Who's The Test Dummy Now?

Edwards Deming would be so proud. The man who endowed the Japanese with a passion for quality after the Second World War might appreciate the level of perfection his protege Toyota now brings to the fine art of corporate self-destruction. At every step of the way Toyota has outperformed all competitors. They have made the Ford Firestone tire recall catastrophe look like a mere firecracker in the plumbing. Even Enron, in the rearview mirror, looks like a mild case of the flu.

This morning Toyota took out a full page apology in the N.Y. Times, in the form of Toyota’s Pledge To You. It is a feast for those that dine on carrion. But before we look at what Toyota is pledging to do from now on that they apparently haven’t done before, let’s look at where they are right now and what the facts seem to be.

Toyota is in the middle of two recalls, one for accelerator problems in which your car suddenly develops a manic desire to go as fast as it can. The result is panicked drivers, high speed catastrophic crashes, and 34 people dead since 2005. Toyota in the first stage of denial hoped it might be floor mats. When a crashed car was found with the floor mats in the trunk, Toyota offered a new theory that an accelerator made by CTS was the problem. When it turned out that the problem had occurred in Toyotas built before CTS became a supplier, Toyota finally admitted what many automotive insiders had already known as far back as 2002: it was a software problem.

Your Toyota accelerator is as connected to your engine as the pilot in Nevada is connected to the drone she’s flying over Afghanistan. The only difference is when the connection is dropped to the drone as it heads into that mountain, the pilot still gets to go to lunch. For the Toyota driver, not so good.

The software that controls the engine speed apparently was written in Japan. The new and even more perfect version of that software suddenly appeared a few days ago and is presently being downloaded to Toyotas all over the world. The same fix could have and should have been in all Toyotas when they got built in the first place, but a few engineers in Japan didn’t run adequate “what if” scenarios, shipped bad code, and never looked back.

Which brings us to today’s apology. It comes from Jim Lentz, the President and COO of Toyota U.S. On behalf of all 172,000 Toyota employees in the U.S. he pledges they will try harder. Thanks, Jim, but they don’t really need to try harder. They weren’t the problem. They shouldn’t be held responsible. You have the wrong people pledging the wrong solution. It’s the guys who designed the car in the first place who should be wringing their hands and pleading for mercy.

If you would like to see more of Toyota’s perfection in pursuit of corporate catastrophe, navigate over to their website and view the hysterical videos of how their electronic throttles work. The voice over seems to be by the same guy who used to do the duck and cover nuclear war training movies. The Toyota videos are so bad they are much more fun.

Now I’ll bet you’d next like to know why Prius brake pedals are also connected to the wheels through a computer that runs on faulty code. But first, all those tens of thousands of Toyota employees need scrape and bow and tell you how sorry they are.

Here’s what Toyota needs to do right now — not just for their consumers but for themselves. All the blather about trying harder doesn’t mean anything at all. What they need to do is find the systems, the human management systems, that let bad engineering get into vehicles as far back as 2002 and not be corrected until now. Hire better software engineers. Create failsafe architecture in every life-endangering system. Bring in genius-level destructive testing. Reward those who immediately surface problems. Fire those who delay that surfacing. When you’ve done that, then you can start your messaging that tells us specifically what you’ve discovered and changed. Then, and only then, we might start to trust you.

In other news, The American Society for Quality has asked Dr. Toyoda to return the Deming Medal. It was, apparently, a mistake.

With the possibility that the health insurance reform bill may be headed for a reconciliation committee, reliable sources in the White House and elsewhere are acknowledging that the rumors about the so-called “vet option” have some basis in fact.

The vet option is short for veterinary option, the radical compromise proposal that would migrate the current US healthcare system to one based on the highly successful animal care model currently prevalent throughout the US, with experts pointing out that the vet system has brought greater health and life expectancy to domestic and farm animals. Although US humans barely rank in the Top 25 in world health care, American animals are consistently in the top 3.

Although not every aspect of the vet model will translate directly to a human model, most aspects of the system will migrate easily, and consumer acceptance in secret focus groups has been high.

