What a Manager Should Know: Deming's Four Elements of Profound Knowledge

Deming argued that there are four elements of profound knowledge that define a what managers should know.

1. Appreciation for a system

2. Understanding of variation

3. Psychology, and

4. A theory of knowledge

To effectively manage or understand an organization, you don't need a deep understanding of any one of these but you need some understanding of all of these. Also, each of these elements makes more sense within the context of the other three; the four form a system.

"A bad system will beat a good person every time."

- Deming 

1. Appreciation for a system and 2. understanding of variation

Deming used things like control charts that tracked data over time to determine what was common cause and what was special cause. To understand variation is to understand the difference between what comes from the system and what does not. People in 2000 in the US were 6X more productive than people in 1900 in the US. It wasn't because they worked harder (in fact, average work weeks dropped from about 60 hours a week to about 38 hours a week in that time). It's because they had better systems. You'll never get as far trying to make people work harder in an old system as you will by improving that system.

Here is a set of 100 data points representing rework (imagine an auto assembly line that created 1,000 cars a day, say) that mostly varies from about 10 to 40 cars that need to be reworked each day That much variation yields a control chart that suggests that normal variation falls within a range of 1 to 47 cars. (Normal variation is what we can expect from the system.)

Only one data point in the above chart - the one on day 16 that hits 57 - appears to come from special cause. All the rest of the variation is just a normal part of the day to day variation. 

Normal variation can still be explained as special by people who don’t understand it. It often is. "Orlando was not paying attention and we had 6 cars in a row assembled with the brake pads swapped. That's what happened." There is always a story to go with the data. And there is often a person we can name in that story. Normal variation can be explained but those explanations are themselves randomly associated with outcomes of a stable system. (This does not just happen on assembly lines. Each day, regardless of whether it goes up or down, moves a lot of moves a little, analysts say things like, "Investors were skittish today because of ..." What would actually be remarkable would be a day in which the major indices finished exactly where they started. Variation is normal. It is only over longer periods of time that you can spot a general direction.)

The only story for a data point that deserves explanation in the above graph is what happened on day 16. That is unusual and the explanation for that day will likely tell you something. It is special, meaning that what happened on that day isn’t explained by the normal rise and fall of our system, is variation that lies outside the normal bounds of daily variation.

Meanwhile, if you don't like it when you have to rework more than, say, 25 cars in a day, you need to look at the system. Is the process you're using dependent on guys like Orlando performing four different assembly steps every 5 minutes for 2 hours in a row before he gets a break? Is there any data suggesting that the average person can sustain focus and accuracy for that long without attention wandering? It's easy to say that Orlando should focus but do you have any data suggesting the average person hired for this role does? If that part of the process is consistently contributing to, say, 4 to 15 of the rework events each day, then we know that changing that process has the potential to reduce rework by about 10 units a day. (Note that this goal of ten is not the product of some arbitrary goal that came of the fact that we have ten fingers but instead comes from examination of the data that suggests we get an average of 10 errors a day from the process Orlando works.)

Once we know what is wrong with the system, rather than blame Orlando for the errors, we can brainstorm solutions. What if we gave Orlando breaks every 90 minutes instead of every 120? What if we rotated the person responsible for this really demanding process step so that no one had to do this task more than 2 hours a day? What if we changed the process so that Orlando has to do just 3 steps every 5 minutes instead of 4 steps? And so on. If we find a plausible theory for improvement, we can implement it for, say, another 30 to 100 days to see if this brought down errors. If it did, we have made progress and we can turn to some other issue within the system.

The behavior of the system is typically stable even as we change who we hire. (And the hiring process is part of the system. If we make a real change in what we screen for when we interview candidates, that too, might improve our system.) Systems define most outcomes. Changing teachers or politicians, employees or bankers is often like changing the cast in your play in the hopes that Romeo & Juliet will end happily.

