Category: leadership and strategy failures

Why Smart People, Executives and Companies Do Dumb Things

I am a big fan of Guy Kawasaki (and his blog), having recently purchased and consumed his last book “Reality Check.” One of the chapters of the book, and the corresponding post on his blog, he refers to a book called “Why Smart People Do Dumb Things” pointing out four reasons why smart, intelligent, powerful, and rich people end up in disastrous situations.

Hubris. Pride to the point that you no longer feel shame, no longer believe that you are subject to public opinion, and no longer need to fear “the gods.” Examples: Gary Hart’s involvement with Donna  Rice that ended his run for the presidency and the Dennis Kozlowski’s (Tyco) $2 million toga party.

Arrogance. From the Latin word arrogare: “to claim for oneself.” Arrogant people believe they have  claim to anything and everything they want–they are “entitled” to it. King David, for example, felt  entitled to the wife (Bathsheba) of one of his soldiers. Modern day King Davids feel entitled to corporate jets and an entourage to tell them that their keynote speech rocked.

Narcissism. Self absorption to the point that you are blind to reality. The world only exists to provide you gratification. Examples: Richard Nixon and Watergate; the Clintons and Whitewater—really just about every politician and CEO who falls from grace.

Unconscious need to fail. If you think failing is hard, try winning. The questions that go through people’s minds when they they are on the doorstep of success are: Do I really deserve to win? Do I want the pressure of constantly having to win in the future? Can I really handle success? Perhaps this explains why professional athletes still take performance enchancement drugs even after watching their colleagues get busted.

The authors of the book prescribe a six-dimensional set of remedies:

  1. Accept yourself
  2. Accept others
  3. Keep your sense of humor
  4. Accept simple pleasures
  5. Enjoy the present
  6. Welcome work

The same book goes on mentioning why smart companies do dumb things. Here the list is more sophisticated.

  • Consensus
  • Conviction
  • CEOs
  • Experts
  • Good news
  • Lofty ends

Guy adds another three additional factors that make smart companies do dumb things.

  • Budgets
  • Greed
  • Arrogance

From my limited experience, I would also add (to make few implications more explicit):

  • Lose of focus/vision
  • Lose of touch with reality
  • Willingness, inability and perseverence to overstretch

Finally, an excellent book (that took six years to complete) by Syney Finkelsteen, “Why Smart Executives Fail,” draws on an unprecedented research of the corporate history and showcases some of most flagrant examples of brilliant and smart executives who caused their companies to fail.  He lists seven habits of spectacularly unsuccessful executives

  1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environments.
  2. They identify so completely with the company that there is no boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interest.
  3. They think they have all the answers.
  4. They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who is not 100 percent behind them.
  5. They are consummate company spokespersons obsessed with the company image.
  6. They underestimate major obstacles.
  7. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

Detroit’s 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them

First Wall Street and now it seems GM and Chrysler came begging at the governments doors for additional $20+ billion dollars. What do they offer in exchange for this money? They want to give buyouts and early retirements packagesin their effort of cost cutting and layoffs. This means essentially that the two companies aim at reviving themselves the old, traditional way adding perhaps an edge of efficiency, leanness and flair of cautiousness in these new realities or do they offer a radical shift, a ideological quantum leap enabling reconstruction of an automotive industry that befits well the expectations, technological progress and strategic vision inherent in the 21st century?

GM and Chrysler so far seem to have chosen what is best characterised by Albert Einstein’s saying, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

Below is an illuminating piece on what (six) mistakes were made by Detroit industries during the 20th century from Umair Haque, one of visionary thinkers on this aspect. These errors, while allegedly bringing automobile industry to their knees in the 21st century, were largely paralleled, ideologically, by other mainstream industries of the 20th century.

1. Old rule: Choose evil. Industrial era business is unrepentantly and almost sociopathically evil: shifting costs onto others, while striving to internalize benefits. Detroit chose lobbying, marketing wars, and low-cost hardball – to always and everywhere try to socialize costs and privatize benefits. Never was this truer than Detroit’s lobbying against public transport throughout the 20th century. Why does public transport in the States suck? Because Detroit’s lobbying machine doesn’t.

New rule? Choose good. In the 21st century, every moral imperative is also a strategic imperative:doing good – for customers, employees, suppliers, or society – is a radical strategic choice that unlocks new pathways to innovation and growth. The opportunity cost of defending evil for Detroit was never learning how to choose good – and that’s a crucial mistake other auto players didn’t make. Tata chose to make a car that was accessible to the world’s poor. Porsche and BMW chose to invest in talent, people, and imagination. Honda and Toyota chose to invest in renewables and partnerships with the public sector. All opened new avenues to growth for an industry at the brink of extinction.

2. Old rule: Selfishness is self-interest.What’s strategic is supposed to be what’s in the firm’s self-interest. But how do we define self-interest? Consider for a second the fact that as recently as this year, Detroit’s lobbyists were hard at work, opposing stricter fuel efficiency standards. That’s 20thcentury self-interest at its finest – not authentic interest for one’s own long-run outcomes, but simply a childlike selfishness, both myopic and narrow, where cutting off the nose to spite the face is as rational as mutual nuclear annihilation.

New rule? Purpose is self-interest. The 21stcentury demands a more enlightened self-interest: one factoring in a longer timescale, fuller contingencies, and an honest and broad consideration of hidden and unintended consequences to people, society and the environment. When we understand all that, have begun to develop a purpose – a way in which we will change the world radically for the better. By confusing selfishness with self-interest, Detroit vaporized it’s own purpose – and will stay trapped in a wilderness of economic meaninglessess until it rediscovers it.