Here’s what will stay the same: as in the current human model, you will be able to choose your own doctor, just as pet owners currently do for their animals.

Insurance: User option. As in the current vet model, you can choose to be insured and choose your level of insurance. As the age of the animal or person approaches the end of normal life expectancy, insurance rates for the previously uninsured go up. If you’ve ever tried to buy cancer coverage for a fifteen year old cat with a recently discovered tumor you can understand how this would work. Same for “end of life care.” If the cat or the person with what looks like a terminal disease is not insured, they will receive appropriate palliative care and, of course, humane disposal.

Meds: Here’s the possibility for a real cost savings. The regulations for animal pharmaceuticals are as rigorous as they are for humans, since many animals are given medicine and then end up in the human foodchain. These same veterinary medications will be available for human consumption directly at a fraction of the cost that the same meds have been for humans. Some exceptions, such as bovine growth hormone, may be held back initially.

Emergency care: Recognizing the current overwhelmed state of most hospital emergency centers, properly licensed veterinary emergency centers will be able to accept the full spectrum of mammalian patients. Clearly veterinarian facilities that include a large animal practice will be able to offer a full-service mammal response from the get-go. The clinics that currently focus on the smaller domestic animals will need to add some equipment in order to join the program, such as larger gurneys and suitable gowns.

The biggest objections to the program have come, surprisingly, more from pet lovers than humans lovers. Pet aficionados have expressed concerns that humans might crowd their existing pet facilities, making access to care for their furry ones less convenient and possibly even driving costs up. Government response so far has been muted, but the White House press office points out that Rahm Emanuel has already addressed the issue, pointing out that animal care in previously human-only hospitals could become a huge boutique profit center for affluent communities.

When we contacted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi about her support of the vet option, she repeated her frequently-heard mantra, “We must get healthcare passed, no matter what.”

Years ago, Fortune magazine ran a powerful advertising campaign using the slogan, “There’s nothing harder to stop than a trend.”  Trends are indeed mighty. But what if things are trending the wrong way? Can a trend be slowed or turned?

This country has been on a stupid vector for a long time. It’s hard to tell when being inarticulate started being as acceptable as being smart, but the notion gained great traction and one could even say reached it fullest expression during the recent decade. The trend didn’t just show itself in malapropisms about how hard it was to put food on your family, it was the explanations of concepts that, when simplified, become dangerous. “I’m the decider,” had reasonable people all over the world start thinking about grabbing a shovel and digging that nuclear shelter.

Some people, apparently, are fond of the dumbing down trend. Witness Charles M. Blow’s recent piece in the New York Times objecting to the President’s language in the State of the Union. Blow says the President was “stuck on studious.”

And the answer? (Warning! I did not fabricate the following:)

Blow says, “Obama has to accept that today’s information environment is broad and shallow, and we now communicate in headline phrases, acerbic humor and ad hominem attacks. Sad but true.”

Blow is saying that the President should try to communicate at the lowest possible level to the people of the United States. Instead of raising the quality of public discourse, which he constantly does, he should lead a race to the bottom and drag those who still think and speak in entire sentences down with him.

What if Blow is right, and President Obama  were to follow his advice? Then America would get even dumber. Continuing along this trend to its logical conclusion we would eventually be communicating in grins, grunts and thrown objects. Devolution will be complete. And this is called thinking by the editorial staff of the New York Times?

I would have imagined that the New York Times, with its billions of net worth riding on the ability of the next generation to think might have some wee bit of vested interest in the world of smart. Now you could reasonably argue that a number of recent columns from Dowd, Collins and Douthat might not be providing the right flypaper for smart folks. You might even wonder if the Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal even reads what goes on his pages. Maybe his job description doesn’t include calling up Mr. Blow and asking him if he really believes the President should talk down to all Americans. Or maybe, and I’m just thinking out loud here, maybe Rosenthal is using Blow to speak for the New York Times itself — We need to try and be as dumb as we imagine our dumbest readers to be.

Now that Safire’s gone we can start with a Vocabulary Cop and go from there.

