Decision By Committee Quotes

Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment. Perhaps such decisions are paving stones on the road to Hell; if so, my route is well paved, and the welcoming committee all ready knows my name.

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices. […] They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems. […] “A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors. […] Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

Sometimes a decision has to be made by a single individual, who has the authority to enforce it. That’s why you need a captain. You can’t run a ship by a committee—at least not all the time.

All my life, I thought I was this independent woman. I was on all the right committees, made speeches for all the right causes, traveled all over the world. I had my little part-time job, I made all my own decisions, but . . . there was always someone there to fall back on when things went bad. Funny, how after so many years of marriage you don’t think about how much you depend on the other person until . . . well, until they’re gone. And then of course there’s just the whole system in the city. Your doctor, your pharmacist, your plumber, your vet . . . there’s always someone there. You never have to find out . . . how much you can’t do.

Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even, by a vote of the members of APA, not to mention the courts.

Many a committee meeting ends with “We need more data.” Everybody nods, breathing a sigh of relief, happy that the decision has been deferred. A week or so later, when the data are in, the group is no further ahead. Everyone’s time is wasted on another meeting, on waiting for even more data. The culprit is a negative error culture, in which everyone lacks the courage to make a decision for which they may be punished.

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

Never had a larger committee been convened to make a decision about the purchase of mustard powder and the replacement of a claw hammer whose handle had split from age and misuse.

We now know, from Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, that the decision to pursue an opening with the United States came not from China’s civilian leaders, but instead from a committee of four Chinese generals.6

In many careers, crucial decisions are deliberated in meetings with white boards and breakout sessions. Options are weighed. Exploratory committees are formed. Ideas are mulled over and then discarded. Gourmet coffee is consumed. Perhaps finger sandwiches are ordered from the catering joint down the street. The whole process can take hours, days, weeks. One of the most crucial decisions you make as a cop is Shoot or Don't Shoot. Given how quickly situations can go all sorts of wrong, you will probably have about a second and a half to deliberate before you make this call. Critics then have a lifetime to pick apart your decision over that coffee and those sandwiches.

press or to Congressional committees. Thus the only way secrecy can be kept is to exclude from the making of the decision all those who

Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself. The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known. Sloan, who headed General Motors from the 1920s until the 1950s, spent most of his six working days a week in meetings—three days a week in formal committee meetings with a set membership, the other three days in ad hoc meetings with individual GM executives or with a small group of executives. At the beginning of a formal meeting, Sloan announced the meeting’s purpose. He then listened. He never took notes and he rarely spoke except to clarify a confusing point. At the end he summed up, thanked the participants, and left. Then he immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at the meeting. It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.

o In the decision to use the bomb the base line had shifted down during the moral slide from the blockade to the area bombing of Germany and to the fire-bombing of Japan. Predictably one member of Stimson’s committee made the point that the ‘number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids’.

Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary builder of General Motors, once said to a meeting of one of his top committees, 'Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?' Everyone around the table nodded. 'Then,' Sloan continued, 'I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants.

Decisions are now made by one individual, rather than by a committee. He no longer has to mind read, predict, or try to please multiple voices with conflicting agendas. When putting himself first all the information he needs to make a decision is within him: "Is this what I want? Yes. Then that's what I'll do.

At the top of the Queen’s Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in. That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions.

Finally, they decided—if it can be called a decision—they decided without a vote but simply by converging in the middle, to form Duma members into a committee but not invest this committee with any authority in advance and wait and see how events unfolded. However, not being the full Duma, they could not vote and elect,

Although Manmohan Singh, the helmsman, got the credit, it was Rao who took the tough and aggressive decisions and provided the energy and political support. He was shrewd and knew how to deal with dissent. The manner in which he pushed through the industrial policy in the cabinet is an example. At the same time, the reforms would not have happened without Manmohan Singh. To the extent that there was one, he created the road map. In a brilliant move, he set up a set of committees—bank reform under Narsimhan, tax reform under Chelliah, and insurance reform under Malhotra—and they provided crucial intellectual sustenance and legitimacy for reform measures in these areas. It needed Manmohan Singh to come and change the nation’s mind-set to growth. But Manmohan Singh is a reticent man and cautious by nature. On his own, without Rao’s constant support, he would not have done it. The new trade policy would not have come about as speedily without Chidambaram. Varma was a terror as the head of the steering committee and he provided the momentum for the implementation of the reforms for two years. He knew the system well, and he played it in favor of the reforms. Varma’s crucial contributions, I believe, have not been understood or appreciated. In the end, all three—Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, and Varma—derived their strength from Narasimha Rao.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia.

The actual consumers of knowledge are the children—who can’t pay, can’t vote, can’t sit on the committees. Their parents care for them, but don’t sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of “tough on education.” Politicians are too busy being re-elected to study all the data themselves; they have to rely on surface images of bureaucrats being busy and commissioning studies—it may not work to help any children, but it works to let politicians appear caring. Bureaucrats don’t expect to use textbooks themselves, so they don’t care if the textbooks are hideous to read, so long as the process by which they are purchased looks good on the surface. The textbook publishers have no motive to produce bad textbooks, but they know that the textbook purchasing committee will be comparing textbooks based on how many different subjects they cover, and that the fourth-grade purchasing committee isn’t coordinated with the third-grade purchasing committee, so they cram as many subjects into one textbook as possible. Teachers won’t get through a fourth of the textbook before the end of the year, and then the next year’s teacher will start over. Teachers might complain, but they aren’t the decision-makers, and ultimately, it’s not their future on the line, which puts sharp bounds on how much effort they’ll spend on unpaid altruism . . .

(I wish I had an ex-wife like you in every department; over in the Fellowship Office, the formerly benevolent Carole continues to maintain an icy distance. I should think her decision to quit our relationship would have filled her with a cheerful burst of self-esteem, but she apparently views the end of our three years together in a different light.)

