, and I can't imagine why anyone would. In case someone might think that 1 suffer from reviewer's fatigue, let me quash the notion. I was the occasional reviewer, averaging 12 or 15 reviews a year. I couldn't hold a candle to someone like George Orwell, who reviewed eight or ten books a month for months at a time, and for whom "the prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books [was] a quite exceptiona\Jy thankless, irritating and exhausting job." Ifit were only reviewing that had caused me to stop reading books, I wouldn't be terribly concerned. A little rest and recreation, and I'd be set to read again. But the disinclination goes deeper. Something is wrong that has nothing to do with reading and writing on assignment. It's difficult to say why, or even to be sure that I have given up on books permanently, but the fact that I can contemplate a life without literature is, to put it mildly, bizarre. Do I have to add that this is not how literary people are supposed to feel? The only writer I know of who professed to be bored by books was Philip Larkin: "Don't read much now: the dude/Who lets the girl down before/The hero arrives, the chap/Who's yellow and keeps the store,/Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:/Books are a load of crap." It's hard to know how serious Larkin was-he seems to be speaking mainly of adventure stories here-but there is something to what he says. After 30 or 40 years of reading in a serious way, a person may be excused for finding many newly minted novels and poems far too familiar. "The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books," Mallarme observed. He hadn't, of course, but we know what he means. long time ago I used to read for the sheer pleasure of it. Words on a page, whether written by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Ford Madox Ford-to name two writers who are probably not smoking a cigar together in the afterlife-absorbed me. It didn't matter that one was a "serious" writer and the other a "hack"; both managed to keep me interested. I knew without having to be taught (writers themselves were sufficient to teach me) which works were profound, shallow, mannered,innovative, raw or cooked. A good teacher or critic was often valuable in pointing out textual subtleties or providing a historical gloss, but to be honest I can't recall any professor significantly altering my view of a poet's or novelist's merits. And I still like the writers I used to like; it's just that I don't plan to renew my acquaintance with them. When I mention my disaffection to friends, they invariably attribute it to the literary climate. "Of course you're depressed. Who isn't these days?" But that explanation doesn't really work for me. After all, people have always complained about bad books and stupid reviews. Self-promoters, blurbmeisters and hucksters are as old as the troubadours. "[I]t is scarcely possible nowadays to tell the reviews from the advertising.," groused Edmund Wilson. "[B]oth tend to convey the impression that masterpieces are being manufactured as regularly as new models of motorcars." The year is 1926 and Wilson goes on to say, "The present writers on

American literature all have interests in one phase or another of it: either the authors,know one another personally or they owe one another debts of gratitude or they are bound together by their loyalty to some stimulating common cause. And almost all forget critical standards in their devotion to the great common causes .... " Wilson himself, incidentally, was not above promoting writers whom he liked or had slept with, and only the terminally naive could think that things have changed much. So ifI can't blame the insularity of the book business for what ails me, what can I blame? Well, the academy comes to mind, that confederation of professors and curricula which over the last three decades has reversed the respective status of criticism and belles lettres, and in the process managed to drive a wedge between the intellectual and the literary life. As recently as 30 years ago, to be literary was by definition to be intellectual. Intellectuals, whether or not inclined to produce poems or novels, were duty-bound to evaluate them, and these evaluations when undertaken by the likes of Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur and M.H. Abrams often approached something like literature itself. But with the advent of

the deconstructioni st/semiotic/hi stori cist/ gender- based critic ism that gained .currency during the 1970s, men of letters such as Saint-Beuve and Lionel Trilling were relegated to the back of the intellectual bus, while the theorists-Barthes, Benjamin, Derrida, Adorno, de Man, Foucault, Lacan, Bakhtin-sat up front. Actually they drove the bus, and the attention lavished on them altered the course oftiterary studies, making it retrograde to uphold the aesthetic qualities that once distinguished literature from other forms of written discourse. As someone who felt that the great writers, despite their personal failings, had more to teach us than those who taught by diminishing their works, I did not take kindly to the exaltation of theory. Nor did I care for the fact that my own essays and book reviews were being held accountable to some putatively democratic ideal that discouraged harsh appraisals of well-intentioned books. One book-review ~ditor, for example, was unhappy with my misgivings about the politically correct orthodoxy demonstrated by The Columbia History of the American Novel. My objections to the way literature was being taught were taken as a political statement by a newspaper that did not want to be seen as condoning such unfashionable views. The irony is (and it can be ironic only in this climate) that my politics, such as they are, are anything but conservative. Endorsing the canon does not mean that I vote the Republican ticket. Edmund Wilson didn't know how good he had it. But bad as things are today, 1 can't really blame my reading problem on the depredations of either the writers or the professors. Although I am convinced that no writer of the past generation has improved upon Nabokov, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden, someone.else has every right to feel differently. My own unshakable conviction is that contemporary novels and poems are ordinary, not because of their subject matter (which may be sensational) but because our expectations oft iterature are so ordinary. We don't expect greatness of our writers, and perhaps we don't want it. We are satisfied with Jay Mclnerney, E.L. Doctorow, Alice Walker, David Leavitt, Joyce Carol Oates or John Irving. Just so there is no confusion, I'm perfectly happy to admit that Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick and a dozen other novelists are worth reading; it's just that I don't see why I should read them. As for contemporary poetry, the secret is out. Some of the poetry of the last quarter century isn't bad, and some of Elizabeth Bishop's and Richard Wilbur's is quite good, but the vast majority has neither beauty nor passion nor the powerto move us. Is itjust my imagination or do critics of poetry overcompensate, assigning greatness where there is only intelligence and competence? Read, say, Helen Vendler on practically anyone and you will be impressed by her insights and references; then read the poetry itself and YQuhave to wonder what inspired her acts of exegetical devotion. Most readers, however, are afraid to question the expertsafraid of appearing too dense to appreciate a poem by James Merri II or Jorie Graham, afraid of being taken for the sort of person who looks at an expressionist painting and says, "My ten-year-old kid could do that." I don't know what's worse: the philistine who

will not make the attempt to grasp the unfamiliar, or the halfsmart, half-literary reader who, because the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books runs high-sounding critical essays, thinks that John Ashbery and Rita Dove are poets of the first rank. Because plenty of other readers feel the same way and haven't given up on reading, 1don't see how I canjustify my loss ofinterest in books on the dearth of great writers today. Moreover, I sti II believe that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Keats and Joyce deflate every theorist, multiculturalist or product of a creative writing workshop now forcing his attentions on us. At the same time, however, 1 feel little desire to reread the Great Books. And that is what's baffling, because it was not supposed to turn out this way. When 1 was young it was axiomatic that a deeper appreciation of books came with age. I remember my parents telling me that Dostoevsky could not really be understood until one was 40, a figure that was amended upward as they got older. And Henry James was always spoken of as someone who improves with age, the reader's age, that is. I've never doubted this, not until now. et me see ifI can make sense of this. Once we have come to appreciate the difficulty of writing, once we have been duly impressed by the poet's or the novelist's genius, once we have read the salient criticism, we are left alone with our thoughts-thoughts unlike those we had when books themselves were tantamount to experiences, part of what formed us. At 15 or 20, the books we read-or rather the minds behind them-are far more interesting than our own. But as we experience for ourselves the rites of passage that were previously only read about, and as we mature and reflect on what those experiences mean, novelists and poets begin to lose an important advantageat some point we've all been down the same road. And what may happen is this: we begin to find that most writers are less interesting than we think ourselves to be. I don't know ifmuch has been written about the relationship between aging and read,ing, but it seems to me, given my own longstanding investment in books, that a rather increasingly fine equation does exist. flow one reads at 20 and 40 (and 60, I expect) are experiences both subtly and conspicuously different. I attach no profundity to this observation. I merely point out that the relationship is not often talked about. Call it the biology of taste, for, ifI'm right, there may be a connection between hormonal balancl: and the patience required to read serious fiction and poetry. In my own case, the difference between my reading habits today and 20 years ago is about as dramatic as the change in my eyesight. Nowadays I require what are called reading glasses, an irony too obvious to dwell on. At one time, books, especially novels, could actually alter the way I felt about the world. Yet this capacity to be amazed and shaped by books has, in my case at least, proved itself temporal. Books that managed to fuel my imagination at 15 or 25 now seem overwrought, self-indulgent, or simply irrelevant. Nor is it only the eccentric or peripheral poet or playwright-Lautreamont, Nerval, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam-who has lost his hold on me, but also writers who deal with the human condition in all its breadth

