Planning and reflection

I went to a talk a month or so ago where this CEO-type was talking about how he always used the week between Christmas and New Year's as a time of reflection and goal-setting for the upcoming year. This is roughly in line with how I have treated the time over the years, but I had never formalized the thinking like that.

So I got all of my expenses totted up and submitted before I came North, so I wouldn't have that odious task hanging over my head.

But, as is the way of all things, I got caught up in the thrall of family and clients. One client recently lost her mother, another was jilted by a lover and may end up moving back to Europe if she can't sort out her job situation, and so on. Helping Mary and Rob empty the attic. Going through George Sr's files making sure we had everything we needed to document Mary Lee's basis in the house, when the time comes to sell. Going up to George Jr's for dinner and to watch Raising Arizona (truly a classic).

Yesterday Graham waxed both Rob and me in chess, in succession. Graham had resisted playing chess against me, saying I took too long. I didn't realize chess was normally played with a clock. I think beating both of us handily was very good for his ego. Afterwards he spent most of the evening on his Chromebook, practicing for Quiz Bowl. I think he is girding for future battle, which is awesome.

So, it's all good. I may not have gotten my CEO seclusion. Or, rather, I may not have spent it a la Stephen Covey, journaling and setting goals. I sat under the blanket, read a book, and looked at the water. So shoot me.

The end?

And so, another vacation in Larchmont draws to a close, perhaps the last one. In the distance, across the Long Island Sound, the lights of the North Shore twinkle in the distance. I have spent many excellent hours on this couch, several of them today. Will this be the last of them?

We shall see.

Much of the last few days was spent ploughing through John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, in which the Wall Street Journal reporter tells the tale of the epic lie that was Theranos, and the many good people who had the backbone to stand up to the delusional bullies who ran it. It is in the end a heartening read, because the good guys win, but the list of those who were hornswaggled is astonishing: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Bill Frist, David Boies, Rupert Murdoch... Elizabeth Holmes shared the stage with Bill and Hillary, with Jack Ma, I'm sure with Obama too at some point in time. But she was full of shit from day one. She never had anything but drive and a willful disregard for truth. And we all lapped it up because she told such a good story.

Never again?

The excitement of approaching

It is hard getting up to come in to The City, especially when it is grey and wet, like today. But as I draw ever closer: coffee, shave, shower, ride to station, train... the old excitement returns. Or, I should say, the excitement of the buzz, the flow of the city, which is on offer for me specifically because I am a visitor. It was a grind when I did it daily, I shouldn't romanticise it unduly. But even then, there was something magical about the city. The distance people traveled to work in teams, which created an extraordinary hive mind. And the sheer scale of it all.

The calm before the storm of wrapping paper

By now, all the kids are teenagers, so they aren't the first ones up on Xmas morning. Actually, judging from the stocking, Graham was the first, but then he retreated to his bed where he is probably (and I just confirmed this with an Xmas morning hug) ensconced in his devices.

The sun is coming in off the Long Island Sound here in the sun room. We have unfortunately gotten into a rhythm in which presents are opened during the sunniest moment of the day, so we are pretty much blinded, but for now, I am in a shady spot where I can see my screen.

This year is a melancholy one for us all. It is not improbable, and probably it is the right thing for all concerned, that this should be our last Christmas here in Larchmont. There was a bunch of mold and other old house problems that had to be remediated in the fall, and Rob is being driven bat-shit crazy living here with his mom. Which is normal for a 50-year old guy, however quirky. He did not grow up aspiring to be the caretaker of a 100-year old house. Who in his right mind would?

So we are doing our best to enjoy the holiday. I won't lie to you and pretend that these wacky markets are helpful in any way. The absence of sensible, principles-based leadership the world around, the profusion of us-firstism married with a disregard for human rights, all set against a backdrop of global overleverage, does not make the path of 2019 and thereafter look to be a simple or easy one. But we will figure it out, and that is a task for another day. For now, onward to breakfast!

Classifying miles

As I move towards the end of the year, I am going through the exercise of going through receipts and my mileage tracker and classifying expenses and drives as personal or business. Sometimes I get to something -- like being in Graham on Saturday, August 4 and I think: what the hell was I doing there? And then I realize: Natalie and I were out canvasing for that nice young woman running for Alamance County Commissioner, the one Maya was interning for. That was a very nice day. It warms me to remember it.

