Why Astronauts Fly Drunk

Last week an independent medical review panel set up by NASA to review health issues of astronauts found evidence of “heavy use of alcohol” by astronauts before launches on at least two separate occasions. Both flight surgeons and other astronauts warned that the drunken astronauts posed a flight risk. Yet, one flight to the international space station was cleared for launch and another flight was delayed but only for mechanical reasons.

When I first read this report, I had just written about the organizational culture at NASA for a chapter in my book on leadership. This new report echoed another report issued after the 2003 Columbia disaster. In the Columbia disaster NASA’s managers had ignored safety concerns of lower-level employees.

Given what I already knew, the new report was only mildly shocking. NASA’s leadership has a history of poor decision making. Yet one wonders: How can an organizational culture be so dysfunctional that is would allow astronauts to fly drunk?

The ongoing failures of leadership at NASA are due to NASA’s rigid hierarchy where decision makers are able to exert tremendous control without much input from others. Just as under socialistic central planning, or just as in countries run by tyrannical dictators, there is simply no mechanism to recognize and correct errors.

Consider the shuttle disasters, first Challenger in 1986 and then Columbia in 2003. In their book Hard Facts, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton observed that even after the Challenger disaster:

NASA remained a dysfunctional bureaucracy where, rather than deferring to people with the greatest technical expertise, leaders believed that “an allegiance to hierarchy, procedure, and following the chain of command” decrease the odds of failure. People with greater prestige and power routinely ignored and stifled those with more expertise but less power and overturned their recommendations.

In other words, the culture at NASA is a dysfunctional authoritarian culture with leaders who believed that knowledge has a “pedigree.” In such a culture it is very difficult to detect errors. In such cultures arrogant, authoritarian leaders believe their way is the correct way to see things and that others with a different viewpoint are nuisances that get in the way.

During the flight of Columbia, the Mission Management Team had knowledge that a piece of foam had broken off the shuttle’s fuel tank. The Mission Management Team’s leader was briefed by the Debris Assessment Team of the possible damage and what could be done to fix it. The Mission Management Team’s leader disastrously decided that the foam strike was inconsequential.

The Debris Assessment Team engineers, who were seriously concerned about the foam strike, never had a serious hearing. Indeed the Debris Assessment Team was reprimanded for going outside of official channels to seek satellite imagery that they needed. Instead of the foam strike being the focus of attention, a bureaucratic squabble became the focus of attention.

The Columbia Accident Safety Board in its 2003 report wrote that: “In our view, the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam.” Although NASA claimed it had risk-averse philosophy that sought to avoid errors, the Board wrote sharply: “Unfortunately NASA’s view of its safety culture… did not reflect reality.” NASA’s safety culture was described as “broken.”

Back to the drunken astronauts, apparently rather than deferring to the flight surgeons and postponing the flight, NASA’s leadership ordered the flight to take place as scheduled. Flying shuttle missions with drunken astronauts is very risky behavior—apparently little has changed at NASA.

The Real Truth About Farmer Chris’s Corn Price

My family is fortunate to be supplied all summer with a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables by a farm not far from our home. The produce is picked fresh each morning, and compared to what is available in a supermarket, the quality is off the charts.

A few days ago marked the first day Chris had corn for sale at his farm stand, and that event always brings the crowds. As my wife was purchasing our produce, she overheard a conversation. A buyer was complaining to Chris about his higher corn price this summer. Chris explained that he had purchased new equipment that allowed him to plant earlier in the season. The higher price, he explained, was how he would recoup his expense.

While Chris is an excellent farmer, businessman, and entrepreneur, he is not much of an economist. Or perhaps he is an armchair economist too and just doesn’t let on. After all, the explanation that he gave his customer for his higher corn price is a lot more palatable than the explanation I’m about to give.

Due to increased demand for ethanol, corn prices are up over the past year. Corn prices are up in the supermarket too. Although Chris’s corn is a premium product, the supermarket acts as competition. Regardless of Chris’s expense, if corn prices were not higher in the supermarket, he would have trouble selling his corn for a higher price at his farm stand.

