The Meadows Museum: Looking at Dallas Like You Weren’t From Here

When you live somewhere it’s surprisingly easy to overlook some wonderful places to go. I was reminded of this a week or so ago when, over a period of less than a week I visited three museums—two in San Francisco and the Meadows Museum here in Dallas. The museums in San Francisco (the Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) were impressive, but the Meadows Museum is also impressive and you only have to go as far as the SMU campus to see it.

The Meadows Museum has the best collection of Spanish Art outside of Spain, and while it isn’t quite up to the standard of the Prado, which I visited last fall, it still has an impressive enough permanent collection to hold your attention for at least an hour or two—and that’s about as long as I like for a museum visit anyway. We weren’t there to see the permanent collection, however, but the Etruscan exhibit. It was fascinating. Etruscan culture is both familiar to me from the study of classics and unknown, because almost nothing survives in the Etruscan language—only two works longer than 100 words still exist. The last person known to read Etruscan was the Roman Emperor Claudius, who died in 54 A.D.

The Romans defeated the Etruscans in their first great war of conquest and the entire culture disappeared. In any event, the sculpture left on their tombs and temples was impressive, as you can see from the picture. I was most affected by the enormous number of decorated safety pins in the exhibit—necessary without buttons—and other simple items, like a kitchen strainer. The strainer, in particular, was almost identical to one I use every week.

The Meadows Museum is free on Thursday evenings, as is parking in its garage. Beginning on June 21, 2009, a special exhibit of Diego Rivera’s portraits will be featured. You can’t be the price.

Capitalism without Capitalists: David Brooks Weighs In, Part V

Just when I was about to give up all hope that the pundocracy would recognize the basic problem with General Motors was with its culture, the urbane and articulate New York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in. His story was reprinted on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 in the Dallas Morning News: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-brooks_03edi.State.Edition1.2685954.html.

Mr. Brooks (writing with the assurance that only attending the right schools, being invited to the right parties and a summer home in the Hamptons can convey) does an excellent job of explaining why the culture at General Motors led to its failure—the same point I have been making in my series of blogs. He is almost always worth reading.

Alas, however, rather than seeing hope in the changes now taking place, Mr. Brooks sees only the possibility of failure because it is the government that is forcing the changes. I am sure that the sense of frustration I am feeling is shining through. I’ve had the opportunity to hear and speak with Mr. Brooks and he is educated and intelligent beyond all measure. He is a person against whom you would lose any argument, whether you were right or wrong, simply because he is smarter than you.

I am frustrated because all this intelligence is wasted. Mr. Brooks makes his living articulating a moderate Republican point of view (he used to make his living articulating a conservative point of view, but apparently that has become less lucrative). Moreover, as a columnist, he feels no duty to propose solutions, only to criticize what is being done from his very studied, reasonable and moderate position. He is just as happy criticizing the Obama administration for government action to save GM as he would have been criticizing the Bush administration for letting GM fail. If only the

Reading Mr. Brooks is like watching a talented musician or ballplayer who refuses to do the hard work of learning their trade and instead gets by on their talent alone. I’m mesmerized by his talent, astounded by his intelligence and frustrated by his unwillingness to engage. At some point, I think you need to stop standing on the sidelines pointing out why failure is inevitable, and decide if the game is going on anyway that you might as well help try to win it.

Otherwise, you’re the intellectual equivalent of Gerald Green.

CityWalk—Work and Tours

Danger and disaster, crises and complications all take a long time to describe and there is a lot to say about them. We haven’t had any such events lately at CityWalk (Thank God!), so I’ve been pretty quiet about what’s going on. Inside the building people are working—as many as ninety people working at once last week. The final design details have been completed—exciting stuff like how to waterproof a window that’s closer to a column than the architects would like (they rejected out of hand my suggestion that we just furnish every resident with a caulking gun).