3. Old rule: Maximize destructiveness. The goal of orthodox strategy is to destroy the ability of others’ to imitate or commoditize you. And Detroit was a master of the art of destructive strategy: patenting, trademarking, and litigating; playing hardball to control distribution channels, defending brands with disproportionately steep marketing investment, and building entire new marques to gain share in key markets and segments. The point of all these tired, stale 20th century strategic moves was the same: strategy as an exercise in exclusion, isolation, and barrier-building.

New rule? Get constructive. True 21st century businesses can be judged in the blink of an eye: how intensely do they put the “co” in constructive? Can they let demand spark and fuel co-creation, can they co-produce from a pool of shared resources, are they capable of letting value activities be co-managed, are they tuned to cooperate? Detroit can’t get constructive because it’s spent the better part of a century playing the games of destructive strategy.

4. Old rule: Seek differentiation. When is a Jaguar really just a Ford? When it’s an S-Type. Under Alfred Sloan, GM famously organized itself divisionally – Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac… – for the sole purpose of differentiation. But industrial era differentiation is too often just skin-deep: the same lemons with slightly different marketing, distribution, and branding. So why pay a steep premium for a Buick if it’s just a Chevy with slightly nicer trim? Detroit discovered the hard way that in the 21st century, the concept of differentiation is increasingly stale.

New rule? Seek difference. Ultimately, the problem is simple: differentiation is about perception. Difference is about reality. People in the 21stcentury aren’t the zombified, braindead consumers of the 20th century. And so the 21st century demands not mere differentiation – a bean counters’ eye view of the world if ever there was one – but true difference. True difference is built by making different choices from the ground up – different in the very essence of the value activities that make the wheels of production and consumption spin. Porsche and BMW strove for difference – not mere differentiation – and it is that choice that is at the heart of their global leadership of the automotive sector.

5. Old rule: Seek agility. Strategy is in many ways simply the avoidance of crisis – the evasion of threat, weakness, and vulnerability. The goal of strategy as the avoidance of crisis is simple: agility. Industrial-era corporations seek agility, in other words, by insulating themselves from real-world economic pressures – that’s what Detroit did bar none, by always seeking to game the system: lobbying, marketing, and wheeling-and-dealing it’s way straight into oblivion.

New rule? Seek crisis. By insulating themselves from real-world economic pressures, boardrooms also dilute and sap incentives for innovation and renewal. Detroit wasn’t innovating because the opportunity cost of strategy as gamesmanship was, ultimately, foregoing innovation itself. In the 21stcentury, gamesmanship – and its attendant dilution of incentives – is a sure path to near terminal strategy decay. Forget Detroit – just ask big music, big pharma, or big food.

6. Old rule: Advantage happens against. Orthodox econ holds that it is through the pursuit of competitive advantage that corporations create the most value most quickly and reliably. And that’s a mistake Detroit made to the hilt. It sought a nakedly competitive advantage – against suppliers, dealers, consumers, and society alike. The result is an industry crippled by structurally antagonistic relationships with labour, buyers, suppliers, consumers, and society alike.

New rule? Advantage happens for. Competitive advantage against bears a striking resemblance to simply bullying. Bullying is easy: just as in the sandbox, any boardroom with market power can jack up margins by forcing others – buyers, suppliers, consumers, society – to bear costs. But if every corporation across the economy is playing that game, the economy’s just a game of musical chairs.

Does your behavior damage trust?

In normal times as well as hard times, trust is the foundation of any collective human endeavor, be it in business, in politics or in any other social or group activity. “Does your behavior damage trust?” is a key question and following are 25 behavioral patterns that contribute to creating mistrust within your team/group.

  1. You fail to keep your promises, agreements and commitments.
  2. You serve your self first and others only when it is convenient.
  3. You micromanage and resist delegating.
  4. You demonstrate an inconsistency between what you say and how you behave.
  5. You fail to share critical information with your colleagues.
  6. You choose to not tell the truth.
  7. You resort to blaming and scapegoating others rather than own your mistakes.
  8. You judge, and criticize rather than offer constructive feedback.
  9. You betray confidences, gossip and talk about others behind their backs.
  10. You choose to not allow others to contribute or make decisions.
  11. You downplay others’ talents, knowledge and skills.
  12. You refuse to support others with their professional development.
  13. You resist creating shared values, expectations and intentions in favor of your own agenda; you refuse to compromise and foster win-lose arguments.
  14. You refuse to be held accountable by your colleagues.
  15. You resist discussing your personal life, allowing your vulnerability, disclosing your weaknesses and admitting your relationship challenges.
  16. You rationalize sarcasm, put-down humor and off-putting remarks as “good for the group”.
  17. You fail to admit you need support and don’t ask colleagues for help.
  18. You take others’ suggestions and critiques as personal attacks.
  19. You fail to speak up in team meetings and avoid contributing constructively.
  20. You refuse to consider the idea of constructive conflict and avoid conflict at all costs.
  21. You consistently hijack team meetings and move them off topic.
  22. You refuse to follow through on decisions agreed upon at team meetings.
  23. You secretly engage in back-door negotiations with other team members to create your own alliances.
  24. You refuse to give others the benefit of the doubt and prefer to judge them without asking them to explain their position or actions.
  25. You refuse to apologize for mistakes, misunderstandings and inappropriate behavior and dig your heels in to defend yourself and protect your reputation.