Also, systems can behave in unexpected ways. A system has emergent properties that none of its part have. For instance, an engine cannot get you across town, nor can a steering wheel nor tires nor an axle. But when these parts are brought together in a system like a car, they can. Organizations are made up of knowledge workers who have to coordinate in order to create value. The person who designs a new product is worthless unless there is a person who can make it. Even those two are worthless if someone can't sell what they make, and so on. Just like the parts of the car cannot get you across town, the parts of an organization can't create value; through coordination, though, these people can create enormous value that emerges from their interactions. As a manager, you need to understand their current output as something that has lots of normal variation and you need to appreciate that the efforts in one part of the process can create problems in another step. (For instance, optimizing each part of the car could result in 87 different size bolts. This complexity could make it more difficult to keep all your parts stocked and even errors in assembly as you raise the risk of someone using the wrong bolt that is just fractionally off in size. Doing what is best for the system - changing the design so that it relies on just 3 different size bolts for instance - might mean doing what is less than optimal for a specific part.) The point is to optimize the system and that depends on people within it cooperating rather than competing.

Which brings us to psychology. 

If you have people within a system compete for promotions and raises rather than cooperate to create a fabulous product, you lay land mines for issues. If you have people work towards local goals rather than cooperate to create a success for the whole organization, you can easily encourage sub-optimization. Worse, you can disengage people through the use of extrinsic motivation.

The worst kind of motivation focuses people so much on the rewards that they don’t pay much attention to the task itself. One study of four-year-old children who tend to love a drum at that age broke the kids into three groups. One group was told that the box in front of them had a special gift for them for playing the drum. They stared at it distractedly the whole time they were pounding. Another group was told, almost in passing, that they’d get a prize for playing the drum. The third group was told nothing but was turned loose in the same toy room that included a drum. The second group was most likely to later identify the drum as their favorite toy, which gave rise to a notion of minimal sufficiency principle, [Mark Lepper] “using rewards or threats that are minimally sufficient to get kids to do the desired behaviors, but not so strong that the kids view the threats or rewards as the reason they are acting that way.”

As with systems or variation, psychology is rich with much more than the simple considerations I’ve mentioned. Deming felt that so much of what we do in school and work undermines the intrinsic motivation of people to learn, engage, cooperate, and create. He often showed this chart (video to follow).

This psychological question of how the system you have designed engages or disengages people might be the most important question of all.

"90% of what matters cannot be measured."

- Deming 

Finally, the fourth element of profound knowledge is the theory of knowledge. How do you know what you know? Your data and people’s behavior might be stable but what if the environment changes? How do you know that customers like your product? What about it do they like? The advances in UX since the time of Deming (he died in the early 1990s) have taken this question seriously. It’s worth remembering that he made his name as a management consultant but first got to Japan as a person to help with the census (“How do we know how many people live in Nara?” “How do we count people staying in a hotel on the night of the census? Are they counted as residents of the city of the hotel or the city they claim as home?”). And he got into the position to help to define this after getting a PhD in Physics. He studied phenomenon and tried to understand how we knew what we knew, and carried that basic inquiry into the question of how to count the population of an entire nation and how to measure quality in a product or service.

Evidence for what you know comes from data but data comes after you’ve formulated a theory. If you change what you are trying to measure or what you believe about the phenomenon, the data may suddenly be made obsolete or you’ll need to collect it differently. Your theory of knowledge is bound up in how you measure variation and how you define and understand the system you expect people to engage in.

Theory of knowledge, psychology, variation and systems. You can start anywhere and go everywhere but the real goal is to understand what you are dealing with in terms of a system and how that enables or disables people from realizing their potential within that system. This means understanding the difference between common cause and special cause variation and even a deeper understanding of how you know anything at all. All of it is humbling but it also leads to continuous learning and improvement as you continue to inquire on all of those fronts. Systems evolve with the people within them and the environment around them … or they become obsolete.

Ultimately, a successful social inventor or entrepreneur creates a system that outlasts them. The US didn’t collapse when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died hours apart on the country’s 50^th anniversary. Apple’s stock didn’t fall to zero when Steve Jobs died. The real value is less about your efforts within a system than your ability to improve or create the system. It’s true that some people run much faster than others but no one outruns a jet; what you want to do in improving or creating a system is to create something that performs much better than the people within it could hope to on their own.  A great manager does the same and I’m not sure how you’d do any of it without at least some intuitive or learned understanding of Deming’s profound knowledge.

A New Kind of Manager

I suspect that in the future, work teams will increasingly be coordinating their activities through the Internet and be less reliant on companies. And this will set the stage for a new kind of manager.

Decades ago, if you had told a new recruit that people would pay for the (admittedly kinder and gentler) experience of boot camp, would HIRE someone to push them beyond what they'd do on their own, they would have laughed at you. And yet (probably) millions of people hire personal trainers.

