Tag Archives: innovation

Serious Conversations, 10

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From Part 2, Chapter VI of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute, this description of a coffeehouse in the Sehzadebasi district of Istanbul:

What wasn’t discussed in the coffeehouse? History, the philosophy of Bergson, Aristotelian logic, Greek poetry, psychoanalysis, spiritualism, everyday gossip, lewd adventures, tales of terror and intrigue, the political events of the day—all gathered up into one swollen conversation that burst like a spring deluge, carrying away everything in its path, as surprising as it was senseless, one topic seething forward before the other was finished. But, then, of course, nothing was ever discussed in detail. In the coffeehouse a story would rise up as if from a long slumber, or like a faint memory of the ancient echo of a death. As conversation turned deliriously from one subject to the next, Alexander the Great would join forces with Hannibal or the Kantian imperative, all to serve as antidotes to daily life. With even the most benign adventure, the pleasure was in the retelling. The patrons had listened to one another for so long that they could guess more or less what would happen in any story. Conversation was merely a platform for the speaker to display his eloquence; it was more like a play, or the recitation of a dearly loved work, for the exchanges were executed according to predetermined conditions—not at all unlike the traditional Turkish mime theater, ortaoyunu. The story would be interrupted by the same interjections, and laughter would follow; if certain members of the crowd were directly involved in the tale, they would make their defining pronouncements at just the right moment. If the narrator introduced new details, he would be cut off at once with, “You made that up!” But it was these new twists that people came to enjoy most in later recitations. And no one ever found the endless—and mandatory—repetitions tedious. In fact it was only the out of the ordinary that met with some resistance. New ideas were at first humored out of courtesy and a slight curiosity, but they would remain unaddressed until the crowd’s ever-vigilant imagination had recast them as pleasantries, thus assimilating them to their own idiom. This is what happened to any attempt at serious conversation. A new story was accepted into the repertory only once it had been reduced to a base sexual escapade, a tale of pederasty, a piece of slapstick shadow-puppet humor, or the replica of an ortaoyunu. There was a specific name given to those who discussed serious matters: they were known as the “world regulators,” the aristocrats who busied themselves with the regulation of the world.

Serious Conversations, 7

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In these notes on serious conversations, I keep circling back, it seems, to two ideas: first, that what makes a conversation serious is not its subject matter or tone, but the stance of its participants toward each other; and, second, that the conversational stance requires that we confer a certain authority on our interlocutors, or (to put it another way) recognize that they have standing to address us.

While other kinds of authority — title, rank, role — are of secondary importance, and can sometimes even get in the way, this moral authority or standing is fundamental. It does not have to be earned, proven or ratified by reference to some person, written instrument or record of accomplishment outside the conversation or by institutional set up. It is constituted and realized in the relationship you and I have — or, if that is just too clunky, let’s say it is the relationship you and I have; and it is sufficient authority for a serious conversation because it makes us mutually accountable to each other.

Where this equal human stature (or dignity) is respected (and appreciated), it can be a source of power: not just the power of one over another, but the power to make claims or demands of each other, or to ask and answer, and this power of asking is essential if we are going to deliberate in earnest about our situation or collaborate on something new.

The conversational stance allows for genuine co-creation, because it’s not founded on subordination or one person ordering the other about. And the capacity for co-creation, the creative power that we share, only increases as we include more people in the circle of the conversation. (Of course there are limits: the research on group size and social complexity Dunbar summarizes suggests the circle probably should not widen beyond 150 people.)

I’ve tried to capture this thought in a simple rule: the power of asking will always be greater than the power of command.

That’s the basic position.

Another way to put the same thought might be in terms of the mechanics of ordering versus asking: whereas in the former we have one person directing the will of another, as we might address a short-order cook, in the latter we direct each other’s wills, so that we are, to stick with the metaphor, chefs in our own kitchen.

Of course the usual caveat applies about too many cooks spoiling the broth, I guess, but let’s also remember that people have different talents, training and competencies, and we can worry about how to order and organize ourselves once it comes to the actual cooking. Right now we’re just having a conversation.

Let’s also acknowledge, while we’re at it, that short-order cooks are models of industrial-era efficiency (but no longer efficient enough for the post-industrial fast food kitchen); gains in co-creativity can and probably will translate to losses in short-term efficiency.

