Mark R. Vickers, Author at The Reticulum

Joining the Big Fat Club

One in a series of posts on my struggles with maintaining a healthier weight, starting in early 2019 and working into the present day

#Weight: 250-something in January, 2019

I’d been giving some though to the big, fat club of which I was a member.

In January 2019, I wrote:

The obvious remedy to being fat is to stop eating so much.

But here’s the thing: I can’t seem to do it. Or, at least, I can’t seem to do it over the long run.

Look, there are thousands of diet and fitness books out there. I own some of them myself. But I know that this isn’t about eating more meat and less bread or whatever. This is less about my body than my mind.

Having said that, I imagine there are some genetic components. In my family, we males tend to gain weight on our hips and only later does it creep up and around our stomachs. At the beach, it’s all too easy to identify us as siblings.

But, hey, even if there is a genetic factor, that doesn’t mean I’m somehow fated to be fat. It just means that losing weight is a somewhat bigger challenge for me than for some other folks.

Yet, that are a lot of other folks, of course. Not long ago, I was at the shuffleboard courts and decided to look for men that weren’t fat or, at least, overweight. Know what? It was a challenge. We fats guys are legion.

Yeah, I know. Shuffleboard, right? The ultra-low impact sport of fat fellows. Especially older fat fellows. But here’s the thing. It’s getting to be a pretty popular sport among the Millennial and Gen Z generations, and a lot of them are pretty heavy as well.

But, again, shuffleboard!

Okay, so go ahead and Google that stuff. You’ll see that an astonishing 80% of U.S. men ages 50 to 54 are either overweight or obese. It’s a frigging American epidemic. And, though we U.S. guys are the poster children of fat people, being fat is a global thing.

We fat folk are over 2 billion strong, at least 30% of the whole world’s population. The number of overweight and obese individuals in the world increased from 857 million (20%) in 1980 to 2.1 billion (30%) in 2013. And things aren’t getting any better. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the percent of U.S. adults aged 20 and over who are overweight or obese was a whopping 71.6% in 2015-2016.

Okay, so there’s not just a genetic component, there’s a cultural one. We denizens of the so-called developed world are just a lot more likely to be fat. Why? Take your pick.

Jobs where we mostly sit all day long
Lots of processed, tasty and calorie-packed foods
Entertainments (Netflix anyone?) where we also mostly sit or, even better, lounge
Tons of work and life stress, especially in the U.S.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg. If we wanted, we could delve into the evils of advertising, the fantastic success of the modern agricultural revolution, and more. But you get the drift. There are a lot of external reasons so many of us have gotten fat.

And, for me, there are a lot of internal reasons as well, which I’ll get into later.

The Fat Men’s Clubs of Yesteryear

Does it matter? That’s a question I keep coming back to. At one time, being fat was fine, even trendy.

There actually were fat men’s clubs in the U.S. back in the day, meaning the late 19th to early 20th centuries. They were literally social clubs that you could only join if you weighed over 200 lbs (91 kg). Back then, the stereotype associated with being a fat man (and, yes, there was double standard for women even back then) was that they were financially successful, benevolent and, well, kind of jolly.

Times have changed, though. Now we fat folk are in a club that few folks want to be part of. Maybe that’ll change again in the future. For now, though, we are legion yet often still ashamed of our not-to-hot bodies.

Engraving showing the 15th Annual Clambake of the Fat Men's Association in Connecticut by Neosho Absecon

On the Stories of Others

I’ve recently become especially interested in hearing the stories of others.

Since the death of my mother, I’ve had this urge to reach out to old acquaintances. It’s not only that I wish to connect but I want to know more of their life stories. At my age, people have a lot of experience to draw on: happy moments and sad, adventures and mind-numbing routines, loved ones gained and lost, pain and pleasure and so much more.

Every person is story, a path taken. Some paths have been sweeter and others, but they’re all stories.

Do I want to write those stories down? Well, writers tend to like stories as material for future works. But I don’t think that’s my primary motivation. I mostly just want to see life from a different perspective than my own.

It All Goes By So Fast

When my father went to the hospital for the last time, he said to me, “It all goes by so fast.” He wasn’t a philosophical type or reflective man most of the time. He was a doctor and man of action. But in his last hours, he gifted me with that observation, and I don’t think I’ve made the most of it since.

