A Book of Ages: An Eccentric Miscellany of Great and Offbeat Moments in the Lives of the Famous and Infamous, Ages 1 to 100
By Eric Hanson
Harmony Books, 2008

This is a fun book by a fun Ole. Eric Hanson ’77 has gleaned from a vast array of scholarly and popular sources a bookful of facts about things that happened to famous people at a certain age in their lives. A Book of Ages is, thus, organized chronologically by year: things that happened to famous people when they were one year old, five years old, 50 years old, and so forth, all the way from age one to age 100. (The temptation, of course, is to turn immediately to your own age, but I don’t advise that: it’s discouraging.)

This is an artfully created book. The author first had to find out all these facts, then select the ones that are most meaningful, then order them to best effect, and then express them just so. The result is a book that is at times hilarious, at others poignant, at others brilliantly ironic. It’s probably not a book that you will read in one sitting. More likely, it will rest on the table next to your favorite chair and give you hours of pleasure as you dip into it over time.

Here are some examples of what you will discover in A Book of Ages:

• At age 10, Elvis Presley sang “Old Shep” at a youth talent contest in Tupelo, Miss., winning second prize, which was $5 and free admission to all the rides.
• At age 16, Marlon Brando was sent to military school in Faribault, Minn., just south of Northfield. (He was expelled for insubordination.)
• At age 18, Woody Allen earned a D in film production at New York University.
• When he was 22, Alexandre Dumas fought a duel during which his pants fell down.
• At age 29, Jesse James tried to rob the bank in Northfield, Minn., but townspeople chased him and his gang out of town.
• Martin Luther was 33 when he nailed his list of complaints about the Catholic Church to the door of his church in Wittenberg. Also at age 33 Michaelangelo was hired to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland, Walter Cronkite joined CBS, Gertrude Stein met Alice B. Toklas, and Groucho Marx painted on a moustache for the first time.

I could go on and on, but perhaps this list gives you an idea of the flavor of the book. For a sense of the puckish writing that makes the book so fun to read, consider an entry like this one: “Novelist and playwright Sherwood Anderson dies of peritonitis and a perforated bowel after swallowing a toothpick from an hors d’oeuvre at a cocktail party. Ironically, the cocktail party is in Colón, Panama.” Or this one: “William F. Buckley retires from The National Review after 50 years at the helm, 2004. Old conservatives are seen wandering glassy-eyed and rudderless on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Weeping is heard in Greenwich, Conn.”

It’s always wonderful to see Oles flourishing. Eric Hanson has written an entertaining and intriguing book. I recommend it.

Fast Track
By John DeDakis
(ArcheBooks Publishing 2005) 

I went to high school with the author of Fast Track. He’s now a senior copy editor at CNN, and this is his first novel. It’s fun to reconnect with him through his fiction.

Fast Track is a crime novel. It’s also, and mainly, a coming-of-age novel. The narrator, Lark Chadwick, was raised by her aunt because her parents were killed in a car-train crash when she was an infant. The novel opens with Lark coming home late one evening after work (she dropped out of college after three years and is working in a restaurant) to find her aunt dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, an apparent suicide. Bereft of all family, the 25-year-old Lark embarks on a journey of self-discovery by returning to the nearby small town where she was born to try to find out more about her parents. The more she finds out, the more suspicious the accident that killed her parents becomes, and that, in turn, casts doubt on her aunt’s death. Her self-discovery becomes, simultaneously, an investigation that yields surprising and disturbing results. It also leads Lark better to understand who she is, to embrace a vocation, and to create a new family.

There is an important story about faith embedded in this novel. Lark’s aunt was being counseled by an Episcopal priest, whose ministry to her and Lark leads to a revolt in his parish and teaches Lark an important lesson about forgiveness.

This is also a novel about writing. The vocation Lark discovers for herself is journalism, and it’s an investigative piece that she writes on her parents’ accident that solves the crime and brings the novel to its crisis. Mentored by the distinguished, but curmudgeonly, editor at her hometown newspaper, she learns important lessons about the techniques of journalism and about the ethics of reporting.

