This is Improbable

by Marc Abrahams

  The book explains that every larger, richer country than Zimbabwe will face the same problems, at which time they will appreciate Gono’s extraordinary skill at meeting such extraordinary challenges. Gono modestly shares the credit, writing on the very first page: ‘I am especially indebted to my principal, President Robert Mugabe’.

  Gono’s talents were spotted by other influential persons. ‘I was both humbled and surprised’, he writes, ‘to get an approach from [US] Ambassador [to Zimbabwe James] McGee on 25 July 2008 with an offer which he said was from President George W. Bush and Secretary Condoleeza Rice and the President of the World Bank for me to take a position in Washington as a Senior Vice President of the World Bank.’

  He confides that later, ‘my staff and I were amused to see the steady mushrooming of rather shameless news stories in some quarters of the Western Press and its allied media claiming that I had approached the United States authorities seeking their help to secure asylum for me and my family in some banana republic or that I somehow wanted to betray President Mugabe and Zimbabwe’s national leadership and to run away from Zimbabwe in the face of what was alleged to be the collapse of the economy and President Mugabe’s rule.’

  Gono emphasizes the importance of sticking to one’s principles. ‘My team and I were guided by the philosophy’, he writes, that ‘where appropriate, short-term inflationary surges are a necessary cost to the achievement of medium to long-range growth in the economy.’

  The book is, at heart, a 232-page literary fleshing-out of an eighteen-word statement issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe on 21 January 2008: ‘Blaming the Government, the Reserve Bank or the Governor all the time is unacceptable and will be met with serious consequences.’

  Gono, Gideon (2008). Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy – Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges. Harare: ZPH Publishers.

  Trinkaus on Trolleys

  Shopping carts are a window, however small, to our inner being.

  ‘Some people entering supermarkets, to do their food shopping, seem to prefer to start their venture with a clean cart – one that is free of litter. However, many times a number of the available carts are not free of the leavings of previous shoppers, for example, store circulars, cash register receipts, shopping lists, plastic bags, produce remnants, facial tissues, and candy wrappers. Such folks, when finding that the cart at the end of the queue is not “clean”, face a decision: push the cart to the side and try the next one, use it anyway, or somehow get rid of the material in the cart. It is this third alternative that was looked at in this enquiry.’

  Thus begins a report from academia’s expert on all things that grate and are small. John W. Trinkaus, a professor emeritus at New York City’s Zichlin School of Business, has turned his gimlet eye to the annoying little aspects of modern life.

  Trinkaus won the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for publishing more than eighty studies of things that annoy him. A former engineer and an ever-curious student of human behaviour, he has personally gathered statistics about people who wear their baseball caps backwards, attitudes towards Brussels sprouts, the marital status of television quiz show contestants, pedestrians who wear sports shoes that are white rather than some other colour, swimmers who swim laps in the shallow end of the pool rather than the deep end, and shoppers who exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket’s express checkout lane. And many, many other quirks of human behaviour. Today his oeuvre totals more than one hundred monographs.

  The Trinkaus method is to observe, and then to produce a no-nonsense report, typically two or three pages long. Many of his publications show a deep interest in waiting, obstruction, and delay, as epitomized in his 1985 single-page ‘Waiting Times in Physicians’ Offices: An Informal Look’.

  Waiting is also the subject in Trinkaus’s gift of a study ‘Visiting Santa: An Additional Look’, which he bestowed on us – all of us – in 2007. That was a sequel to the previous year’s ‘Visiting Santa: Another Look’, which built upon the work he described in the very first of his Santa-related studies, 2004’s ‘Santa Claus: An Informal Look’.

  Each of these reports gives a cheerfully dreary look at the behaviour of children and their parents in a shopping mall. As the 2007 report describes it: ‘The observer [which is to say, Trinkaus] positioned himself unobstrusively a short distance away from a single line of children and guardians advancing to visit with Santa Claus, in a place where the children’s and guardians’ facial expressions could be noted.’ The findings, he writes, are ‘consistent with the conclusions that the greater percentage of children appeared indifferent to their visit to Santa’. As in his previous investigations, many of the guardians did look excited, or at least looked like they were trying to look excited.

  Trinkaus also shows a special fascination with people’s adherence to laws, regulations, and customs. His ‘Stop Sign Compliance: An Informal Look’, published in 1982, examined how many motorists did – and how many did not – come to a full stop at a particular street-corner. Trinkaus did follow-up studies at that same intersection in 1983 (‘Stop Sign Compliance: Another Look’), 1988 (‘... A Further Look’), 1993 (‘... A Follow-Up Look’), and 1997 ‘... A Final Look’). In yet another parallel series of studies, Trinkaus looked at drivers’ compliance with a traffic stoplight. Together, these document an unseemly, seemingly unstoppable rise in scofflawism.

  To do his shopping cart research, Trinkaus lurked, in a professional manner, at a supermarket. He kept a close but, again, unobtrusive watch on people who entered the store. This all took place during the spring, ‘on weekdays when the weather was fair, during the hours of 0900 to 1600’. He paid attention only to those shoppers who cleared their carts of litter prior to doing their shopping. He found that ‘69% dumped the rubbish into another cart, 26% dropped it on the sidewalk, and 5% deposited it in a trash container.’

