One of the least productive things you can do is context switch. When you switch tasks, particularly if you're switching tools as well when you do it, you reset your contextual flow and that has a very real, very measurable effect on your productivity. Now when you migrate from a DIY tool chain to a more comprehensive DevOps platform, you are eliminating not just integrations that you need to manage, but also a huge amount of that switching costs, and you're giving yourself the opportunity to build a better, more comprehensive and productive flow. And one example of that is documentation. In our next talk, Philip Westfallen and Benedict Stimmelt will discuss their journey toward making the developer documentation process as fun and as fluid for developers as the coding process that they were already following. Let's hear what they have to say. Welcome, everyone. We will share a little bit about our way, how we bring the documentation back to the fun level. So documentation is that long-lived documentation. Yes, me. My name is Philip Westfallen. I'm from Hamburg, work for the Flores online shop and yeah, I'm a software engineer there. And a part of that I manage the GitLab Meetup here in Hamburg and I'm also a GitLab hero. Hi, thank you, Philip. My name is Benel or Benedict or Ben, whatever. I'm the CEO of the same company, Blumen 2000 AG. We are a handbook-based company, as you already thought because of Philip doing the Hamburg Meetup. I've been using GitLab for a while now and I'm not a hero, but maybe in the future I will be. I don't know yet. You can see my handles here. I'm a passionate software developer and I'm still trying to get into the code whenever I can, discussing architecture. I love that very much and documentation is always a part of architecture as well. So yeah, we thought let's dig into that topic. It's always a little bit hard to speak about it. But yeah, I think we have a good way of showing you what we like about documentation. Let's head back to Philip. He will start. We will start with a daily disaster with documentation. So we're describing first why writing documentation makes no more fun to us and now he starts with the product owner view or non-technical person view. Yeah, right. So you probably guessed it by now. We're trying to switch between the robots. I'm doing the non-deaf role as it is most of my time in the daily business as well. And Philip is doing more or less of a deaf view. Yeah, what you can see here is my daily what the heck moment when opening Confluence or any other documentation tool like Confluence, but it's always a good example. It's not that. Yeah, it's not what you would have expected from a documentation. So I've picked a random page from our Confluence and what you can see here is a little smaller view like 13 inch display. And then the half you can read anything. It's no structure. It's like a lot of white space, no information there. No one knows what's going on. It's very hard to motivate people writing that it's very hard to focus on the content. Most of the time you focus on on the layout and making it somewhat readable. You all know that. And as you can see here, someone really thought through publishing the page. I don't know what happened there. It's a very big accident. And then enough of that there's no testing. You cannot see what changed during the documentation very well. So yeah, I don't like it very much. You all know that, but somewhat I don't know why it's in the comfort zone for most of the PO's. They tell them, yeah, let's document stuff. They first thing of Confluence. So that's the PO view. Let's take it over to the deaf view. Yeah, for me as a developer, the writing documentation feels mostly boring. I have to head to the web page and type something into Confluence. So it's feeling like a shore because I'm wanting to write code and do the fancy stuff. And yes, and I mentioned before, yeah, we have to move out of our fancy IDE and jump into a tool which is full blown like Word document editing. And yeah, you have so much things to do to bring a good looking documentation. And when I'm my truly passion is or my truly passion, it's my comfort zone as a developer is marked on. So this is everything I need. I have code like structuring my content. And this is everything I need. And I don't need a full blown tool to write our documentation. Yes. So this was our pain. And now we switch to our dream world, I think. Yeah, that's correct. So I think you can relate a lot to what we told you about here in this fast example. So we wanted to get to catch you and not waste too much time on it, but there's so much to tell about the disasters and the pain. But you all know it, right? So let's move away from the pain to the good parts, right, to the light. And for us, at least from a feature point of view, it means that we have a light white tool that is not overgrown with buttons and stuff and you can do this and that and whatever. And you don't need like 90% of that things. And that's why we want to focus on the path that's necessary. So that's why writing good looking documentation needs to focus on creating content and not layout, right? So nowadays, you spend like 90% of the time making it look good and 10% putting the information in there. And that should definitely switch around. So 90% getting the information in there and 10% making it look good. And to make that happen, you need because I'm not a documentation pro and I think Phil isn't as well. So we are developers, right? And we are not technical writers or something. So we need guidance and structure. So the tool should give us that so that confluence is like there's no guidance, no structure at all. So you're lost in there and the tool should guide you, should help you from one of you. And let's look like a little bit of, so we are not trying to bash that much, but the search is like key feature to find stuff in the documentation. Navigation isn't that important to find stuff. Navigation is giving structure. But if you're looking for something, what was the VPN setup like, then the search should be pointing you exactly there. And not like, oh, here are 50 pages talking about somewhat with a V and a P and an M in there. Maybe you look there. So that's, yeah, that doesn't help. So all in all, it just should be fun to write the documentation. It should be easy to read it. It should be fun. And to make that happen, Phil is talking a little bit about the requirements. Yeah, the requirements are quite a lot because we have two worlds colliding, the dev and the POs. So it's mostly important that we find a tool, which is lightweight and especially the language where we are writing them. For example, the markup should be simple and easy to learn and intuitive. And so the language must provide the basics like we have to add links and pictures and tables and whatever you need in a basic set. But also features are important like code blocks because we are writing sometimes technical guides, where it's important that we can choose a language of the programming language and to structure that good. So it's feel cool. And yeah. And these were the requirements for the language or the style we need. And the tool itself needs some essential features. Bina mentioned it before, search is the most important thing. Especially that you don't only search for headlines or... Yeah. Search. You have to search the whole content to find your related information you need. Yes. And navigation should be also very simple. So it feels native to build a structure or in the best case, it should be done by the directory structure. Yes. And another very important thing is that you can write the documentation in the web, like in the web IDE of GitLab or as a developer in the local IDE or whatever you want to do in the repository locally. And the editing process should be... Yeah. It should be easy. You only edit one page and you are done. And yes. And another thing which is important. It should be a home where you can access anywhere and everything. So even when you are on a smartphone or at the desktop, you should be using the tool very good. And yes. And when it comes to local writing documentation, a really cool feature would be that you have live feedback. So when you are editing the documentation, it should be shown immediately. And the web browser is rare. It's documentation rendered. Yes. And nobody likes maintaining and hosting. So the tool should be really easy to maintain and to host. Yes. These are, as a developer view, the most important thing. Yes. I get that. So we have the product owner perspective, the dev perspective. I think you all also think that that's a good start or maybe have some advanced features you need. But for us, this was the set we needed. And obviously tools like Confluence and such provide them, but not in the light-white fashion. So it's all in there, but it's very hard to use. And we'll get there and show you some examples of tools we are currently using. But first, let's make a short excourse on what you actually should write into your documentation. And some of you might thought, hmm, I don't run to write documentation at all. Like, let's just generate all this stuff. And I was a big fan of that as well. But as more as I thought about architecture and people and communication in general, I got used to or I got fond of the idea that it's very hard to generate documentation. Because it's like code formatting. You don't write pretty code because the computer wants you to do that. You want that so that other developers can read it better and see the structure very well and get started immediately with coding and not just first have to, like, platter all this stuff and then find out, wow, it has someone done here. And for me, this is the same with documentation. So if I generate documentation, it's very hard for a human to read it. It's easy for a machine to read it. Obviously, there are some use cases like shown here in this picture where you can generate the documentation and you should because it's, you document a very structured thing that can be very easily generated into a structured documentation. It's very near to the machine, right? Like a REST interface, like you can see the open API standard documentation. And that's pretty easy to generate that. But like generating a class diagram for me has no value at all. Like I can go into the code and generate it myself or I can like see the Java documentation which is on there. So most of the time I think about what is the audience for my code and for my documentation and for my code and what would that audience maybe need to understand the code. And the code itself shouldn't have any comments and stuff like that because it should be self-explanatory, right? So very well-named methods, not the topic for today. But I don't need to document that because it's already documented itself. But I need the context around that. Maybe the purpose of the code, what am I doing here? Everything that's not in the code itself. And I can't generate that because it's not in the code itself, right? So maybe you think about the generating stuff in a different way after that or you've got an idea of what I'm talking about. So what we did, we focused on the not generating part here, right? So we needed a tool for writing the stuff ourselves. And obviously we bashed a lot on confidence until now. So let's have a look at which tools we like and we use. Yeah, we explored some tools which met our requirements or we know they look great in the real world. Yeah, and the first tool is ViewPress. It's most commonly known that it's the documentation of Vue.js. And it's written in Vue.js, which is cool because we write our online shop in Vue.js. So we could extend the documentation if we have more advanced needs. Yeah, and it's a basic side generator. So