Speaking of Bucket Lists

Keywords:  Newt Gingrich
900 words, About 3 pages

 

One of the privileges of being a CEO is getting to have dinner with interesting people.  My wife imagines from time to time having a fantasy dinner party and inviting her favorite celebrities.  She wants the list to include Charlie Gibson, Dolly Parton, Julie Andrews, and of course Colin Firth—an interesting mix no doubt. 

                For reasons beyond explanation my list includes David Brooks, Chris Evert, Rowan Atkins, and Newt Gingrich.   Well, tick one of the characters off the bucket list, for as CEO of an industry association, I did get to have dinner with Newt the other night.  Here’s my report.
                First of all, he’s on time, polite, well dressed and ate nothing but a Caesar salad and drank sparkling water.   OK, so we were eating Mexican, and he did eat more than his fair share of the chips.  He left all the salsa for me thankfully, for my margarita needed something to wash down. 

                “So Dr. Gingrich,” (he does have a real doctorate from a real school after all) “what in your view made the polarized politics of today seem so much worse?”  I asked.

                “It’s somewhat cyclical. Before the Civil War, it was much worse than today.  I’d say today’s cycle is caused mostly by technology,” he said.  Now we can blame a lot on technology, but I’d not heard this take before.
                “You see, up until 20 years or so ago, when Congress was in Washington,  they were in Washington.  That is, their constituents were back home, and they were away from them.  They were fairly isolated in DC, and what social life they had revolved around others in Congress.  If they heard from folks back home, it was through letters or the occasional long distance phone call—remember when someone would hurry you to the phone because it was ‘long distance’?   Congressmen would take the train or a flight back home for a spell and then come back to the environment of dealing with each other almost exclusively.  A lot of golf was played, a lot of deals were cut, and a lot of things got done.  Whereas today, they are in constant touch with their constituents and feel constant pressure to respond and behave as if they’re always in the fight. 
                “Still, the Senate is more the way it used to be than is the House.  The reason, of course, is because one senator can hold up legislation.  Therefore, if you’re a senator and are really obnoxious to another senator, then it will come back to haunt you.  The House doesn’t have such forced gentility.”
                I hadn’t thought about the constant feedback from constituents as leading to operating under pressure to perform and behave a certain way.  And, oddly enough, as he told me this his smartphone chimed with an incoming text.  He excused himself for a few moments to handle a question from his wife. 
                We talked next about European politics.  His doctorate, by the way, is in European history, and his dissertation was on the Belgian colonial experience in Africa.  I’ve been known to dive unabashedly into conversations about the most obscure historical topics--just to show I could work my way out of it, if for no other reason; however, I left this one alone (I’ve learned that as a CEO, it’s generally a good practice to speak less--thus probably saying more).  Talk of Europe led to talk of Spain and Greece and his take on the currency crisis there. 
                “The Germans think the Greeks are going to buckle down and work like Germans, and that’s not going to happen.  The Greeks still think the Nazis ran off with a bunch of their gold, and could not care less about working like Germans.  It’s a case where the economics are going to be shaped by the culture—not by pure economics,” he said. “It may take a while for the powers that be to realize this.
                “Spain is incredibly interesting.   What you have right now is a cultural catastrophe in the making.  You’re about to see a young generation in Spain , many or most of whom have never had a job reach the age of 30.   That means that a crop of young people, mostly educated, will  reach the age of 30 having never had a boss, never had a customer, never gotten an earned pay check, never having paid their own bills or having had responsibility for their own finances.  They don’t live on farms or work the land or do much of anything.  This may be something we’ve never seen in our lifetimes.  Thus the real economic catastrophe in Spain may be cultural.  We’ll see,”  he said. 

                Here is a man—like him or not—who seeks to understand why and how things work the way they do, and what might happen with different experimental approaches to change them.  He talked of his current work researching government regulation.  In his view, there are three major areas of the regulatory continuum:  regulation, restriction, and destruction.  

                “The proper role for government rules is to regulate,” he said.  He expounded, “regulation involves correct processes which encourage good things to happen and prevent bad things from happening.   Restriction occurs when rules—for whatever reason, say the government doesn’t like the practitioner—are formed to punish someone for being in a certain activity.  And lastly, destruction results when the rules drive out the very existence of something.  I’m still working on the framework of this, but I would hope it would be of interest to industry groups,” he said, and I nodded.
                We’d been at dinner almost two hours, when he said it was late, and excused himself.  He had to turn in.  He was speaking to our convention the following day.  At first, I resisted the idea of inviting him in to speak.  He might be too polarizing and might not have much to say that would be useful  to an industry association.   I was wrong about that; I learned a lot from him in one dinner.   It was a worthwhile tick off my bucket list.