Some concessions on one side or the other will probably have to be made, but too often the proponents of efficiency win without any argument, and people start giving orders or setting out plans for what’s to be done before the conversation even has a chance to get started. That’s when all the real power goes out of the room.

A Fifth Note on the First CEO: The Postwar Fad

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We don’t usually think of corporate boardrooms as places where fads start or take hold. But that’s probably the the best way to account for the adoption of the CEO title by American corporations in the postwar period. Or at least that’s the view urged in this 1999 paper by Allison and Potts, which a reader shared in a comment on my post about the postwar provenance of the term CEO: from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s, the adoption of the Chief Executive Officer title spread, primarily through “board interlocks” — or through individuals serving on multiple corporate boards.

Allison and Potts present the title’s diffusion through corporate networks as a “no brainer,” “an innovation largely without consequence to adopters.” It was a case, they say, of “contact-only diffusion” or “diffusion with contagion,” in which no serious choices or business decisions had to be made; the title may have helped clarify the difference between President and Chairman, but for the companies Allison and Potts study there was no “non-trivial economic benefit or cost” involved. Companies adopted the title Chief Executive Officer largely because they were emulating other companies: “diffusion of the CEO title was strictly mimetic, a true fad.”

cumulativeCEO
Everybody was doing it. Container Corporation of America started the trend in the late 1940s: why, Allison and Potts don’t explain, but I hope to make some sense of that at some point in the future; it’s intriguing, to say the least, that the company led by Walter Paepcke — Aspen booster, patron of the arts, and promoter of big ideas — led the way. In 1955, CCA was the only one of the largest 200 industrial companies in the United States that had a Chief Executive Officer. By 1975, all but one of the bunch had adopted the title.

CEO Titles

The fad takes hold in four stages: an early period, from 1955-1961;1962-1965, when adoption rates climb dramatically; a late middle period, from 66-71; and a final period where we see adoption rates drop off, mainly due to the remaining number of small adopters.

Though Allison and Potts don’t distinguish the adoption of the Chief Executive Officer title from the use of the acronym CEO, it’s in that late middle period, which they call the “inflection point” of the fad, where we start to see the first traces of the acronym “CEO” in the Harvard Business Review and other business publications. Shareholder value theory makes its debut in 1970. By the time the fad has run its course, in 1976, Jensen and Meckling have published their theory of the firm: the CEO has been identified as the primary “agent” of the firm’s success. He has also begun to enjoy unprecedented political influence, social prestige and cultural celebrity. What began as a boardroom fad has produced a new icon of American power.

Denning and the Death of Hierarchies

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Steve Denning, the “radical management” and leadership guru, published a post at Forbes.com yesterday about the shift taking place within many organizations, away from hierarchical models of command and toward more fluid, flexible and agile setups. Drawing on Fairtlough’s The Three Ways of Getting Things Done — which argues that the only “effective” organizational models are hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy — Denning argues that hierarchies “must sign their own death warrants to survive” in what he likes to call the Creative Economy.

In this post, Denning’s interested in why business leaders cling to hierarchy even in the face of evidence that it’s no longer the most effective way of getting stuff done (if it ever was), and in the paradox that in all the examples he can find, “it’s the hierarchical management itself that has led the shift away from hierarchy. The shift didn’t occur as a kind of bottom-up movement. It was the top that saw that there was a better way to make decisions and went for it.” Flatter organizations tend to cleave to the status quo and work within established frameworks, he observes.

Of course plenty of other people within an organization might see that there is a better way. Those atop the organizational hierarchy are the ones permitted or entitled to say it aloud or do something about it. Hierarchy isn’t just a way to get things done; it’s also a way of distributing power, and the power relations hierarchy maintains are a daily fact of life for subordinates. They usually don’t have a place at the table when the organizational models are being drawn up or redrawn. In order to effect change within a hierarchy, those at the bottom – and the middle – would need to be enlisted as stakeholders, entrusted with real power and respected as equals (which would itself require some undoing of the organizational hierarchy).

I am a little puzzled why Denning here doesn’t present a more considered and nuanced view of the way power actually works within organizations – and the way in which concentrated power can actually hamper performance and kill ideas or even the motivation to present ideas about how to do things better.

That aside, and no matter how or why or by whom “the shift away from hierarchy” is brought about, Denning’s article is a good place to start talking about what this shift will really entail and require of people at every level of a hierarchical organization. It seems fair to say that as organizations get flatter and try to operate with more creativity and agility, the way things are coordinated – the way we use language to order the world, get things done and coordinate action — will itself have to undergo a radical change. The way I’d put it is that coordination will have to shift from the power of command to the power of asking.