Blow says, “The President must communicate within the environment he inhabits, not the one he envisions. Someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’” That’d be us, the American people. Nipping at Obama’s ankles.

Mr. Blow also seems to suggest we need more ad hominem attacks. I could take the dangled bait and say something not nice about Blow’s thought processes. I could take an easy swipe with some true but snarky remark about how obtuse his graphics have become over the years, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just make an entreaty that he take a moment before the next column to speculate what the world would be like if everyone took his advice.

Coming soon: How u can hv deep thots & save teh world n 140 lttrs.

I’m standing here almost naked at San Francisco Airport security two years from now, trying to check in for a flight to New York. Two TSA staffers have got a Michael Chertoff Special in their hands, trying in the most painful way to explore those hidden places in my body where someone might hide explosives. Once more, I’m thinking that if this gets too much worse, I might just stop flying.

Think back to the glorious days of yesteryear in air travel. You could arrive at the airport fifteen minutes before departure time, run from curb to gate and hand your boarding pass to the attendant as you took a flying leap onto the departing aircraft. All that splendid efficiency is now gone. Air travel, like life in the industrial towns of 19^th century England, has devolved into something two-thirds Hobbesian: nasty and brutish. The short part, unfortunately, has fallen by the wayside.

The hijackers of 9-11 not only blew up the WTC and killed 3000 people. They also ended travel as we knew it. TSA, like a giant wet blanket, settled over the air travel system and smothered it. We all became suspects, and the process of flying began top resemble a mass induction into prison. We watched in horror as nice old ladies were being felt up. Young mothers handed off their infants to strangers as each passed through x-rays. It couldn’t get worse than this.

But it did. Richard Reed and his pals came up with the notion of putting explosives in a hollowed out heel. Suddenly millions of people needed to wander around airports shoeless as they passed through security. Underwire bras were suddenly suspect. Infants were now so irradiated they stopped spoiling — but they did glow in the dark. It couldn’t get worse.

But it did. Several plots were uncovered to blow up a whole raft of aircraft simultaneously over the Atlantic using chemicals that in shaky theory, could be mixed in the aircraft’s bathroom during flight. Despite the fact that explosives experts said it would take three hours to mix the chemicals and even then they would not work, the entire world was now prohibited from carrying more than three ounces of liquid of any kind onboard. Gone was everyone’s mouthwash, shampoo, conditioner, and booze. We became a nation of sober, unkempt, stinkers. Travel had descended to something that would have inspired Dante, if he had lived to see it, to add a tenth circle to Hell. And his famed warning soon became the watchword to every traveler as they approached the Gates of Hellport: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

Surely it could not get worse. But then along comes Umar of the White Raisins (I’m not going to look up his real name and I would suggest you shouldn’t either. Who cares what his name is? Why add to his celebrity?) So along comes Umar carrying something special in his underpants. If his efforts weren’t for real it would be hysterically sad. The day after Christmas I seriously considered shorting my Jockey underwear stock in the simple hope of gaining a modicum of fame for being the first to short shorts. But I knew one thing for sure, air travel was about to get one little more step of degradation worse.

I’ve listened to Janet Napolitano, President Obama, and too many talking heads all agreeing that we urgently needed to close some more loopholes to make sure no one with explosives in their pants can ever get through security again. Well endowed men will get closer examination. Tiger Woods will thank his lucky stars he doesn’t fly commercial.

We can’t go on like this.

What’s really going on is that the terrorists are engaged in a war of escalation, while the West is engaged in a war of containment and defense. For little cost the terrorists send a guy out with some explosives hidden somewhere new (first a heel, then underpants, next a body cavity, then eyeglasses, then a baby) and we react by spending more billions on new machines, waste hundreds of millions of hours putting little old ladies from St. Louis through some wretched new humiliating process. With every new act, the terrorists automatically win, because our quality of life gets worse and our commerce, which requires easy travel to flourish, suffers.

We need to bow out of this escalation war. We can’t win it. But we can surely wreck our world by slowly losing it. The question is — how to get out of the war?