A cadre must know how to carry out instructions, must understand them, adopt them as his own. attach the greatest importance to them, and make them part of his very existence. Otherwise, politics loses its meaning and consists merely of gesticulating. Hence the decisive importance of the cadres department in the apparatus of the Central Committee. Every functionary must be closely studied, from every angle and in the most minute detail.

To make good decisions, CEOs need the courage to seek out disagreement. Alfred Sloan, the longtime CEO and chairman of General Motors, once interrupted a committee meeting with a question: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?” All the committee members nodded. “Then,” Sloan said, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about.

These decisions sparked a strong negative response from conservatives in Congress. In 2004, after the Atkins and Lawrence rulings, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, F. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, addressed the members of the Judicial Conference, gathered for their spring meeting at the Supreme Court. “Inappropriate judicial adherence to foreign laws or legal tribunals threatens American sovereignty, unsettles the separation of powers carefully crafted by our Founders, and threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the American judicial process,

It quickly became apparent that a new president could not be named because three of the contested states with warring governments—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—filed one set of election certificates for Hayes and another for Tilden. Their returning boards, which verified the election returns, were in Republican hands, further tainting the results in Democratic eyes. Faced with this agonizing dilemma, Congress in mid-December called for a special bipartisan committee to settle the electoral crisis and favored the creation of “a tribunal whose authority none can question and whose decision all will accept as final.

Characteristics of the Council 1. The council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing the organization. 2. The Council is assembled and used by the leading executive and usually consists of five to twelve people. 3. Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from the egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest. 4. Each Council member retains the respect of every other Council member, without exception. 5. Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates. 6. The Council includes key members of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, nor is every executive automatically a member. 7. The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project. 8. The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter. 9. The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive. 10. The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or in any formal documents. 11. The Council can have a range of possible names, usually quite innocuous. In the good-to-great companies, they had benign names like Long-Range Profit Improvement Committee, Corporate Products Committee, Strategic Thinking Group, and Executive Council.

Reflecting the new balance of power between Britain and the United States, the committee ignored the case made by the Arabs and the preference of the British government, which was to continue to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine to avoid antagonizing the country’s Arab majority and the populations of the newly independent Arab states. The committee came to conclusions that mirrored precisely the desires of the Zionists and the Truman administration, including the recommendation to admit a hundred thousand Jewish refugees to Palestine. This signified that the 1939 White Paper was indeed a dead letter, that Britain no longer had the decisive voice in Palestine, and that it was the United States that would become the predominant external actor there and eventually in the rest of the Middle East.

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

Many people take this as evidence of duplicity or cynicism. But they don’t know what it’s like to be expected to make comments, almost every working day, on things of which they have little or no reliable knowledge or about which they just don’t care. They don’t appreciate the sheer number of things on which a politician is expected to have a position. Issues on which the governor had no strong opinions, events over which he had no control, situations on which it served no useful purpose for him to comment—all required some kind of remark from our office. On a typical day Aaron might be asked to comment on the indictment of a local school board chairman, the ongoing drought in the Upstate, a dispute between a power company and the state’s environmental regulatory agency, and a study concluding that some supposedly crucial state agency had been underfunded for a decade. Then there were the things the governor actually cared about: a senate committee’s passage of a bill on land use, a decision by the state supreme court on legislation applying to only one county, a public university’s decision to raise tuition by 12 percent. Commenting on that many things is unnatural, and sometimes it was impossible to sound sincere. There was no way around it, though. Journalists would ask our office about anything having remotely to do with the governor’s sphere of authority, and you could give only so many minimalist responses before you began to sound disengaged or ignorant or dishonest. And the necessity of having to manufacture so many views on so many subjects, day after day, fosters a sense that you don’t have to believe your own words. You get comfortable with insincerity. It affected all of us, not just the boss. Sometimes I felt no more attachment to the words I was writing than a dog has to its vomit.

Unfortunately, the Hospital Fund Raising Committee, to which Elizabeth was assigned, spent most of its time mired down in petty trivialities and rarely made a decision on anything. In a fit of bored frustration, Elizabeth finally asked Ian to step into their drawing room one day, while the committee was meeting there, and to give them the benefit of his expertise. “And,” she laughingly warned him in the privacy of his study when he agreed to join them, “no matter how they prose on about every tiny, meaningless expenditure-which they will-promise me you won’t point out to them that you could build six hospitals with less effort and time.” “Could I do that?” he asked, grinning. “Absolutely!” She sighed. “Between them, they must have half the money in Europe, yet they debate about every shilling to be spent as if it were coming out of their own reticules and likely to send them to debtors’ gaol.” “If they offend your thrifty sensibilities, they must be a rare group,” Ian teased. Elizabeth gave him a distracted smile, but when they neared the drawing room, where the committee was drinking tea in Ian’s priceless Sevres china cups, she turned to him and added hastily, “Oh, and don’t comment on Lady Wiltshire’s blue hat.” “Why not?” “Because it’s her hair.” “I wouldn’t do such a thing,” he protested, grinning at her. “Yes, you would!” she whispered, trying to frown and chuckling instead. “The dowager duchess told me that, last night, you complimented the furry dog Lady Shirley had draped over her arm.” “Madam, I was following your specific instructions to be nice to the eccentric old harridan. Why shouldn’t I have complimented her dog?” “Because it was a new fur muff of a rare sort, of which she was extravagantly proud.” “There is no fur on earth that mangy, Elizabeth,” he replied with an impenitent grin. “She’s hoaxing the lot of you,” he added seriously. Elizabeth swallowed a startled laugh and said with an imploring look, “Promise me you’ll be very nice, and very patient with the committee.” “I promise,” he said gravely, but when she reached for the door handle and opened the door-when it was too late to step back and yank it closed-he leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Did you know a camel is the only animal invented by a committee, which is why it turned out the way it has?” If the committee was surprised to see the formerly curt and irascible Marquess of Kensington stroll into their midst wearing a beatific smile worth of a choir boy, they were doubtlessly shocked to see his wife’s hands clamped over her face and her eyes tearing with mirth.

