The Milwaukee Malaise – What We Can Do About It

by Richard Thieme

Published online (jsonline.com) by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in response to responses to The Milwaukee Malaise   February 1 2013

To call for systemic change when our culture – like all cultures – resists change with all its heart and soul is arguably a fool’s errand. But when the risks of not engaging in creative change in intentional, focused ways are as daunting as they are in a world of perpetual change, the risks of engagement are less than the risks of hunkering down. The rate of change itself is accelerating as the IT revolution sustains change in many other areas – biotech, nanotech, materials science, space technologies, transportation – to an unprecedented degree.

Hence this response to the many responses to my op ed on “The Malaise of Milwaukee” on January 27.

The most spirited rebuttal came from Tim Sheehey of the MMAC. I found myself nodding in agreement with many things he wrote – there are dedicated people in Milwaukee, which I never denied, including both of us, doing everything we can to make a positive difference in our collective life. There are creative thinkers and bold actors like Howard Fuller and others who stand out in his list of names.

But they are exceptions that prove the rule. That they stand out is precisely the point. In a culture like the ones, for example, in Silicon Valley, Austin Texas, or Boston, there is such a matrix of creative people and bold actors that they do not stand out. The culture itself supports and generates them, and it is the culture itself – the matrix of values, incentives, and rewards and the actions and behaviors it mandates – that many of us have concluded lacks the leadership, vision, and incentives to bootstrap itself into new ways of thinking and new possibilities for meaningful action.

Sheehey names some of the trees, in other words, while I am speaking about the forest. What he calls a “broad brush approach” is, less pejoratively, the Big Picture, the very thing that Robert Galvin, in my example of how one might inflect behaviors and therefore the culture of a large company, addressed so effectively.

So let me suggest what other responders requested, some things we might do to create a context for creativity and innovation.

(1) The “vision thing” is essential. “Without a vision, the people perish,” and the shared vision called for by Ellen Gilligan of the GMC is needed to “true us up,” as a means of accountability to our goals and intentions.

(2) That vision must be articulated clearly and repeatedly. During times of change, anxiety is a natural response. Fritz Perls, the father of gestalt therapy, said that excitement is anxiety plus oxygen.  Our fears can be transformed by the continuous statement of the positive outcomes we intend. Nothing else penetrates the force field of “I can’t hear you” that anxiety and fear create.

Why IS change so difficult? Because a strategy of generalization, quick conclusions and not-changing often works. To simplify our view of the world and hold it against evidence to the contrary has helped people survive. Better to be wrong – it was a branch snapping in the wind, not a tiger – than be eaten

What does leadership look like in such a context? A friend who kayaks in raging rivers said, “When you look at the rocks you hit the rocks. But when you look at where the water flows, you go where the water flows.”

Leadership is seeing clearly and saying clearly where the water flows. People will know the truth when they hear it and be grateful to go where the water goes.

My friend also said, after practicing karate and mistakenly hurting a friend one night who tapped his shoulder, “Make sure that what you practice is what you want to do, because what you do when you don’t have time to think is what you have practiced.”

(3) These thoughts lead to the three-legged stool which I believe supports all successful organizations. mutuality, feedback, and accountability.

Mutuality means learning, working, and acting in concert, because we can’t do it alone, Business or labor, government or private citizens, any single niche alone will skew toward the self-interest and distortions of its members. Cross-talk broadens the perspective.

Feedback must increase in the face of radical change. Feedback loops inside any system and from that system to other systems calibrate our plans to what is really happening. Since what is happening is rapidly changing, more and more feedback is needed  to align our path with our ultimate intentions, like sailors tacking back and forth across the wind.

Accountability requires frequent alignment of our actions to our clearly stated intentions and goals. Without it, we drift. A minor difference in direction if left uncorrected can result in being many miles off course.

(4) We can face courageously the fact that our culture – mostly rooted in eastern and northern European immigration. although changing as American changes -  has assimilated us like the Borg in Star Trek and deeply influences our choices and behaviors, often unconsciously. That’s just how cultures are. Margaret Mead said it took her a full year to learn as much in a new culture as she learned in a week because of unconscious assimilation  This means:

(5) We MUST listen to “outsider” voices because they see our culture in ways we cannot. Robert Galvin said that when a group gathered to discuss a challenge, if it agreed at once on a solution, it was always wrong. That’s because the solution was a jigsaw puzzle piece that fit the collective groupthink that had developed in the past. Note that this insight – and its corollary, that all breakthrough ideas that changed Motorola for the better began as minority opinions – came from a legendary businessman who knew his stuff.

Therefore we must build in an openness to heresy. All great ideas, as G. B. Shaw said, begin as blasphemies.

(6) All of this suggests a multiplicity of approaches must be used, not just one. We continue with mobilization of what already exists – the  GMC, the MMAC, artistic organizations, non-profits, political leaders. But that won’t be enough. We need alternative routes, too. Lincoln said, when you come to a stump in the field, plow around it. We need heterodox approaches powered by people who do not exercise “structural authority” currently. Organization, the canny use of powerful technologies (as the Obama campaign illustrated), the willingness to believe –bear fruit.

(7) It begins and ends with reality – the courage and will to look at what’s happening “out there” as well as “in here.”

And what is reality? Reality, said Philip K. Dick, is that which, when we stop believing in it, refuses to go away. New global structures – meta-national corporations, dissolving boundaries, new forms of warfare, technological engines that redefine human identity, political  realities that require us to stop using the frames of the twentieth century as if they alone persist – make up that reality. Only the incorporation of everything we learn in cross-disciplinary ways will enable us to forge a future for the city we love with intentionality and power.

The Milwaukee Malaise

Richard Thieme

Published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel January 27 2013

An old Far Side cartoon depicts a dog on a tightrope, balancing a cat on his head, hoops spinning on his paws, above this caption: “High above the crowd, Rex tried to remain focused, but he couldn’t shake one nagging thought: He was an old dog, and this was a new trick.”

Welcome to Milwaukee.

It’s not that our leaders – politicians, executives, union heads, deans – don’t understand the issues that challenge us. Study after study by outside consultants confirm that Milwaukee lags behind other cities in promoting growth in helpful ways.

We know that our leaders understand because they respond with the right sound-bites, insisting they are addressing the issues. But calling a lamb’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one, as the old joke goes, and calling our situation a “Milwaukee Renaissance” doesn’t make it one either.

The Milwaukee malaise is not that we don’t know what’s happening. We have studied it to death. The problem is that we don’t do anything meaningful about it. “Not try. Do!” as Yoda said—but do something more than have committee meetings, issue policy papers, and commission more studies, all of which change nothing essential.

After 25 years in Milwaukee, I think I know why we’re stuck. And I’m part of the problem.

When people like life the way it is, they may give lip service to changing things, but why should want to?

In 2004, I keynoted the Governor’s Conference on Economic Development. The conference celebrated “Making Waves: Bold Strategies for our Economic Future.”