we have files or have our structure, yeah, have our structure of our documentation somewhere and it's print out HTML documents in the end where we can put anywhere. Yes. And the cool thing about that is it's written or you write your documentation and markdown. So it's provide everything you need. You know how markdown works because it's everywhere in GitLab, like in the GitLab issues. So we have to daily deal with markdown. So it's commonly known. Yeah, and it got us a good search about over the content, what's in the documentation. Previously it was only in the headlines. But they released version two some weeks ago. And now you can search additionally in the content. So it's improving and a good living tool. Yeah, and also it has a great performance. It's really fast because it's Vue.js in the background and it's really simple to use. Yeah. And it simply generate our documentation very well for every user. Sounds like a good tool, right? Yes. So let's look into an alternative. So actually there's not that much difference in the core concept of the tool itself, which I really like. So there's MKDocs, which is also a static code generator or documentation generator built on Python. It has a very great extension or it's built. There's something built on MKDocs, which is material for MKDocs, not a theme. So don't get that switched around. It's more like an extension. And it also has all the same properties which Phil mentioned for Vue.js documentation and VuePress. So I think in the end we get to a comparison in the next slide. But looking at the feature side, it's more or less even. There's a bit more of advanced features because MKDocs has been on the market for a long time. But essentially it's actually the same thing. Let's end it with a comparison. So we have VuePress and we have a material for MKDocs. They are both super easy to set up, both based on Markdown, which is easy for product owners and developers to write. It's not that hard to have a structure with that. Plus or minus for us, it was like VuePress, a fairly new player. Phil mentioned Vue2, currently in VTang, has a better search. So there's still a lot of stuff to do until it's that material for MKDocs. So there's a ton of features in the MKDocs that are very powerful search. The only downside, or it's not a real downside, but material has an open source strategy of releasing new features to a payer group, which is the insider version. And after a few contributions or after a few donations, these features go into the open source free version. And the free version is enough for most of the people. So there are some features in the pro or in the insider version, which are nice, but they are not really necessary. So I think you will have a lot more features over VuePress with the free version as well. What we did in the end, we decided for material for MKDocs. Like also like a visual thing, we simply liked that more. There was a dark mode, you know, dark mode, great. Now VuePress has a dark mode as well, but then you get the hang. So actually we started with VuePress and then migrated to MKDocs. The migration took five minutes. So probably migrating back would also be five minutes. You get the tools are very incomparable. I think, Phil, you have five minutes now to tell us something about how we did that on the technical side. The setup in GitHub is quite easy. Yeah. And first of all, you have to do the MKDoc setup. It's just following the instruction. You have only a small configuration file, which you can see on the slide. And the biggest thing in there is simply the navigation. You have to define the navigation there. And serving and building MKDocs is quite easy. This makes really fun because this comment is so short. MKDocs serve is for serving. It's a live feedback thing when you are developing locally or MKDocs build when you generate the pages. And the next thing is directory structure. I think it's a common way to structure the documentation there. You simply have your navigation there and everything you need is written there. The teams have their own space and you can structure it like you want. Yes. And yeah, a nice to know thing is mostly we use draw to draw our conception or concepts and architectures. And we can simply change the directory or the storage from draw to GitLab. And then you save as PNG or SVOG. These both are editable so you don't need two files. And you can simply save it in the docs and it's updated automatically when you change something and save it there. Which is really awesome. That's very awesome. The GitLab repository as a storage is very awesome. You don't have to download it, search it in your local finder and put it in the directory or upload it. Yes. Sometimes there's just not enough features in the documentation tool to generate such a diagram and that's why you need the draw mode. But I think it's okay. You don't want to have that in the documentation tool. It's too hard. Confluence users and no draw already. Yes. And as a setup in the GitLab pages we use for hosting GitLab pages which is really easy to use because we have only a job where we build our application, save it in the directory and push the directory to GitLab pages. This is the whole file, right? That's the whole GitLab. Yeah. This is everything. This is everything. A review app is for previews. Yes. And yeah. We use a custom domain to feel like more inclusive to our technical landscape so we don't have to type in the long GitLab.io page. We simply type in our custom page. So yes. Pretty great, right? What? It's great. It's pretty great. I like the custom domain. Let's show you a quick live demo. So I think we have like one or two minutes left. So let's just do a quick demo and then move to the last slide. Yeah, as you can see here I've prepared something. I prepared a browser and an IDE next to each other. I already did like the MK serve thing here to just serve the documentation. And what you can see here is one of our documentation pages. You can see the nice navigation and stuff. So get into that later. Here, for example, like structuring blocks and admonitions here. And what I can do now is I can, for example, say this is not like, this is like, this is not folded out. It's folded in admonition here, right? So I've changed that. And after a few seconds, it's changed here in the documentation that we do reload. So it actually is live reload, but you have to wait for it for a bit. Like there's a 20 second or 15 seconds delay in there. Yeah, and now you can see this is like folding out and in and not folded out the whole time. We say, I'd like to change it back and want to change the browser version here to something weird. And a few seconds later, the right side is edited. I think you will get the hang of it right here. So it's this again. And what I can do now is if I like this change, I can push it. And so I have a change for you here. I can see what I changed. I can look into the history and see what others changed. You can use the whole good thing, right? So that's pretty great. As a developer, you don't have to leave the IDE. And as a PO, you can use the give that web IDE to edit this. So you don't have to have the live reload, but I think it's good as well. And also PO could use this tool as well. And you've got a markdown preview, which covers the moves. Exactly. So you could also use the markdown preview. Yes, you're right. So you could actually also use the markdown preview, which is even faster, but some of the advanced features are not available there. Thank you, Phil. I forgot about that. Okay, let's move back into the slides. And I think there's nothing much more to say, but thank you very much. For me, it was a pleasure. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, I hope you could take something from that, Phil. What do you have to say? It makes me a lot of fun to do that. And it's a great and documentation makes fun for a long time now. Yeah, I guess so, right? It's fun to do that. I actually liked to write our platform documentation because it was fun. It helped me. I didn't have to think about the layout so much. It looked good very fast. So thank you very much for listening and we are done. Bye-bye. Ciao.


And it is a pleasure to see all of you here for this afternoon's policy talks, which is going to focus on network diplomacy. We're looking forward to having our discussion with all of you here this afternoon. Well, today's speaker, Ambassador Richard Boucher, is here teaching at the Ford School, and so it's a particular pleasure to be able to welcome him here. As many of you know, he is one of our Towsley policymakers and residents, and let me tell you just a little bit about the Towsley program before I introduce him formally. The Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation Policymaker and Residence Program was first established in 2002, and the goal has always been to bring distinguished policy leaders to the Ford School, to engage with our community, to teach students, to share their insights and their perspective with the broader community in a variety of different ways. And we've been delighted and very pleased about the opportunities that that program has afforded us. We're particularly pleased to have Richard with us, and he has joined us this semester, and I know that his wife, Caroline, who is with us here today, was instrumental in his spending this semester in Ann Arbor, and so we're not only very pleased to have her here with us today, but we're also pleased that she was supportive of him in making that decision. So we're particularly grateful for all of that. Richard Boucher's topic today addresses issues of network diplomacy in U.S. foreign affairs, and with the rise of the social media in the 21st century, it seems like the actions of all of the governments around the world are subject to a very different level of public opinion, and that has implications in a variety of different dimensions. Well, Richard Boucher is no stranger to addressing global public opinion of America's foreign affairs. In fact, he was the longest serving assistant secretary of state for public affairs, and in this capacity he was either spokesman or deputy spokesman for five secretaries of state. In particular, Lauren Siegelberger, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice. In 2006, he was appointed assistant secretary of states for South and Central Asian affairs, and served until his retirement from the Foreign Service in 2009. Among his many diplomatic posts, he served as ambassador to Cyprus, consul general in Hong Kong. He led the U.S. efforts for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, APEC. He's fluent in Chinese. Richard has contributed to developing U.S.