Tom Keane

Without Jobs, it won’t be the same

FANS OF Apple Inc. say Steve Jobs’s resignation as CEO is no big deal, predicting that the company will still retain its cutting-edge ways. Technology analyst Farhad Manjoo is typical of those claimants, writing in Slate that “Apple today operates in the image of Steve Jobs - and it’s going to remain that way long after he’s gone.’’

It’s as if the person no longer matters. The organization that is Apple - almost 50,000 employees strong - has somehow absorbed the character and genius of Jobs. The real flesh-and-blood man is no longer even needed.

But this is a claim of fantasy. However smart a company Apple is, individuals still matter in the real world.

Now 56, Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 when he was just 21. Booted out the door in 1985 after a power struggle, he founded NeXT Computer (a financial failure but technological triumph) and purchased what became Pixar from Lucasfilm (both a financial and technological triumph). Meanwhile, Apple’s fortunes had suffered and, in a move of embarrassed desperation, its board in 1996 asked Jobs back.

Over the next 14 years, Jobs unleashed a torrent of products - including the iMac, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPad - that profoundly remade consumer electronics. None of these was as much ground-breaking in technology as it was innovative in design. Jobs has an uncanny ability to think about devices from the perspective of the user and of understanding the importance of beauty and simplicity.

And now the guy who’s done all that is, effectively, gone. One can understand the motivation of investors, employees, and even Apple fans who adamantly assert that Jobs’s departure won’t matter. It’s in their interest to say this, so they rely upon clichés about how the company is bigger than any one man and how no individual is irreplaceable.

And they’ve got support from those who think the future of innovation belongs to corporations and crowds.

It is fashionable to think of businesses as almost living entities themselves. Mitt Romney’s assertion that “corporations are people’’ was bone-headed politically but reflects the widespread notion that organizations are far more than the people that run and staff them. And that couples with another, seemingly new trend: a faith in the wisdom of crowds. Recent years have given us phenomena such as crowd-sourcing (taking a job originally performed by an individual and outsourcing it to a large group of people), crowd-funding (having groups choose which inventions to back) ,and crowd-creation (group innovation). At the heart of all of these is a belief that there is wisdom, creativity, and insight from the collective that is not possible from one person or small group of individuals.

Count me a skeptic. The fact that at one point 62 percent of Americans weren’t sure Barack Obama had been born in the United States itself should make one reconsider group wisdom. Granted, something like crowd-sourcing - really just an updated version of the company suggestion box - can mean that people who might not otherwise look at a problem will tackle it. But group thinking itself tends to hover around the middle. Voices at the extreme - those who would urge a radically new way - quickly get drowned out.

It is hard to imagine that a crowd of people would have come up with the inventions that Jobs pushed through Apple. Indeed, the fact that so many other well-established technology companies did not do so speaks not only to Jobs’ singular genius but also to the flaws of corporations themselves. Once they have figured out a mission, they can be very good at managing and executing. They are not especially good at constant innovation, however. They are often so focused on protecting the business they already have that they can’t take advantage of whatever might be new.

This, I fear, is Apple’s fate. Steve Jobs seems happy with Tim Cook, his pick to succeed him, and Cook may well have Jobs’ sense of originality. More likely, though, he is a good manager. That will do for a while; there are rumors Jobs left behind plans to remake television. But eventually Apple will be eclipsed by some new entrant founded by an enfant terrible - in other words, by someone like Steve Jobs.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.

No malaise, please

President Obama’s disengaged style has evoked bad memories for some liberals

THE QUESTION is raised cautiously, perhaps over drinks at a bar or during a casual dinner among friends. The conversants are staunchly Democratic, and so to even raise the subject seems like disloyalty, but it is raised nonetheless: “So, how do you think Obama is doing?’’

To ask is to admit the answer to come. There are no rousing affirmations (“Great! He’s delivering just what he promised!’’). One word crops up most frequently: “Disappointing.’’