aside, contemporary novels about marital relationships, friendship, parenting, mental illness, homosexuality or coming of age do not persuade me that anything new is being added to the store of literature. Here is the crux, absurdly simple: once you have made the acquaintance of truly interesting minds, minds such as Montaigne's, Shakespeare's, Goethe's, Swift's, Diderot's, Nietzsche's, Mallarme's, Dostoevsky's, Wilde's--even if you disagree with some of their ideas, and even if you detect sighs of ingrained cultural bias-what do the novels and poems of today have to offer other than implicit commentary on their antecedents? Another way of saying this is: the best is the enemy of the good, and once you have become acquainted with the former, why bother with the rest? What happened? What happened to.the capacity to feel the possibilities in books? To answer this, I have to summon up the way books used to make me feel, and when I consider the eagerness with which I set out to read everything I could, and how a peculiar book like Djuna Barnes's Nightwood once made me whistle in amazement, it seems to me that a necessary component of the literary life is a certain romantic attachment to life itself. But life is not very romantic these days.l 'm not sure it ever was, but at least in the days before the media transformed the nature of existence by devaluing the idea of privacy, a writer's imaginative powers and a reader's imaginative responses were shaped by a real sense of possibility. The greater world, being further removed from the ordinary individual, required an imaginative leap to bring it home. And when the imagination succeeded through print or pigment, one feltlhejolt, the power of art to transfigure one's life. "When I was young it was axiomatic that a deeper appreciation of books came with age. "

and complexity. It's easy enough to understand how we can put aside a sentiment such as "As for living, our servants will do that for us," which I confess I once thought pretty cool, but how do I come to terms with casting out Tolstoy and George Eliot? The sad trUth is, I am unable to think seriously about any writer. Instead I think about what every middle-aged, nonliterary person thinks about: family, health, health insurance, money, property, time running out, etc. Why this should interfere with or diminish one's capacity to appreciate literature is not hard to understand. But, by the same token, there are people who turn to literature to tmderstand the mundane, who find in poetry and fiction not so much an escape as an avenue to thoughts so beautifully or interestingly expressed that they may be tested against reality. Indeed, one could argue that life itself sharpens our appreciation of novels, allowing us to see how a writer handles the particularities of experience, how he or she makes the familiar seem new and even transcendent. Conceding this, I still maintain there comes a point when one "outgrows" novels, at least in the sense that the words no longer speak to one's experience in a way that reveals new depth about that experience. Matters of technique and felicitous phrasing

owit is our expectations that have been transformed. What previously was regarded as profane (and therefore also. sacred, in terms of being removed from ordinary discourse and experience) is now insistently made public; we expect as a matter of course to witness communally what formerly we read about alone. How can novels compete in an environment that prides itself on the outpouring of naked emotions? In 1996, Anna Kareninadoesn 't head for the railroad tracks; instead, she and Vronsky take their sad tale to Phil Donahue. And after Heathcliff and Cathy fight it out in the tabloids, they reconcile and make forthe nearest downtown club. Because on some basic level we read to spy on other peoplewhether they lie in bed all day like Oblomov or hop into bed with others like Emma Bovary-why should we bother to open a book when we can witness fear and loathing on the TV screen: actual people screaming, sobbing, accusing or forgiving their spouses, lovers, parents or children in the privacy of our own homes? A "privacy" unlike that of other ages, when solitude meant being unable to see out as well as others being unable to see in. The reason novels are no longer news is not simply that the news can now be electronically transmitted butthat the integrity of once private and powerful emotions has been cheapened by the nature and volume of our public discourse. One has to wonder whether the public display of what are essentially moral concerns does not, in effect, debase the very idea of

morality. When matters fit for private contemplation or family discussion are thrust in our faces, we lose sight of the fact that morality is ultimately an individual concern, not a sideshow disguised as a public forum. This is where the novelist once held sway, in the depiction of the individual's struggle with familial and societal values and the resulting emotional turmoil when conventional morality was flouted. To a large extent, the great novels ofthe past were morality plays spun into art through characters whose souls and minds wrestled with concepts such as "sin," "duty," "pride," "propriety," "virtue," "ambition" and "honor." These words were not used to entertain, and they were not fodder for morning talk shows; they were the stuff of conscience, with enough resonance to power a plot for 300 pages. No more. Morality is no longer part of the novelist's stock-in-trade-it seems more the province of PC militants, evangelists and right-wing bigots-and when manners and morals lose relevance for the greater community, the power of novels to move us is similarly diminished. None of which deters our poets and novelists from their selfappointed rounds. The literary world perpetuates itself like any solid enterprise that depends on product perception. Writers write, reviewers review, publishers publish, and new books come down the pike with pomp and circumstance (80,000 in the United Kingdom per annum; 49,000 in the United States). For those still inclined to read contemporary fiction and poetry, this is good news indeed. As for me, newspapers, magazines and mysteries are quite sufficient, although to be honest, I still dip into the odd poet or essayist now and then; old habits die hard and good writing (in small doses) still gives me a boost. For example, I recently came across what I consider a particularly brilliant, absolutely dead-on literary essay, full of sharp and relevant insights, although somewhat musty in its locution. It begins, "I hate to read new books." And goes on to say, "Books have in a great measure lost their power over me; nor can I revive the same interest in them as formerly. I perceive when a thing is good, rather than feel it. ...lfany one were to ask me what I read now, I might answer with my Lord Hamlet in the play-' Words, words, words.'" he essay is Hazlitt's On Reading Old Books, published in 1821, which presents a problem to this writer, since what Hazlitt regarded as "the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature" pales by comparison with what's going on today. Hazlitt, however, was being a bit disingenuous, striking an ominous note to get the reader's attention, then quickly mellowing. He acknowledges revisiting old favorites as well as having plans to examine many plays, speeches and histories hitherto unread. About novels he is less sanguine, though he intends, he says, to look at Walter Scott's "last new novel (if! could be sure itwasso)." I'm afraid that Hazlitt was a more devout reader than I can claim to be. Nonetheless, 1think it more than a coincidence that old Bill was 43 when he wrote the above, about the same age I was when I began to hate new books. Of course, if Hazlitt had lived another hundred years and refused to read new books, the number of re-

markable books denied him would be formidable. Does this mean that I'm wrong? Perhaps. But somehow I doubt it. Hazlitt lived at a time when literature-and novels in particular-circumvented the cultural limitations imposed on public and private discourse. Thoughts that could not be spoken of-between husband and wife, mother and daughter-found their voice in fictional creations. This voice persists, of course, although it now seems hopelessly muted. I don't mean simply that literature is being shouted down by the media but that poets and novelists somehow know deep in their bones that their work no longer possesses the cultural resonance that writers could once take for granted. Surely such knowledge must account in part for the rather undistinguished work that passes for literary art these days. Writers, in sum, are not to be envied: they know they cannot compete with the age, but, being writers, they also know that they cannot withdraw. Readers, on the other hand, can. So good luck to all the poems, novels, plays, memoirs and new translations of the Iliad and the Inferno that will get written from now to whenever. Among all these there will surely be one or two of surpassing beauty and wisdom, but I shall not-unless a friend hits me over the head with them-learn oftheir existence. And for the time being, this does not seem so great a sacrifice to make. 0

THE

ISDN A Pulitzer Prize-winningjournalist discusses the growing scientific evidence of warming ofthe world's climate and presents a novel plan of action to counter it. fter my lawn had burned away to straw in the summer of 1995, and the local papers announced that the season had been one of the driest in the recorded history of New England, I found myself wondering how long we can go on pretending that nothing is amiss with the world's weather. It wasn't just the 50 ducks near my house that had died when falling water levers in a creek exposed them to botulism-infested mud, or the 500 people dead in the Midwest from an unexpected heat wave that followed the season's second "one-hundred-year flood" in three years. It was also the news from New Orleans (overrun by an extraordinary number of cockroaches and termites after a fifth consecutive winter without a killing frost), from Spain (suffering a fourth year of drought in a region that ordinarily enjoys a rainfall of213 centimeters a year) and from London (Britain's meteorological office reporting the driest summer since 1727 and the hottest since 1659). The reports of changes in the world's climate have been with us for 15 or 20 years, most urgently since 1988, when James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, declared that the era of global warming was at hand. As a newspaper correspondent who had reported on the United Nations conferences on the environment in Stockholm in 1972 and in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, I understood something of the ill effects apt to result from the extravagant burning of oil and coal. New record-setting weather extremes seem to have become as commonplace as traffic accidents, and three simple facts have long been known: the distance from the surface of the Earth to the far edge of the inner atmosphere is only 19 kilometers; the annual amount of carbon