-China relations throughout his foreign service career, and then after decades of representing American interests and negotiating with foreign governments, he accepted a top-level assignment with the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and as deputy secretary general at the OECD found himself negotiating with Americans and representing global interests, and that's an interesting kind of shift in perspective that I suspect we may benefit from today as we hear his remarks. So clearly he brings both breadth and depth of diplomatic perspective to our community and to our conversation this afternoon, and so it is really a pleasure to welcome him here to Michigan and the Ford School. So before we start, I'd like to remind our audience that if you have questions, there are cards that you can write them on, and there will be members of the Ford School staff who will be coming down the aisles to collect the cards at about 4.30 with help from Professor Marina Whitman and two of the Ford School students, Kiana Shelton and Stephen Paparot. We will be reading your questions to Richard during the Q&A session. So if you are watching us online, I encourage you to submit your questions via Twitter and please use the hashtag policy talks. So with that, Richard, I'm delighted to welcome you to the podium and the floor is yours. Thank you very much. That's a better introduction to my CV. I think I'm going to rewrite it or steal it. Good afternoon, everybody. First I want to thank everybody for coming. I want to thank the Towsley Foundation for sponsoring me here at Michigan. Thank Dean Susan Collins for welcoming me, Professor Alan Deirdor, for showing me the ways of the world, and Cliff Martin for everything that he's done to help get me settled and organized and introduced me to Michigan. So thank you all for the warm welcome here at Michigan and thanks for giving me a chance to talk. Before I start, I'm told it might be appropriate to give us all a brief moment of silence to contemplate the basketball scores from the weekend. So now that that's over, we'll start discussing policy again. I want to talk today about what I've done all my life, not just to tell some stories but also to talk about diplomacy and how it's changing in the world and how we're changing into a world that's formed of nodes and networks rather than just powers and blocks. I'll talk from the perspective of the United States because that's what I know, but I think every country is going to have to face this and master doing diplomacy in a new world. I'll give the overview and then after I finish, maybe 25 minutes from now, we can go and talk about anything you want. Diplomacy has always been about winning friends and influencing people. 200 years ago, Ben Franklin went to Paris, put on a Coonskin cap, changed the image for himself and his new nation and managed to get French support for our revolution. Not any significant support until after we'd won a few battles and demonstrated our strength. Power still underpins diplomacy, but as power itself is evolving and how we exercise power is changing too. Moises Naim talks about now the decay of power, the dispersion of power, the scattering of power of all kinds of governments, of corporations, of civil society groups, of religions even. The United States still stands at the top by most measures, but we're not alone anymore and we find that there are more powers, more players, and more blockers than we've gotten used to over the past few decades. In fact, we have what it takes and just about every area of power and influence, we remain either the biggest or the best. We have more aircraft carriers, more cyber capabilities, bigger national income, innovation, economy, global brands, TVs and movies, net imports, capital flows, reserve currencies, even top rated schools with top rated basketball and football teams. Just about everything but soccer. We can use these tools and hopefully we can use them effectively. So when you get to something like Ukraine, there is a classic confrontation going on involving alliances and gunboats and money on the table and gas and economic levers, visa bans, status propaganda and every other traditional element of power and diplomacy. But we all have the feeling now that the outcomes are less clear cut, the effects are more indirect and our ability to wield traditional power has diminished. So in some the US can still lead but getting the people to follow has gotten more complicated than it has been since say about 1990. So I'd like to talk to you today about how traditional power has changed, about how we can rebuild trust in our leadership, about how we can project ourselves differently into the world and then try to come back to Ukraine and try to pull a lot of it together. We no longer live in a world of blocks of packs, we live in a world of nodes and connections. In our world everyone's connected, countries with teenagers, NGOs with corporations, students with universities or terrorist groups. Traditional measures of power don't capture the changed nature and the weaknesses of power diplomacy on a network. Military power for example still uses ships and planes and soldiers but also drones and computer viruses which cost less and go much farther with less risk. So we're facing adversaries often not even nations and states, adversaries who can threaten us with smaller investments and less accountability. Cyber war and war by remote control are new, they don't have rules. When do you use them? Who do you retaliate against? If the actors are not clear and not from governments who do you hold accountable? We ourselves rely on new technology more than almost any state so at the same time as we're powerful we're also vulnerable. We have to think again about how we use these new capabilities. On the economic side, economic power these days relies not just on the size of GDP or of trade balances. Goods are produced in global value chains. People who create the products and services and those who organize the value chains have the power to make the decisions and the money about how the product is produced and where the product is produced. For the moment US brands constitute about 55 out of 100 of the world's leading global brands and in these value chains more value comes from the intangibles the design and the marketing rather than the skill, the manufacturing and assembly. Skills, business organization and services add the most value along the chain and this trend is probably going to strengthen as robotic manufacturing becomes more widespread, more sophisticated and as things like 3D printing expands where there's almost no manufacturing until it gets to your kitchen. So the United States is riding high but we have to pay attention. If value added provides the key to growth productivity and especially to wage growth we have to think again about how we develop skills, how we innovate, about global rules, about taxation, global standards and practices, about just about everything. We also have to ensure that value chains spread respect for workers in the environment as well as for the norms of anti bribery, corporate governance and responsibility. Straight up military and economic power is less effective without the trust of others. In fact trust is what turns power into influence. Economics as you all know here in Michigan because you've been doing an economic confidence survey for 60 some years, economics is a confidence gain. Why don't people invest when interest rates are 2% because they don't have any confidence in the consumers of the future. But politics and diplomacy rely on confidence too. Leaders aren't leaders if no one trusts them enough to follow. And if people trust you they work with you and they involve themselves in your business. Now people around the world have always looked up to and respected the United States particularly the success of our economy and of our democracy. Other nations over time have placed confidence in our leadership. We still get this respect on an individual level and as a society the fact that we're still the top destination for immigrants shows that. But we have a long way to go to repair our image and our brand as a nation. We have a credibility gap. Credibility gap comes from politics from economics and above all from the Iraq war. Start with politics and economics. First and foremost credibility begins at home. We have to work harder on the success of our democracy of our economy of our society. As a U.S. diplomat I used to be able to tell people that yes we have our problems we have our crises. But we face up to them and we fix them. It's a little harder to say these days. The paralysis in Washington sort of undercuts that theory and all I can do is hope that it won't be permanent. We also see economic competitors now. Even competitors when it comes to the economic model. Financial crisis wiped out what was known as the Washington consensus. Even if much of what it embodied remains valid economics. Can we forge a new consensus? A free market path that producing prosperity and reducing inequalities. If we do governments will emulate us and forge compatible practices. If not they're going to look elsewhere. And I for one certainly hope the new commences consensus will emerge as a free market consensus and not a bureaucratic Beijing consensus or even a Brussels consensus. The other component of power that I've worked with is information. Now more than ever information drives the new economy and the new politics and diplomacy. Information started revolutions in the Arab world. It keeps Chinese politics bubbling. It holds governments accountable. Nothing stays secret anymore. We know that from Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. But even in China the government can't repress the social media so the party tries instead to get involved to manage the online conversation and manipulate it. They end up having to fire officials who get exposed on social media for failing to fix problems or for wearing designer watches. When it comes to information credibility is paramount and institutions around the world are facing a decline in credibility and a rise in accountability. Overall that's good but it hasn't been good for our reputation. Confidence in information from the United States public and private sources has been in long term decline from Vietnam through Watergate to the Iraq war. And we need to rebuild our information reputation. American credibility took an enormous hit with Iraq and since I was part of that I want to talk about it a little bit. Our February 5 presentation to the United Nations turned out to be Swiss cheese. As Robert McNamara said in a different context we were wrong terribly wrong and we owe it to future generations to explain why. So let me join the discussion. I want to start out with a flat statement. We did not lie. We made a series of terrible errors. First Saddam had had weapons and we assumed he still had them. We identified certain configurations of trucks that had moved chemical weapons in the past and every time we saw those configurations of trucks we counted with chemical weapons even if we couldn't see the bombs. We committed the error of extrapolating. Second Iraqi officials were lying to themselves. We heard them talking about special weapons and special movements. We committed the error of credulity. Third we thought he had weapons of mass destruction so we found what we were looking for. We committed the error of confirmation bias. And fourth we said if Saddam has no weapons why doesn't he prove it? What's he hiding? In the end I think he was hiding his nakedness from his neighbors. He didn't think we were going to attack and therefore he didn't bother taking steps to stop us. We committed the error of believing that others act and think the way we would. We committed the error of thinking it was about us. Something that I call methropomorphism. So this series of errors led to a tragic blunder. In consequence the world now finds it's unreliable and will not easily follow us again. Now perhaps that's for the better. Maybe more questions will be asked next time we go off. But rebuilding our credibility is not going to be easy. We can't go back to the UN the way Adlai Stevenson did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Notice I'm talking about information, not propaganda. We need to play it straight, not build a new propaganda machine. Most of the world has learned not to trust information from governments, not ours, not theirs. And all that tweeting and blogging from the State Department and the White House that my friends are all doing now, it really doesn't amount to much. It's not worth five minutes of information on Facebook that's produced by the people and for the people. But the most fundamental error in Iraq was not just intelligence or information or the number of troops or the botched occupation. It was really the error of