Q&A on Silos

Q: I'm trying to work with some recruiters in my firm. I need them to help me fill a critical position. The last recruit wasn't a good fit, and we should have eliminated him as a candidate a lot earlier than we did. (We all realize now that this candidate - and how we handled him - was a failure.) I'm concerned the recruiters just don't understand my needs very well. They don't understand what sort of person I need. And I want our process to be different next time. Unfortunately their group and my group are in silos - we don't communicate well and don't understand each other. How can I best proceed?

A: Start first with building rapport. Breaking down the silo is your first job. The other challenges will be a lot easier to take on once you do that.

So, how do you start to reduce or eliminate the silos? One way to start is by increasing your level of trust and communication. (Sometimes humor can be used at this stage, if you're comfortable with that - it can help people to let go of some of their defensiveness.)

You have a silo when members of a group view each other as "us" and the rest of the firm as "them" - as in "they don't understand us" (and we don't understand them or their needs). Frequently, expectations are mis-set, and one of "them" disappoints us, or we disappoint them, and the mistrust grows.

In this case, take advantage of the recent failed recruitment. Call a meeting with your recruiters, and start off with group problem solving: brainstorming what went wrong, all the possible ways to get it right in future, and how to best proceed.

During this brainstorming, it's vital that you mention some things you personally did wrong or could have done better. This works on several levels:

First, when you admit an error, you give others permission to do the same. You're modeling positive behavior.

Second, admitting an error is vulnerable. We trust people who are willing to trust us, and you can demonstrate trust by allowing yourself to become vulnerable.

Third, your problem solving session will only be good if it brings up good issues - and that means you can't hold back. You have to talk about your mistakes.

Once you've finished the problem solving exercise, there should be a higher level of both trust and communication in the room. Use that to move on to the next step - share with them your vision of how the process should look in the future. Tell them what you look for in a recruit, contrasted with the failed recruit if necessary. Give them enough detail that they understand your needs in detail, and tell them why you need it.

One thing you've told me before is that you want to recruit for "soft" skills like the ability to work well with others - you value those higher than the "hard" technical skills. I'm pretty sure the recruiters don't know that, and don't know why you prefer that.

You have to tell them why you prefer candidates with those soft skills. Once they understand why, they can internalize your need and will do a better job finding the recruits who will fit your mold.

Consider the example of the steel workers who visited the bicycle factory. There isn't that much for the steel workers to understand about bicycles. The steel is the same steel it was before the visit. But somehow, seeing the customer using the product makes a big difference in the quality of the work. Workers who go on trips like that come back and do better work. The steel maker who visits the bike maker, comes back and makes better steel.

You need to help your recruiters see the word from their customer's perspective - your perspective.

We Have Met the Enemy, Again

We Have Met the Enemy, Again What the Deutsche Bank building tells us about what's wrong with America.

Henninger is, as usual, spot on:

The hyper-complex requirements and mindset reflected in the public record over 130 Liberty St. mirror the endless debate and litigation we've also layered into efforts to surveil and prosecute terrorists.

Yes, partisanship plays its part, but intellectual hubris and self-regard plays a larger part. We've got a society that's smarter than ever, but maybe too smart for its own good. Whether the problem before us is national security, the environment or protecting baby, we compulsively drive the system now to develop the most exquisite, complex procedures, which allow us to think ourselves both perfectly safe and ethically perfect.

Procedural perfectionism has been raised to religious status.

In other words, it's not the devil that's in the details - God is the details. All hail the details.

One really does get the impression that the Republic could fall and the word be cast back into the Stone Age, and certain (mostly Leftist) procedure freaks would be okay with that, just so long as every detail of the collapse of civilization met their criteria.

This is not to say that procedures are bad - I love good procedures and make my living following them and helping others devise good ones. One of the protections against another Leftist fetish, what Thomas Sowell calls Cosmic Justice, is to be found in the concept of procedural fairness (rather than a perfect fairness of outcomes, which would be unattainable).

The answer is unclear. Perhaps the (perhaps mythical) Icelandic tradition I once heard has it best, that once a year during the winter, the entire law is recited aloud to the people by the eldest and wisest. If a law is forgotten and none correct them, it passes out of the law. Of course, this would require that the law be short enough to read aloud (or memorize and recite) in a single winter, or even a single year. We couldn't even get through the tax code in that time...

Make Up Your Own Mine

Make Up Your Own Mine - An impoverished town strikes gold. George Soros and foreign environmentalists say, leave it in the ground - John Fund writes another excellent article about the angry knee-jerk Left that cares more about their own emotional self-stimulation than about facts or the well being of poor people:

The other side to the controversy is told in a new film that will never be shown on PBS, but is nonetheless rattling the environmental community. 'Mine Your Own Business' is a documentary by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They conclude that the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana 'comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu's mining.'