This has been a bad summer for Barack Obama. There is, of course, the vacation, a 10-day respite to the moneyed enclaves of Martha’s Vineyard. Democrats can dutifully recite the talking points: Obama has taken just 61 days of vacation, while after the same time in office George W. Bush had spent 180 days away from the White House, Ronald Reagan 112. On the other hand, Bill Clinton - in retrospect, his terms were the Democrats’ glory days - had taken but 28. And no one doubts that had Clinton been in office while the economy was tanking, the stock market collapsing, and more than 9 percent of Americans were failing to secure work, he would have understood the theatrics of it all and stayed at home. Or at least he wouldn’t have gone to the Vineyard.

This vacation came on the heels of the ugly battle over raising the debt ceiling, one that Obama largely lost. During that fight, some suggested Obama assert that, as president, he had the power to raise the debt ceiling himself, an argument imperfectly grounded in the 14th Amendment (“The validity of the public debt . . . shall not be questioned’’). Doing so would have given the president a powerful weapon he could have used to push back hard against House Republicans. Bill Clinton thought it a fine idea. Obama rejected the tactic altogether. It felt like unilateral disarmament.

There are other examples as well. The campaign for a national health care bill featured a disengaged Obama - who allowed Congress to put together a potpourri mess of a bill - coupled with partisan strong-arming to force its passage. Many wonder now, with the benefit of hindsight, whether that issue should have been joined at all, given the perilous economy Obama inherited. A focus on jobs alone would have been enough.

The consensus is that Obama is a good man: honest, smart, and well-meaning. These were all words that applied to former president Jimmy Carter, too. When one explores the meaning of the word “disappointing,’’ it lies in a sense that, like Carter, Obama poorly wields the levers of power. He campaigned on lofty ideals and vague words (“hope,’’ of course, being most notable). But on reflection, it turns out we want our presidents to get results, and doing so requires a willingness to use the scheming and manipulative dark arts of politics. Obama seems disinclined to tread that path. Suddenly the idealists who flocked to his campaign because he wasn’t, say, Hilary Clinton, now fret that he doesn’t play the game very well - or even, at all.

Don’t misunderstand. I find few Democrats ready to cast their lot with one of the potential Republican nominees. The Tea Party candidates - Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry - are anathema to what they believe, while Mitt Romney, an amorphous cipher, left a bad taste in their mouths from his days as the Commonwealth’s governor. Nor are there many (although there are a few) who would relish an intraparty challenge, a la Kennedy versus Carter. Obama, they all agree, will be the Democratic nominee in November 2012, and Obama, they also agree, will get their vote.

If they vote - and there’s the rub. Obama was swept into office by a wave of enthusiasm, much of it from younger people, African-Americans, and others disenchanted by national politics. The passion and enthusiasm of those days now seem far gone; the disenchantment is back. Barack Obama has advantages: he is a marvelous campaigner, may have about $1 billion in campaign funds at his disposal, and will be facing a fractured foe (Tea Party versus GOP stalwarts). But to succeed he must somehow, like a preacher before congregants that now question their religion, revive the faith.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.

The folly of easy solutions

IT’S HUMAN nature to avoid tough problems, using a combination of pretense and fantasy to wish them away. Three recent examples come to mind.

The battle over raising the debt ceiling centered on coming up with a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases that would narrow the country’s deficit. Unable to agree, Congress resolved the problem by punting: It specified an amount - $1.5 trillion over 10 years - and set up a committee to make the hard choices.

We’ve heard this before, haven’t we? Just last December, the Simpson-Bowles committee came out with its own proposal to resolve the deficit. The bold plan received much comment and then promptly fell into the legislative dustbin.

This time around will be different, proponents promise. Composed of 12 members - six Republicans and six Democrats, including Senator John Kerry - the so-called super committee has until Nov. 12 to come up with a list of cuts and revenue increases, which then goes to Congress for an up-or-down vote no later than Dec. 23. The hammer that the committee has is that, if its recommendations get rejected, a host of undesirable across-the-board cuts goes into effect.

Granted, that hammer does make the super committee different from the toothless Simpson-Bowles. But the problem with recommendations from past committees also composed of smart, well-intentioned people wasn’t that they lacked power. It’s that enough people didn’t agree with them. The super committee was just Congress’s way of avoiding a difficult issue for a few months. The battles of August will doubtless be rejoined in December.