One of the biggest differences between the personal trainer who pushes you and the drill instructor who pushes you is whether the experience is voluntary. The person who is drafted - or even volunteers - has no choice about the experience, however "good" it may be for him. And in this I think that we potentially have a new model of management.

Imagine a future where managers are brought in by teams who realize that they need someone to coordinate their efforts, even to push them at times, in order to realize their potential. Such a model is not so very odd, really. Personal coaches are very common, but personal coaches work with individuals.

Management is a really crucial skill. More so as our world and projects become more complex. It's probably not enough to leave tasks to individual initiative, even if we have more natural (e.g., market) consequences and inducements for such tasks. Able managers will probably always make a good living.

But one of the big problems with current institutions is their reliance on extrinsic motivation - the use of carrot and stick to make things happen. Employees, like the boot camp recruit, have little or no choice about what to do or any ability to define goals or the tasks they want to try. These are assigned. This is good enough in a world where products are scarce and the definition of economic goods is generally limited to goods to have.

Philosophers talk about three kinds of goods: goods to have, goods to do, and goods to be, each higher and more meaningful than the last. Economic progress will shift soon from an emphasis on economic goods to have to economic goods to do. Work is an essential part of this. (We know that Darwin, Jonas Salk, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Andrew Carnegie were historic figures. We tend to forget that they defined themselves - and our civilization - by their work.) And as people come to work more often as a way to (in part) create goods to have and (in part) create for themselves goods to do, a management that is based on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation will be essential. The drill instructor you have no choice but to obey is replaced by the personal coach you hire to help you to realize your potential.

Of course the paradox is that as we focus more on intrinsic motivation and goods to do, we'll actually get more and better goods to have than in the old system. People who are intrinsically motivated are typically more creative, more productive, and do higher quality work. Call me an optimist, but one reason that I'm convinced that such a model will eventually emerge is because it gets better results.

Management as a service rather than form of control. Think about it.

The Purpose of Teams

Last week, working with a development team, I had this thought.

The purpose of managers is to remind teams of goals.

The purpose of teams is to remind managers of reality.

Obama and McCain Unqualified to be CEO?

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of an $80 billion company, said that the presidential and vice presidential candidates competing to run a $3 trillion federal budget would not be qualified to be CEO. (Curiously, the market seems to have had a similar opinion about Fiorina. During her tenure, HP’s market value dropped in half. After she left in 2005, the stock rose by 224%)

My initial reaction to this was scorn for Fiorina. Here, I thought, is another CEO who actually believes her own compensation package. But then I woke up this morning to news of the bailout of AIG – something that will cost taxpayers $85 billion. It is true, I thought. Any president who could nod his head at that kind of a bill would not be able to run an $80 billion a year company.

The Measure of Organizational Efficacy

"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work."
- Peter Drucker

This morning at breakfast, my buddies Bill and Eric were bemoaning the fact that Detroit has wasted decades in responding to Japan and Germany's lead in cars. They were incredulous that we could still be regularly falling behind and did not understand why these companies had not yet been transformed.

I wonder if the measure of an organization's efficacy isn't a function of the difference between what it takes to be successful within the organization and what it takes to be successful within the community. If the gap is big, the organization is flawed, perhaps pathological. If the gap is small, the organization is healthy and vibrant.

For instance, what it takes to succeed within a gang is criminal behavior. This is the opposite of what it takes to be successful within the community - in fact, "successful" gang members will often end up as failures. Gangs are bad organizations.

Companies often divert a great deal of attention to pleasing management - people who sign paychecks and vote on pay raises but don't actually finance employees with their own money. To the extent that success in the company is dependent on how well employees please management rather than customers, the company is poorly designed, is flawed. Same with teachers who are busy pleasing administrators.

It seems a simple and obvious thing, but once organizations get to a certain size, it is an easy thing for the people within them to become fixated on pleasing others within the organization rather than the people outside the organization who ultimately make it successful or let it fail. Co-workers and managers asking for progress reports are often so much easier to see then the customers who buy the final product.

Doomed New Year's Resolutions

“Men who have discovered the limits of arrogance make better company: You notice more when you're not running around imposing your will on everything.”
- Virginia Vitzthum

Change is a difficult thing but every year, millions of Americans purpose to do just that. Maybe I'm just so old that I've accepted who I am and have difficulty imagining myself as someone different, but it seems like this industry of New Year's resolutions is one based on well intentioned delusion.