Mr. McAleer, a former Financial Times journalist who has followed the mine battle for seven years, says he 'found that everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false.'

Carbon on the Continent - WSJ.com

Carbon on the Continent - WSJ.com Kyle Wingfield writes a caution about blindly following the European lead on Carbon Control and Global Warmism:

Let's assume [...] that most Americans believe global warming is a real danger, that carbon dioxide is public enemy No. 1, and that the only question is what to do about it. Before following Europe's lead in adopting a cap-and-trade system or mandatory renewable energy targets, wouldn't you want to know that those actions will lead to something better than the status quo?

So would I. And the numbers show that if America is the Great Carbon Satan, Europe is certainly no angel.

Since 2000, emissions of CO2 have been growing more rapidly in Europe, with all its capping and yapping, than in the U.S., where there has been minimal government intervention so far. As of 2005, we're talking about a 3.8% rise in the EU-15 versus a 2.5% increase in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Nations.

There is a theme here - that for Europe (as for American Leftists) it's not actions that matter, but words and how they make us feel.

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - Hatred Begins at Home

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan - Hatred Begins at Home analyzes a new report, "The NYPD looks at what turns young Westerners into jihadis."

She says: "The view we show of life to ourselves, and to whatever lost young men are watching, is not broad and inspiriting. It is limited and dispiriting. It is every man for himself.

"We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good."

John F. Kennedy Speech "The President and the Press" (April 27, 1961)

Stumbled across this... Miller Center of Public Affairs - John F. Kennedy Speech "The President and the Press" (April 27, 1961)

Kennedy put it so well:

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future--for reducing this threat or living with it--there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security--a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President--two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

How stark is the contrast between Kennedy's candid appeal, and his eloquence, and the bumblings (to date) of George W. Bush.

If ever a President had a reason to call for national unity, for self restraint by the press, or for international cooperation against a common enemy, JFK did, and GWB does.

Is it too late for Bush to turn things around, to start to unite a nation that he has to a large extent helped divide?

I can only say that it is never too late to try to do the right thing. And I hope he and his administration will not stop trying to improve. We certainly need it.

Crime consumed a family, and an 8-year-old is lost - The Boston Globe

Crime consumed a family, and an 8-year-old is lost - The Boston Globe is a detailed story about the crime-riddled family of the late Liquarry Jefferson.

The story is full of the double-speak and bizarre assumptions so common among the liberal media:

1. The mayor "partly" blames the NRA for the death of this child, when everything leading up to that death involves things the NRA loudly opposes - criminals possessing guns; underage gang members with guns; young children playing with loaded guns without adult supervision. This bizarre stance by the mayor is accepted as perfectly reasonable.

2. A collection of government agencies spent over $300,000 in a single year intervening with this one family, to apparently no positive effect. Yet the professional social workers all are quoted talking about the successes they claim to have achieved - all of them completely subjective. The mother was "responsive" - the surviving 15 year old brother is "bright". Is that what we spend money on, so that social workers can delude themselves?

Perhaps it's even worse. These same social workers are the ones who arranged for this dysfunctional and crime-ridden family (mom with criminal record, once charged with stabbing the dead boy's father in the abdomen; multiple "fathers" of the mom's kids all criminals; the children committing crimes) to remain together:

Despite Liquarry's death, caregivers involved with the family say they see something worth saving in Gadson and her children. As a result, prior to Liquarry's death, the state Department of Social Services didn't take the children into custody even when they witnessed or took part in violence.

These folks see "something worth saving" so they keep this dysfunctional group together... why? So they can continue to be dysfunctional and continue to demand high amounts of services that these same folks are then paid to deliver?

3. When the dead boy's father (with a friend) breaks into an apartment and beats and stabs the occupant to death, it's described as a "tragedy...involving his relatives". No, the tragedy involved the dead neighbor. It was a horrific crime of violence that involved his dad as the perpetrator. Oh, but to the liberal media the killer suffers too - the killer is even more of a victim than the victim.

4. The social worker Carrie Clausen describes the incredible collection of mutual assaults and other crimes - from the dead boy's father beating his mother in the face with a barbell to the oldest child apparently keeping a loaded gun where his young siblings (ages 13, 8, and 2) could find it - as among "a whole lot of ... awful things that happened to the family."

