POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good. Joline Godfrey. HamerBusiness, $20. Body and Soul. Anita Roddick. Crown, $22. In Our Wildest...
...Falco ultimately rejects legalization on the grounds that it would substantially increase the number of drugs users—a conclusion that most Americans accept without question...
...Some of them may be playing on the television in your living room right this minute...
...Anderson, a magazine reporter who has spent most of his career torturing his family, friends, and insurance company with his travels in strange and dangerous places, profiles five guerrilla groups...
...After such hair-raising research it seems petty to quibble...
...She has found that "underdog" campaigners work "doggedly" while frontrunners "persuade," "appeal," and "stride...
...The campaign has been an illuminating experience for us all...
...None of this, she makes clear, means these business owners are patsies...
...The role of groups like the Democratic Leadership Council has been figuring out how to defuse various Republican-zapping techniques and win back the white middle-class voter...
...In the 15 years I have been involved in the world of business it has taught me nothing...
...While the Godfrey-Helgesen view can be overdone, it has merit and is worth exploring...
...One, the Salvadoran FMLN, he got to know well after years of living in El Salvador...
...Her doing good has included well-publicized campaigns aimed at saving the rain forests and working with Amnesty International...
...Godfrey tells us that she intended to write a "gender-neutral" book but couldn't...
...To cite just one of a hundred possible examples, Selznick wants government "to adopt postbureaucratic modes of organization" but also believes (rightly) that "it would he a mistake to pursue a fantasy of government without bureaucracy...
...He offers little commentary or interpretation of his own...
...She is an unabashed champion of the entrepreneur, a female George Gilder who can't understand why women—or men— would waste their time with lumbering, stumbling giant corporations...
...I cringed—and vowed not to put it in my story...
...Patsies...
...I have met no corporate executive who values labor and who exhibits a sense of joy, magic or theater...
...By what must be coincidence, The Moral Commonwealth traffics in virtually all the themes of the Clinton campaign, ending with a glorification of the term "covenant" that recalls Clinton's nomination acceptance speech in New York...
...So far this year, political reporters have discussed whether Bill Clinton had an affair with a onetime television broadcaster, whether he dodged the draft, and whether his wife knows how to bake cookies...
...Of course, this is unfair...
...They have debated Vice President Dan Quayle's spelling abilities, examined the kind of cars Pat Buchanan drives (one Cadillac, one Mercedes), and whether Jerry Brown gets an allowance from his parents (sort of...
...There's the deficit...
...Tom Peters Guerrillas: The Men and Women Fighting Today's Wars...
...Kathleen Hall Jamieson...
...There is so much ignorance in top management and boards of directors: All the big companies seem to be led by accountants and lawyers and become moribund carbon-copy versions of each other...
...Odd how banks are willing to give women credit cards but still find it a leap to give them a business loan...
...Salvadoran women pat tortillas...
...Yet she also reminds those among us for whom the history of dirty politics began in the 1984 presidential campaign that a century ago Harper's Weekly listed some descriptions that were offered up of Abraham Lincoln...
...Roddick would doubtless applaud...
...We finally mastered the ways of business," they say, "and now you're pushing us to acknowledge ideas that the old-boy network calls flaky...
...And so do my counterparts —women who founded and run their own companies...
...But that couldn't happen now—could it...
...I remember being on Gary Hart's campaign plane in 1984 and watching him lean over my laptop...
...Her barebones principles of doing business: First, you have to have fun...
...The facts: There are between 4.1 and 5.4 million women-owned businesses in the United States, depending on how you do your counting (the higher figure is the most plausible...
...In Our Wildest Dreams, entrepreneur and champion of women entrepreneurs Joline Godfrey tells us that there are as many women-owned businesses in the United States as there are people in Norway...
...Most see a clear bottom-line payoff from attending to such issues...
...This is a pretty discouraging landscape...
...Within certain limits, this strategy is not without merit: As Falco demonstrates, forming community coalitions, organizing nightly citizen's patrols, and trying novel municipal approaches—such as using local housing codes to shut down crack houses—are more likely to make a dent in neighborhood drug markets and street dealing than indiscriminate police sweeps and stagedforthe-media drug busts...
...Selznick surely couldn't care less about the really pressing issues, like who gets the office in the southwest corner of the West Wing...
...Perhaps draconian policies that result in the incarceration of a substantial portion of the African-American population might be justified if they could be shown to have actually accomplished something...
...Falco proposes an alternative strategy that de-emphasizes law enforcement and interdiction and relies instead on education, treatment, and community-oriented programs that tap the resourcefulness and creativity of ordinary citizens living in drug-infested neighborhoods...
