29 July 2002

Monday

I have my headphones on as I peck at the machine so as not to disturb my room-mate here in the basement of our three-man flat in the residential area of the Harvard College of Business. The room is spare and white and the double bed is firm to the point of discomfort. There is a bedspread and a sheet and two pillows. There are no ice trays in the refrigerator. I was suffused with a feeling of accomplishment. I have completed all my reading for today, so I intend to be a good student. At least tomorrow.

The cab ride in from Logan International had a local white guy at the wheel. He was not Ethiopian or Afghani or Sudanese, which were the nationalities who have ferried me to and from Dulles in Washington the last three times.  My guy has been hacking for as long as I have been out of college. He lives in South Boston, what used to be an Irish Catholic bastion we knew as Southie. The Bunker Hill memorial is across the street from the High School whose integration caused such a furor long ago. The funny thing was that the problem fixed itself. All the Irish left and now there is no one to bus. The school is now all minority. A cautionary tale for a person headed to a symposium on the implications of Government policy.

We talked about what had changed in this town since I lived in Beverly, up the coast, a quarter century ago. He rents, and says the South Boston he moved into was skid row and now is very upscale- he called it "toney." His landlord hasn't figured it out and sent him packing yet. He is hanging on, the old cabby, and me too, the old Naval Officer in the back seat. The construction in town is quite extraordinary, quite apart from the multi-billion dollar Big Dig in the harbor.

I am billeted in a nice red brick graduate student apartment with three bedrooms. Somebody left a can of coffee in the kitchen so that is not a problem. I have a full cup next to me and two room-mates who are not. One is Mr. Wu, slight, and a devotee of some early stretching regimen. The other is a 6'4" official from the Bureau of Prisons. So you can think of me as in a forced room assignment with a large man from the Department of Corrections.

The radio says Cardinal Law is back from the World Youth Conference with recharged batteries. I had forgotten that the Church was still an integral part of Boston, and the problems of abuse that was such a buzz a couple weeks ago are something that people care about.

I played hooky last night for the first dinner. They had the obligatory orientation and a long, somewhat disjointed set of remarks from Roger Porter, the professor in charge of the senior executive program.

I'm happy to be here, delighted, in fact. I am a little apprehensive about all these people. Harvard, for goodness sake. Roger is slim and elegant and talked without viewgraphs or outline. Which made him wander a bit. He insisted that everything could be devolved to three key points, something he had to do with Mr. Reagan one afternoon, not knowing what the three points of industrial policy were he was about to convey.

It was deep on a Sunday afternoon, the skies were spitting intermittently outside. Roger was getting to the fourth point of three. I wanted to be not wearing a tie and not sitting in a symposium.

Afterwards they had a nice reception. There was some excellent sushi, some mini-crab cakes on trays brought by the help, and coconut shrimp. And free wine. I talked to a senior auditor from the personal staff of the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Chief Counsel of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who used to be with the FCC. We
talked animatedly about spectrum management and the implications of the telecommunications crisis as it related to the Savings and Loans debacle of the Bush administration.

There was to be a nice sit-down dinner after the reception, and I had enough sushi covered with wasabi hot enough to blow the top of my head off. I decided more food (food is a theme here) was purely extraneous, and talking to another set of type-A bureaucrats was more than I could handle. According to Roger's opening remarks, I will have 45 more ninety-minute chances for interaction over the next three weeks.

Today's cases for discussion are about tough decisions at the FTC (Caspar Weinburger), HEW (Joe Califano) and EPA (Ann Gorsuch). How Director of Central Intelligence (Jim Woolsey) dealt with the Aimes spy-scandal (a softball, I know all these people), goal setting and results in the pulp paper industry in the American South, and enhanced performance culture in the AT&T credit card business.

We will deal with the implications of "We are never satisified" as a motto and what that does to the people on the phones, when the operators know that someone is always listening.

And a "Desert Island" exercise designed to show us something or other about choices and priorities.

Gotta shower. We share a bathroom. Timing is everything. Wish me luck.