Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our annual Constitution Day event. My name's Keith Webster. I'm Dean of Libraries at Carnegie Mellon and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our annual lecture. We gather each year for Constitution Day because any college that receives federal funding is required to do programming to honor Constitution Day. And for the past 16 years, the University Libraries has partnered with the Division of Student Affairs to host an annual lecture. As we move into this evening's event, I'd like to recognize and acknowledge our greatly valued partnership with the Division of Student Affairs and with the University's Alumni Association. Their help really makes this event possible. I'm particularly grateful to my colleagues, Shannon Riff and Andy Presbilla, Joe Ramsey Miller in Student Affairs and Katie Morris and Ryan Frytag in Alumni Relations. This event is particularly important to us because we house in the Posner Center one of only four surviving copies of the first printing of the U.S. Bill of Rights and its ratifications. And you'll learn a little bit more about this in a few minutes' time in a brief video presentation. The running order this evening is that we will begin with a video presentation by our colleague, Sam Lemley, Curator of Special Collections at the University Libraries. Sam oversees many of our wonderful treasures in our collections, including the remarkable Posner Collection in which the Bill of Rights is housed. Sam will speak to you through a prerecorded video at the end of which he will introduce our keynote speaker this evening, Professor Joe Trotter, a wonderful colleague and someone with whom we have a tremendous partnership. Joe has chosen for his topic this year African-American workers and U.S. Constitution past and present. At the end of Dr. Trotter's lecture, we will be joined by Dr. Wanda Hedding-Grant and Gina Casolaino. Dr. Hedding-Grant joined the University earlier this year as our inaugural Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She is also the University's Chief Diversity Officer. And she will be joined by Gina Casolaino, Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students at the University. And they will help us, or Wanda will moderate at Q&A with Joe and all of you in our audience. Gina will bring things to an end with some closing remarks. So you've heard enough from me. I hope that you have a pleasant evening that you enjoy Sam's video, that you enjoy Joe's lecture and that you participate actively in the Q&A session at the end. So with that, I am going to step aside and I hope that someone has a magic button which will allow you to hear from Dr. Sam Lemley. Thank you and good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. I'm Sam Lemley. I'm the Curator of Special Collections at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. And tonight I'll be sharing something from the collection with you in introduction to tonight's event. This is, I think, one of the most remarkable things in Special Collections at CMU. It's a printed pamphlet. It's about 11 inches tall. And at some point in the past, it was actually removed from its original binding. You can see that there are some small fragments of that original binding spine on the pamphlet's left-hand edge. You can also see that there's a small stain in the upper right portion of the first page and the outer leaves, right? The first and last pages that kind of serve as the pamphlet's binding in the absence of the original binding are noticeably darker and kind of stained. And that suggests that it's actually been in this disbound condition for some time and was probably handled in this condition for the centuries that it was in circulation before coming to CMU. So on the first page of the document, about a third of the way down, is the article or the document's title. And that's articles in addition to an amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Of course, this is a copy of the American Bill of Rights. It was printed in Philadelphia by Special Commission in January or February 1792. And this particular copy was purchased by Henry Posner Sr. in 1963 and was later deposited with the libraries along with the rest of the Posner Memorial Collection by Henry Posner's son and family. So given the appearance of this document, it usually surprises visitors to special collections to learn that this is one of the rarest documentary artifacts that we have. And in fact, it actually might be the rarest single item we hold, only five copies, including this one are known to survive. So that's a vanishingly small survival rate given the size of the original edition, which I'll get to in a minute. But apart from its rarity, what's fascinating about this document is that this printing of the Bill of Rights, it wasn't fully unprecedented. This was not the first time that the constitutional amendments that would become the Bill of Rights had been printed. In fact, they had been put into circulation fairly early, usually in the form of newspapers or broadsides as early as 1789, which was immediately after they were approved by Congress and sent to the States for debate for ratification. So what does make or did make this particular printing of the Bill of Rights important and groundbreaking then is the context of its printing. And remember that it was printed likely in January or February 1792. In other words, immediately after Virginia became the 11th and final state to ratify on December 15th, 1791. And it was Virginia's vote that met the requirement that three fourths of states ratify any proposed amendment to the Constitution. And remember too, at this point in American history, there were only 14 states and the Constitution itself was fewer than five years old. So this document that I'm holding, putting it differently is it's the first form of the Bill of Rights that could claim the force of law and the first time that it's 10 articles appeared in print as an integral part of the United States Constitution. And for this reason, constitutional scholars and scholars of American history refer to this document, this printing as the first official Bill of Rights. So instead of merely listing the ratified amendments though, it also records the kind of legal deliberation and legislative compromise that led to ratification. So in a sense embedded in this document is the story of the contentious origin of the American Bill of Rights. And I think the best and most basic evidence for this is the fact that it lists 12 amendments rather than the more familiar 10. What many don't know is that of the 12 amendments that were originally proposed in 1789, only amendments three through 12 were ratified to become part of the Constitution. So for example, our first amendment which protects the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press was actually the third in the original form of those 12 articles. So besides that though, beneath the printed amendments beginning on page three appears a kind of roll call of states recording how each state voted on the question of ratification. And I find this fascinating because it turns out that the bulk of the Posner Bill of Rights actually isn't the Bill of Rights at all. The amendments take up only one leaf or two pages out of 12, but otherwise most of the document is given over to kind of an enumerative record of legislative bureaucracy. So I'm gonna show Pennsylvania's vote on screen here which appears on page nine. And Pennsylvania was one of the last states to submit its vote on ratification. And you can see that that vote is dated September 21st, 1791 or about three months before Virginia's deciding vote. So after Virginia's vote to ratify was submitted to the federal government, Thomas Jefferson who was then Secretary of State commissioned the printing of this edition and 135 copies were made and distributed to the 14 state legislatures to ensure that they had the sort of official and approved language of the amendments on file. So that's a very almost painfully brief documentary history of the Bill of Rights that only brings us to about 1792, 1793, but I wanna end with the observation or sort of by looking forward with the observation that this copy of the Bill of Rights offers a number of important lessons, most of which are still very much alive today. Famously Thomas Jefferson called the Constitution a good canvas in need of some retouching. And I think revisiting this document in 2021 reminds us that the American experiment is maybe always a good canvas in need of some retouching. And that's part of its power and part of its beauty. After all, this particular copy of the Posner or the Posner Bill of Rights lacks all the so-called reconstruction amendments including the 13th Amendment which effectively ended slavery in the United States and the 14th and 15th Amendments which respectively extended the rights of citizenship and the right to vote to recently emancipated enslaved people. So with that idea kind of offered in introduction I want to welcome and thank Professor Joe Trotter who will be giving the keynote lecture for this event. I very much look forward to hearing his thoughts and meanwhile I would invite all of you, anyone to reach out to me with questions about special collections or the Posner Bill of Rights. Thank you very much. I first of all want to thank a number of people for making this event possible. Keith Wester, Wanda, Jaina, Ryan, Katie, Andy, Shannon all of you, thanks very much for arranging for me to give this lecture on the African-American experience particularly workers and the US Constitution. As you can see from the screen I have entitled this talk, African-American Workers and the US Constitution. And if you saw the advertisement you will notice there was a little sub here to say it passed and present. And so if you would move to the next slide I want to share with people the overview of this particular talk. As you know, I am especially interested in talking about the role of African-American workers in this constitutional order. I think very often we privilege the doings of some of the most educated and articulate members and leaders of the community. Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many other luminaries have gotten substantial attention when we talk about how the Constitution relates to blacks and their struggle for freedom. But today I want to end this talk looking at this notion of interracial class relations and the Constitution. But those first three items will be an effort to situate this struggle over the Constitution more broadly in some of the debates that have been going on about blacks and the Constitution over several years. And especially the idea of whether we should regard the Constitution of a pro-slavery document or an anti-slavery document whether black people can see themselves inside that document in a viable way that reinforce their quest for citizenship. And so I want to just start by taking a look at this notion of a pro-slavery constitutionalism. So if you would move to the next slide, please. I want to talk a little bit about this. And for the audience sake, I'm going to move pretty quickly through the slides initially because they're a little bit longer than I want to burden you with trying to read. And so I'm going to move fast through the first few slides. This first one is simply situating that from the outset of the new constitution in 1787, African-Americans faced an uphill battle obtaining their rights under the new document. Would you fast forward please for me to slide five? Right here, this is good. Thank you. What I want to say here is this idea of the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, a document that denigrated black people and denied them access to citizenship. It's really based upon three major, you'll see in my, I passed that slide, but three major components of this pro-slavery argument about the Constitution reinforcing the interest of slave owners instead of the interest of the enslaved. And the first item is that it guaranteed the continuation of the international slave trade into this country for 20 years, which meant that the federal government took a hands-off policy toward the slave trade and guaranteed Southern slave holders in particular that they could continue to import African people enslaved human beings into the country for their profit and benefit. And this is considered to be a great failure in terms of the African-American quest for freedom and abolition because it really reinforced the institution of slavery and sort of gave Southerners the ideal that this was their nation and the way this nation would unfold would be on the basis of white supremacy and the enslavement of black people. So that's one pillar of this pro-slavery constitutionalism. Another part, which is equally and even more important over the long haul is that the future slave clause was entered into the federal constitution. And this clause allowed slave owners to enter any state in the union and reclaim people of African descent and as private property and re-enslave them. And because it didn't provide any opportunity for the accused to defend themselves, then it opened the door for free people of color to be ensnared in this process and to be re-enslaved illegally. And so this was a very, very disappointing dimension of the constitution for African-American. And just keep in mind, free people of color would start to increase quite substantially so that by the beginning of the civil war, there's a half million people who were defined as free people of color. And so this ideal of the future slave law giving such blanket power to slave holders really made this population very insecure and exposed them to a number of abuses in terms of being re-enslaved. The third item, and this one gets probably more attention than the other two, is this three-fifths clause, which is often taken as a symbol that slavery regarded black people as less than human beings. But I put in here adding insult to injury is that black people consider in the racist perspective as sub-human beings. But at the same time, these Southerners are arguing that they should be counted as people toward their representation in Congress and in other federal bodies. And so this particular provision enabled slave holders to really take control over the federal lawmaking bodies of the period. Four of the first five presidents of the United States were Virginia slave holders. And if we look at the first 12 US presidents, eight of them claimed ownership of enslaved people of African descent. And so this is a big issue for us thinking about the African-American experience with the American constitution, US constitution. To the next slide, please. But what I wanna call your attention to is this last bullet on this slide. Given what we've said about the international slave trade, about the idea of the future of slaves and about the three-fifth clause, should we therefore consider the constitution of 1787 as uniformly and consistently a pro-slavery and anti-black instrument of government? That is the big question. And it's one that I would like to take up here in this discussion. Now, my short answer to that question, should it be considered a pro-slavery document? It's almost like, yes. I mean, how else can you regard it given the evidence? And here's some additional evidence I wanna say that would lead people to say that this was primarily a pro-slavery document, is that until the onset of the civil war and the emancipation of some 4 million people of African descent, slave owners dominated US policies and practices on race and slavery. And these four items that I list here, fugitive slave law of 1793. These slave owners weren't content to allow the constitution to protect their right to go into any state and retrieve enslaved black people. They immediately got to work and had Congress pass this fugitive slave law of 1793 that spelled out in even more uncertain terms the vulnerability of these people who were fugitives and free people of color who had escaped to the North. This second item, Prig versus Pennsylvania is a US Supreme Court case. So these slave holders are not stopping at Congress. They're asking for the judiciary to stand solidly behind their ownership and enslaved people. And so this statute in 1826 for Pennsylvania sort of set up laws that made it illegal for people to just try to re-enslave a person. They had to take it before a judiciary body and get some kind of allowance and have some kind of testimony that would allow people to defend themselves. And then in some lower court cases that supported that statute, the slave owners simply didn't accept it. They said, we're taking this all the way to the Supreme Court. And so it was taken to the Supreme Court in Prig versus Pennsylvania. And in that case, the court said Pennsylvania's law cannot supersede federal law protecting the property of slave owners in the South. And so slave owners could continue to go into these Northern states, retrieve people and return them to slavery. And then the fugitive slave law simply reinforced the fugitive slave law of 1793. And then this Dred Scott decision simply went a step further and just obliterated the notion that black people could be citizens of the United States.  And so with all of these ideals and all of this evidence supporting slave holder perspective, you would think that no, there's no way black people going to manage to get very far under this constitution. But the truth is there were some areas in that constitution that opened the door. And so I want to go to the next slide and talk a little bit about this. And so I said a better answer would be yes and no, that there was an anti-slavery document as well as a pro-slavery document in some ways. And again, I want to identify three areas where people sympathetic to black people and African-Americans themselves turn to the constitution in three ways to buttress their case for liberty and for citizenship and for the abolition of slavery. Next slide, I want to go to the first item. Okay, this first item, item number one.  And as James Madison put it, that would be wrong to explicitly write into the constitution the idea that property and men or human beings were legitimate rights, protected in perpetuity by the fundamental law of the land, that they would not accept that. And so that is one place where northern allies of black people didn't cave in to the southerners who wanted an explicit provision, acknowledging that slaves as property was legitimate and should be protected under the constitution. The next item that African-Americans took heart in is the way in which once that 20 years of approval for the international slave trade was up, the US Congress did move quickly to outlaw the international slave trade. So in 1808, Congress outlawed the international slave trade into the country and supporters of African-Americans and African people themselves believed that was a wedge for them to begin pushing this constitution more and more toward the anti-racist and anti-slavery perspective, okay? And then the third item, which is significant as well, although historians have been critical of this whole provision, the Northwest ordinance before the constitutional convention of 1787 took place, the Articles of Confederation government had outlawed slavery in the US territories north of the Ohio River. And the constitution that was written incorporated that provision in article four, section three and four. And so abolitionists and people who were involved in crafting an anti-slavery movement and crafting a movement to transform the constitution into an anti-slavery instrument, they pushed this idea that the constitution allows the federal government to limit and even eliminate slavery. So they were pushing hard on that. And so these three items, not mentioned in slavery by name, by outlawing the international slave trade and then looking at the territory and saying, no, we're not gonna permit slavery north of the Ohio River. That activists took hard in these items and they pushed very diligently to transform this constitution into an explicitly and much more explicitly anti-slavery charter. And in a fundamental way, they won the day. In the end, next slide please. I just wanna call attention to this very quickly. The civil war and the emancipation of some 4 million people of African descent resulted in the triumph of the US constitution as an anti-slavery and anti-racist document. Passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment to the constitution between 1865 and 1870 defined black people as four citizens of the United States. In a series of civil rights act by Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 1875, outlawed racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. All kinds of institutions were asked to desegregate and not discriminate on the basis of color. And so this was a great victory for the anti-slavery forces, for African people and their own struggle over years to emancipate themselves. And so the United States as some legal historians now say that this created a second constitutional order which could be called an anti-racist constitutional order compared to the other constitution that lasted in full force all the way down to the beginning of the civil war. The emergence of the post-bellum white supremacist system soon undermined the citizenship rights of black people despite the creation of an egalitarian document that brought black people into the body politic. The next slide please, I'm gonna move quickly. I just want to say this is a very, very troubling, disturbing and violent moment in the nation's history and for black people. In the late 19th and early 20th century, beginning actually with reconstruction, look at this, the Democratic Party from the beginning called itself the white man's party and it pledged to remove black people as a valuable force from the political economy of the nation. The party's program dovetail very well with the rise of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Both the party and the Klan wage violent campaign against African-Americans across urban America and of course in rural areas as well. In New Orleans alone, race riots erupted in 1866, 68, 73, 74 and 1877. In 1866, the riot left over 50 black dead and another 150 people injured. The U.S. Army station in New Orleans and other federal authorities ignored pleas for help. And so that by the onset and by the way, in the 1890s and the late 1880s is the heyday of the lynchings of African people.  