And Time Goes By So Slowly, And Time Can Do So Much

Late last fall, I decided to read three newly released books, all in the course of a week, to find relief from political campaigns.

Each was on a different topic but came together in a way that has crossed my mind many times since:

• The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by University of Texas professor Dr. H.W. Brands
• Klansville, U.S.A – The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan by Dr. David Cunningham of Brandeis University
• The Better Angels of Our Nature – Why Violence Has Declined by Harvard researcher and experimental psychologist Dr. Steven Pinker.

I haven’t written about them until now because a few days after I completed Steven Pinker’s book, a twenty-year-old man killed his mother and then gunned down twenty school children, mostly first graders and six elementary school officials in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

That tragic event doesn’t undermine the thesis of Pinker’s book.  He made an insightful distinction about violence in an interview last month with Rotarian magazine when he stated that:

“Violence is not a hydraulic urge, like hunger, thirst, or sexual desire that has to be discharged through one outlet or another.  It is more like shivering or jealousy – a response to particular triggers in the environment.”

My sixteen great-great grandparents were all of the same generation as U.S. Grant.  They were born during a period of great awakening but by the time they entered adulthood, the nation had begun to unravel. 

When the Civil War broke out Grant was only 39.  By the time he reached 46, he has saved the Union and been elected President of the United States.

There is evidence that profiteering during the war, e.g. black marketeers following behind Union lines to exchange gold for southern cotton which was in turn used to by the Confederacy to buy weapons and supplies.  You get the feeling from the book on Grant that he felt this extended the war by several years.

In his January essay for Our State magazine, Dr. Philip Gerard of UNC-Wilmington provides evidence that when the war turned against the South, religious leaders did not rethink their biblical rationalization of slavery, but chalked it up to God’s displeasure with merchants who were “price-gouging customers for scarce commodities.”

There are many things in Durham, North Carolina, where I have lived for nearly 25 years, that remind us of the generosity Grant and Sherman planned as the huge surrender was negotiated here to effectively end the Civil War.  But that was all reversed when interrupted by President Lincoln’s assassination.

The ink was hardy dry on documents formally ending the war when Southern apologists effectively rewrote the history of the war as one merely about state’s rights.  Many times during his two terms as President, Grant had to send troops back into Southern states to quell violence and safeguard elections.

As soldiers from both sides fraternized during the surrender in Durham, they developed a taste for tobacco that had been cured and stored here.  They wrote letters seeking more once they got home, which help launch factories that saved Durham from much – but not all - of the destitution and violence that inhabited the south after the war.

Economic opportunity here also spawned a Black Wall Street and made Durham a beacon for racial diversity, which it remains today.

When I arrived in 1989 to jumpstart the community’s destination marketing arm, my first business road trip took me eventually south on US 1 where I was stunned to see a huge NCDOT highway sign heralding a small town along the route as the home of the KKK Grand Wizard.

Within a few years Dr. Cunningham started his masters degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill just south of Durham.  His book in many respects helps me understand why that unusual highway marker was not only permitted to exist but enabled.

According to Cunningham’s research, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Klan’s stronghold was North Carolina, with more members than the rest of the South combined.

Writing and presenting editorials for a Raleigh TV station at the time, the soon-to-become Republican Senator Jesse Helms was possibly the first in that party to discover how to inflame angry white men, and by the time I moved here, his campaign commercials even in the 1990s still seemed overtly racist.

As Helms was readying his first campaign for the US Senate in Raleigh in 1971, CP (Claiborne Paul) Ellis, the head of the KKK in Durham, was joining forces with Ann Atwater, a poor African American civil rights activist, to put aside differences and improve public schools.  Their story was published a half dozen years after my arrival here.

North Carolina’s complicated journey toward racial tolerance is epitomized for me by a young North Carolinian of the same generation as U.S. Grant and my great-great grandparents by the name of Hinton Rowan Helper (shown in the image in this blog.)

He was born just off the route of what is I-40 today, about midway between Winston-Salem and Statesville and just west of Mocksville.  He was apprenticed to a printer in Salisbury and in 1857 published a book with charts and graphs showing why slavery didn’t make sense for the South as an economic institution.