dio'.'ide forced into that limited space is six billion tons; and the ten hottest years in recorded human history have all occurred since 1980. The facts beg a question that is as simple to ask as it is hard to answer. What do we do with what we know? The question became more pointed in September 1995, when the 2,500 climate scientists serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a new statement on the prospect of forthcoming catastrophe. Never before had the IPCC (called into existence in 1988) come to so unambiguous a conclusion. Always in years past there had been people saying that we didn't yet know enough, or that the evidence was problematical, or our system of computer simulation was subject to too many uncertainties. No longer. The panel flatly announced that the Earth had entered a period of climatic instability likely to cause "widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century." The continuing emission of greenhouse gases would create protracted, crop-destroying droughts in continental interiors, a host of new and recurring diseases, hurricanes of extraordinary malevolence and rising sea levels that could inundate is!and nations and low-lying coastal rims on the continents. Scientists speak the language of probability. They prefer to avoid making statements that cannot be further corrected, reinterpreted, modified or proven wrong. If its September 1995 announcment was uncharacteristically bold, possibly it was because the IPCC scientists understood that they were addressing their remarks to people profoundly unwilling to hear what they had to say. That resistance is understandable, given the immensity of the stakes. The energy industries now constitute the largest single enterprise known to mankind. Moreover, they are indivisible from automobile, farming, shipping, air freight and banking interests, as well as from the governments dependent on oil revenues for their very existence. With annual sales in excess of one trillion dollars and daily sales of more than two billion dollars, the oil industry alone supports the economies of the Middle East and large segments of the economies of Russia, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, Indonesia, Norway and Great Britain. Begin to enforce restriction on the consumption of oil and coal, and the effects on the global economy-unemployment, depression, social breakdown and war-might lay waste to what we have come to call civilization. It is no wonder that for the past five or six years many of the world's politicians and most of the world's news media have been promoting the perception that the worries about the weatherÂˇ are overwrought. Ever since the IPCC first set out to devise strategies whereby the nations of the world might reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, and thus ward off a rise in the average global temperature on the order of four or five degrees Celsius (roughly equal in magnitude to the difference between the last ice age and the current climatic period), the energy industry has been conducting, not unreasonably, a ferocious public relations campaign meant to sell the notion that science, any science, is always a matter of uncertainty. Yet on reading the news from the IPCC, I wondered how the oil company publicists would"confront the most recent series of geophysical events and scientific findings. To wit: â&#x20AC;˘ A 77-by-35-kilometer chunk of the Larsen Ice Shelf in the

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Antarctic broke off in March 1995, exposing rocks that had been buried for 20,000 years and prompting Rodolfo del Valle of the Argentine Antarctic Institute to tell the Associated Press: "Last November we predicted the [ice shelf] would crack in ten years, but it has happened in barel y two-months." â&#x20AC;˘ In April 1995, researchers discovered a 70 percent decline in the population of zooplankton off the coast of southern California, raising questions about the survival of several species offish that feed on it. Scientists have linked the change to a one- to two-degree Celsius increase in the surface water temperature over the past four decades. â&#x20AC;˘ A recent series of articles in the Lancet, a British 'medical journal, linked changes in climate patterns to the spread of infectious diseases around the world. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads dengue fever and yellow fever, has traditionally been unable to survive at altitudes higher than 1,000 meters above sea level. But these mosquitoes are now being reported at 1,150 meters in Costa Rica and at 2,200 meters in Colombia. Ocean warming has triggered algae blooms linked to outbreaks of cholera in India, Bangladesh and the Pacific coast of South America, where, in 1991, the disease infected more than 400,000 people. â&#x20AC;˘ In a paper published in Science in April 1995, David J. Thomson, of the AT&T Bell Laboratories, concluded that the 0.6 degree Celsius warming of the average global temperature over the past century correlates directly with the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Separate findings by a team of scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center indicate that growing weather extremes in the United States are due, by a probability of90 percent, to rising levels of greenhouse gases. These items (and many like them) would seem to be alarming news worthy of a national debate or the sustained attention of Congress. But the signs and portents have been largely ignored, relegated to the environmental press and the oddball margins of the mass media. More often than not, the news about the accelerating retreat of the world's glaciers or the heat- and insect-stressed Canadian forests comes qualified with the observation that the question of global warming never can be conclusively resolved. For the most part the energy industry has relied on a small band of skeptics-Richard S. Lindzen, Pat Michaels, Robert

Balling, Sherwood Idso and S. Fred Singer, among others-who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis. Through their frequent pronouncements in the press and on radio and television, they have helped to create the illusion that the question is hopelessly mired in unknowns. In May 1995, Minnesota held hearings in St. Paul to determine the environmental cost of coal burning by state power plants. Three of the skepticsLindzen, Michaels and Balling-were hired as expert witnesses to testify on behalf of Western Fuels Association, a $400 million cons'ortium of coal suppliers artdcoal-fired utilities. Lindzen, a distinguished professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified in St. Paul that the maximum probable warming of the atmosphere in the face of a doubling of carbon dioxide emissions over the next century would amount to no more than a negligible 0.3 degree Celsius. Michaels, who teaches climatology.at the University of Virginia, stated that he foresaw no increase in the rate of sea level rise-another feared precursor of global- warming. Balling, who works on climate issues at Arizona State University, declared that the increase in emissions would boost the average global temperature by no more than one degree. At first glance, these attacks appear defensible, given their focus on the black holes of uncertainty that mark our current knowledge of the planet's exquisitely interrelated climate system. The skeptics emphasize the inadequacy of a major climate research tool known as a General Circulation Model, and our ignorance of carbon dioxide exchange between the oceans and the atmosphere and of the various roles of clouds. They have repeatedly pointed out that although the world's output of carbon dioxide has exploded since 1940, there has been no corresponding increase in the global temperature. The larger scientific community, by contrast, holds that this is due to the masking effect oflow-Ievel sulfur particulates, which exert a temporary cooling effect on the Earth, and to a time lag in the oceans' absorption and release of carbon dioxide. The skeptics assert flatly that their science is untainted by funding. Nevertheless, in this persistent and well-funded campaign of denial they have become interchangeable ornaments on the hood of a high-powered engine of disinformation. Their dissenting opinions are amplified beyond all proportion through the media while the concerns of the dominant majority of the world's scien-

tific establishment are marginalized. By keeping the discussion focused on whether there is a problem in the first place, they have effectively silenced the debate over what to do about it. Thus, the question must be asked: can civilization change the way it operates? For 5,000 years, we have thought of ourselves as dependent children of the Earth, flourishing or perishing according to the whims of nature. But with the explosion of the power of our technology and the size of our population, our activities have grown to the proportion of geological forces, affecting the major systems of the planet. Short of the Atlantic washing away half of Florida, the abstract notion that the old anomalies have become the new norm is difficult to grasp. James McCarthy of Harvard, who has supervised the work of climate scientists from 60 nations, puts it this way: "If the last 150 years had been marked by the kind of climate instability we are now seeing, the world would never have been able to support its present population of five billion people." We live in a world of man-size urgencies, measured in hours or days. What unfolds slowly is not, by our lights, urgent, and it will therefore take a collective act of imagination to understand the extremity of the situation we now confront. The lag time in our planet's ecological systems will undoubtedly delay these decisions, and even if the nations of the world were to agree tomorrow on a plan to phase out oil and coal and convert to renewable energies, an equivalent lag time in human affairs would delay its implementation for years. What too many people refuse to understand is that the global economy's existence depends upon the global environment, not the other way around. One cannot negotiate jobs, development or rates of economic growth with nature. What of the standard list of palliati ves-carbon taxes, more energy-efficient buildings, a revival of public transportation? The ideas are attractive, but the thinking is too small. Even were the United States to halve its own carbon dioxide contribution, this cutback would soon be overwhelmed by the coming development of industry and housing and schools in China and India and Mexico for all their billions of citizens. No solution can work that does not provide ample energy resources for the development of all the world's nations. So here is an informal proposal-at best a starting point for a conversation-from one man who is not an expert. What if we turned the deserts of the world into electricity farms? Let the Middle East countries keep their oil royalties as solar royalties. What if the world mobilized around a ten-year project to phase out all fossil fuels, to develop renewable energy technologies, to extend those technologies to every corner of the world? What if, to minimize the conflict of so massive a dislocation, the world's energy companies were put in charge of the transition-answering only to an international regulatory body and an enforceable timetable? Grant them the same profit margins for solar electricity and hydrogen fuel they now recei ve for petroleum and coal. Gi ve them the licenses for all renewable energy technologies. Assure them the same relative position in the world's economy they now enjoy at the end of the project. Are these ideas mere dream? Perhaps, but there are historical