...I was an idiot," she now claims), offers Wildest Dreams as an unabashed celebration of women entrepreneurs...
...I can see their point, though I disagree with it...
...Mike Dukakis fumbles a toss with Red Sox centerfielder Ellis Burks, and it instantly becomes a symbol of a fumbling campaign...
...The whole sense of fun is lost, the whole sense of play, of derring-do, of 'Oh God we screwed that one up.' " Godfrey devotes a whole chapter to fun and play ("Fun is not frivolous...
...It's one of those statistically meaningless comparisons that nonetheless startles...
...At least 26 million Americans used illicit drugs last year, and media and government propaganda notwithstanding, most of them did relatively little damage to society or themselves...
...One of the pleasures of Mickey Kaus' The End of Equality is that it presents a centrist program using extremist rhetoric...
...I write this when there is still a chance that Bill Clinton will not win the presidential election, though it looks pretty close to a sure thing...
...The federal government's war on drugs has more than doubled the nation's prison population to 1.1 million, giving the United States the world's highest rate of incarceration...
...politics has deteriorated as an art form in recent years and how that deterioration has not only eroded the public debate but corroded the quality of life for all of us outside the television studio...
...They certainly won't work until these larger problems of the underclass are tackled with the same zeal and determination with which we currently enforce the drug laws...
...Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks she knows...
...What an indictment...
...The fate of the environment...
...The statistics are important, but Godfrey's treatise is anything but a dry recitation of economic facts...
...It's a question that strikes close to home, because it's often been asked about this magazine as well...
...Despite the last comment (and there are a few such jabs peppered throughout the book), Godfrey never becomes cynical—except when it comes to the Fortune 500...
...There is Jesse Helms' ridiculing of Jim Hunt's lack of a war record...
...The men do calisthenics and recite hymns of praise to the appropriate deities, be they Che, Allah, or Polisario martyr Luali...
...The truth is that the Cold War had ended by then, an eventuality that Bush could not have foreseen...
...Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else...
...to a "Washington read" by mining it for potential clues about the new administration...
...The philosophical moderates are obsessed with a different but complementary issue—the excessive individualism of contemporary American culture...
...Is it realistic to keep talking about a "drugfree" America...
...A major culprit, she says, is network news, which by its nature removes the complexity from politics, largely through the use of soundbites...
...I don't wear Brooks Brothers suits...
...Like water on a rock," she says, "womenowned businesses are eroding timehardened beliefs about the way business is and must be done...
...I get some of my best ideas while outside the workspace...
...it is essential, play is imperative...
...How else, she asks, do you engender cre-ativity and adaptability...
...I don't own an HP calculator (although my business partner does...
...It would be quite easy for a sitting politician to adopt Selznick's exquisitely modulated views and then, sincerely believing he was being faithful to them, deal with every issue simply by splitting the difference...
...Second, you have to put love where your labor is [an acknowledged steal from Ralph Waldo Emerson...
...It fails to make the guerrillas into real people...
...Governmental policies aimed at producing a "drug-free" society pursue an illusory goal at best...
...Just how high...
...After all, my 1987 book was called Thriving on Chaos, and as Godfrey, Helgesen, and others point out, women more than men are masters of that—their lives, at home and at work, are invariably jugglers' lives...
...It is rarely reported that, according to the official federal estimate, about 20 million of those drug users were consumers of marijuana, a substance that, whatever its long-term health effects, is generally viewed as less addictive and less dangerous than the more widely consumed legal drug alcohol...
...It has also produced a social and demographic catastrophe in the inner city...
...One cannot fault Anderson's enthusiasm...
...Or at least it startled me...
...There is Republican Bernard Epton's false radio charges that Harold Washington was a "convicted felon" who had been "disbarred" from the practice of law...
...If the concept of a dense, erudite, 538-page treatise on social theory that is timely isn't a hopeless contradiction in terms, then Philip Selznick's The Moral Commonwealth is timely...
...Those Americans horrified by recent Serbian attempts at "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans would do well to contemplate the consequences of our own efforts to cleanse the nation of illicit pharmaceuticals...
...But that may start to change...
...This was predictable, but Anderson does not predict it...
...Instead of a few main characters, Anderson presents dozens, and they blur together...
...and with this book she makes them visible...
...This adds to its strange feeling of compatibility with the Clinton campaign...
...I laugh, a lot...
...Dan Rather and others, for example, spoke of the "revolving door" of justice in Michael Dukakis' Massachusetts--a phrase right out of the ads that made Willie Horton a household name...
...On the contrary, half the book is devoted to case studies of women entrepreneurs— owners of trucking, marketing, construction, and computer companies and even one "upscale, fresh-flower mail order business...