His book The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It was distributed by the Republican Party as a campaign document and it branded Helper a traitor in the South.  But in the end Helper too was still a white separatist as many were at the time who disavowed slavery.

His book panicked the planter elite for fear this tiny fraction, who held power, would not only face a slave insurrection, a fear of which had spawned the Second Amendment right to bear arms, but an uprising of white yeoman farmers who opposed slavery but ultimately were destined to sacrifice the most blood in its defense.

Ironically though, the right to bear arms also ended up as a protection for free and now freed Blacks who armed themselves following the Civil War and emancipation against the continuing tyranny when following Grant’s terms as President, the Republican Party turned a blind eye to the atrocities and became solely captive to its Wall Street wing.

Today, it is the Republican Party that is more prone to try to manipulate voter rights.  In fact, it may be the Party that saved the Union that is now ironically fostering another era of unraveling which cyclical historians project will lead to another another turn of crisis such as the Civil War or WWII by my mid to late 70s.

It may have a happy ending as WWII did, or it may result in preservation of the Union but decades of unfinished business as the Civil War did.

The cycle is predictable but there are no guarantees of the outcome as time can do so much.

Infographic - Housing Back to Life

For original source, click here.

The Near Term Future of Flight

On any given day, there are 60,000 passengers passing through an average airport, giving those in North Carolina a population between that of Chapel Hill and Asheville or collectively about the size of Durham, the state’s fourth largest city.

Globally, within three years, the number of airline passengers each year will reach 3.6 billion, an amount equal to half of the earth’s population.  Airline traffic is projected to double by 2030 when I could be just shy of my mom’s age now.

In 1948, the year I was born, there were fewer than 15 million airline passengers in the United States on 2 million departures.  By age 19 when I took my first airline flight, a Pan Am 707 from the Rocky Mountains to New York in 1967, annual airline passenger traffic in the US had grown to 142 million taking nearly 5 million departures.

Between my first flight and when I turned 30 on the eve of airline deregulation, passenger miles had grown an average of 12% a year, according to analysis by Doug Henwood, a former conservative who now blogs at Left Business Observer.

Since then, according to Henwood, airlines have averaged less than 4% growth a year.  Before I turned 30, planes were 57% full.  Since then they have averaged 68% full and over the last three years 82%.

Henwood makes the case that airline deregulation has been a disaster not only for the airlines and passengers, but most certainly for many communities.

Fewer planes with higher occupancy may be better for the environment though.  Climate change calculations estimate that when I fly round-trip from the east coast to visit my daughter and grandsons in the Rocky Mountains, I pollute the atmosphere with about 2 tons of carbon, slightly more than I discharge per year driving.

If I take a 6,000-mile cross country trip to see them, as I do at least once each year, I discharge the equivalent in carbon of a cross-country round-trip flight.

Today, 42% of U.S. adults report traveling by air for leisure purposes and 48% for business purposes.  Air is the mode of arrival for less than 10% of the visitor volume for the typical destination community or state.

According to the updated study, Flying Into The Future, another major shift in air travel over the last few years has been the shift to using smartphones.  More than 70% of airline passengers have smartphones compared to slightly more than 50% of the general public.

A third of passengers now use smartphones for check-in and 40% more than in 2010 are using these devices for mobile boarding.  In three years, the number of airlines using mobile check-in etc. will increase from 50% to 90%.

It wasn’t too long ago that people couldn’t imagine smartphones and tablets replacing computers as a means to conduct banking and now 9 out 10 do.

The same was true not long ago about booking air travel via website but today 74% of passengers do so and 70% of airline executives believe mobile apps will soon be equally dominant. Already, 9 out of 10 passengers want mobile flight updates.

Technologies such as Passbook and near-field communication chips will mean that most of us will merely tap our smartphone to check-in or board a flight and integration of technologies will greatly smooth out clearing security.

Airlines are now putting actual servers aboard aircraft to make it easier and less expensive and cumbersome to use devices via Wi-Fi while in flight, not only for passengers but for crew members using them for company purposes.

However, as my friend and fellow-blogger and former DMO exec Bill Giest writes, “it’s really all about the juice,” so I hope airports and airplanes will now make it easier to charge up devices onboard and while sitting in boarding areas.