  Trinkaus sees in these numbers a small warning sign to society: ‘Many people espouse such things as the virtues of the golden rule and brotherly love, but ... one might well wonder how much is rhetoric and how much is real. For example, how much social awareness is being exhibited by those folks leaving behind rubbish in their cart for others to cope with? Too, how much communal consciousness is being evidenced by those people who, when finding rubbish in a cart, shift the disposing problem to others?’ He says: ‘Understanding and measuring real-life, everyday situations, such as that recounted here, could possibly help in unfolding a better understanding of the make-up and operation of present day society.’

  Trinkaus, John W. (2004). ‘Clearing the Supermarket Shopping Cart: An Informal Look.’ Psychological Reports 94: 1442–43.

  –– (2007). ‘Visiting Santa: An Additional Look.’ Psychological Reports 101: 779–83.

  The Strategic Jesus

  A whole new side of Jesus is cropping up in the field of decision science, as a rising generation of scholars is taking Jesus to their collective, theoretic, strategic bosom. Their leader, by eminence and example, and perhaps by judicious application of strategy, is a highly promoted man of both intellect and action.

  ‘Jesus the Strategic Leader’, by Lt. Col. Gregg F. Martin of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was published in the year 2000. It is fifty-one pages long. ‘This is not a religious study’, Colonel Martin writes, ‘it is a practical analysis. If one believes that Jesus was simply a man, and not, as Christians believe, part-man and part-God, then the study reveals how one of history’s greatest leaders led. If, on the other hand, one believes that Jesus was God in human form, then the study not only shows how a great human being practiced the art of leadership, but also how God chose to lead. In either case, the student or practitioner of leadership cannot go wrong.’

  The report includes a drawing of Martin’s ‘pyramid model’ of Jesus the strategic leader. According to this model, Jesus is a pyramid, resting atop and partially intersecting God. God is a pyramid, too, but with a broader base. A third, inverted pyramid is supported at
op Jesus’s pyramid. This third pyramid begins with what Martin calls the ‘Top Three’ disciples (Peter, James, and John) and broadens to include the other apostles, then the disciples and, topping everything, the masses.

  ‘

  The Strategic Jesus’ gives us succinct dictums: ‘Develop expertise, then use it with authority ... Choose your battles ... Delegate and power down.’

  Colonel Martin left the War College not long after publication of his report. He went on to command the 130th Engineer Brigade of the US Army’s Fifth Corps, leading combat engineers before, during, and for more than a year after the invasion of Iraq. He has since returned to his homeland, been promoted to the rank of major general, and been appointed commandant of the War College, where a new generation of American miltary leaders can benefit from his Jesus-style strategic leadership.

  Martin, Lt. Col. Gregg F. (2000). ‘Jesus the Strategic Leader.’ US Army War College strategic report, 5 April, http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA378218.

  Bored Meetings

  Do you believe, as someone somewhere perhaps does, that meetings, meetings, meetings, followed by more meetings, are altogether a good thing? If so, Alexandra Luong, of the University of Minnesota, Deluth, and Steven G. Rogelberg, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, think you should think again. They say: ‘We propose that despite the fact that meetings may help achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings per day may have negative effects on the individual.’

  Their report, published in the journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, begins with a somewhat brief recitation of the history of important research discoveries about meetings. Here is a capsule version of their tale.

  DISCOVERY: The majority of a manager’s typical workday is spent in meetings. This was reported by an investigator named Mintzberg in 1973.

  DISCOVERY: The frequency and length of meetings have grown considerably. So declared the team of Mosvick and Nelson in 1987.

  DISCOVERY: A scientist named Zohar, in a series of reports published during the 1990s, found evidence that ‘annoying episodes’ – which are sometimes also known as ‘hassles’ – contribute to burnout, anxiety, depression, and other negative emotions. Zohar advanced a theoretical framework that may one day help explain why this is so.

  DISCOVERY: In 1999, a scientist named Zijlstra ‘had a sample of office workers work in a simulated office for a period of two days in order to examine the psychological effects of interruptions. [They] were periodically interrupted by telephone calls from the researcher.’ This had what Zijlstra calls ‘negative effects’ on their mood.

  Luong and Rogelberg used those and other discoveries as a basis for their own innovatively broad theory.

  They devised a pair of hypotheses, educatedly guessing that:

  The more meetings one has to attend, the greater the negative effects; and

  The more time one spends in meetings, the greater the negative effects.

  Then they performed an experiment to test their two hypotheses. Thirty-seven volunteers each kept a diary for five working days, answering survey questions after every meeting they attended and also at the end of each day. That was the experiment.

  Figure: ‘Two-way interaction of number of meetings and perceived meeting effectiveness to predict job satisfaction’

  The results speak volumes. ‘It is impressive’, Luong and Rogelberg write in their summary, ‘that a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload was found’. Their central insight, they say, is the concept of ‘the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals’.