...While I think she overstates it, I'd be among the first to acknowledge that it's a question well worth asking...
...Examining the Republicans' bumbling campaign from the vantage of this fall, it's hard to imagine that the party was once so deft, but Jamieson shows us how the 1988 campaign managed to capture not only the offensive in the election struggle, but create its vocabulary as well...
...Many of the consistent themes and phrases that resonate in this book also resonated in Clinton's message: "responsibility," "obligation," "empowerment...
...The Moral Commonwealth does not present a hard, gem-like line of argument...
...A soon-to-be-released study by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives found that in Duval County, Florida, which includes the city of Jacksonville, 78 percent of black men between the ages of 18 and 35 have spent time in prison or jail...
...Roddick is a champion of passion's role in business, and fervently believes that doing good can result in doing well...
...There is Democrat Ed Garvey's charge that GOP Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin drank on the job...
...Still, he is openly working in a vein of moderate-liberal political thought that extends back about 15 years and includes the writing of figures like Amitai Etzioni and Robert Bellah...
...If there is excitement and adventure in their lives, it is contained in the figures on the profit and loss sheet...
...the reader never knows if any of these groups have won Anderson's sympathy...
...He is consistently wise and thoughtful...
...She's clear about what she's about, subscribing to a "loosely structured, collaborative, imaginative, and improvisatory management style, rather than doing things by the book...
...One engine of individualism is capitalism, but another is a certain kind of political liberalism, the kind that emphasizes the protection of an ever-expanding array of legal rights as the highest purpose of government...
...I cry...
...Of course, analysts such as Jamieson predictably chant that mantra every four years...
...Jamieson criticizes Bush for ridiculing Dukakis, who opposed the MX and Midgetman, only to turn around and advocate their elimination himself in October 1991...
...These could not possibly be dull fellows, but most seem like it here...
...How did we get here...
...The shape of the new world order...
...The youngest Afghan boys spend hours cleaning their Kalashnikovs...
...They include: filthy story-teller, ignoramus Abe...
...The first Body Shop opened in 1976 (the first day's take from the Kensington Garden Shop was ?130), and, in a mercilessly competitive industry, it's now grown to more than 794 shops worldwide, with an early 1992 stock market valuation of about $1 billion...
...and they are more thoughtful about integrating their entrepreneurial visions with business ethics...
...And there are moments when this book is unmistakably academic, such as the paragraph that begins: "Before valorizing argumentatively based differentiation, engagement, and accountability as criteria to which campaign discourse should aspire, let me note one strong tendency in contemporary discourse that runs counter to engagement...
...Sometimes, I start late...
...Michael Isikoff Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy...
...Regarding the latter, since Anderson left Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin, freed from the necessity to shoot at Communists, began to turn their rocket launchers on each other...
...And he does offer some insights, such as the depth of the young Palestinians' hatred for the Israelis...
...Roddick, who claims that "a great advantage I had when I started the Body Shop was that I had never been to business school," is as disparaging as Godfrey about big business: For me there are no modern-day heroes in the business world...
...Yet even the most "successful" rehabilitation programs have staggeringly high failure rates...
...Jamieson also shows how the language, forms, and norms of political coverage have their own problems...
...University of California, $40...
...Her answer, in part: Television stinks...
...This philosophical movement has interacted quite energetically with a moderate-liberal political movement that started at about the same time, of which Clinton has always been a leader...
...It would seem that all parties concerned would wish that the lengthy labors of the politicians and the philosophers come to fruition simultaneously...
...She goes on to enumerate some of the ways that women's businesses are different from men's (though she acknowledges many differences among women's businesses...
...For example: when to give up a futile fight and turn to politics, or the longterm effects of wartime brutality...
...These days, it's not the missile gap but the marriage gap—those years when, according to the sober testimony of the governor of Arkansas and his wife, the Clintons had the "marriage difficulties" that have prompted so much panting...
...In this smart book, the power of ads to shape news is a major theme...
...If companies are in business solely to make money, you can't fully trust whatever else they do or say...
...First-generation women in management, like it or not, had to master the intricacies of the National Football League's 3-4 defenses and baseball's sacrifice fly rule in order to gain acceptance...
...But he suffers somewhat from the eternal curse of the moderates: a tendency to call for a balanced approach...
...But more than one reporter couldn't resist seizing on it...
...She adds that, "For us the business of business is to keep the company alive and breathlessly excited, to protect the workforce, to be a force for good in our society and, then, after all that, to think of the speculators...
...rather, it covers an enormous amount of ground in the form of a long series of linked essays...