And so that by the beginning of World War I, the new Jim Crow order, the new white supremacy system, the new segregationist order is well in place. It defined people of African descent as second class rather than first class citizen. And it undermined the promise of the second anti-racist constitutional order. But black people didn't despair because they moved forward and struggled even within the context of the Jim Crow order. They struggled against that order and they consistently mobilized above ground and underground to really undercut white supremacy. The modern black freedom movement must be given credit for extending the unfinished, you know, in some way finishing the unfinished business of the second constitutional order. And what I mean by finishing, I mean it added another layer of legal protection for African American rights by delegitimating the Jim Crow order between 1954 and 1968, the US Supreme Court's Brown versus Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 65 and 68 established the foundation for the emergence of a new equal opportunity regime. It's not an entirely new constitutional order. It's a elaboration and development of what has started nearly a hundred years ago. And because I'm just gonna read this because I think it's important that the class dynamic that I wanna talk about, there's not enough time to do it justice, but the modern black freedom movement helped African American workers as well as educated and more professional people. Sociologist Bart Landry notes that the gains of the modern black freedom movement reach far down into the neighborhoods and homes of the black working class, as well as the middle class. And I know for a fact, and we may talk about this a little bit more, but coming from a coal mining family, there's no way I would be in a Carnegie Mellon University today without the unpack of the modern black freedom movement. So it may not have gone as far as it should have. And we're gonna talk about that too, but it was a tremendous breakthrough, tremendous moment in African American history. And it wasn't that moment just it wasn't automatic. It's like people sacrifice all of the struggles of the civil rights era, all of the violence and bloodshed, all of the death eventually produced something tangible that helped this next generation to get a footing of some sort in the American order. It's unfortunate that this sort of effort to finish the unfinished business of transform the constitution in reality to a document that ensures the full citizenship rights of black people, that some fundamental structural changes as well as the persistence of certain racist ideals and practices undercut that achievement. But the collapse of the nation's urban industry economy had a devastating impact on the movement toward this more just and equitable society. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I'm pushing ahead on a lot of different fronts, but the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement symbolizes a new moment in African American constitutional and legal history. And I'm going to suggest that we may be now in a moment of a kind of third constitutional order because it seems like that second constitutional order didn't pan out as well, even after the great breakthroughs of the civil rights movement. And so we'll have to talk about where do we go from here? In the wake of George Floyd's public execution in the hands of Minneapolis police, some activists have urged the movement to embrace the constitution in a more activist and militant way. Next slide. I'm quoting from this activist and writer, Brandon Simeon-Donkey. I don't know how many of you familiar with him, but I searched the web on this one to try to get some up-to-date information about how the Black Lives Matter was beginning to interface with the constitution as a way to empower that movement. And Donkey wrote this essay that says, why the Black Lives Matter movement should claim the 14th Amendment. He saw the Black Lives Matter as not really invoking the constitution in the way that it might as a potential weapon against what he called the racial caste system, that the 14th Amendment, and I'm quoting, converted the constitution into a potential weapon against the racial caste system. But more than 150 years of evidence demonstrates that the amendment and its judicial interpreters have abandoned Black folk. To reverse that damage, the people who endeavor to create an anti-racist world must snatch the constitution from the groups of the enemies of Black freedom and seize hold of it for the first time. Black Lives Matter, because our constitution, because the Equal Protection Clause demands it, end of quote. I thought that was pretty telling quote, trying to really connect contemporary today's movement with this constitution in a vibrant way. And so I wanted to bring that forward in this talk. Here is where I want you to bear with me. I'm going to read, I'm gonna conclude by reading this section of the talk. This is the heart of what I'm trying to get at. It's this ideal that at each moment of our constitutional struggle, there has been a dynamic interplay between the activism of poor and working class Blacks and their highly educated elite counterparts. And I mentioned earlier that very often we published the words and deeds of the most articulate, eloquent and educated leaders of the African-American community. But we need to give greater attention to the precise class dynamics of the African-American struggle for just constitutional order. These class dynamics are not only deeply rooted in the early 20th century beginning of the great migration of rural Southern Blacks into the major urban industrial centers of the nation. They are also present in varying degrees from the founding of the constitution to recent times. In closing, I wish to provide one prominent example from the mid 19th century before the Civil War. In 1851, following the enactment of the future of the slave law of 1850, an annual convention of Black people met in Cleveland, Ohio. At that meeting, a young 19-year-old barber named H. Ford Douglas, no relation to Frederick Douglas, moved that the convention approved a resolution that he wished to put forward. His resolution declared in no uncertain terms that the U.S. Constitution was, quote, a slave holder's document. It was designed, he said, to protect and perpetuate the institution of African slavery. In rising to speak, the young barber forcefully declared, I hold, sir, that the constitution of the United States is pro-slavery, considered so by those who framed it. The constitution, he continued, legalizes and protects, quote, one of the valid systems of wrong ever invented by the cupidity and avarice of man. Furthermore, he said that the racial provisions of the U.S. Constitution exceeded the tyranny of the worst days of Roman despotism. Finally, Douglas concluded, quote, no colored man can consistently vote under the United States Constitution, end of quote. According to one historian, the young Douglas was, quote, a formidable working class abolitionist opponent who was rapidly becoming one of the most forceful abolitionist orders in the state of Ohio. Only four years earlier, Douglas had escaped from slavery on a Virginia plantation. He was very close to the grassroots everyday lives of enslaved fugitives. Across the state, he took his message that the constitution protected slavery and was an optical to the liberation of black people. The Cleveland Convention, however, defeated the Ford Douglas Resolution by a large vote of 28 to two. So he had one friend on board, or at least one friend who was willing to speak up on his behalf. Now, at that same Cleveland Convention, too well educated, openly mobile, free men of color led the opposition to the Ford Douglas Resolution. One of these men was John Mercer Langston, the future attorney, founder of the law school at Howard University and later president of Howard University. The other man was William Howard Day, a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and an accomplished newspaper editor. Both Day and Langston firmly embraced the constitution as a foundation for the African-American freedom movement. They believed that it would be a mistake to allow slaveholders and their pro-slavery judges and politician to define the US constitution and its role in the fight against slavery and second-class citizenship. As Day put it, and I'm quoting, I consider the constitution, the foundation of American liberties and wrapping myself in the flag of the nation. I would plant myself upon that constitution and using the weapon they have given me, I would appeal to the American people for the rights thus guaranteed." End of quote. Langston was even more specific. He invoked the constitution to challenge the future of the slave law, slavery and discrimination against free people of color on the ground in the 1850s. In his view, the constitution guaranteed, quote, trial by jury due process of law and habeas corpus, end of quote. Against this standard, he concluded that the future of the slave law was not only unjust but flagrantly unconstitutional, end of quote. Langston and Day left no doubt about their views on the legality of the future of the slave act of 1850. In their view, the future of the slave law possessed, quote, neither the form nor the essence of true law. It kills alike the spirit of the declaration of independence, the constitution and the palladium of our liberties. End of quote. In conclusion, I would like to return to my basic argument about the African American struggle for broader and more inclusive American constitutionalism. This struggle was not directed only from the top down. While Day and Langston won the vote at the 1851 Cleveland Convention, their embrace of constitutional principles cannot be understood outside the influence of poor and working class blacks like Ford Douglas. Their