Pen Thoughts

  I want to start by correcting something I almost got wrong myself. Cruise control is not, by itself, a sign of a failing organization. Some of the best-run institutions I have ever encountered work exactly like cruise control: a founder, or a generation of leaders, built a system so well designed that it began running itself, delivering results without needing a hand on the wheel every hour of every day. That is not failure. That is craftsmanship. The danger is not the system. The danger is time. Since the 1990s, the environment around every organization has been changing at a pace that keeps compressing: every few years, then every few semesters, now every few months, sometimes every few weeks. A system built for the road of 1995, however well engineered, was not built for the road of today. It can keep running, and keep delivering, for a long time after it has stopped fitting the world it operates in. That is the trap. The most dangerous organizations are not the ones that ...

I was born on a Wednesday in July 1981, in Saint Joseph Hospital, a short drive from the shelter where I would spend much of my childhood. On paper, Lebanon's civil war was six years old that summer. Growing up, I learned it had been rehearsing its provocations long before its official date. My family likes to say I was born in a shelter. It is a metaphor, but only barely. The first nine years of my life kept making it true. The shelter was the minus-one of my grandparents' building: a warehouse of perhaps two hundred square meters, cleaned out and claimed by the families above it. It had two entries, one from the parking, and one from the lobby, where you stepped over a concrete lip and climbed down a ladder someone had built by hand. We strung electric lamps against the dark. When the battles intensified, bread could vanish for weeks at a time. During the worst sieges, it reached us only rationed, passed down through the militias that held the area. My grandmother Teta Victo...

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