Posted here Sunday, March 14, 2004 at 1:00:10 PM 
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 11:04:45 AM
Harvard Gazette: Academic turns city into a social experiment |
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Women's night and mimes
There is almost always a civics lesson behind Mockus' antics. Florence Thomas, a feminist and a professor at Colombian National University, pointed out to Mockus that in Bogotá women were afraid to go out at night. "At that time, we were also looking for what would be the best image of a safe city, and I realized that if you see streets with many women you feel safer," Mockus explained.
So he asked men to stay home and suggested that both sexes should take advantage of the "Night for Women" to reflect on women's role in society. About 700,000
More of Mockus in Bogotá
Here are a few more innovations from Antanas Mockus' two mayoral terms:
Mockus mobilized people to protest against violence and terrorist attacks. He invented a "vaccine against violence," asking people to draw the faces of the people who had hurt them on balloons, which they then popped. About 50,000 people participated in this campaign.
Mockus also embraced the concept of community policing. He tried to bring the community and the police closer together through the creation of Schools of Civic Security and local security fronts. In 2003, there were about 7,000 local security fronts in Bogotá. "It is very important to understand that the Schools and Fronts respond to a civic ideal. They have nothing to do with firearms but basically promote community organization," Mockus points out.
Voluntary disarmament days were held in December 1996 and again in 2003. Though less than 1 percent of the firearms in the city were given up, homicides fell by 26 percent, thanks in part to the attention given to the program by the media. The percentage of people who think that it is better to have firearms in order to protect themselves fell from 24.8 percent in 2001 to 10.4 percent in 2003.
In 2003, the Mockus administration provided 1,235,000 homes with sewage service and 1,316,500 with water services. The city's provision of drinking water rose from 78.7 percent of homes in 1993 to 100 percent in 2003. The sewage service rose from 70.8 percent of homes in 1993 to 94.9 percent in 2003.
When Mockus assumed power, many city positions were distributed according to council members' recommendations. "I stopped that, and some called me an anti-patronage fundamentalist," Mockus said. He remembers that when he handed a text explaining his goals of transparency to one key council member, the council member first smiled, but later resigned.
women went out, flocking to free, open-air concerts. They flooded into bars that offered women-only drink specials and strolled down a central boulevard that had been converted into a pedestrian zone.
To avoid legal challenges, the mayor stated that the men's curfew was strictly voluntary. Men who simply couldn't bear to stay indoors during the six-hour restriction were asked to carry self-styled "safe conduct" passes. About 200,000 men went out that night, some of them angrily calling Mockus a "clown" in TV interviews.
But most men graciously embraced Mockus' campaign. In the lower-middle-class neighborhood of San Cristobal, women marched through the streets to celebrate their night. When they saw a man staying at home, carrying a baby, or taking care of children, the women stopped and applauded.
That night the police commander was a woman, and 1,500 women police were in charge of Bogotá's security.
Another innovative idea was to use mimes to improve both traffic and citizens' behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who didn't follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people were trained as mimes.
"It was a pacifist counterweight," Mockus said. "With neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations." |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:53:14 AM
Harvard Business Online |
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Microsoft's and Wal-Mart's preeminence in modern business has been attributed to any number of factors--from the vision and drive of their founders to the companies' aggressive competitive practices. But the authors maintain that a bigger factor of their success is the success of the networks of companies with which Microsoft and Wal-Mart do business. Most companies today inhabit ecosystems--loose networks of suppliers, distributors, and outsourcers; makers of related products or services; providers of relevant technology; and other organizations. The analogy between business networks and biological ecosystems vividly highlights certain pivotal concepts. The moves that a company makes will, to varying degrees, affect the health of its business network, which in turn will ultimately affect the organization's performance. Because a company, like an individual species in a biological ecosystem, ultimately shares its fate with the network as a whole, smart firms pursue strategies that will benefit everyone. So how can you promote the health and stability of your own ecosystem, determine your place in it, and develop a strategy to match your role? Knowing what to do requires understanding the ecosystem and your organization's role in it. Is your company a niche player, a keystone, or a dominator? |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:50:50 AM
Harvard Business Online |
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Leaders who rely forever on the same internal advisers run the risk of being sold short and possibly betrayed. Alternatively, lone-wolf leaders may make enormous, yet preventable, mistakes when trying to sort through difficult decisions. A sophisticated understanding of trust can protect leaders from both fates. During the past decade, author and consultant Saj-nicole Joni studied leadership in more than 150 European and North American companies. Her research reveals three fundamental types of trust: personal trust, expertise trust, and structural trust. Executives may persevere in relationships that are based on personal trust, but such relationships are unlikely to remain static--and probably won't provide the kinds of deep, often specialized knowledge leaders need. In organizations, leaders develop expertise trust by working closely with people who consistently demonstrate their mastery of particular subjects or processes. Structural trust refers to how roles and ambitions influence advisers' perspectives and candor. Advisers in positions of the highest structural trust generally reside outside organizations, providing leaders with insights that their organizations cannot. High-performing leaders' most enduring valuable relationships are characterized by enormous levels of all three kinds of trust. |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:42:43 AM
