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Fable 2 Review: Countless Choices and Options, None of Which are Fun
July 24th, 2010 | 
Author: Fable 2
Score: 5.8
Systems: Xbox 360
Genre: Adventure
Length: 12 hours
Difficulty: 5
Developer: Lionhead Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Release Date: 10/21/08
Pros
- Large variety of skills to upgrade and use in combat
- World is vast and beautiful
Cons
- Combat system is repetitive and easy to manipulate
- Far too many side quests, none of which are fun
- The countless choices have little impact on actual gameplay
- Buying houses, furniture, vegetables and getting jobs don’t belong in games
by Rabid Rabbit
Fable 2 is yet another over-rated game that focuses too much on side quests that simply aren’t fun and leaves the main campaign boring and repetitive. Similar to the distractions that made Metal Gear Solid 4, Spore and Grand Theft Auto IV boring games, Fable 2 gets distracted from providing meaningful and interesting gameplay. Far too much effort was placed on meaningless tasks that don’t materially affect gameplay, such as getting married, choices between good and evil and jobs to earn money. The main campaign involves traversing a large world and fighting a series of non-descript enemies that lack variety. The actual fighting mechanics quickly devolve into button mashing regardless of your preferred method of dispensing with your foes. The end result is a game that strays into many different gameplay elements but never makes any of them particularly fun. The developers simply forgot to make the game fun. Apparently they knew this was a problem when they released a statement asking people to have non-gamers try the game. Apparently it was made for people who don’t know what to demand from a game rather than traditional gamers who have more discerning tastes and demand higher forms of entertainment.
The crux of Fable 2 is choices. The main adventure is littered with a myriad of choices to help or harm people. If you choose to help people, then you are revered by citizens and gain their favor. If you choose the path of the dark side, then people will fear and despise you. It’s amazing that so much time was spent on this gameplay element, but it actually has very little impact on the actual game. The only material effect is how people react to you and evil characters’ complexions will deteriorate into a purple monster with horns. When you go into town, citizens will run in fear from evil heroes and may charge you higher prices for goods. You can reduce any price hikes by simply scaring them into lower prices though.
Any benefits from being a good person can be earned as an evil hero by scaring people or stealing from them as an evil person. There are just different means to the same ends. Without a material impact to your choices other than people calling you a murderer and running from you, it’s really hard to take these choices seriously. The entire system falls apart and becomes more of a nuisance than a unique aspect to tinker with.
The Fable 2 world is vast and includes a number of towns and people to interact with. You can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or you can just kill people for their goods, money and gifts. If you kill people or get caught stealing, then you should expect the police to quickly arrive to keep the peace. They will give you the choice to pay a fine, complete a community service task, or you can resist arrest. The community service is typically just a simple task to help someone or kill some bandits. If you resist arrest, then expect to be constantly chased by guards in town that you must fight.
This entire crime punishment system is extremely easy to circumvent. All you have to do is continually commit to community service tasks that you don’t ever complete. After choosing to complete one of these tasks, the guards will leave you alone and give you a few days to finish your work. If you don’t finish the task, you can simply request another task. The result is that you can do whatever you want in town without ever suffering any negative consequence. The only other noticeable effect is that your reputation follows you to every town you visit and people will fear you and call you a thief or a murderer. For a game so focused on choices, that seems like an easy choice to me: just steal and kill as much as you want without ever getting punished.
There are also a wide variety of choices for how you interact with people in town. You can choose to be nice by telling jokes or complimenting people to gain their favor or you can be mean by insulting them or giving rude gestures to lose their favor. There are also seductive gestures to attract people of the opposite sex. If you show enough interest in someone, then you can eventually propose to them by giving them a ring. After purchasing a house, you will be married to your fiancée. If you have unprotected sex (yes the game actually has condoms to prevent pregnancy and STD transmission), then you will likely have a child.
Like the rest of the game, the entire marriage and family system is extremely simple. The main result of a family is a budget drain on your income. If you keep your spouse happy, then you will get a gift from them when you arrive home from adventuring. You can also name your child. That’s about it. For a system that took so much work to incorporate into the game, you’d hope there would be more to it, such as training your spouse and kid to aid you in your adventures. Nope, there’s nothing like that in this game. If you like this boring gameplay and are a glutton for punishment, you are able to become a polygamist and have more than one family in the world. Like the rest of Fable 2, there isn’t much interesting depth here to keep you coming back for more of these Brady Bunch antics.
Towns offer a wide variety of things to do, but almost all of them either have no point or are extremely boring. You can get a job to make money, but why would you want to do that when you could be fighting monsters and playing the main campaign. We all have jobs, and we leave them to have fun playing games rather than to start another job inside a game. If you choose to take one of these jobs, you will enter a world of hurt involving extremely repetitive tasks that require no skill. As a blacksmith or wood cutter, you are simply timing button presses to a sliding scale. If you become a bar tender, you simply hold down a button to the end of a meter to pour a full glass of beer. None of these tasks ever change no matter how much you get promoted. Other jobs involve fetching people or items, such as the bounty hunter job.