But now I’d like to. How does one stretch time out a bit? No idea, really. I know that theoretically you could do some really interesting things with a really fast spaceship, but I don’t think that would stretch out your psychological experience of time.

I’ve read some articles on the topic. One recommends, among other things reminiscing. I suppose that’s one reason I’m increasingly drawn to the stories of friends and acquaintances. It’s not so much that I want to relive old times. In fact, I really don’t care if I’m involved in their stories. From a purely selfish perspective, I guess I just want to expand my own experiences through theirs, to acquire insights that have often been hard won by others.

This is part of what reading is for, of course. By reading a good book, fiction or nonfiction, you’re broadening your life–or at least seem to be–in ways that are nearly miraculous. But there’s something different about listening to someone tell you about their life in real time.

And there’s something different yet about reading letters. Too bad that’s a dying art form, killed by social media, email and every other electronic pastime filling our days, from computer games to Netflix. (Yes, you can write a letter in email form, but how many people actually do?)

Tell Me Your Story

So, I suggest starting a movement. Let’s call it the “tell me your story” movement. Sit down with a friend and ask them to tell you some of their stories. Some won’t especially want to. Maybe they’re embarrassed, or may they believe their story is none of your damn business (which is fair).

But some will. You’ll get to live through their eyes for a brief time, and you’ll learn to understand them as individuals in a deeper way than you had before. To me, that feels like one of the most precious gifts ever given and, in fact, more precious for being rare in the electronic wastelands of our modern lives (says the man typing away on his digital device).

At some level, though, we’re aware of the precious nature of these gifts. It’s one of the reasons many still croon the words to “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, even if we can’t exactly remember what they mean. You know the ones:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne

The title, which literally translates to “old long since,” is an ode of past times and old friends.

Stories can “bring to mind” old acquaintances, but they can also do more, I think. They’re capable of enriching us in ways few other things can.

Featured image by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli - A garden party. Storytelling, Wikimedia Commons

Enough of Too Much

One in a series of posts on my struggles with maintaining a healthier weight, starting in early 2019 and working into the present day

#Weight: 252 lbs on Jan. 20, 2019

I’d had enough of too much.

On January 20th, 2019, I wrote the following:

I’m sick of being fat. Thus, this fat journal, where I track my weight, explore why I’m fat and think about how I can get un-fat.

The easy answer for why I’m fat seems simple. I eat too much. I eat compulsively sometimes, to be honest. I eat when I’m stressed, depressed or just when I want to relax in front of the tube.

So, the solution looks simple to a lot of people, often including myself. Just stop eating so much!

Yep, simple. So, so simple.

Since my 30s or so, I’ve struggled with weight. I’ve been thinner at times. Down to 200 or fewer pounds, which is a more reasonable weight for a guy who stands around 6 foot 2 inches.

But I haven’t always been that thin, of course. Not by a long shot. In January 2019, I was 252 pounds according to my bathroom scale. That was pretty close to my all-time high. Even worse, my bathroom scale is generous compared to my doctor’s scale, so that bad news was probably worse than it appeared. I was starting to feel is was both dangerous and dumb to be that heavy.

The National Institutes of Health website site was telling me that if I were at a “normal” weight, I’d be anywhere between 145 to 193 lbs. Mind you, it’s hard for me to even picture myself at 145 pounds, which I don’t think I’ve weighed since I was a sophomore in high school. But 193? Sure, I could envision that.

Okay, so being overweight isn’t exactly the end of the world, right? Well, yeah, but I was overweight and into the obese range. Just to stop being obese, I’d need to hit 232. Then I’d only be “nearly obese.” Yay.

I could claim that the whole “body mass index” (aka, BMI) is a kind of unscientific hoax perpetrated by, well, somebody. Michelle Obama, maybe? The folks who run the fat farms? The bathroom scale makers themselves?

Ah, so many possible conspirators. Should I just stop worrying about it and tell the fatphobics to fuck off? After all, it’s just a social construct. Fatphobia ruins peoples lives, and there are plenty of fat-acceptance activists who are fighting for the rights of people like me so that we aren’t stigmatized. I support their cause.

In fact, I very much wanted to just stop worrying about it.

Except for one thing: my body was telling me I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I felt lousy, my head was foggy, my energy not-so-hot. I could just sense that I was on some sort of edge over which I could easily slip. Slip into what, exactly? I guess any of the usual haunts of abysses. Death, disease, despair.

