Exceptionalism Imperative

My lineage as an American goes back 376 years.  By 1840, all but two lines had perpetually been frontiersmen and would continue to forge new settlements for another hundred years, long after the Census declared the frontier closed.

This gives me a different understanding of American “exceptionalism” than many today.  All of my ancestors came to this country in search of religious freedom as Remonstrates, Huguenots, Quakers, Amish, Palatines and Mormons to name a few.

But while forging a new land, they continued to reach back to their homelands and import “best practices.”

Many who wrap themselves in “exceptionalism” today may not have the benefit of that perspective for they seem to have given up on learning from other countries.

A few of my ancestors were Scandinavian including the linage of those who rode with William the Conqueror nearly a thousand years ago to establish what we know as Great Britain.

While throttling American progress over the last three decades or more with anti-tax, antigovernment rhetoric, today’s “exceptionalist wannabees” have ridiculed Scandinavia countries as tax and spend welfare states.

But they have ignored that Scandinavian countries also have some of the strongest economic outcomes in the world.

This country’s founders made it imperative to study and glean everything they could from the powers of that day.  Maybe that is the part we have neglected.

A new study by Dr. Henrik Kleven, a researchers and economist at the London School of Economics, who has also studied at Columbia and UC-Berkeley, unwraps some things we can learn from Scandinavian countries.

Apparently, the data shows that three factors are more important than the level of taxation:

1. Broadening the tax base.
2. Limiting legal tax avoidance (e.g. loopholes.)
3. Public spending focused on complements to work.

Complements to work include using tax revenue to fund universal child care, preschool and elder care etc.

A key finding in the study is that Scandinavians have a different view of poor people than most Americans.  In surveys, only 10-15% of Scandinavians view poor people as lazy compared to 60% of Americans.

The study also notes that “large tax collections go hand in hand with a number of measures of social cohesiveness like civic participation, voter turnout, trust, low crime and so on.”

As for something Americans have been arguing about since our nation’s founding, the study finds that there is a small amount of “tax-charity crowdout,” or the reduction of philanthropy when taxes go up.

But studies show no negative relationship between coercive taxation and voluntary donations, nor does it indicate that Scandinavians are less involved in charity than populations facing smaller tax takes.

There is much to learn from this study but unfortunately belief systems are rarely based on facts.

Yellowstone As Metaphor

Because I am representative of both sides, I am eager to read a book due to be released this summer entitled, The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict.

It is a study of old west belief systems such as those held by my great grandparents, grandparents and parents who forged ancestral ranchland where I was born along the Idaho edge of Yellowstone.

It also concerns the overlapping “new west” concern for protecting and restoring habitat and wildlife.

But while the data is both quantitative and qualitative, Yellowstone is used as a spiritual metaphor for how Americans approach moral disputes overall.

My Idaho roots stretch back to territorial days a dozen years before the creation of Yellowstone as America’s first national park, straddled a few decades later, when my my ancestors who began settling the Rockies in 1847, forged the horse and cattle ranch of my youth along the park’s western border.

By the time I came along the Bowmans had pushed large populations of Grizzlies back into the park and equally proximate Targhee National Forest, almost eliminating wolves and subduing the resulting over populations of beaver. 

But ranchers back then had an innate grasp of ecological balance, and most were early conservationists, if not considered early environmentalists.  Today those camps have become tribes who see the other as enemies.

In my experience, the battle there is not between old west and new west but sterilized, extremist versions of each who refuse to listen to one another.

In other words a microcosm of what’s gone wrong with America.

In a quote in The Economist recently, Dr. Jeff Hardin a devout Christian and zoologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison put it succinctly while noting that “Many partisans subscribe to the post-Enlightenment idea that giving people lots of facts ought to be enough to convince people.”

Guilty as charged.

But today and maybe always according to Hardin, “most of us hold our beliefs in a tangled ball of yarn.”  “Tug on one thread, and people fear that their very identity is under attack.”

I don’t have much patience for some of today’s ranchers who see the rebalancing of populations of wolves, Grizzlies and bison as surrogate agents of the federal government.

But environmentalists can also fail to accept or inform opinions with new information, such as this report in High Country News, revealing that reintroduction of wolves is not a panacea in Yellowstone and that some ecosystems once altered may never recover.