You can also earn money by playing some games. These games mimic real-world games such as craps, card games and slots. A significant amount of effort went into differentiating these games from their real life counterparts. This becomes obvious when you watch the 5 minute tutorials that teach how to play the games. All of the games involve mere chance and require no skill on your part. Why would throwing dice be more interesting than actually playing the game’s main quest? It’s really absurd how much effort went into these games rather than making the main quest more interesting.
A number of possibilities are available in towns. You can choose to steal from merchants. When you attempt to steal, an icon appears to let you know if someone is watching you. If you are seen pilfering the store, then a guard will approach to punish you.
You can also choose to buy a wide variety of food and items with a myriad of different qualities. It’s really perplexing why people would care so much about different grades of meat, fish, pies, fruits and vegetables. There’s even tofu! The only way these different types of food impacts gameplay is that you will gain weight if you eat too many fatty foods, such as meat and pies. However, gaining weight doesn’t change your speed or the amount of damage you do in combat, so why should you care unless you are a narcissist?
You can also buy houses and shops. Then you can change your properties’ rent or the shop item’s selling prices to affect your profits. Other than additional profits, the only impact to raising prices is your alignment becomes more evil. If you decide to live in a house, you can go out and buy furniture, which increases the house’s value. Yes, you can actually choose to spend your free time looking at different grades of furniture in a video game. If that doesn’t put you to sleep, I don’t know what will.
The game also gives you a dog to accompany you through most of your tasks. His main purpose is to help you find buried treasures or hidden treasure that are off the main paths. He can also be trained to improve his treasure sniffing abilities to find more valuable loot than worthless things such as rancid tofu. If you knock an enemy down in a fight, your dog will also pounce on top of him to cause some additional damage.
With so many side quests and distractions, you’d think the game is a social interactions simulator and there weren’t any problems in the world. If you ever get out of town, you’ll realize there is the typical world coming to an end plotline along with an antagonist to stop. Your main objective is to gather three other heroes to combine forces and stop the world from becoming enslaved. The story unfolds through a series of tasks strewn across a large world with various enemies to defeat.
In order to progress through the story and gain new tasks, you must increase your renown throughout the world by helping people. The world of Fable 2 is large and these tasks are scattered across its many locales. To help ensure you don’t get lost trying to find your next task, the game includes a glowing trail for you to follow to your next objective. Once you have traveled to an area, you can choose to save time by letting the game transport you to your destination.
Combat is resolved by defeating enemies with melee fighting mechanics, shooting foes or employing magic. The associated skills of strength, skill and will increase as you use them in combat. Each downed enemy drops experience based on the ability type you use to defeat them. If you perform well in a fight by winning quickly or taking little damage, then you’ll be rewarded bonus experience. Then you can spend the experience to further hone these skills. Increasing some skills can provide new abilities such as sword counters and combos, but most upgrades simply cause more damage or increase your life meter rather than adding any depth.
Strength skills include causing more melee damage, reducing damage you take and increasing your life bar. Skill abilities revolve around improving shooting accuracy, damage and your ability to avoid enemy strikes. Will abilities include a variety of spells.
Direct damage spells hurt enemies with elements, such as fire, electricity, and blades. You can choose to cause more damage to a specific target or distribute your love through an area of effect spell. There are also indirect spells, such as raise dead to summon minions to aid your cause and charm spells to temporarily remove some foes from the fight by confusing them. The magic system is oddly unbalanced. Magic spells are cast without limit because you don’t spend mana points to cast spells. The result is you can just sit back and cast unlimited spells if you create a buffer against enemy attacks, such as summoning a horde of undead creatures with the raise dead spell.
While there are a variety of different abilities, fights generally devolve into simple button mashing. You’ll either madly press buttons to hack and slash with your melee weapons, shoot with your crossbow or gun or continually cast your spells. There’s very little depth in the actual encounters. Almost all enemies are dispatched with the same maneuvers regardless of how different they look. The only exceptions are the large trolls, which have specific weaknesses to target. Most of the campaign involves these repetitive fights, which makes it more of an effort in patience to endure the game’s monotonous encounters rather than having fun.
Most fights are rather easy, but even encounters that may offer a challenge are simple because there is no real consequence to losing a fight. If you run out of health, you are knocked out rather than dying. The only downside to getting KOed is that you will lose any ungathered experience. You can eat food or drink potions to increase your health, but there’s really no point in wasting your time buying the food and eating it. Just make sure to gather any experience if you are low on health and then you won’t lose anything by being knocked out. You’ll be revived to the same fight without having to walk back to the encounter and you won’t waste any money on healing items. So you can just mash buttons without paying attention to your health level because losing a fight has no negative consequence. These ridiculous gameplay elements further reduce the point of the fights and the campaign itself.
There is also the option of join a friend’s campaign in the game’s co-op mode. As with most games, playing the game with a friend can make it more fun. It’s pretty cool that the game is flexible enough that you and your friend don’t even have to be in the same place. You can choose to take on different tasks and not be in each other’s vicinity. While co-op mode generally add to the overall experience, it’s hard to say it makes a huge difference considering it doesn’t fix the game’s numerous other problems.
If you can endure the boring main quest to the end, you are rewarded with a horrid ending. I’m not talking about an ending movie. I won’t give anything away, but it’s important to note that there isn’t a final confrontation. After pouring hours into a boring campaign and exploring mundane side quests, Fable 2 simply continues to underwhelm with a slow boring end to the game that you have little control over. Well, at least the game’s boring features are consistent from its beginning to its ultimate ending.
The game’s vast world includes a wide variety of landscapes. From the dreary swamps to the lush hilly areas to the dark caves lit by torchlight, the world of Fable 2 is a beautiful place to explore. The only downside is that its ambitious long draw distances coupled with numerous enemies do create noticeable framerate hiccups throughout the quest.
Overall, Fable 2 promises a lot. It allows you to explore towns and make many choices. There are many side quests, jobs, businesses to buy and people to interact with, but none of these distractions are interesting. The main quest and its combat system have a wide variety of skills and enemies to fight but none really differentiate themselves from each other. The end result is a game that fails to entertain or involve you regardless of what you are doing in the game. It simply isn’t fun, no matter what you do or what choices you make in its elaborate world.
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Rabid Rabbit
http://www.articlesbase.com/computer-games-articles/fable-2-review-countless-choices-and-options-none-of-which-are-fun-756254.html
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Gianni Truvianni’s What Should not Matter (chapter 1)
The time and place was New York’s Lennox Hill Hospital on Wednesday at 11:30 in the antemeridian during the warm month of May; where we see Britta Swen welcoming her patient and friend Rosa Diaz O’Leary. Britta is a gynecologist who like many of New York’s doctors had immigrated. Britta having done so from her native country of Sweden to the USA where she did her postgraduate studies at Cornel University.
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Britta originally had not intended to stay on in the USA but to go back to her hometown in Sweden where she had always wanted to practice medicine. Her plans were changed however when her father, Thomas Swen was given a post at the Swedish consulate in New York City. Britta was a person who many considered to be impractical when it come to things such as money so it would be fare to say that financial reward was not what prevented her from going back to her hometown but the wanting to be close to her mother whom she allowed for better or for worse to guide her life.
Britta was a woman who to many in America represented their stereotypical idea of what the Nordic woman was like. She was light skinned in a rosy tone that made it easy for her face as well as the rest of her body to freckle up in the summer given the low amount of pigmentation she had. Her eyes were blue so much so that it was difficult not to take notice of them even for those who tended to be nonobservant of such details.
On the whole hers was the kind of face that was nice to look at as all her features were ideally proportioned from her nose which was perfectly straight to her lips which could not have been better suited to the rest of her face had Michael Angelo himself painted them. All those features which also included high check bones were served to the viewer in a face that was oval in shape while being framed with golden; almost yellow locks of hair that came down from her head and went past her shoulders. How lovely was this ever so slightly wavy hair which she took great pride in, almost as much as she did in her blue eyes. This long thin hair which flowed down resembling honey pouring out of a jar when ever the sun’s ray would strike it just right made her as imposing a sight as those pagan Nordic goddesses whose magnificence had impressed her so when she was in her childhood.
Yes, she was definitely pretty perhaps overly some might say to make her beautiful as she did not posses any of those perhaps faults that create character which in the opinion of some were the essence of what true beauty was.
Body wise, her height was one that could be considered tall with her standing at 175 cm while being thin weighing in at 65 kilograms with small breast which were not uncommon for women in her country given that statistically speaking they were said to have the smallest in Europe.
Britta was born in Gothenburg, a city situated north of Sweden’s capital Stockholm; where she spend the first years of her life as the only daughter of Thomas Swen and Inga Johansson who had her only daughter at the age of thirty after having started her profession as pediatrician. To many people the marriage of these two individuals who were her parents was a union of opposites if not two people who should have never joined one another in any kind of union let alone one of holy matrimony. Inga was a woman of great beauty (her daughter being almost an exact replica of her) which was not to say that Thomas was really ugly but the truth was that all those around could not imagine why she had chosen him. She was a woman who though her ambitions did not include fame or fortune; they at least did make her want to be the best she could be in her chosen medical profession. Perhaps it was not only professional desire but the caring person she was who did really care about her patients in a way that went beyond her medical profession. It was all this that really made her an outstanding doctor; contrary to those in the hospitals were she had worked at who only sought to perform their duties well so they might be promoted to the head of a department or perhaps hospital, she was more then content to simply be a doctor who had her patients’ trust.