Challenges

Reading this morning from Around the Year, Nick Murray's book of daily reflections for financial planners -- which I read every morning before breakfast along with other things, he commented on the fact that about 80% of financial advisors cited volatile markets as the biggest challenge to their business. Nah.

Make no mistake, volatile markets, nervous people, and high ambient amounts of atmospheric uncertainty do suck. But there is always uncertainty.

The most difficult thing is using one's time wisely to figure out how best to serve one's clients best, while also seeking to grow one's business. In the end, these are problems of time and scope management -- figuring out what it is you should be doing, what you should be delegating, and what you should be defining as outside of your competency and referring out and/or asking an expert.

Yesterday, for example, I did a phone interview with a journalist about the life and financial lessons one should be teaching one's kids before they go to college. I spent time preparing for a meeting with a prospect who has a multi-million dollar package of Phantom Stock Units that will come into play if/when his firm IPOs a few years out. I reported to 401k wholesalers about the pain points of a prospect with whom we will be meeting in January to help them pick a new platform (or not). At the end of the day, I went to a board meeting for a non-profit, after which I conferred with a guy who wants to set up his own non-profit about some of the things he should be thinking through. I gave him my card and told him I'd connect him with a friend who consults on this kind of thing. An ex-girlfriend, actually.

In each of these interactions there were questions I didn't know the answer to and I had to admit it frankly and/or appeal to a specialist for guidance.

Then I went home and watched The Wire with Graham. At the end, he fell asleep with his feet across my lap. That was the best part.

GE AAA

Read a long article in the Journal this weekend about GE and its collapse from being one of the biggest companies in America to its ignominious position today. The long and short of it is very similar to the story at AIG: a rapid climb under a legendary CEO, leveraging a AAA credit rating to expand into too many lines of business, the inability of a successor to find a way forward. As a personal story, admittedly, in many ways Jeff Immelt is more like Steve Balmer of Microsoft -- an underachiever who diddled his way to mediocrity, than Martin Sullivan was at AIG -- a catastrophe. Presumably that's because Jack Welch was less of a control freak than Hank Greenberg was at AIG, and developed stronger lieutenants.

But the use of the AAA credit rating as a way to finance whatever rhymes convincingly with AIG's experience. Admittedly, GE went much crazier than did AIG in terms of getting into everything but the kitchen sink (though they probably did make those).

More than anything, it makes me wonder -- along with the entire investing world -- about succession at Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett has discussed it for years somewhat openly, and we know that the culture of the "organization", if one can even speak of such a unitary thing in Berkshire's case, is as distributed as it can be. But is it held together by nothing other than pixie dust, Cherry Coke and the credit rating? Time will tell.

Guest blogging

Today, I am coming to you from the couch downstairs, next to the Christmas tree. This is very rare, very rare indeed. I find it more or less necessary to be alone when I blog, and I am very rarely alone down here, but today Mary is with Graham in Durham at a Quiz Bowl tournament, where I must spell her after lunch.

Interestingly, it is at the NC School of Science and Math, which back through the 60s was Watts Hospital, where I was born. I'm honestly not sure I've been back since then. Certainly when I had my bout of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in '73 or '74, I went to Duke. And there was no way I was trying to go to Science and Match back in the day, because I was a humanist by inclination, and we had a soccer championship to win at CHHS, and how could I be certain of the quality of the ladies in a place like Science and Math, when I was certain there was much honeys at the high school, including some lovely new ones from Culbreth.

So it will be interesting today, and great to see Graham up there competing. I know he is ready to go, based on the degree of competitiveness he showed over dinner last Sunday with one Chad Ludington, Professor of History at NC State. Graham was flat out drilling him on details of 16th Century British succession -- admittedly not Chad's deepest area of focus.  On the one hand, Chad was digging the jousting element. On the other, we had to talk to Graham a little about the extent to which he was dominating the dinner table conversation and not letting others talk freely amongst themselves -- mostly because Chad and Graham were at opposite ends of the table.

Anyhoo, today is open competition, and it is all about answering them questions fast, and Graham is ready to go.

Obituaries

I am formulating a policy, firming up what has heretofore been an inclination, to read any and all tributes people post about loved ones passing on Facebook. People show their true stripes when telling tales of their beloveds and, in the end, honoring the dead is in its way as important as nurturing the young.

