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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

My first, mild exposure to antisemitism was in my teenage years, when an acquaintance used “Jew” as a verb. As I recall, my response was “What?!?”

Even back then my eloquence was, you’ll agree, impressive.

Early in my career, at a table in the company cafeteria, one of my colleagues referred to Blacks as “jungle bunnies.” I forget the context but remember my response … an utterly blank look as I tried to figure out just exactly what to say. I failed, and the moment passed.

I first wrote about bigotry in the workplace seventeen years ago (“The uselessness of race“) in KJR’s predecessor, InfoWorld’s IS Survival Guide. I was shocked when several correspondents wrote to inform me … gently … of my error: Blacks really are, they explained, cognitively inferior to whites.

I’m reading Spymistress: The True Story of the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (William Stevenson, 2011). I already knew that colonial England had a level of racism baked into its culture — a country could not practice colonialism without it.

But I was shocked at how profound the English aristocracy’s antisemitism was, rivaling that of Germany’s Nazis … so much so that many British leaders openly endorsed the Nazi program.

Two years ago Charlottesville happened, with its disturbing Tonga torchlight parade and brutal murder by a white supremacist of a counter protester.

Who would have thought that two years later, one fatality would be considered an improvement?

Which, skipping a few steps, brings us to the present, where domestic white supremacists have overtaken radicalized foreign and domestic Muslims as our most significant terrorist threat.

I’m no longer naïve enough to be shocked that racism, mysogeny, antisemitism, and other bigotries are alive and well in the United States of America. I am still absorbing the shock that bigots have joined flat-earthers in their utter lack of embarrassment.

In fact, these no-they-aren’t-just-as-fine folks don’t seem to realize that thinking Blacks and Hispanics are inferior; that Jews belong to a secret cabal plotting to run the world; that women in positions of authority are emasculating … they don’t realize their views are, in fact, outrageously bigoted and have no place here.

What can we do to combat this repulsive trend?

As an individual, if you’re adept at social media, you might consider trolling the most prominent alt-right sites. An adept hacker might plant humiliating content there, too (I’m not advocating this, merely pointing out the possibility).

But as individuals our most important role is to make clear to anyone we hear espousing any form of bigotry that they’re embarrassing themselves and should be embarrassed.

Following this, in a closely run second place, is to echo, wherever and whenever it might be appropriate, Isaac Asimov’s conclusion that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

Bigots who aren’t violent and don’t incite violence aren’t dangerous. They’re merely annoying.

No, it isn’t particularly profound to observe that we need culture change, and that peer pressure is important in making it happen, but I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of profound to offer on this subject.

Anyway, I write KJR for managers and for those who have to deal with managers. So as a manager, what role you have to play in all of this?

The starting point is recognizing that you do have a role to play. You have a legal responsibility to provide a workplace that’s free from harassment and intimidation. If you observe an employee speaking and acting in a bigoted way, it isn’t okay to ignore it unless and until someone complains.

And a thought for IT: It isn’t just websites featuring erotica that you should block access to. If visits to erotic sites have no business purpose, neither do visits to sites that promote hate and violence.

As a teenager I read The Autobiography of Malcom X. The book as a whole vividly introduced me to the Black American experience. But what stuck in my mind more than anything else was Malcom X’s account of how he met his wife: He explained that really, she was the one in control of it all.

By modern standards this was a mildly sexist account of things. What struck me then was that, in this one respect at least, Malcolm X was just a guy.

In 2010, I attended Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. There, on the national mall, I saw a smiling, relaxed, friendly-looking Pakistani family sitting on lawn chairs, holding a sign that read, “We’re the people you’re supposed to be afraid of.”

Believe me … these aren’t the people you should be afraid of.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

The third-finest movie I’ve seen about the space program was First Man. Marvelous as it was, it was biography, telling the story of Neil Armstrong, a quintessentially American hero.

The second-finest was probably Hidden Figures, about the team of mathematicians who made the early missions possible, overcoming the dual prejudices they faced for being both African American and female. It is an incredible story, about the space program but even more to help us see that while we still have quite a long way to go in overcoming prejudice, we clearly have come quite a long way from where we were.

These two stories rate second and third because they’re about individuals. Remarkable individuals we should remember and honor, but individuals nonetheless.

For my money the truly outstanding work is Apollo 13 — not because it’s a better piece of film-making but because it tells the story of NASA as a profoundly capable organization — one that could not only achieve the remarkable, but one that could adapt to the most intense challenges, and overcome them because and only because it was a profoundly capable organization.

I’m admittedly biased — I once had the privilege of hearing Jim Lovell and Gene Kranz speak about the mission and the movie, for which they served as consultants to Ron Howard to make sure he got it right.

While we’re on the subject, take a few minutes to read Randy Cassingham’s homage to Chris Kraft, not because it honors a man who deserves to be remembered in the same breath as these others, but because it describes his achievement and contribution: he designed Mission Control — not just the facility, but the roles, operating procedures, and all the rest of what made putting human beings into space possible.

In 2015, when Scott Lee and I wrote The Cognitive Enterprise, I’m embarrassed to tell you neither of us thought to mention NASA as the archetypical example.

But it is. From everything I know and have read, NASA is a seriously cognitive enterprise. It’s an organization that acts with purpose, having clear goals and then sensing, interpreting, and responding to changing circumstances so as to achieve them. Which is how it is that NASA landed Mars rovers that exceeded their planned mission lives by 2,500%; launched a spacecraft (Cassini) for a planned four-year tour of Saturn that lasted 20; and that sent the New Horizons spacecraft to visit both Pluto and the Kuiper belt, thereby inspiring astrophysicist and Queen lead guitarist Brian May to record a song named after its destination — Ultima Thule.

What’s most remarkable about NASA — and what we should, as Americans, be particularly proud of — isn’t what it’s achieved but how easily it might have failed to achieve it.

Like all large organizations, government agencies easily slide into bureaucracy. This happened to NASA in the course of its history, resulting in a sad string of mission failures that ranged from embarrassing — the Mars Climate Orbiter missed the red planet because some calculations used the English measurement system while others used metric units — to the tragic Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters. Richard Feynman’s analysis of the latter demonstrates that the core failure was of the organization as a whole, not of incompetent engineers.

What’s extraordinary about NASA is that its leaders didn’t pretend, didn’t duck and cover, and didn’t make politically expedient decisions. They took serious steps to understand what it was about the organization that encouraged mistakes. They then accomplished the truly remarkable — they fixed the organization, restoring its cognitive essence.

KJR is, at its core, about managing and leading effective organizations. As one of its readers you might lead and manage an organization; you might either enjoy the results of good leadership or cope with the consequences of the other kind; or you might fall into both categories.

To the extent you’re responsible for running an effective organization, and even more so to the extent you’re responsible for fixing an organization that’s less effective than it needs to be, you could do worse than use NASA’s leaders as your role models.

Far worse.

Also to the extent you need to fix an ineffective organization, a caution: Effectiveness is the least-stable state of organization. Among the reasons: organizational effectiveness asks everyone involved to subordinate their personal ambitions to the larger aims of the organization as a whole.

Which, among other challenges, means defining the larger aims of the organization as a whole so they’re inspiring enough to make this choice worthwhile.

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