All this in her was in clear difference to her husband who was not only plain in looks with features that followed the norm of his country men which were the blue eyes and the blonde hair but contrary to his wife, his face was not nice to look at. His eyes being small with a nose that like his mouth was simply unpleasant which perhaps made him look nastier then his demeanor really was. Professionally speaking was another place where these two separated as unlike his wife; Thomas was not a man of ambition in any sense of the word. He not only did not care to make money but he did not necessarily even care to be good at the job he had; believing that work was a place where one spend time till one got paid. It was precisely this reason why he never rose above that of a minor government worker who on many an occasion more for his wife’s family connections then his skill had been sent abroad to represent Sweden in minor posts which though not overly important had granted him a very good salary. This income being the standard for all government workers when ever serving abroad. As for Inga she had been the one who to a large part had sacrificed her own career in favor of her husband as she was not allowed to practice medicine in many of the countries were they had been sent to given that she did not have a license.
In many ways Britta had had a life that many might want and even envy. She had traveled to many places with her parents; spending a lot of time in those countries in which her father had held positions for the Swedish government. All this allowing her to learn several foreign languages that included Portuguese along with French added to English and all those Scandinavian languages such as Danish and Norwegian which the average Swede could understand without major difficulties.
Her childhood had been nice in many ways but happiness was something that had never been hers and this was basically due to her father who in his intensions had wanted else then what he would accomplish which was to have his daughter dread him. He being one of those who had never really accomplished much made it that he desired to push his daughter to what he had not achieved but instead of being a motivator turned in to a small minded tyrant who often made his daughter cry when ever she turned to him for support.
Compounded to this was the fact that Britta was a complicated person in the meaning that she was one who had about her so many contradictions and inner conflicts that she was in constant struggle not only with herself but with everything around her from her strong faith in God to her body to her sexuality to her career. Everything to her was complex as was her life and the way she had made it which influenced all the relationships she had with all those around her like parents, relatives, suitors and even God whose judgment she was in constant fear of.
Britta was a woman of thirty three years of age who had graduated medical school at a relatively young age more because of the long hours she had dedicated to her studies then to being a student of brilliance. She also earned what she considered to be a good deal of money as it was more then she would have made in her own country where the social medical system did not allow physicians to become wealthy.
My name is Gianni Truvianni, I am an author who writes with the simple aim of sharing his ideas, thoughts and so much more of what I am with those who are interested in perhaps reading something new. I also am the author of the book entitled “New York’s Opera Society” which is now available on Amazon.
Gianni Truvianni
http://www.articlesbase.com/fiction-articles/gianni-truviannis-what-should-not-matter-chapter-1-710317.html
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The Go Pointer’s Guide to Unforced Errors
The Go Pointer’s Guide to Unforced Errors
By Michael Useem
Author of The Go Point
All in all, our decision-making equipment is pretty sound. We don’t follow the lead lemming over a cliff. We can’t be fooled into thinking that a 99-cent lure is a meal. We don’t try to catch car fenders with our teeth. Then again, it wasn’t a dog who launched New Coke. So there are a few bugs little design flaws of the mind that can have big consequences.
People are clinically overoptimistic, for instance, assigning zero probability to events that are merely unlikely (such as a massive iceberg in the path of a really big ship). We see “patterns” in the random movements of stocks the way our ancestors saw bears and hunters in the scatterplot of the night sky. We make choices that justify our past choices and then look for data to support them. Not only do we make these errors; we make them reliably.
That’s the good news. Predictable errors are preventable errors. And a few simple techniques, like those below, can help you steer clear of the most common wrong turns. They can get you to your go point, that decisive moment when the essential information has been gathered, the pros and cons weighed, and the time has come to get off the fence.
Problem: Authority Is Not Bestowed
Tool: Pursue Responsibility
For some, responsibility is simply bestowed: a princess is handed the kingdom upon the passing of the monarch; a favorite son inherits the family business. For most, however, the authority to make decisions must be actively sought.
Born in the Bronx of an interracial marriage, Jaime Irick thrived from his earliest days by tackling new challenges. In high school, he jumped into sports; at college, he took on social service projects. After graduation, Irick joined the military, qualified as an airborne Ranger, and found himself promoted up the officer ranks. Back in civilian life, he repeatedly asked for larger and stretch assignments. “I’ve never been fully qualified on paper for a job that I’ve had,” he told me, yet he so readily embraced his duties that ever more responsibility came naturally his way. With a new MBA degree in hand, Irick brashly contacted GE’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, with a simple message: “I always wanted to run something.” The personal appeal to the CEO worked. Today, as director of sales in General Electric’s Homeland Protection division, Jaime Irick plays a significant role in one of Immelt’s growth businesses.
