Learning from Experience - Hardcover

Shultz, George P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817919848 ISBN 13: 9780817919849

Verlag: HOOVER INST PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

George P. Shultz recounts a lifetime of experiences in government, business, and academia and describes how those experiences have shaped the way he thinks about the world. In his plainspoken manner, he provides the reader with keys to understanding how he helped bring the nuclear disarmament movement into the mainstream of American policy discussions, why he urges his Republican Party colleagues to adopt measures to address climate change as an insurance policy for the future, why leaders must learn to govern over diversity, and more. Far more than a simple biography, Learning from Experience makes a unique contribution to political, social, and economic thought, offering the author’s reflections on experiences that have influenced his worldview. Ranging far beyond the realm of diplomacy, Shultz’s account illuminates America’s race relations, defines a down-to-earth economic philosophy built on free markets and fair treatment of labor, and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of presidential leadership as observed during his government service, including four cabinet posts, in the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan administrations.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

George P. Shultz has had a distinguished career in government, in academia, and in the world of business. He is one of two individuals who have held four different federal cabinet posts; he has also taught at three of this country’s great universities. In 1989 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

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Learning From Experience

By George P. Shultz

Hoover Institution Press

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8179-1984-9

Contents

Foreword by Jim Hoagland, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART ONE Durable Lessons, 
• The Market Has an Answer, 
• Everyone Learns, Including the Leader, 
• Challenge the Numbers, 
• No Empty Threats (or Reckless Ones), 
PART TWO Laboring in the Fields, 
• Everybody Has a Job to Do, 
• Argue About the Problem, not the Principle, 
• Seize the Moral High Ground, 
• Let People Own Their Agreement, 
PART THREE In the Arena: The Nixon Cabinet, 
• Competence Counts, 
• Tell the Truth, Stand Firm, Follow Through, 
• The Invisible Hand Is Strong, 
• Sometimes It Takes a Crisis, 
• A Word from the Pope, 
• Steer by Your Compass, 
• You Can't Want the Job Too Much, 
PART FOUR Schooled in Business at Bechtel, 
PART FIVE Back in the Arena: The Reagan Years, 
• Accept the Short-Term Cost, 
• Unstable Systems Crumble, 
• Respect Your Adversaries, 
• Don't Rush to Take Credit, 
• Grow a Backbone, 
• Support the Change You Want to See, 
• Don't Give In When You're Right, 
• Be a Team Player, 
PART SIX Transitions, 
• Bring It All Together, 
• Progress Can Slip Away, 
• Never Lose Sight of the Bottom Line, 
• Prepare for the Worst, Aim for the Best, 
• Strength and Diplomacy Harmonize, 
• Diversity Demands Transparency, 
• At Home in the United States of Diversity, 
• History Repeats, 
• Governance: Family, Community, and Beyond, 
• A Time to Trust, to Lead, and to Hope, 
Appendix: "Terrorism and the Modern World," an address by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, October 25, 1984, 
About the Author, 
Index, 
Photo Section, 

CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

Durable Lessons

The Market Has an Answer

When I was about twelve (in 1932 or so), I decided to start a little newspaper for my neighborhood. I thought I could get it out once a week, so I had the imaginative title of The Weekly News. I got up copies, put the price at five cents a copy, and went around to peddle them in my neighborhood. I will always remember knocking on one door and the man of the house, who was a friend of my parents and whom I, of course, knew, looked at what I had to present. He went inside and came back with a copy of The Saturday Evening Post, a wonderful magazine with beautiful Norman Rockwell covers. He held it up to me and said, "Here is what I can get for five cents." He declined to buy my newspaper.

My first reaction to this rejection was disappointment, but then I realized that if I were to compete with The Saturday Evening Post, I would have to develop some content that was interesting to the neighbors and unavailable to the Post. Reflecting on this incident in later years, I realized it was a lesson in the creativity of the marketplace. I was led, as if by Adam Smith's invisible hand, to try to come up with something better. Ever since, I have come to expect that in a creative society, market solutions will arise.

I was deeply affected by the Great Depression and the sharp fall in stock values. My father was the creator and the dean of the New York Stock Exchange Institute, so he was a salaried employee and somewhat shielded from the ups and downs of the stock market. But everyone felt those large gyrations and struggled to understand them. The talk was all about the market and the money that was being lost, but I remember thinking, even at that young age, that the real problem was unemployment and the lack of productive jobs that gave us the goods and services we needed. I had a sense there was a real economy and a money economy. The two are tightly linked, of course, and one doesn't really exist without the other; nevertheless, from an early age my orientation and my reason for being so interested in economics was a concern about the real economy. This preoccupation influenced choices that had a big impact on my life and, in the policy area, on the views I espoused and the issues I worked on. I became more interested in labor markets than financial markets, even fully recognizing their vital interactions.

Everyone Learns, Including the Leader

I have always loved sports. My father played football as an undergraduate at DePauw University and he encouraged my interest, which I pursued in high school and at Princeton.

Sports is celebrated as a blend of experience and accountability. Golf is an obvious example: there you are on the green, there's the hole, there's the ball, and you are holding the putter. You hit the ball and the result is unambiguous. Whether or not you sink your shot is solely up to you and the quality of your experience. That accountability factor is unavoidable in all sports, whether individual or team. It becomes natural to extend those insights — to realize the importance of accountability in any system for it to work well.

A good team effort means everyone does his job. If only one member falls down, the team suffers.

At Princeton, I learned something else that affected my style of work in all my later years. During senior year, I showed up for preseason football practice in my best-ever physical condition. I was doing really well until I was blocked across the back of my knees — clipped — and was out for the season. Since I knew the system, I was asked to coach the backfield of the freshman team.

At first I told the squad what to do. Before long, I realized that nothing was getting through: no matter what I "taught," the only thing that mattered was what they learned. I realized that my job as a leader, in this and in many subsequent jobs, was to create a situation in which everyone learned, including me. Then I would have a hot group. What is the problem faced by the offensive backfield? How do we solve it? What are our skills and how do we make the best of them? Once we started asking these questions, the Princeton play system could take its place as an important contribution to solving the problem.

Challenge the Numbers

I STUDIED, TOO. I majored in economics and also was involved in what was then known as the School of Public and International Affairs. It ran a session each semester on a domestic and then an international policy area in which each student was given a role, such as secretary of the treasury or foreign minister of Japan, so we worked at the problem from a position of responsibility. It quickly became clear that having a policy was not enough: you had to pay attention to execution. These exercises started me thinking beyond the process of policy formulation to the importance of carrying out whatever it was you decided to do.

I also learned a lot doing a senior thesis at Princeton. My topic was the agricultural program of the new Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a plan to distribute fertilizer to farmers in exchange for agricultural practices that conserved the land. During a summer fellowship I went to Washington and collected statistics, and then to the TVA's headquarters in Knoxville for more data, and somehow ended up spending two weeks living with a hillbilly couple on their demonstration...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: HOOVER INST PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817919848
• ISBN 13: 9780817919849
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 184
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar