Knowing the Territory

For John, BLUF:  Know your environment.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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This may be a tale out of school, but someone I know mentioned this comment by Ms Anne-Marie Slaughter, ♠ at a private luncheon for Hill Staff.  It was about the difference between academia & policy.  She said:

In academia you are rewarded for coming up with a really Big Idea--"change the paradigm"--and put your name on it and no one else's.  In government, you are rewarded for taking a Big Idea, dividing it into many small, doable pieces, and convincing everyone else that they thought of it.

She said it well.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  She is a former Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department, a former Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the current head of the New America Foundation.  She is the author, two years ago, of an Atlantic article, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All".