I asked the audience: who wants more traffic? Who wants higher prices? Who wants a longer commute, longer lines in stores? Who wants more noise?

No hands went up. People laughed. No hands would go up now, either.

THAT’S OUR PROBLEM. A lot of us like it here just the way it is. We don’t see how we can make changes that would address our real issues without changing who we are and what we have.

We don’t WANT to be like L. A. or New York or Atlanta or anywhere else where dense traffic, noise, congestion, and higher prices make life less enjoyable … but those places also have extraordinary resources and dynamic environments that attract smart diverse risk-taking kinds of people. That’s why it’s noisy there and so quiet here we can u-turn in the middle of downtown.

We say we want what they have but don’t want to pay the price. So we don’t create a context in which businesses and industries in the 21^st century can succeed.

Our leaders feel no real incentive to create bold strategies or make even a single wave. As long as elected officials do not threaten the status quo, they are re-elected again and again.

The people in that audience nearly a decade ago –successful, mostly male, mostly white – are the kinds of people who have historically exercised leadership here. Because they have prospered in life-as-it-is and carved out comfortable geographic enclaves that enable them to avoid the behavioral sinks that fester in the invisible city, they can raise tinkling glasses of self-congratulation and enjoy the good life.

They do not feel the pain that compels people to do things differently. And until our leaders feel that pain and are motivated to use their power to create a context more aligned with twenty-first century realities, nothing will change.

I have lived in Milwaukee for 25 years. I have watched with frustration as leaders in other midwest cities – Indianapolis, Minneapolis, now Oklahoma City – unite to formulate plans for the future and forge ahead with economic incentives to make them happen. I have listened as Milwaukee metrics are cited, time after time, that quantify our malaise. But we refuse to implement the strategies that work elsewhere. We refuse to forge the alliances that generate creative change.

Perhaps a more oblique approach might work.

Robert Galvin was a genius who built Motorola into a powerhouse. At one point, he wanted to see then-newfangled “quality initiatives” implemented throughout the corporation. But it didn’t work when he lectured about it. Old habits were not dislodged by words. So Galvin chose a subtle approach.

He attended meetings at which lower level managers made presentations. As soon as the presentation involving quality had been given, he left.

He did that until the message sank in: the boss cares about quality. If you want him to listen to your ideas, you better make them part of a quality presentation.

Everyone learned to present their best ideas in the “total quality” slot.

Behaviors change when people pay attention to what they really care about. Meetings led by “nice guys” do not move people to action. Despite our moralistic pronouncements, we are all motivated by self-interest, and unless we see our self-interest tied to bold initiatives, why should we embrace them? Why make waves when we prefer still waters?

Will this kind of approach work? Who knows? But we might as well try this and any other approach that might make a difference. Until we break through our denial and rationalizations, until the comfortable are genuinely afflicted and the threat of doing nothing gets personal – the malaise will continue, columns like this will be written, consultants will thrive—and the change that happens will not be the kind we need or want.

Living in a World Without Walls

Published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel    September 16 2012

“You have zero privacy,” Scott McNealey, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, said in 1999. “Get over it!”

He wasn’t kidding.  Privacy is gone.  But ordinary people do not yet “get”  the full implications. We still live as if it’s the middle of the twentieth century.

McNealey’s statement was made in the middle of an IT revolution that transformed our lives. In a way, that revolution is over. Information technologies will not stop advancing – the internet is disappearing into cars, homes, clothing, even inside us –  but more important, that revolution is accelerating revolutions in all other areas -–  biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials science, neuroscience, space exploration, and more.

It is embedded in every domain and accelerating progress in all of them. And because IT is transparent, because computers are in more and more things the way the electric grid is the power behind appliances,  users are not conscious of the consequences of their day-to-day transactions.

Those who gather massive amounts of data and and analyze it gain the ability to manipulate our lives in ways we don’t see, feel, or understand. They analyze transactions on a meta-level, using billions of transactions to find patterns and respond to them in real time. They store the details of individual lives. They aggregate that data with a click.

The patterns of our lives make us predictable. Those who know what we buy, what or where we eat, how or where we travel, how we vote, can capture us all like real birds in a digital cage, then move the cage, and we won’t even know it.

I have worked closely with experts in information security, hacking, and professional intelligence for twenty years. The world they inhabit is not the world experienced by most people.

A friend who has worked at the National Security Agency for decades says, “People are not asking the right questions,. They need to ask, how do we live in a world without walls? How can we live vibrantly? How can we free our minds [from the constraints of the past]?

The ways we think and behave, he is saying, are framed by technologies which become the context of our lives and disappear into background noise.

Older people still speak of “going on the internet” and “making telephone calls.” Younger generations do not see the internet or think of handheld computers as “telephones.” Global connectivity 24/7 is just what’s so. That they broadcast everything about their lives is also just what’s so.

In addition, since 9/11, our interpretation of the Constitution and how it applies has also changed radically. Warrentless wiretaps and collection and storage of the data of our lives by governments is another fact of life. It doesn’t matter which administration is in the White House. Intrusion and surveillance, from linked pubic and private networks, from cameras to massive databases, are now embedded deeply.

When meta-data from, say, cellphone transactions, is analyzed, the analysts know more about us than we know about ourselves.  Researchers at MIT, for example, detected flu symptoms before students knew they were sick, using patterns of movement and duration, They knew when two people were talking about politics, despite not knowing the content of the conversation.

And when you read a book on your sexy new “pad,” the publishers know what books you finish, how long it took, and what you immediately download next (this is why more trilogies are being published; addicted readers of melodramatic formulaic fiction tend to order the next installment right away).

“People look like little particles that move in space and occasionally communicate with each other,” says Northwestern University physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabast in a Wall Street Journal feature on smart phones

It’s hard to worry about privacy or other ethical issues from that God’s-eye perspective.

Software to monitor online activity has become so inexpensive and the means of implementing technologies of surveillance so universal that every country in the world  today can observe every single electronic transaction that takes place inside its borders.

A friend works with telecom companies to develop policies that will enable them to cooperate with governments to intercept communications. “Will we ever be free from this level of intrusion?” I asked.

Oh Richard, she said, her voice suggesting I was a naive child. Of course not.

Can we, then, prevent misuse or abuse? Can we establish levels of accountability that protect us?

The answer to that question, based on human history, is not good. Every technology is dual use, and humans will employ them across the entire spectrum of possibilities.

That leaves on the table only the question posed by my friend at NSA: how do we free our minds from the past? How do we live in a world without walls?

When one of our daughters was a teenager, we often found ourselves at the bottom of the stairs, needing to leave and late again as she continued to apply the lotions and creams essential to her well-being. We listened to the whirring of the hair dryer with growing frustration, and at last one of us would call, “Come on! We need to go!”

To which she replied, “I am!”

Yet the hair dryer didn’t stop. The footsteps that would signal that she was coming downstairs did not sound.

