Where do your ideas come from?

 

DSP’s December Fireside Chat with Chief Publicist Nick Wale

It's the wrapper's fault

 

PhotoShop saves the day

 The photo processing utility PhotoShop often gets a bad rap because scam artists and hucksters use it to create fake photos that mislead or cheat people. But it's just a tool and shouldn't be blamed because some people misuse it. It can be a life saver in some circumstances. Like the time my nephew, Keith, needed new head shots for a film role he was auditioning for and asked if I would do them. I agreed, but since all my photo gear was destroyed when our house burned in March 2021, and I've only just begun to repurchase equipment, all I had was my DSLR camera, a few filters, and two lenses. He recently moved, and his lights, backdrops and other gear needed to do proper head shots was still in storage, we decided to make do with a large piece of brown cardboard and my camera's internal flash. Most of the photos (especially those we took outdoors) came out okay, but some of the closeups had a harsh shadow and the texture of the cardboard glaringly apparent. To make sure the photos would pass muster, I decided that it was time to invest in some proper post processing software, so I bought and installed PhotoShop. A few hours of practice to get the feel of it, and then I tackled the offending shots. Below, see before and after shots to show just what this amazing software can do.

Not a bad shot but that shadow of the head ruins it for use as a proper headshot. The flash also causes the texture of the cardboard to be apparent if you look closely.

Thanks to Photoshop, the shadow's gone and the harsh brown cardboard background has been replaced with a smooth creamy background that I feel sets off the tux better. The photo was also cropped to tighten in on the face and skin tones were softened.

Voila, a completely different photograph, thanks to PhotoShop.

Decline in the rule of law

 

A tale of two countries

In early October, I was invited to travel by train from Washington, DC to New Haven, Connecticut, to talk to a global affairs class at Yale University. The five-hour train trip up was my first since the official start of the pandemic but I found it quite nice, even with having to wear a mask except when I was eating in the dining car.

It was my arrival in New Haven, though, that had a profound impact on me. I contrasted what I saw and experienced there with what my daughter described to me after she and her family visited in-laws in Atlanta, Georgia, a couple of weeks earlier.

In Georgia, she described crowded restaurants where the majority of diners and staff wore no masks, getting on crowded tour busses with people who refused to wear masks, and being invited to social events with relatives who not only refused to wear masks, but bragged about refusing to be vaccinated. In one case, she told me, a relative showed up to visit—wanting to hug the children—and confessed to having recently been diagnosed as positive for the virus, but who insisted that it was ‘harmless.’

Now, my trip was completely different. Federal regulations require masks on all public transport, so everyone on my Northeastern Regional train to Boston by way of Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, New York City, and New Haven had to wear a mask. When I arrived at New Haven’s Union Station, the cab driver who took me to my hotel wore a mask. The desk clerk and hotel staff wore masks, and when I went out for a quick supper around the corner from my hotel, I not only had to wear a mask to enter the restaurant, but I had to show my vaccination card. So did all the students eating there, and not one complained.

During my meetings with university officials the next day and my lecture to the class, everyone wore masks. There were several test stations around Yale’s campus, and I had to submit certification of my vaccination status before they bought my train ticket.

At the time, Georgia’s infection, hospitalization, and death rates from COVID was higher than Connecticut’s. Georgia had a 7-day case average of 940 and a 7-day average of deaths of 85, while Connecticut’s was 341 and 4 respectively. Connecticut’s total deaths were 8,751 whole 28,939 Georgians have died. If you were paying attention to what I just wrote, you probably have already figured out why.

It’s because here in the United States of America, we don’t live in one country but many. We are as balkanized as the Balkan states when they were ruled by the Ottoman Empire between 1817 and 1912. This term, coined to described the breakup of countries into smaller entities who do not play well together after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, unfortunately describes—in my humble opinion—the situation the U.S. and some other countries are experiencing right now. Citizens are divided by so many criteria one needs a spread sheet and a lot of patience to keep up with it. We’re divided by race, ethnicity, national origin, gender and sex, religion, and politics. Urban and rural people don’t understand, trust, or like each other. Native-born are suspicious of immigrants. We’re even irredeemably divided over who we voted for in the last election.

I wish I could say that I’ve discovered the cure for this condition, but alas I have not. I mean, it would be nice if we could sit down and discuss it, but there’s even a divide between people with college degrees and those without.