Indeed, how we use language – how we make claims and demands on others, how we talk and listen to others about what to do — can itself help effect a shift from hierarchical command structures to the more fluid structure associated with the give and take of serious conversation (the rough equivalent, to my mind, of what philosopher T.M. Scanlon calls “co-deliberation”). I’ll have more to say about what constitutes a serious conversation in a future post.

The Whole Foods Language Police: Keystone Cops or Company Thugs?

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Whole Foods now denies that Lupe Gonzales and Bryan Baldizan were suspended for speaking Spanish on the job. While the company does, in fact, have a written policy requiring employees to speak English while “on the clock” — in order to maintain what one Whole Foods manager calls “a uniform form of communication” — the employees, Whole Foods now says, were fired for being “disrespectful.”

The proof? A letter Gonzales and Baldizan wrote, asking why workers in the Albuquerque, New Mexico store could be dressed in Mexican bandito costumes (“sarapes and sombreros with fake mustaches”) on Cinco de Mayo, but are “forbidden” to speak Spanish on the job.

Nothing says respect like grotesque parodies of Mexican culture. As for the actual, living culture of New Mexico (where, by the way, not just Spanish but Ladino is spoken) — just keep it off the clock and preferably outside the store.

Ralph Arellanes, New Mexico director with the League of United Latin American Citizens, said he “almost fell off [his] chair” when he first got wind of this; now the League is threatening a nationwide boycott if Whole Foods does not drop the policy. The company says the English-only policy is necessary for “safety” and — incredible though it may seem — inclusion: if workers speak Spanish, “team leaders” and customers may feel “excluded.” How is a leader expected to lead, or customer able to shop, or feel that they belong at Whole Foods, or in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for goodness sake, with all that Spanish being spoken around them?

It’s tempting to write this off as yet another example of the folly of top-down corporate policy-making: policies imposed from above usually hit the floor with a thud; hilarity or disaster ensues. There’s also a cautionary tale here about policing language, which hasn’t worked since the days of Babel. The language police usually turn out to be Keystone cops.

keystone-cops-granger
Or, worse, they end up offending people, and the policy-makers look historically ignorant, culturally arrogant and out of touch.

I wonder, however, if there’s something else at work here. People who speak the same language — a language “team leaders” don’t speak — are able start their own conversations about work and other topics. They can talk about their lives and their families. They can form new bonds and build networks within and beyond officially recognized teams.

Those informal bonds can pay off. It’s been repeatedly shown that unofficial, loose, self-directed, peer-to-peer social bonds help people learn from one another and develop new approaches to their work: people who share a language can share practices that have proven effective, find new ways to do things, or create unwritten rules and new combinations that will help them collaborate.

On the other hand, of course, workers can use a language they share to talk about the realities of their jobs, the possibilities they see for themselves within the organization, the conditions under which they work as well as the barriers to their advancement. And they can talk about their Anglophone leaders, too. I suspect those are conversations Whole Foods — “a staunchly anti-union enterprise” run by a man who sees himself as the benevolent father of his workers — probably wants to nip in the bud.

Creativity or Command?

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John Hagel and John Seely-Brown have a new piece on CNN Money called “Welcome to the Hardware Revolution” that nicely highlights an issue I touched on yesterday: the limits that institutionalized power — or the ways we institutionalize power — can place on learning and innovation.

I suggested, in passing, that business organizations rely on hierarchical models of command-obedience in order to achieve efficiency; but that doesn’t always work to their advantage (and the performance advantage to be gained from scalable efficiency, Hagel and Seely-Brown have argued elsewhere, isn’t anywhere near what it used to be). What these companies may gain in efficiency they lose in creativity, learning and innovation.

Here is what Hagel and Seely-Brown have to say in their “Hardware Revolution” piece:

many of the executives we speak with list talent development and innovation as top priorities, but for all they push, progress remains a struggle. Part of the problem is that most businesses’ institutional structures, hierarchies, and cultures actually limit the connecting, exploration, tinkering, and improvisation that make learning and innovation possible.

Increasingly, the sharing of ideas and new developments are taking place outside big companies or officially sanctioned workflows and processes, in what Hagel and Seely-Brown call “creation spaces.” These are spaces — communities, networks and cultures — conducive to what Illich would call conviviality: places real or virtual, open and decentralized, where people congregate to share tools and experiment together, learn from one another, try new things, and be part of a community of people with shared interests.