reasons to have hope. Four years ago a significant fraction of humanity overturned its communist system in a historical blink of an eye. Eight years ago the world's governments joined together in Montreal to regulate CFCs. Technology is not the issue. The atomic bomb was developed in two-and-a-half years. Putting a man on the moon took 11. Surely, given the same sense of urgency, we can develop new energy systems in ten years. Most of the technology is already available to us or soon will be. We have the knowledge, the energy and the hunger for jobs to get it done. And we are different in one unmeasurable way from previous generations: ours is the first to be educated about the larger world by the global reach of electronic information. The leaders of the oil and coal industry, along with their skeptical scientists, relentlessly accuse environmentalists of overstating the climatic threat to destroy capitalism. Must a transformation that is merely technological dislodge the keystone of the economic order? I don't know. But I do know that technology changes the way we conceive ofthe world. To transform our economy would oblige us to understand the limits of the planet. That understanding alone might seed the culture with a more organic concept of ourselves and our connectedness to the Earth. And corporations, it is useful to remember, are not only obstacles on the road to the future. They are also crucibles of technology and organizing engines of production, the modem expression of mankind's drive forcreati vity. The industrialist is no less human than the poet, and both the climate scientist and the oil company operator inhabit the same planet, suffer the same short life span, harbor the same hopes for their children. Each summer, our family walks the deep north Maine woods in search of adventure and a sense of reI).ewal. The trip this year was different for me; I was visited by premonitions of the coming sickness of the forests, haunted by unwelcome and indescribably sad imaginings. They intruded at unexpected moments. One night while listening to a dialogue of loons on a black lake I suddenly experienced a momentary feeling of bottomless grief. Struck by the recognition of how fragile was the frame of the world, and how easily it could be shattered by our mutual distrust and confusion, IJeared that the cause of survival would be lost to the greed and alienation and shortsightedness that dog our few last steps to the threshold of the millennium. My dream ofreconfiguring the global economy was probably nothing more than the hopeless longing of a reporter, not a social thinker or macroeconomic engineer. But I am also a husband and a father, a son and a grandson. And someday perhaps a grandfather. Our history is rich with visionaries urging us to change our ways of thinking, asking questions about the meaning of the past and the shape of the future. Now the questions are being posed, in a language we don't yet fully understand, by the oceans. I have promised myself that next summer I will keep my lawn watered, at leastas long as the water holds out. 0 About the Author: Ross Gelbspan has written about environmental affairs, civil liberties and race relations for the Washington Post, the Village Voice and the Boston Globe. In 1984, he was corecipient of a Pulitzer Prizefor public-service reporting.

Some American local governments are hiring private companies to manage schools in the face of the traditional system's failure to provide quality education to many students.

Do Firms Run Schools Well? u.s.

Reprinted from News & World Report, January 8,1996, published at Washington, D.C.

huge searchlights brightened the night sky and local television stations captured the event, 2,000 students, parents, grandparents and staff gathered at Dodge Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas, on a chilly night last October. As the school's principal announced the names of fifth graders and the assemblage roared, the pupils walked with their parents to the stage and were handed Apple desktop computers to use at home. To Dodge's poor, blue-collar neighborhood, the event was a spectacular sign that a new age had arrived with the Edison Project

LP's takeover of the school during the summer. About 480 kilometers to the ,south, at Washington Elementary School in Sherman, Texas, Edison was introducing a school day and year that were also hailed as a revolutionary break with the past, giving students an extra four years' worth of teaching by high school graduation. Private firms in the United States have run public school cafeterias and bus routes Left: Rules at the Washington Elementary School, a company-run school in Sherman, Texas, require students to march with one hand behind their back to prevent rough-housing. Above: Kindergarten students at this school practice spelling.

for years. But the idea that private companies would take over entire schools and be responsible for educating kids is a pretty recent and radical departure. In all, there are 14,900 students in seven states attending public schools managed by private companies. This effort is part of a wider campaign to make public education a more entrepreneurial enterprise in the face of traditional school systems' failure to educate many students well. Another big move: Nineteen states, inspired by a new breed of activist Republican governors, have passed "charter school" laws permitting groups of teachers and a range of nonschool Qrganizations to start independent public schools. Wall Street's bulls. This passion for privatization has also attracted the attention of Wall Street. Investors are beginning to focus on the $300 billion education market in a way that reminds some of the passion for health care investing in the late 1980s at the dawn of epochal changes in the medical marketplace. Indeed, the term of art on Wall Street for firms that run schools is "educational management organization"-EMO, aplayon HMO, health maintenance organization. Yet there is strong opposition to privatization in many quarters. Critics like liberal author Jonathan Kozol fear the idea of allowing profit makers into public education. Selling textbooks to schools is one thing, they argue; handing over responsibility for students' minds and morals to profit seekers is quite another. And the record of the early entrepreneurs is trouble-plagued. After months of bitter political infighting, the Baltimore school board voted last November to pull out of America's largest school privatization contract, a five-year, $220 million deal it signed with Education Alternative Inc. (EAI) in 1992 to run nine schools. The firm's work in Hartford, Connecticut, is mired in controversy. And, facing unanticipated financial constraints, Chris Whittle's widely watched Edison Project has stretched out its timetable for building an extensive network of schools around the nation. Still, it's a certainty that private firms and organizations ranging from universi-

ties to the National Urban League are entering the business of running public schools, and many more are poised to follow soon. There is already plenty of evidence from the early days of the EMOs to give those reformers a sense of the do's and don'ts of getting into the education business. Here they are: LESSON 1: Set standards and design schools to meet them That seems obvious, but the vast majority of public schools in the U.S. are organized in ways that discourage meaningful standards. Newcomers need to make a dramatic difference, and EAI's record in Baltimore shows why. In 1992, the firm found that some of the stairwells in its Baltimore schools stank of urine, because bathrooms were befouled by broken plumbing. EAI and a subcontractor cleaned up the schools. But the company didn't have a strategy to transform its students' educational experience in the same way. Incredibly, it left Baltimore's thin-gruel curriculum in place. The company merely sought to train teachers in new teaching techniques like group learning, peer tutoring and handson science and math instruction-well-regarded reforms, but not enough to turn bad schools into good ones. The second cornerstone of EAI's school design was technology. The company got lots of public-relations mileage out of installing hundreds of computers in Baltimore schools. But they weren't being deployed in the name of educational excellence. Students spent 30 minutes a day on the machines, doing simplistic math and reading drills, as part of the company's strategy to improve students' scores on standardized basic-skills tests. They didn't use the computers to improve their writing or to do other constructive tasks. The result was often counterproductive. A new study of EAI's performance by researchers at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County concludes that "the intensive use of computers for drill and practice" was "incompatible" with new methods of reading and math instruction that EAI was urging on teachers. In sharp contrast, the Edison Project has

dramatically redesigned the public schools it runs to encourage student achievement. It has expanded its school day and school year, regrouped teachers into teams and students into manageable groups of 80 to 120 and opened before- and after-school programs. Students are studying a highly touted math curriculum created at the University of Chicago, for example, and the Edison schools are equipped with a plethora of technology, including fax machines, modems, televisions and computers that permit students to do everything from painting to writing music. Students' home computers are linked by modem to their schools, and teachers have portable computers that tie them into a nationwide Edison network. Not only does this help kids, but it's a good defense against opponents. Says Greg Jones, president of the Wichita Federation of Teachers: "Edison's design puts us in a tough spot. It's tough to say, 'Don 'ttry it. ' " LESSON 2: Focus on individual schools, not school systems EAI was hired by Hartford to manage the city's entire 23,500-student, $200 million school system for five years. So confident was the company that it would be able to slash Hartford's bureaucracy, it proposed that it be paid exclusively from savings it generated-a deal the cash-strapped system couldn't turn down. But the task overwhelmed EAI. By the spring of 1995, eight months into its contract, the company still hadn't put in place the payroll, purchasing and other systems needed to run the city's 32 schools. It hadn't renovated many of them. And it had run afoul of the school superintendent, the City Council and the city's finance officials, all of whom resented EAI's moving onto their turf. The school board cut the company's presence to six schools, and EAI was forced to write off $5.5 million because the city refused to pay the firm's bills. EAl's travails suggest the difficulty of getting the many players in a big system to buy into big changes. Even a few wellplaced opponents can thwart or stall change. Edison and other companies have a strategy that's less controversial and less prone to be-