Last month, a jury in my native Fremont County, Idaho convicted a hunter of illegally killing a Grizzly bear and it reminded me that in the 1840s when most of my ancestors settled in the Rockies, the historic population outside of Alaska of 50,000 Grizzlies between the Pacific coast and the Mississippi River had already been pushed back into what are now the plains states.

Settlements back then required hunters such as my great (x3) grandfather Thomas Graham to protect against Grizzlies.

He was killed by one in November 1864 while protecting another ancestor and livestock in Northern Utah about 28 miles from the Idaho border.

But until recently, the last known Grizzly in Utah were seen in 1923, the year my father was born.  Today, they no longer exist in six western states, including California the “Golden Bear” state, where they had been driven out by 1922.

By the time I was graduating from BYU in 1972, only a few hundred were in existence with a concentration in and around Yellowstone including Targhee National Forest near our ranch.

There were several hundred verified sightings in our nook of Idaho between 1965 and 2000.  Male Yellowstone Grizzlies can range more than 300 square miles, far more widely than other populations.

Between 1974 and 1979 when I was marketing Spokane, scientists tracked Grizzlies in and around my native nook of Idaho along the border of Yellowstone to document clashes with livestock such as cattle and sheep.

It was a lot less than ranchers believed but it only takes one encounter to inflame fears.  The truth is that raising livestock on rangeland is inherently risky for many reasons and predators such as wolves and Grizzlies are easy scapegoats as is the fear of disease from bison.

But thanks to endangered species protection, Grizzlies in and around Yellowstone are now back to a sustainable high of 700 or more Grizzlies.  Nor do they stay put, ranging five times the distance our ranch was from Yellowstone.

It may be time for delisting and based on the recent conviction turning the species over to state management, at least in Idaho where a management plan has long been in place.

In my native Fremont County nook of Idaho, ranchers, farmers, conservationists, settlements and sportsmen also have a proven track record of reaching compromises to protect the famed Henry’s Fork River, from which Grizzlies scoop up their share of native Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout.

But environmentalists are distrustful, giving too much credibility to the relatively small group of vocal ranchers who refuse to accept the importance of ecological balance or even sit down to listen even if to agree to disagree.

There are solutions but just as with the innovations of the Affordable Care Act, they come from admitting that some parts of alternative views are with merit, while acknowledging that something one might have disagreed with is actually working.

Our way out of gridlock is to put those with extreme either/or views on the sidelines and to return to the practical middle ground that is part of what made this country so exceptional.

A Rare Pedigree of Orneriness

My father and paternal grandfather shared the same middle name, Melvin but the name is in honor of my great-great grandmother, Amanda Melvina Poorman.

In America, her first and middle names were popular in the late 18th and early 19th century among descendants from Ireland, Scotland and England due to their literary use.

But I was intrigued recently to learn that her father, John Poorman had been only the 31st person baptized into the Mormon Church barely two months after it was organized as the Church of Christ and nearly two years before Brigham Young.

He was baptized by immersion on June 9, 1830 at the northern end of Seneca Lake a few miles from his farm by his neighbor David Whitmer famed as one of the witnesses who had actually laid eyes on the ancient “golden plates” from which the Book of Mormon was translated.

Whitmer had been baptized a year earlier and was one of the six founders of the new restorationist Christian religion, today the third largest by affiliation in America.

But those first eight years from mid-1830 to mid-1838 were tumultuous as much internally as from external persecution including several name changes as the new church rapidly grew to nearly 18,000 members, up to half in Great Britain.

My great (x3) grandfather Poorman followed church leaders to the area around Kirtland (northeast) Ohio in early 1831, fighting off a mob of 40-50 men a year later who tarred and tried to suffocate church founder and prophet Joseph Smith.

By 1833, Poorman was among the first  couple of hundred Mormons who settled in northwestern Missouri along the western banks of the (Big) Blue River which at the time was the edge of the American frontier, long before the existence of Kansas City.

Mormons including my ancestors there were defending themselves from mobs of vigilantes.  These Mormons were from the northeast, with abolitionist sensibilities, when it came to slavery.