This is a tightly-plotted and well-written novel. You should read it.

The Wisdom of Crowds
By James Surowiecki
(Anchor Books, 2005)

Over the past year I have been reading a series of books on the general subject of how we make decisions, toward a goal of creating a conceptual framework to help me, and others, make the best decisions for St. Olaf College. (For a list of, and my comments on, the other books in this series see http://www.stolaf.edu/president/reading_0708.html.) The Wisdom of Crowds was recommended to me by the distinguished environmentalist Susan Seacrest ’75, our 2008 commencement speaker.

Fundamentally, this book argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them” (p. xiii). Individuals, Surowiecki, argues, are not necessarily “perfectly designed decision makers” (p. xiv). We lack the ability to make “sophisticated cost-benefit calculations,” we let “emotion affect our judgment,” and we generally operate with less information than we need. But the imperfect judgments of imperfect decision makers, when “aggregated in the right way,” are “often excellent” (p. xiv). Surowiecki explains this nicely: if 100 people run a 100-meter race and you average their times, that number will be slower than the fastest runners. But if 100 people answer a question, the average answer will “often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member” (p. 11).

What conditions are required to tap into the decision-making ability of a group? “Groups generally need rules to maintain order and coherence”; “Groups benefit from talking to and learning from each other”; “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise;” “The best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible” (pp. xix-xx).

Surowiecki describes a multitude of instances where a group made measurably better decisions than any of the individuals in the group, from judging the weight of an ox at a country fair (p. xi) to estimating where a missing submarine might have ended up on the ocean floor (p. xx) to fingering the responsible party in the 1986 Challenger tragedy (pp. 7-10) to predicting the winner of the Iowa presidential primary (pp. 17-22). Some of these groups consist of random fairgoers, some of engineers and military personnel, some of stockholders, some of political junkies.

For me one of the most important insights of this book is the requirement that in order to tap into the power of collective decision-making, the group — whatever its size — must be cognitively diverse. In other words, it must be comprised of individuals with different points of view, different experiences, and different solutions to the problem at hand. Diversity is so important because “it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision-making” (p. 29). Diversity is more important in a small group or in an organization such as a Board of Directors than in large one, like the stock market, that is almost by definition heterogeneous. Citing research done at the University of Michigan, Surowiecki argues that sheer intelligence alone is not enough to guarantee the best decision-making in a group “because intelligence alone cannot guarantee you different perspectives on a problem” (p. 30). As this book moves from its conceptual argument to the series of case studies that marks its latter half, it returns over and over again to the necessity of cognitive diversity to effective decision-making.

The Wisdom of Crowds is a fundamentally democratic book. It argues for bottom-up, rather than top-down, decision-making. It argues for the free and complete communication of information, and it argues against the cult of the expert. For example, in the context of corporations the book argues that “The more power you give a single individual [i.e., the CEO] in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made. As a result, there are good reasons for companies to try to think past hierarchy as a solution to cognition problems” (p. 221).

It’s easy to make fun of the decision-making process in place at most colleges and universities. I’ve done it myself. Certainly anyone who has ever sat through a faculty meeting or seen a committee take a year to come up with a recommendation has reason to lament the inefficiencies inherent in the system. On the other hand, The Wisdom of Crowds suggests that the deliberative process in place at an institution like St. Olaf, though cumbersome at times, conforms rather well to the best practices for tapping into the collective wisdom of the crowd. Where this book suggests that the college needs to exercise vigilance is in the need for cognitive diversity among its decision makers. One of St. Olaf’s great strengths is its strong institutional identity, born of its history and nurtured over time. As with individuals so it is with institutions: often our greatest weaknesses are the flip side of our greatest strengths, and in seeking to be faithful to our history and to preserve our identity we need to guard against closing off the kind of diversity of opinion and experience that might limit us over time.

Haunted Ground
By Erin Hart
(Scribner, 2003)

Oles go on from our college to do many good things, including writing fine novels like this one by Erin Hart ’80. Greg Kneser, our esteemed dean of students at St. Olaf, shared this book with me, and I recommend it highly to you.