hubris, the belief that we could fix things for everybody else. But as power becomes more diffuse, as people get more tools and governments, as we make things together with others instead of by ourselves, we need to shift our ideas about our role in the world. The United States has to stop trying to be Mr. Fixit, start using our diplomacy to empower other people to fix their own problems. Fundamental goals have not changed. We still believe we do best in a world of free societies and free markets and free peoples. In a networked world, we can provide the connections and the tools that those societies, markets, and peoples need. In a networked world, there are viruses, not existential threats to the United States. And we all benefit from the rise of new nodes. Finally, we shouldn't think governments should do everything. Extending platforms for business, education, and individuals empowers the kind of change we want. But it's the educators, the business people, and the individuals who actually make the change. There are more and more people that want to do this. The world's middle class is exploding. And in fact, the world's middle class is revolting. These consumers have market power. They increasingly want political power. Many of the revolutions around the world are middle class revolutions. They don't need us to solve their problems. They're taking matters into their own hands. We need to speak to them and their needs for access, for education, for opportunity. And I have to say, I think our best diplomacy is diplomacy where we put the tools in other people's hands. And I'm going to hold up my one example that I love to cite. The Beijing Air Quality Index. The people in my class have seen this like a dozen times. Beijing Air Quality Index. You can get it on your portable phone. The U.S. embassies started monitoring the air quality in Beijing and put a sensor on their roof and put up the index for their staff. And then the Chinese found out about it and Chinese citizens started using it to figure out what the weather was, what the smog alert level was in Beijing. This then produced pressure on the Chinese government to do something about the smog. So right now it's 227 particles per million of particulate matter in Beijing. And you can get Guangzhou and Shanghai and other places too. And what we've done is basically given Chinese citizens the tools that they need, the spark that they need to pressure their government into doing something about it. And so you'll see on the application, it's not just the U.S. embassies index, but the Chinese had to set up their own monitoring service so the Chinese citizens would actually trust their government when it came to defining the smog levels. So how do we provide more people with their own platforms for change? Their own opportunities that they can use for themselves. Let me talk about five different areas. I think first and foremost we provide platforms for expression. So a lot of Cypriots told me that first thing they knew about the world, first thing they knew about the United States was when the U.S. Information Agency would drive a pickup truck up to the village and they'd hear the sound of the generator and a projector would go on and start showing these movies on the white walls of the villages. And the movies were these huge combines going harvesting wheat from here to the sky. Had nothing to do with terrorist olive farmers in the middle of Cyprus mountains. But it showed them there was a big world out there. It showed them there was something different. And that's how they started to get interested in things like foreign policy and U.S. education. Some Indian leaders told me that they used to go to the USA, U.S. libraries in Delhi. And I said, oh that's great. Were you interested in the United States at a young age? I said no, no. It was the only place a student could go to get air conditioned. But while I was there I read the magazines and I read the literature on the education system and I decided I wanted to go to university in the U.S. We can still do that for people. We don't need to do air conditioned libraries anymore. We can do internet access. I've seen it work. We show the kids the world in Turkmenistan, American Corners. Where you go into an old concrete building that's falling apart. You open the door and there's posters and internet terminals and kids and people looking at all this information and air conditioning as well. Where they can see what's out there beyond their confines. So you see it every day with Peace Corps volunteers all over the world who do it on a personal basis. That's something we can do. And American private firms do it too. They provide this access on Facebook and Google and Instagram and all the other different tools. Said Boizezi, the Tunisian fruit seller who burned himself, emulated himself. He would have died anonymously if it wasn't for cell phones and Facebook. But his sacrifice fed far and wide on the electronic platforms. It created revolutions. And in Tehran, is that me? Maybe not. In Tehran they were chanting first Ben Ali in Tunisia, then Mubarak of Egypt. Now it's time for Sayyad Ali, how many in Iran? You see spread like wildfire because of these platforms, because of these networks. However, if the U.S. is to become the trusted platform, we're going to have to provide secure internet access with an abundance of information and variety of views. Forgo the desire to listen and probe everything that appears on the internet. We're suspect because of all the NSA snooping. Everyone thinks we know everything and listen to everything. The Brazilians and the Germans now want to localize their internet. And that would create major obstacles for all of us who want to truly open worldwide web. So if we want people to trust us and use our technology, we need to provide the platforms and the tools for incredibly secure internet. Reliable tools for authentication, encryption, privacy and security. Protections modeled on the Seattle Seahawks who showed us all the defense beats offense. Second, we can provide the platforms for personal advancement. Kids in Nepal can now study at MIT. Kids all over the world can use the Khan Academy to get ahead. That empowers both us and them. With our outreach and our foreign assistance, we can promote programs like one laptop per child or distant learning or remote health services. Third, areas we can provide people around the world with platforms to build their own prosperity. Access to the value chains that provides jobs and development. The transfer technology and standards bring in suppliers and entrepreneurs. And if it's done right, give every country a chance to become part of global commerce. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development is now cooperating with companies to develop small enterprises in Southeast Asia. We can work with other governments, with companies and groups on simple and adaptable standards that others can use. Things like a single electronic customs form that would lower cost, reduce delays and reduce bribery as goods move across the borders. Something like the Common App for universities. Skills are what add value and we can help develop portable certifications so that people without university degrees can bring skills, can get certified for their skills and take them where they need them. We can spread technologies by passing more open intellectual property and patent laws so that people can use and build on prior inventions without denying a return to those who developed them. Fourth, we can provide better government. Electronic governance is generally less corrupt, makes government more accountable and it's cleaner than what many people have now, including many of us. And finally, we can provide welcoming platforms to work out the new rules for a new system and a new economy. Since the back room trade deals in Seattle and Cancun broke down more than a decade ago, and more and more I think every day, the Gs are artificial, the G7, the G8, the G20 even, or the P5 or the 15 and the 193 at the United Nations. Regional bilateral agreements are now opening up trade even though global negotiations have stalled if not died. Foreign policy is becoming more and more a pick up basketball game. Certain stalwarts play every Saturday, no matter what. Others show up depending on the game and the weather. They're going to have a lot more of that kind of diplomacy. We need to open up and welcome all the interested players who want to show up for the game. All right, so how does all this come together in an instant like Ukraine, where brick bats and information platforms, economic persuasion and Peace Corps volunteers all make a difference? In a world of hard knocks like Ukraine, what good are ideas about platforms and empowerment? You might say, don't be naive. Well, in many ways our response is classic. Sanctions, alliances, military deployments bashing with sticks and throwing mud. Something diplomats are good at. We're not going to reverse Putin in the short term. We may stop him, but we need to turn his tactical advantage into a strategic setback. And to do that, we need to empower others. We need to think again about how to empower Ukrainians, extend European association and other reform programs, perhaps more visible intelligence sharing, perhaps even crowdsourced reporting on tank movements or using cell tower data to track concentrations of Moscow's cell phones. Isn't there an app for that? We need to think about how to empower Russia's neighbors by supporting the Central Asians and expediting membership in the World Trade Organization for Kazakhstan, which has a significant Russian speaking population, which they would like to protect themselves, but the Russians come in and do it.  And we need to provide visible NATO support for our allies in Turkey and the Baltics in Poland. We also need to think about how to empower Europeans and wean them from reliance on Russia, promoting US gas exports and building LNG terminals or encouraging fracking in Poland and other European countries. We might even think about getting the British to nationalize the Chelsea Football Club and taking over the New Jersey, the Brooklyn, sorry, Nets ourselves. We might do all these things anyway, playing power politics from the past, but we need to react in a strategic way, not just bash Russia with sticks. We can establish a platform for the long-term orientation of Russia's neighbors with the West and we need to keep that strategic goal front and center. In fact, it's strategic because, unfortunately, Vladimir Putin's Empire Envy is going to be with us for some time to come. In any case, the new agenda for diplomacy still involves negotiation and power projection, but also more domestic innovation, information platforms and furnishing people in societies with new opportunity. What we do for some people around the world will determine whether they trust us and whether they share interests with us. In the network world, our influence comes not just from the tools of raw power, but from our ability to empower other people with platforms for their own success. We can't fix everything, but we can enable a lot of others to fix their own problems. And in a modern networked world, that in itself constitutes a powerful platform. So thank you very much and now I'll be happy to take your questions about this or anything else. Well, we're so excited to have you today. My name is Kiana Sheldon and we have a few questions. I'm also here today with the fabulous Stephen Paparo, first-year MPP and thanks again for the Ford School for putting this together and thanks again, Richard, for teaching two excellent courses this semester here at the Ford School. I'm a little bit biased. I'm in one right now. Everyone in the room is extremely jealous. It's great. So we have some