Now, for Chris to tell a customer that he is going to charge what the market will bear will not go over well with some. Many will believe that the price is unfair. After all, they will reason, Chris is not selling his corn for ethanol, so why should he get a higher price?

While I think ethanol is a terrible idea (and I will explain why in another blog post), I for one am glad that Chris charges what the market will bear. It provides him a powerful incentive to plant his crops in early spring, take risks, and work in miserable weather. There are other farms stands in our area, but none have but a fraction of the produce Chris has.

There is a fundamental law of exchange in the free-market—that law is that both parties in an exchange are made better off. I value Chris’s produce more than the money I give him, and Chris values my money more than he does his produce. In that fundamental law of exchange, we find a basis for the cooperation and harmony of interests that exists between Chris and my family.

Having known Chris for many summers, I know he works very hard and although he likes his work, he also likes money. That combination is unbeatable. It works well for Chris and for his consumers too.

The Real Lesson of the Chinese Food Scandals

Revelations in the Chinese food scandal continue to grow. Consider this list of tainted foods provided by Chinese muckraker Zhou Qing: “Seafood laced with additives that lower men’s sperm counts, soy sauce bulked up with arsenic-tainted human hair swept up from the barbershop floor, and hormone-infused fast food that prompts 6-year-old boys to sprout facial hair and 7-year-old girls to grow breasts.”

Ok, we all get the point by now—don’t trust imported food from China. But there is a much larger lesson to be learned here and that lesson is to understand why our own domestic food supply is not similarly contaminated.

The common wisdom about anything is often wrong. In the case of the Chinese food scandals, the common wisdom seems to stem from one belief—namely that it is only because of our own strong food regulations that the United States has escaped its own domestic food scandals. This belief is dangerously false.

This belief can be almost instantly dismissed as it is unsupported by recent evidence. After all, have not the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies allowed numerous shipments of tainted imports into this country? If the FDA is an effective watchdog, why has the FDA only recently acted to block imports of five types of farm-raised Chinese seafood that are routinely contaminated with dangerous chemicals? If our government is a champion of the consumer, why is there a loophole in the law that permits corporations to use imported ingredients and not disclose the origin of those ingredients on their product labels?

But this belief that the government has protected us is more than unsupported, it is also dangerously false. The belief is dangerously false because it feeds the belief that corporations are made of individuals who would poison our fellow citizens if not for the watchful eye of government. This belief is corrosive to our liberty and prosperity.

What then has protected us that from our own scandals? There is one major force at work that most would never consider—our food is safe because we have relatively free-markets. Before we examine this point, let’s return for a minute to China and author Zhou Qing.

Zhou Qing tells a disturbing tale about a poisonous pig-feed additive called clenbuterol. Although it is poisonous to humans, it makes pork redder and meatier. Newsweek tells this story:

Zhou hears from a food-safety official about a provincial political leader told by a farmer that his pigs still get the banned chemical because it makes their meat a hot seller in urban areas. “Don’t you know that it harms people?” asks the official. “‘Yes,” replies the farmer. “But city people have free medical care, so it’s no problem.”

I would state with certainly that very few American businessman or farmers think like the Chinese farmer. They don’t think: “City dwellers are buying my product; I can harm them.” James Surowiecki in his Forbes essay “A Virtuous Cycle” helps us to understand why. He explains that a key ingredient in the development of free-markets is trust, and capitalism has been moving in the direction of more trust:

That evolution, of course, has not taken place because capitalists are naturally good people. Instead, it’s taken place because the benefits of trust—that is, of being trusting and of being trustworthy—are potentially immense and because a successful market system teaches people to recognize those benefits. At this point, it’s been well demonstrated that flourishing economies require a healthy level of trust in the reliability and fairness of everyday transactions. If you assumed every potential deal was a rip-off or that the products you were buying were probably going to be lemons, then very little business would get done.

In other words, in a free-market economy, a firm’s reputation is critical to its success. In the United States, firms don’t poison their consumers, not just because their ethical values won’t allow it, but also because their reputation would be destroyed and with that, their profits.