No, these things did not just happen "to" the family. But that's the sort of criminal-as-victim, projection of powerlessness that one expects from the pimps of the welfare state. No wonder nobody ever expected any member of this family to behave responsibly. The idea of responsible behavior is foreign to them, social workers and reporters alike.

Immigration Reform Without Deportation or Amnesty

Can we - and should we - reform our immigration policies without wholesale amnesty?

Can we - and should we - reform our immigration policies without wholesale deportation?

My answer on all counts is yes.

As I've said before, amnesty is wrong - it rewards lawbreakers for their lawbreaking, and encourages more. It severely devalues citizenship. It also makes fools of the tens of thousands who have obeyed the law and are, right now, still waiting and working through the legal channels to obtain citizenship "through the front door."

I also believe that wholesale deportation is also wrong, on both moral and practical grounds.

The moral case goes something like this:

Implied Permission
America has been divided internally for 20+ years about enforcing our immigration laws. The Feds have laws against being an undocumented alien, but clearly don't care enough to actually enforce it. The other levels of government have actively assisted people entering illegally, including passing laws to forbid local law enforcement (and state and local bureaucrats) from asking about citizenship status, to agencies holding special outreach events to sign up illegal aliens for state services to which they are not legally entitled. Taken as a whole, there's been something of a welcome mat set out - woven unevenly out of federal indifference and local encouragement.

That internal division, this de facto welcome mat, is not without consequences. Morally, it makes the arrival and the residency of illegal aliens something that America has allowed. We've become complicit.

Consider a very rough parallel with property rights and the idea of "adverse possession." Suppose you own a field, but you allow me to put up a fence on it, you allow me to mow it, water it, graze my animals on it, plant it, and so forth - and you allow me to do that for a number of years. Then, in most states I can make a legal claim to ownership of the land. And I can get the title to that land transferred to me, without paying you a dime.

You thus lose your property rights - because you abandoned them. You allowed me to make use of the property as if they were mine and never complained about it. The law allows you to bring a complaint of trespass against me. You can easily get the authorities to stop me. By choosing not to enforce your rights, you abandon your claim to the property.

Why Adverse Possession is a Good Doctrine
The good side of "adverse possession" is that it prevents an injustice that was depressingly common in the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s (though the concept was well established in England and Wales hundreds of years earlier). During the homesteading period, a settler could live on and improve a piece of land, and by improving it, lay title to it - the state or territory would transfer ownership from the state to the settler. (Native Americans were of course conveniently excluded from this equation.)

The homesteading deal was conditional - you had to actually improve (farm) the land, not just squat on it. A temptation could arise when someone owned a very large amount of land, having purchased it instead of improving it. If a settler came along and started building improvements, thinking it was unclaimed land, the landowner could sit silently while the settler worked for years to improve the land. Then, years later, the owner would "suddenly" discover this person living on his land and evict him - but keep the improvements (buildings, cleared fields, fences, etc.)

The settler who worked for years in hopes of earning the land now discovers he was working for free to improve someone else's land.

The Parallel
The parallel, though inexact, is this - I think that America has allowed illegal immigrants to come here too easily. We've allowed the federal laws to go unenforced while locals have acted in ways that welcome illegal immigration. We've looked the other way or been (effectively) silent as aliens have moved here and built their lives.

For us now to suddenly decide we want to enforce the laws after all, feels a little dishonest to me.

If the undocumented or illegal alien is really so unwelcome, why did we look the other way for over twenty years? It's not as if our citizens haven't benefited from the arrangement. We have. We've hired them, sold them houses and cars and clothing and food, and taken their tax payments and Social Security contributions. We today live, many of us, in houses built with their labor. We've allowed them (indeed, by discontinuing the guest worker program, encouraged them) to bring their families here and establish lives.

Given where we all are and how we got here, I think amnesty is too much to give, but mass deportation is too harsh to inflict.

So Now What?
Here's my proposal.

Allow illegal aliens with (say) 5 years or more of residency to receive a new visa and stay indefinitely as a legal resident alien, with these limits:

• They can never become citizens
• They will be deported if convicted of any crime
• They must demonstrate within two years that they have paid all taxes they owe
• They can never collect taxpayer funded welfare or medical benefits

No More Anchor Babies
An illegal immigrant parent of a US citizen child may, if facing deportation, either leave the child with a legal resident, leave it with an orphanage, or waive the child's citizenship and take the child back to the parent's home country.

Path to Citizenship
If a permanent resident alien wants to apply for US citizenship after all, they should be allowed to do so under these conditions:

• The permanent resident alien must leave the US and establish residency in their home country
• Every other applicant who has already applied for US citizenship must be processed first
• The existing quotas on US citizenship will still apply