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

It is not only in childhood that people of high potential can be encouraged or held back and their promise subverted or sustained. The year before I went to Amherst, a group of women had declined to stand for tenure. One of them simply said that after six years she was used up, too weary and too eroded by constant belittlement to accept tenure if it were offered to her. Women were worn down or burnt out. During the three years I spent as dean of the faculty, as I watched some young faculty members flourish and others falter, I gradually realized that the principal instrument of sexism was not the refusal to appoint women or even the refusal to promote (though both occurred, for minorities as well as women), but the habit of hiring women and then dealing with them in such a way that when the time came for promotion it would be reasonable to deny it. It was not hard to show that a particular individual who was a star in graduate school had somehow belied her promise, had proved unable to achieve up to her potential. This subversion was accomplished by taking advantage of two kinds of vulnerability that women raised in our society tend to have. The first is the quality of self-sacrifice, a learned willingness to set their own interests aside and be used and even used up by the community. Many women at Amherst ended up investing vast amounts of time in needed public-service activities, committee work, and teaching nondepartmental courses. Since these activities were not weighed significantly in promotion decisions, they were self-destructive. The second kind of vulnerability trained into women is a readiness to believe messages of disdain and derogation. Even women who arrived at Amherst full of confidence gradually became vulnerable to distorted visions of themselves, no longer secure that their sense of who they were matched the perceptions of others. When a new president, appointed in 1983, told me before coming and without previous discussion with me that he had heard I was “consistently confrontational,” that I had made Amherst “a tense, unhappy place,” and that he would want to select a new dean, I should have reacted to his picture of me as bizarre, and indeed confronted its inaccuracy, but instead I was shattered. It took me a year to understand that he was simply accepting the semantics of senior men who expected a female dean to be easily disparaged and bullied, like so many of the young women they had managed to dislodge. It took me a year to recover a sense of myself as worth defending and to learn to be angry both for myself and for the college as I watched a tranquil campus turned into one that was truly tense and unhappy.

Democracy, the apple of the eye of modern western society, flies the flag of equality, tolerance, and the right of its weaker members to defense and protection. The flag bearers for children's rights adhere to these same values. But should democracy bring about the invalidation of parental authority? Does democracy mean total freedom for children? Is it possible that in the name of democracy, parents are no longer allowed to say no to their children or to punish them? The belief that punishment is harmful to children has long been a part of our culture. It affects each and every one of us and penetrates our awareness via the movies we see and the books we read. It is a concept that has become a kingpin of modern society and helps form the media's attitudes toward parenting, as well as influencing legislation and courtroom decisions. In recent years, the children's rights movement has enjoyed enormous momentum and among the current generation, this movement has become pivotal and is stronger than ever before. Educational systems are embracing psychological concepts in which stern approaches and firm discipline during childhood are said to create emotional problems in adulthood, and liberal concepts have become the order of the day. To prevent parents from abusing their children, the public is constantly being bombarded by messages of clemency and boundless consideration; effectively, children should be forgiven, parents should be understanding, and punishment should be avoided. Out of a desire to protect children from all hardship and unpleasantness, parental authority has become enfeebled and boundaries have been blurred. Nonetheless, at the same time society has seen a worrying rise in violence, from domestic violence to violence at school and on the streets. Sweden, a pioneer in enacting legislation that limits parental authority, is now experiencing a dramatic rise in child and youth violence. The country's lawyers and academics, who have established a committee for human rights, are now protesting that while Swedish children are protected against light physical punishment from their parents (e.g., being spanked on the bottom), they are exposed to much more serious violence from their peers. The committee's position is supported by statistics that indicate a dramatic rise in attacks on children and youths by their peers over the years since the law went into effect (9-1). Is it conceivable, therefore, that a connection exists between legislation that forbids across-the-board physical punishment and a rise in youth violence? We believe so! In Israel, where physical punishment has been forbidden since 2000 (9-2), there has also been a steady and sharp rise in youth violence, which bears an obvious connection to reduced parental authority. Children and adults are subjected to vicious beatings and even murder at the hands of violent youths, while parents, who should by nature be responsible for setting boundaries for their children, are denied the right to do so properly, as they are weakened by the authority of the law. Parents are constantly under suspicion, and the fear that they may act in a punitive manner toward their wayward children has paralyzed them and led to the almost complete transfer of their power into the hands of law-enforcement authorities. Is this what we had hoped for? Are the indifferent and hesitant law-enforcement authorities a suitable substitute for concerned and caring parents? We are well aware of the fact that law-enforcement authorities are not always able to effectively do their jobs, which, in turn, leads to the crumbling of society.