Imagine this scenario. We take down our conveyor belts, the X-ray machines, our blow machines, our body scanning machines. We announce to the world that we can detect explosives with only a single molecule (which we can in many instances.) We start relying on profiling, don’t announce how we’re doing it, and simply start to act smart. We take the billions we’re currently wasting and spend it on smarter security forces. When we catch a lunatic with something wicked up his derriere, we say nothing. And I mean nothing. Those schemers back in their caves will be reading the police blotters from Elkhart, Indiana wondering what the hell ever happened to Omar. Meanwhile, Omar gets tried, convicted for life, and disappears. The terrorists get no publicity. It takes two to play a war of escalation. We just need to get off the escalator.

What if a terrorist gets through? They’re as likely to either way. In the war of escalation, when a terrorist gets through, they kill a lot of people and the West spends billions escalating. If a terrorist gets through after we’ve quit the war of escalation, we still go after the bad guys in the same way, but we don’t escalate our defense in any way they can see. We appear to ignore them as we would ignore a child throwing a tantrum. Terror only works when there’s someone to terrorize. When we stop being terrorized, there won’t be any more terrorists.

She seemed like what you might call ‘a nice person.’ He seemed decent enough, too. His voice a tad too loud, but not meaning to be obnoxious. They were just enjoying the days between Christmas and New Years, chatting, flirting, browsing the new non-fiction cases at City Lights. Multitasking ran deep in their veins. They were joking, scanning book jackets and discussing several topics at once.

I would have turned back to my browsing, when suddenly it caught my eye. She wasn’t even looking at her phone, but in a well-practiced gesture that you might not have seen if you weren’t paying close attention, she hovered her phone over the book and snapped a picture of the cover. It took less than a second but there was no mistaking the intent. City Lights had lost another sale. That $35 book would soon be coming her way from Amazon at $24.95.

The store was bustling with customers. We try to visit regularly because the browsing is always so superb — it’s impossible to glance at a shelf without discovering a terrific book that you haven’t heard of before. A year ago I had been scanning a category of books near the cashier called “Books With CDs” and Arnold Steinhardt’s exquisitely crafted Violin Dreams fell into my hands. (And I bought it there.) I’d never heard of it before and never seen a mention of it in print since. If not for City Lights I would never have discovered one of my favorite books of all time.

Browsing is like middle children — something you take for granted but when it’s gone society loses something important. Middle children are the buffers in a family, the ones who learn to negotiate between the typically aggressive eldest child and the clingy youngest siblings. Middle children are like saints, actually. (Full disclosure, yes, the author of this piece is a middle child, but you probably already knew that.) It was predicted a generation ago, and clearly now come to fruition, that with the shrinking American family and the decline of the numbers of middle children, we would become a more contentious people. Clearly this explains what’s going on in the Senate.

Browsing has a big role to play in society, too. Browsing is the enabler of serendipity. Without browsing, the chances for the out-of-frame discovery are terribly diminished. I am still waiting for someone to say, “I discovered this really great book on Amazon.” What would our world be like without serendipity? That would be gray, dear reader.

Busy as the store way, the City Lights cashiers had nothing to do but chat with each other and answer the occasional reference question. They just weren’t ringing up sales. City Lights had become a free browsing service for Amazon.

We took a break from browsing and headed out for some non-touristy North Beach food. We stopped in front of a restaurant and were immediately assaulted by a hawker who swept down, apparently attempting to entice us with a breath that sang of fresh garlic. She announced the specials in an accent so obscure that even as we read the menu along with her, not a word could be understood. The dim sum parlors provided a different sort of browsing: plates of wax food that was meant to speak directly to one’s salivary glands.

And then I got it. Both the restaurants and City Lights were providing a browsing experience. The difference was that the customers browsing the restaurants came in and actually bought stuff. But people browsing the books at City Lights were buying their books from Amazon, even while they were still right there in the store!

What to do?