Cardiovascular disease is the one I fear most, partly because it runs in my family. I’ve seen it up close. But also because of all the studies out there connecting obesity to heart disease. Here’s one representative snippet:

[A] study published in April 2018 in the journal JAMA Cardiology concluded that adults between ages 40 and 59 who are overweight or obese have a significantly increased risk (ranging from 21 to 85 percent higher) of developing cardiovascular disease as compared with their normal weight peers. Individuals who are overweight, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 29.9, or are obese (a BMI of 30 or higher), also have a much greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease at a younger age. The research showed that individuals who are obese had a shorter lifespan.

Guess I’ll end the post with that sobering and, to be honest, deeply annoying thought.

Featured image from https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/images/assessing/bmi-adult-fb-600x315.jpg

Big: An Introduction to My Weight-Loss Journal

The first in a series of posts on my struggles with maintaining a healthier weight

Back in January 2019, I started keeping an unusual kind of weight-loss journal that was also part treatise on today’s obesity pandemic. It documents my attempt to understand how I originally became overweight and how I might maintain a healthier weight.

What it doesn’t document, however, is everything I ate and how many calories were in it. That might be helpful for some people, but it’s just too tedious for me and, in my case, not as helpful as trying to understand myself better.

A lot of it deals with my thoughts about food and with our natural human yearnings to eat enough food to fuel our big, energy-hungry brains.

I’m a researcher by trade and a bonafide nerd by nature. So, it made sense for me to delve into the world’s obesity problem as a way of explaining my situation to myself. In truth, every fat person has their own story to tell. But I suspect most overweight people also share much in common, often including modern cultures where their condition has become the norm and where there are plenty of conflicts over issues such as body image, fat-shaming and more.

Now I’m going to turn some of that weight-loss journal into a series of posts in a way that I hope will be helpful to some other folks.

The first post up is Enough Is Too Much.

Featured image: An fMRI image of the human cranial region, showing the different parts of the brain anatomy, by DrOONeil

Talking Drums and the Depths of Human Ignorance

When I first heard of the talking drums, it make me think of how little we know about our fellow human beings and about the other citizens of the planet as well.

It’s a small but genuine annoyance. I’ll be listening some “expert,” often a professor, being interviewed for a radio show or podcast. If the idea of cognition comes up, they’ll state as a fact that humans are far more intelligent than any other animal on the planet. And, almost inevitably, one piece of evidence they’ll point to is communication. There’s the assumed inability of other animals to communicate with as much sophistication as we do.

Now, they might be right about these things, though obviously we’d need to define intelligence and communication to even establish a working hypotheses. What irritates me, though, is the certainty with which they make their claims. In truth, we just don’t know how we stack up in the animal kingdom because we still live in such a deep state of ignorance about our fellow creatures.

The Talking Drums

When I hear such claims, I think about the talking drums. For hundreds of years, certain African cultures were able to communicate effectively across vast distances. They did this right beneath the noses and within the hearing of ignorant, superior-feeling Europeans.

In his book The Information, James Gleick lays out the story of the talking drums in Chapter One. Via drums, certain African peoples were able to quickly communicate detailed and nuanced messages over long distances well before Europeans acquired comparable technologies. At least as far back as the 1700s, these African peoples were able to relay messages from village to village, messages that “could rumble a hundred miles or more in a matter of an hour…. Here was a messaging system that outpaced the best couriers, the fastest horses on good roads with say stations and relays.”

It was only in the 19th century that the missionary Roger T. Clarke recognized that “the signals represent the tones of the syllables of conventional phrases of a traditional and highly poetic character.” Because many African languages are tonal in the same way Chinese is, the pitch is crucial in determining the meaning of a particular word. What the drums allowed these peoples to do was communicate complex messages using tones rather than vowels or consonants.

Using low tones, the drummer communicates through the phrases and pauses. Extra phrases are added to each short “word” beaten on the drums. These extra phrases would be be redundant in speech, but they can provide context to the core drum signal.

Enormous Chasms

The technology and innovativeness of the talking drums is amazing, of course, but what’s especially startling is the centuries-long depth of European ignorance about the technology. Even once some Europeans admitted that actual information was being communicated across vast distances, they could not fathom how.