This list is especially relevant for leaders and those appointed to leadership positions for trust is the foundation of successful leadership.

Seven Virtues of Failure

Another excellent article (below) about virtues of business/entrepreneurial failure.

I believe that failing daily does two things, it teaches me what I need to do better; and it reminds me of what failure feels like. Both are awesome outcomes.

Temperance (Gluttony)

“The downside to this level of ambition is that it’s not complicated to overload yourself. I’ve learned that ambition minus realism often equals failure.”

The truth is that ambition always has a lack of realism. Its impossible to believe you will one day be the best without believing first that you are capable of being the best. You have to be unrealistic in your expectations to truly become successful. Its the lack of realism that creates the potential for failure.

The best failures are measured and tempered with self control. Understand the downside of any potential failure. Keep the failure contained through careful understanding.

Charity (Greed)

“Sacrificing your core business by spending too much time on non-core ideas…It’s important to realize that not all ideas are worth pursuing”

Yet many people eventually fail through anlysis paralysis. I have a standard equation, out of 10 ideas, 8 suck. 1 is decent, and one is fantastic. To understand success through failure, one must be willing to become creative and think uniquely about the problem. By ideating, over time, several solutions are born. Being generous with yourself and allowing the ideation to occur, develops the potential for mass, measured failure.

And, failure always leads to success.

Diligence (Sloth)

“Where it can become mostly problematic is when it keeps you from seeing a project through to the end.”

I get what Jeffrey is saying here. Starting projects is easy. The middle is not that hard, but to finish? Often its a Herculean effort. Why? Because the completion of a project allows you to determine if it was a success or failure. The completion of a project allows OTHERS to say if its a success or failure.

Its often easier to live in the grey area of undone, than it is to live in the world of definition.

With failures its the same way. My favorite saying is “failure is not what you do, but what you do after.”

Persevere. Fail a lot. Fail early. But be amazing once the failures teach you how to succeed.

Chastity (Lust)

“Getting lured away from what you need to do by what you want to do.”

Lust is an interesting sin. By definition, Lust involves a lack of thought with a focus on immediate gratification. So how does the virtue, Chasity or Purity work with failure? Failure is pure. There is nothing about failure that can be soiled. Each failure creates the same emotions, usually regret and disappointment, and each failure creates the same reality. Yet, each failure, when learning occurs, also creates the very real case of being one step closer to success.

It is impossible to do nothing but succeed if each failure is coupled with learning. You dont have to lust after success to achieve it.

Humility (Pride)

“Success has this extra-special way of super gluing on the ‘I’m so awesome’ blinders and fooling you into thinking that you’re the smartest person alive.”

The greatest thing about consistent failure, is that it reminds you that you cant solve every problem. That you arent the greatest. That at the end of the day only the outcome matters in the measurement of success, not the process.

Failure teaches us that the real talent is the recovering and learning from failure. Turning that failure (perhaps matching it to a previous failure) into a road map for success is what separates the great from the good.

Allow the emotion of humility to provide you the open-mindedness to review your failures in such a way as to improve incrementally and move towards success.

Patience (Wrath)

“Wrath is energy, and like all energy it can be used to good or evil. I like to think about the ratio of windshield to rear-view mirror and use that idea to focus my energy on what’s next.”

If wrath is energy, then patience is focused energy. Its hard to fail, fail and then fail again. You want to push, you want to accelerate the process. You move into a world of immediate gratification and would rather skip to the success part of the adventure.

Patience is not just a function of waiting, or sitting idly by. Patience is actually a function of perseverance.

If you read Jeffrey’s post, and remove the “Seven Sins” metaphor, every point he makes actually is interwoven. Words like energy, focus, hard work are repeated themes.

Failure becomes a part of the process, removing the need for a perceived failure end point.

Satisfaction/Kindness (Envy)

“Just stay true to your original plans; see them through; and understand that more-often-than-not, these new and exciting concepts are rarely vetted for use beyond their original purpose, thus having the extreme ability to only add layers of complexity to what you already do.”

Envy kills success. Focusing on competitors is a horrible action that causes most companies to lose focus. If you are doing what you need to do, focusing and understanding the market, your competitors dont matter.

Envy creates failure. Simple enough.

But, the key to all of this, is if you understand the importance of failure to the creation of success; you will also experience true satisfaction.

You have succeeded and failed completely.

And, becoming a success at the end of the day is the greatest satisfaction.

17 Mistakes Start-ups Make

John Osher, a serial entrepreneur who launched several successful companies (notoriously, Cap Toys with sales of $125 million per year and sold it to Hasbro Inc.  in 1997 ), came up with an informal list of “16 Mistakes Start-Ups Make” – since expanded to 17 – where he put every blunder and error he made during his entrepreneurial career. Ever since, this list has been used in Harvard  Business School case studies and in many business publications. He also used the list in 1999 – he wanted to build a company and product  deprived of all his previous blunders – when he started SpinBrush, $5 electric toothbrush (hitherto costing circa $80), which he sold to P&G for $475 million in 2001. Below is his “17 mistakes start-ups make” list:

  1. Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it’s viable.
  2. Miscalculating market size, timing, ease of entry and potential market share.
  3. Underestimating financial requirements and timing.
  4. Overprojecting sales volume and timing.
  5. Making cost projections that are too low.
  6. Hiring too many people and spending too much on offices and facilities.
  7. Lacking a contingency plan for a shortfall in expectations.
  8. Bringing in unnecessary partners.
  9. Hiring for convenience rather than skill requirements.
  10. Neglecting to manage the entire company as a whole.
  11. Accepting that it’s “not possible” too easily rather than finding a way.
  12. Focusing too much on sales volume and company size rather than profit.
  13. Seeking confirmation of your actions rather than seeking the truth.
  14. Lacking simplicity in your vision.
  15. Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose.
  16. Lacking focus and identity.
  17. Lacking an exit strategy.