efforts included an ongoing and dynamic relationship between the struggles of poor and working class blacks and their more highly educated brothers and sisters. The African American constitutional struggle also entails significant support from a small core of white allies. But most of all, it included a long and protracted fight against white elite as well as grassroots white working class opposition. The struggle continues to this day with the emergence of the digital age and the Black Lives Matter movement. In many ways, African American activists believe that the US Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1789 never adjourned. The struggle over the meaning of the constitution and access to rights has continued to this day in a variety of settings across the nation. Thank you. I think I'm asked to invite Dr. Wanda heading grant forward to moderate a conversation with the audience today. Thank you. Well, oh my God, Dr. Trotter. First of all, I'm so happy to be here with you and everyone else. And as you said, I am Wanda heading grant and I use she, her, hers pronouns. And my heart is beating so fast. And not only as a person who is so embedded in higher education, but very specifically as a woman and as a Black, African American woman, my heart is just pounding right now in terms of something going on up in here in terms of the information you're provided, what I'm thinking about in terms of the past, my present and in the future. So I just want you to know, first of all, thank you so much for what you shared. And I also want you to know that it's having a profound mind opening, eye opening, but also sort of an emotional kind of response on me. And so one way I think that to help me get a little bit like, ooh, calm down. I want to start with Jess, let's just take a quick moment here, besides saying thank you. I think it's important to say congratulations on the 25th anniversary for the Center for African American Urban Studies and the economy. Also now. Thank you. Thank you. So if you're all out there, please clap. I appreciate it. Yes. And so just would like if you could just take a brief moment to just share a little history about cause and its mission. And also, I think it would be great so people know what's also going on and maybe they might attend some of the events that are happening. Yeah. Well, Wanda, let me tell you, is deeply rooted in the notion of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's like almost, in 1985, I came here. That's over 30 years ago, I came here and I took a job in the history department at a time when the history department was a pioneer at Carnegie Mellon in this notion of history from below, history from the bottom up. I mean, it resonated with me and I found that it would be a great home for me intellectually and politically, all kind of ways to be here. But the reality is that Carnegie Mellon wasn't doing very good on recruiting or diverse student body, faculty, administrators across the board, a lot of deficits. And so cause grew out of this notion that I and my colleagues had and especially I felt that, man, if I'm going to survive and survive and thrive at Carnegie Mellon, there's got to be some way that what I do can be connected to what the community needs. And so we created cause as a way on two levels, as a way, and I'm doing history, right? And I'm not working directly in the policy realm, in public policy schools are really good at all of that. But I'm a historian, I'm trying to ground the history of the contemporary community in its past so they can understand better about how to move forward. And so cause were created to create connections between historians working on issues in the past with contemporary public policy and scholars, sociologists, political scientists and so on working on the present and trying to understand the impact of deindustrialization on black people in Pittsburgh and across the nation. And so that was where cause had its beginning to really, to demonstrate in some ways that history can play a role in people who are currently struggling trying to make sense of their world today. And so that was one part and the other part is that we wanted to open up our lectures and any programming that we had to the larger Pittsburgh community. And we didn't want to see these contributions that scholars from across the country were bringing to Pittsburgh and sharing with us. We didn't want to see those sort of just captured behind the walls of academia and people in the community have no inkling you know if what's going on. So there has been a great presence in our event of people in the neighborhoods and around the city. And so that's where we started that's where we wanted to go. And I'm just happy we've done it for 25 years and happy to celebrate it. Thank you, thank you so much for all of that. You know, you mentioned doing your talk you know coming from a coal mining family and I'm aware of that. Can you just share a little bit in terms of you were trained as a bricklayer early on in life and as well as that correct. You know, how do some of these firsthand experiences inform you around the studies and what you're looking at? How did it shape your perspective? Or did it? I like that question. I like to talk about it to tell the truth. My upbringing in West Virginia had a profound impact on me. I came from a family of 14 siblings 10 sisters and four brothers. And all of my sisters, well, you know, at least five of my sisters were older than I. So I had to really come to grips with living in a household with a lot of women. But they helped me tremendously. And then I have four brothers who were younger than me. And my mother became wood old when I was about 12 years old. And she taught me much about life because after our father passed away, she was in the sole direction of our family. And one of the things that she did that I appreciate to this day is that there were so many relatives who were coming to town, talking about which ones they would take.  So my mother said, there is no way if we're going to suffer, we're gonna suffer together. And so she kept off, but by that time there were two sisters who had graduated but all 12 of us are together. And so we managed to stay together as a family. And it has been a blessing. But then to get back to the training part, I was a student in high school when the counselors, they forced us to make a decision. What kind of life are you gonna leave? What are you gonna do as an adult? And at that time, I wasn't doing so well in school that I could even pretend that I'm going to college.  And they'll know I haven't taken all the courses. And so I said, I'll go to trade school. And our high school was equipped with a trade school where you could take auto repair, carpentry, electrician, all kinds of things. But I chose Brick Lane because I was informed by a young man who was in our neighborhood who was laying bricks. He was in trade school much earlier than I. And so I decided to take up Brick Lane. The problem is that before I could finish high school and get some kind of certificate that I could do this, my mother moved the family to Ohio and there was no Brick Lane trade school there. And I had to study, you know, in a different kind of way. And eventually I found my way to history courses in Ohio and started to say, oh man, I really, I enjoy this, you know? And so that's one way to shape, you know, my trajectory. And so in Ohio, I think my mother's instinct, we're right. It gave us greater access to education and an opportunity to really, you know, to do some good. Well, thank you. I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. And I'm gonna go now another layer down and we have a question here for you that gets a little closer to what you were speaking about. It reads, it's a very interesting idea that Black Lives Matter should embrace the Constitution in an activist way. Yeah. What would that look like? Say that again, Wanda. One of our participants, audience members has asked, it's a very interesting idea that Black Lives Matter should embrace the Constitution in an activist way. Oh yeah, what that looks like. Yeah, thank you. Yes, yes, and they're using a quote from, it's a quote from something you said. I'm still wondering what that's gonna look like too, you know, it's unfolding. But I do think that mass, you know, let's say grassroots social movements, I think they almost always ultimately have to come to grips with their impact on public policy and the instruments of government and the way in which part of what they wish to accomplish have to involve, you know, governmental structures. And so I think this is one way in which I think the infusion of new young people into these legal institutions. I think the fact that young people in the Black Lives Matter movement are no doubt in law school today and they're getting degrees and they are rethinking the whole constitutional order. I think it's going to evolve in terms of another generation of young people who actually are not shackled by the same paradigm, so to speak, as some of their elders. And so I think they can rethink and creatively craft a new kind of constitutionalism that will at least serve better their moment in history. But I'm convinced this thing is not over and it will never quite be over. And so, but just doing good for moments as you move through time and getting closer and closer to equity and inclusion and all of those other things, I think it's worth to fight, it's worth to fight. That's right. It reminded me when we were doing Juneteenth and when you were talking and part of what was bubbling up as I'm finally kind of settling down in my heart was this, we are some resilient people and so I remember thinking about that and really as folks who were enslaved and really wanting to put out there in the atmosphere in the space that we were very much a part of the ending of slavery. It wasn't just horses and people coming in soldiers and just sort of announcing it in Texas. And you know, there was so much work that was done by a set of people to get us to that place that slavery would go away. And so as you were talking, it reminded me of that in terms of the resiliency, the smartness, the adaptability and flexibility and the strength and courage and all those kinds of things that how the constitution was used in a different way to open things up. So then that leads me to, besides making that statement as part of things that were going on for me. What are your thoughts about, and ending with that the young people and the youth, what do you think about, you know, civic education and whether that's a loss that we certainly don't have it so much anymore in terms of, you know, people not understanding civics, understanding our history. And then I'm trying to connect that to where we're at in terms of the argument about critical race theory. And so all of that is to sort of get into in terms of why are there things missing from our educational system that the people as such as my age, the young, the old should be having. And what is the race theory fit in all of this for you in terms of folks understanding the world before, the world now and planning for the world in the future? Long question, but I wanted to give some background. Right, yeah. Yeah, I just think that, you know, this struggle has always been part of this struggle, you know, struggle over education, the struggle over learning and, you know, access to knowledge and much of what is, you know, considered critical race theory. You know, for years, African-Americans were not part of the academy, you know, at least the mainstream academy. And so a lot of these ideals have been around in what we could call the black history movement that was sort of underground until the civil rights era, you know, because African-American scholars had to work in isolation and alone and with a lot of disdain, you know, for their perspective on society, politics, culture and so on. So a lot of what people are reacting against and negatively is the awakening, you know, that this scholarship is forcing, you know, upon the country and young people, I think many of them are more receptive to some of these ideals than some of their elders may think. And that we have to keep, and we have to keep fighting this fight. We can't give up because people are contesting, you know, our perspectives and interpretation and so on. So we just have to keep struggling with that. And I definitely will say that we need to bring young people into higher education in as larger numbers as we can and as quickly as we can. It's very, very critical. Well, I have another question here. Yeah. You know, Dr. Trotter, what message would you send to social justice activists of today who are navigating labor movements today through an intergenerational lens? Yeah, well, I, you know, I'm just really appreciative of social justice activists who are working in the labor movement today. But I just think I would just suggest that the kind of history that we've done on the labor movement can be instructive to some of the struggles that are going on today. African-Americans have a very rich labor history. And it's not just a, it's a very diverse kind of history of strategizing and reactions to the predominantly white labor movement when they were excluded from unions and so on, strike breaking, for example. And I'm actually, we're working on a study of Pittsburgh right now. And I've been looking at a lot of examples of strike breaking in the early 20th century and the late 19th and early 20th century when African-Americans really, some of them embrace this ideal of breaking strikes as a way to address the color line and labor unions. You know, like labor unions were excluding blacks from jobs. And so blacks were saying, if the only way we're gonna get into, you know, the industrial sector is by breaking a strike, then we'll break a strike. And I'm saying it wasn't an easy choice for them. They didn't just automatically allow companies to import them into the city to break a strike. It was a thoughtful process and the dangers were great. They understood the dangers and they were not all of one mind. There were blacks who were cross a picket line. There were blacks who were not cross a picket line. So I just think that the complexity of the experiences of African-American in the earlier period, I would just encourage activists to also become, you know, labor history conscious, so to speak, you know, conscious of labor history. And also about the interracial dimensions of it, because throughout black labor history, there have been moments and opportunities where blacks and whites have made common cause and they have really come together to challenge some of the mistreatment they encountered in the workplace and from the employers. You know, one question I'm gonna ask you is related to, I saw it earlier, the question could talk a lot about resistance for people who refuse to come aboard or want to listen or participate. I'm curious your thoughts about what do you do when there's a resistance to moving forward, moving that needle around D, E, and I and J or Jedi justice, you know, equity, diversity and inclusion. What do you do? Any words out there for folks? You mean when there's resistance? When there's resistance to making the change around fairness and, you know, equity and diversity and inclusions or just fairness around justice. How do you deal with that? You're thinking of, I just wanna make sure I understand, are you thinking of resistance on the part of people empowered or resistance on the part of people who will stand to benefit? So that's definitely, let's go with empower right now. Well, my approach to this is that people who are disadvantaged and outside, you know, the orbit of influence and power, but they're never outside the orbit of influence and power, but they just simply have to come together and organize and to build communities of resistance, communities of struggle that allows them to support each other in these undertakings because it's always risky. Somebody has to pay prices. And so I think that when people are unified and they have a common, you know, set of issues that they are going to demand and work for, people in power have to in some way respond to those. However much they may wanna resist, there's a way in which there's a dependence on workers, you know, and people who are disadvantaged, they play a role, they contribute something, they are important. And so the more value they place on themselves and their struggles, the more value they'll force people in power to concede to those struggles. So I think they just have to stay the course and keep struggling and building unity.  I'm not sure that's a great answer, but that's about the best I can do to take it. Well, this has been wonderful. We are coming to the end of our time and you know, there's always plenty of time to ask a lot more questions and so forth. As we're ending, I wanna say thank you for sharing so much. And it's been a pleasure speaking with you and asking you questions. I would really at this time like to invite my colleague, my friend, Gina Casalingo, to come and share some closing remarks. Thank you. Thank you so much, Wanda. And Joe, Dr. Trotter, Dr. Heading Grant, for bringing life. Dr. Trotter, your reflections, your research and your words today really brought to life meaningful ways that ordinary working people, both embraced and as you shared, deployed constitutional principles to advance a more egalitarian political landscape.  So thank you for sharing so much with us. And Wanda, thank you so much for moderating a terrific Q&A session. As we close our program, I'd like to lift up the power and the resonance of having centers like our very own cause. You heard a little bit about it from Dr. Trotter, the Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy. The work that Dr. Trotter and colleagues do to call for more urgent action to understand and dismantle systemic racism is ever more critical today than even when the center was founded 25 years ago. I know that our event participants, we all join one another in gratitude for your lecture, Joe, this evening and for your passionate and tireless work as we celebrate the 25th anniversary. This Friday, I encourage you to take a look at our website, university website, where you'll learn more about day two of the celebration of the cause program on training the next generation, changing the academy and reaping the harvest at 4.30 PM this Friday, I hope you can join. And also looking to share with you opportunities to deepen our knowledge thanks to Dr. Trotter who has curated the Constitution Day 2021 reading list that I know I'm looking forward to exploring in the weeks ahead and one more shout out. The opportunity to highlight a book display on the intersection of STEM, perfect for Carnegie Mellon, identity and social justice curated by our very own Dr. Heading Grant and our DEI learning and development trainer, Mark D'Angelo who has joined Wanda's team. All of us are invited to participate in an upcoming book discussion event heading right to the point, discussing the immortal life of Henrietta Lacks through the lens of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, which will be hosted by Dr. Heading Grant on October 14th and you can find out more about that on the library's event calendar. You know, on a personal note as I wrap up, it was interesting to hear you reflect on the founding of cause Joe because, you know I'll share that as a member of this community only for the last 19 years. So I came after cause was founded in recent, you know, months over the last year plus I have really especially seized the opportunity to reflect on my own work in the DEI space and the work of this institution that I love and call home. For my first days here at Carnegie Mellon in the early days of cause, in the days of Dr. Jerry Cohen's presidency it was evident to me that this community and this university's leadership cared deeply about diversity. But when I pause to think about what it means to be in an institution that is centered in diversity, equity and inclusion work I have honestly never felt more energized and more hopeful about the work that is being done collectively to advance our impact than I am today. We are so fortunate to have the expertise and the leadership of our vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion, Dr. Wanda Heading Grant as she joins countless subject matter experts among our faculty like you, Dr. Trotter along with passionate advocates among our students, our faculty, our staff and our alumni and of course the leadership of this university today. Taking time to reflect on the founding document this evening of this nation provides an important opportunity to consider our present day and a brighter future. I love that you lifted up the past, present future, Wanda in your initial reaction to Joe's lecture. A brighter future where we aspire to create justice, equity and liberty that are indeed enjoyed by every person not only here at Carnegie Mellon but across this land and that here at Carnegie Mellon we're in the business of not only imagining a more perfect union but in creating it through our research, our scholarship, our service and our collective everyday actions. So with that I'll close tonight's session with thanks to all who joined us. Thank you all for being here and especially to the faculty and staff from university libraries, Student Affairs University Advancement and the events team and of course our featured speaker, Dr. Joe Trotter and Dr. Wanda Heading Grant for bringing us tonight's program. Thank you all so much and have a great evening.