The other day, I was talking to what seemed to be a darling woman. She said that she was going to get more organized for the new year and was even able to list out all the benefits of doing just that. "So why aren't you more organized already," I asked. My own suspicion is that she has made such resolutions before but finds herself, once again, resolving anew to be who she is not. Such an endeavor seems like such a waste of energy when she could, instead, build on what everyone else sees as unique - or at least rare - strengths. New Year's Resolutions can too easily be attempts to be like someone we admire rather than self actualize.

According to First Break All the Rules, what distinguishes the really extraordinary managers from those who are merely very good or even mediocre is how they deal with shortcomings. The motto of the extraordinary managers in regards to their employees seems to be, "Don't try to put in what was left out. Instead, draw out what was left in. That's hard enough." In other words, we all arrive at life with missing pieces. We can spend our energy and ambition trying to address this obvious and sometimes distressing lack, but it's not clear that it'll ever make much difference. Or, we can acknowledge what we actually brought to the party and find a way to make that work. It wasn't that Einstein failed to work hard, he just (as far as I know) didn't spend much effort trying to be a world class dancer. It takes a great deal of effort just to be good at what we're good at.

If you have to make a New Year's resolution (and given it's already 11 January you probably don't), make a resolution to enhance or strengthen what you already know to be a positive part of you. Save the scary and often unrewarding work of trying low probability goals for experiments when you are already feeling confident and are less likely to make failure mean too much.

Senior Management

The optimist says that the glass is half full.
The pessimist says that the glass is half empty.
The senior executive says that the glass needs to be downsized by 50%.

Systems, Individuals & Real Management

Harvard and Stanford are not really such great universities. If they had to take high school graduates at random, it’s not obvious that they’d do any better with them than other universities. Rather, Harvard and Stanford are able to select exceptionally intelligent and able people. The schools aren’t so very different, but their students are.

And this is our model of management. Find the best people and succeed. We don’t quite know what to do with average people. Yet average is all we have - on average.

History is nothing if not repeated proof that “average” people turn out to be quite extraordinary when their situation, context, and understanding change. The serf of the middle ages has evolved into today’s white collar professional – creating more value in a 40-hour week than the serf could create in a life time.

And this is the challenge of management everywhere – a responsibility not just ignored but unseen: make the system better. Among the many skills this requires, it starts with an acceptance of people for who they are. And perhaps in that way, being a real manager is no different than being a real human being.

Confusion About Incentives & Management

You wouldn't think much of a doctor who dangled a $20 bill in front of a child with a fever and told him, "You can have this money if you'll just lower your temperature by 2 degrees." In fact, you'd know that you were dealing with a doctor who knew little about the body or medicine.

So what to make of the managers who dangle incentives in front of their people and then say, "You can have this money if you'll just increase profits by 10%." Or the school administrator who tells a principal or teacher, "You can have this money if you just increase average test scores by 10 points."

A management practitioner needs to understand system dynamics that ultimately define outcomes, just as a doctor needs to understand the physical processes that ultimately define states of health or disease.

Particularly in schools, this sensibility seems to be missing. The thought that vouchers, incentives, and ranking of schools will actually transform schools seems to me naïve, and resorting to incentives strikes me as an admission of defeat. If school administrators know what helps children to learn, they should institute this across all classrooms. If they don't know what to do, they should learn rather than admonish teachers.

If you need a clear example of how bankrupt is this approach, look at Iraq. Bush has basically been told by the American people to get things in order there. Unable to create order in Iraq, he's offered inducements to the generals. They, in turn, have ordered the Maliki government to create order. Maliki has, in turn, ordered those below him. And all the way down - from the American press and public to Bush to the Pentagon to Maliki - there is ignorance and inability. No one knows how to create order in Iraq and inducements are not going to make a difference. Not dips or rises in opinion polls, not additional troops or money (or fewer troops or money).

[The example of dangling money before a fevered child comes, if I remember correctly, from Alfie Kohn, whose delightful writing on competition and rewards will likely transform your opinion about such topics.]

Organizational Goals are Meaningless Goals

Organizational Goals are Meaningless Goals

I've become an officer for a local Toastmaster's club and we officers are supposed to articulate club goals next week. I have a problem with this, one that is not specific to Toastmaster's but applies to organizations in general.