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE NATION (4 Volumes) |
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THE CONSTITUTION AND THE NATION (4 Volumes), by Christopher Waldrep and Lynne Curry (eds.). New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003. Volume 1: ESTABLISHING THE CONSTITUTION, 1215-1829. 214 pp. Paper $21.95 23.50 € 15.00 £. ISBN: 0-8204-5730-2. Volume 2: THE CIVIL WAR AND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM, 1830-1890. 269 pp. Paper$21.95 23.50 € 15.00 £. ISBN: 0-8204-5731-0. Volume 3: THE REGULATORY STATE, 1890-1945. 179 pp. Paper $21.95 23.50 € 15.00 £. ISBN: 0-8204-5732-9. Volume 4: A REVOLUTION IN RIGHTS, 1937-2002. 269 pp. Paper $21.95 23.50 € 15.00 £. ISBN: 0-8204-5733-7. Reviewed by Samuel B. Hoff, Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy, Delaware State University. Email: shoff@desu.edu . |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:40:43 AM
washingtonpost.com: Right Makes Might |
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Bush does seem sincere enough in his moral opinions, contrary to an entirely cynical interpretation of his words and actions, but there is an impression of callow simple-mindedness in his moral sentiments; at the least, he has not thought through the complexities of the issues he is called upon to deal with.
The conventional view of George W. Bush is that, while he is a man of marked intellectual limitations, he is governed by a consistent set of deeply held moral convictions. Singer's book refutes this comforting myth. Bush is a man of sporadically good moral instincts, perhaps, as with his AIDS initiative, but he sways inconsistently and opportunistically in the political breeze, and has no idea how to make his beliefs fit coherently together. • |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:38:04 AM
washingtonpost.com: Right Makes Might |
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The President of Good & Evil, Peter Singer's timely and searching new book, is in effect an ethics tutorial directed toward the leader of the "free world." Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, gives Bush a D, if not an outright fail. The bulk of the book is a litany of moral inconsistencies and failures, of persistent hypocrisy and doublethink. Singer's method is to contrast Bush's enunciations of principle with the realities of his policies, finding repeatedly that political expediency triumphs over declarations of principle. The list is by now familiar, but worth assembling. Bush began his presidency lamenting the injustice of children born to poverty and disadvantage: "And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity." Yet his enormous cuts in taxation clearly entail the withdrawal of resources from social programs that would help ameliorate such problems. |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 10:29:27 AM
The Way We Live Now: The Year of Living Dangerously |
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Now that we are there, our problem is no longer hope and illusion but despair and disillusion. The press coverage from Baghdad is so gloomy that it's hard to remember that a dictator is gone, oil is pumping again and the proposed interim constitution contains strong human rights guarantees. We seem not even to recognize freedom when we see it: Shiites by the hundreds of thousands walking barefoot to celebrate in the holy city of Karbala, Iraqis turning up at town meetings and trying out democracy for the first time, newspapers and free media sprouting everywhere, daily demonstrations in the streets. If freedom is the only goal that redeems all the dying, there is more real freedom in Iraq than at any time in its history. And why should we suppose that freedom will be anything other than messy, chaotic, even frightening? Why should we be surprised that Iraqis are using their freedom to tell us to go home? Wouldn't we do just the same?
Freedom alone, of course, is not enough. Whether freedom turns into long-term constitutional order depends on whether a vicious resistance that does not hesitate to pit Muslim against Muslim, Iraqi against Iraqi, can drive an administration, fearful about its re-election, into drawing down U.S. forces. If the United States falters now, civil war is entirely possible. If it falters, it will betray everyone who has died for something better.
Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice.
Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer for the magazine, is director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. |
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Sunday, March 14, 2004 9:09:58 AM
International Social Science Review: The Middle East: some new realities and old problems. |
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Appearing before a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman characterized Britain's pending withdrawal from Greece and Turkey as a "grave situation" affecting American national security that required an immediate response. He then outlined the basic principles around which American foreign policy in the developing areas of the world would revolve until the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. An essential objective of American foreign policy entailed "the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion." Alternative systems of government and of life contended with one another for adherents. As Truman described the choice between opposites, "one way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression." The other, by contrast, "is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms." The Truman Doctrine firmly equated democracy, economic stability, and orderly political processes. These, the president argued, must be fostered through economic and financial aid, since "the seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive." (2) |
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