The article goes on to recommend some basic questions business executives can ask themselves in order to improve their companies and move them toward creativity, or at least get their bearings. But there’s another question looming behind those: the question how (in a large and established organization) you go about institutionalizing the kind of practices you find in creation spaces. Eventually, something’s got to give; and if it comes down to a decision between preserving organizational hierarchies and legacy models of how stuff gets done or opening the doors to creativity — how many will choose the latter?

Maybe the choice is not as stark as my title makes it out to be. Let’s just say there are better ways to spur creativity than to command it.

Reading Orwell On Mining and the Metabolism of Civilization

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I just finished George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. I wanted to track down the passage about mining and the “metabolism” of civilization that Shefa Siegel refers to in his essay on “The Missing Ethics of Mining” (which I quoted at length in a previous post). It comes early in the book, at the start of chapter two:

Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual process by which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance and are willing to take the trouble.

There is some uncertainty about the reference to Chesterton here. The editors of one anthology point to a debate about coal mining between Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Mark Bernstein and Scott Rosenberg trace the reference to Chesterton’s assertion that civilization “is founded upon abstractions”. I like this better. Pace Chesterton, Orwell anchors civilization in the dark rock world below — the “necessary counterpart of our world above” — and in the hard work of the miners he witnesses: the stooping, the “travelling,” the dust, the deafening noise and the grimy air, the excruciating shovel work at the coal face, which the miners or “fillers” perform kneeling, and in hot, stuffy, dirty cramped spaces, stripped to the waist, sometimes down to their drawers, for 7 hours at a stretch.

Of course what Orwell wrote of coal in the 1930s could now easily be said of oil and gas, and, as Siegel would have it, many minerals as well — minerals we do not see or even give a moment’s thought, but which, like oil and gas, are extracted from the earth (and now, with rare earth metals, from the sea-bottom) at great hazard and great cost. The metabolism of the world (now the whole world, not just the West) has changed, as well as the materials that we now require to keep things up and running. That’s largely because things have changed.

That ordinary expression deserves some careful consideration. It’s safe to say that, although things have changed, we are, for the most part, blithely unaware of the hard, dirty world on which the things that make up our world depend. Or at least we prefer to act as if we are.

We still tend to believe, or I should say we would like to believe that that which does not appear grimy somehow comes into the world clean, the outcome of a great idea, the product of abstraction or an innovative approach, a flash of insight drawn on a cocktail napkin. That belief in the power of great ideas to make up the things of this world makes us especially ill equipped and nowhere near ready to deal with the increasing scarcity of the resources on which the shiny, fast world of things depends.

Postscript:

Ask Is A Verb

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If you have spent any time in conference rooms or on conference calls, you have no doubt arrived at the moment when someone, usually the person who commands the most authority in the room, articulates “the ask” of the meeting. Or someone will ask, “what is the ask?” and this poor excuse for a question will snap everyone to attention, demonstrating that they regarded most of what went before as inconsequential blather. They were merely awaiting their orders.

Against this slide into jargon – and it’s fair to talk about it as a slide, an intellectually lazy lapse into the jargon of bureaucratic command– it is important to assert: ask is a verb. Why? Because verbs describe and denote action, and asking is a special action – an action that initiates and coordinates new action (on a very basic level, the discussion of the request, the coordination of the actors who will attempt to satisfy the request.) Asking is a way to begin, and beginnings are the prerogative not just of nominal leaders, but of all human beings.

When a designated leader, or anyone, for that matter, talks about “the ask,” they are turning a verb into a noun, an action into a thing – into a command, more precisely, and depriving asking of its native connection to action. They are not interested in beginnings, but in ends, the outcome they already have in mind. At the level of the sentence, “the ask” or “my ask” obscures the basic relationship that the verb “to ask” usually creates between a petitioner (the person doing the asking) and a respondent (the one of whom a thing is asked), and converts that very fragile and mutable relationship, that conversation about the world and what we should do together, into a superior’s control over a subordinate.