The rooms are rushing on toward completion. The air handler will be placed on top of the building on June 13. That’s an enormous piece of equipment. A crane is being brought in and we will have to close Akard Street between San Jacinto and Patterson for a day. As soon as the air handler is on the roof, then we can start working on the parking lots and the new entrance. The new windows have all been delivered and we’re starting to put them in place. That’s important because it means the building will finally be water tight. The elevators are ahead of schedule and should be working this month. The main electrical transformer is a little behind schedule and won’t arrive until sometime in July.

It’s all important but probably not very interesting, except to me and the other people working on CityWalk. Even less interesting is the work I’m doing on some budget amendments to reflect a few change orders or a technical amendment to the loan documents we are working on.

When you’ve worked on a project as long as I have at CityWalk, every detail is interesting. There’s a whole history to our efforts to repair the fountain on the third floor deck (at a reasonable cost); to the extent we’re building out the first floor bathrooms; to how we resolve a place where the level of the concrete flooring is uneven in one of the units. Each problem, no matter how small, has to be confronted and resolved. Every change to every document has to be reviewed and scrutinized and either approved or revised.

I had a number of people in to tour CityWalk last week. There was a whole group from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. It was a public performance and went well, although when I talk to a group of forty people I am always a little disappointed that I can’t meet and get to know each of them. Forty people is a speech; not the conversation I prefer.

Michael German also came. He’s the National Team Leader for the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (don’t you love federal titles!). He’s the person in charge of the federal efforts to end homelessness. His tour was more satisfactory to me.

Mr. German visited the building late in the afternoon, after normal working hours. The only people in the building were he and I and Brian, from our general contractor. Brian’s job was, in reality, to make sure we didn’t hurt ourselves on the construction site. The visit was wonderful, because Michael German was interested in every detail of the building and every detail of our work with homeless people and in no hurry at all to complete his tour.

I imagine in part that was because his evening was only going to be spent alone in a hotel room, working. But it was also clear that his interest was real and with just the two of us, and Brian, away from the press or other officials, Michael was free to be himself and to be interested in the work of ending homelessness. I think we both found it energizing to just talk about our work, without concerns about what people might think or how the press might use our words. I know Mr. German is accountable to the public and even I, in a much lesser way, have to remain conscious of my public image, but it was wonderful not to have to worry about that.

It was a real pleasure to spend a couple hours just talking with someone with a deep understanding about how to do our work. Nothing was for show or said to impress. Afterwards I felt better for days about the quality of the work of our federal officials. Mr. German could have skipped the tour and spent the evening relaxing in his hotel room. No one but I would have known the difference.

The picture is of Michael German (in the upper left, standing) in a more typical setting for his work, I am afraid, with the Riverside, California City Council.

Capitalism without Capitalists, Part IV

Now GM has an owner, even if it is the government, and I hope that changes things. Ownership gives you a different view.

Recently I had a conversation with a local real estate developer, and he told me a brief story. A few years ago, he found a development partner with a very substantial net worth, enough so that my friend’s guaranty on the loans on the real estate projects he was working on was really not meaningful compared to his partner’s much larger net worth and guaranty. He asked the bank to make a loan based solely on the partner’s guaranty. The bank said no, it wanted his guaranty as well. The bank wanted him at risk as well—not because of the money involved, but because that would guaranty his full concentration on the project.

The maxim, “Nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging,” is attributed to various people, including Mark Twain and Judge Roy Bean, but it seems to have originated in some slightly different lines by Samuel Johnson, in any event I think it gets to the truth of this situation. When you are at risk, then you bring a whole different level of concentration to a problem. No one person or group of people has had the responsibility of owning GM for many years now.

Without a personal risk, GM’s management just went on doing things the way it had always done them and expecting the same results. Even when Kerkorian tried to tell GM’s management in 2006 that it wasn’t 1970 anymore, and that GM would never again have a 50% share of the automobile market in the United States, nobody would listen. Just a couple of months ago, GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner was forced out because he kept submitting reorganization plans that made unrealistic assumptions about GM’s potential market share.