“I think you mean,” I helpfully explained, “’I will.’ If you meant ‘I am!’ – if you were actually doing it – you would be down here.”

I think of those scenes, now blissfully past, when I read how our mayor responds to study after study of leadership lacking in our city. He circles the wagons and defends himself, telling the authors of the frequent reports how wrong they are, how much he has done, again and again.

“I am!” the Mayor insists.

But if he were, the studies would begin to come to different conclusions. He would not have to invoke an imaginary future when the seven counties of southeast Wisconsin will dance together like lions and lambs and dogs and cats will be sleeping together.

Make no mistake, Mayor Barrett is a nice guy, a very nice guy. When he was elected, the main theme I heard from those who worked closely with Mayor Norquist was what a nice guy the new mayor was, how pleasant it was to meet with him.

Norquist was accused of many things, but being touchy-feely was not one. Norquist left feelings splattered on the walls after meetings and pursued his agendas with single-minded intensity.

Maybe the pendulum has swung too far. Maybe a little less nice and a little more vision and real leadership would be welcome.

In the movie Ghostbusters, the Sumerian god Gozer tells the Ghostbusters that the next thing they think about will be the form taken by Gozer who has come to destroy the world. Despite their efforts to blank their minds, one explains that Mr. Stay Puft “just popped in there” as “something that could never possibly hurt us.” Moments later a huge Stay Puft Marshmallow Man comes thundering down the street.

Mayor Stay Puft looked like someone who could never hurt Milwaukee. But the “leadership gap” in our city is doing just that. When inaction is writ large, it tends to have an impact.

“He just doesn’t know how to get things done,” a political insider suggested, a criticism seldom levied against Norquist. The freeway corridor was cleared, the river walk was extended, and deals got done.

Those of us at the bottom of the stairs, calling to Mayor Stay Puft, “Come on!” don’t do it because we don’t care about our city. It is because we do care that we have not joined the many professionals leaving in search of environments that proactively support meaningful change.

My frequent trips abroad – most recently to Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia to speak about security and intelligence to business and government leaders – result in frustration when I return.  We hear the spin about new condos and restaurants downtown. But we do not see evidence of a realistic economic alignment with the world outside our perimeter.

Just as a “moment of clarity” is often needed to break through denial and initiate meaningful change in our lives, we would love to hear the Mayor say that he really gets why well-intentioned citizens continue to say the same things over and over again. President Bush too showed an unwillingness to admit he made mistakes until so many people voted against him that he had to listen. It takes what it takes, they say in recovery programs. Maybe in politics too.

Please, Mayor Stay Puft, don’t keep saying, “I am!” when you’re not. Invite input from people who disagree with your sanguine appraisal and seriously consider some new possibilities, not because we’re motivated by partisan politics or personal agendas, but because this is our city too and we genuinely care about our future.

Richard Thieme is an author and professional speaker focused on the social and cultural implications of technology, religion, and science.  He has lived in the Milwaukee area for nearly 20 years.

Privacy? Never again.

Our option?

As Scott McNeeley of Sun Microsystems said years ago, “Get over it.”

A good friend, a well known information security expert, was asked this morning whether or not one can still do something to have privacy.

He said, “When people who are serious ask me what to do to prevent the loss of their privacy in full, I tell them that serious people have as many non-intersecting identities as possible, and that protecting one is no longer feasible at all, full stop.  It would take so much money to do so that the existence of that amount of money would work against your being able to achieve privacy – some sort of parallel to JP Morgan’s famous “If you have to ask, then you can’t afford it”, such as “If you can afford it, then you can’t have it.”

He is simply describing what’s so – in other words, he is invoking a metaphor created by Marshall McLuhan, the “global village.”

Recall that in small towns and villages, people pretty much know everything about their neighbors and develop interpenetrating concentric circles of behavior that suggest when one can act as if one knows and when one can’t. Social boundaries are created, that is, in the absence of boundaries of information.

When information is concentrated in the hands of the “information-haves,” of course, it creates the split world in which we live, a kind of informational third world of haves and have nots. In place of a middle class, there is an expanding paranoid class, consisting of people who know they don’t know but not knowing what they don’t know. Because they know that their perception of “reality” is often managed, they fill in the blanks, often with farfetched stories.

That’s why almost anything is believable, these days, for some people.  It isn’t paranoia. It’s the inevitable consequence of a national security state in which compartmented information is power and the technologies that enable such a state to exist. It’s because people know that much of the truth is held back, but don’t know what.

When I talk about these issues in greater detail in speeches, I am sometimes asked by educated adults if I believe we landed on the moon. That’s only a step away from asking if the Holocaust took place.

As I said, almost anything is believable. It isn’t just ignorance. It’s inevitable that members of the paranoid class who know they are fed distortions, half-truths, and outright lies as “the news” will project fears and unrealities onto the blank screen of unknowing. They know that propaganda, public relations, and much of what they see and hear as “news” are part of the same spectrum.

This is also why routine blackmail procedures used by the intelligence community have become standard political and business practice, too, when the stakes are sufficiently high.

I once asked a confidante of a Midwest governor why the opposition party did not use its knowledge of the governor’s sexual adventures to its advantage.

“That’s easy,” he said. “We had a sit-down. We know what they have on us and they know what we have on them. It’s mutual assured destruction so no one will launch the first strike.”

Some call this sort of ramble “conspiracy theory.” But I know better. I work with these people, some of whom are designers of the reality show called modern life.

Of course it’s easier for some to live in denial, to live “as if” because it manages cognitive dissonance better.

I don’t judge that quasi-conscious decision. We all do it some, and some do it all the time. The managers of perception count on that. It makes their work more fun.

And now … back to Survivor, The Apprentice, the Amazing Race, the Bachelor, Fox News, and all the other reality shows that make five hundred cable channels such a blessing ….

Mid-life issues, I learned from twenty years of professional ministry and my own life experience, are as predictable as those of adolescence. When they emerge, it doesn’t always mean a crisis but it does generally mean that a passage is under way.

Carl Jung illuminated the midlife passage by describing the process of individuation. During individuation, which intensifies between 35 and 45, we incorporate attributes from within ourselves that we previously looked to others to provide.

The midlife passage can be an opportunity or the end of a relationship. Couples either renegotiate the terms of their relationships and put themselves on a new footing or go their separate ways. We just don’t need others in the same ways that we needed them before.

A book that helped me during that time was The Seasons of a Man’s Life by Daniel J. Levinson. The basis for popular books like Passages, it defined adult stages of male development in depth and detail. From the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties, developmental tasks presented themselves as certainly as forging an identity was required in the teens and twenties.

But Levinson lived in a time when midlife was the primary concern of most men – a book about women was written later – and the challenge and adventure of aging was not on anyone’s radar. Levinson defined the period after sixty as senescence – a churlish word, uttered with the pride of life – and left that part of the map blank. He might as well have written, “beyond here be monsters” and drawn a big serpent with a coiled tail.