questions for you from our audience today and we'll start with this one. Why does the U.S. continue to seek to be on top economically, socially, and politically? Yeah, it's a good question. I think, first of all, the world needs some kind of leadership and we believe in ourselves, others historically generally have believed in us and we think that we're a power for good. We're a power for change and that we can certainly do better. But I think as far as most Americans, we believe we can do better in a world where we exercise leadership. It takes a certain level of understanding of others, but I do think we have something to offer and we should not shrink from the task. You described a series of errors in the run-up to the war in Iraq. When you said we made mistakes specifically, were we referring to the State Department? What were your thoughts about Rumsfeld, the intelligence community, the vice president, and others in the Bush administration? Did they make mistakes or are they lying? I think they made mistakes. I wouldn't say they lied. I think they had an ideological agenda, some of them more than others, and they found the evidence to prove their agenda. I think they had an ideological agenda and did not face up to the reality of the situation, but they decided Iran was a rock. They decided Iran was a strategic problem. They just didn't get around to it. They decided Iraq was a strategic problem and that they had to do something about it and so they marshaled sets of information and facts in order to create the case for going to do it. The fundamental error of hubris of believing that it was up to us that we could do this that nobody else could, that we had to do it, I think that's where it lay. Diplomacy can often be slow and time-consuming. When should the U.S. use force in defense of women's, of human rights abroad? I think it always has to be the last resort. Force always has to be the last resort and yes diplomacy can be messy, time-consuming and often very unproductive, but with every situation we face you can't say well we're going to send military forces to take care of it. I don't think any of the mothers or fathers in this room would think that we should readily send boys and girls off to die and that's what happens when you use military force. Sometimes it works out nicely and you don't have to worry but every time you send military into combat you're threatening people's lives on both sides. So as unfortunate as that is it means human rights problems. We're going to have to try to fix them in other ways because I think there are very few situations like that around the world where we in fact do believe we should send American forces. Now the alternative is not always American force sometimes if you can negotiate a deal you can get peacekeeping troops in we've done that again and again in the end in Darfur we got the African peacekeepers in there to stop the violence but you just can't use military force all the time as the answer. Why does the U.S. think it has any business inserting itself into the Ukrainian issue? I think because it's a challenge to a kind of world we and many many others would like to see that trying to build a world that's more open that trades that changes people and ideas that shares prosperity and we're not trying to redraw a line across Europe whereas I think Putin is thinking about it in very old ways. He wants to draw a line and say this is mine and that's yours and I think we have to resist that because if you start doing that and others start to do it too and you end up with a world that gets divided back into blocks and a new Cold War. I think we have to handle this crisis in a way that doesn't allow him to do that which means we don't respond in a truly reciprocal manner so we don't draw a line and say okay this is ours and that's yours. There's been talk about technology being the next step for diplomacy and talk about the return to human-centered approaches like the Peace Corps. Are these methods competing for resources or does one enhance the other? I think they're both absolutely necessary. I mean the talk of using technology to replace diplomacy has been around for a long time. Those of us who remember Ross Perot remember that he said we could replace the State Department with a fax machine. I won't explain what a fax machine is as you can google it. But when we had something to tell another government we just slap it on the fax machine and we tell them and that's really it doesn't work that way. I mean nothing works that way. It's still about people and it's still about that last two feet of meeting people and talking to them and understanding them and trying to deal with them. And as much diplomacy as we conduct these days by email or by telephone it's all based on personal relationships that are that are begun face to face and that are continue to maintain face to face. Now those relationships are not just American diplomats with badges and signs or American ambassadors. They're Peace Corps volunteers. They're journalists. They're American travelers. They're American business people. They're NGOs. They're people out traveling the world to save pandas and people out traveling the world to create exchanges. They're people at universities in the United States who welcome foreign students. So I don't think we're ever going to get beyond the fact that well I like to say that there's the first rule of diplomacy comes from the Muppets movie which is where Nick the Greek says peoples is peoples. And in the end that's what it's all about. It's about peoples and you've got to deal with people as individuals as as regular human beings and once you start doing that you start to understand what they want what you want and maybe how you can both get what you want together. Of the many administrations you've worked for which one was the most sympathetic to the State Department or diplomacy and conversely in general which of the administrations you worked for was the least sympathetic? Wow. You know for 30 years I wouldn't answer a question like that. It really is funny. I used to quote we had a friend of the family and we went to like the third bar mitzvah in a week when when my friends were all turning 13 and I said you know food was better last week wasn't it? He turned to me and said don't compare just enjoy. So I said you know secretaries of state are like a filter fish you know they don't compare just enjoy and I did that for a long time but I think it's time now maybe to compare a little bit. You had sort of everybody the State Department depends on the personality the present personality of the Secretary of State. So you had people like George Schultz who was a professor experienced very smart and you had this feeling like he was really sort of working the the paper process the intellectual machine you know when Schultz you'd get little comments in the margins of your memos back and you felt like you and he had this relationship you were writing your papers and he was creating them sometimes not always positively and Madeline Albright was a bit that way too she was a bit professorial as well that was her background. Now Connie Rice was a professor but every time you went to see her it was like going for your graduate exams where you felt like he just didn't know enough and she had more insightful and piercing questions than you were prepared to answer but you kept trying because that's what you do. I think George Schultz Colin Powell believed in the institution Colin Powell remade the State Department institutionally he brought the internet onto our desks before he arrived this is year 2001 we had classified computers on our desks but the system was really bad and really slow so you'd send a cable to somebody you know in Brussels saying you know we need you tomorrow to go in and talk to the Europeans about pasta and then you go home at night and get on your computer and you send them an email saying I sent you a cable saying we need to go talk to the Europeans about pasta it wasn't a very secure system because you were doing so much on your home computer. Powell brought the internet into our offices so we could actually look things up so we could actually communicate with the rest of the world not just diplomats who had classified I think Powell more than anybody cared about State Department and how it operated and how as an institution of American diplomacy it could work people say that James Baker was probably the most hostile he was probably the least integrated although I worked for him and his team and I felt like I was part of that sometimes more a part of his team than I was the rest of the building but he had one guy had a guy named Bob Kimmet who later became our ambassador in Germany and he was kind of a linchpin so Baker and his crowd would get together in the morning this is particularly true during the Iraq war first Iraq war and they would decide that that we needed to do things and then Kimmet would have his meeting with like 60 people in his office and he'd say okay the Intel boys you got to call the CIA you got to get in touch with the Saudis you know and do this the econ people we need some numbers on you know oil flows and prices and we need you to watch these markets and you know you the press guy you go to this and that's what Kimmet could do you could translate the sort of Baker isolation into instructions that the rest of us could carry out so each one had a different style I at one point thought it sort of people rose to the moment that they were you know the part of history that they had to manage but I don't think that's true I think it's just personal style but it was probably you felt more reward and more fun working for Colin Powell than anybody else no longer answer this first time I've answered the question so I'll get better at it how do you envision the U.S.-China relationship in the next 50 years oh messy very messy must have been the early 1980s John K Fairbanks is like the foremost scholar of China and U.S.-China relations came to the State Department gave a speech and he said the biggest problem in U.S.