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| FOLLOW THE LEADER
I thoroughly enjoyed your recent interview with Gen. Colin Powell ["Follow the Leader," February/March 2000], as it captures Powell’s heartfelt beliefs. The only point I would raise concerns the opening, where you say Powell competed against "pedigreed West Pointers." As a member of "the long gray line," I can assure you that most of us came from equally humble beginnings. In fact, a lot of us chose the U.S. Military Academy at West Point because it was absolutely the best education and crucible of leadership available for the "price," which was free. The reference to pedigrees reinforces a stereotype that just is not true. While I am sure some of us came from more affluent backgrounds, the fact remains that a lot of us had the same "hoops to jump through" as Powell. And rest assured the U.S. Army judges its leaders by their merits and not where they went to school. Again, congratulations on a wonderful article about an exceptional American. —Lewis Boore
THE CEO AS MAESTRO I was so pleased to read Bob Greenberg’s article in a recent issue of Context ["The CEO as Maestro," February/March 2000]. I have had the privilege of working with Greenberg during the past seven years in a leadership- development program targeted at our senior executives and have found the experience inspiring. Leadership requires the ability to take a broad view of one’s situation, to set a direction, and to steer an often-unwieldy organization toward a goal. The development of business leaders, therefore, requires expanding the viewpoint of potential leaders beyond their own disciplinary background and training in business and economics. The Andersen Executive Program provides our partners with an opportunity to do just that using the arts, sciences, and even religion as a starting point for discovery. The resulting discussions and learning have been remarkable. Music is the ideal metaphor for business executives and especially for professional-services firms. As with an orchestra, a professional-services firm has only the expertise of its professionals and their ability to form and sustain relationships to ensure its success. Like orchestra members, our professionals are experts in their field and, increasingly, as with an orchestra, the ability to provide valuable service to our clients depends upon the skill with which our professionals perform as members of an ensemble. Although Greenberg cautions against taking the CEO-as-conductor metaphor too far, it would be interesting to contrast the role of the conductor and the CEO in creating the "masterpiece" to be performed. My supposition is that business executives would have much to learn about their relationships with their strategists by examining the composer-conductor relationship. —Constance M. Filling
UP TO SPEED I read with great interest your article "Up to Speed" [CEO User’s Guide, September/October 1999]. I am totally in support of your perspective that e-business implementation and start-ups have been given too little priority by a traditional management team. Traditional organizations usually aren’t moving fast enough to understand the impact of e-business. My experience with family-run businesses has been that management teams want to see tangible value from e-business before they invest. If you can’t bring immediate value to the table, the e-business project is shelved. I wish that such traditional senior managers could be educated fast enough to realize their shortsightedness. —Alfred Cheah
MIND GAMES For more than 30 years I have been an "involved observer" of our society and human nature. Simply put, I believe David Grossman is right on the mark [The Last Word, November/December 1999]. Children are not adults. To give kids unlimited access to viewing violence in the name of freedom, instead of teaching decent moral values and respect for each other, has resulted in the decline of society that we see today. No person may be the president of the U.S. until reaching the age of 35—perhaps it might be wise to preclude nose rings, gang clothes, and exposure to violence until a child has had time to mature into a responsible young adult. —Chuck Schroeder
As a game designer and an academic who studies games, I agree with Henry Jenkins that the cultural phenomenon of video games can only be understood in context. Too often, debates about video-game violence take place "over the shoulders" of game players—neglecting the experiences of the games themselves in favor of the violent imagery that parents glimpse flickering on the computer screen. If we look at the actual experience of players, as Jenkins suggests, David Grossman’s demonized portrait of the games begins to unravel. For example, the light-gun arcade shooting games that Grossman believes are teaching kids to kill do not, in fact, allow a player to "blow Billy’s stinkin’ head off," as Grossman suggests. If two players are both playing a game of this kind, they are standing side by side and cooperating against the computer, operating in the dense social space of the arcade—a maelstrom of adolescent posturing, rivalry, and comradeship akin to the culture of street court basketball. The focal point of the play is not so much in a single game as in the social space around it. Furthermore, the five-year-olds whom Grossman worries are confused about the difference between game reality and the real world cannot physically play these games. The guns are too large for their hands, and the kids can’t see the entire screen. An even clearer example is the first-person-shooter (FPS) games like Quake and Doom that also come under fire from Grossman. Viewing them "over the shoulders" of players, it is easy to think that the games exist only to spew images of gratuitous violence onto computer screens. In fact, games of this type are among the most progressive digital experiences available, empowering players to have a critical relationship to media in a number of ways. For example, players of FPS games have the ability to customize the appearance of their "avatar—"the character that they control in the game—even creating their own persona from scratch. The open source programming model for FPS games means that players can manipulate the commercial program they purchase to create their own game spaces, some of which are used to create completely non-violent virtual worlds. The social communities that form around FPS games (such as “Quake Clans”) are among the most diverse and long-lasting virtual cliques on the Internet. Far from the mindless zombies Grossman depicts, video-game players creatively engage with their media. In suggesting we remove these constructive play contexts, Grossman is in danger of committing acts of violence far greater than anything that can be found in a video game. Should game designers expand the current repertoire of digital content? Should we invent new kinds of gaming? Of course. But new forms of meaningful play will never be developed until the hysteria dies down and the ways that games actually function are better understood. Kudos to Jenkins for taking on this important work. —Eric Zimmerman
CORRECTION Bank One’s original headquarters was in Columbus, Ohio. In "Bland Ambition" [February/March 2000], it was incorrectly said to be in Cincinnati.
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