The mobs were from the upper south and worried that voting as a block Mormons would threaten Missouri’s status as a slave state.  Little did they know the discord and internal friction among Mormons at the time.

The battle took place in an area along the I-435 beltway, an alternative route from I-70 around downtown Kansas City and one to which I will pay much more attention whenever future cross-country road trips with Mugs (my English Bulldog) take us along that route.

The Blue River flows out of Kansas and just before it flows into the Missouri River near Independence, Missouri is where Poorman was involved in the Battle of the Blue in November of 1833 to fight off mobs of vigilantes.

A few miles north, across the Missouri River in Liberty is where Poorman married my great (x3) grandmother Nancy Botkin Davis three years later, apparently four or five months after my great-great grandmother was born (ahem) and help to raise her children by a previous marriage.

However, internal strife and power struggles were beginning to take a toll.  Two years later, in 1838, his friend David Whitmer, who had headed the church in Missouri, suddenly resigned.

Refusing to defend himself, Whitmer was then excommunicated ostensibly as part of a coup to topple Joseph Smith over the then secret practice of polygamy as well as the word of wisdom.

But many times subsequent to parting ways, including on his deathbed, Whitmer reaffirmed his witness of the “golden plates.”

My Poorman ancestors had lived in the same Kaw Township settlement with Whitmer.  While there is no record they were involved, I am sure it distressed them to see their long-time friend ostracized.

Politics had taken a toll.

Ironically, a little more than fifty years later and thirteen years after Whitmer’s death in Missouri, Mormon leaders would disavow polygamy but without reinstating those who had resisted it from the beginning.

That fall of 1838 the Mormons were expelled from Missouri after the governor signed an extermination order.  But my great (x3) grandparents were among a few who stayed, relocating about fifty miles north and a bit west to Washington Township, a few miles west of St. Josephs.

Until then, this “nose” of Missouri had been set aside in treaty as Indian lands but by just as my Poorman ancestors sought sanctuary there, the area was being annexed into the United States as part of Missouri with Platte Purchase.

Records show that the Mormon church lost track of the Poormans after 1840 so they would not have met many of my other ancestors then gathering in Nauvoo, Illinois as recent converts.

But as the Mormons were also driven out of Illinois after the murder of Joseph Smith in 1844 and across Iowa in very early 1846, it is possible the Poormans were contacted by Mormon agents sent into Missouri to buy supplies.

They may have also met members of the Mormon Battalion including several other ancestors as it marched through St. Joseph in route from Iowa to Fort Leavenworth in preparation for marching southwest into the war with Mexico.

Mormons talk as if its members had all gathered in Winter Quarters, Nebraska or back across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs but these places were only major staging areas for the nearly half of all members preparing to head west beginning in 1847 when three of my ancestors paved the way.

Approximately 15,000 members who were gathered along the river were scattered in 90 settlements, some only 20 miles from the Missouri border and only 60 miles from where the Poormans lived.

Sometime around 1853, my great-great grandmother Amanda Melvina Poorman traveled up the Missouri and caught a wagon train west to join Mormons gathering in the Rockies, probably upon the death of her father.

Her mother died the following year, just as Amanda, out west, was marrying George Washington Kent, someone with whom she had played during her early years in Missouri.

She died in her early 40s and was buried in Richmond, Utah near the Idaho border, less than four years before her daughter Margaret would marry Hyrum Edward Bowman, two decades before they would head up into the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho to a ranch where I was born and where they are buried.

When my ancestors established the first settlement in my native Idaho, the Mormon Church had just surpassed 61,000 members.  When great-great grandmother Amanda died, it has just surpassed 100,000 members.

It reached 180,000 when my paternal grandfather Mel was born and 231,000 when my grandmother Adah was born.  It crested 300,000 before they and my great grandparents homesteaded our ancestral ranch along the Henry’s Fork.

Mormon membership reached 576,000 the year my dad was born on that same ranch and 664,000 when my mom was born.  By the time I was born it had just passed 1 million.

When my daughter was born and involvement lapsed more than forty years ago, membership was well past three million.  When my grandsons were born it was surpassing 12 million and today there are more than 15 million, counting the 40% who are lapsed.

It not only gives me pause to think my great-great-great grandfather was among the first 31 but I can empathize that the internal politics took their toll.

