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Projected shortfall, in millions, of global knowledge workers by 2020.

– Source: Making talent a strategic priority, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2008.

How to plan for change in a "white water world"

BUSINESS

Media and Moneyball: An exclusive interview with George Will

July 18, 2007

George Will Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Newsweek essayist, George F. Will is one of the most iconic political columnists and foremost conservative voices in the U.S. His popular syndicated column and regular appearances on ABC's This Week are both influential and far-reaching.

In addition to ABC News political analyst responsibilities, Will writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post syndicate that reaches nearly 500 newspapers throughout the United States, Canada, South America, Japan, Australia, and Europe.

He is also a prolific author with books ranging from The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric, Bunts, and With a Happy Eye, but ...: America and the World, 1997–2002.

Here, he joins Kelsey Howarth, Senior Writer for Cognos, an IBM company, to discuss government, the media, and Moneyball.

A search warrant to find the truth?

KH: You have stated that this is an age where one cannot find common sense without a search warrant. Is the same true for finding the truth?

"They're much the same thing – the truth and common sense. The truth is rarely that exotic."

GW: "They're much the same thing — truth and common sense. The truth is rarely that exotic, in politics at least.

We have a society in denial about certain large things. In denial about entitlement mentality that the welfare state has produced; in denial about the cost of the entitlements that the entitlement mentality has produced; in denial about the fact that a welfare state in a context of an aging population requires a degree of economic growth and efficiency that the welfare state itself interferes with. So you have a kind of cultural contradiction of a welfare state."

Bloggers and accountability

KH: Today, people have more access to information than ever before with the Internet, 24 hour news channels, and more. Has this forced more accountability in the government?

"CBS said this inconsistency was spotted by people sitting around in their kitchen and in their pajamas. Well, the guys in their pajamas brought down CBS."

GW: "No question. It has forced more accountability in the government but also, more accountability in the media.

Dan Rather was brought down, really, in five minutes. The reaction started instantly when [CBS] ran, during the heat of the 2004 campaign, the report on George Bush's National Guard Service based on fraudulent documents.

It was bloggers who spotted an inconsistency in the documents. CBS dismissively said at the time, this inconsistency was spotted by people sitting around in their kitchen and in their pajamas. Well, the guys in their pajamas brought down this iconic news organization, CBS.

Thirty years ago 80 percent of the television sets were tuned to ABC, NBC, or CBS at dinnertime. Today, it's well under 50 percent and continuing to decline. You not only have CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and all the rest, but you have this cornucopia of information from the Internet.

Today, there is no political point of view and no interest that's not catered to by a magazine, a web site, or a television cable channel. There's never been anything like it."

Filters for the nervous system

KH: You have said that "as advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise." Have we reached that stage yet?

"We certainly are bombarded by messages to a degree that would have driven people in an earlier age stark raving mad. We have had to develop filters to block out the static."

GW: "We certainly are bombarded by messages to a degree that it jangles our nervous systems; to a degree that would have driven people in an earlier age, say 500 years ago, stark raving mad.

If you were living in Boston at the time of the American Revolution, what did you hear? Almost nothing. What did you see? Very few messages. Now we have television and neon billboard signs aimed at us all the time.

As a result we have had to develop filters to block out the static so that we don't notice it, making it even harder to get our attention.

In response, advertisers have become more ingenious about how to rivet the attention, grab us by the lapels and say, 'Look at me. Listen to my message. See my product.'

It's a challenge. It really would have driven people in Boston bonkers to be exposed to all of this. But we're not from Boston in the colonial era. We are used to this. We've grown up with it and we've developed marvelous mechanisms for not noticing it."

"The hardwiring of our brains has changed"

KH: So how do people make sense of it all?

GW: "The hardwiring in our brain has changed. We can deal with a surplus of sources of information. There are those who say that more is less; that the more sources of information you have, the more confused people get.

These theorists say – I think, falsely – that if you walk into a supermarket and you see 40 different kinds of breakfast cereal you are paralyzed by indecision. I think that's just a common tendency on the part of the intellectuals to denigrate the capacities of the common man.

Intellectuals don't like markets terribly much because markets function so brilliantly without intellectuals. The American people are perfectly capable of finding the cereal they want, and perfectly capable of finding the politician they want, and perfectly capable of doing this without the tutors of the intellectuals."

The qualities of a leader

KH: When you think about leadership, what do you think are the essential qualities of a good leader?

"We are all sunk in the day-to-dayness of life. What a leader does in a democracy is raise people's sense of the horizon."

GW: "They have to believe things. He or she has to want to go somewhere. You're not going to have followers unless you are heading somewhere.

Often leadership also means the ability to inflict pain or discomfort and get away with it. You need to lead them to do strenuous things that require deferral of gratification and the longer view.

Basically, what a leader does in a democracy is raise people's sense of the horizon. We are all sunk in the day-to-dayness of life. We're busy raising children, getting the car fixed, and going to our jobs.

A leader looks at the horizon and sees danger and possibilities, and advises certain short term pains for long term gains."

Some thoughts on the candidates...

KH: Who would you like to see in the White House based on those qualities?

GW: "At this point I'm not remarkably in love with any of the candidates. I'm of a conservative stripe so I'm more interested in the Republican contest, although I think frankly both parties have a pretty rich array of talent this year.

I think on the Democratic side two people are better qualified than the others but are not doing very well: Joe Biden and Bill Richardson.

"We generally elect governors. They have executive temperaments. They want to decide things and move on."

We generally, in our history, elect governors. They've run something larger than a Senate office. They have executive temperaments. They want to decide things and move on.

Legislators exist to rub the edges off issues, to form coalitions. That's an honorable profession, but it's very different from an executive job.

On the Republican side, I've been very impressed by John McCain's steadfastness on the war. I disagree with him on many aspects of this, but he shows leadership. Rudy Giuliani was a spectacularly successful and a very conservative Mayor of New York. Mitt Romney is a successful governor of Massachusetts who, by founding Bain Capital, knows something about how wealth is created in this country. So there are some good choices."

...and some thoughts on the Chicago Cubs

KH: Now on to baseball. You have called yourself a pessimist, but not when it comes to the Chicago Cubs. That's your team of choice, correct?

"People always say baseball doesn't have a clock but it does. There are twenty seven ticks. They're outs and the object of the game is to not make an out."

GW: "That's right. I'm a fatalist!"

KH: How are they going to do this year?

GW: "Fortunately, they're in the right neighborhood, and that is the National League Central, which is the weakest division in baseball so almost anyone can win it.

The Cubs have a chance to make it into the playoffs. If they get to the post season it is as Billy Beane, the famous general manager of the Oakland As said, 'It's a crapshoot.' Any team can get hot in a seven game series. So that's the Cubs' plan for this year: stagger through and get lucky."

Moneyball and information "sweet spots"

KH: I just finished reading Moneyball. At Cognos we help companies find the sweet spots of information – the metrics that really matter. If you owned the Cubs, what metrics would you have them focus on? Where do they need some help?

GW: "Billy Beane, the star of Moneyball, is a very close friend of mine and I think he's got it right.

People always say baseball doesn't have a clock but it does. There are twenty seven ticks. They're outs and the object of the game is to not make an out. Hence the great emphasis that Billy Beane has brought to baseball on on-base percentage.

Walks. Hits. Move the runners. Don't make an out because you've only got 27 of them. When they're gone, you lose."

A final word for government decision-makers

KH: Today we are chatting at our annual Government Forum event. If you could give one piece of advice to senior government decision-makers what would it be?

GW: "Deal with the inevitable. Focus on your aging workforce."