Four recipes to save Italy: “Meritocrazia” by Roger Abravanel

The Italian malaise, so widely chronicled in its various facets of gerontocracy, corruption, stagnation and economic insecurity, is one of those systemic issues that have become so entrenched that it seems nearly impossible to do anything about it. Yet, author and former management consultant Roger Abravanel believes that many Italians’ dissatisfaction with the status quo may have reached the threshold that triggers change.

A few words on why, far from being impartial, I am a member of the subterranean Roger Abravanel Fan Club. When I joined McKinsey, Roger was already a senior partner at the firm, having returned to Milan after his years in Tokyo, Mexico City and Paris. I had the privilege to work with Roger on several assignments throughout my years there, and I looked up to him as a leading role model; he was, I believe, the most sincere practitioner of the caring meritocracy that kept many of us going through those nights and weekends at work. After retiring in 2006, Roger spent his time as a board member at companies in both Italy and Israel, and started writing a book about meritocracy, published this month.

Meritocrazia argues, with Roger’s characteristic optimism, that four concrete solutions can inject a jolt of leadership and excellence into Italian economy and society, and jumpstart its turnaround. These are his four proposals:

1. Establish a Delivery Unit for the public sector in Italy, modeled after the one launched by Tony Blair in 2001 to monitor progress on and strengthen the British government’s ability to deliver on its key priorities across education, health, crime and transport. Roger has extensively discussed that experience with Sir Michael Barber, the first head of the Delivery Unit, and argues that an Italian version of it could both improve quality and reduce waste in the public sector, and train a new generation of young leaders. The extraordinary civil service of Singapore and, though only in part, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in France provide more food for thought on how to turn around our dismal performance in government services.
2. Create a standardized testing system for Italian schools, similar to the SAT Reasoning Test in the United States (“the secret weapon of American meritocracy”, in the words of Nicolas Lemann). No education reform and no amount of money showered onto schools and universitites can ever achieve any impact, if we can’t measure how schools and teachers are performing.
3. Launch an Authority to deregulate and promote competition in private and public local services. From food retail to urban transport, from pharmacies to taxis, from water utilities to toll roads, from gas stations to local professions, local services are the bulk of the economy: and they have largely been untouched by liberalization, thanks to the extortionary power they exert on consumers’ daily lives (try driving through Rome during a taxi strike) and the political consensus that protects local monopolists and oligopolists. This Authority should lead an extraordinary effort to unlock competition in local services. “Devolution” is not the answer: on the contrary, getting results will require strong alignment from the center.
4. Unlock the leadership talent of Italian women through affirmative action for women in corporate boards. The model here is the recent Norwegian law mandating that medium and large companies must have at least 40% of board members who are women, or face tough sanctions, including forced liquidation. Italian women themselves are not fond of the affirmative action idea, and some of them have, most insidiously, interiorized our culture’s worst stereotypes. But I believe Roger is right in saying that we’re not going to get anywhere without a shock therapy forcing the end of discrimination at the top of our economy and society. Women’s careers should also be supported through incentives for shorter maternity leaves and a better public and private child care network.

Roger’s book is well-documented, wide-ranging and convincingly argued; it has the crucial virtue of moving beyond diagnosis and adopting a “can-do” attitude to defeat the defeatism so prevailing in public discourse. It is also a direct appeal to our Prime Minister, whoever that would be (the book was going into print just around the time of the April elections), to adopt these proposals. Whether Roger is listened to or not will be, in my opinion, a crucial test for the openness of this government’s agenda to citizens’ needs.

Finally, an apology to some of my Twitter followers. Last Wednesday I inundated them with a live twittercast from the presentation of the book, in Italian – I understand it looked like a ton of spam to those who don’t speak it. But now you understand why I cared so much about what was going on!

Update, September 2008: Please visit www.meritocrazia.com to leave your comments and questions for Roger Abravanel!