The same occurred to my great-grandfather who married into that line when a Mormon Apostle and neighbor refused to take back a defective piece of equipment he had bought and then refused to let my great grandfather be buried in the clothing in which he had married my great-grandmother.

Their son, my grandfather, famously caught a church Bishop stealing water while others were in church services.   As the story is told, using he old Winchester hanging on my wall, he fired into the air as a warning.

By the time I entered grade school, classmates had exaggerated the story giving me a reputation for toughness.

My dad tried to be active as we were growing up but politics intervened when he was released after insisting there be no swearing during church ball games.

Yet we have all lived lives intertwined with that culture and its values.

I have other ancestors who joined shortly after John Poorman, most by 1840, and all had become Mormons by 1855 when there were fewer than 64,000 members.

For several years after the Mormons settled in the Rockies, membership declined, in part, because of radicalization during a movement by hardliners called the Mormon Reformation.

Several ancestors were dis-fellowshipped for speaking their minds when they disagreed with local church leaders over civil issues and controversial decisions and one or possibly two were required to undergo re-baptism.

Nearly all of this family background was unknown to me when my own involvement lapsed more than four decades ago.  Genetic expression is different among decedents but some traits are apparently very consistent.

There are very few with my pedigree today in that spiritual tradition and possibly even fewer with a legacy of such orneriness.

But I wouldn’t trade those genes or my heritage or my cultural values with anyone.

Unwrapping Generalizable Transformation

Several things came to mind yesterday as I read a column written by a friend of mine who manages the news room for our local newspaper looking back on the 10 years since he returned to Durham, North Carolina in that capacity.

First was how fast ten years goes by and second, that we rarely get a chance to catch up since I ducked below the radar into retirement five years ago.

He noted several brick and mortar projects that he believes have transformed Durham during that span, but what caught my eye at the end of the column was his impression that these projects have changed how we see ourselves.

His impression from ten years ago was that Durham residents conveyed, as he put it, a much more “Eeyore-like, woe-is-us mantra.”

I don’t question that was his impression.  News executives I know tend in general to not only be overly influenced by anecdotal comments from individuals but what they get seems to be overwhelmingly negative.

I took a look back to see what Durham resident opinions were of their community to see if his impressions were generalizable.  They weren’t.  Back then, Durham residents were proud or very proud of Durham by a ratio of 5 to 1.

Even back then, as it had been a decade earlier, that was a higher community pride ratio than any other major city in North Carolina and based on a subsequent study of other cities nationwide, very positive.

Of course, 15.6% of residents were not proud of Durham back then, much lower than other communities and a proportion in Durham that is about average over the last two decades.

So why did my friend think Durham residents were woe-is-us?

One reason is because about two out of three people he encountered on the street or in meetings or emails were not from Durham.  They just commuted to work or or ran a business here, some of whom, misunderstanding they were the ones with issues, would publically lecture Durham.

A far greater percentage of these non-resident workers and business owners/managers were negative about Durham or condescending at best, and their numbers greatly amplified the relatively modest number of Durham residents who had issues.

In fact, until the late 1990s, far more of these non-residents were negative than positive about Durham.  That’s when a decade grassroots effort to reverse that ratio reached a tipping point to the positive and polls showed that Durham residents could sense it.

That’s when they began to believe Durham’s image among nearby populations who had been historically negative was improving, long before any of the brick and mortar projects given attribution in my friend’s column.

So what he heard anecdotally ten years ago obviously made an impression but scientifically, it was definitely not generalizable to Durham residents overall.

While Durham residents who are not proud of the community in any degree has dwindled by 10 percentage points in the past ten years, my journalist friend probably still hears disproportionately from those who are negative.

While the trend of commuters who work here and non-residents owning businesses becoming more positive about Durham has continued to increase since that tipping point more 15 years ago, there are still enough who are negative to amplify discontented locals who are.

My suspicion is that after ten years, my friend is also just getting better at weighting or filtering what he hears.

But he also has a point in his column that the brick and mortar projects have played a role in what he sees as a transformation at least of the area we call downtown.

Experts in the diffusion of opinions through populations would argue that reversing that image issue among residents in neighboring communities including commuters to Durham greatly contributed to making these brick and mortar projects possible, e.g. financing.

