This interview-style TED talk featured Dr. Larry Brilliant talking about the global pandemic and the numerous mistakes made by governments worldwide. The video opened with a clip of him in 2006 explaining how a pandemic originating in South Asia may spread around the world, highlighting the importance of the first 2-3 weeks where most contaminating contact is made. The general trend was the governments who received a better “grade” from Dr. Brilliant (yes that is his name) but aside their fear, accepted the reality of the situation, and acted quickly within this 2 week window. This reminds me of some of the leadership concepts that we’ve talked about regarding decision making. Just like in the reading, he believes that taking steps immediately, even if they are smaller steps does more than waiting to find the perfect solution because the virus will not wait for our governments to catch up.

Another important point he touched on was the need for coordinated efforts across governments. Our world is the most global it has ever been; people trade and travel worldwide all the time, meaning every nation needs to coordinate with one another. I think it will be interesting to observe how global leaders handle the next few months because as more tests and potential treatments emerge, every one will want access to the same technology which might create more competition than collaboration. We will simply have to wait and see.

Guy Kawasaki worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, and presented the 12 lessons that he learned from him, two of which I found most interesting and most applicable to our class. Lesson 7 was “Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.” This clearly relates back to the reading that talked about what makes the best decision makers. The answer was those that take responsibility for their actions and then form a new plan of action are better leaders. Kawasaki provided an example of how Steve Jobs originally didn’t want any 3rd party applications on the iPhone. He realized he was wrong and completely embraced a new path. For leaders in all fields, this teaches us that leaders need to be more married to their/their followers’ success than their own pride; humility in admitting faults, another thing we talked about, is imperative for forward progress.

The second lesson that stuck with me was lesson 9, “A players hire A+ players.” Kawasaki explains that people who are smart are also confident in their own abilities and can therefore surround themselves with smarter people without feeling insecure, lesser, or weak. B level players do not have this same confidence and hire people who they perceive to be less smart or capable than them to boost themselves up; he argues that we need A level leaders who can see their own gaps in ability and surround themselves with people who can fill the gaps. This relates back to the point of humility; overly confident or overly insecure people cannot admit their own mistakes or short-comings, making them worse decision makers and creating a feedback loop where the business/organization/mission will fail because the leader refuses to bring in the necessary talent to save it. This relates back to the previous lesson because the leader cares more about him or herself and their own pride than the larger picture.

This TED Talk was recommended to me and sounded interesting so I clicked on it. Part of the way through I realized that I had seen it before, but it’s such a good one that I finished the talk and think it’s worth sharing. Adichie talks about how when only exposed to one narrative about a person/country/ethnic or religious group, then we form stereotypes based on that single story. She used a lot of examples from her own life as a Nigerian author. Adichie made a compelling and eye-opening argument about how a single story “robs people’s dignity” and “emphasizes differences over similarities.”

I think this talk is super relevant to the readings and discussions we’ve had about how people’s personal biases or interests are intermixed with the narratives that they tell, which can make the portrayal in the story more inaccurate and give it a message about the people, places, or things in that story. Adichie hit on this in a very similar way by talking about how historically, white people have given no attention to black people because they were “lesser beings” and “economic vehicles.” She emphasizes the need to change this and expand the stories and images that we hear or see because that breaks the biases that we hold about large number of groups. This same conclusion that she came to reminds me a lot of the numerous discussions we’ve had about the importance of diversifying the representation of people in our many different forms of media.

The first portion “Political Paralysis” talked about the power of small, everyday kindnesses and very positive effects that they can have on others. Danusha Veronica Goska talked about how people can view their contribution as small and insignificant which can make people discouraged and inhibit them from taking small steps or contributing to a larger solution. I think this relates to the COVID-19 situation because not everyone understands the necessity of social distancing and how limiting contact with other people contributes to addressing the public health crisis. I am not in a “hot spot” area, and as a result, some people in my community feel separated from the issue and do not recognize how drastic a situation this is, causing them to break social distancing protocol. I assume they are thinking “the crisis is so far away from us. why should we be expected to alter our lives when the crisis isn’t here?” when in reality, social distancing is important so that St. Louis doesn’t become a hot spot like some other cities.

Zinn’s chapter “The Optimism of Uncertainty” talked about power. He says that people often feel powerless because sometimes change is slow and it is hard to see the progress that movements make. He also talked about certain movements in history which succeeded to due to persistence; the longer these movements existed, the more traction they gained, the more people they attracted which led to them become successful. He claims that many people also share your thoughts on certain issues and will eventually join you when they realize that you exist. When reading this chapter, I felt my heart swell with pride at the different movements that have succeeded against strong opposition and changed the status quo. It gave me a sense of hope that movements for my generation that seem hopeless (fighting climate change, closing the income gap) might not be if we practice the patience and persistence that Zinn recommended. However, upon greater reflection, the way that Zinn explained it is that no movement is doomed if it keeps going, but what about the movements that are counterproductive to progress. If read by a different audience, someone in a white supremacist movement for example could believe that if they just never give up then their movement will eventually succeed.