  Dr Rogelberg delivered this insight in a talk called ‘Meetings and More Meetings’, which he presented to a meeting at the University of Sheffield. He also does a talk called ‘Not Another Meeting!’, which was well received at two meetings in North Carolina and also at two meetings in Israel.

  Luong, Alexandra, and Steven G. Rogelberg (2005). ‘Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees.’ Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 9 (1): 58–67.

  Rogelberg, S. G., D. J. Leach, P. B. Warr, and J. L. Burnfield (2006). ‘“Not Another Meeting!” Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-being?’ Journal of Applied Psychology 91 (1): 83–96.

  Corporate Tiers of a Clown

  Ronald McDonald is not just a clown who hawks hamburgers and fries. According to two scholars writing in the journal Leadership Quarterly, Ronald McDonald is also a transformational corporate leader.

  David M. Boje holds the Bank of America Endowed Professorship of Management at New Mexico State University. Carl Rhodes is an associate professor in the School of Management at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Together they produced ‘The Leadership of Ronald McDonald: Double Narration and Stylistic Lines of Transformation’.

  Boje and Rhodes put their case forthrightly. ‘The argument’, they say, ‘is that rather than just being a spokesperson or marketing device for the McDonald’s corporation, Ronald performs an important transformational leadership function.’ ‘We argue’, they argue, ‘that while Ronald is crafted by the actual leaders of McDonald’s, his leadership exceeds official corporate narratives because of the cultural meanings associated with his character as a clown.’

  Clown figures employed by other companies are at best mere employees, at worst mere fictions. As measured by org charts, Mr McDonald towers above the other corporate clowns. Boje and Rhodes reveal that ‘since 2003, he has held the quasi-formal executive position of Chief Happiness Officer, and, on 16 April 2004, he became the Ambassador for an Active Lifestyle’.

  Boje and Rhodes tell in detail how and why Mr McDonald entered the executive ranks. They then boil it all down to this: ‘McDonald’s corporate executives believed Ronald could do more than just be a figurehead “spokesclown” at “high-profile public relations stunts such as delivering Happy Meals to the United Nations.” [The Russian philosopher Mikhail] Bakhtin’s words apply to Ronald: “there always remains in him unrealized potential and unrealized demands”.’

  Though the researchers may be too modest to suggest it, their Ronald McDonald analysis can be applied to other fields of inquiry. For example, it could help explain recent leadership trends in great nations.

  Here are some McNuggets from the study:

  Our analysis suggests that a new category of leader is needed; something called a ‘clown leader’. As Ronald takes on the ancient masks of rogue, clown, and fool, he integrates diverse forms of laughter (rogue destructive humor, clown merry deception, and fool’s right not to comprehend the system). It is this appropriation of a clown type by the world’s largest restaurant corporation that is central to its transformation. A method used to transform clowns into leaders is to represent them in adventures of misfortune which are overcome by their leadership powers ...

  There is much reason to be skeptical about new forms of leadership that might enhance corporate power in a way that creates new forms of authoritarianism whose operations are far from transparent. This is even more salient for leadership such as Ronald’s, whose influence might not easily be noticed given his fictional character.

  Boje, David M., and Carl Rhodes (2006). ‘The Leadership of Ronald McDonald: Double Narration and Stylistic Lines of Transformation.’ Leadership Quarterly 17 (1): 94–103.

  In Brief

  ‘Vision of Integrated Happiness Accounting System in China’

  by G. Cheng, Z. Xuand, and J. Xu (published by Acta Geographica Sinica, 2005)

  A Calculus of Prostitution

  There are many theories about prostitution. The theory devised by Marina Della Giusta, Maria Laura Di Tommaso, and Steinar Strøm is one of the few that involves partial differential equations. Sure, they could, if they wished, describe prostitution in words. But for scholars who want to explain prostitution, differential calculus may
be the clearest language.

  These three scholars, economists all, are based in the UK, Italy, and Norway, making this an international affair. Della Giusta teaches at the University of Reading, Di Tommaso at the University of Turin, and Strøm jointly at the University of Turin and the University of Oslo.

  They make their case in a report published in 2007 in the Journal of Population Economics. It begins by summarizing the ways in which other economists explain prostitution. Here’s a summary of their summary: those other economists are wrong.

  The other economists concentrate on gender, pay, and the ‘nature of forgone earning opportunities of prostitutes and clients’. But, say Della Giusta, Di Tommaso, and Strøm, those don’t count for much. What really matters is the economic role played by stigma and reputation. And the simplest, best way to explain that is with mathematics.

  The concepts are as easy and familiar as a good street-corner prostitute:

  U is your satisfaction. It’s what you, as a prostitute, really care about – the satisfaction you gain from selling your services. Economists like to call it ‘utility’, which is why they like to use the letter ‘U’.

  L is the amount of leisure you have.

  C is the amount of goods and services you, as a consumer, consume.

  S is the amount of prostitution you, as a prostitute, sell to your customers.

  w is the going price for prostitutes.

  r is a measure of your reputation.

  The whole situation, seemingly so complicated, simmers down to a nice partial differential equation. Here it is – ‌Della Giusta, Di Tommaso, and Strøm’s rule of thumb for prostitutes. You, a prostitute, find it worthwhile to sell your prostitution services when: