FAO Quotables

"But being right, even morally right, isn't everything. It is also important to be competent, to be consistent, and to be knowledgeable. It's important for your soldiers and diplomats to speak the language of the people you want to influence. It's important to understand the ethnic and tribal divisions of the place you hope to assist."
-Anne Applebaum

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Weekly Reading: Treating People Well, Happiness, Lent, Cleaning up Cereal, Partition and Confrontational, Loud Israelis

Playing a little catch up on my weekly readings.

A New Business Strategy: Treating Employees Well
Who would have thought right?  Great article on B-corporations and King Arthur flour in particular.

http://worldhappiness.report/
Yes, happiness is a difficult thing to quantify but this report is a great start.  Figuring out a country or a person's concept of happiness is one of the single most important thing you can do if you are a diplomat/foreign area officer working in a foreign country.

Ash Dykes Madagascar Journey
The man who traversed Madagascar on foot...and who wrote, filmed and blogged about it.

The baffling reason many millennials don’t eat cereal
Perfectly sums them up.  They don't cereal because they don't like to clean it up...seriously...they don't like to clean up the bowl...of empty cereal.

If my church does not practice Lent, should I?
Great post by an old friend from our church in DC.

Navy Medal of Honor Awardee Inducted into Pentagon's Hall of Heroes
Great video.

Goldwater Nichols 2.0
Mandatory reading for Foreign Area officers.  Great CSIS breakdown on the 2016 SASC hearings on defense reform and interagency changes.

It’s Time to Seriously Consider Partitioning Syria
Stavridis opines on partition.  Here's my own argument for partition, in general.

A helpful graphic that compares how EMOTIONALLY EXPRESSIVE and how CONFRONTATIONAL people of various cultural backgrounds generally are.