From Michael to Megan: being transgendered in the workplace

Megan Wallent works in the management ranks at Microsoft. Until a few weeks ago, she was called Michael Wallent. She writes a blog chronicling her transformation. It tells you something about Microsoft culture, or indeed U.S. West Coast culture, that seeing her back to work as a woman wasn’t a big deal for any of her coworkers.

And yet. As beautiful and strong and amazing as women are, the workplace is not where they call the shots. Not even the U.S. West Coast workplace. Steve Ballmer is not a woman (and it would be real interesting news if he discovered his inner femininity). So, this is where I’m puzzled, and I know it’s not going to be politically correct of me to write this, but, as sympathetic and supportive I am of Megan, there’s also something I don’t understand.

It is: it’s hard for me to understand how, in a corporate environment, one would choose to put oneself in a position of lesser power.

It’s tough out there, as women know. Beauty can help somewhat, perhaps. Adam’s apples are ugly, and Michael’s had to go, and so it did. But notice. I don’t know if Michael was a tall guy, but Megan looks like she’s a tall woman. Michael didn’t go to the surgeon in San Francisco complaining about his height and asking “make me a petite”. (For the sake of clarification: I wouldn’t have expected him to.) So, no change in the height department. Tall with boobs is even more imposing than tall with no boobs.

Megan’s voice is also the same as Michael’s voice. That helps, for example on the phone, in conveying power. And I’m pretty sure Megan hasn’t started phrasing her statements with the questioning upward slant that makes so many young American women sound terminally indecisive. No, my guess is Megan has a remarkably decisive voice. I don’t thing she giggles.

So, it will be interesting to see if Megan’s new feminine features help or hinder her power in the organization. My bet is: it doesn’t help to look like a woman. It’s a burden and an excuse for men to treat you, unconsciously or not, worse than you deserve. (Just ask women at investment banks from Morgan Stanley to Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein; no wonder Morgan Stanley prefers to settle its women brokers’ class-action suits out of court). Megan made a conscious trade-off between corporate status and other things that were more important to her, and she hedged her strategy by retaining and using those masculine features and mannerisms that sustain her standing in the workplace. Smart choice, Megan.

For those if you less interested than I am in the dynamics of power and politics in the workplace, here’s something else. If you’re like me, you will recall from your childhood The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. It’s a classic, and even today Megan reads it to her son at bedtime.

Think about this: have you become the kind of butterfly you dreamt of in your caterpillar days?

Does anybody, ever, really?

Jane Smiley on de Sade’s Justine and the morality of the novel

A few months ago I submitted to your attention, dear readers, a few notable excerpts from Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. I am now enjoying a rather more diverse piece of literary criticism, Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

Smiley, an acclaimed biographer of Charles Dickens and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Thousand Acres, writes thoughtfully about such broad topics as “What Is a Novel?” and “Who is a Novelist?”; in her sixth chapter, “Morality and the Novel”, she needs to deal with de Sade and his Justine.

But before getting to Justine, a quote about how one – in Smiley’s opinion, and in mine – becomes a novelist, which is out of a compulsive habit of reading as a child:

Undoubtedly, we were reading for all the wrong reasons — escape, pleasure, avoidance of responsibilities and human contact. We were reading because it was easy and fun and because we were unsupervised. We were reading to find companions more congenial than those around us. We wanted to fill our heads with nonsense and tune out practical considerations. We were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children. We were reluctant to help around the house or to go outside and play. [...] We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid.

Ever met children like these? Ever been one?

And, now, to Justine.

Justine was published in 1791, during the French Revolution, and the novel’s theme, you might say, is the right of every man of rank to do whatever he wants with any woman he can gain access to, preferably by force. [...] In Justine, the goal is not to reinforce the social order but to maximize the exploitation of female flesh. [...] It seems obvious that de Sade wrote Justine for pornographic reasons — that is, the plot and the protagonist are there to serve the author’s and the reader’s shared desire to fetishize sex and cruelty and to use images for lascivious excitement. Even so [...], de Sade makes rape part of the apparatus of state control as expressed by individual members of the ruling class (most of whom possess formal authority; they are not renegades or rogues). [...] Justine is a true heroine; she never betrays herself, always tries to understand and survive, never loses her moral compass. Surely she speaks for the author as much as the men do. [...]