New presses don’t make journalism better, better journalism makes journalism better and that has a lot to do with perception, information and opinion, not new coats of paint.

The same is true with bricks and mortar.  It plays a role but it perpetually cycles as all “physical” transformations do.

Anyone concerned about sustainable transformation needs to be very worried that “based on the way people talk,” those who expect a negative experience in Durham has reached a 17-year high, as has the percentage who’s personal experiences here have been negative.

Transformation requires a lot more than brick and mortar.

Two Hallmarks of a Worthy Consultant

A well-researched and documented concept such as “authenticity” is often misunderstood when executives such as many in my former field of community marketing begin to salt and pepper it into use as a buzz word, rather than understanding its real meaning.

They are easy to spot because they haven’t really read the research behind the term, hoping their community can bluff visitor prospects by liberally adding it throughout its communication resume.

The thing about authenticity, though, is that to consumers it is not a buzz word making it easy for them to detect a fraud.

Linked is an article forwarded by a friend of mine about how Asheville, North Carolina is losing its authenticity.  A three and a half hour drive east, Downtown Durham too may also already be on the backside of that tipping point.

Having destination marketing organizations with a good sense of what makes these communities authentic is not enough if even the best intended developer and public officials carelessly enable destructive mainstream forces instead.

Soon the existence of authenticity in North Carolina may be extinct except for history museums, greatly diminishing its appeal in the eyes of travelers including more than 80% of those who visit fantasy attractions and events.

Few DMOs and even fewer consultants to DMOs have actually read this research about authenticity which was conducted in 2009.

Bill Geist is one of only three consultants to DMOs that I recommend, but it isn’t because he was necessarily a visionary during the nearly nine years he was a DMO exec or because we are friends or because we have always seen eye to eye.

I recommend Bill because in the twenty years since he ran a DMO, he has never stopped learning or repopulating what he had learned to others.  He understands that it isn’t what a community DMO knows or has accomplished but how eager it is to learn that makes all the difference.

Innovation is another attribute that is overused but those who merely salt and pepper it into resumes or initiatives are easy to detect.

Even fewer truly grasp “disruptive innovation.”

According to the Harvard business professor, entrepreneur and consultant who coined the term more than 15 years ago, a “disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough that makes good products a lot better.”  Those are sustaining innovations.

A disruptive innovation transforms a product or service to be more affordable and accessible, giving a much larger population access to them.

When Clay Christensen and I briefly overlapped as classmates at BYU the only computer programming we learned to do was creating punch cards for the university’s huge mainframe computer.

By the time Christensen coined disruptive innovation, the organizations I led had been using desktop computers since the early 1980s.

By the time my career was coming in for a landing, Steve Jobs, who wrote about powerful influence of Clay’s book, had put that computing power in a smartphone.

What distinguishes Bill Geist and Clay Christensen is their humility, a prerequisite to lifelong learning.  Consultants who believe they know it all are a dime a dozen and worth even less.

Christensen famously tells the story of getting a call from a notoriously gruff and impatient Andy Grove at Intel, asking the professor to fly out and explain the theory of disruptive innovation to his execs because he was too busy to read.

When he arrived, crises had arisen and Christensen was told that the execs didn’t have time to even listen to the theory so he would need to just tell them what they needed to do in the ten minutes available.

Pivotal is that Christensen held his ground and insisted they listen to an explanation of the theory because he didn’t know much about Intel but that the theory of Disruptive Innovation would have an opinion.

Grove listened and made the connections.

Christensen eloquently describes the challenge of a consultant.  You can’t be suckered into just telling an organization what to do because there is no way a consultant can ever know enough about an organization or community to do that.

The value of a consultant is to show you how to think differently.  Data can only tell you about the past and help illuminate patterns and connections.  But strategic direction is about connecting data, connections and patterns with a good theory.

A consultant can only teach managers how to think differently and see “through the lens of a theory into the future, you can actually see it very clearly.”

All of this is to say that if you think you don’t have time to read and think about the data behind something like community authenticity or delude yourself into applying buzz words as a short cut, you have no business masquerading as a community marketing exec.

Nor will consultants, even those few who are the best, be able to connect the dots.