Madhabi Puri Buch did much the same at ICICI, one of India’s premier banks, which she joined in 1997. With little experience in fairly specialized fields, she tackled a succession of responsibilities, ranging from Internet trading to mortgage financing. Finally, she asked chief executive K. V. Kamath to give her a crack at running the “boiler room” of the bank, the back office that handles the enormous volume of paper, telephone, and electronic data that surges through the bank every day. “In the past,” she explained, “I had been given assignments where I had no experience. Yet they worked well!” Now she upped the stakes by taking on one of the bank’s least glamorous but most critical operations. Her friends thought she had been “sidelined.” Instead, Buch mastered the essence of still another banking function by taking responsibility for deciding how to remake it.
Problem: Unfamiliar Responsibilities
Tool: Appraise the Past
In embracing new responsibilities, past decisions can serve as a natural curriculum for avoiding future mistakes.
Liu Chuanzhi was working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1984 when his country commenced its momentous liberalization. Inspired, Liu formed what would become Legend Group, at first distributing a few foreign personal computers and eventually morphing into China’s largest PC producer. In 2005, rechristened as Lenovo, the company acquired IBM’s personal computer line, making it the number three PC producer globally. As a young man, Liu had wanted to become a fighter pilot with the People’s Liberation Army. Instead, he became one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.
When Liu left the state-sponsored research laboratory in 1984, he knew nothing about how to build an enterprise, so he set about learning to do so by studying his own go points in minute detail. At the end of every week, Liu and his top aides met to review major decisions of the past five days. Many errors were committed, he told me, but the weekly debrief helped “to ensure that we don’t make [the same] mistakes in the future.” Thanks to the reviews and lessons drawn from them, Lenovo was able to weather China’s economic gyrations while others faltered. By routinely looking back on his decision processes, Liu Chuanzhi constructed his own decision template for going forward.
The after-action review can be monthly, quarterly, yearly, or even daily, depending on the decision-making tempo. In July 2004, I watched a wildland fire crew in action against a raging blaze in Yosemite National Park. Every afternoon without fail, the incident commander, operations director, planning chief, and a dozen responsible firefighters gathered to review the present day’s decisions and decide on the next day’s actions. At the end of each of the fact-drenched, disciplined reviews, one of the participants would pose four questions: What had been planned for the day? What actually happened during the day? Why did that happen? And what should be done next time? Roundrobin style, each crew member addressed each of the topics. Only in that way could firefighters stay on top of a situation that changed constantly with the fire’s everchanging momentum. The principle: study the past, even if it is only yesterday, and heed its continuing lessons.
Problem: Inexperienced Gut
Tool: Educate Your Instincts
“Go with your gut.” “Follow your intuition.” “Trust your feelings.” The sayings are commonplace, but do our instincts make good decisions? In fact, blind instinct cannot be trusted, but it can be educated. The main purpose of flight simulators, for example, is to allow pilots to experience unlikely surprises so many times that, should one actually occur, their response will be reflexive. “Train like you fly and fly like you train” is how they put it at NASA’s astronaut training program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Consistent with that dictum, astronauts undergo an exhaustive curriculum that includes some five hundred simulated landings of the shuttle before flying it. No wonder so many of the space travelers are apt to say upon returning to Earth, “When something went wrong, I went into my training mode.”
Practice does not always make perfect, but it certainly helps. When he was named Episcopal bishop for the diocese of Pennsylvania in 1998, Charles E. Bennison drew on the three decades of experience since his ordination to tackle a succession of touchy issues. Despite widespread opposition from priests and laity, he pushed through plans to hire a fulltime fundraiser to shore up finances for the 162parish diocese. Later, again knowing he would encounter protests, he suspended a church rector who opposed the ordination of women and gays. “Day by day I don’t have too much doubt because I trust my intuitions,” he said. “I may be making big mistakes, but I feel fairly confident on an incremental daily basis that I am in touch and that I am making the right decisions.” That doesn’t mean Bennison jumps to the go point. Far from it. “I’ll stew and waver and listen and take in data and talk to all kinds of people before I feel comfortable with something,” he said. But it does mean, that in getting to go, he consults a welleducated gut.
“If you get educated about something and then you live that, the line blurs between what your instincts used to be and what they are now,” General Peter Pace explains. “Your mind touches on resources it’s not even conscious of touching on.” In the words of Blink author Malcolm Gladwell, that is the “power of thinking without thinking.”
Problem: Analysis Paralysis
Tool: The 70 Percent Solution
Only professors and journalists get paid to say, “On the one hand….” When the rest of us continue to mine and massage the data in pursuit of perfect knowledge and thus perfect certainty we are edging toward that clinical condition of decidophobia, fear of facing a go point.
The Marine Corps battles this syndrome with the “70 percent solution.” If you have 70 percent of the information, have done 70 percent of the analysis, and feel 70 percent confident, then move. The logic is simple: a less than ideal action, swiftly executed, stands a chance of success, whereas no action stands no chance. The worst decision is no decision at all.
Analyze, but not overanalyze: that is the message Hewlett-Packard executive vice president Ann Livermore sends to HP’s Technology Solutions Group, a $30-billion-plus business that en-compasses enterprise storage and systems, software and services, and employs 95,000 IT professionals. She places a primacy on “fast enough” decision making based on sufficient information, not perfect data. GE teaches the same at its retreats. By requiring ranking managers to vote up or down, individually and publicly, on a variety of proposed changes, GE avoids the endless analysis that compromises decision tempo.
Drawing upon his own tumultuous experience as president of Pakistan since 1999, Pervez Musharraf says that while a leader must hear opposing views and engage people in the deliberations, he or she “must never suffer from paralysis.” Moreover, in reaching a decision, rarely are all the data available to be sure of its outcome. “Decisions are twothirds facts and figures,” Musharraf contends, and “one-third a leap in the dark where you don’t have all the facts.” If you increase the short side of the equation, you’re too impulsive, but if you increase the other side, you’re not a leader.
Problem: Mistakes Happen
Tool: Tolerate Them Once
Short of perfect information and analysis, mistakes are sure to happen. The secret, says Peter Pace, is: “Don’t beat yourself up. If you’re not making mistakes, I don’t need you in my organization,” which in his case includes some 2.4 million uniformed troops. “I want you doing 90 percent right in a big universe rather than 100 percent right in a small universe.”
Charles Elachi directs the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s contract agency for unmanned space missions, including the 2004 Spirit and Opportunity Mars landings that found evidence of water between layers of volcanic rock. Given the technical complexity of space flight, Elachi insists that every significant pre-mission decision at JPL receive intense peer appraisal and even outsider review. To ensure disciplined decision making during a mission, he also insists on resilience. “We operate under very heavy pressure,” he says. “Many critical things are riding on our decisions. You have to have nerves of steel. Everyone involved in the project has to keep calm and composed so that we can think clearly about what is happening. Anyone who panics under pressure is just in the wrong business.” To instill those steel-like nerves among his 5,500 employees, Elachi requires less experienced workers to witness JPL veterans making decisions.
Predictably, though, some of JPL’s decisions do go wrong. A mission to Mars in 1998 ended in such a high-profile, costly failure that the mission’s top two managers were ready to resign. Elachi would not let them. “Normally, when a project fails, people look around for someone to blame,” he says, “but if you hang the person who made the mistake, you’ve also lost a lot of experience.” Instead, Elachi told the two managers, “We have spent $400 million training you. You have to learn from those mistakes, and I’m sure you will not repeat them.” Six years later one of the managers was serving as a mission director and the other as a deputy manager for the highly successful Spirit and Opportunity trips to Mars.
Problem: Rush to Judgment
Tool: Preserve Optionality
Many decisions come with looming deadlines: the battle is lost, the market opportunity gone if you do not act in timely fashion. Even without a deadline it can still be tempting to get the hard business of choice making over with. The more one can tamp down the uncertainties and let the pieces fall in place before deciding, however, the more likely one will reach the right go point.
As U.S. treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999, Robert Rubin faced a string of momentous decisions ranging from the bailout of the Mexican peso to China’s application to join the World Trade Organization. Time and again, Rubin elected to keep his “choices open for as long as possible,” a proclivity that his thendeputy Lawrence Summers calls “preserving optionality.”
As CEO of Scottish Power, an energy producer with major operations in the United States and United Kingdom including extensive wind farms, Ian Russell makes investment decisions entailing hundreds of millions of dollars at a shot. One of his new power plants alone can guzzle $350 million; wind farms have consumed $3 billion. With so much riding on each go point, a rush to judgment on any one decision could result in a strategic error from which recovery would be extremely costly.
Not surprisingly, Russell takes his time in making such choices. “Let’s be careful,” he warns, and to that end he works to ensure that his team understands the decision options, appreciates their upsides and downsides, and knows what might go wrong with each so that the company does not look “foolish in a year’s time.” For decisions of such scope, Russell counsels waiting three, six, or even twelve months to diminish complexity and reduce uncertainty as much as possible before pulling the trigger.
Reprinted from THE GO POINT: When It’s Time to Decide. Copyright © 2006 by Michael Useem. Published by Crown Business, a division of Random House, Inc.
Michael Useem, the author of The Go Point and The Leadership Moment, is the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, as well as the director of its Center for Leadership and Change Management. Professor Useem takes his students to the ends of the world — the Antarctic, the Andes, and the Himalayas — to learn about their personal and professional go points. Visit www.thegopoint.com for more info.
Michael Useem
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/the-go-pointers-guide-to-unforced-errors-76580.html
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Anger and Gender Expression
“Women don’t have problems with anger— they just manage it differently,” stated June Tangney, professor of psychology at George Mason University.
When a woman and a man get angry, it’s not necessarily the case that women get angrier than men or that men get angrier than women.
However, when women and men get angry it reflects a process of gender socialization, more specifically, it is how men and women have learned to understand and cope with anger.