It’s hard to know if the government will make the right decisions to bring GM back to health or not. I hope when President Obama said, “I don’t want to run auto companies” that the missing corollary was, “but I’ll do it if I have to.” The culture at GM is entirely incapable of facing the current realities. If somebody doesn’t take ownership and force GM to do what it needs to do to survive, then it will fail. I am optimistic that the bankruptcy filing means that GM’s management has been forced to concentrate, given what’s going to happen otherwise.

Capitalism without Capitalists, Part III

In 2006, when Kirk Kerkorian sold his GM shares, the value of a share of GM stock was at about $30. Last Friday GM closed at less than $1.00 per share and trading has been halted because of the bankruptcy. GM would listen to Kerkorian three years ago, but more surprisingly, GM wouldn’t even consider the steps necessary to save itself as recently as this winter—after it was already surviving on government handouts.

I think the problem was GM’s size. Not because it was too large to make the changes necessary, but because GM was so large that it spawned a culture that precluded seeing the necessity of change. As recently as last fall, GM employed almost 250,000 people, and that’s a substantial decline from its high in 1970 of 395,000. GM has been Michigan’s biggest company and biggest employer for many years. In 1949 GM already had more than 220,000 employees in Michigan.

Rick Wagoner, who is pictured here, was a GM lifer. He joined GM in 1977 after graduating from Harvard Business School and worked at GM for over thirty years until he was forced to retire as CEO and Board President this winter. As far as I can tell, Mr. Wagoner never held a job with anyone other than GM. You need to understand how dominate GM has been in Michigan and how large and successful GM was for decades to understand why it couldn’t change. There was a GM way of doing things; a company culture that was all pervasive and dominated the way the company and everyone in it thought. People worked their entire lives at GM. At one time it was the largest company in the world and it was all centered in Detroit, a company town.

For real insiders it was unthinkable that GM could ever fail—and I don’t mean this as a metaphor, GM executives had a worldview that didn’t allow them to see a world without GM. Look at the idealized view of the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan. Then compare it to a recent picture.

The world fell down around them and GM never noticed.

Capitalism without Capitalists, Part II

General Motors has now filed for bankruptcy and when it re-emerges from bankruptcy a majority of the stock of the company will be owned by the United States Government. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but at least it’s different and worth thinking about for a moment.

First, it’s important to understand that this isn’t socialism—the company won’t be owned by its workers (although a trust for the healthcare for UAW workers will be the second largest shareholder). This is state capitalism. GM will still be operated as a for-profit company with the goal of making money for its shareholders. It’s just that the shareholders will be the United States taxpayers.

Listening to the comments from the pundocracy, I’ve been most struck by the fact that the biggest concern seems to be that the government may do something as the owner of GM. Now, the government may turn out to be a bad owner and a bad capitalist (I don’t think that would surprise anybody), but what is the alternative?

Up until now GM has been run only by its executives without any input from its owners. I imagine that’s because GM is owned by thousands of different entities, many of them mutual funds that themselves have thousands of owners. None of these entities or people owned enough of GM’s stock to influence its behavior, and most of them probable don’t know any more than you or I about running an automobile company.

Back in 2006, Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire investor, actually accumulated 9.9% of GM’s stock and forced GM to put a board member of his choosing, Jerome York, on its board. He came up with some innovative ideas to try to put GM back on the right track, presented them to the Board of Directors and was promptly ignored. Shortly after he left the Board of Directors and Kerkorian sold all of his GM his stock before the end of 2006.

Many of the ideas put forth by Kerkorian—selling Hummer and Saturn, closing plants, cutting back on the number of brands and dealers—are just what GM is doing in bankruptcy. In 2006, when the economy was strong, it would have been much easier to turn GM around, then it is now, but GM wasn’t willing to listen.

Vision Dallas in Unfair Park

Any wise person is nervous to find out that there’s an article about him in Unfair Park, but I was in it today. Check out the article here: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/06/youre_gonna_see_one_of.php.

I hate to admit it, but the quotes even seem accurate—as well as I can remember what I said a few minutes ago!