The Edison Project has dramatically redesigned the public schools it runs to encourage student achievement. ing stymied by reform opponents: running a small number of schools in different districts and trying to make them part of a national system that saves costs by having a lean national headquarters that gives lots of authority to individual schools. Let schools be independent and make them compete for students, and reforms will spread throughout school systems, argues William DeLoache, 40, cofounder of Nashvillebased Alternative Public Schools Inc. APS took over its first public school last fall, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, an impoverished Pittsburgh suburb. LESSON 3: Truly create public schools To win crucial community support, public schools run by private firms should have egalitarian entrance policies. In Boston, where Edison opened a citywide charter school, the nonprofit charter board that hired Edison publicized the school widely, going door-to-door in many minority neighborhoods. Then it held a lottery for the 2,000 applicants seeking the school's 600 openings. The school has a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students than the Boston public schools. And the school attracted a lot of blue-collar white students from South Boston parochial schools, who had abandoned Boston's public schools in droves in the wake of race-based busing in the 1970s. Making enrollment in privatized schools voluntary pays an important dividend: a sense of ownership. In Wichita, 40 parents gave Edison's public school a much-needed $40,000 paint job that wasn't in the company's budget. Contrary to the charges of

critics, privatized schools in t.he U.S. don't favor privileged students. All the public schools under private management this year have majorities of disadvantaged students. In Wilkinsburg, 80 percent of APS students live in poverty. One reason is that school systems have sought private companies to help where they need it most-in their most troubled schools in their poorest neighborhoods. Another is that companies want disadvantaged students because they bring large amounts of extra revenue ($800 per student in Boston) from state and federal programs. LESSON 4: Demand autonomy Public e'ducation is still rule bound, and anyone who wants to run a different kind of school must win the right to run it independently. Most important, they need the right to hire and fire their own principals and teachers. That results in a far larger applicant pool-and a higher-quality staffthan traditional seniority-based systems. Edison, for instance, attracted last year's New York State elementary teacher of the year to its Boston school. It also increases the odds of attracting staff who are committed to a new school design-a key to privatization's prospects. Finally, in the case of profit-seeking firms, getting autonomy is absolutely essential to the company's chances of making any money. Teacher unions have bitterly opposed privatization as a threat to their jobs, and EAI has paid dearly in its struggles in Hartford and Baltimore for challenging the unions. Edison's strategy has been to do business where teacher organizations are weak. In the one Edison school where there is a strong union, in Mount Clemens, a blue~collar Detroit suburb, the company found itself barred from paying teachers on the basis of their performance, a local-preference hiring clause resulted in only five applicants for the school's five top-level teaching jobs and a job security provision made it difficult to remove weak teachers. "I'm staying out of public schools until the courts protect companies from teacher unions and bureaucracy," says Jack Clegg, chief executive of Nobel Education

Dynamics Inc., a Pennsylvania-based company that has opened 17 for-profit elementary and middle schools in the past three years. Some charter school laws give public school privatizers a great deal of autonomy. Under Massachusetts and Arizona laws, for example, there are no unions, no local school board politics or policies to confront. But most state charter laws exclude private companies. Indeed, largely as a result of lobbying by teacher unions and school board groups, half the laws don't give to charter holders the independence in areas like staffing and budgeting that is needed to innovate. LESSON 5: Be accountable The market provides some accountability. When Edison's complex daily sche'dule broke down in Sherman last fall, causing teacher morale to plummet, it sent scores of staffers to the school to get things back on track. And as disruptive students became a major problem, the firm flew teachers from its Texas, Kansas and Michigan schools to Boston to study a successful program there. But stern oversight is vital because selfpolicing only goes so far. Federal officials concluded that EAl had deprived disabled students of required assistance and ordered the company to supply the students with 136,000 hours of make-up instruction. To save money, Edison has crammed upward of 40 students into Spanish and other classes. The privatization movement's greatest tests lie ahead. EAI may disappear, and Edison faces a difficult road to profitability. The company is projected to lose $6.7 million on revenues of$I1.9 million this year. But heavy union spending failed to unseat pro-privatization majorities in school board elections in Hartford and Wilkinsburg last November. Wall Street is bullish. The only thing America needs is proof that such schools really make a difference in the classroom. 0 About the Author: Thomas Toch is a senior editor with U.S. News& World Report. CopyrightÂŠ

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Changing the wa~l?-eoplelive, learn, work and I?-Iay.

A Personal Odyssey

From Pinstripes to the Chalkboard A retired American diplomat tells the story of what it was

like to teach international relations to students of many nationalities at the Woodstock School in Mussoorie.

"How do you knOll' I am a diplomat? " "By the skillful

WG)-'

you hide your claws. "

-L 'Aiglon, Edmond Rosmnd (1868-1918)

Don Holmes is an Australian educator whose accent has been honed to a fine edge through lifelong devotion to "Vegemite" and cricket. He is academic vice principal of the Woodstock School in Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh. A year and a hal f ago he came down the mountain to Delhi in search of urban amenities and to find a teacher to fill a gap in the social science department. He was my houseguest in Delhi. I was then director of the U.S. Information Service in India and publisher of SPAN magazine. Don asked whether I knew anyone who might like to spend a semester teaching history and world affairs atthe Woodstock Schoo!. I said I did. I had just decided to retire from the American diplomatic service so that I might accompany my family to Kazakhstan, where my wife was to be our next ambassador. I was attracted to the notion of trying my hand at teaching. Thus it came to be that in July 1995 I threaded my way up into the foothills of the Himalayas with a blank notebook, a pile of books, a modicum of panache, and precious little notion of what I was about. My 12year-old daughter had emboldened me to take up this assignment. "Dad," she insisted, "you'll be a good teacher. Just go do it!" My introduction to the Woodstock School had come only months before. As head of USIS India, I had decided to visit the Doon School in Dehra Doon to learn more about India's educational underpinnings. Someone

Thomas Homan in his book-filled study at the Woodstock School.

suggested that while I was there I might as well drive up the hill to Woodstock, vaguely described to me as "an old American missionary schoo!." I agreed to do so. My encounter with that august institution remains firmly entrenched in my memory. As I walked onto the campus, which lies a fair piece along the Tehri Road beyond Mussoorie's colorful Landour Bazaar, an unusually heavy snowstorm peppered Mussoorie and the surrounding hills. Woodstock students were out in numbers, frolicking boisterously in the freshly accumulated powder, celebrating the weather and their reunion with school chums following several weeks of winter break. Suddenly I felt a hammer-hard

thud dead-center on my back. For someone who spent much of his early life constructing and defending snow forts, I knew it was the work of an expert, an artist in the field of snow projectiles, possibly a physics star. A well-packed snowball had found its mark, as surely as William Tell's arrow had cleaved the apple. I have yet to learn the identity of my assailant, but accord the test-match bowler a certain grudging respect. Fairness requires me to insert parenthetically that in 1960 while a high school senior at Maur Hill, a Benedictine boarding school in the mid-western state of Kansas, I similarly fired a well-formed snow-missile from behind a dormitory redoubt and nailed the school's headmaster squarely on the ear. I was as shocked as he was since he was a long way off. The impact sent his black clerical hat spiraling high into the air, and caused him to take quick refuge behind the nearest privet as he scanned the horizon for his assailant. Father Edwin was clearly not amused and, fortunately for me, never learned who threw it. If he happens to read this account, he'll now know the identity ofthe assailant as well as that the j u'stice has been done. Back to Mussoorie. I made my way on through the snow without further bombardment to the redoubt of the Quad, a central administrative complex dating from the school's founding in 1854. The Quad provides the architectural nucleus around which Woodstock's sprawling out-buildings cling to steep hillsides like so many brambles, providing playpens for the langur and rhesus monkeys that abound there.

There are only two directions at Woodstock: up and down. Situated at 1,850 meters, the campus rises to 2,300 at its highest point near Sisters Bazaar, removing any option about whetherto keep fit. . My Australian host that day gave me tea and a chocolate brownie in his chilly monk-like cell while he informed me about the school. Founded as an English-medium girls' school for the Christian missionary community in 1854, Woodstock had undergone much institutional evolution through the intervening years, eventually becoming a coeducational international school, attracting students from diverse religions and some 35 nationalities. Twenty percent come from North America. It was agreed that I would teach two courses (eventually three when political theory was added) and help out in the journalism and literature departments as needed. I also agreed to pull together an international news program for Wednesday assemblies and to be adviser to a group of tenth graders. My courses were to be American history (1492-1865) and a 20th-

Above: Thomas Homan teaching at Woodstock Left: A panoramic view of the school.

century world history course called "Problems of the Modern World," nicknamed PMW. This course was to focus on international affairs and society's woes over the period since World War II. It was PMW that especially appealed to me in terms of my foreign service experience. As I prepared for my first classroom experience as teacher, I thought it possible that I would have classroom jitters. I had vastly underestimated that likelihood. In the event, I felt not unlike I had in 1962 on my first day of Navy bootcamp, though I was now considerably surer of my ground. Before me sat some 20 studentsAmericans, Indians, Bhutanese, Nepalis and half-a-dozen other nationalities. Woodstock prides itself on its international and ethnic mix and strives mightily to maintain it.

Setting the tone in the classroom is a challenge unto itself. If the teacher is too severe, the dialogue is stymied, if too lax, some will take advantage and slip the traces. I had never thought about these things before and found myself reaching back into my own experience at the Maur Hill School to emulate those teachers I favored. I was drawn to the approach of Father Wilfred who mixed gentle banter with hard information to lead us through the study of world literature. When studying Shakespeare, I remember him patiently waiting while I overcame a stutter that was interfering with my reciting of Mark Antony's eulogy to Caesar. His was a no-nonsense class that would occasionally erupt in applause of uproarious laughterbut never beyond his control. Striking the balance is a very personal thing. I saw some teachers wither when their classrooms could not be brought to order. Others never faced the problem.