Faithful readers of this blog - you two know who you are - have read previous posts in which I've talked about a corporate revolution that, in part, turns the corporation into a tool for the individual, reversing the current order in which the individual is a tool for the corporation. Such a shift suggests a change in emphasis, or sequence, for the articulation of goals.

To me, there are few things as meaningless as organizational goals. As near as I can tell, "organizations" are abstractions that have no real interest in whether these organizational goals are met or not. People, though, do have goals and can be seized by care or apathy. Stockholders have goals for returns by a certain date. Employees have goals for engaging work, development, and income. Customers have goals for convenience, affordability, and enjoyment. Management is an art of creating relationships between these parties, making trade offs when needed and but generally designing solutions that allow all of these parties to meet their goals in ways that they couldn't in isolation from one another.

The more management knows about individual goals, the more they can make organizational design and priority decisions that enable these goals. The miracle of an organization is that it enables the realization of individual goals. The opposite, that the miracle of the individual is that s/he enables the realization of organizational goals, is false.

So, let me go back to the Toastmaster's example. Throughout the year, we get probably 40-80 first-time visitors. Of that, we probably gain about 20 new members while losing about 20. Individuals come to the club with particular goals in mind. Some want to learn how to engage audiences as they deliver regular reports. Some want to overcome stage fright, hesitancy, or rapid-fire delivery. Others want to learn how to read an audience, vary the pace, persuade, or simplify complex ideas. The club, or organization, will thrive if its leadership can figure out how to meet those needs. But before it can meet such needs, it needs to determine those needs.

Currently, there is far more emphasis on having new members learn the Toastmaster's process than there is in having Toastmaster's learn the goals of new members. To talk about organizational goals like signing up 20 new members or getting 5 existing members through the competent communications manual seems to me meaningless. Better to translate the goals of real people into organizational events, actions, and forums that enable the goals of individuals. An organization that does this is going to thrive. It may be transformed - may even change regularly - but it will thrive.

Organizations don't have goals or needs. People do. An organization's only justification is as a means to realize the goals of real people. As soon as leaders forget that and begin talking in abstract terms, they risk drifting into irrelevance and eventual obsolescence.

The Future of Business: Developing Next Generation Soft Technology

Most attempts by business to understand the future rather seem to miss the point. They come across as technology plays, predictions about which breakthroughs are likely to come to fruition and how they'll parlay these into products. This is fine if you are head of a research lab, but has less obvious application if you are tasked with other management positions. If your job is to head up a business or function, you're likely looking - if indeed you are looking at all - at the wrong kind of technology.

Some should focus on the evolution and change in hard technology - changes in cars, computers, drugs, and telephones. Most managers should be focused instead on soft technology - changes in culture, behavior, roles, beliefs, and organization. It's true that in practice these two, the hard and soft technologies, play together. It's also true that any one individual is likely to focus on one dimension. Thanks to roughly a century in the evolution of the formal role of scientists and engineers, we have clearly defined the tasks associated with the development of hard technology. By contrast, roles for developing soft technology are less clearly defined. Indeed, what plays catalyst for the shift in public opinion or new practice often seems unpredictable and random. Of course, so is the development of hard technology, but that doesn't stop societies from investing hundreds of billions into its development.

Most management types should be looking at the future of organizations, work, and society. It is not that they should remain willfully ignorant of the hard technology, but often there is little that a CEO or VP of, say, Human Relations can do about furthering the next generation of web development software. They can help to develop the organization.

There is so much that can be written about this, but I will for now limit myself to this. There are a variety of questions that anyone in management - from small business owner to CEO - can ask, questions that intelligent and imaginative people scattered throughout the organization can answer more creatively than me. Managers should be regularly asking these questions.

1. How do we more fully engage our people in work? What work place designs, chunking of tasks, and communication protocols should we use to encourage focus?

2. How do we clarify consequences? What can we do to more clearly link the work of the individual to the value created by the organization?

3. How do we more clearly tie together individual effort, longer term consequences, and organizational performance? Are there lessons we can draw from market economies?

4. Are we prepared for the devolution of power and decision making as accords with self-adapting complexity and market dynamics that might follow from designing a system that allows individual initiative in place of central controls? What are the consequences of creating such a system? How would we make this operational? What are the practical obstacles to moving in this direction today?