Up date

I have come a long ways from the early days of this blog, when I exercised great vigilance to be sure to post something every day, so as to maintain a discipline of de minimis writing. Nowadays, I end up obsessing about whether I have something to say, whether it is worthy of the blog, or I just get caught up in the doings of the day and plum forget. Which is silly.

The onset of this snowstorm (did they name it Diego or something?) accelerated the turn of the seasons. On Saturday I worked hard to rake up the bulk of the leaves on the "grassy" (I caveat because a good portion of the lawn has been ceded to the ravages of Japanese stiltgrass) parts of the front lawn, and also the deck and driveway. I hauled like seven or eight big tarps (don't ask) to the bottom of our back yard, where it is poised to wash down and one day enrich Jordan Lake. At the end of that I climbed into the leaf pile and chilled, looking up at the sky. Off to the left of me, I could hear seagulls screeching. Yes, seagulls, who are visiting our lake in great number due to a lake management anomaly, but that is a story for another day. But I couldn't really hear much of them, on account of the leaf-blowers around the neighborhood, and small airplanes flying lowish above, despite the closure of Horace Williams Airport a few miles away.

It struck me how we formulate freedom in the sense of freedom to (freedom to hunt, shoot, drive fast, use small motors for whatever the fuck we want to) and not much in terms of freedom from (freedom from the encroachments of others). I could riff on this all day.

Then -- back to the changing of the seasons -- Sunday and yesterday, the snows came, paralyzing the area in wintry whiteness, and my sore body, having exerted itself moving leaves, found itself shoveling snow. All good, and part of any disciplined seasonal cross-training regime.

Then there were Xmas parties, and intimations of mortality (Robb Ladd injury, David Brower Sr. passing, someone else has terminal cancer). And last night we video-called with Natalie, who is making her way through her first semester's papers while trying to go to bed earlier, and has purchased a new scarf.

And then there is work, to which I am off.

Changing complexion

Really since Graham Allison's book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap came out, the complexion of thinking about China has changed, and Trump has really ramped it up. Now everyone is very much focused on China more as an adversary than as a partner.

A few thoughts

1. We need to be very careful about Russia. We know they don't really regard us as their friend, at least the current leadership, which generally enjoys support. I spend some time within the last year watching Russian tv (in Russian, not RT), and one thing that's clear is that they are courting China. So when Pompeo starts sabre-rattling (as he did this week) about pulling out of nuclear arms treaties with Russia, that's a big fucking deal.
2. We need to be very clear what we believe in, and who we support. Throughout the Cold War we has a clear stated goal of supporting human rights in the Soviet Union. Our attitude was "we don't oppose the Soviet people, we oppose the Soviet regime." We need to keep this idea front and center now. The Chinese -- via the Belt and Road initiative and whatever other means necessary -- are exporting an ideology of China first, human rights be damned. We need to oppose that on principles. We need to watch with great care the panopticon police state the Chinese are establishing in Xinjiang as a test bed for elsewhere. Right now the Chinese have a "fuck it, who cares about those Muslim Uighurs" attitude. But it's bad, and they are honing the tools that they could use elsewhere, and you'd better believe that Google, Facebook, Palantir, and Amazon are watching the Chinese experience there, how the rest of the world reacts to it, and what it means for them.
3. We need to be very open to and solicitous of the Chinese in America. Make no mistake, they are for the most part not spies. They were pissed off when Trump accepted Stephen Miller's suggestion that they mostly are. They have come here because of what America has historically stood for and what we strive to be: a good place to live, have a career, raise a family -- with as many kids as you want and without breathing shitty air. They form the backbone of our scientific class now, and they are important.
4. But we need to anticipate more Chinese PhDs moving back to China -- as they have been -- because of a better atmosphere there for entrepreneurialism, as well as tensions here. That means we need to be serious about figuring out how to develop a scientific cadre here -- and not just from blue zip codes. Reading the biographies of Norman Borlaug and John Hope Franklin in the last year reminded me of how the path from rural places into the highest ranks of academia used to be much more plausible and open. Partially it's because the barriers to entry in terms of early academic achievement are a little higher, and the average quality of public schools in red counties lower. I think. But it also may be because the academy has become so stultifyingly blue and not an attractive place for someone who grew up in a red county.

OK, I am rambling and speculating. So shoot me.

