Thang Nguyen 555

Former Secretary of State Albright came out with a new book. This time, it’s entitled “Read My Pins”.

Her first pin was a serpent, all due to Saddam Hussein who “pinned” her with this biblical insignia.

Ever since, she figured pins can be put to diplomatic services i.e. to send out signals, to encode her message.

This is what women bring to public service: creativity, intuition  and emotional intelligence.

She not only broke the glass ceiling. She incorporated both non-verbal and verbal communication into the negotiation process ( her own interpretation of feminine mystique

not unlike a cowboy laying his gun to the side to signal peaceful intention).

Diplomacy of Engagement. Consultative selling.

Tribal chief was known for listening to the whole tribe before making a decision, which all along was his.

At least the crowd feel validated.

A lot of companies are into “crowdsourcing” these days: Netflix, Dell, Cisco, IBM.

People like to be consulted, not insulted.

Gone are the days of “shoot first, listen later.”

Unless you are NASA, and the recipient is the Moon.

Then you jabbed not once but twice.

Anyhow, her pins are on display, but what’s most important is the milestone she herself has accomplished.

We saw that in a succession of qualified women in that post.

And America has never been in a better place, diplomatically speaking.

World’s Most Admired Country. Chief of Everything. Global Village Chief who signals his intention to listen. Signals are encoded and beamed two-way. At first, feedback tend to get mixed up with noise. Your  filter after years of exposure and experience will cancel out noise.  Then, the skilled synthesizer would clarify, paraphrase, and probe beneath the veneer (predictably irrational). Then comes the summary phase and the trail close to obtain buy-in.

People like to be consulted, not insulted. A young or weak nation today, might propel to the top of the chart a few  decades from now. (Or one of its citizens might win the Nobel Prize in Literature, as in the case of Romania).

And vice versa. Nations are here on Earth, and they constantly hold up posters which say “read my signals”, unlike the Moon that you have to jab twice to get any reaction at all.