If I ran City Lights and wanted to stay in business, I’d put big signs in the windows and behind the cash register: “We’ll meet Amazon’s Price!” Apparently City Lights management believes that they can’t make enough money trying to match Amazon, but I have news — making $7 on a book is better than making nothing on it. The day I was there thousands of dollars in sales were being lost. And as long as you have the traffic, do what the carwashes do. Sell other stuff to your customers at full price: accessories like reading lamps and bookmarks, gift cards, even Smithfield hams, dammit! But don’t turn your bookstore into a browsing facility for Amazon. You can’t go on like this.

I left the store a little depressed, fearing for a great institution. As we walked by The Stinking Rose, another North Beach fixture, I noted a woman in her thirties deep into her book as she sat by herself in the window. There was no question where she had bought her copy: she was reading a nice fresh volume of Kerouac.

So City Lights had managed to make at least one sale. I hope it wasn’t the last.

On August 17, 2009, President Obama addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

“But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is a — this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

This is either true or not true. If true, then winning the war in Afghanistan is fundamental to the defense of the homeland, and there can be no sacrifice too great. Because the last thing we want to be engaged in is a half-hearted, one foot in, one foot out, kind of war. If it is a war of necessity, then there is no question about giving the generals all the troops and equipment and support they need for as long as they need. America’s at war, dammit.

But David Brooks in this morning’s Times just blows past the basic question– do we need to win this war or not? Instead he dwells on Obama’s feelings and his level of determination. Brooks doesn’t believe Obama is really telling us the truth about how he feels about the war. He thinks the president needs to spend some quality time looking at himself in the mirror. “If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now.”

Actually, no. I don’t really care about President Obama’s feelings about the war. I care about his judgment. And if he says we must win this war, then we must win this war. If he’s changed his mind, then we need to have new goals articulated, and we need to achieve them. We can’t just increase or decrease troop levels depending on the president’s serotonin levels.

I do want to know more about what the President means when he says “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” I thought most of those plotters died in the attack, or have been caught or killed since, with the significant exception of Osama bin Laden himself. (How is it that this lunatic, flitting from cave to cave, supposedly on and off dialysis, under constant surveillance from our hundreds of millions of dollars of drones that cruise the area, is able to survive while the comparable uninsured American, during the same time period, has probably suffered the fatal consequences of our patchwork health-care system? Just asking.)

And I’m troubled about the basis for Tom Friedman’s judgment that we really don’t need to win the Afghan war. In the first place, Friedman was such a great champion for the Iraq pre-emptive war and then for repeatedly calling for staying the course “just another six months” that in many circles, six months is now simply referred to as a Friedman Unit. (At last count, the Iraq war, from March 19, 2003 to now has required 19 Friedman Units, soon to be a smooth 20 to 1 error in judgment.)

Now we have a new Friedman measure of progress in the world, from a column this week. Progress is now to be measured by “when a key player in the Middle East actually does something that puts a smile on my face.” Oh Oracle of Delphi, how far we’ve fallen! Somehow the idea that I’m going to be spending the rest of my life peering into that Friedman mustache trying to find traces of a smile makes me, how to put this delicately, have flashes of driving the big white bus.

Friedman blows past the basic question of whether or not we must win this war to keep America safe. Friedman gets the big questions completely backward: the real question seems to be not must we win, but how hard will it be to win: “We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.” So under Friedman’s logic we wind down the Afghan war even it means the possible destruction of America. Since it’s too hard to win. Gee, Tom. WWII was hard, too.

And that kind of logic ought to be enough to lower everyone’s serotonin levels.

If you read the N.Y.Times in its coverage of the disruption of the Kindle, you might think that publishers are losing a fortune from the sudden rise in Kindle sales.

Actually, the opposite is true. Amazon is buying Kindle rights from publishers at the same price they’re paying for physical books. And Amazon is sticking with its policy to sell Kindle books at no more than $9.99. So take your average $20 list price hardcover book (if I were a shameless self-promoter, I would use my book The Genius Machine as an example, since it also has a list price of $20. But I will resist the temptation.) The publisher sells it to Amazon for 50% off, or $10. Amazon could sell my the book for $20, but they discount it down to $13.57, and make a profit of $3.57, or maybe a little less if Amazon is paying for shipping.