Adventists urged to study women’s ordination for themselves Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson appealed to members to study the Bible regarding the theology of ordination as the Church continues to examine the matter at Annual Council next month and at General Conference Session next year. Above, Wilson delivers the Sabbath sermon at Annual Council last year. [ANN file photo] President Wilson and TOSC chair Stele also ask for prayers for Holy Spirit to guide proceedings September 24, 2014 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Andrew McChesney/Adventist Review Ted N. C. Wilson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, appealed to church members worldwide to earnestly read what the Bible says about women’s ordination and to pray that he and other church leaders humbly follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance on the matter. Church members wishing to understand what the Bible teaches on women’s ordination have no reason to worry about where to start, said Artur A. Stele, who oversaw an unprecedented, two-year study on women’s ordination as chair of the church-commissioned Theology of Ordination Study Committee. Stele, who echoed Wilson’s call for church members to read the Bible and pray on the issue, recommended reading the study’s three brief “Way Forward Statements,” which cite Bible texts and Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White to support each of the three positions on women’s ordination that emerged during the committee’s research. The results of the study will be discussed in October at the Annual Council, a major business meeting of church leaders. The Annual Council will then decide whether to ask the nearly 2,600 delegates of the world church to make a final call on women’s ordination in a vote at the General Conference Session next July. Wilson, speaking in an interview, urged each of the church’s 18 million members to prayerfully read the study materials, available on the website of the church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. "Look to see how the papers and presentations were based on an understanding of a clear reading of Scripture,” Wilson said in his office at General Conference headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The Spirit of Prophecy tells us that we are to take the Bible just as it reads,” he said. “And I would encourage each church member, and certainly each representative at the Annual Council and those who will be delegates to the General Conference Session, to prayerfully review those presentations and then ask the Holy Spirit to help them know God’s will.” The Spirit of Prophecy refers to the writings of White, who among her statements on how to read the Bible wrote in The Great Controversy (p. 598), “The language of the Bible should be explained according to its obvious meaning, unless a symbol or figure is employed.” “We don’t have the luxury of having the Urim and the Thummim,” Wilson said, in a nod to the stones that the Israelite high priest used in Old Testament times to learn God’s will. “Nor do we have a living prophet with us. So we must rely upon the Holy Spirit’s leading in our own Bible study as we review the plain teachings of Scripture.” He said world church leadership was committed to “a very open, fair, and careful process” on the issue of women’s ordination. Wilson added that the crucial question facing the church wasn’t whether women should be ordained but whether church members who disagreed with the final decision on ordination, whatever it might be, would be willing to set aside their differences to focus on the church’s 151-year mission: proclaiming Revelation 14 and the three angels’ messages that Jesus is coming soon. 3 Views on Women’s Ordination In an effort to better understand the Bible’s teaching on ordination, the church established the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, a group of 106 members commonly referred to by church leaders as TOSC. It was not organized

Compromise is like the old joke, “A camel is a horse made by a committee.

Consider the following investing strategy: On the day before a Fed policy announcement, buy the stocks in the S&P 500 index. Sell them a week later, and buy them again the following week. Stick with that pattern until the Fed next meets. Sound ridiculous? A portfolio run this way since early 1994, when the Fed's policy-setting committee began publicly announcing interest rate decisions, would have returned about 650%. That is significantly better than the S&P 500's total return over the entire period of about 505%. The pattern of stocks performing

As described in the literature and experienced in practice, governance is a multi-dimensional concept, encompassing elements of organizational stewardship, accountability, risk management, compliance, control, propriety, functional oversight, resource allocation and capability. It tends to be defined from one of two perspectives: functionally, in terms of what governance does (e.g., assigning and administering decision rights, responsibilities and accountabilities) or; structurally, in terms of what it looks like (a framework of interrelated boards, councils, and committees). This paper argues that both perspectives are necessary for a balanced representation of governance. Furthermore, the two approaches are brought together in a metamanagement perspective of governance, outlined in the next section. In preparation, this section considers eight issues that can influence how governance is viewed.

organization after a decision is made at the Full-member Committee · Distribute press kits and respond to

Small and exclusive committees of parties or of party coalitions make their decisions behind closed doors, and what representatives of the big capitalist interest groups agree to in the smallest committees is more important for the fate of millions of people, perhaps, than any political decision.

This was the problem with making important decisions by committee and trying to run a war of ideals with men and women whose vision was so limited by money.

The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process. In Britain, national budgets are not drawn up in Parliament, but in Whitehall, the seat of the bureaucracy, where professional civil servants act under instructions from the cabinet and prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote. This usually takes place within a week or two of its promulgation by the government. The process in the United States is totally different. The Constitution grants Congress primary authority over the budget. While presidents formulate budgets through the executive branch Office of Management and Budget, this office often becomes more like another lobbying organization supporting the president’s preferences. The budget, put before Congress in February, works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification (we hope) by the two houses toward the end of the summer is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process in comparison to what happens in Britain.

Fund management is a skill—you cannot run money through consultants or committees. If you have a committee, you should buy an index fund and stop trying. Committees settle to the lowest common denominator, which is the lowest risk. A committee will not take risk. By the time a committee decides to buy tech, it is already March 2000. Fund management is like cooking, whereby 10 chefs have the same ingredients but make 10 different things. You have great chefs who get three stars and lousy chefs who make horrible food. Fund management is similar in that what is important is what you make out of the mix, how you interpret information, how you structure trades and build portfolios. But with committees somehow the results are always the same. When you have a committee, you cannot be the only guy making the decision because, at some stage, you will be wrong in the short-term and everyone will get fired. So the whole groupthink model makes things very difficult, as does the visibility of these posts. Making or losing a lot of money always makes headlines—there is no upside or solution for that.

We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption).

The committee will now adjourn upstairs for an hour, and when we have reached a decision we will come down and tell you about it.” So

Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.

The ruling paved the way for a related decision by an appeals court in a case called SpeechNow, which soon after overturned limits on how much money individuals could give to outside groups too. Previously, contributions to political action committees, or PACs, had been capped at $5,000 per person per year. But now the court found that there could be no donation limits so long as there was no coordination with the candidates’ campaigns. Soon, the groups set up to take the unlimited contributions were dubbed super PACs for their augmented new powers.

Rather than setting up a separate diversity committee or women’s committee with dedicated resources, I recommend that companies instead assemble small, temporary, twenty-first-century leadership task forces. This is an efficient, flexible team with the knowledge and authority to make decisions and the seniority and business networks to influence key stakeholders. Such a team would emphasize the accountability of business leaders for making change happen.

Each of these decisions is instead made either by a group of peers, a committee, or a dedicated, independent team. Many newly hired managers hate this!

Like Brandenburg and Grill, he didn’t trust MPEG, as he had seen these “impartial” standards committees make biased decisions before.

According to the Nobel Committee (the group of ultra-liberals in Norway who pick the prize winners), Obama was awarded the 2009 prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”8 Really? After less than a year in office? This was an award modeled after Seinfeld—it truly was about nothing, and meant nothing, at least in reality. Even the Obama administration had the good grace to be embarrassed by the award. Besides giving an abysmally naïve “speech to the Muslim world” in Cairo and talking about things like nuclear nonproliferation and climate change, the man had done squat in terms of forwarding world peace in the months he had been in office. He said so himself: “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.”9 Though the administration was not quite embarrassed enough to show the good grace of declining the honor in favor of someone who actually deserved it. But here’s why this award matters—because it fits so perfectly with Leftist philosophy. Obama was a global rock star who had replaced the “evil” George W. Bush. He was also the first African American to lead the United States. And the Nobel Committee wanted to do what felt good. They wanted in on the action. Essentially, this once-prestigious organization decided to act like squealing teenagers at a Beatles concert; they got caught up in “Obamamania” and just couldn’t help themselves. It felt good, so it felt right. So they did it. And then this Nobel Laureate went on to spend eight years undermining world peace by kneecapping the one thing that keeps a lid on this bubbling cauldron of a world: the U.S. military. He also invaded and destabilized Libya, broke his promises on Syria, has been downright dismissive to Israel, kowtowed to China, and let Russian President Vladimir Putin walk all over him (and therefore us). This man has done more to destabilize the world than perhaps any American President, ever. And guess what? Even the Nobel Committee who scrambled to award him the prize came to regret their decision! The Nobel Institute’s director at the time told the media in September 2015 that they “thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect,” and “even many of Obama’s supporters thought that the prize was a mistake.”10 Oops.

By now you’ll guess that promotion decisions, like rating decisions, are made by committees. They

Seventeen hundred years ago, key elements of our ancient heritage were lost, relegated to the elite priesthoods and esoteric traditions of the day. In an effort to simplify the loosely organized religious and historic traditions of his time, early in the fourth century A.D. the Roman emperor Constantine formed a council of historians and scholars. What would later be known as the Council of Nice fulfilled the directive of its charter and recommended that at least twenty-five documents be modified or removed from the collection of texts.1 The committee found many of the works under consideration to be redundant, with overlapping stories and repeated parables. Other manuscripts were so abstract and in some cases so mystical that they were believed to be beyond any practical value. Additionally, another twenty supporting documents were removed, held in reserve for privileged researchers and select scholars. The remaining books were condensed and rearranged, to give them greater meaning and make them more accessible to the common reader. Each of these decisions contributed to further confusing the mystery of our purpose, possibilities, and relationship to one another. Following the accomplishment of their task, the council produced a single document in A.D. 325. The result of their labor remains with us as perhaps one of the most controversial texts of sacred history. It is known today as the Holy Bible.

Simplicity is important because it enables locality. Locality in our code is what keeps systems loosely coupled, enabling us to deliver features faster. Teams can quickly and independently develop, test, and deploy value to customers. Locality in our organizations allows teams to make decisions without having to communicate and coordinate with people outside the team, potentially having to get approvals from distant authorities or committees so far removed from the work that they have no relevant basis to make good decisions,” he says, clearly disgusted.

Locality in our organizations allows teams to make decisions without having to communicate and coordinate with people outside the team, potentially having to get approvals from distant authorities or committees so far removed from the work that they have no relevant basis to make good decisions,” he says, clearly disgusted.

Bethmann expressed concern for unity and exhorted the deputies to "be unanimous" in their decisions. "We shall be unanimous, Excellency," a spokesman for the Liberals replied obediently. The all-knowing Erzberger who, as rapporteur of the Military Affairs Committee and a close associate of the Chancellor, was considered to have his ear to Olympus, bustled among his fellow deputies assuring them that the Serbs would be beaten "by this time next Monday" and that everything was going well.

It was the Lenin of kto kogo? As Stalin put it in his speech to the Central Committee plenum of April 1929, when he branded Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky as the leaders of the “Right deviation” in the party, “The situation is that we live according to Lenin’s formula of ‘kto kogo’: either we shall pin them, the capitalists, to the ground and give them, as Lenin expressed it, final decisive battle, or they will pin our shoulders to the ground.

Abedin was a subject of interest for the House Benghazi Committee, and, separately, for Iowa senator Chuck Grassley. He was investigating the work she’d done for Teneo, an international consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s longtime consigliere, Doug Band, when she was on the State Department payroll. Grassley thought that was a major conflict of interest, and even some of Hillary’s advisers privately agreed. Having Abedin serve as Hillary’s traveling aide was one thing, but giving her the title of vice chair and allowing her to expand her portfolio into major campaign decisions made little sense.

1995, the firm revamped its governance structure, forming two new eighteen-person decision-making groups: the partnership committee and the operating committee. The operating committee focused on coordination of strategy and operations among the firm’s departments, divisions, and geographies. The partnership committee oversaw the firm’s capital structure as well as the selection of partners.

U.S. Senate, Connie Mack, once complained to us: We never have more than two and a half uninterrupted minutes for anything on Capitol Hill. There’s no time to stop and think or to have anything approaching an intellectual conversation.… We have to spend two thirds of our time doing public relations, campaigning or raising campaign funds. I’m on this committee, that task force, the other working group, and who knows what else. Do you think I can possibly know enough to make intelligent decisions about all the different things I’m supposed to know about? It’s impossible. There’s no time. So my staff makes more and more decisions.

His personal approach was modest, direct, simple; his analysis of problems was exceptionally clear. His technique for sizing up group opinion dates from his early days. 'I recall him well,' a veteran Bolshevik told me, 'a quiet youth who sat at the edge of the committee, saying little and listening much. Towards the end, he would make a comment, perhaps only as a question. Gradually, we came to see that he summed up the best of our joint thinking.' This description will be recognized by anyone who ever sat in a discussion with Stalin. It explains how he kept his majority, for he sized up the majority before he laid down 'the line.' Thus, his mind was not that of a despot, who believes that orders can operate against the majority will. But neither was it that of the passive democrat, who awaits the vote and accepts it as final. Stalin knew that majority support is essential to sound political action; but he also knew how majorities are made. He first probed the thought of a group and then with his own words swung the decision as far as he could get the majority to go.