In a free-market economy, honest transactions do not occur only if you have affection for the people with whom you are dealing. The Chinese pig farmer who is poisoning others is able to sleep at night because there is no social norm of trust that has been established by commerce in a free-market. In his eyes, city dwellers were less worthy than rural dwellers. Perhaps to the city dwellers, the farmer was just a mere peasant. Both attitudes breed contempt and bad behavior. Provincial and ethnic prejudices run very deep in China.

In our own country, let us count our blessings. Our food supply is relatively safe not because we have strong government watchdogs, but because we have a strong free-market economy.

The One Thing That Doesn’t Cause Cancer

While driving home from work last month, I was listening to the radio and heard an advertisement for a local television station’s five o’clock news program. Breathlessly a reporter announced that multivitamins may increase the incidence of prostate cancer; the news would have details at five.

As a user of multivitamins, I was a little alarmed. In truth I was a more amused than alarmed. I was not amused because I dismiss cancer warnings with a perfunctory “what doesn’t cause cancer” statement. I don’t. But I also believe our understanding of what causes cancer is very primitive. There is probably too much emphasis on genes, on the environment, and on other factors beyond our control. There is too little emphasis on factors that are under our control, such as our diet and other choices we make daily.

There is one thing I am certain that doesn’t cause cancer. That one thing is Love. Now I don’t mean the love that we are most familiar with. That love is conditional; you do this for me and I’ll do this for you. I’ll love you if I get something I want from you. Couples frequently have very complex deals; and when the deal is broken, they separate. They say they fell out of love. The truth may be they never Loved.

When we truly Love, we behave in a Loving way, not because someone else deserves it and not to preserve a deal we made. Instead, we Love because we choose to allow what Thomas Hora calls the ocean of Love-Intelligence to flow through us.

We did not create the ocean of Love-Intelligence, but we are part of the ocean of Love- Intelligence; it is our natural inheritance. It flows through us automatically, except when we block its flow. How do we block its flow? We block its flow by being caught up in our ego’s thoughts.

In our minds, there are certain universal themes that our ego plays over and over. Many of these themes involve struggling against what is. Why is the traffic so slow today? Why are these drivers such idiots? Why are the people in this town so rude? Why does the checkout clerk work so slowly? Why aren’t my children doing better in school? Why doesn’t my boss appreciate me more? Why don’t my employees take more initiative? Why doesn’t my spouse do more household chores?

The outcome of all these universal ego themes is the same—we feel separated from the people we are judging. Our ego counsels us: we are innocent and they are guilty. Those people are victimizing us, proclaims the ego. In truth, we are all being victimized by our dysfunctional thinking.

Each time we create a story around who is to blame, we squeeze the flow a little more. We rehearse the stories and seek witnesses to our stories. When we are in the grip of our stories, we want to be right. We want to be innocent. Since our stories further constrict us, we pay a high price for being right.

As we struggle with what is, as we judge our life in this moment, we block the ocean of Love-Intelligence from flowing through us. We may go through the motions of doing loving things, but we are not fooling anybody. We are not Loving.

The antidote to blocking Love is pure awareness. Pure awareness is free of judgment. When we can look at our thinking with honesty, which means without judgment or justification, we began the process of releasing our constrictions which squeeze the flow of Love to a trickle.

If everyone is part of this ocean of Love-Intelligence, constricting its flow must affect our happiness and health. And although there are no guarantees, if we are constricting Love, allowing more Love to flow through us may improve our health. We can be sure of one thing—allowing Love to flow through us is the one thing that does not cause cancer.

Time Warner Cable Tries Socialism and It Doesn’t Work

Time Warner Cable is known for having terrible customer service. No wonder, since they rely on the failed ideas of socialism to run their business.

Though socialism has been shown to be a failure throughout the world, its ideas still enamor many academics, intellectuals, and businessmen. Businessmen? You may be surprised to see them listed with academics and intellectuals as supporters of socialism. Most businessmen themselves would indignantly scoff at this assertion.

One of the failed ideas of socialism is relying on centralized decision-making; that means substituting the will of one person or small group of people for the on-the-spot knowledge and day-to-day decisions of many people.