Ostensibly shocking and immoral, Justine actually promotes a certain moral point of view — that integrity and virtue can be retained and recognized in the face of relentless suffering. In addition, to expose secret corruption is to challenge its existence because of the nature of the novel as a common and available commodity.

Naked ambition, the FT, and Italian women

Readers of my other blog know that I often comment – mostly with dismay – on the status of women in Italian society. Today, the FT Weekend article by Adrian Michaels gives me a chance to rant here too.

In a nutshell, Michaels argues that the female image portrayed by media and advertising in Italy feeds on, and in turn reinforces, the low status of women in Italian business, politics, and in the professions. And I think he’s right: there are few role models for young girls beyond the veline (skimpily dressed TV dancers, for readers who aren’t familiar with the term), and hardly any visible women CEOs or entrepreneurs beyond those who have inherited their roles because they are the founder’s daughter, sister or widow. Outside these pockets of privilege, there are enormous constraints on the time a woman can devote to pursuing professional achievement if she’s trying to keep a family going (from schools that close in the afternoon to primitive retail and banking hours, as the author himself discovers when trying to buy milk on a Sunday). According to economists Tito Boeri and Daniela del Boca, only 25% of the hours worked by Italian women are paid work; the rest is unpaid, work hours spent outside the labor market, taking care of others for free (including, increasingly, older family members). Among women who work outside the home, only 30% return to work after having a child; for the careers of the others, maternity means game over.

I think we need a rather radical agenda to get out of this vicious circle. First, we need to be more selfish.

Let the house get a bit dirtier. Some scum in the shower never killed anybody. Cleanliness is overrated.

Go to supermarkets that sell ready meals. Yes, they’re pricey, but not as much as our time is worth. Better yet, order online or by phone. Arrange delivery when convenient. Bank online. It is retailers who ought to adapt to our needs, not we to theirs.

Let the baby wallow in a dirty diaper until Dad changes it. Let older children wash themselves, or go to bed dirty. Some exposure to germs is good as it increases resistance to diseases.

Let your husband pay for a nurse for your mother-in-law. If he does not have enough money, tell him to get a second job, or to act as a nurse himself. This may take until Grandma gets a couple of bedsores. Bedsores are a necessary evil in the education of men.

Get extremely organized (you might pick a few ideas from The 4-Hour Workweek). Then, use the time you rediscovered to play the power game. Be bold. Call a meeting with your boss at 8pm to show him your ideas for reorganizing his department, and engage him in a long discussion, so that he misses the first half of that Champions League match. Go out to breakfast with a head hunter. Network with other women. Write about your agenda for change, and become a columnist for your local paper. Bootstrap your reputation. Stand for election to your town council, or some other body where you will have the power to change things.

The point is: no one will hand power over to women. Not if we accept the state of things as they are, or if we merely entertain interesting proposals about quotas in company boards and so on. We have to want it, and we have to build our resumes for it.

Are you ready?

On Muslim headscarves and peep-toe shoes

Some personal disclosure, first: I never understood those people who feel most at ease when naked. If you sleep naked, you’re probably one of them. I’m not. I’m most comfortable when fully clothed. I like my arms to be covered by long sleeves, and my legs to be clothed in full-length trousers. I’ve been known to wear gloves about six months a year, especially when riding public transportation. For years, I could not imagine wearing sandals in public, and stuck to sneakers and shoes all summer. The fact that I now own not one but two pairs of peep-toe shoes, even if I rarely wear them, feels to me like an extraordinarily daring act.

The bare shoulder and arm you see in my sidebar picture are a reminder: writing ought to be like getting naked. If I don’t feel some of the same discomfort, I’m not writing candidly enough.