But we are living longer and longer and we are gong to live longer and longer. The average life span for a man in America went from 47 in 1900 to 78 in 2000. Medical advances and the enhancement of our bodies through chemicals, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and anti-aging protocols in this century may mean that 130 or more will be within our reach.

The fastest growing segment of the population by percentage increase is over 100. The segment from 80 to 100 is next.

So as I look out over the deep waters of the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and more – while that particular passage may not be my fate, it will be the fate of many – where are the helpful texts? Where are the stories of mentors who have gone before? What are the developmental tasks of this period, what unique challenges do these decades pose?

The shelf is empty. Nobody knows. We are writing the book as we live it.

We will take this territory inch by inch as we redefine ourselves for a time of life when most of our parents were checking out.

This is the real new frontier of the twenty-first century. Space travel will take us to other planets and other star systems, other races and civilizations will emerge in the foreground of our consciousness, identity will be reinvented through myriad technologies, changing the essential definition of what it means to be human. We are already fledgling cyborgs, running on plastic joints and putting implants into our heads as well as our hearts.  But what we do with the life that these changes enable, that’s the real challenge. What will transformation mean for society and culture writ large?

Above all … what will it mean for us?

I have reinvented myself for three distinct careers. Each required a different persona and much of the joy of my life consisted of creating personas equal to the challenge. Now I find that reinvention is not over. I have to do it again, and maybe again. There is no book, no wise parent to point the way. Pre-boomers and boomers are linked in this endeavor by destiny and default, and the pursuit of creative solutions will define our ability to age, not gracefully, but robustly, engaged with the complex challenges presented by globalization and the colonization of inner and outer space. This is the joy of our reprieve, this undeserved beneficence, this terrific mountain, promising magnificent vistas, well worth the arduous climb.

A few of us silverbacks were sitting around the coffee shop talking about the newest generation. Someone mentioned the sense of entitlement we hear about these days, how they were raised to think that one opinion was equal to another, that everyone should be making a hundred thousand dollars a few years out of college, that everyone gets a trophy.

“It’s more than entitlement,” one said. “My son is nineteen, a sophomore in college, and I don’t think that he can imagine hardship.”

He meant that literally. His son grew up surrounded by enabling devices like his own computers, televisions, cell phones. His large bedroom looked like an ad for the Sharper Image. The only thing missing was a microwave that would have let him leave trays for his parents and never have to leave his room.

I thought back to my own childhood in the fifties and how I resisted parental tales of the Depression as moral stories that didn’t apply because post-war prosperity was the water in which we were swimming. But the shadow of the Depression — and the war — fell over my immediate sense of the past and the world that had given birth to my own. I knew that darkness was real.

And then, there was the Cold War. The world was bi-polar. Real and imagined enemies staked a claim to territory, too.

“Your son,” I said, “grew up in a uni-polar world. He has known nothing but American Empire, the presumption of American dominion over all of the creatures of the earth.”

I think there’s a link between the personal sense of entitlement we had been discussing and the way the nation has been extending its power.

When I returned to my office, I found an email from a friend. He’s an intelligence professional who is deeply concerned about a cloud of large-scale “blowback” that he thinks might be looming on the horizon.

My friend sent a letter to the editor he had just read in which the American right to use CIA operatives to kidnap people abroad for rendition was called into question. Would we be neutral, the writer asked, if Italians kidnapped American spies and brought them to Rome for trial?

Americans can’t really imagine that happening. Americans have lived for so long with the feeling that we can go anywhere, do anything, without negative consequences, that empathy with others has atrophied. So has the right of others to do unto us as we do unto them.

It wasn’t long ago that the current administration refused to accept jurisdiction by the World Court. The reason was that others might try us as war criminals one day and we could not acquiesce to a court that might find us guilty.

That reminded me of growing up in Chicago. I was taught never to go to traffic court, for example, without the right lawyer to make sure the court arrived at the right decision.

David MacMichael, a former CIA contract employee, testified in the Hague about the criminality of covert actions by the Reagan administration. David told me he thought it had to be done, if for no other reason than America was part of the world, too, and injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.

Although I come from Chicago, I lived for a few years on a neighbor island in Hawaii. Once I was backing out of a parking space and was almost hit by another car. In good Chicago fashion, I came storming out of my auto, ready to rumble. The person in the other car, however, turned out to be a friend who – luckily – knew I was a recent arrival.

“Richard!” she said. “This isn’t Chicago! You can’t do that here! This is a small island. We have to live together.”

The earth, too, is a small island. An entire generation has grown up thinking we can be the Big Gorilla because they have never known anything else. Currently by official count we have 737 bases in foreign countries, more than 95% of the military bases on foreign territory in the world. But silverbacks know: nothing lasts forever. The Big Gorilla gets sick or loses weight and then depends on others for bananas.

No one knows what complex events will trigger the diminishing of American Empire or when. The only sure bet is that it will end as all things do end on this planet. These winter nights, we can hear the wind in the rafters and sleet against the window. There is a message in the wind: We do not live alone nor can we act as if we do. The consequences of disrespect for others and for moral laws – and aren’t they the same? – come with the twilight, and descend.

No, I don’t mean the condition we used to call manic depression. I mean the compulsion of television news programs to divide every issue into yin and yang, for and against, two often arbitrary but always oppositional positions that polarize a discussion.

This method of “delivering issues” creates a false aura of importance, requiring opponents to shout at each other. Taking their cue from the hollering matches that pass for analysis, shouting heads have replaced talking heads on many cable stations. Even changing in the locker room at the fitness center, I am assaulted by sports pundits yelling about nothing and shouting each other down.

So the other morning, Matt Lauer welcomed one of the flim flam men hawking the latest New Age scam, The Secret, to the Today Show. The Secret, of course, is no secret. It is the oft repeated claim that “as you believe so shall you receive” that is repeated regularly in the self-help world because desperate people who can’t change their lives will always buy simplistic solutions to complex or ineradicable problems. The secret is as old as Napoleon Hill and the first recorded self-help material eighty years ago.

If self-help books worked, of course, there would be fewer of them each year, not more.

The Secret recycles the belief that we create or attract happiness, healing, prosperity, everything by believing as we do.

Except … (1) we don’t; and (2) it’s not a secret.

Yes, beliefs and intentions have a lot to do with what happens to us throughout our lives. I’ll tell you that for nothing. But beliefs do not determine everything. Some apples bonk us on our heads even if we believe we can fly.  Some boulders roll down hills and hit cars, some people leave others, some get sick through no fault of their own, some are poor because the marketplace does not reward their skills and safety nets have holes.  Lots of things get in the way that are not our fault and over which we have no control.

So yes, belief and intention create a lot of space in our lives, but not all of it, not everything, and sometimes, not at all.

Every time someone claims there’s a secret that they alone know and which they will sell, not give, you, it’s bogus. The secrets of Judaism and Christianity are open and available to everyone. There’s no secret to being a mensch or accepting sacrifice as the cost of personal transformation.