When you ask someone to do something you will elicit a response. The response can be a simple yes or no; and the number one rule of asking  — of being a petitioner — is “always take no for an answer.” In other words, be prepared to listen, engage and adapt. Asking someone to do something – as opposed to ordering them to do it – is to initiate an event whose outcome is unpredictable. The request is fraught with possibility, uncertainty, promise. That is because when you ask, you implicitly acknowledge the independence and autonomy of the other – recognizing them as an agent capable of their own beginnings. When you command, you forgo that recognition, and the respect that goes along with it, to remind the other of his subordination, and treat him as an instrument of your will, a means to your own ends.

This little piece of jargon creates a big moral muddle, but sometimes a muddle is exactly what bureaucrats want to create because they are unwilling to assume the responsibility of command, they are averse to risk (beginnings are always risky), or they are just cowardly.  “The ask” preserves hierarchy without acknowledging power relations. It involves phony respect for the other: I am not petitioner asking you, the respondent, to do something; there is an object called “the ask” that we must address. It comes from nowhere, really; its origin is unclear, but our duty is clear.  That request from nowhere or at least nobody also keeps power relations, the status quo, intact. The course is set. Things have already begun; the task now is to complete them. So “the ask” works as a hedge against change, against doing something really new; it short-circuits the conversation, shuts down dialogue, and enlists others not as collaborators but as a pair of hands to get a job done.

I suppose that’s not so surprising in a context where the point is execution of an already-decided objective or plan, not debate; but without debate or deliberation a plan or objective will lack meaning for those asked to carry it out. They won’t have had a chance to figure out for themselves the best way to carry it out, whether they are the right people to carry it out, or whether it ought to be carried out at all.

Who’s Afraid of 953(b)?

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Insanity! That’s how Thomas Sternberg, co-founder of Staples, describes Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act. “Incredibly wasteful,” adds John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank. For the past year or so, CEOs and business lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable and the National Investor Relations Institute have been fighting “tooth and nail” against 953(b). With the SEC preparing to issue its proposed rules sometime this spring, expect a lot more noise.

Why all the fuss over 953(b)? This section of Dodd Frank deals with disclosure of executive compensation – always a touchy subject. Specifically it would mandate public companies to disclose, in their SEC filings:

(A) the median of the annual total compensation of all employees of the issuer, except the chief executive officer (or any equivalent position) of the issuer;
(B) the annual total compensation of the chief executive officer (or any equivalent position) of the issuer; and
(C) the ratio of the amount described in subparagraph (A) to the amount described in subparagraph (B).

Issuers — public companies — advance a number of arguments against having to make this dread calculation. The one repeated most often is that it is cumbersome – a burden, just too difficult, a waste of everybody’s time and money. (They respond in the same way when they are asked to report on human rights, by the way.) But compensation data can’t be all that hard to gather, can it? What would it really take to calculate the median of the annual total compensation of all employees? Are we to take seriously the claim that companies do not have these numbers already available? And if they do not, isn’t that a sign of seriously poor fiscal management, or negligence? Time to demand better housekeeping.

Second, we are told, 953(b) disclosures wouldn’t be of value to investors; the measure is just politically motivated. “Everyone recognizes that this is a political disclosure, not an economic one,” writes Michael S. Melbinger, partner at Winston and Strawn; 953(b) is “intended to give unions and certain media folks a tool to bash corporate America”.

The unions and the media? Melbinger’s argument is specious at best. You can only bash corporate America, and these disclosures will only count against companies, if there is something disclosed that is embarrassing, or worse. And of course there is. The research of Duke University’s Dan Ariely suggests that these disclosures would reveal gross inequities: in the past 20 years, CEO pay has increased from 130 to about 350 times that of the average worker. Does that give people a bashing tool? Or does it reveal that ordinary people are regularly getting bashed by a bunch of corporate tools?

Third, some companies argue that the disclosures should be restricted to employee compensation in the United States. The fear is that employee compensation in foreign countries will drag down the median. Strange that companies that are usually so bold about their global reach or their smart outsourcing strategies are suddenly so shy. But shareholders (and customers) are increasingly concerned about the treatment of foreign workers – how much they are paid, and what their working conditions are – and are demanding transparency and accountability across the supply and service chain. Witness Apple.

These arguments are merely blinds. The question is whether the SEC, after so much heavy lobbying, will be able to see them for what they are. Maybe shareholder demands for greater transparency can eventually make up for any shortcomings of the SEC’s final ruling, but that will, of course, be a longer slog.

