Perspective on Time Horizons

     A little more than ten years ago I was fortunate to spend a morning listening to Dr. Elliot Jaques discuss in an open forum many of the concepts that he had conceived during his illustrious career.  His notion of time horizons seems to ring truer today than at any other time.  For Jacques time horizons were the most useful and objective measure of the level and complexity of work.  While the janitor sweeping the shop floor might be thinking about what was for dinner, the assembly line worker might be more concerned with this week’s pay, a director of marketing more worried about marketing campaigns for next year, the chief executive SHOULD be looking to the future - even beyond his own time at the helm.  Jaques observed that organizations implicitly recognize this fact in everything from titles to salary: line workers are paid hourly, managers annually, and senior executives compensated with longer-term incentives such as stock options.

      Jaques identified seven different time horizons and argued that requisite organizations to be successful should assure the suitability of the employee’s time horizon to the task.  Indeed his research within the context of organizational development indicated that it was this disconnect that made for unhappy employees and failed businesses.  Jaques noted that in effective organizations workers with  differing time horizons worked  at a level where they felt comfortable. If a worker's job was beyond their innate time horizon, they would fail. Less and they would be insufficiently challenged. Level 1 encompasses jobs such as sales associates or line workers handling routine tasks with a time horizon of up to three months. Levels 2 to 4 encompass various managerial positions with time horizons between one to five years. Level 5 crosses over to five to 10 years and is the domain of chief executives. Beyond Level 5, one enters the realm of statesmen and legendary business leaders comfortable with 20 or 50 year time horizons.

     In a world where there is no shortage of short sightedness from egregious examples of greed and short term profits that led to the financial meltdown in 2008 to political leaders who make and change policy based on the latest polls, Dr. Jaques perspective that great leaders are those that tend to be visionaries is worth revisiting. Arguably problems like governement deficits are intractable because we have an electorate that is at Level 2 and elects maybe Level 3 politicians when we really need Level 5 solutions. 

More on responsibility in the context of gun control

To follow up on the notion that the electorate is uninformed, it is incredible that the gun control zealots are unable to understand the problem, and when you can't define the problem your solution will not make any difference. As reported in the "Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City" for the first six months of 2010: 95.1 percent of all murder victims and 95.9 percent of all shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic and 90.2 percent of those arrested for murder and 96.7 percent of those arrested for shooting someone are black and Hispanic. According to Ann Coulter, the murder rate among white Americans is as low as the murder rate in Belgium. "So perhaps it's not a gun problem," she has concluded. "Perhaps it's a demographic problem."

The gun control argument is that gun laws intended to put guns into the hands of "good guys" are the laws that also multiply guns in the hands of "bad guys". Note that these guns are hand guns and are not the topic of the current assault weapon rhetoric. Gun buy backs in inner cities have had mixed results and may be a short term solution, but in the long term the problem of the black ghetto underclass has to shift from the politically correct argument that white racism is the cause and black inequality is the result. As an example, Bill Cosby is one voice that has tried to transform black helplessness, frustration and righteous indignation into a sense of shared responsibility and action. As the dropout rate approaches 70% and the teenage single parenthood is about 80% in the lower economic neighborhoods, Coz has emphasized to the students the importance of their education: “Study. That’s all. It’s not tough. You’re not picking cotton. You’re not picking up the trash. You’re not washing windows. You sit down. You read. You develop your brain.” His message is that black poverty will only end when and if black people themselves take responsibility for changing their lives.

Ironically when the country has moved to where the president can and should be an inspiration for those in the black ghetto underclass, he and the gun control zealots are unable to place responsibility where it belongs

Responsibility

Wrote this before the concept of blogs was imagined! More true today...

America is faced with a shortage of personal responsibility at every level of society. In America, pre-World War II, the churches, the schools and the families inculcated the standards of acceptable behavior. New generations learned the established and agreed upon customs of cooperative and civilized behavior very much as they learned a mother tongue. Starting with the psychedelic 1970's, we have been encouraged to do our own thing and all the traditional concepts of right and wrong have been replaced by a psychological approach to values: instead of being taught that there are absolutes by which they must abide, children are taught, "You'll feel better, if you do the right thing." Thus, having replaced moral concepts of good and evil with therapeutic categories of desire and feeling, we have lost the ability to instill a sense of character in young people and will likely continue to produce new generations of cultural orphans. Character is about one's adherence to moral principles and the standards of conduct that distinguish right from wrong.

Moral principles are not relative to the revisionist history of the moment. A clear lack of personal responsibility is when the President of the United States can admit that he lied to the American people, but urges the American people to be angry with Congress for making an issue of his lying - and they agree. The philosophical basis of this new lack of personal responsibility is rooted in determinism, the argument that people have no control over anything they choose to do, since everything anyone ever does is the result of a chain of causes. In order to fill the void of moral accountability, Americans generally rely on the courts to support the moral underpinnings of our culture which among other consequences results in piles of regulations and commensurate numbers of lawyers. As an example, most pundits agree that runaway medical costs could be seriously checked by tort reform. During the 1980’s Americans did collectively start accepting greater personal responsibility for their actions. This new attitude impacted social programs, as people questioned the assumption that unequal distribution of wealth is always society's fault. More recently, both intellectual and financial success have been demonized and we are moving away from the traditional American value that people are responsible for their own lives.

Dr. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish physician incarcerated in one of Hitler's concentration camps. From that experience, he developed a new school of psychiatry; based on the premise that mental wellness is not achieved by helping the individual understand what caused his psychological problems, but by taking action to resolve the problem. When Dr. Frankl lectured in the United States, he would conclude with a plea for Americans to erect a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast because, he declared, freedom requires a balance between those two ideals, liberty and responsibility.