All right. Welcome to another session of the Virtual Open Source Summit. My name is Federico Lucifradi and I'll be your guide for the next few minutes. Let me see. Let's get started. So this is meant to be an introduction to managing certain types of problems in a corporation. Now, a little bit of background to justify why am I saying these things and hopefully give you a little bit of confidence that I know what I'm talking about. I worked on a few of these products and I was the maintainer of MAN for about five years between 2004 and 2010. As you can see, I had pretty much the privilege of being in open source my entire career. Currently, I'm the product management director for Sefert Red Hat. Previously, I was the Ubuntu server PM at Canonical and if you turn back the decade, I was the system management star at SUSA. Of course, none of these awesome organizations suffer from any of the issues that we're about to discuss. Oh, shameless plug. I have a book out AWS System Administration by O'Reilly. And that's why you see the clouds next to my picture. So you can see that besides the Linux distribution stuff, I have a big background in systems management. And usually, I talk about hardware or hardware hacks and they come with a disclaimer. The obligatory disclaimer is that we'll most likely break some hardware playing with it and it will come out of your pocket. But in this case, the hardware is your org and people may be involved. caveat, enter, let the buyer beware, proceed with caution and all that. Jokes aside, don't break people. The spirit of the management stock as opposed to a technical talk is to take what you like and leave the rest. I don't expect everything will discuss today to make sense for your org. Woe is you if it does, it would be a scary place to work at. You probably need 10 companies to manifest all the dysfunctions we're about to discuss here. So our subject today is decision making in the corporate organization. Decision making in the modern corporation is riddled with paradox. The outwardly declared objective of the organization, which is making something, has to contend with the old human realities ranging from the Peter principle to having too many cooks in the kitchen to the individual's perfectionism and decision or even straight up cowardice. Decisions that are lifeblood of your project can be deferred, avoided, eroded or derailed in perfectly legitimate and even well meaning ways. But this can spell death for what you were tasked to build as success depends on implementation as much if not more than on having a good idea. So you cannot execute decisions. You cannot execute if decisions are not prompt, mostly correct and accepted by the team. And that's why we're here. So, okay, decisions. I don't know about you, but I don't feel a sense of relief when the organization sends down decisions. And I'm a manager. Should we really be asking for decisions? So decisions are necessary because of how wonderfully unconstrained software is. Until some key decisions are made, you could be building voting via blockchain or a self driving car with the same team. Well, obviously there are limitations almost with the same team. Unless you're building a category special, a team making a car knows it will have four wheels. And it will be roughly a certain number of feet long. Well, meters if you're in Canada. And apparently someone built a Formula one racer with six wheels in the 70s. But even if you buy the apex of automotive innovation today at Tesla, Elon Musk will still ship you four wheels. Manufacturers have lots of other hard problems to keep them busy, mind you, like union strikes, supply chains, inventories, shipping delays and all that. Flooded mines, trade wars, even train derailment. This is a train derailment in Montana a few years back with 3737 fuselages went straight into the Clark Ford River. And you thought our problems were big. But this rigidity of manufacturing brings constraints and manufacturers team can build upon they do not need to wait for you or your boss or your boss's boss to decide how many wheels do you want to go to market with. As Morpheus taught us the matrix allows us to make anything real, as long as it is codified by electric signals. No constraints. Well, except perhaps time and budget, but they're minor compared to the rest of the real world. As Jeff basis as famously pointed out constraints drive innovation. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out. They clarify cut through and get to the essence of your problem domain. So let's free your mind about decisions. They are not that important. You can get things wrong and things will still be okay. As long as you do not stall the organization and your team is set up to recover quickly. A single contributor can stall a few colleagues by not taking decisions. I can block about 160 people by overthinking installing my boss more than 300. His boss in turn can block maybe 500 if he picks the right thing to waffle about. And his boss could conceivably block all 15,000 of us. That's no good. That's much more important than whether the decision was correct or not. So here is a model to make the technically minded among you comfortable. Early in my career, I worked in the same office as Miguel de Caza for some years. They're not on the same team. And Miguel was working on mono. I was working on suicide products for Linux products. One thing that struck me about Miguel was the speed with which he could take technical decisions often on the spot in a couple of minutes. And he would defend that speed allowing the scent, but not what he called stopping force, which would cause delays. Now I'm sure Miguel would argue that he has five nines and his decision success rate. But to me, his speed was striking, not his accuracy. And that got me thinking about the odds of what was going on. I was not in that team, but my impression was that he was right a lot. So perhaps not always. That got me thinking probabilistically and I decided that for certain types of decisions, you could be right 70% of the time and as long as you were fast, you could be a good manager. 90% would make you great. While 50% would make you a coin toss manager that is one that could be replaced by flipping a coin with the organization better off in the trade. ASUS again has a heuristic to offer here having recently said that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. Meaning waiting to have the full picture will make you late by definition. Now I don't think you should be wrong one time out of four. But the thought is liberating. At 75% you could be wrong once every four decisions and still be a better manager than one making you wait a week for decisions that are 80% accurate. At 90% you're off one out of 10. Allow yourself to be corrected by others. It's okay really. I don't think I'm wrong every 10th time I make a choice, but even if I wear my concern would be first to discover if my teams are getting decisions out of me fast enough. Not if I need to move to 95 success rate. Besides, engineers will keep you honest. If your success rate is too low, you will know. But if you're too slow, they will, they may just let you be. So you need to police speed yourself and let them wake you up if you're getting sloppy. Still with me. One more detail is needed here. There are different classes of decisions strategic decisions for one. Choosing architecturally between Kubernetes swarm and misos three years ago, well, five years ago would qualify. If your strategist picked the wrong container orchestrator. Now you are busy re implementing and migrating your customers. Whereas if you pick the right one, you had a two year head start. Inventing your own cloud infrastructure while everyone else was flocking to open stack is another major example in recent times. These are hefty decisions and make all the difference between building a product for three years or gaining experience for three years that you can then use to rebuild your product with the winning technology. The opportunity cost is huge. It could sink a company if it's a startup. Some decisions are worth pondering for weeks, even months, if you're really to take to talk to a large number of folks. Now I don't know about you but momentous decisions of that magnitude or maybe one or two a year for me. The rest are things like monitor this cluster would collect the or Prometheus or installed by a public or Ansible. It is not as dramatic a cost to change implementation tooling as it is to replace an architecture when the underlying factors or technology fashion changes. And these in turn are huge decisions compared to what you are deciding every week. So you have almost no excuse for not being blistering fast and questions that are almost that amount to what parking spot should I be using today. In planning terms, you need to move it and let your team catch you if you fail on a phone if you fall on a fast one. While you don't let your team down on the strategic and you think through those well, they will rescue you if you screw up on the day to day. Let them help you. Think through the right stuff, move fast on the rest and everything is good. Well, if you have a well oiled team, everything is good. Now that we have hopefully freed your mind to take decisions. Let's look at what happens adding group dynamics and what anti patterns emerge, which is the core of this talk. The first and most destructive anti pattern of corporate decisions is not taking them. Perhaps the most damaging of all is postponing strategic decisions. So let's start there. This is straight from set Godin's blog. Let me read it to you. Your first mistake was getting on the a 53 bus, the one that goes cross town instead of to where you're going. Mistake like this happened all the time. The big mistake though, the one that will cost you is staying on the wrong bus. You have to get on the bus. I know you got a seat. I know it's getting dark outside, but you're on the wrong bus and staying on the wrong bus won't make it the right bus. If you really want to get to where you set out to go, you are going to have to get off the wrong bus. It doesn't matter what you got on the bus. It doesn't matter how much the ticket was you only way you can fix this is by getting off the bus. I can tell you there is no solution I know for the wrong bus problem. If you're a VP or a general manager, or their boss, the CEO, you can try and depending on you and your organization, you may be able to make a strategic change. But if you're lower in the organization like the rest of us here, we can only contribute to an org that wants strategic input, not force an organization to think strategically. We have to get off the bus, if strategy matters that much to you, because you're never touching that steering this bus always travels along the same path. But there are good news to in this pattern, use that affect you directly. You can get people to steer for tactical reasons. We discussed having no constraints as a problem at the tactical level. You can force decisions from the leadership on budgets and schedules using the cone of uncertainty model. This concept was made famous by Steve McConnell, the author of code complete. You can get this poster from his company constructs, which delivers excellent training by the way. The idea of the cone is to track the remaining variability in the project. This is the right way to convene to senior executives that we need to make up our minds as to what is we're actually building. How many wheels does the car have as it were, because we need to know what it is outside of the project as much or more than what's in it, especially at the start. The core decisions about business models strategic market feature MVP are gating the detailed planning and schedule. See how the curve changes and becomes linear. And you can hide very professionally behind this chart until they give you what you need. The course is a decision, but that's so politely implying no decision equals no schedule, but without you ripping your hair out in front of them, which would not be proper. Let me share a personal battle story eons ago so probably okay to tell but let's put it this way. I was working for a Linux distribution and we unplug the partner and let's just say their name starts with I and ends with BM. Unplugging the partner would have been bad enough, but what happened was way worse. We unplugged all their customers. Here is what happened. Of course, I'm on holiday. I think I'm in Florida. My phone is programmed to sound off for a predefined set of emergency red alert email subject subject lines and it goes off repeatedly. I read the messages and my jaw drops. After I explained to my wife that I'm no longer on holiday for the rest of the day. I did three things. First, I sent an email to my boss, his boss, the VP of product and his boss's boss, the GPM of everything. I put lots of detail in because I'm a detail oriented kind of person but the message is, I'm a desk on one you do not need to be. Then I tracked down the four people I need to solve this mess my right hand manager in Prague, fortunately Europe was still on and awake. The lead engineer in Utah, and his manager, also in the US. I'd like to tell you that we met in 15 minutes, but we did not have iPhones and Google Canada. It was the age of group wise and blackberries. It took a little bit longer. So maybe an hour later, we're all on the phone. These are people who know me very well. We work together for years and they're visibly nervous shaken. Almost. We are bouncing update requests for a sizable chunk of the user base of a partner delivering 25% of our revenue. The first thing I say to them is, I assume full responsibility for this incident. Do not worry about explanations. Let's just fix it. It was like lifting a huge weight of their shoulders could almost hear them breathing easier. With that out of their heads, they all focused on solving the problem. Nobody is getting blamed for the past. Now the job is to make sure we're not all blamed for the future, meaning the next few hours. What was previously not thought possible was implemented and follow the sun mode and the issue was resolved in 24 hours. By 36 hours support was confirming resolution with the fortunately few customers who had managed to realize they could not access their updates. I get a couple of jokes from the GM and everything is back to normal. Now what happened here? Why did I do this? The first thing is fear. These are people I worked with for a long time. They can handle some stress, but the situation called for more than handling it. It called for resolving a problem we previously thought could not be solved. I needed amazing performance on instant schedule. I did not want them distracted. Removing fear allowed them to laser focus on the problem. Now this is the easy one. There is more going on here. If we were live, I would let you guess, but we're not. So I'll tell you the answer. Here it is. They are my team. I'm going to protect them anyway. So I might as well tell them now so they can relax. We accomplished under extreme time pressure and stress, something that months before we thought we could not do. Focus helped us do that because folks were on the problem. The politics of the rest of the organization were off the table. As I announced that this buck stops with me, I enabled people to focus exclusively on what needs doing next and not CIA for what had already happened. They focused on not getting blamed for what was coming, not focusing on getting blamed for what had already happened. Now one word of caution. Removing worry from the group can be a powerful technique, but danger will Robinson. Your team will appreciate your behavior, but there is a problem, multiple problems actually, but let's focus on just one for starters. As your sphere of influence in organization in the organization grows. Someone is bound not to like you. It's nothing specific.  