Hotel industry veteran Ajit B. Kerkar was a member of the Air-India board, and sat on the sub-committee that decided to disinvest hotels owned by its subsidiary, Hotel Corporation of India. A day after the divestment decision was taken, Kerkar exited the board, only to return as a buyer. A company promoted by him bought it, and then re-sold it within a few years at a significant premium. That, in a nutshell, is how divestment has played out in India.

In a bureaucracy, every new challenge spawns a new fiefdom, usually headed by a CxO. Today, it’s not unusual for a company to have a chief compliance officer, chief digital officer, chief diversity officer, chief environmental officer, chief transformation officer, and more. Every freshly minted CxO will set up new committees, issue new policies, and demand the collection of new data. There will be more check-ins and sign-offs, more turf battles, and more cooks in the kitchen. The result: more overhead, less accountability, and ever-longer decision cycles.

I’m an extrovert, through and through, and a deeply loyal person. Because of those two qualities, I’ve made most of my biggest decisions by committee, choosing to believe that the people I love most will advise me well, and that their wisdom will prevail. That has been immensely helpful for so many decisions. And yet. This last round of decisions have been made in silence and solitude, and that’s been necessary and healing and challenging. I’ve wanted the committee, and at the same time, I’ve sensed that there are some seasons in which the only way through is alone, a solitary path of listening and learning. This is uncomfortable for me, and I’ve yearned to gather around my people at every point, for familiarity and safety. There are, though, certain passages you have to walk alone. When you arrive on the other side, the people you love most will be there to meet you, certainly, to wrap their arms around you and walk closely with you once again. But it’s only when we’re truly alone that we can listen to our lives and God’s voice speaking out from the silence. These last months have required more silence than any other season in my life. I’ve both craved it and avoided it, in equal turns, and finally realized that the craving is something to listen to, something to obey. These days I’m pursuing regular intervals of silence and solitude. It’s almost like training wheels, or like a cast. I’m so unfamiliar with listening deeply to my own life and desires that I can only do it in the context and confines of silence—I lose track of my own voice in a crowd very easily. In seasons of deep transformation, silence will be your greatest guide. Even if it’s scary, especially if it’s scary, let silence be your anchor, your sacred space, your dwelling place. It’s where you will become used to your own voice, your agency, your authority. It’s where you will nurture that fledgling sense of authority, like a newborn deer on spindly fragile legs. Silence will become the incubator for your newfound spirit, keeping it safe, growing it steadily. For the first time in my life, it’s when I’m alone and quiet that I feel my strength. I need more and more of it than I ever have, like a vitamin, like a safe house.

Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

In the 1950s, Harry became aware that an extremely important member of Congress was a heroin addict. “He headed one of the powerful9 committees of Congress,” he wrote. “His decisions and statements helped to shape and direct the destiny of the United States and the free world.” Harry went to this man in the corridors of Washington, D.C., and told him sternly he must stop using the drug. “I wouldn’t try to do anything about it, Commissioner,” replied the legislator. “It will be the worse for you.” He would go to the gangsters to get it whatever Harry did, “and if it winds up in a public scandal and that should hurt this country, I wouldn’t care . . . The choice is yours.”10 All over America, Anslinger had cut off legal avenues to drugs and forced addicts to go to gangsters for a filthy supply. But he had always pictured it being done to the “unstable, emotional, hysterical,11 degenerate, mentally deficient and vicious classes.” Now, before Harry, there was a man he respected, and he was an addict. So he assured the legislator that there would be a safe, legal supply for him at a Washington, D.C., pharmacy so he would never have to go to the gangsters or go without. The bureau even picked up the tab until the day the congressman died. A journalist uncovered the story and was about to break it. Harry told him that if he published a word, Harry would have him sent to prison for two years. He smothered the story.12 Years

It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent.

Colonel Jiang Shi hated politicians. Few possessed analytic minds. Fewer still understood the tenets of warfare. It was why he had wanted the politicians kept out of it. But the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee was the supreme decision-making body of the Chinese Communist Party. Nothing in China was done without their permission. Shi had been left with little choice, especially when his superiors secured an invitation from the General Secretary for him to make the presentation himself. Depending on whom you asked, the meeting had either been a success or an utter disaster. Shi believed it fell in the latter camp.

Overthinking numbs our instincts and turns what should be a quick decision into a mental committee meeting.

The State Defence Committee adopted some 10,000 resolutions and decisions of a military and economic nature during the war. All of them were carried out with precision and energy. They gave the start to assiduous work, assuring a single Party line in the country’s administration during that rigorous and arduous time.

Having clear decision rules saves heartburn later.

Hindsight is always superior to foresight. When the accident investigation committee reviews the event that contributed to the problem, they know what actually happened, so it is easy for them to pick out which information was relevant, which was not. This is retrospective decision making. But when the incident was taking place, the people were probably overwhelmed with far too much irrelevant information and probably not a lot of relevant information. How were they to know which to attend to and which to ignore? Most of the time, experienced operators get things right. The one time they fail, the retrospective analysis is apt to condemn them for missing the obvious. Well, during the event, nothing may be obvious. I return to this topic later in the chapter.

There are essentially three ways for a product manager to work, and I argue only one of them leads to success: The product manager can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO. In this model, the product manager is really a backlog administrator. Lots of CEOs tell me this is the model they find themselves in, and it's not scaling. If you think the product manager job is what's described in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class, you almost certainly fall into this category. The product manager can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then let them fight it out. This is design by committee, and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. In this model, very common in large companies, the product manager is really a roadmap administrator. The product manager can do his or her job. The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. My intention in this book is to convince you of this third way of working. It will take me the entire book to describe how the strong product manager does his or her job, but let me just say for now that this is a very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths.

When you're married, you are a part of a vast decision making body. Before anything is accomplished, there's got to be meetings, committees have to study the situation.

