Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Jetzt ab nach Fort Myers .....
(Vielen Dank Thomas und Steffi)

The other person...

Me, this year !

The other person is always right.

Always right about feelings.
About the day he just experienced.
About the fears (real, unreal or ill-founded) in his life.
About the narrative going on, unspoken, in his head.
About what he likes and what he dislikes.

You'll need to travel to his place of 'right' before you have any chance at all of actual communication. 

Make Change Happen

By Newt Gingrich.

I learned these principles from working with President Reagan on dramatic change in the 1980s and then leading the Contract with America with its deep changes (welfare reform, the only four balanced budgets in your lifetime, the largest capital gains tax cut in history, etc.) The principles I learned working with Reagan and applied as Speaker seem to be universal for those who would enact deep, profound changes.

They are:

1. The “normal” will try to convince the leader to be “reasonable”.
2. Solving symptoms feels satisfying and is an easy substitute for solving the real, underlying problems.
3. The urgent drives out the important.

President-elect Trump should get up every day and begin by looking at his own campaign promises. He owes his presidency to the people who believed in him, not to the courtiers and schmoozers who had contempt for him as candidate but adore him now that he is going to be president. “Reasonableness” will be the death of Trumpism. The very essence of the Trump candidacy was a willingness to set out new policies, new goals, and new toughness that was “unreasonable” to Washington but made perfect sense to millions of Americans. President Trump should “unreasonably” insist on draining the swamp and changing policies. This is why he was elected.

Second, there will be so many symptoms of problems that a president could satisfyingly spend every day focusing on little problems that require little solutions. While that approach will yield many small satisfactions, however, it will not produce the profound changes that are needed. Peter Drucker warned of this tendency to allow surface symptoms to attract our attention. In The Effective Executive (a book every Trump appointee should be required to read), Drucker wrote that great leaders look below the symptom to find the real problem. 

President-elect Trump and his senior team have to acquire the habit of asking of every situation “Is this a symptom, or a problem?” If it is symptom, they must take some time to look for the real underlying problem. When they solve that problem they will have solved orders of magnitude more symptoms.

Third, Washington is a city in which the urgent drives out the important. Senator Jesse Helms first taught me this. He saw me on the street one day early in my career and said, “Young man, remember that this is a city in which the urgent drives out the important. Your job is to get up every morning, place the important at the center of your desk, and work on it until the urgent overwhelms it.”

As I thought about Helms’s rule and watched President Reagan, I realized he had developed an antelope-and-chipmunk theory of leading. Lions know that they cannot afford to hunt chipmunks because even if they capture them, they will starve to death. Lions have to hunt antelopes and zebras.

President Reagan was a lion. He wanted to accomplish big things. He knew that meant he could not get bogged down by tiny problems (chipmunks). President Reagan got up every morning and reminded himself of his three antelopes: defeat the Soviet Union, grow the American economy, and renew American civic culture so we would be proud to be American again. When President Reagan entered the oval office, chipmunks would come running in. Some federal chipmunks can be $10 billion or more. Reagan would listen patiently and say “You are a fine chipmunk! Have you met my chief of staff?” Jim Baker became the largest chipmunk collector in the world.

If you call ..

Für November und Wolfgang!

Donald Trump wins, why?

After the sucess of UKIP and Brexit in the United Kingdom, the success of Donald Trump was surely no surprise?

Millions of American blue collar workers yesterday voted against an establishment that is simply oblivious to working class people. There have been decades of industrial decline, the export of jobs, the destruction of any hope that blue collar people might still aspire to the American dream. The gap between the richest and the poorest has grown wider and wider, corporate America has acquired previously unimaginable wealth while working people have worked longer and longer hours for low wages. The financial crisis forced the country to struggle with debts caused by rich bankers. Hillary Clinton, being part of the establishment, offered no radical analysis of the economy Is it any surprise that Donald Trump was able to win the support of all those angry people?

As the UKIP voters were derided, as the Brexit voters were derided, so the Trump voters have met a similar wave of abuse, “Dumb” and “stupid” being the most frequent terms. Perhaps those who are dumb and stupid are those who for more than a decade have ignored the growing sense of alienation, those who preferred to think that the anger would simply fade away. If liberal values are to be preserved, then it will need a reformed persuasive political analysis that re-connects with lost communities.

Someday

Mein Wunsch! (Smile) 

For example to reference U2 once again there’s the enigmatic “Uno, Dos, Tres, Catorce,” which some fans view as a cryptic scripture reference – If you know how to find your way around in the Bible, look up the first testament (uno), the second book (dos), the third chapter (tres) and the 14thverse (catorce).
Specially for you, Reg!

Hillary and Donald

I’m just a little bemused over the whole Donald Trump thing. 

But perhaps it’s none of my business. I'm Irish but live in Germany. As a member of the EU I think free movement of people and goods are both good and beneficial things, I want to work and play across the continent without encountering unnecessary bureaucratic barriers, I like my DAK European Health Insurance because I think the idea is very civilised, I like the protections granted to the people by an international regulatory body that reigns in the worst ideas of each new government, and provides welcome oversight of our leaders because I don’t trust any of them and prefer that they exist as small fish in a big pond, not big dictatorial fish in a small pond. And, finally, as a student of history I appreciate the fact that Europe has been quite peaceful all these years and that closer union between the member states helped that peace prevail. 

Hillary is a text-book politician of the kind we’ve had in Ireland and Europe for some time now. She lies, she manoeuvres, she cheats but so what? It’s modern politics. We in Old Europe don’t have the luxury of voting for people who are pure in word and deed. We don’t even subscribe to such fallacies any more. We deal with the situation as it is and make the best choice we can, with our eyes open and few illusions about the messy business called governance. We do not demand that our politicians be pure, we just hope that they are competent.

I mean no disrespect to the USA. Many of Mr. Trump’s “mistakes” have turned out to serve him well. Hillary’s interests appear to be mainly concentrated on personal gain. We’ll just have to see.