Now take the same book sold as a Kindle. Amazon pays $10 for those rights, too. And Amazon sells the download for $9.99, thereby earning a gross profit of 1¢ on each copy. On books that wholesale for more than $9.99, Amazon seems to be locked into a loss with every sale.

And what about the publisher? On a $20 retail book they get the same $10 for the Kindle edition as they did for the actual hardcover that cost them some $2.00 to manufacture, ship, and even keep a reserve for returns of unsold books. So who is making a killing on the Kindle? The publishers. And Publishers, please, if I’m wrong about these numbers, share the facts with us in the comments below.

Publishers are worried that Amazon will choose to stop losing money on Kindle sales at some point. They are just waiting for that shoe to drop. Hence the cheering for Barnes & Noble’s new reader, Nook. (Nook. Interesting name. Just asking, but what would you call a diminuitive version of the Nook?) Publishers are beyond eager for someone, anyone, to stop Amazon from completely owning ebooks!

Now let’s talk about those ten books that Wal-Mart and Target are offering for pre-orders at $8.99 and Amazon at $9.00. These are for hardcover books ranging in list price from Linda Howard’s Ice at $22 all the way up to Stephen King’s 1088 page monster Under the Dome that lists for a mighty $35. What is the meaning, if any, in these door-busting discounts?

Comes now (“Comes now” is a locution reserved for columnists who can’t find a better way to introduce a new character into a story. But I digress.) Motoko “Cassandra” Rich of the N.Y. Times in her “Price War” story in last Saturday’s paper, wherein she worries that Wal-Mart selling some pro-orders for books as a loss-leader will somehow “fundamentally damage the industry and the ability of future authors to write or publish books.” And, once more, end publishing as we know it.

To tell her story, Ms. Rich interviews bestselling author James Patterson, who she was apparently grateful to reach before her deadline, since she quotes him at length no matter how little light he has to shed upon the subject. Frankly, interviewing an author about retail price discounting is akin to interviewing a tuna about the price of a Salade Niçoise.

The fact is, publishers don’t really care what a retailer sells a book for. Retailers want to take a loss? No problem. What everyone needs to be concerned about, though, is when a Wal-Mart or Amazon pressures a publisher to sell at what is known as a “deep-discount.” That should set off alarms for authors and agents, since most author agreements call for author royalties to take a severe hit when the publisher sells at a deep discount.

Authors: Read your contracts! Find that “Deep Discount” clause. Does it say something to the effect that when the publisher sells your book for more than a 50% discount, the author royalty suddenly gets cut in half? Think about that. The publisher gives Barnes & Noble an extra 1% discount and you lose half your royalties on every book sold.

The big take-away here is that nine of the ten books being hacked down in price by Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart are fiction titles. Only one calls itself non-fiction. And this is the clue to smart book pricing. Fiction is generally sold as entertainment. Entertainment tends to be more fungible. Non-fiction is generally sold on the value of the information it contains. So pricing the two in the same way seems crazy.

How much would you pay for information that can change your life? Heal a child? Save your business? Is that information worth only $20? Is that all you’d pay for it?

We haven’t begun to touch value pricing for non-fiction. That is the real gold mine just waiting for publishers. We’ll write more about the potential and the theory of value pricing soon.

In the meantime, you have to wonder about the one non-fiction title that’s being treated just like all those other nine fiction titles being deep discounted. Yes, it’s Sarah Palin’s memoir. Now, if what she were about to disclose had great value, say information that could, in some way, save the Union, it certainly would be worth a lot. Some of us would pay real money for that kind of knowledge.

But Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon say we can have it all for just $8.99. Maybe they know something.

You’re third in line for takeoff, finally ready to depart La Guardia and get to your lunch meeting in Chicago. The pilot comes on the P.A. for a last-minute cheery message: “Thanks for your patience. We hope to make it up one we’re in the air and get you to O’Hare on time. Or at least someplace not too far from there. We’re thinking maybe Gary or Indianapolis. As the President says, we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential. So wish us luck.”