-China relations and the time that he could foresee was going to be human rights and all of us on the China desk came back just shaking our heads thinking this guy's you know he's getting old he's truly you know starting to lose it and of course this was like five or six years before Tiananmen and the human rights problems that have been with us continued with us and which we failed to solve ever since and I sometimes think that back to that because if we'd taken it more seriously if we'd set out at that time to solve human rights problems we might have done some good we might not have prevented Tiananmen Square but for example the education through labor system which they just announced the end to about two years ago we had a shot at getting rid of that in the 80s if we'd really focused on that and said you need to put that in more judicial setting and not let party officials send people off for reeducation you know so all that's a prelude to saying I don't know but I'll predict anyway I think China is facing some really tough times in the next few years I think they're coming to the end of an economic model they're investing more and getting less out of it they're bumping into you might call the democratic constraints on development that if you want to have a creative economy if you want to have an innovative economy you need to give people the freedom to create and innovate they need to have fair information they need to have fair regulation there needs to be accountability of officials so on the one hand they're facing the end of the model on the other hand they're facing the threat of housing bubbles popping and banking crises and things like that so I think there's going to be a lot of turmoil in China and there's going to be a tendency on the part of some Chinese to look outside of their borders to create nationalist fervor to start trying to deal with Taiwan to start trying to take little islands from the Japanese that kind of stuff so I think we're not only going to face sort of economic turmoil in the relationship but we are going to face some of these security questions as well and that's that's going to be kind of tough I don't think China is has visions of grandeur I don't think China is trying to become a power that protects the world or to displace the United States from the the world scene but I do think they want to control traditionally Chinese areas and traditionally Chinese seas and especially they want to control their access to Taiwan so that we can't protect Taiwan and that's where we and they rub up in friction and I think unfortunately as China goes through internal turmoil there may be a tendency to exacerbate that do you believe in the current diplomatic military shift towards Asia the pivot will come to fruition or will issues elsewhere like the Middle East the Ukraine prevent it from happening do we really get to set the agenda or do other factors drive it well I no I don't believe in the pivot I believe you got to keep your eyes everywhere all the time I think there's too many lessons that the place you're not paying attention to is the place you have problems whether you're in management in a corporation or whether you're running the world we're trying to we're trying not to that if you if you don't you know pay attention to Ukraine that's where you're going to have problems if you stop watching out for Singapore and Vietnam that's where you're going to have problems if you go away from Afghanistan for 10 years and let them fight out their civil war it's going to come back to bite you and so unfortunately for the United States and our friends working with friends we ought to be paying attention to everything we ought to have sufficient capability in Asia and sufficient capability in Europe as well as Africa and Latin America so that we can deal with a lot of different things at once in a world of network diplomacy with more interested and informed players will it be essential for the US to be willing to follow more often in order to generate trust for others to be willing to follow our leadership when should the US be a follower yeah I think that's a very good question I think it's it's basically the answer is there that there are cases where we can be a follower I don't think we can take ourselves completely out of the action but with Libya when the revolution started theirs our cozy for whatever reason wanted the French to be in the lead and we supported with NATO I don't think we have to do everything and certainly I think we can extend capabilities to others like the aircraft monitoring systems that we provided for Libya for French operations in Libya or some of the other platforms that we provided to other allies that went in with intelligence agents and things like that so I think there's things that we can do you know in second tier and third tier things in many cases and this is it's good to have a world where different people are in the lead so that comes back to that we don't have to fix everything we don't have to lead everything but we are going to probably get involved in a lot more things than we might instinctively like to this is a three part question throughout your diplomatic career which diplomatic efforts have most impressed you what are you most proud of and which did you find to be the most frustrating I love three part questions because you get to remember two of them and skip one was the first part the ones that most impressed me those who were in my class first half of the semester know that I the period of the the Baker administration the fall of Berlin Wall Tiananmen in China and of the Soviet Union how we got through that peacefully is still really something of a a mystery to scholars and historians the fact that we were able to manage all that and get a new round of Middle East peace talks starting is probably the thing that most impressed me and that a lot of that has to do with Baker and George Bush George HW Bush the president that they were working it they were working it personally throughout most frustrating while the whole Iraq war most frustrating because not because I knew at the time it was a stupid thing to do I can't quite go that far but I did think at the time that we could have supported the inspectors we could have used the inspectors to disarm Iraq and not have to go in with military force and the fact that we couldn't do that we couldn't hold back Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president people like that from from using force I would say prematurely another couple months I think we might have actually gotten the UN to take care of the weapons of mass destruction problem or at least prove they didn't have any but anyway I mean the other frustrating thing frankly was Bosnia was the Balkans right about the same time as we were picked you know as we were taking care of the Soviet Union and everything else we had the Balkan wars and there were just horrible things going on everywhere that we were not in a position to stop we didn't think we were in a position to stop let's put it that way and it was very frustrating I was spokesman at the time and most days I went out and people would say there's a Holocaust happening why aren't you stopping it I didn't have very good answers should we have asked for more from China and Russia to join the WTO in 19 now early in my career I was on the east west trade the office of east west trade and I wrote a paper on what we should ask for for China to join the general agreements on terrorist trade the predecessor of the WTO and I wrote a 95 page memo I mean unheard of in the State Department with all the analysis of the conditions and what Romanian Bulgaria had been forced to agree to and all that stuff on China's membership and I sent it upstairs to Bob Hormat some of you may know him he came back in various incarnations and it came back downstairs with a note on it that said I will not sign anything I do not understand and I don't have time to try to figure this out and so I had to wait till he was on a trip and his deputy who was quite willing to be the smarter red faster or whatever but he was going to sign but anyway the note on the front is something I've kept in my mind my whole life and I don't think I've ever signed anything I don't understand or that I didn't have time to figure out no I think the answers clearly know that those 95 pages had way too many conditions and by the time we got China into the WTO it was time and the reason is that the conditionality is a lever for change so you want to focus it on the things that give you the biggest multiplier not a whole codicell of thousands of rules and regulations and product standards and you know quota requirements you want to focus on the levers that actually produce real change in China and if you look at China since they joined the WTO that really has changed a lot of the ways of doing business in China a lot of the ways that corporations react a lot of the ways that corporations behave in the world it's not the only tool we had and we shouldn't pretend pretend that it was but it it really was a very powerful lever and I think that's been for the good of all of us this question comes from a student from China I come from China I feel even though China's economy has risen people's thinking has still been traditional and old you think it will change over time what can we do as international students thanks and people's thinking in China or outside of China in China one of our one of our Chinese friends is a trade guy that used to work for the commercial section at the embassy in Washington when China joined the WTO he was on these teams he used to travel all over China and go talk to local enterprises to provincial officials and tell them about the WTO and what it required and how it's going to have to look at how to behave to you know how how to operate differently I think he wasn't as successful as we all might hope he had been I think that's the problem of entering coming to the end of the economic model and that what has to happen is it's not that people have to change you can't educate people to behave in a way that the system doesn't encourage them to behave right now the system encourages them to borrow cheap money from the bank not pay it back invest in whatever they want and create more products to export that's what the exchange rates do that's what the interest rates do that's what the way party cadre or looked at and promoted it's what the statistical system does it encourages people just to do more of that and if you're having a slowdown you just throw more money at it you put some more cotton candy into the kid's mouth and he keeps going like this for a while long but they're running on fumes now and that model is not going to take them forward into a new economy and into the rebalanced economy what they've been doing is investing more and getting left out less out of it they're investing more than 50 percent of their GDP right now because money is cheap so what the party tried to do what the new leaders tried to do at the last plenum in october november was to start fiddling not with a big economic model things they're not ready to take that on because it's just too political to change the sort of orientation of china's economy you've got to go after the big state enterprises the big banks the export industries and the provincial coastal provinces where a lot of the export growth has come from those are the people who just elected the new leadership it's like turning on your constituency and your voters they can't do that politically but what they're trying to do is they they freed up the exchange rate and let the exchange rate become more uh realistic shall we say which means there's no more a bigger premium on exports than there is on imports consumers can afford to buy a little more and you won't get quite as much or you don't make quite as much on exports they're freeing up exchange interest rates as well so that state enterprises can no longer buy borrow terribly cheap money and invest it any way they want even unproductively they're starting to introduce a bit of market discipline for chinese companies even state enterprises so that they're going to be more accountable for profit making and for returning some of the loans for bringing some of the dividends back into the people but it's just a little technical physics and i don't see any real effect yet and i think until you seriously change some of the incentives involved in interest rates and exchange rates and corporate governance and payment dividends and competition in the market people are not going to change their behavior systems rigged in that direction and everybody goes in that direction the shanghai taxi driver i talked to i don't know eight years ago or something i said do you invest in the stock market and he said uh yeah make a lot of money said but it's rigged isn't it he said yeah well how do you make money it's just got to figure out which direction they've rigged it in and then you bet on that horse so i think until that stops you're not going to get the kind of market discipline that you need for people to behave differently based on your experience with the oecd how do you think the rest of the world deals with americans at the negotiating table boy is it funny being on the outside um for all our career uh the state department sent telegrams like this world war two system of sending out instructions to the embassies and they were always in all capital letters and american diplomats when they speak they speak