At home, Massachusetts has just ended a tax-free weekend, a (mostly) annual gift from the Legislature whose main purpose, it seems, is to make residents wonder why they shouldn’t move to New Hampshire. The illusion of the tax-free holiday is that we can both have taxes and not have taxes.

This year, 17 states will have sales tax holidays, which are wildly popular. Retailers use them to pump up sales while politicians claim to their constituents they are helping their pocketbooks. The problem is that such holidays are a gimmick. Studies suggest they do little to increase overall retail sales (they just change the timing of those sales), they don’t save consumers much (retailers often just raise prices during the holidays), they impose a significant cost on state budgets (the estimate is that up to $25 million will be lost in Massachusetts), and, as the nonpartisan Tax Foundation points out, they “distract policymakers and taxpayers from genuine, permanent tax relief.’’ If the sales tax rate is too high, by all means reduce it year round. But in fact, two years ago we actually increased our sales tax by 25 percent. Bay State pols are just trying to have it both ways.

Meanwhile, college administrators are trumpeting a new program, AlcoholEdu, that curbs binge drinking, and a new study seems to confirm it works. The program - a three-hour online course - reduces risky behavior by freshmen who take it during the fall semester. Alas, the effects seem short lived; by the spring, the study notes, the students are back to bingeing.

That should be no surprise. We have a contradictory approach to alcohol. It is deeply ingrained in our culture yet we have no idea of how to introduce it to children. Those ages 18 to 21 are regarded as adults in all ways but one: we prohibit them from drinking. Instead of alcohol being part of something - a glass of wine, say, at a meal - it is forced into becoming a secretive event in and of itself. Trying to teach kids not to drink may work in the short term, but in the long term we need to teach them how to drink, something the law says we are not allowed to do.

The thread of all these fantasies is a kind of self-delusion: believing an easy tactic - a congressional committee, a weekend respite from taxes, or an online course - will somehow solve a hard problem. But hard problems require hard solutions. If they didn’t, fantasies notwithstanding, they would have been solved by now.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.

Yes, our government still works

THREE OBSERVATIONS in the wake of last week’s vote to raise the US debt ceiling: Members of the House squabbled; senators were level-headed. There is hope for those who fear government is gridlocked. And the Constitution proved itself once again a well-crafted basis of government.

The vote, you will remember, came the day before the United States was set to default, an event, economists claimed, that would cause the stock market to crash, the world economy to sink into another recession, and the United States to lose its AAA credit rating. Luckily, the United States didn’t default, with the result being that the stock market crashed, the world began to sink into recession, and the United States lost its AAA credit rating.

So much for the predictive power of economics. Still, at the time members of Congress understood the apparent gravity of the situation before them and many behaved as if they just didn’t care.

That was especially true of the House. In the run-up to the vote, the members were locked in partisan battles between Democrats and Republicans and factional battles between Tea Party adherents and moderates. To those watching from the outside, it seemed an incredible thing, as if the nation’s overall good meant nothing to those determined to have their own way. And that didn’t end even when a compromise, approved by the president, was finally struck. Just three of Massachusetts’s 10 representatives (Bill Keating, Stephen Lynch, and Niki Tsongas) voted for the deal. The rest could not yield, even understanding the larger matters at stake.

Not so the Senate. After the House had failed multiple times to come up with an acceptable agreement, one could see a shift in power, as the Senate suddenly seized control of the process. It felt as if, having let the kids mess around for too long, the adults were stepping in. And they did so effectively, crafting a proposal that quickly won support from leadership of both houses.

And sure enough, as partisan was the House vote, the Senate was bipartisan. In Massachusetts, for instance, both Democrat John Kerry and Republican Scott Brown backed the measure. Both men were able to put aside their considerable differences - and diverging political ideologies - for the greater good of the nation. It’s an apt illustration of the dramatic contrast between the ways the two bodies - the House and Senate - think, operate, and vote.

And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

The creation of two branches of Congress in 1787 was itself a compromise on two key questions. One had to do with the nation itself: was it a coming together of a people or a federation of states? The second had to do with the proper role of democracy. One side favored a legislative branch that was entirely democratic, as directly as possible representing the people of the country. The other, fearing mob mentalities, urged a legislative branch that was more a body of wise men (women, at the time, being off the list).