What if that were acceptable? What if we never got where we were hoping to go, and it was okay?

What are the implications when President Obama tells us that part of his philosophy is, “We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential?” Sounds reasonable, in a way. Don’t want to be a perfectionist about everything. Wouldn’t be realistic. Never get anything done. Got to compromise, make a deal. Make progress of some kind.

I’m not so sure about throwing the perfect overboard. I keep wondering how can we ever know what really is essential unless we first know what the perfect looks like? Sure, when you’re going 500 miles per hour in an aluminum can at 30,000 feet, essential is you land in one piece, somewhere. But when you’re on the ground planning a trip, maybe the perfect includes getting all the way to your destination.

You want to know why this country is so confused about how to move forward on healthcare? One reason is, no one has given us a vision of what the perfect looks like. Without the perfect, we’re not even heading to Chicago and putting up with the reality that we might land in Cleveland. Obama’s vision for healthcare still feels to lots of people as if we’re just lifting off with no clear vision of where we hope to land.

Would you really want your team to design anything without first making the effort to get a clear picture of what the perfect might be? If we don’t attempt to imagine what the perfect is, let ourselves dream and reach for the stars, then we are giving up our greatest gift as human beings before we even start. Without a destiny that we can see and dream about and hope for, what is to guide our efforts? The journey of progress will be vastly longer if we don’t know where we’re going.

What if Frank Gehrey had listened to that board member (whom I’m certain existed), the one who said, “Now, don’t go all crazy Frank,” and never asked himself what the Disney Concert Hall should be like if he could create exactly what we wanted? What would I like the outcome to be of my open heart surgery? What kind of achievements would you like to have in your life? Do you want to start by thinking about all the compromises you’re going to have to make, or do you want to imagine what you want to do, first?

Now that I’ve won you over (at least for a moment) to the notion that we should try to imagine what perfect would look like, let me invite you join me in imagining what would a perfect healthcare system be like? I, for one, would toss in the principles that everyone would have the healthcare they wanted and needed. People would be educated about healthy choices, and the obesity rates would decline. Money in the system would go to caregivers. Overhead would be kept at a minimum. Compensation for doctors would incentivized quality outcomes. We would shift from a sickness to a wellness system. That’s top of mind for me.

What about you? You can add your own thoughts, or turn this upside down. But whatever the discussion, we need to be able to hold up for ourselves a clear well defined picture of where we’d like to be someday. Many people feel the perfect is, “Single Payer.” But I think whether that’s it or not, we need to see how it would actually be in reality. Maybe we even to imagine what would happen if the healthcare insurance industry were downsized or shut down. I have no trouble seeing it, by the way. I just imagine decommissioning old coal-fired electricity generating plants. Same thing.

Whatever our vision of the perfect is we will be, finally, ready to design our compromises with “political reality” (which means working with those Stakeholders Who Are So Large That No One Can Say Their Name). And most important, look at those compromises and determine whether they allow us to remain aligned with our vision of the perfect, or if they take us farther off track.

Without that clear picture of where we want to go, we will never get closer to it. With that vision of the perfect, we’ll always know what’s left to be done. That’s what leaders are for, by the way. To inspire us with a vision of the ideal, and then make the incremental steps that move us comfortably yet inexorably, forward.

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?”

Richard is gone now, but I would like to know what helpful highly focusing question he might pose to help us think clearly about health care, as the debate (this is a debate?) gets louder, and we tend to lose sight of our goals here. Certainly one of Richard’s questions is helpful — “Is this good for our children?” But that question only gets to part of those affected. After all, this is about all of us, as individuals, as parents, as children, and as members of our local and national communities.

What simple and powerful questions can we agree on that will help us know when we’ve come up with the best possible solution to designing a health care system for America?

Those who are afraid that their Medicare might be taken away or compromised might want to ask the question, “Will Medicare be left alone?” Those who have health insurance but don’t want to pay additional taxes for anyone else’s healthcare might want to test any new plan by that threshold. Public health officials might want to ask how any new plan will affect the nation’s ability to deal with a biological attack or a natural pathogen-caused pandemic. We could add to the list of who should be asking these questions of self-interest, parents, college-age students, those without coverage at the moment, and other people who are concerned about how they will be affected.