In the context of a dictionary, anger is defined as a feeling. In a social context, anger is defined as a reaction according to specific gender stereotypes. For the most part, when women are angry they are classified as irrational and frenzied.
A stereotypical scenario for women is when a woman gets mad and she cries. This may be interpreted as emotional and irrational. Whereas men’s anger is sometimes recognized as strength and aggressiveness. An example of the stereotype for men is when a man gets angry and gets into a fistfight. This can be interpreted as not having fear and being aggressive. Hence, gender is a powerful influence on the way society understands and interprets anger.
According to a poll conducted for Girls, Inc in 2000, from over 2,000 students in grades 3 through 12, 63% of both boys and girls believe that girls are under pressure to please everyone and 56% say girls are expected to speak softly and not cause trouble.
Generally speaking, for girls, this stereotype warns them to stay away from the loudness of anger. In order to be a “good” girl then a person has to be soft spoken and avoid anger. For a boy it is the contrary. He has to be more aggressive and louder than girls to reinforce his sexuality as a male. Bullying, attacking and intimidation are their resources for conflict resolution. Yet this double standard restricts both boys and girls.
If the sexist stereotypic roles are endorsed then it is gender that dictates relationships with anger into adulthood. It is no surprise that in expressing their anger women tend not to be as aggressive as men and tend to talk about their anger more. For instance, when a woman gets upset with her husband about leaving his dirty clothes on the floor when he changes, she will talk about how this is bothering her and how it is not just her responsibility to pick up after him.
On the other hand, there is a tendency for men to express their anger in the form of physical aggression, passive aggression and to impulsively deal with their anger. When he gets mad, for example, because he feels his wife won’t let him do what he wants in his own home, he may simply walk away mumbling.
From both perspectives in the previous examples, the man and woman’s actions to anger may not necessarily resolve the anger but simply perpetuate it by their reactions according to the specific gender stereotypes. In other words, neither the man nor woman see the opposite’s point of view as it is but sees the other’s reason for anger according to gender stereotypes. From the husband’s perspective, he may see his wife’s action as nagging. From her perspective, she may see her husband’s action as being passive aggressive by ignoring her. But neither, during their argument, understands the other’s perspective and reason for anger. Both husband and wife react to the other’s anger according to the gender stereotypes. Thus, sexist stereotypic roles are endorsed in this example.
Yet this is not to say that there aren’t exceptions to the stereotypes. In fact, as more women and men take on non-traditional roles, the gender social stereotypes have been changing. With models of women as Hilary Rodham Clinton or even on TV, such as the character of Murphy Brown, women are gradually being disassociated from the traditional social roles of compliancy and seen as taking charge and being more “aggressive.”
For men, society has come to see and accept more men playing the role of the homemaker, single fathers or simply sharing more household responsibilities with their spouse, including being involved in same sex marriages.
However, there are some individuals that may convey anger utilizing varying degrees of rage, while other individuals are angry very quietly. Anger as rage can be both destructive and violent to all the persons involved in the argument, including innocent by-standers such as children. For example, children may be riding in the back seat of a car when an argument between their parents breaks out. Not only do the children witness the harsh words being passed back and forth between their parents but they also feel the anger and, as a result, are affected by it.
Passive anger such as the silent treatment or withholding cooperation can be more destructive than more aggressive acts such as verbal and physical (non-violent) outbursts. For instance, when a person gets upset by their significant other, that person may swallow their anger in order to not hurt a loved one. Swallowing one’s anger can cause problems over time. In turn, the anger simply gets buried alive. Over the course of time, the pressure of anger can accumulate and lead to a great eruption of rage and, more commonly, the individual may also suffer physical consequences. Buried anger can cause ulcers, heart disease, hypertension, headaches, back pain, depression, guilt and fatigue. Needless to say, our emotional health goes hand in hand with our physical health.
Nevertheless, “getting angry” is a means by which to express anger and can be used as a positive force in a person’s life. A reaction to anger can also be a means of coping with it. By getting angry, a person exerts feelings that have been building inside. For those who hold in anger there is a need to vent their emotions and a need to find a safe and appropriate way to release them, regardless of their gender. Some take on painting, while others choose kickboxing to express their anger. The point is to find a non-violent way to express the anger so as not to perpetuate the expression of violence, as in kicking the walls or destroying property, and to have some time to think things through before saying something that can be more hurtful and harmful to the relationship in question.
So does one sex get angry more than the other? It is a question that requires a closer look into social stereotypes that have long been influential in how men and women interpret, understand and cope with anger. As social stereotypes change and social roles revolutionize, so does our social understanding and interpretations of anger. In short, it is not one gender that gets angry more than the other. It simply depends on the individual.
Andrea Brandt, Ph.d.
http://www.articlesbase.com/relationships-articles/anger-and-gender-expression-99636.html
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No Grace for Liberals
My wife, who I always run my weekly articles by, said this article sounded preachy. That is sort of the point. If you are one of my regular readers, you know that I have no qualms about being blunt – which also happens to sound “preachy” at times. But maybe, considering this week’s article is about aspects of the Christian faith it may be a little more preachy than usual. If you think it is too preachy, then oh well! If discussion of Christianity bothers you, then double oh well.