Dissecting Collaborations

Collaborations are difficult because of what psychologists call the “availability bias.” Some people vet an idea when it first occurs to them. They don’t assume they are the first to have an idea or that they are expert at everything.

Others just automatically assume their ideas are great because they occurred to them and set off to proselytize others.  Unfortunately, this is usually at the expense of those with background and expertise on the subject by putting them in a corner.

Elected officials and government administrators are particularly susceptible to those with “availability bias,” because politics not only is  one of the few areas left where access to information is automatically assumed to be asymmetrical but there is an over-reliance on lobbying vs. keeping up with other information that is otherwise made readily available.

You hear it in comments on the floor of legislative bodies when bill sponsors chide peers who ask for time to study lengthy bills by condescendingly directing them to sparse summaries or creating peer pressure to make decisions based only on “who’s asking.”  This leads to democracy being representative only of a powerful few.

Individuals with what cognitive researchers call “availability bias” not only make collaboration more difficult and complex, they often destroy any potential by pitting forces against one another. They can’t fathom such a thing as win-win.

They either join collaborations in name only, leaving all the heavy lifting to others, or they politicize these groups before they are fully formed by creating opposing sides in an attempt to control the outcome or specific details. They have no patience for the interplay of ideas without dictating the outcome in advance.

Occasionally during my now-concluded 40-year career as a community marketing exec, I would be frozen out of a launch or a grand opening that had been enabled, in part, by the organizations I led in three different communities when individuals who with whom I had tried to collaborate maneuvered officials to make sure I was excluded.

Having become more comfortable as “the man behind the curtain” as my friends kidded me (a reference from The Wizard of Oz or the TV classic Lost depending on your age,) the blackballings were amusing and brought to mind an admonition from a friend that with some people “you are either on their team or you’re not.”

With these people, raising questions about their pet projects is never tolerated even when I may have been in a position of more expertise.

Decades ago I took part in a team-building workshop with a handful of other civic leaders in a community I represented that included a collaborator I realize now had “availability bias.”  This included a very in-depth Myers-Briggs analysis that I wish I had kept at hand back then to better understand inscrutable interactions.

I am an XNTX and this person’s inherent preferences made them an EXTJ.

The first letter indicates where you get energy.  I rated an X for borderline but I was actually slightly “I” for Introvert, making me more of an ominivert, someone who creates his own energy but is still functional for brief periods in settings where extroverts thrive.

This associate was a strong “E” for extrovert, meaning this individual’s energy came from other people, an energivore, so to speak.  The amusing illustration linked here explains introverts and omniverts to extroverts.

Had I remembered, this difference would have alerted me to counterbalance this person’s insatiable ability and need to to lobby others, an activity that fueled their energy level.  Individuals such as this are also known as “psychic vampires.” 

My inclination as an introvert-leaning omnivert also explains my comfort at being more the “man behind the curtain” as a means of conserving energy.

However, it is the last three designations that are more insightful about our differences and also why at times the two of us were so complimentary.  I was strongly “N” for intuitive and “T” for thinking, while my collaborationist was on the line between “sensing” or “intuitive” and a “T” for thinking but very close to the line for “feeling.”

This means I almost always informed information gathered through the five senses with more of the “big picture” including concepts, relationships and meaning. On some days this person was on that page with me or would rely on me for the “big picture” when learning more to their sensing side.

We both tended toward thinking or facts and logic when interpreting information but, when this person was leaning toward his “feeling” inclination, “gut” reactions took over along with a susceptibility to “who’s asking.”

When we made decisions, this person was strongly “J” for judging or quick to make a decision based on only a few facets of an issue and greatly irritated if re-opening the decision became necessary based on additional information and data.

I was on the line, meaning I often made decisions that way too, but just as often I would want to inform a decision with other opinions and options as well as more information.  This meant we often got on each others nerves and trust in me eroded whenever my inclinations switched between “J” and “P.”

The missions of our organizations were different. This person’s was narrow and more tangible.  Mine was community-wide and dealt with understanding, integrating, balancing and influencing the values and perceptions of a broad range of fluid audiences both internal and external including those of this person’s organization and constituents.

My world was always both/and and relied on collaborations and strategic partnerships while forces often dictated that my collaborator's were either/or and even zero-sum.