And finally, one of the commenters on this article, Trevas from eBookGuru, suggested an essential mistake which causes many (which have inexperienced founders) of  startups fail (and is not explicitly present among the 17 mistakes above).

18.   Lack of commitment to see the idea through.

31 Of The Biggest Entrepreneurial Mistakes That You Must Avoid At All Cost

Below is a selected list of entrepreneurial mistakes, originally posted on The Toilet Entrepreneur, which I liked most.

1. Too Much Office Space

I made the mistake of getting more office space than I really needed.
It cost me too much money, which of course came from my pocket. I was way too caught up in the ego of having a nice space. These days, I am into virtual businesses and telecommuting–why waste money on rent?

Kathryn Korostoff, President, Sage Research

9. Not Getting Money Up Front

The biggest mistake I made as an entrepreneur is not to get money up front. I become a bill-collector, not a businessperson as a result and spend needless amounts of time following up on money owed.

Dr. Linda Seger, Script Consultant (since 1981), Seminar Leader, Author

13. Not Prepared With Clear Deliverables

Not having clear deliverables in writing before beginning a project.  As a result there was a lot of ambiguity and my client and I had very different points of view.  In the end, it was just a case of having different expectations.  We ended up parting ways and neither party was happy.

Danielle Luffey, Managing Partner, DVA Brand Communications

14. No Separation Agreement

Three of us went into business together and formed an LLC.  However, when creative differences caused us to go our separate ways the lawyers made out to the tune of over six figures between us.  And, friendships were ruined!  Always have a prenuptial for the unexpected.

Mark Smith, Founder, iKids Play (the next generation of the business)

22. Making Too Many Promises

I made too many commitments to appear in front of live audiences and had to re-negotiate where I would appear live to present my workshops or keynote  It was the “thrill” of being booked to speak that caused me to mis-judge how much I could accomplish in a month.

Amy Dorn Kopelan, Co-Creator of The Guru Nation

24. Trying To Get Rich Quick

My two biggest entrepreneurial mistakes were trying to get rich quick and not creating a business that helps others. When you chase money, the quality of your product or service suffers. And creating a venture that doesn’t help others is a selfish pursuit.

Andrew Galasetti, Founder & Editor, Lyved.com

25. Thinking You’re A “Special Case”

Even though I taught business plan classes for those seeking funding, I thought that I didn’t need on.  Finally creating one .. using the One Page Business Plan ® program really helped my business.

Maria Marsala CBC, Chief Strategy Officer, Informational Speaker, Author www.ElevatingYourBusiness.com

26. Trying To Do Everything

I tried to do everything myself instead of hiring help. For example: I wrote features, did the layouts, updated the mailing list, did the bookkeeping, updated the website, etc. I was spread too thin and wasn’t doing any of it well. It would have been worth the money it cost to hire help in order to have the extra time to meet my publishing deadlines.

Cindi Leeman, Editor/Publisher for WALK Magazine

28. Not Being Clear With Your Companies Name

I designed my business name using my last name thinking it was clever.  Huntingtax when my last name is Huntington.  I didn’t consider the fact that new clients or even clients who don’t know my last name would wonder what in the hell Huntingtax meant or was.  Clients always just say or use Huntington tax accounting or Huntington accounting instead of my actual business name “Huntingtax Accounting Services”.

Kristi Huntington, Owner, Huntingtax Accounting Services, Inc.

29. Underestimating The Companies Growth

When I began a previous start-up, I underestimated the company’s growth and had to move four times before I finally leased too much space.

Blake Squires, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Findaway, makers of Playaway®

30. Working Without A Signed Contract

Hungry to grow my consulting business, I agreed to work without a signed contract for what promised to be a long-term relationship. The client worked me to death –far beyond my retainer hours limit and then dropped me as soon as his big project was done. What a bargain for him. What a lesson for me.

Joyce Wilden, President, Buzz Biz Public Relations

31. Investing Too Much On Self-Promotion

Investing too much money on self-promotion. When I started my agency, I went out and spent a ton of money on mailers, I did custom photography and invested the time to design and print a beautiful piece, but in the end it directed recipients to my website, which really didn’t have anything substantial on it at the time to get clients interested. In hindsight, creating a much simpler mailer, would have been so much smarter and would have gotten me the same results.

Jordan Mauriello, Founder & Creative Director of moreYELLOW

Did God change his mind?

Apart from the loss of life of 1000 Palestinians and 13 Israelis and the vast destruction after 19 days of aerial bombardment, the Israeli invasion of Gaza has seemingly failed to achieve its strategic objectives, chief among which was to stop rocket fire from Hamas. The Palestinian resistance still seems to be quite functional – there is still rocket fire. So, what has been gained? Hamas has withstood the ferocious Israeli assault without knuckling under or making any concessions.