5. Are our people motivated by a vision of their future? Do they see this organization as a place of possibility or are they even interested in realizing their own potential? Why or why not? What would we have to change about our organization to allow a critical mass of our employees to realize their potential?

6. Who in the organization is tasked with coaching our people towards the realization of their potential? What is the lost revenue resulting from our lack of interest in this?

I would argue that seriously pursuing questions such as this could be the catalyst for developing new organizations, for creating the next generation soft technology. If your business is hard technology, you are likely focusing an enormous amount of energy on creating the next generation of your products. If you expect to remain competitive as a senior executive, you should be just as focused on creating the next generation of soft technology.

It's a Tough Job

Project management is often described just this way:




(I don't work for EDS, but I do work as in project management consulting.)

Value of a MBA? Negative $100 billion a year

It's worth noting that George W. is the first American president with a MBA. I'm a business consultant privy to the inner workings of many great companies. I'm not particularly convinced that the way George handled Iraq is all that different from the way that senior management in corporate America handles affairs.

He delegated hugely important issues like the reconstruction of Iraq after the invasion, basically showing little or no interest in helping to solve these incredibly difficult problems. He created a "can-do" culture in which dissent, questioning, and pointing out that a particular plan was unlikely to work were all discouraged. He talked in broad strokes about vision of the future regarding a reality he knew about only through PowerPoint presentations that had been heavily filtered. He focused on a series of intermediate deadlines (e.g., capturing Baghdad, approving a constitution) with little consideration for how achieving those intermediate goals might complicate his longer term goals. His approach to managing Iraq shares many of the traits seen in managers throughout corporate America.

The Iraqi debacle is not just a warning for policy makers in DC. It ought to be a warning for every senior executive seeped in the current style of management.

Top Down or Grass Roots?

There are at least two ways to arrive at government regulation, programs, or spending. The first is as a result of experts conferring in private rooms. The second is as a result of the public meeting in town halls.

The politicians in DC still don't seem to realize that this process makes more difference than the particular outcome in terms of support or protest.

Watch for the politicians who learn how to use technology to involve a wider swath of people in the formulation of policy. When a politician steps out of DC to involve groups in town hall meetings -- meetings that involve dialogue and not preaching -- that politician will rapidly rise to power and prominence. And the politicians still trying to contain politics to the beltway are going to be taken completely by surprise.

If the last election taught nothing, it should be that Americans simply don't trust supposed experts conferring in private rooms. Even better than transparency is involvement. If politicians want power, they should do all they can to disperse power by engaging others in a dialogue in which their input actually changes policy.

Timetables, Benchmarks and Other Ways to Avoid the Hard Questions

Bush announced that he is going to establish benchmarks for leaving Iraq and explained why benchmarks are not the same thing as timetables about as well as he has explained his reasons for the Iraqi invasion in the first place. This is to say that anyone listening was simply left perplexed.

Putting aside the fact that the difference between timetables and benchmarks is trivial, there is a problem with both. One of my heroes, management guru W. Edwards Deming, used to admonish managers to do away with exhortations and slogans in the work place. What Deming continually asked is "By what method?" You want to increase sales by 10%? First he'd splay his fingers, look at them and say, "10 ... that's a nice round number. I wonder how they ever thought of that. If they can just increase sales by 10%, why didn't they do that last year? If they already know the method, why did they wait until this year?" If you don't have a method to achieve a goal, the goal is merely speculative.

What is worse, Bush is basically admitting that the US is unable to "solve" the problem of establishing a stable government in Iraq and is now turning on his heels to point the finger at the immature Iraqi government, foisting off responsibility for establishing security to them. He's turning to them to ask, "How long do you think you'll need for this benchmark?" If someone had asked US officials how long they thought it would have taken to establish a secure Iraq, they would have (Rumsfeld actually did) say that it might be about 3 months. This speculation turned out to be speculative, based as it was on neither an accurate assessment nor clear strategy.

Bush has not yet shown that he knows the difference between a strategy and an admonition. This is not so very rare for men in power who can simply make declarations and see things happen within their staff. But when the declarations are made against complex forces, against the tide or winds, against social dynamics he doesn't begin to understand, the consequences are never as satisfactory.

Bush says that he will soon have benchmarks. The real question is, "By what method?" So far, the operating theories that the Bush administration has used at every step of this invasion and occupation have been proven false. Until they offer a new, overarching operating theory, benchmarks will be meaningless.