This reminds me of the importance of context that we’ve talked about previously. Based on the examples that Zinn used, I don’t think this piece was meant to inspire white supremacists. However, their context and views differ greatly from that of a Bostonian educator which means they would apply the advice to their own ideas opposed to the ideas that Zinn intended. This makes me wonder how two opposing movements who are employing the same strategies would face-off. I would like to think that the majority of opinions in the US would side with Zinn, but until an actual show-down occurs, I’m not sure there’s a way to know.

My favorite ad from the 2000 Presidential election between Al Gore and George Bush was Gore’s “1969” ad.    http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/2000 

It reminded me of an elevator pitch of how he got to where he was, his track record as a politician, and what made him qualified to be president. It talked about how he didn’t want to go into politics but had to “fight for what’s right.” This positioning as a reluctant leader reminds me of some of the readings that we’ve done which say those reluctant to take power tend to succeed at it. In addition, the ad was interesting to look at because of all the pieces in it. On the living room candidate survey, this ad checked almost all of the boxes despite only being 1 minute long; every sentence brought in a new issue or point, almost to do the point of information overload. The first time I watched it, I didn’t catch every line and was more engulfed by the courageous, patriotic images and uplifting music playing in the background. This is clearly by design because even if someone is not dissecting every word or phrase, they get a feeling from Al Gore.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the similarities in messaging between Bush and Gore. In other campaigns, I saw similarities between the candidates but the messaging and core ideas were more different. In Bush and Gore’s ads, they even used the exact same phrasing and format in some of them. This makes me wonder whether such similar branding is part of what caused their election to be so close.

Considering the number of images and messages that we are bombarded with on the daily, it is hard to pick just one that rises above the rest. So naturally, I’ve selected a couple.

One of my favorite’s is probably Always’s  “Like A Girl” campaign. They would show short clips on TV, but post 5 minute or more videos of YouTube that outlined the whole campaign. They would ask older teenagers what it meant to do something “like a girl,” and they acted out the traditional insulting image of what that looked like. Then they would ask the name of younger girls who showed a different meaning of what “like a girl” meant to them. I liked it before it forced people to confront the sexist language and euphemisms that we use everyday.  LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs

Another one I love is GEICO because of their wide variety of ads with the same punchline –GEICO making its customers happier than the witch in the broom factory or a camel on humpday or Paul Revere with a cellphone. They’re always funny and are super re-quotable which helps make them more famous (especially the “humpday” one). They are also all very brief at about only 30 seconds which means they are very effective at communicating their message in compelling way in a very short amount of time. LINK:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LtjzQaFZ3k

Bezio’s “From Rome to Tyre to London” brought up a couple of interesting points. First, I agreed with one of her very first assertions that history and fiction are “irreducibly complex.” I am often bothered when leaders try to exactly emulate past figures, or when people applaud current leaders for this emulation, because context is so important. Some people celebrate Trump’s likeness with Ronald Reagan, but the tactics and characteristics that made Reagan stand-out aided his success mainly because of the time period in which he existed. To hone in too much on the individual figures distorts their image. I think part of this emphasis comes from our evolutionary tendency to associate successful societies with good leadership and failing societies with bad leadership, as a previous reading pointed out. I think it would be interesting to further investigate why our emphasis falls on the person and how it relates to this evolutionary tendency.

The largest takeaway from this article was how to connect historical leaders and events to present circumstances. Considering the fact Bezio dedicated the first 11.5 pages to understanding the story and the context in which it was written, that appears to be the first step. In fact, I think it is the most important step when trying to make these connections. As I mentioned before, I object to the comparison between Reagan and Trump because their contexts were so different. Bezio did a great job of breaking down Shakespeare’s context of post-Elizabethan England so that every choice Shakespeare made in his writing made sense in that context. Once that was done, making the connections between those smaller pieces and Brexit was a lot easier and straight-forward. I think that if someone broke down all pieces of Reagan’s presidency then I would object less to an off-hand comparison of the two because the argument would be more concrete. Once Bezio broke down all the pieces of Shakespeare, i was impressed by how easy and intuitive those connections to a modern concept were, showing how important a through investigation of the past is. I think it will be interesting because 50 years, 100years, 200 years from now people will be analyzing and breaking down events like Brexit or Donald Trump’s election, having to explain every bit of context  which makes perfect sense to us because we are living in it.

I, like I’m sure many others did as well, was not taught the extent of Columbus’s actions until much later in life. In fact, my school celebrated Columbus day with stories, parades, and games, which gave me very positive association with the man. When I got older, people told me the truth about Columbus and his actions, and it made me wonder why we teach such a warped history to kids. I understand the desire to protect children’s innocence, but is there a need to paint him as such a hero? I feel like there is definitely a way to introduce Columbus in a less celebratory way to kids so that when they do learn the full magnitude of his atrocities, they will not be shocked.