For Israel, the military campaign has been a public relations disaster. Photos on the internet of bloodied and dismembered children rushed off to make-shift hospitals or wrapped in their funereal shrouds has generated unprecedented sympathy for the plight of Palestinians. Israel has come across as a bully condemned by many international bodies including Red Cross and Human Rights Council. On top of that, Jerusalem Post reported that Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu had written a letter to PM Olmert informing him that “all civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot….Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.”

Besides, it deserves a consideration that Israel’s economy has been on a downturn and started feeling consequences of the global economic recession. It has been ordering closure of chemical and other plants, some of them producing military-related materials and equipment.

Hamas chief Meshaal knows well that Israel doesn’t want to reoccupy Gaza. He also knows that DM Ehud Barak doesn’t want to be bogged down when elections roll around in few weeks – current advance of Israeli forces to suburbs of Gaza city is mostly due to increasing pressure from the PM Ehud Olmert who wants to put an end to what he sees as military capacity of Hamas. Initially, Israel was hoping to rout Hamas quickly and install Abbas’s PA security guards at the Rafah crossing, but now they’ve hit a glitch and the battle is starting to look like a quagmire, with Israelis increasingly reluctant to go deep into the city in fear of incurring significant casualties and where artillery and air force will only be able to have very limited operations.

And let us not forget the cost of Gaza war, estimated to be around NIS 2.4 billion (620 million USD) two weeks ago, 1.3% (a huge number considering the time length) of the annual GDP estimate of NIS 186 billion in 2007. And this was before the major callup for reservists and advance into the suburbs of Gaza.

And still as of yesterday there were reportedly 25 mortars and rockets fired into into southern Israel.

What about Obama’s administration in matters related to the Middle East? A report in the IHT says that the people who are most likely to play significant roles on the Middle East in the Obama administration are “Dennis Ross (the veteran Clinton administration Mideast peace envoy who may now extend his brief to Iran); Jim Steinberg (as deputy secretary of state); Dan Kurtzer (the former U.S. ambassador to Israel); Dan Shapiro (a longtime aide to Obama); and Martin Indyk (another former ambassador to Israel who is close to the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton).” The only difference between this group of pro-Israel hawks and the Bush claque is that they are more adept at creating the illusion of a “peace process.” Other than that, the differences are negligible.

And there are already reports that Israel is going to receive an unusually large weapons shipment from the US. Is this a sign of a weakening military capacity of Israeli military, a strain on their budget or a resolution to proceed with military campaign until the complete eradication of Hamas?

And what about Hamas itself? In name of protection of its own people, as it loudly claims, it brought not only the wrath of Israeli air force but the entire might of Israeli artillery and ground forces deep into the Gaza city. Perhaps the Israeli allegations of Hamas fighters intentionally using innocent civilians as cover are exaggerated, but BBC’s Gaza correspondent and many other eyewitness accounts tell of Hamas fighters launching RPGs and bombs on Israelis from rooftops of densely populated buildings and from nearby hospitals, without reflection of possible Israeli retaliation and casualties entailed. Israelis claim to only fire on those who fire on them. If a grenade is thrown at them from around a corner of an inhabited building, they fire on the building…

Israel is the bully and the aggressor but no finger points at Hamas’s own “losing” tactic which brings nothing but death and havoc upon its own people, without themselves coming even close to their aspired goals, leaving for the moment aside the morality, righteousness and other aspects thereof.

And Meshaal? A coward hidding in Damascus…Afraid to come out of his safe-house (whom Mossad attempted to assassinate some 12 years ago), he is only as good as a violent but short wind, which blows and passes without any longterm consequences. He talks, only…

It is perhaps time that someone, a Palestinian in particular, pointed a finger at Hamas and questionned their goals and most importantly their means of achieving them.

Anyhow, as one Israeli settler leader recently argued during a conversation with a visiting American peace activist that ‘if it was right to commit genocide during Biblical time, why can’t it be right to commit genocide now. Has God changed his mind,’ the settler wondered sarcastically.”

Musings on scarcity of resources and political strifes

The most important prerequisite of social stability and economic development in a country or region is political stability and good governance. In times of strives, conflicts and wars, the only priority for the society and its people is a day-to-day survival and struggle for achievement of piece. Every other matter has a lesser priority… Maslow’s Pyramid, that is.

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”  – Henry David Thoreau

While the immediate reaction and focus of any potentially conflict-rich situation is leave aside other concerns besides security and peace, it must be nonetheless stressed that such situations result mostly from social, cultural, economic or plain human-nature specific reasons. Greed, egoism, arrogance, self-indulgence. These are human traits common to individuals. What is not common and desirable is when they mould into a group-think and become directed towards an end at the detriment of moral values and traditions of a society.

History is a witness to a great number of wars that have started as a result of scarcity of resources. Water, land and natural resources attracted greedy and powerful in their quest for self-fulfillment and enrichment like magnet attract metal. Wars ensued; innocent people died; lands were plundered.

Three-quarters of all wars since 1945 have been within countries rather than between them, and the vast majority of these conflicts have occurred in the world’s poorest nations. Wars and other violent conflicts have killed some 40 million people since 1945, and as many people may have died as a result of civil strife since 1980 as were killed in the First World War. Although the number of internal wars peaked in the early 1990s and has been declining slowly ever since, they remain a scourge on humanity. Armed conflicts have crippled the prospect for a better life in many developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, by destroying essential infrastructure, decimating social trust, encouraging human and capital flight, exacerbating food shortages, spreading disease, and diverting precious financial resources toward military spending.