Why? Sure, racism no doubt played a part. But the larger truth is that they simply didn’t have enough information and wisdom to figure it out. That is despite the fact that we are talking about members of the same species and, indeed, a species with very little genetic diversity.

Here’s how the Smithsonian Institution reports on this lack of diversity:

[C]ompared with many other mammalian species, humans are genetically far less diverse – a counterintuitive finding, given our large population and worldwide distribution. For example, the subspecies of the chimpanzee that lives just in central Africa, Pan troglodytes troglodytes, has higher levels of diversity than do humans globally, and the genetic differentiation between the western (P. t. verus) and central (P. t. troglodytes) subspecies of chimpanzees is much greater than that between human populations.

On average, any two members of our species differ at about 1 in 1,000 DNA base pairs (0.1%). This suggests that we’re a relatively new species and that at one time our entire population was very small, at around 10,000 or so breeding individuals.

For Europeans to remain so ignorant about a technology created by other members of their own barely diversified species tells us how truly awful we are at understanding the communication capabilities of others. Now add in the exponentially higher levels of genetic diversity between species. For example, the last known common ancestor between whales and human existed about 97 million years ago. How about the last known ancestor between birds and humans? About 300 million years ago.

These timescales represent enormous genetic chasms that we are not remotely capable of bridging at the moment. We are still in the dark ages of understanding animal cognition and communication. So far, our most successful way of communicating with other animals is by teaching them our languages. So now we have chimpanzees using sign language and parrots imitating our speech patterns. African Grey parrots, for example, can learn up to 1,000 words that they can use in context.

Yet, when these species do not use human language as well as humans, we consider them inferior.

If We’re So Bloody Bright…

But if we as a species are so intelligent, why aren’t we using their means of communication? I’m not suggesting that other animals use words, symbols and grammar the way humans do. But communicate they do. I live in Florida, which is basically a suburbanized rainforest, and have become familiar with the calls of various birds, tropical and otherwise. One of the more common local denizens is the fish crow. I hear crows that are perched blocks away from one another do calls and responses. The calls vary considerably even to my ignorant, human ears, and there are probably countless nuances I’m missing.

Are they speaking a “language”? I don’t know, but it seems highly unlikely they’re expending all the vocal and cognitive energy for no reason. Their vocalizations mean something, even if we can’t grasp what.

Inevitably, humans think all animal communication is about food, sex and territory. But that’s just a guess on our part. We assume that their vocalizations are otherwise meaningless just as many Europeans assumed the talking drums were mostly meaningless noise. In short, we’re human-centric bigots.

Consider the songs of the humpback whales. These are extremely complex vocalizations that can be registered over vast distances. Indeed, scientists estimate that whales’ low frequency sounds can travel up to 10,000 miles! Yet, we’re only guessing about why males engage in such “songs.” For all we know, they’re passing along arcane mathematical conceits that would put our human Fields Medal winners to shame.

On Human Ignorance

The point is that we continue to live in a state of deep ignorance when it comes to other our fellow creatures. That’s okay as long as we remain humble, but we humility is not what people do best. We assume we are far more intelligent and/or far better communicators than are other species.

Yet, consider the counterevidence. Just look the various environmental, political and even nuclear crises in which we conflict-loving primates are so dangerously enmeshed. It hardly seems like intelligence. Maybe the whales and parrots are really discussing what incapable morons humans are compared to themselves. With that, mind you, it would be hard to argue.

Featured image from Mplanetech. 11 January 2017

Are We All Crew on the Pequod Now?

We are all in the same boat, as the saying goes. But what scares me is that maybe that boat is ultimately as doomed as the Pequod in Moby-Dick.

On the Pequod and Spaceship Earth

I went to Disney World a couple of weeks ago. Although I didn’t go into the Spaceship Earth ride in the Epcot part of the park, I got a good look at it from a helium balloon in the Disney shopping district. A little while later, a Facebook friend posted the famous Earthrise photo.

The point is I’ve been thinking about the Earth as an astonishing and gorgeous spaceship that is, as far as we know, utterly unique in the cosmos. Is this spaceship a metaphor or fact? Well, the planet is moving around the sun at nearly 30 kilometers per second, which amounts to 67,000 miles per hour. But that’s not the only movement. Our whole solar system, gravitationally tied to the sun, is zipping around our galaxy at about 490,000 miles per hour.