in all capital letters and if you don't do what they say they say it more loudly and they say it again and again and again until you understand what they're telling to you one of my bosses said for well this this goes back way too far that said allies means never having to say you're sorry some of us remember from our college days but there's a tendency on american diplomats just say this is the way it's got to be we want it that way that's what it all we ought to do and you can talk till you're blue in the face sometimes and they're not listening and they're not adjusting and they're not thinking about how to modify their positions so i'm hoping that the new email systems that keep getting promised will have not just capitals but small letters and will facilitate a little more listening second rule of diplomacy after people's people is listen first and talk later because usually the other people will say what they want to do and frequently what they want to do can be done your way so better have it better to do it the way they want it than the way you want it but right now at least during most of my career americans are very frustrating to deal with and it was really funny being on the outside what advice do you have for students interested in careers in the international and foreign service read history it's what i didn't do it's what i told my kids they didn't do it either so i'm going to tell you maybe some of you will do that i i think most of the situations where we really got in stupid trouble was because we hadn't read the history we hadn't understood what was going on we didn't know that afghanistan was a country with a history and how the systems worked in the past and how the system didn't work in the past we didn't understand vietnam we didn't understand iraq we didn't understand allies and friends and until we start to understand their history and what they are thinking when you the slavius started falling apart baker and his team went out to belgrade and tried to talk to the leadership there about you know working this out peacefully i can't everybody be nice and my boss at the time margaret tutwiler said she was sitting next to this guy from belgrade it was very sophisticated spoke three languages you know had handkerchief in his pocket and all that stuff and she said she asked him so why can't you guys just work this out and he said but you don't understand in 1389 and she said right there i knew it was just no way we were going to be able to figure this one out and 1389 is not just the serbs and the kosovo problem it's all over the world everybody's got a 1389 we had a moment we were talking to the japanese and the koreans about some of their problem and you saw president obama had to get the two leaders together in brussels a couple weeks ago and we were talking to the japanese and we go over to korea we're talking to the koreans and the koreans look at us and said but they stole our princess thinking they stole your princess what well it's 1262 or something like that they stole their princess you know and they're still fighting over it so until we understand that other people have a different history than us we're new you know not only do we have a short history but we make it up we pretend every four years like nothing's ever happened before and uh other people don't do that so until we start understanding their history we're going to it's going to be hard to deal with them sadly this is our last question for the afternoon how can the u.s regain the trust of the international community i think the first thing is to fix our own problems is really to to take care of the united states make sure we're doing everything right here make sure we're fixing our problems at home not one way or the other the way that everybody can agree upon we have a system that's designed so that the government doesn't do anything that most people don't agree is really important but there's a lot of things that we ought to agree on now and get done i think that on the democracy and the economic side is most important i think second of all we really have to look at things like the nsa spying um that just breeds so much mistrust people already believe that we do everything that they see a mission impossible and james bond and to have that more or less confirmed by edward snowden is really bad for us and the problem is not just edward snowden releasing information the problems that we're doing it we're gonna just stop it and get used to the fact that we're gonna live in a world where we don't collect every phone call we don't listen to every conversation we don't look at everybody's email so i think if people had more trust and we could provide them with the tools they can use to keep themselves safe keep themselves secure take care of their own lives i think we we we get back to the kind of credibility we used to have in the world okay thank you i'd like to thank ambassador richard boucher for his thoughtful informative remarks and for his candor i'd also like to thank all of you for joining us and for a very wide range of questions and i know that there are a number of people who have additional questions for richard and so i hope that you will join us in the great hall we do have a reception and we can continue the conversation more informally there again thank you again for joining us and i hope to see you in another policy talks at the ford school


QuickBooks Online 2023 Class Tracking versus Projects versus Location Tracking versus Tags versus Subcustomers or Jobs Overview. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file. Remember the two ways you may be able to practice with QuickBooks Online possibly for free is one utilized a free 30-day trial often offered by Intuit. Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks best way to get there I believe is to go to the Intuit website intuit.com search for QuickBooks and then I would go all the way to the bottom of the page where they have the products down here and then search for QuickBooks Online and then you'll be able to see hopefully at this point in time the free 30-day trial here and this little toggle button for the free 30-day trial here. The second option is to utilize the QuickBooks Online test company file best way to find it is to just go to your favorite search engine and type in QuickBooks Online test company file. If you want the to open at the same time then you're going to need to support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Use a different browser if you're using Google Chrome you can then also use the incognito mode to have them open at the same time which you could find by going to the three dots and go to the new incognito window opening an incognito browser type in QuickBooks Online test company file and then search for the option that has into it the owner of QuickBooks in the URL. Now we're going to be in the accountant view as opposed to the business view you can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top and then switching the views on down below. Now we want to take a look at some of those cool tools QuickBooks Online provides us allowing us to better track and categorize our data including class tracking projects location tracking tags and sub customers which used to be called jobs. Although these tools give us a lot more flexibility they also come with problems possibly leading to paralysis at times for multiple different reasons. One is just because there's a lot of them which is a little bit overwhelming. Two is that the functionality of these tools can sometimes overlap on each other. So for example if you have a particular thing that you would want to do you could pick multiple of these tools that might be able to accomplish that task leading to the question of which tool would be the best tool to use for the particular task we want to get done. Three you might be trying to integrate multiple of these tools into your accounting system so when we try to stack them together and see how the interplay between these tools will work that can add a lot of confusion a lot more kind of options as well. And four if you've learned accounting from like a textbook kind of situation you're basically learning a double entry accounting system. Some of these tools what they're really doing is kind of adding another dimension so the double entry accounting you can think of doing on like an excel spreadsheet in a two-dimensional kind of system and now they're breaking out the data in like another dimension right so now we're going to have basically an income statement with multiple columns that could of course be quite confusing to first try to grasp just the double entry accounting system is quite complex in and of itself and now when you add this you know third dimension that we're going to be breaking things out in that is going to be confusing at first and then when you look at different options to do that that gets more confusing so first what we want to do is just kind of look at these tools in chronological order for the most part as they basically came up and then we'll get into each of the individual tools in and of themselves which tools might be the best ones to do for a particular kind of thing that you're trying to accomplish and then how the tools might interplay on each other when you might use multiple tools at the same time chronologically the first tool we had was called jobs back in the old quickbooks desktop version when it was converted to quickbooks online they changed the terminology from job to sub customers they're linked to customers as the name would indicate so in the sales tab on the left hand side your customers up top i've got three generic customers here if i had a job cost type of system it's possible that i would have multiple jobs for example tied to customer number one like if i was in construction i might have a job doing a patio versus a job building a wall or something and those would be separate jobs that i would like linked to customer number one to make a job or sub customer i can go to the new button up top and then i'm just going to name it a number 400 let's say and i'm going to make it a sub customer of customer number one now i can make it billable or not billable to the customer so i'll keep that as the default and then i'm going to save it and it shows up as our sub customer here now to some degree this this concept has been taken over by the projects to some degree in it in like a job cost system which we'll talk about shortly but the projects are only available if you've got quickbooks pro plus i think or above if you have something below that then you might be able to do similar kind of things still with a with a sub customer setting and you can also use those two things in alignment so the fact that you have projects doesn't necessarily mean that you're never going to use sub customers because you might tie a project to basically a sub customer the basic idea here would be that you're going to assign items to the customer and then when you run reports you can run reports by customer so for example if i go up top right click and duplicate the tab so i can put a report in the tab to the right we can go to the reports on the left hand side open up a profit and loss let's change the range up top from 010123 to 123123 run it and then i can run it by customer which will break it out up top by customer which will also include the jobs it'll give us a breakout basically of the jobs up top so when we when we think about the next dimension what are these doing from a report standpoint a lot of the times we're thinking about the profit and loss and breaking the profit and loss from a single column document to multiple columns which will be broken out in this case by customers which also include the sub customers and then we'll get into classes