...Soap opera is infinitely preferable to policy debate as an entertainment form...
...But Falco fails to subject some of her proposals to the same rigor with which she scrutinizes current policies...
...For instance, Jamieson tells us that in the last two elections, "oppositional ads" were aired earlier than ever before, that spending on such advertising is increasing, and that devastating assertions, no matter how untrue, are hard to shake...
...The way women owners must scramble for money to even start a business calls for the most extraordinary effort and ingenuity...
...This was also journalist Sally Helgesen's point in her 1990 The Female Advantage: Women's Ways of Leadership, a meticulously reported book about life on the job for four female leaders, including Girl Scout chief Frances Hesselbein...
...Selznick, if read as a kind of philosopher-surrogate for Clinton, doesn't completely lay the matter to rest...
...In the preface, Smith and Hawken founder and author Paul Hawken flatly declares that "women's businesses are pivotal to meaningful change" in a corporate America that he sees as gone awry...
...Only a spoilsport, or perhaps one of those lonely souls who have been dispatched to write about the "issues," would dare utter a discouraging word and suggest: This election is important...
...he's trying to synthesize a political philosophy for the long term, not plot legislative strategy...
...But her latest book is a reasoned explanation of how U.S...
...The others he visited: the Afghan Mujaheddin, the Polisario fighting Morocco to liberate a strip of the Western Sahara, the ethnic Karen guerrillas in their 40-year battle with Burma (now officially Myanmar) for their independence, and Palestinians in the Breij refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied Gaza strip...
...Ultimately, though, the book is unsatisfying...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good...
...The twin ideas of love and care touch everything we do," she writes...
...Jamieson complains, with some justification, that "campaigns have become narcotics that blur out our awareness of problems long enough to elect the lawmakers who must deal with them...
...He presents, without comment, stories of guerrillas killing civilians and summarily executing suspected spies...
...I don't look like I have "the right stuff," but I do...
...Then there are the metaphors...
...Anderson's account would have benefitted from more context and perspective— explaining why, as Polish dissident Adam Michnik said, "those who begin by storming the Bastilles end up by building their own...
...Last spring I was traveling with Paul Tsongas when his jetliner got stuck in the mud in Chicago...
...Like many commentators, Jamieson finds the 1988 election, and particularly the conduct of George Bush and his acolytes, especially offensive...
...The truth is that, in forthcoming editions of this book, there will be more examples of lies and exaggerations shaping American political history...
...Of course, the cuestion about Clinton has always been whether he actually has a coherent, cohesive view of governance or just a long series of interesting but unrelated opinions...
...Jon Lee Anderson...
...Women owners are still invisible," she writes...
...I touch people...
...But the new generation of women managers—and women business owners—is at the point where it can take its own strengths seriously and straight to the bank...
...Anderson does write well, and his descriptions of scenery are especially vivid...
...As he strained to see my lede, he began ridiculing the narrow perspective of us ink-stained wretches by parodying the stories he knew we were writing: "Gary Hart, struggling to reinvigorate his lagging campaign," the candidate said, half angry and half bemused—and probably more than half right...
...The structure of emerging trade patterns...
...old scoundrel, butcher, and (my favorite) "a long, lean, lank, lantern-jawed, high cheek-boned, spavined, rail-splitting stallion...
...That "what" is a virtual carbon copy of Godfrey's analysis: more attention to business ethics, new emphasis on relationship development, and a sense of caring and artistry...
...The soundbite tells a voter what a candidate believes, but not how he or she arrived at that conclusion or conviction...
...What business needs now," Helgesen claims at one point, "is exactly what women are able to provide...
...Yet today, most of this takes place among the inner-city poor, where the drug culture is an inevitable outgrowth of high unemployment, dilapidated public housing, schools that don't teach, and a welfare system that breaks up families and encourages indolence...
...His main points—that guerrillas are willing to sacrifice themselves, that they justify violence in the names of their causes, and that they invent their own worlds with their own gods—are not particularly profound ones...
...Personal proof: It is the single book that I choose to give young women—and men—thinking about a career in business...
...Godfrey, a 10-year veteran of Polaroid before starting her own firm in 1986 (at one point she thought she could make a difference in a big corporation...
...But ultimately, this earnest, wellmeaning tome suffers from the conceptual flaws inherent in its title...
...I start work early—sometimes...
...And he fails to explore some of the important questions he raises...
...I talk about how I feel...
...And if it does, no one will deserve greater credit than Body Shop founder Anita Roddick...
...The reader loses count of the number of times his immediate surroundings were pounded by helicopter gunships, MiG fighter-bombers, mortars, bazookas, rockets, or just plain bullets...