But I digress.

The silliness that prompted this bit is that Matt Lauer had to have two people arguing about this, one a snake-oil guy who was selling the book and DVD, the other a sane professional who pointed out how idiotic the other’s remarks were.

By presenting both sides as if they were equal, Lauer dignified the silliness and also amplified the selling of the book, the movie, the whole marketing scheme.

As they say in Hollywood, it’s not the money – it’s the money! If someone will buy it, someone will sell it. And you can bet that NBC or GE had a stake somewhere along the line.

Lauer concluded the “debate” by saying, you out there (that is, us), go read the book and buy the DVD and decide for yourself.

As Good Old Charlie Brown used to say: Aaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh!

You know what? The holocaust really happened. We landed on the moon. But if someone is on television to discuss the holocaust, there has to be a holocaust denier, a person with zero credibility and hate in their hearts to create a false opposition and attract viewers by the shrillness of their argument.

And the moon landing? Better have someone on who says it was staged.

Examples can be multiplied. The “news” programs do not present intelligent discussions by people behaving civilly. They set up brawls and call them “fights of the century.”

The real secret is out. You do not have to pay someone for it. Everything you need to know about how to live life is already known and in the public domain.  It’s available at the library, in religious services week in and week out, in books published long ago that have no special effects.

This commentary is free. It will never be amplified by Oprah. But mundane as it is, it is all true, and no secret.

The Milwaukee 7 and their supporters and allies are struggling to give birth to a new vision for Milwaukee and South-east Wisconsin.

They are getting it almost right … but “almost” doesn’t win a cigar.

They are trying too hard to turn what isn’t into what is and what is into what isn’t.

The Milwaukee 7 looks here, there and everywhere to see what works. Members take trips to Ireland and China, look at neighboring second-tier cities – but miss what’s already here. Ireland sells a green world that no longer exists. China sells the Great Wall. Behind the scenes, they do what they need to do, but that’s not what they sell.

The Milwaukee 7 was created in 2005 to market southeastern Wisconsin as a strong region for business investment. Because members are business-oriented, they look at the economic drivers of a regional economy. They’re focusing, that is, on the horse we have in the race.

But racing fans know that the jockey is just as important. Marketing is not about the economic backbone. It’s about what people think they’re buying.

The jockey is the social and cultural fabric of Milwaukee as it exists in the minds of others. That’s the rider that wields the whip.

James B. Twitchell, a professor at the University of Florida, wrote a brilliant book called “Branded Nation.” He illuminates how the management of perception is creating communities of all kinds, how universities, museums, and mega-churches are creating lifestyle enclaves relating to every aspect of life. The process is driven by globalization. As every place becomes more and more like every other, the creation of “mental spaces” that people believe they inhabit are more important. People move to university towns or to the gated community of the mind inside a church to buy a complete lifestyle.

That’s what Milwaukee ought to market.

By emphasizing underlying economic conditions, the M-7 is doing what we might expect a conservative culture to do – focus on the infrastructure.

But a brand is a perception, a belief, an image. It lives in the mind. A brand doesn’t just happen – it must be created and sustained. The infrastructure must exist, but the brand does not sell the infrastructure. It presumes it. The infrastructure is only noticed like a pot hole or broken main when something goes wrong.

Globalization has created homogenous landscapes all over the world. The same stores, restaurants and streetscapes are everywhere. Localities reflect the single economy of which they are all a part. They are differentiated not by what is different but by what is perceived to be different.

Milwaukee doesn’t have a brand – Milwaukee is a brand. If we look only at how we might resemble other cities, we’re missing the point. To be one more city with financial services, restaurants, and coffee shops does not let us compete. All cities have that.

When we moved here from Hawaii twenty years ago, we told friends where we were going.

“Milwaukee!” cried a biker. “Harley!”

“Milwaukee!” cried a porky pal. “Cheese and sauerbraten!”

“Milwaukee!” cried a drinking buddy. “Beer!”

Forget the facts. It’s not important that California makes more cheese, nor that most breweries are gone. The point is that there is already an image in people’s minds and that’s what they buy, not the stony granite faces of a corporate boardroom. Those faces look great on Mount Rushmore but not on a marketing brochure.

We should be selling our brand under the banner of gemultlekeit, fellowship in beer halls, robust eating, bikers riding loud into the sunset, summer festivals and winter dreams. We should be selling the party of life. Tech-savvy people, the ones we say we want, love those things. They don’t move to a place for its banks, insurance companies, or financial services. They want to live and play in the fantasy world in their heads.

It’s easier to ride a horse in the direction it’s going. When Vegas stopped pretending to be a family destination and returned to its roots (“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”), it took off like a rocket.

People think they know what’s here. Let’s stop trying to change their minds and project that image on steroids. Yes, build the infrastructure behind the scenes, but sell the lifestyle people think they want.

If Minneapolis can sell a winter festival, we can sell dreams of the fifties and a good time with friends and family.  But we can’t be ashamed of how we’re perceived. We have to be ourselves, celebrate ourselves, and invite others to the party.

In sixteen years of professional ministry and subsequently as a consultant and speaker, I concluded that three things are needed for organizations to be effective:  mutuality, feedback, and accountability. The absence of any one skews behaviors in predictable directions.
Mutuality means real cooperation, real teamwork.

Feedback means loops both inside and to the outside of the system in proportion to the speed of the flow of information into and out of and within the system.

Accountability requires leadership and systemic attributes sustained and reinforced by that leadership to ensure that action happens, not just chatter.

It also happens that during times of rapid change, people become rigid, isolated, and fearful, and M F and A are antidotes to that condition.
The devil of course is in the details, the execution, how structures of M F and A are created, sustained, refreshed. That’s when insight turns into consulting. A lot depends on the organizational culture and how it inhibits or accelerates effectiveness. It also depends on the willingness of leaders to build the same kinds of structures into their personal and professional lives.

I thought of this when I read a diary this week that my father wrote in 1946. He was a metallurgist of note and one of a small group of civilians who went to Europe shortly after the war to make recommendations for the allocation of scrap metal. He traveled with a military escort from the beaches to Berlin. Thousands of displaced persons were everywhere, more thousands of bodies were decaying in the rubble, and the reek of death was everywhere. Germany and much of Europe was in ruins.

What is the relevance of what he describes to our situation today?

No one he encountered from industrial leaders to military brass felt confident about the future. Standing in the rubble, no one thought that rehabilitation would be easy and few had ideas about how to do it. The leaders he met were nervous because they were being criticized by pundits in America far from the scenes of devastation. They hoped Truman would lead but didn’t know if he would or could.
Everywhere he went, there was hunger, desperation, and chaos. In Rome, he was warned not to leave the hotel without an escort because people were being murdered on the streets for their clothing. There was disease everywhere, predatory bands of criminals and those seeking revenge. Little and big civil wars threatened the continent. Hanging over all, of course, the Soviet Union appeared poised to march to the Atlantic.