All of this is to say that successful intra-community collaborations are often more dependent on the inclinations of those who lead them than the willingness of the organizations themselves.

Communities seeking genuine collaboration based on mutual respect and what’s best overall vs. the zero-sum push and shove of personal politics or “availability bias” are well-advised to have its leaders undergo well-proven analysis such as an in-depth Myers-Briggs and then to keep the results handy for reference whenever interactions occur.

Flossing A Community’s Image Turn Around

I was lucky.  At the dawn of the 1990s, as I led the jumpstart of Durham, North Carolina’s community-destination marketing organization and guardian of its image, brand and sense of place, the scientific research we used to unwrap a perception issue exonerated any role by Durham residents.

Durham’s ratio of residents who are positive has always greatly exceeded the benchmark for communities overall.  Still, several circumstances made the nearly two-decade turn around very thorny.

• The negativity was rooted among residents of neighboring communities where two out of three held a negative image of Durham, even though most had never been here.

Because, when it comes to communities, neighbors are somewhat like family, the challenge became how to separate soft negatives from the hardcore 10% who actively marketed against Durham.

• This was further complicated because those holding half - now 3 out of 5 jobs in Durham, including owners and managers of many businesses - are non-residents who, if not negative themselves, were immersed daily in this negativity about Durham.

• What further complicated the image turn-around were a few opinion-leaders in those nearby communities who denied there was any such problem on the pretense that they were looking out for Durham because to them to admit there is a problem was to be a victim.

Little known to the public was the paradox that representatives of their interests in Durham made daily requests to us for information that would help counter the effects of this negativity.

A few in Durham were worried by the old adage that “the best way to kill a product with image issues is to advertise it.”  They thought to advertise meant to publicly acknowledge it, but with a background in marketing I knew it meant that advertising as a tool is useless for the purpose of overcoming image issues.

Instead, to separate soft negatives from hardcore negatives, we launched a series of guerrilla communications that promoted a wide variety of Durham positives while always incorporating some aspect we needed to improve and statistical benchmarks to put it all in perspective.

A study published recently by researchers at Stanford and Tel Aviv universities calls this the “blemishing effect” and finds that subsequent mention of a negative actually amplifies the positive, especially with audiences who may be distracted or unaware of the source of their opinions.

Gradually, and sometimes glacially, Durham’s image among those who live in nearby communities greatly improved but though isolated, on average there remain 10% who are negative.

This occurs less in Orange County which is part of the Durham metro and more in a Wake County, part of the Raleigh metro and one of the state’s most populous.

The organization charged as the guardian of Durham’s image must be vigilant to see that this proportion of hardcore negatives remains contained.  However it seems that 10% of the overall population is also responsible for any number of other societal problems:

• 10% of Americans never, ever floss their teeth, driving up costs for those of us who do when they inevitably burden the system.  Other surveys put that figure closer to 18%.
• An average of 10% of Americans are responsible for roadside litter, 4% intentionally and 17% by being oblivious.
• 10% of Americans don’t wash up after using the rest room, spreading bacteria to those who do. The figure is four times higher for men observed at major sports events.

I thought of the never-ending challenge Durham faces to contain the remaining hardcore negativists in nearby counties when I read a study recently about messages to encourage hand washing and a book about win-lose behavior.

As it has been for many years now, on average Durham continues to be held in higher esteem by external audiences statewide than any other community of a similar size or larger.

Its image among residents of the two adjacent counties, while still on average more than 80% positive, is beginning to show erosion especially in Wake County.  This is further evidence that erecting facilities, however remarkable, is not a solution to image.

Left unchecked, the corrosive influence of those who are hardcore negatives can bring uncertainty to those who are positive.  The lessons of Durham’s image turn-around, while informative, must be updated using research by behavior economists, including some of the world’s renowned who live here.

Durham pioneered several techniques to turn its image around.  It will need to stay on the forefront to keep it that way.

In doing so, Durham should continue to promote its status as a place “where great things happen,” but keep in mind a recent study by researchers at Stanford and Harvard which could be relevant to pursuing visitors including newcomers such as relocating executives and other talent so crucial to continued economic vitality.

Entitled The Preference for Potential, the study finds that, during an evaluation, potential often has more power than accomplishment, because it leads to more intensive processing of why it is a good choice.