...Godfrey agrees...
...I remember birthdays (most of the time...
...This volume has some small flaws...
...Some women (let alone men) bristle at the idea of women's ways of managing, and even call the notion harmful...
...It is always obvious what he believes (community) and what he doesn't (relativism...
...Nor does Anderson use his reporting to explone larger issues...
...Women-owned businesses are as statistically prevalent in construction and agribusiness as men-owned enterprises...
...Times, $22...
...Guerrillas is a very good piece of battle reporting, but it suffers from battle reporting's classic problem: It says little about the context of the war...
...Women have a greater "sense of artistry, imagination, and playfulness," Godfrey adds...
...Times, $21...
...This is in large measure the "responsible" approach to the drug problem favored by newspaper editorial writers, most Democrats (including Bill Clinton), think tanks, and foundations— one of which, Carnegie, sponsored Falco's book...
...The great obsession of the political moderates has been the Democratic party's loss of its majority status in presidential elections, beginning with the 1968 election...
...David Shribman The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community...
...Mathea Falco...
...Certainly it would be socially desirable to offer treatment to any addict who wants it...
...In fact, as Falco reminds us, drug smuggling and drugrelated homicides are more prevalent than ever while hard-core abuse of cocaine and heroin remains undiminished from levels in 1989, when President Bush stated in his one specific inaugural pledge, "Take my word for it: This scourge will stop...
...They employ as many people as the entire Fortune 500 and ring up half a trillion dollars in annual revenue...
...Fortunately there is not too much of that to fog up her interesting snapshots of the milestones on the road to Willie Horton...
...Roddick, more brazenly than Godfrey, plumps for a new way of doing business...
...More important, little of what they do is interesting or unpredictable...
...Women's businesses surged from 5 percent of all businesses in the United States in 1972 to 30 percent by 1987...
...And so the magic of the marketplace has finally wreaked its wretched sorcery on politics...
...After touting the benefits of so-called therapeutic communities such as Phoenix House (where young drug addicts spend up to two years in intensive, highly structured residential programs of psychological counseling and job training) Falco notes nearly parenthetically that "the drop-out rate is very high...
...It isn't necessarily the case, then, that the restoration of the national Democratic party (if that's what we're seeing) will mean the restoration of the kind of communitarian values that Selznick prizes...
...The next time Bush objects to being called a wimp, remind him of that barb, issued during Lincoln's reelection campaign...
...But he fails to address how such behavior shapes the kind of government they would run if given the opportunity...
...The doing well is not in question either...
...Tina Rosenberg The Making of a Drug-Free America:: Programs That Work...
...Only one in four clients remain longer than three months, while fewer than one in six complete the one- to two-year course of treatment," she states...
...Nicholas Lemann...
...In the opening chapter, titled, "The (New) Right Stuff," Godfrey begins: I am not six feet tall...
...To my mind, her Body and Soul is one of the best business books written in years by an author of either sex...
...I have met no captain of industry who's made my blood surge...
...Women, for example, are generally less concerned wiith control and put more effort into relationship development —a virtue for any manager in an emerging business environment where hierarchies are being flattened and business is being done through temporary networks rather than the old vertically integrated monster monoliths...
...Still, some things are new...
...She lost her voice, she says, and decided to write for women, though she contends (and I agree) that the book is also a useful primer for men...
...Consider the political fallout (not to mention the inevitable media expos?s) were the government to pump billions of scarce federal dollars into programs where more than 80 percent of the "patients" wind up back on drugs...
...I take time off (at least a week or two a season...
...Despite the obligatory annual articles in Fortune and Business Week on "women cracking the glass ceiling," Godfrey is right about women's lingering invisibility in business (and in business books, including, lamentably, my own...
...Political philosophies like libertarianism and communism, which call for the dial to be twisted all the way to one side, are much more intellectually compelling...
...What is indisputably a serious societal problem is the trafficking in, and hard-core abuse of, cocaine and heroin...
...Philip Selznick...
...There is Lyndon Johnson's exaggeration of his war record...
...In Dirty Politics she sets out the sad story, but one with a conclusion sure to warm the heart of any member of what used to be called, quaintly, the "pencil press...
...Godfrey cites one entrepreneur who "used 15 credit cards, each with a limit of $5,000, to raise $75,000 in startup capital...
...For one, there are too many of them...
...Oxford, $25...
...Both Godfrey and Hawken believe that women's approaches to leading and managing are harbingers of successful business practice in the years ahead...
...So it's impossible to resist subjecting Selznick's discussion of Dewey, Kant, Hume, Locke, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Weber, Freud, et al...
Vol. 24 • November 1992 • No. 11