For instance, the former Soviet Union instead of having a market system for food distribution had five-year plans. These plans specified which crops a farmer would grow, which train or truck would transport each crop to each city, which stores would stock which products, and how much of each product they were allotted to sell.

No matter how refined the five-year plan was, the result was the same—food rotted in farmers’ fields, transportation was inadequate to get the food that was picked into the cities, and little food was stocked on store shelves.

The idea that centralized decision-making can work has been shown to be theoretically impossible and centuries of failed experiments have confirmed that it does not work.

Yet many businessmen in the United States persist in utilizing centralizing decision-making. Why? They may arrogantly believe that they are smarter than everyone else; and thus, they should make all the decisions.

My own inconvenience is not the point of the following little tale.

Ownership of our local cable company had been transferred from Adelphia Cable to Time Warner Cable. The local town office of the cable company is still in the same building. From the outside it looks like only the name has changed, but there is one big difference. Time Warner Cable believes in centralized decision-making.

Our home, which is on a small side street, needs a new cable buried across the road. We found this out when the local installer was unable to complete our installation. The installer did promise that the additional work would begin within 48 hours.

After a week went by, we called Time Warner Cable in another state? Why would we call another state? We do not have the phone number of the local cable office. It is Time Warner Cable policy that all calls have to be routed to this central office.

After several rounds of phone calls to this “foreign” office and being told a different story each time, we decided to drop in at the local office of Time Warner Cable.

We were actually able to speak to the manager and he was very apologetic. He had our work-order; but other than that, he could give us no information. He explained he was literally not in control of his own crews. The management of his own crews have been taken from him and transferred to this out-of-state office.

He had no way of knowing when our job would be done. Under the former policy of decentralized decision-making, he explained, the job would have been done in a few days. Now, he explained to our frustration, it may be months until the job would be completed. He promised to call us in a few days.

When he didn’t call, we returned to the local office and learned from the secretary that our installation was scheduled. She was surprised that no one had called to tell us. We were not.

A few days later, a Time Warner employee showed up to mark the road. He told us that he didn’t know when the work would be completed. He didn’t know that our installation was scheduled and hoped that the road cut would be completed in time.

Apparently decision-making at Time Warner Cable is not only centralized but information is not even shared. Every employee that we encountered was a decent human being trying to do a good job, but their hands were tied by the policies of Time Warner Cable.

The failed ideas of socialism at work indeed! Human intelligence is not utilized, jobs are not getting done, customer service costs escalate for Time Warner Cable, and everybody is frustrated.

There is enough theoretical and empirical evidence to convince anyone that centralized decision-making can never be efficient. Because they don’t understand this, the leadership at Time Warner is destroying their shareholders’ equity.

Destroying shareholders’ equity is a bold claim. Yet, every time Time Warner Cable employees cannot efficiently coordinate among themselves and their customers, money is lost. Not only that, consumer ill will is created. Isn’t customer good will among an organization’s most important assets?

Currently Time Warner Cable “has no plans to pay cash dividends on its common stock in the future, and expects to retain future earnings for use in the operation and expansion of its business.”

Good luck to their shareholders! Future expansion of their business depends in part upon innovation. Innovation can not easily occur under a regime of centralized decision-making. Innovative organizations, such as W.L. Gore and Associates, use flat hierarchies with decentralized decision-making to promote a culture of innovation. They don’t use the failed ideas of socialism.

Lexus Face

All of us are familiar with the derogatory term “two-faced.” This refers to somebody who falsely presents themselves.

A new idiom may be about to enter the lexicon. That idiom is “Lexus Face.” According to The Wall Street Journal “Lexus Face” is “a peaceful Ogasawara-style closed mouth smile said to put customers at ease.”

Ogasawara refers to the Ogasawara Ryu Reihou institute in Japan. This institute is an etiquette school which teaches samurai etiquette which has been handed down since the 1300s.

In Japan, Toyota is sending all Lexus employees for samurai etiquette training under the belief that this will help sell more cars. Besides “Lexus Face” employees are learning how to stand idly with “fingers together and thumbs interlocked” as well as how many arm lengths to stand away from the customer.