Something in the air sustains order in the classrooms. I determined at the outset that there were two things I would not tolerate: there would be no unauthorized talking and I would not argue about the marks I had given. Fairness on my part had to be accepted as fact. Errors, of course, should be brought to my attention. The combination served to foster order in subtle ways so that the classroom atmosphere was sustained as a learning environment. Admittedly there were lapses, but none brought the house down. One of my first tough tasks in the PMW course was to develop the historic and conceptual framework in which the founding of the United Nations had taken place. Fortunately my classroom looked like a UN junior-caucus room. I wanted to inculcate the importance of international cooperation both to secure progress and to help prevent the kinds of wars that had obliterated so much during this century. It was sometimes difficult to establish the point that international organizations and regional associations played a useful role when so much had gone wrong. timulating debate and fostering dy" namic discussion is especially tough when one is dealing in textbook history that lies beyond the personal experience of young people. A few weeks into the semester, I had complaints from the class representative that PMW should be looking more at society's problems today, not those of yesterday. I quoted George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher who warned that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Having made the point, I took the point and proposed that Fridays be devoted to open discussion with the students choosing the topics. Pop! Things began to open up. "Is it true that OJ. Simpson killed his wife but will be let off because he has lots of money and clever lawyers? Isjustice for sale in America?" "Why is there so much crime and urban violence in America? What happened to America's founding principles?" "Let's debate abortion. When does life really begin?" "Tell us what Watergate was all about.

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."

What really happened? If he was so bad, why wasÂˇPresident Nixon buried as a hero?" "Do you think Indians and Pakistanis will ever live together in peace?" "Why was there such a big protest movementduringthe Vietnam War? How was itdifferent from World War II orthe Korean War?" "Why do the Arabs and the Jews hate each other so much? Why are wars fought over religion?" "What about euthanasia? Is it always wrong? What about Dr. Kevorkian? Should we be allowed to choose when we want to die?" Things had come alive. Suddenly I had breached the chasm to dialogue. The formula was a simple one but I was new to teaching. I should have asked the kids early on what they wanted to get from the course. I'd learned an important lesson. Fortunately Woodstock's faculty is as rich in experience as it is in its cultural mix and dedication. I was able to reach out for some expert help. To deal with OJ. Simpson trial I brought in a faculty lawyer who heads up the school's development office. He reviewed U.S. law and the court system and described how a court case proceeds from jury selection to sentencing. He had also (conveniently from my perspective) been arrested in 1968 in Washington, D.C., while protesting the war in Vietnam. He did a second session on the justice of war, the right to dissent, the risk of imprisonment and the importance (and the risks) of adhering to principle. I considered for some time how best to move into a discussion of Kashmir and the broader Indo-Pak relationship since 1947. Woodstock rightfully eschews being perceived as staking out any political positions, and I was counseled to bear this in

mind when approaching regional issues. I knew from several years on the subcontinent that there were two (and more) sides to every issue that arose, posited with equal fervor by the contending parties. Where you sat was where you stood. I toyed with inviting members of the so-called "Neemrana" dialogue team, an effort I had helped to start while serving with USIS in Islamabad in 1991. Its purpose was to stimulate unofficial confidence-building dialogue between Indians and Pakistanis on the range of bilateral issues along the lines that had worked so well in the Soviet-U.S. dialogue from 1964-91. I know most of the Neemrana players and they are fair-minded and articulate. But I realized that Woodstock didn't deserve to risk being the centerofany political debate. Betterto followthe text. I taught the issues as straight history drawing on historical and current commentaries from both sides. It was a wise though intellectually unsatisfactory compromise, especially in light of my public affairs background. Several weeks into the semester Don Holmes asked me to take on political theory, a class of nine juniors and seniors. I had studied that subject alongside journalism in graduate school and was a political science major. Howcould I say no') I was to begin with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), sometimes called "the father of atheists." I thought it a curious twist in this Christian bastion. In his lifetime, Hobbes's writings had been so controversial in Britain that the bishops prevented their publication, forcing him to cross to more liberal Holland to publish Leviathan, his seminal opus. Teaching this class excited me and it became a defining experience for me, with gifted, enthusiastic' students who (mostly) shared my enthusiasm for the topic. We delved into discussions of the state of nature, totalitarianism, fascism and the Holocaust. We probed Hobbes's analysis of the combative, competitive character of man, whose life he described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Great grist for the classroom mill. My hat is offta you, Thomas Hobbes! We went on through Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke and Jeremy Bentham, the

founder of Utilitarianism. I made the course deliberately tough, drawing on lots of outside sources I'd scrounged from the school's ample library (nothing is ever discarded at Woodstock). I was deliberately teaching at the university level, demanding careful note-taking and crisply worded comparative essays. These kids were responding. It was an unexpected reward, I hope for all of us. For each examination they had to reach back through all ofthe political philosophers we had studied in order to compare, contrast and integrate what they had learned. There were extracurricular activities for all of us. On Sports Day, I decided to compete in the junior-senior girls' five-kilometerrun.1 got acouple of other members of the faculty to come along. I huffed and puffed like a Stanley Steamer through the race, finishing 28th in a field of 63. A 28-year-old practice teacher from St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minnesota, came in second. n unexpected pursuit was working with the journalism class to fashion a weekly international newsÂˇ show for the high school assembly. We decided to call our "station" WJRN (Woodstock Journalists Report the News). It involved three different students each week monitoring the media and local events to produce the show, which we did on stage along the lines of an American newscast. "Good morning and welcome to the WJRN Wednesday report from India, the region and around the world. First the regional news .... " We soon began supplementing with up-to-the-hour satellite feeds, special student-produced video reports and other tools of the trade. It was hugely popular. We reported the news from Bosnia as it broke, covered elections and floods in India, earthquakes in Latin America and the fighting in Chechnya. We also covered the Woodstock drama productions, the work of our community out-reach groups and, yes, my wife's swearing-in ceremony in Washington. Our news program was equally popular with the faculty, judging from comments that came my way, which were mostly complimentary. The WJRN experience was a highlight of my stay. There are perils that come with teaching

and I will admit that I was caught off-guard with this one. I had agreed to fly to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where my wife had just taken up her position as ambassador. My absence involved arranging for various colleagues to cover for the period I was to be away. To ease their burden, I scheduled examinations to absorb part of the class time. The student-teacher from St. Olaf's generously volunteered to assist with the coverage. I returned from Kazakhstan to find the expected pile of essay examinations piled in my room at the Quad. It was Sunday evening and I decided to grade the PMW exams before bed. I was tired but felt I could manage some 20 exam papers and have a jump on the week. Little did I suspect the perfidy into which I was about to plunge. It remains painful in the telling. I followed the practice offirst reading the exams of my best students so that I would know how the curve was likely to develop and whether any of my questions had gone wrong. It was with a sinking feeling that I plodded through the first paper. Every fact was a half-twist off the mark. My "A" student was awarded a "c" and I penned a long note of explanation. The second paper was worse. I doggedly leafed through the next few papers with apocalyptic results. One student cheekily ended his brief essay with the words: "For additional details please see text pages 117-149." I harkened back to Thomas Hobbes's now oddly apt description of man's life. I lay awake through the night pondering options. I clearly had failed in my teaching and should begin in a spirit of profound humility with an apology, and schedule a replacement exam. Even my BEST students had failed to grasp the essentials of what I had taught. One or two had come just close enough to throw me off the scent. It was with a heavy heart that I chugged up snowball lane and the 26 steps leading to classroom number 31. The students smiled benignly as I entered the room. There was a studied silence. They looked somber. Obviously they were aware that they had made a dismal showing. I was asked politely whether I had enjoyed my stay in Kazakhstan. I reported that I had. There was no doubt something lack-

ing in my response. There was a brief and pregnant pause as they eyed me. "Mr. Homan, how did we do in our exams?" one student asked. "They were really hard." I lamented that things had not gone well. They read the disappointment on my face and averted their eyes. I was about to launch into the apologia when these exquisite thespians opted to bestow mercy. Perhaps it was their tutelage in the Eight Beatitudes that prompted their change of heart. "Mr. Homan, are you sure you saw our real exam papers?" I pursed my lips and dismissed the class with a flourish so that I could mount the search-and-destroy mission against the young practice teacher from St. Olaf's College, whose unseen hand I sensed. She would need the assistance of all nine choirs of angels PLUS all the help she could muster from St. Olaf, whoever he was. (Probably the patron of wayward women, I muttered to myself, somewhat uncharitably.) She was on my hit list. Evidently Miss Olaf had found the pace of life in Mussoorie phlegmatic in contrast to the zippy urban bustle of Northfield, Minnesota. My absence had afforded her her scam. I cornered her at tea and conducted my interrogation, drawing on my days as an investigator for the U.S. Navy. Her denials rang hollow and soon the confession was extracted, piecemeal. fter administering the exam, she had passed out second copies and instructed the students to amuse themselves over the weekend by composing "joke answers" for their vagabond teacher. When I finally laid my hands on the real thing, which she had tucked under a mattress, my sanity was mercifully restored. The crime remains unavenged but time rests on my side. The wheels of justice turn slowly, as Father Edwin can attest. As I reflect now on my Woodstock era, two thoughts stay with me, both developed during my time there: No one knows ifhe is doing his best as a teacher except oneself; a good teacher should learn as much as his students in the classroom. These two principles together can produce excellence. Would I do teach again at Woodstock? I wouldandlwill. 0

Ranjabati Sircw; who has specialized both in American modern dance and Indian classical dance forms (above), in her recent modern solo production Cassandra (top andjar left). She is also active in the Navanritya productions with her mother, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar (left), and in the ballets (right) of the Dancers' Guild in Calcutta.