Although there is no single cause of strife or war, a growing number of scholars suggest that rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and competition over natural resources play important causal roles in many of these conflicts. Recent quantitative studies analyzing the correlates of internal and external wars from the 1950s to the present indicate that population size and population density are significant risk factors. In terms of environmental factors, recent statistical work indicates that countries highly dependent on natural resources, as well as those experiencing high rates of deforestation and soil degradation, and low per capita availability of arable land and freshwater, have higher-than-average risks of falling into turmoil. In short, many researchers now conclude that it is impossible to fully understand the patterns and dynamics of modern conflicts without considering their demographic and environmental dimensions.

The past century witnessed unprecedented population growth, economic development, and environmental stress, changes that continue to this day. From 1900 to 2000 world population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion. Since 1950 alone 3.5 billion people have been added to the planet, with 85% of this increase occurring in developing and transition countries. Worldwide population growth rates peaked in the late 1960s at around 2% a year, but the current rate of 1.2% still represents a net addition of 77 million people per year.

Such rapid demographic and economic changes over the past century have placed severe and accelerating pressures on natural resources and planetary life-support systems. The traditional Malthusian notion that exponential population growth alone drives strains on the environment has long been refuted; no serious thinkers, including neo-Malthusians, now maintain that human-induced environmental changes are a mere function of numbers. Rather, neo-Malthusians argue that the relationship between population growth and the environment is mediated by consumption habits, and by the technologies used to extract natural resources and provide goods and services.

Neo-Malthusians cite the 1969 war between El-Salvador and Honduras as a classic example of a scarcity induced conflict. The conflict became known as the Soccer War and lasted only 100 hours, during which several thousand people died on both sides. One of the main causes of this war was the scarcity of arable land. The sources of the shortage were population growth, erosion and unequal land distribution. A similar scarcity of arable land resonated in the minds of Ethiopians when their then Emperor Haile Selassie was ousted in 1974. The provisional Ethiopian government, the Dergue, failed to improve conditions resulting in large migrations of Ethiopians into a contested region on the Somali border, which in turn precipitated the Ogaden War of 1977. The scarcity of arable land was also a contributing cause of the violent dispute between Senegal and Mauritania in 1989. The conflict focused on Senegal River, which demarcated the border between the two. In this case, it was shown that the cause of land scarcity was population growth and desertification, along with lack of adequate quantities of fresh water.

Numerous signs suggest that the combined effects of unsustainable consumption, population growth, and extreme poverty are taking their toll on the environment. More natural resources have been consumed since the end of the WW2 than in all human history to that point. The consumption of nonrenewable resources has significantly increased, although it has risen at a slower rate than population and economic growth as a result of changes in technology. The global consumption of fossil fuels (which account for 77% of all energy use) in 2003 was 4.7 times the level it was in 1950.

“Many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil, but wars of the 21st century will be over water,”  – Ismail Serageldin,  Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and former World Bank Vice President

In the eyes of a future observer, what will characterize the political landscape of the Middle East and North Africa? Will the future mirror the past or, as suggested by the quote above, are significant changes on the horizon? In the past, struggles over territory, ideology, colonialism, nationalism, religion, and oil have defined the region. While it is clear that many of those sources of conflict remain salient today, future war in the Middle East and North Africa also will be increasingly influenced by economic and demographic trends that do not bode well for the region.

By 2025, world population is projected to reach eight billion. As a global figure, this number is troubling enough; however, over 90% of the projected growth will take place in developing countries in which the vast majority of the population is dependent on local renewable resources. For instance, World Bank estimates place the present annual growth rate in the Middle East and North Africa at 1.9% versus a worldwide average of 1.4%. In most of these countries, these precious renewable resources are controlled by small segments of the domestic political elite, leaving less and less to the majority of the population. As a result, if present population and economic trends continue, many future conflicts throughout the region will be directly linked to what researchers term “environmental scarcity”— the scarcity of renewable resources such as arable land, forests, and fresh water.

The UN and human rights failures

August 2006. Although hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel had been raging for nearly a month, both sides waited for a green light from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) special session on 3 August in Malaysia before demanding an United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) special session on Lebanon. There was no debate, elaboration or explanation. The special session represented a series of monologues and declamations in complete isolation from the outside world. The passed resolution condemned Israel unilaterally without the least reference to Hezbollah attacks on civilian targets in northern Israel. Only a paragraph added by Pakistan to the initial draft urged all the parties involved to respect the rules of international humanitarian law.

This was not the end of the story. The HRC session was held the same day that the Security Council (SC) was adopting the resolution 1701 calling for a cessation of hostilities (in a glaring breach of Article 12 of the UN Charter, which forbids the GA to make recommendations w.r.t. a dispute at hand while the SC is holding a session about that dispute).

Issues related to human rights have historically been (mis)interpreted and disregarded during the entire human history, but the WW2 was the last straw. The idea, shortly after the inception of the UN, to establish an international body, United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), responsible for monitoring and reporting on human rights issues prompted all the nations assembled in 1948 for a GA session to sign a founding text, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arguably the Most Translated Document in the world. One of its main architects, the French jurist René Cassin, had to fight for the declaration to be “universal “and not just “international.” He thought that the suffering of victims is the same everywhere. The Declaration was drafted not only by European jurists but also a Lebanese diplomat, a Chilean, and a Chinese academic, Peng-chun Chang.