The importance of the role of the plan sponsor cannot be emphasized enough. The decisions made at this level can significantly add to or subtract from pension and investment assets.

The problems of the 1960s were not simply a case of history repeating itself from the racial discrimination in Boston of black students in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When such racial discrimination became illegal in 1855, public officials complied, and black and white students were able to attend class together. That state law is still valid. However, the 1855 state statute and the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education were both insufficient to deter Boston’s bigoted School Committee in the mid-twentieth century.

But we will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed medium-sized and large businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level. Charlie and I will limit ourselves to allocating capital, controlling enterprise risk, choosing managers and setting their compensation.

Fans who had only just seen the team win the 2015 World Cup probably weren’t aware of what the players had been through in the past—boycotting games to earn comparable pay to the men, threatening to retire in the face of a lawsuit, asking the U.S. Olympic Committee to intervene, and so on. These sorts of battles were built into the DNA of the team. Their drive to win and their drive to stand up for themselves seemed to go hand in hand. For Lloyd, the appearance on the Today show and the public decision to file the EEOC claim gave the players a chance to help people understand that this sort of substandard treatment was the reality of the women’s national team. She laments that some people mistook the players’ stance as fighting against the men’s team itself, but she says it shined a light on the issues confronting the women’s team. “A lot of people didn’t realize the history of this team and what we’ve had to fight for,” Lloyd says. “When I first joined the team in 2005, they were fighting for salaries, healthcare, pregnancy leave—basic stuff.” Like many American women, the players had their own struggles with equal pay, fair treatment, maternity leave, and other issues that are as endemic in the United States as they are disheartening. As it turned out, even World Cup champions faced the same challenges as other women.

That, too. But there’s more. The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices.” “Acceptable choices?” “They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems.” “But don’t they sometimes need more information to make . . .” “A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors.” “And good administrators?” “Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.

Some readers—and many who haven’t read the book—argue that I have talked too much out of school, and by exposing the behind-the-scenes machinations of a church and its search committee, I have disclosed too many secrets, certainly more than the average credulous churchgoer cares to know. I believe that the more the average credulous churchgoer knows, the more responsible their decisions will be when choosing a leader. The health and future of their institution depend on it. A church is a human structure. We build it and inhabit it, and immediately stories and secrets abound within. It is my hope that the stories and secrets related in these pages continue to entertain and, with luck, enlighten.

When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things. For clients of mine who are institutional investors, I have suggested that type of strategy as a way to improve their sell-side decisions. Have the committee approving what to buy be different from the committee approving what and when to sell.

In 1970 the Quakers released a slim book entitled “Who Shall Live? Man’s Control over Birth and Death: A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee” which was the result of a decision which the Family Planning Committee of the AFSC reached in December 1966 “to explore the issues involved in abortion.” That meeting in turn flowed from the November 1966 meeting that the AFSC had had with Planned Parenthood, and that meeting resulted from the setback the Quaker and Episcopalian forces for sexual liberation and eugenics in Philadelphia had suffered at the hands of Martin Mullen, when the governor capitulated to his demands and backed away from state-promoted birth control in August of the same year. As a result of their meeting with Planned Parenthood, the Quakers decided to “make a study of the availability of family planning services for medically indigent families in the city and to form an estimate as to the extent of the unmet need for such services. “Who Shall Live” was the fruit of this labor. “Who Shall Live?” is a graphic example of moral theology in the Quaker mode. It begins by announcing that “for 300 years members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have been seekers after the truth” and concludes by admitting that they have been so far unsuccessful in their efforts. Where once people like Fox and Penn “thought of himself as created only a few thousand years ago,” the enlightened Quakers who wrote birth-control tracts in the 1960s “now know he is part of an evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years. In that process he has arrived at a stage of knowledge and technology whereby he himself has the power, at least in part, to determine the direction in which he will evolve in the future.” Having decided that their religious forebears were wrong on just about everything because they didn’t understand science, the 1970 Quakers then give some sense of their own grasp of science as it applies to population issues. Looking at the world from outer space in 1968, the Quakers found it “incredible that 3.5 billion people should be living on that small spinning planet.” Taking their cue from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” the Quakers concluded quite logically that if the planet cannot sustain 3.5 billion people in 1968, then it certainly couldn’t sustain 6 billion people in the year 2000. Unless drastic population-control measures are introduced immediately, dire consequences will follow. “Lamont C. Cole, who is a Professor of Ecology warns that we may one day find ourselves short of breathable air,” the Quakers announced breathlessly.

To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.

The ethnics caught up in the racial struggies oi the post-war period in Chicago were in the unenviable position of people who had the rules changed on them in mid-game. The Poles who settled Calumet Park as Sobieski Park had created their neighborhood enclaves under certain assumptions, all of which got changed when the environmentalist East Coast WASP internationalist establishment took power in 1941. Not only hadn’t they been informed of the rule change, they were doubly vulnerable because compared to their opponents who were further along on the scale of assimilation, they didn’t have a clear sense of themselves as Poles or Catholics or Americans or “white” people. They also feared the sexual mores of the invading black hordes but could not articulate this fear in polite language. As a result, each attempt to explain their position drove them further beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. More often than not, the only people who were articulating their position were the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee agents sent into their neighborhoods to spy on them. One AFSC spy reported that fear of intermarriage “caused the intensity of feelings” in Trumbull Park.* Black attempts to use the community swimming pool were similarly seen in a sexual light. The ACLU agent who was paid to infiltrate bars in South Deering reported that the real motivation behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision mandating desegregation of Southern schools, was to move “niggers into every neighborhood” to intermarry and thereby send the “whole white race . . . downhill.” Deprived of their ethnic designation as Catholic by a Church that was either hostile (as in the case of Catholic intellectuals) or indifferent (as in the case of the bishops and their chancery officials), Chicago ethnics, attempting to be good Americans, chose to become “white” instead, a transformation that not only guaranteed that they would lose their battle in the court of public opinion, but one which also guaranteed that they would go out of existence as well, through the very assimilation process being proposed by their enemies.