The problem with the samurai techniques is that they are mere techniques. A samurai warrior in Japan went through years and years of rigorous training. This training was not only about techniques; it taught a samurai way of being in the world.

Corporations such as Southwest Airlines, L.L. Bean, and Nordstrom that do have legendary customer service do not rely on techniques to ensure their service. They rely on hiring and training employees who have positive regard for their customers. They then give their employees the autonomy that is necessary, so that employees can demonstrate their positive regard.

A “Lexus Face” put on the face of a Lexus employee will fool nobody if either the employee does not have positive regard for their customer or the employee does not have autonomy to demonstrate their regard by the service they perform.

Let me suggest a more foolproof method to increase sales—genuine positive regard for the customers. A Course in Miracles, a modern statement of the perennial spiritual wisdom offers this advice:

When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him you will see yourself. As you treat him you will treat yourself. As you think of him you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself.

Now this is a radical frame of mind to be in. It takes us far beyond the need for a one-size-fits-all smile. This reminds us that we and the customers we serve are really not separate. If we are thinking poorly of them, we are really thinking poorly of ourselves; this is hardly a combination that is going to make a sale.

It is out of a frame of mind that has a genuine desire to be of service that we go beyond the need for technique. A “Lexus Face” may be better than a scowl, but not much better; especially if the “face” is not accompanied by sincere regard and the autonomy to be of genuine service.

More Fallout from the Chinese Food Scandals: Heavy Metals in Our Food?

The Chinese food scandal continues to multiply. There is now little doubt that Chinese food imports have entered the United States food supply in widespread and unexpected ways.

For instance, a former FDA official, William Hubbard, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that most of the candy in supermarket aisles is “likely made with at least one ingredient that originated” in China.

Even organic products are not immune from Chinese ingredients. According to the Organic Consumers Association, Dean Foods, maker of the popular “organic” Silk soymilk, uses Chinese soybeans in their soymilk. With soybeans being such a ubiquitous crop in the United States, who would’ve ever thunk it? I know I didn’t!

As this blog has discussed in previous posts, the American public is in blissful ignorance of how widespread Chinese ingredients are in their food supply. This is because of a little-known loophole in the food labeling laws that does not require country of origin for food ingredients if the product has been processed and has undergone substantial transformation.

Even if Chinese food ingredients have not been tainted outright with poisonous chemicals such as melamine, formaldehyde, etc., the Wall Street Journal has reported a new threat from Chinese food ingredients—namely heavy metals, such as cadmium, mercury and lead contamination.

According to the Journal there is much Chinese farmland in the vicinity of factory smokestacks or mining operations. This farmland has been contaminated by heavy metals that can cause a “sweeping range of health problems from brain damage to cancer.”

This contamination is not just mere conjecture; according to the Journal, some Chinese have recently been poisoned with contaminated rice that “contained 20 times permitted levels of cadmium.” Vegetable crops have been poisoned too.

According to the Journal, heavy use of fertilizers, contaminated with metals and other toxins, is widespread. Despite all of this, in the United States, the FDA does no routine testing of food imports for metals. Given this, we have no way to know how widespread the problem is.

Richard Maybury has summarized the basic laws that allow civilizations to progress. One of these laws is: “Do all that you have agreed to do.”

Food manufactures that take advantage of the loophole in the food labeling requirements and use potentially contaminated ingredients are not doing all that they have agreed to do.

Why? If a consumer buys a product in the supermarket there is an implicit understanding that the product is not contaminated in any way with tainted ingredients or heavy metals.

Let’s leave aside the economics of how regulatory agencies are frequently “captured” by the industries that they are supposed to regulate. Instead, let us focus on the dubious ethics of many food manufacturers who are taking advantage of this loophole in the law.

By not doing all that they have agreed to do—that is, delivering a food product free from contamination–they are undermining the market system. The consumer suffers twice. The first effect is being exposed, unwittingly, to contaminated food. The second effect is more systemic. When consumers can no longer trust the word of the companies that they are buying from, commerce and the economy begin to slow. In that way, we all suffer.