Ranjabati Sircar, a trained dancer in Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Manipuri and Mayurbhanj Chhau, has been working since 1983 on the development of acontempormy dance methodology, Navanritya (new dance), with her dancer mother at the Dancers' Guild in Calcutta. She has performed at such prestigious dance festivals as the Vivarta Festival and Magdalena Project in the u.K. and the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Sircar has won several awards including the London Dance and Performance Award. She is also a recipient of a senior research fellowship, given to outstanding artists by the Indian Government s Department of Culture.

the n autumn of 1994, I went back to myoId "hometown" in New York State, the village of New Paltz in the green rolling hills of the Hudson River Valley near the Catskill Mountains. It had been ten years exactly since I had been there last, visiting my parents just before my father, Parbati Kumar Sircar, took an early retirement from the State University of New York in New Paltz where he had taught geography for over two decades, and moved back to India to join my mother, Manjusri, who is a dancer. ] myself had moved to India five years before, alone, at the age of 16. Old streets, familiar faces, favorite trees that suddenly seemed smaller than my childhood memory had retained them; but most

evocative, the crunch of fallen leaves beneath my booted feet and the smell of fall in rural New York. It was like drinking in some visceral nourishment that opened doors in my mind and let memories course through freely. My visit to the U.S.came about quite by accident. During his] 993 tour of India, the dancer Jonathan Hollander mentioned to me that he knew someone in New Paltz-and it turned outto be Livia Drapkin, from whom I had taken lessons in modern dance years ago. When Livia heard that I wuuld be touring the U.S., she immediately invited me to do a performance and several workshops in the place where I grew up. My eighth grade math teacher, Steve Ford, invited me to stay with him and his wife Carole. The circle was complete, for the Fords had involved me in a school play that had originally sparked off my love for performance. Although I had studied dance from my mother since chi Idhood, no one had thought I would be a dancer when I left in] 979. A writer, yes, a concert pianist, perhaps, but not a dancer. So in] 994, when I appeared on the stage in New Paltz as a dancer, itwas probably as much of a surprise to myoid acquaintances as itwas ajourney of return and remembrance for me. I perfornled two self-choreographed pieces, Gangavataran and Fable for La Gran Sabana. Both works utilized the contemporary dance methodology-Navanritya-I had evolved along with my mother since 1983, and drew from my varied training and artistic experience. The first was a straightforward telling of the story of the descent of the Ganges; the second was a magic realist narrative that I wrote at an artists' encounter in Venezuela in 1991, in a wilderness area at the edge of the Amazon forest. Among -those who saw my performance was an American bansuri player, Steve Gorn, a disciple of the late Gour Goswami. We met a few days later over Iunch at one of New Paltz's many small bistros. He told me how much he had liked my work and how he could relate to my dual cultural experience, as he himself had received his own bansuri training

Relurning Reclaiming

cominued

Steve Gorn Multicultural Musician Steve Gorn has performed

Indian classical

music

and New American Music on the bansuri, soprano saxophone and clarinet in concerts and festivals throughout the world. A disciple of the late Gour Goswami of Calcutta, he has been praised by critics and leading Indian musicians as one of the few Westerners recognized as having captured the subtlety and beauty of Indian music. He has performed and recorded discs with Nana Vasconcelos,

Jack De Johnette and the New

York City Ballet, among others, and has composed theater, PBS and ABC television

for

and film. He has over

a dozen recordings

to his credit, including Luminous

Ragas (I nterworld,

1994), Yantra (M usic of the World,

1994) and Since the Beginning (lnterworld, 1993). His score for Cassandra includes the sounds of bansuri, clarinet, tamboura, frame drums, riq (Arabic tambourine), Tibetan singing bowls and cymbals, didgeridoo, rain stick, conch, snake ocarina, mushi (Japanese whistle), bell chimes, Balinese angklung and kecak and Bulgarian Women's Choir.

in Calcutta. We found further common ground in our interest and involvement in Buddhist spiritual practices. When I heard his music on tape I was deeply impressed. After returning to India in the winter of 1994, I started on my new work, Cassandra, with funding from the Max Mueller Bhavan.1 began a correspondence with Steve regarding collaboration on the project. A fter several months of written exchange, we worked together in his studio in Kingston, New York, throughout the month of October 1995. During that period we were able to complete the final conceptualization of the project and by December, when Steve came to my house in Santiniketan, the master tape was ready. A major part of the choreographic images had already been created, for the composition of the music was truly an experience in bouncing off one another, the music inciting a movement quality or pattern and vice versa. Our final discussions in India started off the staging process for the production which premiered last February in Calcutta and Mumbai. The idea for the work actually goes back to 1986, when I first came across Christa Wolf's Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. The book had moved and intrigued me .. About three years ago I picked up myoid Virago edition and started thinking how powerful the Cassandra myth really is; how similar to the story of Khana, the Bengali astrologer/mathematician; how these women were archetypal images of the marginalizing, the degrading and the silencing of the female voice. Other influences came in: the traditional image of Cassandra as a mad woman, somewhat fearsome, somewhat absurd, in Euripides; as a woman with a wholly modern voice, as in Ursule Molinaro's An Autobiography of Cassandra. What I liked most about Wolf's work, however, was her relating of the Cassandra story to the large scale of sociopolitical reality in our times. The story thus exists for me on a number of interrelated levels: as an archetype, as an individual female experience, as a historical event, as a political symbol, as a spiritual document. In remembering Cassandra's story, I seek to redefine her identity, reclaim the power of her voice in the present moment. It is the voice of "feminine" consciousness-not genderdefined, but suggesting an aspect of human consciousness as a whole. When we return to the past, we find things that were lost. We reclaim them, make them part of ourselves, treasure them, nourish our memories. Similarly, when we return to history and myth, we rescue stories and characters from centuries of interpretation. We make them our own, refashion them according to our dreams, reconstruct them from the perspective of the present. In reclaiming them, we are empowered. 0

SECURlT\E5 srOCk EXCAAt\lGE lAIC:

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THE SEVEN HABITS OF

HIGHLY OFFENSIVE PEOPLE

In the real world, the highly successful corporate executives we love usually share certain characteristics. All are hard driving, often at others' expense. All maintain their personal instrument with obsessive zeal, arriving at work and leaving at the end of the day with an almost inhuman level of burn ish, torque and sheen. Pleasant? Virtually always, except when they're angry. All, in short, are truly offensive on a magnificent scale. Want to be offensive enough to make it into the big leagues? You'll have to put your nose to the grindstone. Offensiveness is not a walk in the park. It's a way of life. The very quirks,foibles and obnoxious characteristics that make these people intolerable as human beings are also what make them highly effective managers. But if you're ready to make that trade-off-and make some serious money-let 'er rip.

giant, reportedly likes to conduct much of his business between the hours of four in the morning and noon. MyoId boss Chet, when he didn't have a business luncheon, liked to eat a tuna fish sandwich from the Tasmanian deli downstairs, which was served to him on a white china plate, on a lace place mat, with a Diet Coke in a crystal goblet at its side. Somewhat lower down, my friend Rafferty Iilis a small paper coffee cup with instant oatmeal every morning at 8:40, pours in hot water, then goes around stirring it for about an hour, standing in people's doorways with the hon'ible stuff steaming away, stirring it, eating a little of the gelatinous goop, talking about business. Gross! We let him do it because he controls compensation. My point is, the higher they get, the weirder they are. This is no coincidence. With the breaking of the logjam of appropriate behavior come a rush of ideas and irrational determination to get them done. Now if you'll excuse me, [have to polish my blotter.

Embrace compensation. Evcryone likes money, but truly offensive people can talk about it like U.S. Congressmen filibustering legislation they don't understand. A few years ago, I was the most junior member in a meeting at which a variety of extremcly important mattcrs were to be discussed. It was the late 1980s, and business was not good. The smell of cutbacks was in the air, and not all the numbers were going to hc made. Discussion of a range of operating issues took up thc entire morning. After lunch, at precisely I: 12, we sat down to what I prcsumed would be a full afternoon of work. Therc was sti II plenty on the agenda. The floor was at that point ceded to the vice presidcnt of human resources, who gently launched into an explanation of the new grid upon which performance awards would be measured. Two o'clock rolled around. Thcn 2:30. Then 3:30. I couldn't believe it. Scientists atLos Alamos spent less timeon the mass ofthc neutrino than these guys devotcd to the point at which increased revenue produced the maximum bonus payout. It was grotesque! Since then I'vecome up six or seven grade levels, and am now eligible for such consideration. Last week we had an executive staff meeting where the same subject came up, and I assure you that I found it very interesting. That's offensive, even to me. HABIT NO.