Only in retrospect can we see that we did the right thing, haltingly, and heroically, to recreate European civilization. The effort involved plenty of mutuality, feedback, and accountability, and the difference between Germany today and what my father described only 60 years ago is absolute.

We’re talking everywhere about big issues in a complicated and often chaotic world. We’re struggling to arrive at sane policies and ways to execute them. Many are expressing feelings of frustration and powerlessness, a lot of them esteemed veterans with significant achievements, the kinds of people others might hear and think that they of all people have their hands on throttles of power. Yet all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time feel helpless to make much of a difference.

Maybe the difference we wish we could make is impossible to make. But maybe
the little differences that we do and can make feed streams that in turn feed
a bigger river.

I feel powerless too, but for good reason: I am. I filter and sift streams of information from diverse sources, documents by the thousands, reading and scanning and writing and thinking and speaking … and when someone out there remarks, as one recently did, that I’m “an influencer,” I roar with laughter. I can’t influence my toast into darkening, is how it feels, most of the time.

The only way to control the world, I do know deeply, is to allow things simply to take their course.

My father clearly felt that he was influencing policy on that trip, and he did. But he also dropped dead the year after he wrote that book, when I was 2 years old. The rest of the family, who might have shared anecdotes about him, died long ago too. That diary is all I have. I read his words sixty years later and boy, I wish I could talk to him about what he wrote. About all this.

His words reveal a difficult, brilliant man and I salute my genetic heritage like a good soldier. But his premature death removed from my life a context which he would have embodied in the flesh, a model of one way to make sense of seeming contradictions. The reconciliation of opposites in our lives is always imperfect, but that very imperfection is a gift, leading us to accept our humanity – and the humanity of others. There are few answers but there is genuine relief in not having to puzzle it all out for ourselves. Community in and of itself is redemptive.

I am grateful for friends and mentors, colleagues and communities, and grateful that others including my father wrote or said anything at all.  Those words, for a few moments, before the paper on which they are printed or the storage medium holding their digital form, disintegrates, are sustaining. We are all suspended in space, building together the next section of a bridge across the chasm out of planks taken from behind.  Images of the recent past, torn up and assembled in new configurations, offer good enough images of possibility and promise to keep us moving. Our shared words, the matrix of our mutuality, build a platform on which we somehow bootstrap ourselves against all odds, creating possibilities out of thin air.

Through feedback mediated by collegial structures we come to those wonderful moments when our self-importance vanishes and we get, we really get, that what we don’t know is so much bigger than we are. Only through a matrix of collegiality, good will, and generosity of spirit are we sustained in our endeavors and get anywhere at all. Perpetuating that vision, we sustain a larger perspective and are able to live with realistic hope.

Get a move on, Milwaukee!

By RICHARD THIEME

Posted: April 29, 2006

Icame to Milwaukee in 1987 as the head pastor of a downtown church. In my sermon at the installation service, I named two issues that I believed were critical to Milwaukee’s future, economically and spiritually – race relations and the kinds of jobs that would sustain our economy during a time of change.

Twenty years later, I could give the same sermon, with the same result.

Former Mayor Frank Zeidler told me he appreciated and agreed with my remarks. Others nodded.

They would nod today, too. But would anything change?

Let’s take the issue of work first.

I have felt despair as we read study after study identifying our weaknesses relative to other American cities. The studies generally describe a downward path because the causes of our problems are seldom addressed between one study and the next.

We go to Ireland or Indianapolis, identify what they did there that worked and then come home and refuse to do it.

The latest study revealed that only three metropolitan areas had lost more jobs than Milwaukee in the past year – New Orleans, Gulfport and Detroit.

New Orleans and Gulfport were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and Detroit was the subject of a recent satire in The Onion reporting that the city had been sold for scrap.

The only three cities that lost more jobs than Milwaukee look like poster cities for biblical calamities.

Milwaukee looks better than that, our downtown anyway. Ours is a less visible calamity of the spirit and will, a state of paralysis that in an individual would look like a pathology.

Thomas Hefty, one local leader who has worked tirelessly to awaken our area to the realities of our economic situation, has said that we need a sense of urgency to deal with the causes of the job loss. Hearing that, I flashed back on another time I heard the word “urgency.”

Shortly after 9-11, I gave a speech for a consortium of financial services, government and security professionals. I spoke of our security needs in the aftermath of the terrorist attack.

Stash Jarocki, president of the group and an executive at Morgan Stanley, told me, “We can change things, but we have to act while there’s a sense of urgency, and urgency has a half life of 90 days.”

Unless we act now about job loss, complacency will once again saturate our emotional lives, and denial will wall off the reality of our situation. Others warned that we would need five, 10 or 20 years to address the root causes of our dilemma because “we did not get here overnight.”

That’s true. We did not get here overnight because at every crossroads, whenever we felt that urgency before, we did little or nothing.

When we say something will not happen overnight, it usually means our leaders lack the will, the ability, and/or the means to do this huge but necessary task, to redefine how we think and behave because how we think and behave no longer makes sense.

Insanity is defined as doing the same things long after it is clear they do not work.

And race? The same lessons apply to race as it figured in the Frank Jude Jr. verdict and the demonstration, once again, that the police force in Milwaukee grants itself a dispensation to commit felonies.

Why in the world would any minority in the city of Milwaukee call the police when they cannot expect to be treated like human beings worthy of respect?

An appropriate response to the trial is rage and outrage. If African-Americans tried to protect their families by doing to the police what the police did to Jude, they would be rounded up, beaten up and sent up.

Twenty years ago, I was told of a white police officer who had beaten someone senseless and said in his defense that he had recently transferred from the core of the city and had not realized that the rules were different in other neighborhoods.

That was 20 years ago! Twenty years.

No, things will not change overnight – or ever – unless business, labor, education and media leaders are committed to changing them.

Otherwise, the past will once again be our future, repeating itself over and over like those studies documenting our economic slide.

We will read them, but we will still not “get” why other cities can adapt to a global economic transformation while we are still wringing our hands about the procrastinations of Brett Favre or whoever replaces that issue at the head of the list of Things We Really Care About.

Richard Thieme of Milwaukee is an author and professional speaker. He has spoken for the FBI, the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of Treasury.

From the April 30, 2006 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The battle over a new stadium is unsettling to everyone. Most of us know about this event because the media give it so much coverage. This is only appropriate. During a week when the Israeli Prime Minister warns of the likelihood of nuclear terrorism, mass graves are uncovered in the Balkans, and economic data reminds us of the growing abyss between the “underclass” and those who are firing them, it is imperative that we remain focussed on what really matters.

I offer a solution that will not only end our hand-wringing about the future of Milwaukee baseball but will solve critical social, economic, and political problems at the same time.

Through the long days of summer, thousands of men get lost in “fantasy baseball.” Players invent teams of selected “real” players, then use actual performances to determine results. They make trades, keep detailed statistics, win and lose small fortunes.