I think this distortion of history points towards a larger issue in our society, as Zinn focused on, that we manipulate information in order to convey certain messages. I think that people manipulate the message of Christopher Columbus because no one wants to embrace the idea of a murderer as the first explorer to find the land that we live on. I think it is similarly why we sugarcoat the story of Thanksgiving and settler-Native American relations in general. People are so proud of our origins as a nation that any evidence to taint that is reconfigured to make it “kid-friendly,” which as Zinn seems do argue, does more harm than good.

Hayter’s article reminded me of some of the things we had to read for my Justice & Civil Society class with Williamson. Just last week we read updates from the Office of Community Wealth Building in Richmond. One part of our reading went explained in-depth the history of segregation in Richmond and how the city and suburbs/counties were basically designed to keep black people poorer, contained, and socially lower than white people. I thought this recognition of systematic discrimination coming from a government office was a huge step in the right direction because we so rarely see that narrative in general, especially not from government officials or public figures. The part in the Office of Community Wealth Building’s report reminded me a lot of Hayter’s article, but it was just published in a more public way.

The Goethals and Allison reading introduced a lot of new theories/ideas while also bringing other ideas together. I thought the most interesting new concept was the “basic law of rumors.” Rumors are something we are all acquainted with, but this is the first time I’ve seen it written into an equation. I think this makes complete sense, especially when put into the context of modern-day America. We seem to have a problem with rumors aka “fake news.” I think a large part of this issue come from the first piece of the equation: importance. Everyone has different things that are important to them, so everyone is more likely to believe a rumor that aligns with something they find important. Similarly, people are drawn to news outlets that reenforce their own beliefs and what they find to be important. This perpetuates the issue because no one is challenging the information that they see and hear, or potential rumors they encounter, because it aligns with their own “importance scale” and makes them more likely to believe it.

I also thought that the implicit leadership theories (ILTs). The first part of leadership schema (beliefs about traits of a leader) reminded me a lot of the reading on SSSs and what physical traits we associate with leadership. The second part (beliefs about what leaders do) reminded me of the reading we read for Monday about what makes a good decision maker and what doesn’t, especially how we gravitate towards the opposite of those good decision maker traits because doing things like being decisive and never admitting wrongdoing supposedly convey strength. This leads back again to the first reading about how our un-evolved brains value strength. One thing I feel like the past two readings as well as this one have failed to do it explain what we can do as a society to work against them perceptions in our brain. If we know this information, how can we spread it to the rest of our communities to make everyone more analytical when assessing good leadership?

Finally, the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’ve read about and studied this before in other classes, and what I find so continually interesting is the role of power in the way that we act. It almost reminds me of some game theory concepts like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In that situation, in order to maintain power/control, you are encouraged to be selfish even though collaboration would bring you the best outcome. In the Stanford Prison experiment, the guards become more violent and cruel towards to prisoners’, most likely because they feel a need to keep control and go to more extreme measures than necessary to absolutely ensure it. Even though this was an experiment, there are real-life instances of these kind of things happening such as in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. In this instance, American soldiers and intelligence officers went to terrible extremes in torturing prisoners, even after some were determined to have no connections to terrorist groups; most people attribute the abuse to “power trips” or incessant needs for control.

In the very first paragraph in the body of this reading, the authors introduced the evolutionary approach to leadership. One particularly interesting idea was the “mismatch hypothesis” where we judge and select candidates somewhat on their physical attributes when the more important aspects of that person are their intellectual abilities and past experiences that would help that individual become a more successful business or political leader. This reminded me of an activity that we did in either this class or Bezio’s 101 class where we pictured a leader and then listed out our thoughts on leadership examples on the board. My mind personally went to presidents who are pretty much all tall, decently fit males; I had to do a self-check to instead suggest non-traditional leaders even though those are the people that inspire me more than the white male presidents of the past. In this instance, I think it is hard to tell whether this is an example of my own evolutionary bias (which I’m sure I hold to some degree) or whether it is more the product of past voters/generations choosing these evolutionarily-qualified men as what leaders are.

In the “functions of leaders in SSSs,” I felt that the duties of the US President were somewhat shaped by these ideas, whether conscious or not. (Sorry to keep talking about the US Presidency but it’s kinda on my mind right now.) He is responsible for managing relations with other nations, as with other groups, as well as the “power to quell conflict” aka being Commander in Chief for all military branches. The reading also says that the leader is not always granted large amounts of power/control but usually is well-respected so their opinion holds more weight. While the US President no doubt has lots of power/control, his position is designed to not be the only voice in the room, through having a designated cabinet who acts as advisors and specialists in a variety of areas, and through having two other branches of government that check his power and actions.

The connection between the US Presidency and the leaders of SSSs did not end there. The description of leaders closely aligns with who our past presidents were. They were all on the older side, as is with SSSs leaders, except for times of institutional change (think JFK). As mentioned before with the evolutionary portion, we gravitate towards taller and stronger people who are pretty much always men as indicated in the “Gender” section of this reading. I think the “hubs of social networks” part translates to a presidential candidate being popular, being the type of person that you want to be friends with. For the most part, presidential candidates from both parties are already involved in politics in some way, making them already known and giving them a group of people who inherently support them. I think this makes Donald Trump’s election more interesting because it breaks this idea of society.