So, yes, we are literally on a kind of spaceship.

At the same time, of course, I’m been writing about leadership lessons in the great novel Moby-Dick. I’ve been pondering whether or not there was any avoiding the tragedy of Ahab (spoiler alert) destroying the Pequod and killing every member of the crew (aside from our narrator Ishmael, of course).

On the Dark Obsessions of Ahab and Putin

Ahab spends a lot of time by himself obsessing. In fact, when we first hear of him, Captain Peleg tells Ishmael, “I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee.”

As of Chapter 21, we still haven’t gotten a look at Ahab, the only word being that “Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.” In Chapter 23, we are told, “Captain Ahab stayed below.”

This reminds us of current events. The stories about Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, are eerily similar these days. We hear that “Putin himself was isolated, from other foreign leaders and from his own advisers and allies” in recent times.

Some of this isolation has been inspired by the pandemic, but it seems to have gone beyond that: “Questions have been raised over whether Covid-19 has fueled Vladimir Putin’s paranoia after claims emerged the isolated president spent time ‘stewing in his own fears’ after ‘withdrawing into himself’ during the pandemic.”

Some speculate that Putin’s psyche, already demented by his years in the KGB, has been further warped by his isolation in a bunker, where he has had a great deal of time to obsess about “the West,” perhaps in the same way Ahab obsesses about the great whale that has harmed him so.

On the Failure to Stop a Megalomaniac

In Moby-Dick, there are multiple failures to stop the tragedy. As we’ve noted, Peleg allowed Ahab to take the Pequod to sea even though he should have known better. Later on, Starbuck comes to understand how dangerous Ahab is, but he can’t bring himself to mutiny against his captain, and it’s not clear that he’d have the crew’s support if he did.

That leaves the crew itself. The crew members could have put an end to Ahab’s mad quest but they didn’t feel as if they had the power. That’s what a dictator does. He (and it is usually a he, with a few exceptions) makes others believe that he rather than they have the power, even if it’s based on an illusion. Dictators know how to divide and conquer and cast an aura of invincibility even though their deepest fear is that they will be exposed as the frail, vulnerable and all-too-fallible individuals that they are.

As I write this, there is no knowing how the current invasion of Ukraine will end. What we do know is that Putin himself has raised the specter of nuclear war. Of course, aside from not being a fictional character, Putin is no Ahab. He is being resisted on many fronts. Yet, sitting on the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, Putin has the potential to do untold damage to all the inhabitants of the ship called Earth. It’s as if we are all now crew members aboard the Pequod.

I don’t know if Putin is as obsessed and insane as Ahab. Maybe he’s a cold-blooded strategist rather than an emotional cripple, or maybe he’s somewhere in between.

Nor do I know if there’s any stopping him. Is there a Starbuck who could act against him in Russia? Could the Russian nation itself rise against him?

From what I’ve read, these are both long shots. There’s no telling how this will end.

What I do know is that it’s scary, at least from my perspective, that the fate of the planet rests largely on the shoulders of, again from my perspective, one very bad and possibly mad leader.

If we have the chance, we crew of the Spaceship Earth should do our level best to rid ourselves of the kinds of weaponry that makes it possible for one Ahab-like leader to so easily scuttle the vessel on which we ride though the star-studded seas. I’m afraid, though, that most of us can no longer even imagine the possibility of disarming our tripwire weapons of mass destruction. If so, then perhaps we have no more autonomy than the ill-fated crew of Melville’s tragic tale.

The Underhanded Leader

One in a series of posts about management lessons derived from the classic novel Moby-Dick

To get what he wanted, Captain Ahab knew how to manipulate his employers. It’s one of the oldest ploys in the leadership book: act in a stealthy manner to keep the execs off your back so you can more freely reign over your own crew (who, no doubt, are picking up their own cues from you). The underhanded leader is all too common in fiction…and in life.

In Chapter 50, “Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah,” Melville tells us about how Ahab had been stowing away a private crew of whale killers, tough-guy mercenaries who could man his own personal whale boat so he could stick the barb to Moby-Dick. This bout of hands-on micromanagement from a one-legged man was simply not foreseen by his employers. Melville tells it thus:

[I]s it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not. Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt — above all for Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that matter.