A colleague of mine once said that out country and others go through periods of insanity every sixty or seventy years. It can get pretty bad. During one such period of madness we had a Civil War (I’ve always been fascinated by that term. Is there such a thing as an uncivil War?) which killed more people than any of our other wars, and they were all from the same nation. You’ll note I say nation and not country, because we are sometimes two countries, three countries, or even more, and when we are those countries are in a perpetual state of hostility.

I’m hoping the pandemic represents the crisis period of the disease and we’re on the mend. We’ve had enough of worst of times and the age of foolishness, and I, for one, am ready for some of that ‘best of times and the age of wisdom.’

Who is up to join me? – NWI

The Future of South Africa

 Published originally in Diplomatic Diary on November 5, 2021

Why Are Soldiers Treated Better Than Diplomats?

People are the most important resource in government. In treating its own, the State Department can learn from the military.

It’s no secret that morale at the State Department has been in the doldrums for years. In a 2020 ranking of the best places to work in the federal government by the Partnership for Public Service, the department came in 14th out of 17 large agencies. A survey for 2021 hasn’t been released yet, but it’s no less of a secret that a hoped-for bounce in morale from its Trump administration lows has been much slower and more modest than many diplomats anticipated.

How the department treats its employees is rarely a top priority for a secretary of state — Colin Powell was one of very few exceptions. There are always crises to resolve somewhere in the world that the chief U.S. diplomat considers more important. The military, on the other hand, is known for treating both troops and their families much better than the Foreign Service cares for its own members. With that in mind, is adopting and adapting some of the Defense Department’s best practices a good idea for the State Department?

I spent 20 years in the U.S. Army, followed by 30 years in the Foreign Service. While the differences between the missions of the two organizations are such that wholesale crossover is both impossible and unwise, there are lessons the State Department can learn from the military. People are the most important resource of both agencies, differences in mission notwithstanding, and it’s critical that attention be devoted to how employees are treated. The demands on the people in both departments are great, calling for more similarity in the way they are treated than currently exists. Although the military is more hierarchical in some ways, with missions that demand instant and unquestioned obedience to orders, it’s not quite blind, unthinking loyalty that is sought. From the first day until retirement — and beyond — service members are treated as valued parts of the team. While you are encouraged to pursue individual accomplishment, such as continuing education, you are also taught that your team must function as a cohesive whole. Every person is responsible for every other member of the unit. You are also taught from day one to be a leader. You are certainly required to follow the legitimate orders of those above you, but you are also taught that, when the person in the chain of command falls, you are to move up and take over.

The team concept is often given lip service at the State Department, but the reality is that it fosters an “everyone for himself” environment, where career advancement almost always wins over teamwork. During my time in the Foreign Service, until 2012, the annual performance evaluations put emphasis on what the individual had achieved, rather than on what was done to advance the goals of the organization or to assist others.

Military personnel and most civilian employees of the Defense Department are not only encouraged to get as much education and training as possible, but professional education is a requirement to advance in rank or rise to higher levels of responsibility. Officers spend as much as 25 percent of their careers in long-term educational programs, in addition to their occupation-specific skills training.

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That practice of career-long education and training is not a staple of the Foreign Service. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Training Center, also known as the Foreign Service Institute, does an excellent job in tradecraft and foreign language instruction, but it falls short in the area of professional education. Leadership training has been required for promotion to the senior ranks only in the past decade or so. For mid-level officers, such mandatory training lasts only a week. Few take optional courses, for which they are often forced to use vacation time. Junior diplomats aren’t evaluated for their leadership skills.

The treatment I received when I joined the Foreign Service reminded me of the way my older cousin taught me to swim. He took me out to the middle of a pond on a raft and pushed me into the water. I assume that, if I had not been able to dog-paddle my way back to the banks of the pond, he wouldn’t have let me drown. Would that have been the case with the State Department? Either way, an organization’s support for its people shouldn’t depend on luck. A lot of this is driven by legislation or lack of budgetary support, but the State Department’s failure to press for changes further contributes to the impression that people are not considered an important resource in the department. The Biden administration has made statements that signal a possible change in this perception, but the devil is in the details, and the administration will be known not by what it says but by what it does.

If we are to have a strong, effective diplomatic service for the coming decades, we will need to have committed people, and that will only happen when we deliver on the rhetoric and start actually putting people first.