Ever since its creation, the Commission has seen a mounting criticism not only for its obtusely bureaucratic practices but also for the composition of its membership. In particular, several of its member countries (Sudan, Saudi Arabia, PRC, Pakistan, Vietnam) themselves had dubious human rights records, including states whose representatives have been elected to chair the commission (Lybia in 2003). Another criticism was that the Commission did not engage in constructive discussion of human rights issues, but was a forum for politically selective finger-pointing and criticism. The desire of states with problematic human rights records to be elected to the Commission was viewed largely as a way to defend themselves from such attacks.

In 2005, Kofi Annan admitted that the commission has “cast a shadow on the reputation of the UN system as a whole.”

There was also the problem of the exploitation and sexual abuse of refugees. It was bad enough that UN “peacekeepers” were notoriously unable to protect women in UN camps in western Sudan. It was even more deplorable that UN peacekeepers themselves were part of the problem. In 2004, Kofi Annan finally admitted that there were 150 allegations of abuse by UN peacekeepers and staff in the DR Congo, including UN military and civilian personnel from Nepal, Tunisia, South Africa, Pakistan, and France. The victims were defenseless refugees — many of them children — already brutalized by years of civil strife and war.

Finally, UN attitude toward some of the most important defenders of human rights – the charities and faith-based groups – might seem weird to the uninformed. Most of the UN’s favorite NGOs use international rulings to overturn democratic protections in their home countries. The UN vision of civil society, in other words, seems to be a penumbra of activist groups that simply endorse its agenda of centralized economies, large welfare states, and massive social engineering.  Many function simply as front groups for despotic and totalitarian governments such as Cuba and Saudi Arabia.  On the other hand, organizations that work to assist AIDS orphans, eradicate human trafficking, curb prostitution, or defend religious liberty don’t get much air time.

The UNHRC was established in 2006 to replace the discredited UNCHR. Despite minimal safeguards against capture of the HRC by human rights abusers, HRC supporters, including UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, were quick to declare that the new body represented the “dawn of a new era” in promoting human rights in the UN. Noteworthy to mention that the US was one of only four countries that voted against the GA resolution that created the Council.

But the hopes placed in the UN’s new guard dog were quickly dashed. When the first council was elected in May 2006, its members included countries in which the death penalty, torture, impunity, arbitrary detention and denial of basic rights seem to be essential components of their societies. The UN put Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Nigeria and Russia in charge of defending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The machinery was still brand new but it was already beginning to squeak. Some of teh other inadequacies and short-sighted decisions concerning the creation, membership and structure of the Council included:

  • The Council has no criteria for membership other than geographical representation.
  • The Council has no criteria for membership other than geographical representation.
  • The resolution set a higher bar to suspend a HRC member—a vote of two-thirds of the General Assembly—than the simple majority necessary to win a seat.
  • The Council is only marginally smaller than the Commission, from 53 members to 47.
  • While the Council is charged with conducting a universal periodic review, the conclusions of the review would not prevent those countries found complicit in human rights violations from participating in the Council.

In less than two years, the council has terminated the mandates of its independent experts – only UN officials who escape the dictates of a government – in charge of monitoring the situation in Cuba, Belarus and even DR Congo, where the recent years have witnessed mass killings and flood of refugees. The Council also refused to appoint an expert for Turkmenistan, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world.

In the meantime, China, Uzbekistan, Russia and others have been maneuvering behind the scenes and struck deals to ensure that their and their allies’ interests would be safeguarded. Votes are not cast according to the seriousness of the situation in a country but according to the possible advantages that the country or its allies can offer in return. China is the champion in this game. Using its enormous economic power, it ensures that it is systematically supported by countries on whom it lavishes loans, subsidies and other material and economic advantages.

Meant to defend the universality of values, the UNHRC has so far tackled human rights issues, even the most appalling of violations, in a little better than a condemnable manner.

The real message of Žižek

Who is Slavoj Žižek? According to the following excellent article, he is the Magician of Ljubljana.

Intellectuals possess a special kind of power. Unlike politicians, generals, or corporate bosses, they lack both the authority and the ability to impose their will directly on others. They must therefore rely on “symbolic capital,” a term the historian Shlomo Zand of Tel Aviv University explains this way:

The power of their presence in the consciousness of their colleagues, or in wider public circles, is what establishes their status. As an offshoot, their power source is predominantly the symbolic prestige capital they accumulate. This capital, in many ways similar to financial capital, is obviously not a “thing,” but an attitude. To a certain extent it may be said that the thought patterns of consumers of intellectual output are the banks in which this precious capital is accumulated. This symbolic power can be measured in academic degrees, in prizes, in the extent of mentions and attributions, in the number of publications, and in many other practices routinely employed in the stock exchange of respect and acclamation.1

By these standards, it is safe to say that a sizable quantity of “symbolic capital” is today concentrated in the hands of Slavoj Žižek, philosopher, cultural commentator, and abounding wordsmith. Since the 1989 publication of his first book in English, Žižek, a senior researcher in the faculty of social sciences at Ljubljana University, has become the hot name of the Western intellectual scene. His books, translated into dozens of languages, have earned near-unanimous acclaim: The New Yorker crowned him an “international star” and credited him with putting his mother country, Slovenia, on the world map of ideas.2 Sarah Kay, professor of French literature at the University of Cambridge and author of a critical introduction to Žižek’s work, maintains that his enormous influence on the humanities and social sciences is reminiscent of the profound impression made by French thinker Michel Foucault on these academic disciplines during the seventies and eighties.3 And Glyn Daly, a senior lecturer in politics at University College, Northampton, who published a book of conversations with Žižek, describes him as “the philosophical equivalent of a virulent plague.”4 For its part, The Chronicle of Higher Education employed a slightly less ominous metaphor to describe the unique status of the Slovenian theoretician: “Žižek,” it writes, “is the Elvis of cultural theory.”5

What would be the kind of associations that spring into mind after reading this short para? Humanitarian, egalitarian,  democracy-loving, modern-minded?