Once safely out of the owners’ scrutiny and reach, Ahab was going rogue, hijacking their business plans for his own private purposes.

Underhanded? Sure. Mad? No doubt.

But also nicely contrived, Captain! Good job with the prior planning, the holding of cards close to your vest, the crafty coordination of personnel.

Such are the games that leaders may play. It’s often for their own selfish ends, as they use company funds to pad their own accounts, or fly their lovers around, or take their rich and influential friends on all-expenses-paid vacations. But sometimes leaders playing such dangerous games have less selfish goals.

Maybe they’re intent on trying out some radical idea that they know their own bosses would nix but which they believe will serve the company in the long haul. Maybe they want to sell to a neglected market. Or pour R&D funds into a risky innovation. Or try out a new management technique that goes against the grain of the corporate culture.

It’s always a risk. Such leaders could well be hung out to dry if and when they’re found out. But maybe, if their secret gambit pays off, they’ll eventually be honored as a “risk taker,” a “maverick,” a cocky type whistling Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way” all the way to the bank.

Melvillian Leadership Lesson: Such underhandedness is usually a rotten idea. If a leader believes so much in a certain idea, then she or he shouldn’t go behind the boss’s back to pursue it. Instead, if they can’t convince their supervisors that something is a worth a risk, they should take off and do it on their own. That’s what entrepreneurship is for.

In the Cap’s case, of course, his deceit was sheer expediency. He didn’t give a rat’s buttocks about being fair to his employers. Nor did he care about deceiving his own crew. He decided to use the tried-and-not-so-true method of mushroom management: keeping his workers in the dark and feeding them… well, you know. In his own eyes, though, the means would justify the ends. This too is a leadership lesson. When leaders start thinking, “Yes, this is a lousy thing to do, but I’ve got to do it to get to my goal,” they should think twice, maybe even thrice.

Featured image from I. W. Taber - Moby Dick - edition: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, Wikipedia

The Oblivious Leader

I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. – Ishmael, in Moby-Dick

A leader should never forget the gist of this quote from Herman Melville’s great novel. Whether a ship captain or other type of leader, you will often find out things well after the “sailors on the forecastle” or the employees on the shop floor know it. Wise leaders do not “little suspect” this, as Melville says. They know it with every fiber.

Of course, even knowing about it doesn’t mean leaders can always avoid getting their “atmosphere at second hand.” As manager, I’ve seen how complex this can become. At different times, I’ve been in the know, I’ve been in the dark, and I’ve been in that gloomy place in between where suspicion and rumor dwell. The latter place is the land of “scuttlebutt,” which is, of course, originally a sailing term; drinking water on a sailing ship was stored in a “scuttled butt,” meaning a butt or cask that had been scuttled by making a hole in it so the water could be withdrawn.

Leadership Lesson: There’s no getting around organizational scuttlebutt, but my feeling is that the most honorable and open captains can keep it to a minimum. They take the trip to the forecastle as often as they can. They don’t need to go incognito like the undercover bosses of reality television to get a fresh breeze now and then.

But even if they can’t get to the forecastle as often as they like, there are surveys, 360s, focus groups and just “management by walking around.” These days, there are also less savory choices, such as keeping an eye on employees’ email, IMs and social networking activities.

I doubt the best leaders need to use these techniques, but watching employees via technologies remains an option. There’s no one rule that applies to every case. When in doubt, think about those negative as well as positive leadership models. “What would Ahab do?”, for example, can be a useful question. Obsess over a personal grievance? Keep dark secrets from the crew? Call one of your direct reports a dog? Or maybe go all demagoguery to get what you want?

Yeah, usually you’ll want to go in a different direction from the not-so-good captain.

Featured image from https://twitter.com/IntEtymology/status/998879578851508224

Poor Peleg’s Leadership Blunder

One in a series of posts about management lessons derived from the classic novel Moby-Dick

I know…that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.
–Captain Peleg’s thoughts on Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick

Poor Peleg. He’s the perfect prototype of the angel investor – one of the owners of the ill-fated ship Pequod – who literally sinks his money in a catastrophic investment: that is, crazed Captain Ahab’s venture. What I love most about this particular passage is that Peleg is simultaneously both right and infamously wrong. It is a leadership blunder that rings of wisdom.