The above groups of people, taken as a whole, are likely to ask questions and be satisfied with answers that reflect their self- or community health-interest. Some of these people will be focused on the greater good. Some will be focused on their immediate, one could say, more selfish interests. But whether enlightened self-interest or not, this would be the American people asking the questions that count.

Did I leave some groups out? Yes, indeed. I realize that the healthcare industry also has questions. Will be this be good for insurance companies? Will any change be good for hospitals? Will drug companies be able to set their own prices? What will be the impact on healthcare providers? And I would answer, I don’t think their questions are as important. Acting in our (the people’s) self-interest, we all want doctors to be happy, not overworked, and well-paid. We want hospitals to be efficient and clean, fully staffed, and pleasant places of nurture and recovery.

I’m willing to take it on faith that the pharmaceuticals, the insurance companies, the hospitals, and even the doctors, are going to take care of themselves. So when Big Pharma promises to take an $80 billion haircut out of the goodness of their hearts, or Karen Ignagni, lobbyist and spokesperson for the insurers says that now they’re going to stop denying coverage for “pre-existing conditions,” I think, thanks, Big Pharma. And thanks Karen, but I’m not all that into what you have to say right now. It’s a little late. What I do care about is that the National Academy of Sciences is reporting that 20,000 American’s die each year because they can’t get the healthcare they need.

And I am haunted by Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without creating a civilization in-between.” I had always hoped we could avoid that curse. Maybe this is when we get our chance.

So when I see talking heads, “experts,” and politicians talking about healthcare, I want them to answer the people’s, and only the people’s questions — “How will this change be good for me?” I want the people to be heard and answered, even though our questions might seem a little selfish. Make most of us happy, and just maybe, together, we can create something we could fairly call civilization.

We all know that the world treats you better if you’re good-looking. Tall is helpful, too. Tall men make more money than short men. They are more likely to become CEOs. They are seen as not only more powerful, but more intelligent.

Do you care if people see you as intelligent? If you do, then you might want to practice a few simple things that can make it more likely that people will grock you as smart. Let’s start with posture. If you occupy your clothes as if they’re still on a hanger, you’ll look as if you’re tired. And if you look tired, people will think you’re generally sleepy-headed. When you’re sitting either at a table or at your desk, you’ll want to practice being compact in your body, legs and arms neatly arranged. Sprawl means disorganized, and unless you’re already certified as a genius, sprawl means you can’t find what you need when you need it, either on your desk or in your head.

Have you ever taught a class, or given a formal presentation to a group of people? Can you remember the experience of looking out at dozens of pairs of eyes? Some people in your audience probably met your look toward them, making eye contact. Others might have disconcerted you by never meeting your gaze.

Where should your eyes go when you’re working in a group, or reporting to your boss, or working closely with someone? If you can maintain eye contact, you will be in good communication with other people. Once they know that you’re looking carefully at them, they will be reading your face to see if you get what they are saying. With tiny head and facial gestures you can indicate that you understand. You appear intelligent, participating in two-way communication even if the other person is doing the talking.

Years ago I had a partner who joined me one day in presenting our wares to a large gathering of our salespeople. When it was over we took a moment to review our presentations. My partner asked me how I felt his presentation of a particular product had gone. I said, “Couldn’t you tell?” “ I haven’t got a clue,” he said. “I don’t like to wear my glasses when I present, so I can’t see anybody’s face.”

Intelligent people are looking for clues, for the unsaid. Valerie Jarrett says President Obama reads body language better than anyone in his top team. He can read a group in the oval office and know in an instant who will need follow up.

So before you even open your mouth and say your first word, people are making judgments about your intelligence. They’re reading your energy levels from your posture. They’re making judgments about how well organized your mind might be from how you hold yourself and move your limbs. And they’re looking at your eyes to see if you are looking at them. If they can’t make contact with you, they might assume there’s no light on.

No matter how tall you are.