HABIT NO.

Empower your

inner

child. Start by finding and

mastering that famous beast. The irascible and lovable kid inside you contains the greatest potential for true offensi veness-and power. This docsn't mean you have to bc petulant and grabby all the time. Kids are oftcn perfectly jolly, whistling, singing, tclling insipidjokes. But you have no idea how obnoxious resolute jollincss can be in the wrong circumstances. It sends the message that you live in a Iittle bubble of self-regard impenetrable by mortal men. That's a good thi ng. Other timcs, you may need to get a little rough to get what you want. Feel free to do so. Does the little fellow inside you want his muffin infinitcsimally better done at that Hotel Regency power breakfast? Send it back! Does she get all cranky when her have to do her numbers instead of go outside and play? Make 'em sorry they wrecked your day!

Weirdness is strength. Howard Hughes liked to grow his fingernails long and demanded that his fruit cocktail cans be opened with surgical cleanliness. Si Newhouse, the communications

Focus! Focus! Focus! portant subjects at times express exactly Normal people have a what's on their minds-which is nothing. couple of things on So they sit there saying nothing for a real their minds. Truly oflong time, until other, less offensive peofensive people don't ple pick up the ball and carry it into the have that problem. The higher the execuend zone. Either method can soon have tive, thc more intense is his ability to filyou running big-deal stuff. tcr out extraneous material. Sometimes this can produce a creepy, almost superHABIT NO. Don't get even-get natural zone of concentration around the mad. Only small and inexecutive. Our former chairman was like significant people conthat. One time he was in Philadelphia tain their rage, mostly with our general counsel, Morgenstern. because they have to. Morgenstern was late for the limo ride to Real hillers have good, working contact "Opposing views are welcome, the airport with Don, and you wcre nevcr, but not from any of you. " with their anger and use it to get what they ever, to be marc than 30 seconds late for a want without shame, regret or constraint. Drawing by Eric & Bill; ÂŠ Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. mutual incident involving Don. Time The great practitioners of the angry arts, was money to Don. Not his time, yours. of course, don't just spew eight hours a Your time was his money, that was it. So Morgenstern was waiting day. No, they keep a lid on their displeasure and modulate it, so that at the checkout counter, hoping to sleazc out of the hotel, whcn he students can perceive when the great mountain is about to blowbegan to feel strange. "Ifelt a warm spot in my back, as ifsomeone and act accordingly. Walt, our leader, utilizes skin color to send off was sticking a hot poker into me at that spot," he recalls. "And I warning signals. A slow change from white to pink moves us from turned around and there was Don, staring at me from across the Defcon 6 to Defcon 5. When pink turns to red, the area is cleared by lobby, boring a holc into me with his eyes." At that point, all sentient life forms. The trick is moving beyond peevishness, Morgenstcrn basically climbcd over the people in front of him on which I happen to think I have down pat, to genuine wrath that can line, weeping and chattering to the managerto let him out of there. inspirc others to improve operating profit by double digits in a Focus works, that's the point. slow-growth environment. The great ones can make that happen. HABIT NO.

Say whatever the heck is on your mind. All of us have been in meetings where very successful people nerblcd on for hours about nothing anybody understood. Conversely, guys who are supposed to talk seriously about extremely im-

The Seven Habits of Highly Ejfeclive People by Stephen R. Covey, published in 1992, became an international bestseller and has \9Verthe last four years become as influential as Dale Carnegie's famous How 10 Win Friends and Influence People was decades ago. Seven Habits has sold more than a million copies worJJlwide and there's even a new word in the workplace callcd Âˇ'Coveyism." Covey's seven habits are: Be Proactive; Begin with the End in Mind; Put First Things First; Think Win/Win; Seck First to Understand, Then to Be Understood; Synergize (creative cooperation); and Sharpen the Saw (self-renewal). These are traits, he says, that make people become leaders and better managers of thcmseves as well as of their employees. Playing the dcvil's advocate, the author of this whimsical column reminds us that many people get ahead in the workplace with seven obnoxious habits'

HABIT NO.

Keep your jargon fresh! Buy a business book every six months. Good news on that front! This

was just a brief rundown of the seven habits of truly offensive people. We didn't even have a chance to roll out our matrix graphs, charts containing concentric circles each with a different insightful label, or dynamic pyramids linked with vector arrows that make you fcel stupid if you look at them for too long. All those and more are available in my upcoming book, The Seven Habits of Highly Offensive People. Anyone who docsn't have it on his or her desk next year will immediately be subject to reorganization with extreme prejudice. Just kidding! By the way, it's not available right now becausc I haven't written it yet, but contact Fortulle immediately and tell my editors you'd really like to see this particular concept worked out at great length for, say, $24.95 a copy. As you may know, this magazine has a sister division that runs a gigantic book publishing company that, if they promote it right, could make my potential project a big success and earn me a lot of money. Thanks! Oh, and anybody who thinks it's inappropriatc for me to use this space to promote my own crass self-interest just hasn't been readi ng very carefully. 0 About the Author: Stanley/Bing is a real exec//live al a FORTUNE 500 companv he'd ralher nOIname. He is also aUlhorofa slandardFortune magazine column called" While You Were Out, "which is Ihe source of this ante/e.

Judy Pfaff assembles one of the "constellation" clusters of cirque, Cirque at the Pennsylmnia Convention CenteJ:

udy Pfaff is a Manhattan artist known for her risky, improvisational works that are big in scale and bold in color. Pfaff first attracted the art world's attention soon after receiving a master offine arts degree from Yale in 1973 when she created dense abstract environments that suggested swirling undersea gardens, whirling tornadoes, and Jackson Pollock canvases gone three-di mensional. By the end of the decade, Pfaffhad established a signature style, and was much sought after. In 1991, she was commissioned to do a sculpture for the GTE Corporation in Irving, Texas, and in 1994 a lobby installation for the Miami Beach Police Department. Pfaff's first really big success came last year when she created an installation fonhe new Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. Titled cirque, Cirque, the installation is a vast, ceiling-suspended artwork of steel and aluminum tubes and glass orbs that extends across 6,500 square meters of space and cost $400,000 to produce and install. The gigantic artwork has been made

possible-thanks to the Pennsylvania Convention Center's Percent for Art program. Under this program, one-half to one percent of a public building's construction budget is set aside for art. There are some 200 such programs at various levels of government in the United States. The design of cirque, Cirque, Pfaff says, was inspired by the old Reading Terminal, a massive, abandoned 27-meter-high train shed that has been transformed into the convention center. Recalling her first visit to the eerily empty shed on a rainy day, she says: "There were 50-foot cranes and parts of the roof were missing; it looked like Dante'slnjerno." The design resembles the romantic evocation of a night sky at a rai Iroad station, but it is three-dimensional. The artwork's 14 elements include two immense, swooping circular double-helix forms, one painted blue and the other gold; a variety of other cometlike trails of tubing, and "constellation" cl usters whose stars arc glass globes set into tubular nests. In addition to the miles oftubing, the work, which was originally called Cosmography, re-

quircd 120 handblown-glass orbs and more than 570 liters of automobile paint and primer. It took Pfaff and her six-member crew, working from a l20-meter-long barn near Granite Springs, New York, almost a year to fabricate hundreds of pieces that went into the making of cirque, Cirque, which were latertrucked to the site in Philadelphia for final assembly. Until the last moments of giving final touches to the gigantic creation, Pfaffsays, she was worried that cirque, Cirque might not work, that it might be swallowed up by its dramatic context. "Too many publ ic art-Âˇ works are invisible," she says. "They blend right into the archi tecture." But this one is not invisible. "To see it realized was thrilling," says Judith Stein, a member of the art advisory committee for the center. "Set againstthe architecture, it is everything I had hoped for, and more." llearing the enthusiastic response her artwork received from critics and the public, Pfaffbubbles with excitement and confidence. "We triumphed against the odds. I 0 could build anything now."

Your documents are our business. Much more than mere paper or an image on the screen, a document is a valuable piece of communication, created through the considerable efforts of your people and technology. And it is the document that is at the very heart of every business. Documents account for 95% of the information we receive. And 60% of an executive's time. On an average, every organisation spends 8% of its revenue on producing documents. Consider then, how effectively you can enhance business productivity by streamlining document management. At Modi Xerox, everything we do is designed to make our customers more productive. From the smallest offices to global corporations, we are helping people

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