Haunted Ground begins with a grisly discovery. A farmer digging peat in a bog in Ireland unearths the severed head of a young woman. Apparently, bogs have preservative powers, so the head could be hundreds of years old. The National Museum in Ireland has jurisdiction over such bog finds, and they dispatch Cormac Maguire, an archeologist at University College, Dublin, and Nora Gavin, a lecturer in anatomy at Trinity College Medical School, to investigate. To complicate matters, the bog in which the head was discovered sits at the nexus of a whole set of tensions, conflicts, and complications among neighboring residents, including an angry farmer with a complex family dynamic, a widower whose wife and son recently disappeared and who is a suspect in their disappearance, Detective Garrett Devaney who is not supposed to be investigating the disappearance of the wife and son but does so anyway, and more than a little sexual tension between Cormac and Nora.

If it sounds to you as though there’s a lot going on in this novel, you’re right: there is. But Hart interweaves the narrative of the investigation into the severed head, the investigation into the disappearance of the wife and son, the issues of the angry farmer and his family, and the relationship between Nora and Cormac into one coherent story. The narratives become more closely connected as the novel progresses, until by the end pulling on one thread unravels them all. This is a novel about parents and their children, about husbands and wives, about lovers, about anger, and about forgiveness.

If you are interested in Ireland and things Irish you will love this book for its powerful evocation of Irish musical traditions, its depiction of Irish landscapes, its portraits of the Irish, and its careful attention to Irish history. If you love rich and evocative prose, you will admire this novel’s bold eloquence. And if you love a narrative about how a crime gets solved, you will take pleasure in Detective Garrett Devaney’s unraveling of a modern crime and Cormac and Nora’s unraveling of an ancient one.

The Board Book: An Insider’s Guide for Directors and Trustees
By William G. Bowen
(W. W. Norton & Company, 2008)

William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is one of the country’s leading commentators on organizational governance. His service as a director on the boards of such for-profit companies as Merck and American Express and as a trustee on the boards of such nonprofits as the Smithsonian Institution and Denison University, has given him a synoptic view of the governance issues in both realms. In this new book, Bowen discusses the role of a board; weighs in on the debate about how to structure board leadership; reviews the hot-button issues of CEO compensation, evaluation, and transition; offers insights on how to build an effective board; and describes best practices for managing board affairs. Governance might sound like a dull subject to some readers, but in a post-Enron world it has become critical for organizations to attend to their governance structures and practices. Bowen’s book gets right at the key issues and discusses them incisively. It’s a good read.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book for me is Bowen’s discussion of how different elements of governance play out differently in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. For example, more and more for-profit companies are moving away from the model where the CEO also chairs the board of directors. Some companies have moved directly to the opposite model where a non-executive chairperson chairs the board, while others have transitioned to the “lead director” model. In the nonprofit world — and certainly in colleges and universities — the non-executive chairperson model has been in place for many years. In this respect, the nonprofit sector has been the leader in establishing a best practice in governance. On the other hand, as Bowen points out, the for-profit sector is far ahead of nonprofits in establishing clear performance metrics for the organization and its leadership and in making data-driven evaluations of performance.

Bowen writes with great insight about the challenges to mission-driven organizations (a category which includes most nonprofits) in using performance metrics. Nonprofits pursue a “double bottom line”: they must not only show that they are deploying their resources in the most effective way but also that they are serving the mission of the organization. It is this second bottom line, the “return on mission,” that is challenging to measure and assess. Bowen cautions nonprofits not to lose sight of this second bottom line and “begin to evaluate themselves solely on the basis of financial results.” (p. 29)

The issues addressed in this book are, obviously, important for a college president to consider. Working effectively with the Board of Regents to further the mission of the college is among the most important responsibilities of the president of St. Olaf. I found much in this book to help me with that work. This book would also be of benefit to any reader who serves on a for-profit or nonprofit board and would like to enhance either one’s own effectiveness as a board member or the effectiveness of the board. And it would be a great read for anyone considering joining a board. I recommend it.

President Anderson's bookshelf from 2007-08.

President Anderson's bookshelf from 2006-07.