The Great Debate UK

from The Great Debate:

Performance reviews – a global scourge

It is time to kill the annual performance review, for decades a feature of corporate life around the globe, dreaded both by those who do the reviewing and those who are reviewed.

It is a corporate sham and one of the most insidious, most damaging and yet most prevalent of corporate activities. It is a pretentious, bogus practice that produces nothing that could be called a corporate plus. It is universally despised yet few people do anything to kill it.

So says Samuel A. Culbert, a consultant and professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in a just-published book entitled, Get Rid of the Performance Review! The book grew from a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal which, Culbert says, prompted a thousand letters to the editor and a flood of online comments, mostly in favour of his argument.

It is not new, but presented in particularly blunt language. A decade ago, a book by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins entitled Abolishing Performance Appraisals made similar arguments, based on a study of 26 companies where morale, effectiveness and profitability had improved after they abolished appraisals.

Doubts about the process emerged as far back as 1957, with an article in the Harvard Business Review by Douglas McGregor, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who suggested replacing the conventional boss-subordinate meeting with an approach allowing the employee to set personal short-term goals and evaluating himself.

An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisal, the headline said. There has been a lot more unease since then, so why does the practice persist? And why would a date on a calendar be relevant to determining when someone's performance needs reviewing?

Culbert zeroes in on two culprits. The first is a management theory - Management by Objectives - which came into vogue after the end of the World War II and provided for managers to set goals for their departments and then figure out what individual employees need to do to achieve department goals.

from The Great Debate:

Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again

For the growing number of Americans who see China heading for inevitable global dominance, nudging aside the United States, a brief walk down memory lane helps put long-term predictions into perspective.

Not so long ago, Japan was seen as the next (economic) number 1. American executives studied the 14 management principles of The Toyota Way, developed by the automobile manufacturer that grew into the world's biggest car maker and is now recalling millions of defective vehicles.

Between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, books with titles such as Trading Places - How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It (by Clyde Prestowitz) were required reading in Washington. Learned panelists expounded on the wondrous efficiency of "Japan Inc."

A glut of "Amazing Japan" books, Chicago Tribune writer Ronald Yates noted in 1987, hammered home the same theme: Japanese technology is superior, Japanese management is better, Japanese products are unrivaled, Japanese people work harder, Japanese are smarter, Japan is No. 1.

Skip over the two decades of economic stagnation of Japan Inc. that soon followed the hype and fast forward to the present. The book which best reflects today's American worries is entitled When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of the New Global Order, by British author Martin Jacques. His forecast is part of a growing library of essays, analyses and books on the 21st century belonging to China.

If history is any guide, there's a better than even chance that the "goodbye America, hello China" school of thought will prove as embarrassingly wrong as the 1980s assessment of the relative strengths of Japan and the United States.

Long-term predictions tend to be more often wrong than right and the decline of the U.S. is a topic of seasonal regularity.

from The Great Debate:

American intelligence and fortune-telling

-- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

Hot on the heels of  what President Barack Obama called a potentially disastrous "screw-up" by the civilian intelligence community, here comes a devastating report on shortcomings of military intelligence in Afghanistan, by the officer in charge of it. He likens the work of analysts to fortune-telling.

The report is highly unusual both because of its almost brutal candor and the way it was published, outside military channels. Even more unusual: the three authors hold out journalistic skills as models to emulate for gathering and putting together intelligence.

"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy," write the authors, Major General Michael Flynn, the most senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, his advisor Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

"The ... vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among the villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers ... U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency."

While finding and finishing off enemy leaders is an important part of intelligence work, the report says, there have been only token efforts to acquire knowledge about the population, the economy, the government and other aspects of the environment the U.S. and its allies in the 43-member coalition are trying to secure and eventually leave behind.

from The Great Debate:

War and Peace, by Barack Obama

-- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

It is a timeline rich in irony. On Dec. 10, Barack Obama will star at a glittering ceremony in Oslo to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. That's just nine days after he ordered 30,000 additional American troops into a war many of his fellow citizens think the U.S. can neither win nor afford.

Whether the sharp escalation of the war in Afghanistan he ordered on December 1 will achieve its stated aim - disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan - remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: more troops equals more fighting equals more deaths -- of soldiers, insurgents and the hapless civilians caught in the middle. Not exactly a scenario of peace.

In Oslo, Obama will become the fourth American president (after Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) to be handed the coveted peace medal and invited to give the traditional Nobel Lecture. It is meant to spell out the award winner's vision of peace, a challenging task for a man who just picked a much bigger war from a range of options that included reducing the U.S. military presence.

Resolving the contradiction will require the mastery of words of Leo Tolstoy, author of the epic novel War and Peace about the run-up to the unsuccessful invasion of Russia by Napoleon.

The deployment Obama announced at the U.S. military academy at West Point will bring U.S. forces to around 100,000, more than three times as many as when the president took office in January. The combined strength of American troops and soldiers from 42 other nations will be 140,000 - the same level as the peak of Soviet forces during an eight-year war that ended in a humiliating defeat.

Obama and his war council are as confident that the U.S. will not share the same fate as they are determined to reject comparisons between the American involvement in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam. "This argument depends upon a false reading of history," Obama said in his West Point speech.

from The Great Debate:

America’s perennial Vietnam syndrome

--  Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

Prophetic words they were not. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula."

Thus spoke a euphoric President George H.W.Bush early in March, 1991, shortly after the 100-hour ground war that chased Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the oil-rich U.S. ally they had invaded and occupied in the summer of 1990.

The specter of Vietnam, far from being buried in the Arabian sands, has risen again as President Barack Obama and his advisers are considering the course of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year, increasingly unpopular, and considered unwinnable even by America's senior soldiers if it is fought alongside a corrupt government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

That the Vietnam syndrome is alive and well is obvious by the proliferation of analyses and commentaries drawing parallels, or dismissing them as nonsense, since Obama declared Afghanistan a war of necessity. (Type "Is Afghanistan Obama's Vietnam" into the Google search box and you get more than nine million references).

The cover of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine is taken up by an iconic photograph of the Vietnam war, people clambering up a ladder to a U.S. helicopter waiting to evacuate them off the roof of a Saigon building the day before the city fell to communist forces on April 30, 1975. The story inside: what to learn from the lessons of Vietnam.

The answers to that question differ widely and the Vietnam analogy has come up routinely whenever the United States resorted to military action in the past three decades, from Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq.  Obama himself has dismissed the parallel.

from The Great Debate:

Obama’s good war goes bad

In the protracted Washington debate over the war in Afghanistan, the most concise analysis so far has come from America's top soldier: "If we don't get a level of legitimacy and governance (there), then all the troops in the world aren't going to make any difference."

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was speaking two days after Hamid Karzai was declared the winner, by default, in August elections so massively rigged that a U.N.-backed electoral complaints committee threw out about a million Karzai votes. That forced a run-off from which his challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah withdrew, saying the second round would be just as fraudulent as the first.

So much for an exercise in democracy President Barack Obama had used as his rationale for escalating the war a few months after he took office. "I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important."

It was. It showed that the United States and its NATO allies are fighting on the side of a corrupt and discredited government in a war, now in its ninth year, for which, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, there can be no purely military solution.

An angry assessment of the Afghan leader last year by Thomas Schweich, a former top anti-narcotics official in Afghanistan, has proved prophetic. Karzai, he said, had been playing the Americans like a fiddle ever since he came to power. "The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends would get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term."

U.S. officials, including Admiral Mullen, are now calling on Karzai to purge Afghanistan of corrupt officials by arresting and prosecuting them. This is an unlikely prospect. In his victory speech, Karzai said he would work to wipe off "the stain of corruption" but said that could not be done simply by removing corrupt officials.

The implicit notice that there would be no major house-cleaning followed a telephone call Obama made to Karzai to say it was time for "a new chapter based on improved governance (and) a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption..." If previous promises from Karzai are any guide, the new chapter will remain unwritten.

from The Great Debate:

The lucrative business of Obama-bashing

-- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.

"I...don't need 400 words," he said, "I need four: I hope he fails."