Even if you're the nicest person. One out of 500 colleagues will not like you. Who knows why the mean here is funny, but it is not about being evil. It's just law of large numbers. If you have enough influence that you have these son of a snake people dash statistical phenomena to contend with, you cannot leave yourself that open.  While in the best case, they will just advertise your original failure to the forewind. As a marketing manager put it to me over dinner, assuming responsibility like I chose to do in my story does not scale. At the very least, you need to make sure you're taking the seat doesn't invite trolls to the party and make the problem actually worse. But there is risk aversion everywhere at work. It may be cultural in a permission driven society, it may be some form of politely deferring to you out of respect. It does not have to be full on fear, but the mechanism is the same. If people are not sharing their thinking enough, they may not have been asked or trained to speak up. But more likely they simply do not realize they're in a safe space to share their ideas. Remove risk, tell them it is your decision and hint and hint your responsibility. But despite it being your decision, you want to hear everybody's idea before taking it. You may think of risk aversion is the managing down version of the cone of uncertainty, which is the managing approach to make people speak up. Now for another anti pattern, the opposite scenario. Too many cooks in the kitchen, zero fear, everyone chimes in on everything. Open discussion is fine, but pointless chatter is not at some point you are not adding anything and the cost of communication is way, way far from small. As Brooks law teaches us.  So tuning the balance of risk aversion is a powerful mechanism for increasing or reducing communication.  At least he thought it was crazy and funny. That was his point. I at least I last Mark pretended not to understand this was a joke. He was part of his keynote plan for the next open stack summit to be delivered in three months. That engineer stopped joking in the wrong meetings I can assure you, he had to implement and present the demo as he did, and he did a darn good job of it too. But I think he learned something else here. Oops, there is the site. Here is why too much communication is too much. This is from a recent book from Matt Nicholson when computing got personal. It's like getting 400,000 people to agree on what they want to have for lunch. I mean, it's just not going to happen. It's going to be lowest common denominator. It's going to be hot dogs and beans. So why are you going to do IBM had created this process and it absolutely made sure that quality would be preserved throughout the process that you actually were doing what you set out to do. The customer wanted at one point somebody looked at the process to see what it's doing and what's the overhead built into it found that it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box. I absolutely love love the quantifying approach it so IBM. So they measure nine months to ship an empty box. Now IBM is not the only company tripping on its own red tape. And here, the focus is not communication overhead. Here the focus is on communication overhead. Get 400,000 people to agree that appears to be too much communication. IBM also gave us Brooks law on the cost of communication, adding people to a late project makes it later.  Yes, but here are some starting points. What about the next time pattern. What is the problem is that they cannot be bothered to care. I think that they would just say yes and send you on your way but instead the justifiable fear we faced earlier, but instead of the justifiable fear that we faced earlier. Here we have cowardice or laziness. What happens if someone stamps your project with a yes, they feel somewhat responsible. They aren't really the people who think this way are 599 in line for responsibility and the blame. There are process focused people and you need something from them, usually bringing nothing in exchange. The classic example of this is needing something from the department. Did you get get a PayPal bowl approving your request. Oh, you missed the 2020 planning deadline back in 2018. See you next year. Good luck moving at the internet. I mean DMV speed with these functions. But there are some things you can do. The first is respect, not as impolite and proper, which you should be anyway. Here is a story. One of the Linux Foundation board members and me are selling this product concept to a C level investment board within the company. We address general manager CMO a few others. Next is the head of support. This is a very mysterious stakeholder to us, because her role did not really have anything to do with creating a product. The first six products created that year required support approval at this high level. It was done by her staff to levels down here we had her own year only because of this new sea level approval board. So we're perplexed, we did not know her I do not know the motions that this corporate role expects from us. We could show up and give her the facts we prepared for the previous executive. So I call my mentor the head of product. I explained to my predicament. I need this approval. I'm not sure what she will care about. I don't know her. I don't know what KPI is a for removed executive on the support line tracks and basically blind. I don't want to have a meeting to get slapped around and then do the right thing. The second or third do over. So my mentor gives me a number of items. He thinks she will care about will we create more incidents than the existing version where we need to hire more people support stuff like that. So I schedule a meeting to go over materials created for this person specifically for this role specifically. I make it relevant to her concerns. I made the meeting about what she needs from me not about the approval I need from her. Also, that's obviously why I'm there. She asked me something I did not expect. Will hardware returns be going through her team or what about warranties. Great question. I worked that all out last month. I'm not takes all the del hardware and loads it with our software and shipping blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We do not have inventory in the books. Marvelous. We just get the bill on the quarter. She was impressed. I think but in any event, she gives us her note her not and we go on to seek the next approval. This is very much of a community manager type of skill respect in being polite and considerate of others should be natural to everyone respect for other people's time. As in don't show me the next 40 slides. You made for someone else is rare, but the community manager can understand what someone he or she does not necessarily agree with his thinking and starts from there. That's why what this approach is community managers understand this instinctively because they live in a world where communication is a many too many reality by default, whereas most middle management thinks one too many by one too many by default, or one to one. At the opposite end of the spectrum is making it ridiculous not to agree with you. Mind you, you're not ridiculing a person that would not be nice. No, you're doing something completely different.  You make it ridiculous for folks to take on that position before they declare themselves. And here is a good example. This is from an old notebook. I got the slide from that freedman when he was working on getting early funding for sister studio. He had this slide that collected all objections you always hear about innovation from the objections that the company historians like me would have, knowing all past failures, I can effortlessly pull up an example at will to the hilarious just a position of it has been done before and it has never been done before. Very nice. Now, let's say you are in an operational role and have something of an approval power, maybe accounting or even the CFO, you want to be labeled an innovator or someone who does not understand innovation. And this slide is disarming to anyone who does not really care and wants to send back you with generic objections. It defanks the defenders of the status quo and works wonderfully in large meetings. You can neutralize multiple naysayers with one shot. Now I'm going to cover one more pattern, and then we're going to cut this because we're running out of time. Now, the third option is opening a can of who passed discouraged on so many levels, and we'll see why later. So hold on your horses. The key here is that people who are sending bagging you essentially do not care and have nothing at stake. Losing your temper and some variants changes the equation. You are on the offensive and now they need to spend efforts to defend a negotiation terms that changes their batman. This is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. The negotiators use as their bottom line. If the negotiation is going nowhere, you get the batman meaning it is what does not require agreement for you to achieve. In the case where your interlocutor that just does not care, you're asking them to invest effort while they could just do nothing. Their batman is certainly better than what you're offering. The result is that they are sincerely uninterested. If you fail give up on your project or simply walk away. They have less work to do. The can of who pass radically changes this math. Now they need to put in work to defend from your attack. It is suddenly better to just agree to your boring to them. term and move on. So pure corporate dysfunction on tap. Here's what you can do. It's a better way to approach this situation than opening a can of who pass will call this the open Heimer and Feynman approach, which are fine one was a Nobel Prize winner in physics, of course, and this among his many achievements, one of the youngest PhD in staff at Los Alamos. One day, Project Chief Robert Oppenheimer sends them for a safety inspection to Oak Ridge. Where a fissile uranium is being separated from the common isotope. Fissile material is being handled by the staff who have not been briefed on nuclear chain reaction risks and open Heimer fears and accident. Feynman objects, Dr. Oppenheimer, you're telling me that the military big wigs over at Oak Ridge are going to listen to me little Richard. Yes, they will says Oppenheimer and he explains he's to use the following words. Los Alamos will not assume responsibility for the safety of Oak Ridge plant. If these concerns are not addressed. Feynman flies over has other adventures along the way, including other passengers wondering how is it that such a youngster got a seat on their airplane during wartime. Sure enough, the plant managers do what he says. And for the record, he does indeed find problems. What is going on here is assumed ownership.  And you can make this very clear without ruffling your feathers. The modern version of finance line is my team cannot deliver a corporate level okay are without your support a corporate objective tracked by the board will be missed and it will be on you. Mike drop have a nice day. You will not carry the ownership for them if you do not deliver if they do not deliver their part. Whereas you will carry the ownership for them if they do blame versus potential credit. On the receiving end of the strategy, you may honestly not have the resources to deliver all your known and unknown commitments, in which case you surface the conflict and let the higher ups decide what they want more between the two possibilities. Now we are out of time. And there are a few more patterns here, which we don't have the time to cover, but the slides are going to be up on the website. And I'm happy to take questions on slack. If you want, there is also a full recording of the presentation on the, that is going to go up my rehearsal. So to speak at the Boston Linux and Unix user group, and you can find them on their YouTube channel so you can learn what a longer version of the talk would look like. And I think we'll, we'll stop here.