So, here’s a candid reflection on headscarves. I don’t mind the idea of headscarves at all. As long as your face is shown – your expression, your personality, the sparkle in your eye – who cares about whether the rest of you is in plain view or hidden by a scarf?

Yet, our culture – ever since we threw the Victorian whalebone armor into the bonfire – associates freedom with the less restrictive dress codes. More skin, more freedom. It’s hard for us to understand how some women, in cultures that are not so far from ours, may choose to wear a headscarf as liberating. Yet, I have a lot of personal sympathy for this claim. I think I can instinctively understand how a woman, modestly dressed and with her hair covered, might find it somewhat easier to go about her business.

Yet this is not a commonly held view in the West. Ataturk, in the 1920s, decided that banning the Muslim headscarf was a necessary milestone in the secularization of Turkey. (Incidentally, the country just went through a psychodrama over the headscarf-wearing wife of presidential candidate Abdullah Gul, but let’s put this aside for a minute.) So, if – like Turkey, Tunisia, and some Western democracies – you decide to ban the Muslim headscarf from schools and public offices, where should you draw the line? Surely, then, the Polish legislator who is introducing a bill to ban miniskirts and see-through or low-cut blouses is justified too? In the end, that’s probably a more demeaning dress code than the headscarf, and perhaps a ban is healthy, one could argue. Our culture has plenty of instances of demeaning dress codes enforced by tacit agreement – and I don’t mean in Hollywood or Las Vegas. In my country, a member country of G7 and a founding member of the European Union, I have seen corporate cultures where the dress code for women – usually confined to administrative or other low-ranking jobs – involved plunging necklines, miniskirts and high heels. I will repeat it for the sake of my American readers, who may not remember life before Politically Correct: I have seen corporate cultures where, to this day, women are expected to come to the office in plunging necklines, miniskirts and high heels. In the summer, those places look like meat markets. I’d choose full Muslim garb any time.

Of course, at least from a libertarian point of view, banning any sort of harmless personal or religious expression doesn’t make sense. Such a point of view would also argue that, in personal appearance, rules of any kind invite defiance, and therefore defeat themselves. (The Economist reports that in both Turkey and Tunisia “veiling, which a decade ago was confined largely to the tradition-bound poor, has made a middle-class comeback”; at the same time, some of the countries with some of the strictest rules mandating headscarves – Iran, Saudi Arabia – are witnessing “an undercurrent of rebellion against sartorial rules of any kind.”) So, let people wear what they want, perhaps with minimal exceptions for identification documents and the like. Don’t ban anything, or it will come back to haunt you.

Are bans ever justified? Perhaps under revolutionary conditions, when a strong break with tradition is needed (as in 1920s Turkey, and probably even more so in today’s Taliban strongholds?) Or when whoever gets to decide feels that there’s not enough separation between church and state? If I were a ruler in charge of deciding on this criterion, I probably wouldn’t ban anything in Turkey and in France, who are established separationists; yet, I’d be tempted to ban religious displays from schools and public offices in the United States, where those boundaries are a lot more porous.

It is plain to see that the world doesn’t work according to logic. We have a lot of bans that ought to go, and we may engage in intellectual play over some that are never going to happen. Yet, I think if I were to meet Mrs. Gul, we’d probably have more in common than one would first guess. For a start, she probably doesn’t have too many pairs of peep-toe shoes either.

Why Google is scary

I run my other blog on Google’s Blogger platform. That blog is in Italian and has even fewer that the handful of readers this one has. So I was quite surprised last week, while posting an entry, to see that Google wanted me to start monetizing my blog with AdSense.

Now, this doesn’t actually make a lot of sense for many reasons. It is not a thematic blog, so few topics recur with any regularity. It has got zero page rank. Hardly anybody links to it. Technorati can’t seem to tell when it’s been updated, and refuses to ping it (a prejudice against blogs that are not written in English? Google Blog Search, unsurprisingly, seems to crawl every post instantly). I write the blog for the heck of it. (On the plus side, I think it may be occasionally well-written and somewhat thought-provoking, but these are not necessarily qualities of interest to AdSense).