According to the gospels, Jesus implies that it is deeds and not just words that are required to enter into the kingdom of Heaven and that to generate “grace” one must do good works and do so freely. Some modern day sects of Christianity disagree, preaching instead an unconditional grant of this blessing by God just by virtue of the fact that all of us are his children and that by simply claiming to believe in Jesus Christ we shall enter into Heaven. I strongly disagree. God and his only son, Jesus Christ, are not the “do as I say, not as I do” types and I find it very hard to believe that God would except such as a valid excuse from those awaiting entrance into the hereafter.
People who deny the need for good works will quote passages like Ephesians 2:8-9 ,”For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: [it is] the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”
But the truth is that believing in Christ itself imparts an inherent duty to follow his teachings and to do as he did to the best of our human ability. Christ helped people. He himself did good works. You cannot say to God, “But I believe in Christ and his teachings,” when you did nothing to show that you really do believe in such things. Words are great. But deeds are the ultimate proof of concept and your faith.
Our faith, if it is true, dictates that we do indeed do good works. What passages like Ephesians say is that simply doing good works is not enough. You must be doing them with a faith in Christ and accepting him as your savior.
When I talk to liberals who fancy themselves as Christians while promoting their big government ideas, forced wealth redistribution plans, and other socialist programs, the reasoning that they often give to me as to why they believe in such things is that they are just being “good Christians”. They just see themselves as doing God’s will and that they are doing good works. They believe that far too many are not capable of doing these good works without their guidance. They believe that by levying taxes on Americans, including themselves, and using that money to help others that they are doing God’s work and are doing good deeds that they will be rewarded for. Well, they may want to go back to their Bibles and get out of their left wing Churches because, I am sad to say, nothing could be further from the truth.
Often those on the left cringe at having their “Christian” credentials challenged and will hurl the typical admonishment about not judging others less I also be judged. I have often proudly said that I am very secure in my relationship with God. So with that said once again, I say very confidently to let that judgment of me be swift and true and that I certainly do not fear it.
As a Christian, but a non-denominational Christian because I have grown to distrust so many of the organized churches over the years, I believe that, like my liberal acquaintances, generating grace is the means to entering Heaven. But for me, grace is generated by not only professing a belief in Jesus Christ as one’s savior, but by also doing as he and those that followed him in life taught us. This includes doing good deeds to others.
A reader to my website recently reminded me of one particular admonishment that Christians, particularly liberal “Christians” who think that by using taxes and government to “help” through coerced “giving”, should take note of. This admonishment comes from 2 Corinthians.
“Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” 9:7
Let us remember this. It does not say God loves, and gives grace to, those that are coerced to give or those that force others to give. It says that God loves those that have decided in their hearts to give. This means that if you are a liberal who thinks that you will be rewarded in the next life because you promoted high taxes and wealth redistribution plans to force yourself and others to give, then think again. You have not done the right thing in God’s eyes.
This is not the only example of how Christians are commanded to act when it comes to charitable giving and helping others. Proverbs 11:24-25 tells us once again that those that give freely, without coercion, are favored by God.
“One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed.”
Once again, nothing about being forced to give, forcing others to give or being forced to give is seen here as being a means to gaining favor with the Almighty. Also, we are told clearly again that good works do indeed reward us.
And there is another passage of which I am reminded of from Matthew which speaks of the same ideals. But this passage goes even further. It tells us that those that give not for the recognition of having given and helped their fellow man, but that give in private are the ones that are truly blessed with God’s grace.
“Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
I would say this is pretty clear and that if you are one of those “Christians” that are constantly running around promoting enforced giving through wealth redistribution and social welfare programs and on top of that running to the microphones (like our elected officials so often do) to let everyone know that you are doing these things and talking about how you are doing them in God’s name, then you have received your own shallow reward. But you are gaining no favor with our Father in Heaven.
Now, I understand that all of this that I have talked about this week is meaningless to some. They will continue to believe that they are “‘good Christians” just like Nancy Pelosi will continue to believe that the issue of when life begins has not been settled by her church of choice, the Catholic Church, even after being shown to be wrong and told so very bluntly by those in positions of authority within the church itself that she is wrong. That is basically the definition of a liberal though; one that will believe what they want to believe even in the face of all logic and reason.
Just remember that God is all knowing and all seeing. And you cannot scrub that which is shameful from your resume come judgment day. And if you coerced others into giving as you decide they should, force yourself to give because you cannot bring yourself to do so freely in your own heart and above all else do so for the public recognition of having given then just please remember that you are not quite as “Christian” as you believe yourself to be.
J.J. Jackson
http://www.articlesbase.com/politics-articles/no-grace-for-liberals-571123.html
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