In the early ’60’s a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide. But previous training got the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee.

He stopped, because the door had swung open to allow the ingress of a reinforced, heavy-duty tea trolley. Since it was not being propelled by Her, the wizards paid no further attention and settled down to the passing of cups, the handing round of the sugar bowl, the inspection of the quality of the chocolate biscuits with a view to taking more than one’s entitlement and all the other little diversions without which a committee would be a clever device for making worthwhile decisions quickly.

In a survey of 161 global business decision makers shown in Figure 2-6, only 24% of respondents reported using an economic model to make investment decisions in products and services. Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.

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One secret in Yale’s success has been David Swensen’s ability to engage the committee in governance—and not in investment management. Contributing factors include: selection of committee members who are experienced, hard-working, and personally agreeable; extensive documentation of the due diligence devoted to preparing each investment decision; and full agreement on the evidence and reasoning behind the policy framework within which individual investment decisions will be made.

When in the natural course of human affairs, the leaders of the nations of the earth fail in their duty to; Protect the dignity of its inhabitants, Preserve the health of the environment, Prevent the over accumulation of wealth to the elite and, Provide the necessary means to settle disputes among nations. Then it becomes incumbent upon the peoples of the earth to take as their right, a greater part in the governing of their respective jurisdictions. The main purpose of government is to ensure the natural rights of all people in this generation and the generations that follow, in order to provide, but not limited to, an equal opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are not the sole rights of any country, group, or person, and when a leader, body, or committee takes for themselves a greater share in order to deprive another group, person, or generation, then by necessity the people shall assemble and overturn any decision or policy that is proven to be inequitable. Our Creator has provided a guideline for the laws governing the affairs of men. The summary of which would be the outward expression of earnest affection for your Creator and your neighbor. Bearing one another's burden as a reasonable service. These leading to a lasting peace between all men. Natural law has provided a clear example of fair and balanced systems in the natural world. Any system of government should be modeled around the premise that the fitness of the system requires balance at every level of the hierarchy. With no concentration of power above that which is necessary to provide reasonable service to the community, and no allocation of resources beyond that which is necessary to the sustainable balance of any particular part of the system. With great care and attention given to preserving an efficient and effective bureaucracy that is never allowed to grow without meaningful oversight, designed to prevent the corruption and waste that plagues most forms of government.

While redistricting committees are often encouraged to avoid splitting communities of interest, rarely are workable definitions provided to define what constitutes a community of interest. As we saw in chapter 3, if the community of interest is defined in racial or ethnic terms, then the Voting Rights Act provided the basis for a challenge. One major case dealt with alternative communities of interest. Hasidic Jews in New York City went to court when the legislature split the one district from which they had been able to elect their preference in order to create a majority-black district.17 The Supreme Court upheld the decision by the New York legislature to draw a heavily African American district even though that eliminated the prospects for the Hasidic Jewish community. The Court reasoned that the legislature appropriately gave precedence to black concerns since the Voting Rights Act specifically addressed the

In principle, the document stated that selection should be carried out in any country where it was actually possible to select candidates. The countries explicitly listed were Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, Persia, India, and the countries of Central and Western Europe. The cases of rescue Aliyah that would be determined by the Coordination Committee were explicitly excluded.124 The class component of selection was clearly present in the decision to also exempt “people with means” (baalei emtzaim), and implicit in the choice not to include the Americas in the list of regions where selection would be implemented in order not to deter the “handful of Jews who would be interested in making Aliyah from there,” as Levi Eshkol put it.

He announced that from now on the Sunday-morning Meetings would come to an end. They were unnecessary, he said, and wasted time. In future all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself. These would meet in private and afterwards communicate their decisions to the others. The animals would still assemble on Sunday mornings to salute the flag, sing ‘Beasts of England’, and receive their orders for the week;

In order to think through the decision, he engaged in a Quaker practice that involves a body called a clearness committee. The committee is a group of peers who simply pose questions and allow the person to come to their own conclusions.

We’ve looked at over a dozen policies and processes that most companies have but that we don’t have at Netflix. These include: Vacation Policies Decision-Making Approvals Expense Policies Performance Improvement Plans Approval Processes Raise Pools Key Performance Indicators Management by Objective Travel Policies Decision Making by Committee Contract Sign-Offs Salary Bands Pay Grades Pay-Per-Performance Bonuses These are all ways of controlling people rather than inspiring them. It’s not easy to avoid chaos and anarchy as you remove these controls, but if you develop every employee’s sense of self-discipline and responsibility, help them develop enough knowledge to make good decisions, and develop a feedback culture to stimulate learning, you’ll be amazed at how effective your organization can be.

both the Presidential Commission and the House Committee fully agreed on one point: “Neither NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident.”132 Commissioner Feynman observed, “The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood . . . officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the ‘success’ of previous flights.”133 Only in the wake of the tragedy was it clear they had not understood. At the end of 1985, they believed they did.

When choosing committees, look for opportunities that will help you level up as opposed to volunteering for the sake of volunteering. Ultimately, what I am involved in today either fulfills me personally, or it fulfills a strategic objective. Try everything once and then whittle down your list by evaluating afterwards with these questions: - Did I meet the people I wanted to meet? - Did it help me meet people who have influence? - Will it bring me visibility? - Will it get me decision-making power or a seat at a table I wouldn't normally get a seat at? - Is it worth attending again? It wasn't long after I started prioritizing networking that people began to notice that i was looped in. When people came to me with their work issues, I either had the answers to their questions, or I knew exactly where to send them. Since I had networked across all levels within my company, I was in a unique position to be helpful up and down the org chart.

Gentlemen, I do not trust committees. In the face of a need for urgent decision, they are often extraordinarily clumsy. I suspect that in such endeavors secrecy may sometimes be necessary, and that such a committee could not be relied upon to maintain such secrecy.