and and so on and so forth now the the next thing that happened chronologically i believe was the class tracking now notice that the the jobs kind of most closely aligned to the projects the projects kind of overtakes some of the functionality of the jobs but i think chronologically the next tool that came in place was the class tracking so let's take a look at that to do the class tracking you got to turn on class tracking so note that if i open up a normal kind of invoice or something without class tracking then it won't have this class tracking field in it and that'll be easier because then you'll have less fields when you do the data input but if you want to do class tracking then you want to turn this on and you'll have these data input fields of course now where's the class tracking located it's in the cogs up top settings on the left hand side under the advanced tab and then you've got your categories both class tracking and location tracking are in the same area but location tracking actually came up a lot later it's a lot it's much newer of a function and it's kind of a variant of course on the class tracking so let's first just look at the class tracking here to turn it on obviously you toggle on the class tracking and with the class tracking you'll be able to assign a class to not only every transaction but every line item of the transaction the general goal will be similar to what we saw with the project with the with the sub customers we could run reports primarily an income statement but you also have some functionality on the balance sheet to run reports by class which adds another column of the classes and then you've got your option down here to uh one uh one to enter transaction and one to each row of the transaction now one of the benefits of the class tracking is usually you're going to want them on each row or that's one of the differences between it and location tracking so for example uh if i use that standard default i'm going to say save it and we go into our invoice or something that we're going to enter into the system then you've got your classes field and it's for every line item so if i had multiple line items in my field i can assign a class to each of the line items instead of assigning one class to every line item so so that's kind of nice when you then run the reports you're typically thinking again income statement reports primarily although the classes have some options for other reports you can hit the breakdown here by classes so now you've added another dimension up top this time not broken out by customer and project or sub-customer but by class and so you can see you can use the classes for some similar things if you're trying to break out the concept up top by jobs for example then you could assign classes as the jobs and do a similar kind of thing as you could with the sub-customers but you can also use classes you know for other things or use them both together which we'll talk more about later all right then that was the classes then i think the next thing that came up chronologically i'm pretty i'm not completely sure chronologically but i'm pretty sure that the next thing was not the location tracking but rather the projects so the projects over here and this is where they deviated and they basically left the desktop version kind of behind because i don't think they have they don't have projects on the desktop version and they added this kind of nice feature in the online version so if you go into projects now we can we can add basically a project now the projects you can think of as kind of to some degree a more advanced than sub-customers it's only available if you have quickbooks pro plus or higher so you need to have if you're in a lower version than that you might be able to do a similar thing with with the with the sub-customers and possibly tags but the projects allow you to get this whole separate area tracking by project so you can open up a project here i can go into the project and then i can track income and expenses by project tying invoice and expenses to the project projects also have a pretty nice our integration with the the payroll so you might be able to actually assign payroll which has been some of the has been a kind of a problematic issue with some of the other methods in a job cost system and then you've got your own project reports and you can track all the transactions by project so it's so it's kind of a level up of a job costing kind of thing and then you can run reports in a similar fashion as we did before let's open up the reports again i can run reports over here and a profit and loss and i could run them by customers again and when i run them by customers the projects will show up again that's why it's kind of similar to the to the job cost kind of system because you're going to have the project that you can run that way you can also run a project's report which is a little bit more summarized of of a type of report and then you've got these internal reports over here which are going to be run per project so you can go into your projects over here and go into a particular project and the project reports here and run the reports within the projects so so then the so the project's kind of replaced to some degree the sub customers however you might use them in conjunction because you might for example want to add a sub customer and then tie the project to the sub customer so if i was to say that we want to uh i'm sorry a new project i'm going to go back on over here and say i want a new project then i have to assign it to a customer but i could assign it to a sub customer so i might for example have customer number one but then i have a different billing area for this particular job therefore i create a sub customer and then i tie the project to the sub customer so the sub customer is going to be billed to to the i'm sorry the project's going to be billed to the sub customer which is basically linked to the customer number one so you can see so so that's how you can kind of use those in alignment so sub customers aren't completely obsolete even though you're probably going to use jobs if you have the capacity to in a lot of ways that you wouldn't use sub customers before to do a job cost type of system okay then i think they added the location tracking so the location tracking as you can see is in the same area we saw before i'm going to go to the cog and then the settings on the left it's in the advanced items down below and the same place where we had the class tracking we've got the location tracking so here's the location tracking now it's similar to the class tracking uh except now it's assigned to every transaction so it would be similar to the to the class tracking if i chose this option to have one class per transaction but the cool thing about classes is that you can assign a different class to each line item within the transaction whereas the location tracking you're gonna have the whole location assigned to one location now the drop down here you can call it you can call it location property store business this line item is what's going to show up when you sort it on the report so the fact that it says location here doesn't mean that you have to do it by location you can use the location tracking to break out whatever you want in a similar way as with the class tracking but the location tracking is actually a little a little less robust in some ways than the class tracking because the payroll like you have some more limitations on the payroll we'll dive into later and and again you have to assign it to the whole transaction but not to each line line item of the transaction so to me for most cases if you still have the capacity to use class tracking that's probably the number one option you would use because it has more flexibility if you're already using class tracking and you want to assign another item in a similar way as class tracking but have a whole different set of columns that are going to show up on the income statement then i would go you know to the location tracking so for example if i turn that on and we're going to say okay i think it was already on and i go to the new button and invoice now i've got the location which is i haven't called territory up here but that's the location i can add a location and i can add a class to the same transaction so possibly i use these in conjunction possibly i have two regions in the country california and and and and um nevada let's say and i can say i can tag these to california or nevada for the entire transaction and down here maybe i tag further by uh department so it's going to be admin you know versus sales or something like that or i can just use classes and i can say what if i have a subclass and so these are some again some different interplays which one would be better we'll dive into that in more detail in the future but location tracking primarily your thinking income statement accounts if i go back on over here i can sort by class customer or now locations which is called territories because that's what i switched it to on the so it's called territories in here and i can run it and now i'm going to get my my columns up top broken out by territory so now it's pretty neat because i get my whole profit and loss which is now broken out by territory or i can break it out by classes this way or i can break it out by the customers so then there's a questions of well which one do i want to use the location tracking for which one do i want to use class tracking for which one do i want to use the the customers for and whatnot and then the last one that came along was called tags and tags uh has a couple things that are are neat to it one is that what if you've already used all the classes that you want and you've already used the location tracking and then you you want to be able to break out your income statement by some other category other than the classes and locations that you've already used so you've already you're using classes for let's say the departments you're using the locations for the actual locations and then i also want to break out like by sales rep or something like that uh or or by like an advertising project campaign or something like that i want to tag more transactions and break out primarily income statement accounts by those or if you're in a system where you don't have quickbooks pro plus or above and you only have the the prior versions you i think you still have access to tags but not to the classes possibly or locations or projects and therefore you might use tags in a similar way as you would use projects or uh so that's what so so the tags to get to the tags you can go one way to get there as you go to the the tool up top and in the lists you've got your tags so here's your tags and then you can you can basically add uh new tags in here now the tags are a little bit kind of uh i call it like a little walk here a little bit funny because if i add the tags and i just go to a normal profit and loss i don't always get the tags over here i think i've got this ungrouped tags but all the tags that i make don't always show up over here but if i open up the reports from the tags area then i have the filtering options uh by the tags so those that's a quick overview of them kind of uh but but notice there's a lot of overlap so now we can get into ideas of which one would be best for the task uh at hand when would we use each of these tasks and then when we have multiple of them together then how do they interplay with each other because i could run something for example by classes and then i could customize and filter you know by territory which is the location one right and so i can kind of play with these two things together how do they how do they play together so we'll dive into some more details on that in future presentations