Different thanks

It seems that, in the South at least, the idiom for expressing thanks has split in recent years across racial lines. In white society, people are frequently wont to say "Thanks so much!", with a pretty healthy mmph and a note of enhanced earnestness plugged into the "so much!" part of it. I find myself saying it sometimes, but I don't really like it.

Many black people, on the other hand, have taken to saying "I appreciate you" in place of good old "Thank you." The phrasing is typically pretty low key, because the words, rather than the larynx, are carrying the weight of emphasis. I like it. I think I am going in this direction going forward.

The Headmaster

Just pawed my way through McPhee's The Headmaster in two days, not much of a stretch, as it was a thin tome, as McPhee's typically are. The great thing about McPhee is that, as with Caro, we can sense the extent to which he has fallen in love with his subject at times, and cannot help but to join in.

Also, I should note that, when Graham and I got home from martial arts on Saturday, we saw a cat walking along the rock wall in our back yard. It seems that the cat was out on its accustomed walk with its owner, who told us that the cat always accompanies her when she walks around the lake and the neighborhood.

Fresh air

For the time being, I have put aside Knausgaard, with about 400 of 1200 pages of Volume 6 in the rearview. It is still on my bedside table.  It was fucking killing me. He just needed to get on with it.

And so, I am breathing the oxygen of other writers. First I knocked off Pistol, a biography of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel (I just had to Google the author's name, it wasn't really sticking to me). This is a good, if not great book about a pretty fascinating figure. Maravich would be more interesting as a figure if he had lived longer, and if he was more multi-dimensional as a character. Or maybe he was, and Kriegel's just not a great writer. His other book is about Joe Namath, so that tells us something about him.

At the conference in Asheville somebody mentioned the autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America. I found that it was available on Audible, so I quickly downloaded it and started listening to it on the drive back (I had been listening to a book by Eric Posner and somebody else on using auction mechanisms broadly throughout society to reconfigure everything, which was kind of interesting, but also rather stultifying).

Franklin's book is great. I will say this, if only it were truly a mirror to America, we would all be living in a much better place. For, although Franklin catalogs a number of indignities to which he was subject throughout his life, he transcended every one of them through a herculean work ethic, an unshakable sense of right and wrong, and astounding grace. And his language! If he had a British accent, it is true, I might want to shoot him. But he doesn't. He writes with a formality and erudition which seems to have long since vanished from these shores.

Franklin is someone I will be reading more of, most likely his biography of George Washington Williams, whoever the hell that is. Franklin considered it his crowning achievement, so I will get it.

Right now I am quickly going through John McPhee's The Headmaster, a slim tome (as all of his are) about Frank Boyden, who had run Deerfield Academy for 60 years when McPhee wrote it. It is also lovely, and was already nostalgic 50 years ago.

Soon, I suppose, it will be time to snap out of the past and get back to reality

Graham and I are watching The Wire, which is pretty real. Perhaps more naturalist than realist, but more on that later.

IEI conference in Asheville

Went down to Asheville for a day for the ReConnectNC conference from the Institute for Emerging Issues. The premise of the conference was to reconnect communities that weren't communicating well. At that it pretty much failed. It was desperately overprogrammed. The breaks were too short and too few, because there were too many speakers. The speakers were generally overfocused on promoting what they were doing in their own communities, and of those there was dramatic overrepresentation of liberals: people of color, women, people in the arts, blah blah blah. Of course, I generally agree with those people about most things, with the exception of the transformative power of arts and culture in the public sphere. All too often when arts and culture are undertaken with state support, you get cant, bullshit, and half-baked pieties, at best.

Then at lunch, which was late because there were too many speakers, they tried to have each table have a focused discussion on a theme put forth by one of the speakers. I'm so sure. When were we supposed to "connect?"

I go to bed with a liberal every night, I brush my teeth looking at one in the mirror. I don't have a problem finding more of them to talk to. The problem is that I don't talk to enough conservatives, and people who could bring themselves to vote for Trump. I still don't get how conservatives can have done that, and still look at themselves in the mirror.

David Brooks of the NY Times was good, and the story of how Tru Pettigrew and the Cary Police initiated and fostered dialogue between the African-American community in Cary and the police there was pretty amazing.

In short, the model was excessively dirigiste. IEI is nestled with NC State and has pretty significant headcount. I don't know what its funding model is, but I am surprised that it has not come under attach by the legislature while the Republicans had a veto-proof supermajority.