The “moody good captain” line is golden – in theory. Sure, it’s great to have a leader who knows how to tell and take a joke, especially if the jokes aren’t the snarky, sarcastic types that can waft through a corporate culture like toxic gas. But a leader had better be able to do more than hit a punchline. A captain who regularly sends the ship into the shoals ain’t much of a captain, no matter how lilting his laughter.

On the other hand, a crew can take some moodiness – maybe some surliness – from a captain who really knows her trade and keeps things ship shape, even in the big waves.

But, though right in theory, Peleg was way off in fact. Ahab’s desperate moodiness will not “pass off.” Not by a long shot.

Melvillian Management Lesson: “Thou shalt not delegate a critical enterprise to someone, even to someone you’ve trusted in the past, who has been through a major ordeal if you’re still not sure how they’re going to come out the other end.” Peleg should have waited before sending Ahab out again, especially since there would be no overseeing the voyage of the Pequod once it cast off.

As an investor, Peleg paid for his leadership blunder, but he didn’t pay nearly as dearly as Ahab’s crew. That’s always the problem with leadership sins: they cascade downward and outward, rippling through oceans.

Featured image from Petesimon, 10 March 2009, Wikimedia Commons.

The Leader Makeover

One in a series of blog posts about leadership lessons from the classic novel Moby-Dick

John Barrymore’s Ahab, from Observationnotes

This is a departure from the other Ahab posts on this blog in that it’s not about a specific chapter in the book. Instead, this is a quick bit of balladry, inspired by the avid polishing work carried out by the plethora of hard-working public relations pros on behalf of their companies and leaders. Here’s a short poem on how a hired hand might provide a restoration of the reputation of Ahab, a leader makeover, if you will:

The Makeover

When my boss told me about our new client,
I thanked her, quietly excused myself,
strolled onto a nearby smoking terrace,
then squealed alone with urgent delight.

Ahab! Ahab! Ahab! I chanted to myself.
“Makeover of the Millennium” they’d print in a bold,
45-point font above the fold, a striking sanserif
across my nose, PRWeek posted on my brow.

“Start by tarring Ishmael,” the boss had urged.
“Some depressed sailor-schoolmaster harboring
violent, hat-knocking, anti-social obsessions;
his word shouldn’t mean squat in this town.”

Yes, and then I’ll need a social media angle,
maybe start with anonymous Wikipedia retouches:
“Tyrannical captain” to “committed leader”;
“monomaniacal desire” to “impassioned focus.”

Stress his courage overcoming a disability,
his refusal to take a penny of workers’ comp,
a sacrificing, Quaker-modest company man walking
the peg-legged talk, a Steve-Jobs perfectionist.

And ultra-master motivator to boot! Yeah, with
mast-hammering, doubloon-flashing showmanship,
a productivity-enhancing, pay-for-performance pro,
the original Jack Welch with more crust and courage.

His only flaw an aversion of evil. Even Ishmael’s
words, untwisted, tell that tale, with grisly Moby not
just killer but incarnation of “malicious agencies,”
the Ahab Christian pit against the Devil itself.

O Captain! My Captain! The Whitman poem truly
honors you, great Ahab, not poor old Abraham.
Both being lanky, bearded greats on much-weathered ships,
vessels grim and daring – an easy mistake to make.

Melvillian Management Lesson: Right up until the day he got them all killed, a lot of crewmembers aboard the Pequod were drinking Ahab’s Kool-Aid. Even truly terrible leaders, if they can carve out their own brand of rhetoric and charisma, can attract avid followers. Donald Trump once boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

Well, no. It’s all too credible. People develop strong loyalties to truly terrible leaders all the time. It’s a story as old as humanity itself. And today, if you add in a little professional public relations with a large dash of media canniness, you can convince followers that the phoniest fabricators in the world are “plainspoken” or that the most selfish and cruel leaders are somehow self-sacrificing and caring.

So, we shouldn’t judge leaders (nor should they judge themselves) by their ability to attract and motivate followers. That is neither the purpose nor the mark of good leadership, as Moby-Dick clearly shows. The purpose and mark of a good leader is the ability to move people in a positive direction that does good in the world. That sounds sappy, and “good in the world” is all-too-open to interpretation. But if you want to go further, you’ll have to grab your sextant and dig out the star charts of Plato, Aquinas, Kant and the like. Even the great Melville can take us only so far into those deep waters.