update. Good afternoon folks. This is Steve Rhodes coming to you live from the shores of sunny Delray Beach, Florida with your 2 p.m. update and currently we have all the U.S. Indies trading to the downside.  That's 95 points and Azdec down to 92 2% there the Russell off two and a quarter percent 45 points what is seven tenths for the socks you've got golds off 14 bucks silver down 32 cents like recruit of a buck 68 natural gas up 32 cents 30 your Treasury is basically flat out here trading out at 140. Let's go spend a little time with our indice charts see what they're communicating to you and I momentarily in the upper left hand corner you're going to see the Dow Jones industrials and the Dow right now is trading before trading below its green assets are in the change line and it is taking out its TD 9 count bottom. Let me just expand this chart out and just confirm that now what you need to see today to negate that TD 9 count bottom is a close below the price point of 3410281 we're trained below that right now if we get a close below that what does that suggest that suggests getting back to the February swing point inside the Dow Jones industrials we take a look at the S&P 500 it is negating this TD 9 count breakout level that suggests to move back to 4521 or it's February 24th swing point out there if we take a look at the NDX 100 it is testing it's actually trading below its TD 9 count breakout level 13 475 it is trading into the swing point from the trading day of March the 14th so that's the only savior in this market does price test and reject that level a rejection would be a close back above 13 386 66 you're 13 430 right now has price gone down to 13 386 I don't think so so watch that you've got down to 13 714 so price should at least tag that level up and closes inside there that's a suggestion that the low of that swing point should get tested Russell 2000 is trading into its swing point from February 23rd that may be signaling to us that it wants to get down there and test that the semis they are trading below their swing point from March the 24th out there what is that setup that sets up lower price that could be setting up a large A to B equal CD to the downside that smell smells and spells trouble looks like the next price target for the semis are around 2862 that is a TD 9 count breakout level folks they do your favorite polar bears up next entombed bride he'll take us home from three to four please join me on Monday morning at eight o'clock sharp as I record the trader's it show between eight and nine have a fantastic weekend folks thanks for joining us we'll see you again next


Thanks, Bob. Jim, you've sat in Brian Cashman's chair before. What's it like as you're waiting for a free agent to make his decision? Well, I mean, this is a rare case.  So it's a really tough spot. You know, Brian's got more experience in the big market than anybody in the history of the game.  But I'm sure he's not getting too many full sleeps at night, you know. So it's a tough deal. And like today's the real stressful day.  And we'll see. But I, you know, it's a really tough spot to be Cash. But he does a great job of not like showing that kind of stress to the rest of us. Coach, one of the MVP last year, he had 62 home runs. He's also a former first round pick for the Yankees. Another former first round pick, Anthony Volpe. I remember talking to you at the stadium in September and you were gushing about him. What do you like the most about his game? Well, I've been a real fan of the player and the young man since we took him. You know, Damon Oppenheimer obviously made the final call, but I was fortunate enough to get to know him and his family quite a bit that year. And he had a full scholarship to Vanderbilt. And I think we're all convinced that only the Yankees were going to be able to sign him. His father and grandfather had lived and died with the Yankees all his life. But I compared him a lot coming out of high school draft wise to like Alex Bregman, who I knew quite well as a kid before he went to LSU. And I thought he had that kind of makeup. You know, we all have the it factor definition, however we want to do it. But I felt this young man has that. He's got a lot of ability. I think he'll thrive in New York. I don't think it will get him in the negative way. He's a special kid and could be a really good player for a long time. Keeping it with Middle infielders, one guy that you know very well is Glebert Torres. You've known him since he was essentially 16 years old. He's had ups and downs throughout his big league career. What have you seen from him last season? And why do you think that he could still potentially get a little bit better? Yeah, I think last year he made quite a bit of progress. Again, you know, I think the way the game is the last four or five years, it became such a home run driven, you know, pull the ball all the time in the air, try to get the ball in the ballpark and Glebert had 38 home runs in one year. And I think he can get a little bit pull happy. You know, I think when he's going good as we saw last year, he centers the ball in the middle of the diamond, right center field, and is a very, very advanced hitter when he does that. So it's kind of like some inconsistency still, but I thought he made a lot of progress from the year, year and a half before last year. And I think we saw when he's going good, he can still be that guy that's capable of playing at a very, very high level. Jim, last year at this time, the Yankees talked about getting better defensively. And then in 2022, you guys did, talked about running the bases better in 2022. What are you guys talking about getting better at now for 2023? Well, I think obviously, you know, when you don't end up holding up the trophy, which we didn't and didn't deserve it, you know, we got beat by a team that was obviously the best team in baseball and obviously beat us kind of handily. So first and foremost, you look at your inconsistencies late in the year. We had such a great first two-thirds of the season and then, you know, a lot of bumps and bruises on the way in still won almost 100 games, you know, so we can't look at ourselves like it was a bad year. We just kind of didn't play well when we needed to at the end. So I think we're looking at improving the situational hitting. Obviously, we struck out 50 times in four games and we got a little bit of a, you know, a lesson on how to do things across the dugout there. You know, they hit the ball the ballpark when they needed to. The situational hit really well when they needed to. And for the most part, we did improve in a lot of ways. We just had the snags at the wrong time at the end. So we've got to do better. You know, we've got to knock in runs better. We've got to put the ball and play better when the time calls for that. You also know there are going to be some rule changes heading into next season. How do you think that's going to affect the game and affect the team? Well, I'm all for it. I'm a big fan of getting rid of the shift. I don't like it, see when the league average is 230 and people that are good left-handers hit what I would call line drive singles to right and they're out of first base. I think it's going to put some athleticism back in the game. I think we'd all agree that how we grew up in the game, a lot of people played second base the last four or five years that won't be able to play second base anymore. And I think there'll be more base running attempts, more steals, more hitting behind runners, maybe more first to thirds. I think it'll be better for the game. I think the fans need a little more action besides, you know, upper deck or three run homers. It's going to be good. I think it's going to really help some people like Rizzo and the kind of quality left-hand hitters that aren't runners and they've been really kind of disadvantaged by the shift. Jim, we won't take up too much of your time. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you all. Always enjoyed.