The remark set the tone for a steady stream of unbridled and often bizarre criticism from Limbaugh and like-minded radio and TV commentators, several of them working for Fox News, the network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Obama responded four days after his inauguration, telling a group of Republican congressmen they needed to break away from a mindset of confrontation.

"You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done."

What followed should have helped the new administration to reflect on the wisdom of singling out a media critic. But it didn't. Limbaugh promptly portrayed himself as a man of such pivotal importance that the president of the world's only superpower needed to pay personal attention to his tartly-worded opinion.

The controversy over his ill wishes for the president caused, as he put, his ratings to go "through the roof," a reassuring development for a man who makes $38 million a year under an eight-year contract that runs through 2016. The score of that early skirmish: Limbaugh 1, Obama 0.

from The Great Debate:

Catch-22 and the long war in Afghanistan

-- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. --

Listening to the protracted Washington debate over the war in Afghanistan, the phrase Catch-22 comes to mind. It was the title of a best-selling 1961 satirical novel on World War II by Joseph Heller and entered the popular lexicon to denote a conundrum without a winning solution.

Example: You can't get work without experience and you can't get experience without work.

In the context of the war in Afghanistan, soon entering its ninth year and already longer than the Vietnam war, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in mid-September heard a description of the Afghan conundrum worthy of joining a list of examples to explain Catch-22.

"You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development or development without security."

That observation came from Rory Stewart, an expert witness with a more intimate understanding of Afghanistan than most -- he walked, alone, across the entire country (the size of Texas, twice the size of Vietnam) on a trek that began two weeks after U.S. troops and bombers drove the Taliban government from power in 2002.

That was the "good war," a widely-applauded act of vengeance and punishment for the Taliban for having played host to Osama bin Laden and his fellow al Qaeda planners of the Sept. 11 mass murder of 3,000 people in Manhattan and Washington. The assault on Afghanistan had a clear rationale but the war gradually morphed into a nation-building exercise that defied simple answers to the question "why are we there?"

from The Great Debate:

Undercounting deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan

- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -

By most counts, the death toll of U.S. soldiers in America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stood at 5,157 in the second week of September. Add at least 1,360 private contractors working for the U.S. and the number tops 6,500.

Contractor deaths and injuries (around 30,000 so far) are rarely reported but they highlight America's steadily growing dependence on private enterprise. It's a dependence some say has slid into incurable addiction. Contractor ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan have swollen to just under a quarter million. They outnumber American troops in Afghanistan and they almost match uniformed soldiers in Iraq.

The present ratio of about one contractor for every uniformed member of the U.S. armed forces is more than double that of every other major conflict in American history, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That means the world's only superpower cannot fight its war nor protect its civilian officials, diplomats and embassies without support from contractors.

"As the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have progressed, the military services, defense agencies and other stakeholder agencies...continue to increase their reliance on contractors. Contractors are now literally in the center of the battlefield in unprecedented numbers," according to a report to Congress by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"In previous wars, the military police protected bases and the battle space as other military service members engaged and pursued the enemy," said the report. In listing the 1,360-plus contractor casualties, it noted that criticism of the present system and suggestions for reforming it "in no way diminish their sacrifices."

So why are they not routinely added to military casualty counts? And why should they? A full accounting for total casualties is important because both Congress and the public tend to gauge a war's success or failure by the size of the force deployed and the number of killed and wounded, according to George Washington university scholar Steven Schooner.

from The Great Debate:

Fresh thinking on the war on drugs?

- Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -There are times when silence can be as eloquent as words. Take the case of Washington's reaction to announcements, in quick succession, from Mexico and Argentina of changes in their drug policies that run counter to America's own rigidly prohibitionist federal laws. No U.S. expressions of dismay or alarm.Contrast that with three years ago, when Mexico was close to enacting timid reforms almost identical to those that became effective on August 21. In 2006, shouts of shock and horror from the administration of George W. Bush reached such a pitch that the then Mexican president, Vicente Fox, abruptly vetoed a bill his own party had written and he had supported.What has changed? Was it a matter of something happening in August, when most of official Washington is on holiday? Or was it a sign of greater American readiness to rethink a war on drugs that has, in almost four decades, failed to curb production and stifle consumption of illicit drugs? And that despite law enforcement efforts that resulted in an average of around 4,700 arrests for drug offences every single day since the beginning of the millennium. (Just under 40 percent of those arrests are for possession of marijuana).Or was it a matter of more countries realising that, as drug reform advocate Ethan Nadelmann puts it, "looking to the United States as a role model for drug control is like looking to apartheid-era South Africa for how to deal with race." Nadelmann heads the Drug Policy Alliance, one of several groups lobbying for reform of U.S. drug policies.Under the Mexican law that took effect in August, it is legal to possess small, precisely specified amounts, for personal use, of  marijuana, heroin, opium, cocaine, methamphetamine and LSD. In Argentina, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional criminal sanctions for the possession of small quantities of marijuana for personal use. The ruling opened the door to legislation similar to Mexico's.Brazil decriminalised drug possession in 2006; Ecuador is likely to follow suit this year. In much of Europe, drug use (as opposed to drug trafficking) is treated as an administrative offence rather than a criminal act. America's hard-line approach has helped to make the United States the country with the world's largest prison population.Advocates of more flexible policies say they feel the winds of change beginning to rise in the administration of  Barack Obama, a president who has admitted that in his youth, he smoked marijuana frequently and used "a little blow"(of cocaine) when he could afford it. But hopes for a break from long-standing orthodoxy might be premature, even though a recent Zogby poll showed 52 percent support for treating marijuana as a legal, taxed and regulated drug.AMSTERDAM'S SCHIZOPHRENIC PRAGMATISM "As regards to legalization, it is not in the president's vocabulary and it is not in mine," Obama's drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske said in July. "Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefits."Oddly, he made the statement in California, where an estimated 250,000 people can legally buy marijuana with a letter of recommendation from their physician. The drug is used for a variety of illnesses, from chronic pain to insomnia and depression. There is extensive academic literature on the medical benefits of marijuana.Medical opinion, however, conflicts with the congressionally-mandated job description Kerlikowske inherited when he took up the post. It says that the director of the Office of National Drug Policy, the White House group in charge of drug war strategy, must "oppose any attempt to legalize the use of a substance listed in schedule I of section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act."Schedule I of the act, which took force in 1970 during the administration of Richard Nixon, the president who formally declared "war on drugs", places marijuana alongside powerfully addictive drugs such as heroin. The wrong-headed classification matches that of an international treaty, the 1961 United Nations Single Convention of Narcotics Drugs. The convention is a major obstacle for signatory countries that want to legalize drugs.No country has actually done that. Even the Netherlands, the Mecca of marijuana aficionados, operates on a system best described as schizophrenic pragmatism. Amsterdam's "coffee shops" are allowed to have 500 grams of marijuana on the premises and sell no more than 5 grams per person to people over 18. The runners who re-supply the shops routinely carry more than the legal quantity and violate the law. So do importers.While the failure of the drug war and the prohibitionist ideology that drives it have been analysed in great detail in scores of sober assessments by academics and government commissions, there have been few studies of the "how to" of legalization. What, for example, would happen to the criminal mafias that are now running a violent illicit business with a turnover estimated at more than $300 billion a year?Some drug traffickers would switch to other criminal activities and it is realistic to expect increases in such areas as cyber crime and extortion, according to Steve Rolles, Head of Research of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a British think tank. "But the big picture will undoubtedly show a significant net fall in overall criminal activity in the longer term," he said in an interview. "Getting rid of illegal drug markets is about reducing opportunities for crime."Rolles is author of the optimistically titled "After the war on drugs: Blueprint for Regulation," a book scheduled for publication in November and meant to kickstart a debate on what he sees as something of a blank slate - the specifics of regulation for currently illegal drugs.On a global scale, nothing much can happen unless there are changes in the world's largest and most lucrative market for drugs, the United States. If they happen, they won't happen fast. "I see this as a multi-generational effort, with incremental changes," said Nadelmann, who has been involved in drug policy since he taught at Princeton University in the late 1980s. "But for the first time, I feel I have the wind in my back and not in my face."(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)