I contend that “real” baseball is impossible to distinguish from fantasy baseball.

The most popular site on the World Wide Web is ESPN’s SportsZone. Why? Because sports fans live entirely in their heads and the virtual reconstruction of what is a fantasy in the first place is simply a bump up to another level of abstraction.

There are good economic and political reasons for this. Professional sports are our version of the “bread and circuses” provided for the rabble as the Roman Empire slid downhill into the mud like a Malibu cliff-house in the rain. The major activity at baseball games is eating – not bread but brats and beer. The ingestion of so much numbing stuff keeps our economy humming and also keeps us oblivious to what is going on around us.

Baseball, in short, like all professional sports, is an effective way to channel the competitiveness and hostility of millions of people into a relatively harmless form. A European soccer fan might occasionally be killed in a riot, but a dead fan now and again is hardly a high price to pay for social stability.

Even those who still attend “real games” don’t tune in to the game but to media simulations of the game. Giant video screens and loud announcements make it impossible to watch a Bucks game (thank heaven). Baseball fans plug headphones into their ears so they won’t even hear the shouts of the crowd of which they’re a part.

The replication of the game by the media IS the game.

Simulations of reality have become copies without originals. It simply does not matter whether baseball is played in a real stadium or not for the larger purpose for which professional sports exist to be achieved.

Therefore I propose that we create a virtual stadium using the Internet, radio, television, and print media, recognizing that it is all fantasy baseball anyway. We will save huge amounts of money because players, the most expensive and least important item on the balance sheet, can be eliminated. With no human beings interfering with the purity of the virtual construct, the game will at last reach its potential.

I predict that no one will notice the absence of an external point of reference. We will stumble numbly through the painful trauma of social and economic transformation, bloated with beer and brats, a vast harmless herd in an immense fantasy SportsZone. With a little luck, we’ll reach the 21st century with a minimum of social disruption and even less awareness of how we got there.

Will Wisconsin decide to compete in 21st century?

The Business Journal of Milwaukee – June 24, 2005

by Richard Thieme

How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Just one, says the old joke, but the lightbulb has to really want to be changed.

The same is true for Wisconsin in the 21st century.

When I keynoted Gov. Jim Doyle’s Conference on Economic Development in February 2004, I asked the audience:

How many want more traffic?

Zero hands.

How many want a longer commute?

Zero hands.

How many want housing prices to multiply by double digits and mortgage payments and taxes to rise accordingly?

Zero hands.

Nobody wants these things in Wisconsin. When we come home after enduring congestion, tension and infrastructure meltdown on business trips, we breathe a sigh of relief. Even with highway construction, it’s easier to get places and do things here than in most big cities.

Yet in that audience were movers and shakers brought together by the Wisconsin Economic Development Association to explore ways of changing our economy so we can be more competitive in a global high-tech marketplace, so knowledge workers will want to come here and stay.

We have met the enemy, as Pogo said, and it is us.

Our problem is, we like it here. We like it the way it is, and as long as we are among the beneficiaries of a comfortable lifestyle, why would we want to change?

Milwaukee over Maui

I moved to Milwaukee from Maui 17 years ago. After three years on that tiny island, the horizons closed in. Horizon fever is real. Metro Milwaukee felt like paradise — good schools, affordable housing, easy access to downtown, the best airline in the nation.

So I’m part of the problem. I admit it.

Yet study after study shows that we are falling further behind by most measures in the competition to participate in a global high-tech economy. When I ask executives who have lived here a long time why we are like this, the answer is always the same: It’s the culture.

We wring our hands but always turn our backs on the only solution. To change the culture would mean changing our behavior and changing our behavior is unthinkable. But unless we change our behavior, we will keep getting the same results.

Those results are still acceptable to our political and business leaders. I know that because nothing changes. They don’t choose to do what is needed to initiate systemic change. The pain of doing that is perceived to be much greater than the pain of not doing it.

Of course, we don’t want cultural change if it means more people, more traffic, longer commutes — all signs of a growing economy. We would rather keep complaining but keep things exactly as they are.

We don’t ask the right questions because we don’t want to hear the answers. Can we intentionally create a context in which businesses of the 21st century are more likely to succeed in Wisconsin without feeling we are paying too high a price? Do we have the will to do what we know needs to be done?

So far, the answer is “no.” The only ones who will profit in the long term are the people who do the studies. The rest of us will enjoy our city even as it slides away from us. We’ll ignore the alarms going off until the decibel level is too high to dismiss and we finally acknowledge that we live happily in a comfortable darkness because the lightbulb doesn’t want to be changed.

Richard Thieme is a Fox Point author and professional speaker.

We’re living longer and longer, but we still treat boomers as if they’re busted.

It takes society a while to catch up with itself. One thing changes – and it might be a really big thing – but institutions with deeply ingrained habits don’t see that they’re out of step … until the gap widens and someone feels the pain.

Life expectancy is increasing dramatically. The average lifespan in America went from 47 in 1900 to 78 in 2000. The population segment with the largest percentage increase year by year is people over one hundred.

And the rate of change itself is accelerating. It is not unreasonable to anticipate life spans of 150 years or more as anti-aging medicines and genetic and biochemical enhancements allow people to live functional lives for many decades more than they do now.

Yet society still expects us to retire in our sixties. Lip service may be given to boomers wanting adventuresome retirements but they’re still expected to retire at an age that no longer makes sense.

At the same time, major industries – computer science, aerospace, nuclear science, engineering – are sounding the alarm because retiring veterans are not being replaced by younger people. A fifty-something veteran at Los Alamos National Laboratory told me recently that without the excitement of setting off explosions (they have to use simulations to evaluate weapons that can not be tested under current treaties), significant expertise in nuclear weapon development will soon be lost.

During a speech in Madison recently at the UW E-Business Consortium, I heard the same anxiety expressed about computer scientists. Young people, prolonging adolescence well into their twenties, are not showing up with the requisite skills.

I asked the speaker if training – a college degree, a certificate course, on-line learning – was being offered to boomers (I am a bit ahead of the demographic, having been born in 1944).

“At 62,” I said, “I’m still healthy and viable. I speak to government and corporate leaders all over the world. My last physical went great. I might have another ten, twenty, even thirty years of productive life ahead, and I want to contribute, I want to be challenged, I want to stay engaged with all pistons firing.

“Is anything being done to facilitate the re-training of people like me – up to and including entire degree programs in areas we have not previously mastered – because the skills and maturity we bring to our work, to say nothing of the work ethic, our love of the work itself when it’s what we want to be doing, make us so viable?”

He shook his head.

“Many Gen Ys and Echo Boomers,” I said, “have faster trigger fingers and can multi-task a lot better. But wisdom and maturity and insight still have value, don’t they? The ability to see patterns, know which ones matter, the judgment and discernment to infer the right things – these attributes enhance, rather than replace, the skills of the younger bunch, don’t they?”