Yet I decided to give it a try, certainly not in the hope of quitting my day job and making a living as a blogger, but more out of curiosity for the ads that the algorithm would match to my content, which is sometimes, well, decidedly non-commercial. (And I truly, truly hope I never see an ad by someone offering instructions for suicide bombings or performing Female Genital Mutilation services).

You see, the reason Google is scary is that their infrastructure appears to be infinitely scaleable. Their marginal cost of having me as a publisher is so tiny that their algorithm must have reckoned that the marginal revenue they make, even if the ads on my blog generate one click in a million years, is worth it.

As Spiderman said, with great power comes great responsibility. Google has already moved beyond being good or evil (ever seen “Master Plan: The Movie“?): we all need to make sure they stay responsible.

More from Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman

Thanks to Akismet anti-spam filters, I can blog more about Angela Carter’s book. It has great nuggets about politics (“Class dictates our choice of partners [...] it must be obvious that sexual sophistication is a by-product of education”); about psychology (“Sade is a great puritan and will disinfect of sensuality anything he can lay his hands on; therefore he writes about sexual relations in terms of butchery and meat”); about clever historical critique (“Sade, the eighteenth-century lecher, knew that manipulation of the clitoris was the unique key to the female orgasm, but a hundred years later, Sigmund Freud, a Viennese intellectual, did not wish to believe that this grand simplicity was all there was to the business [...] Yet Freud, the psychoanalyst, can conceive of a far richer notion of human nature as a whole than Sade, the illiberal philosopher, is capable of; the social boundaries of knowledge expand in some areas and contract in others due to historical forces”).

The central theme of the book was perhaps an exercise in hope for a growth in the level of common discourse that, as far as I can see, has not occurred in the last thirty years or so: not because Angela Carter hasn’t been read (the book, unlike most feminist critique, is still in print); but perhaps because we haven’t been courageous enough. Her first chapter, aptly named “Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women”, sets out a lucid diagnosis and a vision for change, a change that did not happen in her lifetime, and I doubt I may see in mine:

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations, as if sex itself were an external fact, as immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never a part of it. [...] It is fair to say that, when pornography serves — as with rare exceptions it always does — to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society, is it tolerated; and when it does not, it is banned. [...]

Out of this dilemma, the moral pornographer might be born.

The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it. [...]

Sade remains a monstrous and daunting cultural edifice; yet I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women.

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: two excerpts

I read Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography in the early ’90s, well after it was written in 1978, which was itself perhaps a while after the more vehement season of feminist critique. Today, I still find it to be one of the most enduring works in its genre, not least because of its readability and its no-nonsense style. Here, for example, is a great snippet where Carter takes issue with an idea that would, over the next decade, degenerate into a New Age platitude.

If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

Deadpan demystification pervades the book and lends it a humorous, down-to-earth quality:

The truth of the womb is, that it is an organ like any other organ, more useful than the appendix, less useful than the colon but not much use to you at all if you do not wish to utilise its sole function, that of bearing children. At the best of times, it is apt to malfunction and cause sickness, pain and inconvenience. The assertion of this elementary fact through the means of a fictional woman [Juliette] involves an entire process of demystification and denial in which far more than the demystification, the secularisation of women is involved.

The book is primarily about the works of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), but has a lot more going for it: Michel Foucault, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein all make appearances throughout the text. It is full of insight into the cultural construction of human nature, and somewhat hopeful about the “cruelly divisive” state of relations between men and women in our common struggle to understand the world. Yet, today, it seems to me that a door that was briefly opened at the end of the eighteenth century, and then again at the end of the twentieth, is locked shut again; something that, if Carter were alive today, would disappoint her, and frankly disappoints me, too.