We got both. The House of Representatives represented the first answer to each question and the Senate the second, which is why the two bodies are so different from each other. Members of the House, with two-year terms, have to be responsive to their constituents; reelection depends more on satisfying their demands than looking out for the nation as a whole. It also can change its political character quickly, responding to the changing whims of voters. We saw that in 2010 when the just-born Tea Party movement was able to make its influence felt in the election of a significant number of new US representatives.

Senators, on the other hand, represent broader constituencies with differing interests. Moreover, they only face reelection every six years. That allows them the latitude to rise above the parochial, making the body more conservative and slow-moving.

In truth, it’s a good and necessary mix. We need the free-wheeling political dynamism of the House to allow the people a voice as much as we need the calm, national perspective of the Senate. And for all of the ugliness and angst leading up to the debt-ceiling vote, the result suggests that, far from broken, the system still works.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.

Seeing good in the Greenway

IT’S SATURDAY afternoon and the Greenway is packed. Parents form a circle around the Rings Fountain, with squealing children running through its jetting spouts of water. There’s a line for the carousel. Shoppers stop by tents to examine wares from local artisans. Throngs cross back and forth between Quincy Market and the Aquarium. Tourists and locals wander through the newly installed Harbor Park Pavilion.

All of this comes as a surprise because, as is well known and much commented upon (including by me), the Greenway is a failure, a squandered opportunity that, much like City Hall Plaza, is just wasted and empty space.

But facts, as they say, are stubborn things. I have walked (and now biked - thanks Hubway!) the Greenway many times this summer and the masses of folks wandering, playing, and just hanging out suggests that, for all its flaws, the Greenway is a roaring success.

Part of the goal of the Big Dig was to reconnect the city to the harbor. The old elevated expressway was not only a physical barrier but a psychic one as well, making it easy to forget that Boston really was a waterfront town. That has changed. The three-lane surface roads that run alongside the Greenway - Atlantic Avenue and Surface Road (clever name that) are still obstacles to a crossing. But, now visible, the water lures and the hordes who want to get there take courage in their numbers, ignoring “Don’t Walk’’ signs and angry horns from motorists.

The other goal of the Big Dig was to knit together neighborhoods sundered by the old expressway. Doing so would have meant actually building structures across the land underneath the elevated highway so that, for example, Haymarket could be reconnected with the North End. But the design of the tunnels is such that buildings cannot feasibly be built overhead - or at least, not without enormous cost.

So instead, the Greenway, with its self-conscious echo of the north-south highway, still separates. But the Greenway Conservancy, the nonprofit charged with managing the place, has come up with a very good alternative: the parks are now meeting places, common ground between neighborhoods, destinations in and of themselves.

In the first few years of the Greenway’s existence, this was hard to see. But this summer, especially, the parks have come into their own. Partly that is because, as befits its name, the place really is green - lush, in fact. Some areas, such as the Urban Arboretum, are so chock filled with mature plantings that they seem forest-like. The other is that the Conservancy has worked hard to give each of the Greenway parks a distinct character, with attractions (fountains, things that move and places that sell stuff) that compel people to visit. One park has public art, another has a farmers’ market, a third a meandering path with odd gizmos that shoot off cooling steam.

It’s not perfect. Of the 14 parcels that make up the Greenway, a few are still unfinished. The exits from Route 93 interrupt others. And the Chinatown Park, despite a clever fountain that turns into a waterfall and then a river, seems like an afterthought.

Moreover, it is striking the degree to which the buildings on either side of the Greenway were designed so that only blank walls face the parks. That made sense back when the elevated highway was there - who’d want to look at that? - but now it looks as if they have figuratively turned their backs to it. It will take time for them to reorient themselves to face the parks, although a few are trying, such as the Irish Times, with an outdoor beer garden, and Pasta Beach, a new restaurant at the massive Rowes Wharf complex (one of the few buildings whose design anticipated the removal of the expressway).

Still, much works brilliantly. The six Wharf District and North End parks in particular have a remarkable sense of energy and fun. I’d tell you it’s worth a visit but, judging from the crowds already there, I think you’ve figured that out.

Originally published in the Boston Globe.