His numerous books and articles, many of which are internationally acclaimed bestsellers, leave a different impression, but only to a very attentive and intellectual reader. Below are few excerpts from a shrewd analysis of his works. In the first instance, it is important to remember how he manipulates his “dialectical reversal” to free himself of self-contradiction and mould smoothly the disagreements between his thoughts and notions into the accepted modern discourse of humanism, democracy and capitalism.

It also provides a fine illustration of the sort of dialectical reversal that is Zizek’s favorite intellectual stratagem, and which gives his writing its disorienting, counterintuitive dazzle. Torture, which appears to be un-American, is pronounced to be the thing that is most American. It follows that the legalization of torture, far from barbarizing the United States, is actually a step toward humanizing it. According to the old Marxist logic, it heightens the contradictions, bringing us closer to the day when we realize, as Zizek writes, that “universal human rights” are an ideological sham, “effectively the rights of white male property owners to exchange freely on the market and exploit workers and women.”

Nor does Zizek simply condemn Al Qaeda’s violence as “horrifying.” Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but “in a curious inversion,” he characteristically observes, “religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.” And the whole premise of Violence, as of Zizek’s recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. “Everything is to be endorsed here,” he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, “up to and including religious ‘fanaticism.'”

His numerous pronunciations on violence are more appalling than merely representing a “different perspective”:

The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror–especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes–the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy”; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is “a stimulating writer” who “will entertain and offend, but never bore.” In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that “the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred”; but this is an example of his “typical brio and boldness.” And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement,” and that “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”; but this book, its publisher informs us, is “a witty, adrenalinfueled manifesto for universal values.”

Among other feats, Žižek is renowned for his genuine mixture of philosophy and psychoanalysis from one side and pop-culture and consumerism from the other. One of his touchstone messages is based on the famous movie Matrix, where Neo is revealed the reality by the phrase “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” the namesake of which has become a book by Žižek.

But Zizek is not an empiricist, or a liberal, and he has another answer. It is that capitalism is the Matrix, the illusion in which we are trapped.

This, of course, is merely a flamboyant sci-fi formulation of the old Marxist concept of false consciousness. “Our ‘freedoms,'” Zizek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, “themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom.” This is the central instance in Zizek’s work of the kind of dialectical reversal, the clever anti-liberal inversion, that is the basic movement of his mind. It could hardly be otherwise, considering that his intellectual gods are Hegel and Lacan–masters of the dialectic, for whom reality never appears except in the form of the illusion or the symptom.
…
This sacerdotal notion of intellectual authority makes both thinkers essentially hostile to democracy, which holds that the truth is available in principle to everyone, and that every individual must be allowed to speak for himself. Zizek, too, sees the similarity–or, as he says, “the profound solidarity”–between his favorite philosophical traditions. “Their structure,” he acknowledges, “is inherently ‘authoritarian’….term “authoritarian” is not used here pejoratively.
…
But to know what is worth struggling for, you need theories about struggle. Only if you have already accepted the terms of the struggle–in Zizek’s case, the class struggle–can you move on to the struggling theory that teaches you how to fight. In this sense, Zizek the dialectician is at bottom entirely undialectical. That liberalism is evil and that communism is good is not his conclusion, it is his premise; and the contortions of his thought, especially in his most political books, result from the need to reconcile that premise with a reality that seems abundantly to indicate the opposite.

Hence the necessity of the Matrix, or something like it, for Zizek’s worldview. And hence his approval of anything that unplugs us from the Matrix and returns us to the desert of the real–for instance, the horrors of September 11.

What is then the essence of his message?

Zizek endorses one after another of the practices and the values of fascism, but he obstinately denies the label.

…

“To be clear and brutal to the end,” he sums up, “there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: ‘In this city, I decide who is a Jew!’… In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency.”

And his views on Jews?

In Zizek’s telling, that relationship is sickeningly familiar. Invoking Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Zizek asserts that Judaism harbors a “‘stubborn attachment’ … to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement.” Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, “the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost.” This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its “natural” death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the “fatal unholy void” of this “most reprobate and abandoned” religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism that created the figure of the Wandering Jew, who also “refused to give up the ghost.”

…

“What makes Nazism repulsive,” he writes, “is not the rhetoric of a final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it.” Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Zizek writes: “To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the ‘Jewish question’ is the ‘final solution’ (their annihilation), because Jews … are the ultimate obstacle to the ‘final solution’ of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.”

What do we make of him? His views leave no room but to call him fascist. His witty, cultured, flirting and half-joking ways conceal his real message, not unlike the real message of Plato‘s Republic and the way it was and is still understood: completely the opposite, as can be seen from an enlightening analysis of Karl Popper in his (properly named)  “Open Society and its Enemies: Spell of Plato“.