Again, he shook his head. “I agree, but nothing is being done about it.”

Luckily our entrepreneurial skills enable us to contribute in ways that enable us to fly solo or in small formations. Organizations with habits and practices based on the past just don’t have us on the radar. Radar scans the skies of the future, not the mists of the past. Yet it’s future-pull that will tug the shapes of organizational practice into new configurations. It’s the future that will deliver these possibilities and the leaders that align themselves with the future.

Retraining our brains to see these patterns is one example of what I’m talking about. Those with a smaller data-base, that is, the youthful and inexperienced, can’t always do it. The ways new technologies have framed their brains and behaviors are implicit and unconscious. They know how to do some terrific things but they don’t always know that they know. That’s a higher order of insight and it comes with experience and serious reflection. That kind of insight has value.

I cannot pretend that this plea is not self-interested. I want to keep going … and going … and going … until I am all used up. But I also want leaders with foresight to see that resources are all around them – they just don’t look like what they expect of a “new hire.”

And I want them to see it soon.

from the Stone Creek coffee newsletter …

New Mugs at Stone Creek Coffee – The Simple pleasures of the Poor

“Wow! just FEEL that!”

Not used to such enthusiasm from my wife about holding a hot cup of coffee, I looked at her hands cupped around the new Stone Creek coffee mugs. Her fingers moved over the raised logo and she smiled.

“What an incredible feel!”

My daughter-in-law, visiting for the holidays, slid her fingers over the surface of her cup too. “It’s so big and warm,” she said, “with a great surface area. It’s almost a two-handed cup.”

She squeezed the warm ceramic, then let her fingers dance lightly around the rim. “I hate to sound like an ad, but this mug is so satisfying and comforting. The tactile sensation, the smoothness of the surface, the heft when you lift the cup … this is just great!”

They reminded me of the Woody Allen character in Sleeper unwilling to relinquish the orgasmatron, so deliciously sensual were the feelings the new mugs generated in the sensitive tips of their fingers and palms of their hands. Inhaling the rich odor of their lattes, they caressed the hot mugs with delight, savoring the tingling sensations.

“Oh, by the way,” my out-of-town daughter-in-law added. “This coffee is great, too.”

Richard Thieme, a local writer and speaker and a steady customer at Stone Creek WFB, shared the wow response of his wife and daughter-in-law. If you haven’t held our new mugs brimful of fresh hot coffee in your own little hands, now’s the time.

Besides, the coffee is great, too.

“It’s different in Wisconsin”

The first time I heard that was as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during a political science course. I had lived until then in Chicago and when I raised issues based on my experience with the Richard J. Daley machine, the instructor laughed at my naiveté and spoke of Lafollette Progressives and Socialist mayors which, she suggested, were the proper benchmarks for Wisconsin politics and, indeed, Wisconsin culture.

“We’re not like Chicago,” she said. “It’s different in Wisconsin.”

When I moved to Milwaukee sixteen years ago I heard the same refrain. In the meantime I had lived in Madrid, London, Salt Lake City, and on Maui before returning to the Midwest, so I knew something about other cultures. I knew that basic cultural assumptions are often invisible to members of a culture like water to a fish. I also knew something of tribal loyalty whether it was mocking derision directed at Chicago corruption or Packer backers bashing Bear fans. Primitive feelings about our inherent superiority to our neighbors run deep.

After transferring to Northwestern for my final three years of college, I worked with the Daley machine in my precinct and ward in exchange for patronage jobs. Everything I learned about how it worked in Chicago was true to its reputation. I delivered money and liquor to poorer voters in exchange for votes while the alderman took care of zoning changes for those that needed something more. I observed that if our alderman had four ways of doing something and three were legal, he would do it illegally just to maintain his integrity.

Still, there was something refreshing about deals getting done on the top of the table. Everybody knew the rules. If you needed something, you came up with a quid pro quo. The Mayor, a master at knowing what others needed, used to invite attackers to his office. “So what do you need?” he always asked, and once they had it, Republicans became Democrats and detractors became supporters. I learned that partisan positions usually stem from simple self interest.

Chicago was a good place to learn about how people really work. Those lessons helped me understand members of the parishes I served as an Episcopal priest for sixteen years because people everywhere have the same needs and the same levels of self-interest. Those are basics of human nature, and I learned that there was nothing shameful in being human. The compassion I developed as a minister came from the realization that whatever burden someone confessed, I might have done the same thing under the same circumstances. Nobody has the high moral ground.

Still I was told: “It’s different in Wisconsin.”

Indeed, there are differences in how the deal gets done up here, but it’s not what people think. The major difference is that while human nature leads to the same human flaws and behaviors, the commitment to denial is so strong in our culture that the deal is done under the table instead of on top of it. That way deal-makers can insist that everything’s on the up and up and people want to believe them.

Appearance matters more than reality.

“What will the neighbors think?” is emblazoned on the flag that flies above us. Or as someone said when I interrupted an angry rant to tell the ranter that I belonged to the very group she was savagely attacking, “Oh! If I had known, I wouldn’t have said anything.”

I agree with Walt Whitman, who said there is about as much good and evil in the world now as there always was and that it is pretty much evenly distributed. Walt wouldn’t be popular in a place where the fault is found not in the being or the doing but in the saying so.

Now some of our mighty have fallen. Local financial heroes like Bill Nasgovitz and Dick Strong lead the parade of investment managers charged with serious indiscretions. From the state level with its caucus scandals to the pension scandal in Milwaukee County to local alderman sentenced to jail, malfeasance at all levels of our public life has been exposed. It’s not that it wasn’t always there, it’s just that it happened under the table while everybody pretended they were dealing sheepshead, not making deals.

The issue is not whether or not Wisconsinites are more or less righteous than Chicagoans. People are people. The issue is what we do with self-knowledge now that we have it.

That’s where cultural differences make a HUGE difference. A culture determines what we believe are appropriate actions. A culture that denies it’s all-too-human roots is setting itself up to be taken to the cleaners. A culture that recognizes our common flaws, on the other hand, and knows what can happen if they are ignored or denied recognizes that we need transparency in government, a meaningful system of checks and balances, and a skeptical sense of humor when hypocrites pretend to be our moral benchmarks.

That’s where Chicago might have an advantage. A more freewheeling environment lets people come to the table based on what they have of value. People get down to what they need and trade on that basis. It may not look like a Sunday School, but maybe that self-awareness is one reason Chicago is a regional center and we’re an economic satellite.

We are the same people whether fifty miles north of the state line or fifty miles south. Human nature does not cash in its chips at the border. The evidence of our humanity is in,  so can we admit that our founding fathers were wise to provide checks and balances because they knew that honest people might do the wrong thing if no one is watching? Trust but verify, said President Reagan, speaking of the Russians, but the Russians were saying it too, speaking of us. Can we accept that the enemy needs to be watched just as closely when the enemy is us?