It would be difficult to argue that a CEO earning 350, 250, or 100 times the average worker is really a model of good corporate governance. A study [pdf] by Michael J. Cooper, Huseyin Gulen and P. Raghavendra Rau shows that highly paid CEOs are not necessarily more effective CEOs, and that CEO pay does not correlate with company performance. And a recent post by Christopher Swann and Agnes T. Crane gives the lie to the usual excuse for bloated compensation packages: the “global war for talent” has not brought global talent to the C-Suite; American companies still hire American-born CEOS, even though American CEOs have lagged behind their European-born peers in delivering performance.

In any case, we need a better understanding of how pay ratios and the hierarchies they perpetuate affect performance, especially in an environment where command and control hierarchies can seriously limit agility and hamper innovation. 953(b) provides a good opportunity to have that conversation.

Finally, my guess – and right now I don’t have any research to back this up, so I will have to rely on behavior I’ve observed – is that overpaid CEOs tend not to attract, retain or inspire innovative thinkers in their immediate circle. There are, of course, notable exceptions; and this is not to say that overpaid CEOs cannot preside over innovative companies. But like mafia bosses and politicians, most SuperCEOs tend to prefer polite indulgence or deference, even if what they are saying is wrong, ridiculous, or just plain boring. Talented people, on the other hand, need to follow their own course and will dissent, or just leave and start their own thing, rather than keep silent, tolerate gross inequities, or toady up to the big bad boss.

A Connecticut Lobbyist In Obama’s Court

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There has been plenty of griping and grumbling over the past twenty-four hours about the President’s appointment of General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to lead the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. While he may be an idol of corporate America, Immelt appears to be an unlikely champion of American job creation. “Since Immelt took over in 2001,” Shahien Nasiripour reports in an article on Huffington Post,

GE has shed 34,000 jobs in the U.S., according to its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it’s added 25,000 jobs overseas.
At the end of 2009, GE employed 36,000 more people abroad than it did in the U.S. In 2000, it was nearly the opposite.

To make matters worse, Connecticut-based GE has not exactly been focusing its investments on American innovation and growth: in 2008 and 2009, Nasiripour points out, GE decided “indefinitely” to invest earnings abroad, while booking losses at home: as a result, General Electric enjoyed a negative tax rate in 2009 and a low rate of around 5 percent in 2008.

It stands to reason that more inducements and allurements, in the form of corporate tax breaks, are in the works to help focus Immelt and other corporate leaders on job creation. To help bring some of those foreign investments home, Immelt and other corporate titans will most likely continue to push for making the Research and Development Tax Credit permanent. They give the impression they are holding the spirit of Thomas Edison hostage, and will only release him if their conditions are met.

You might be forgiven for asking whether this is really the best way to spur American innovation, or whether Jeffrey Immelt and GE really have America’s best interests at heart. I’m sure Immelt believes he does; but can he, really? Maybe it all depends on how you sweeten the deal. Immelt himself reassured analysts and investors yesterday that he will always put GE first: “My commitment to GE and my leadership at GE, that doesn’t change,” he said on a conference call. He knows, I suppose, that no man can serve two masters.

The disturbing truth is that there really isn’t any great conflict of interest here: GE’s interests are not so far from American lawmakers’ interests. This happy consensus is largely the result of GE’s lobbying campaign, which in 2010 amounted to $39.3 million. $9 million of that campaign was dedicated to lobbying around a single project: the F-136 propulsion engine.

Developed for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet (a big $382 billion project), the F136 propulsion system is GE’s “alternative” to the F-135 propulsion system developed by Pratt & Whitney. An alternative. That is, there are no plans to use GE’s F-136 engine in the fighter jets. Pratt & Whitney won the government contract for the F-35’s propulsion system. You’d think that would have resolved the matter.

But these things have a momentum all their own. Funding for the F-136 started as an earmark in a defense bill, and grew. The Bush administration tried to kill the F-136 engine; Secretary Gates called it a “boondoggle,” and President Obama promised to veto any defense bill that included the GE engine. Robert Gibbs yesterday reiterated that the engine is “not something we need.” But GE, arguing that competition drives down costs, has lobbied and continues to lobby for its engine, running ads, working both sides of the aisle, and spreading its message through the press.

Newly elected House Republicans are not going to stop the F-136. Congress has already funded its development to the tune of $3 billion, and funding will continue unabated through March 4th of this year. And just yesterday, a GE spokesman told ABC Newsthat “newly elevated leaders are even more likely to keep the engine program afloat.” It remains to be seen whether, come March, the President can or will stand his ground.