When a Girl Scout moves up from one level to the next, her troop holds a bridging ceremony. The girls cross a bridge, a real one or a symbolic one, to the new level. The Girl Scouts call it “a beloved Girl Scout tradition that honors girls’ achievements throughout the year.”
The Road to Abilene
In 1974 the management scholar Jerry B. Harvey published “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement.” It begins with a family in Coleman, Texas, playing dominoes. The father-in-law suggests driving 50 miles to Abilene for dinner. “Sounds like a great idea,” says the wife. “Sounds good to me,” says the husband. “Of course I want to go,” says the mother-in-law.
The trip is miserable. Back home, each of them admits that they never wanted to go. Each had gone along with what they thought the others wanted.
Simple Sabotage
On January 17, 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the American wartime intelligence agency, issued the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Part of it told ordinary citizens in occupied countries how to slow down organizations from the inside. “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.'” “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.” “When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.'”
The manual was declassified in 2008.
Shadow IT
American IT departments have a name for technology that employees use without the IT department’s knowledge. They call it shadow IT. According to the research firm Gartner, “41% of employees acquired, modified, or created technology outside of IT’s visibility in 2022.”
Poor Ike
Before Dwight Eisenhower became president, Harry Truman imagined the general at the president’s desk. “He’ll sit here,” Truman would say, tapping his desk, “and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”
The remark is quoted in Presidential Power (1960), a book by the political scientist Richard Neustadt.
The Lines
In the early 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch asked students at Swarthmore College to take what they thought was a vision test. They had to say which of three lines matched the length of another line. The answer was obvious. But the other people in the room were Asch’s assistants, and on some rounds they all gave the same wrong answer out loud.
About 75 percent of the real participants went along with the wrong answer at least once.
Change We Can Believe In
Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 under the slogan “Change we can believe in.” It appeared on his banners, podiums and posters.
On election night, November 4, 2008, he spoke in Grant Park in Chicago. “But tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
The Voluntary Metric System
On December 23, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act. It created a U.S. Metric Board. Conversion was voluntary.
The board was abolished in 1982. Americans still buy gasoline by the gallon, measure height in feet and inches, and give the weather in degrees Fahrenheit.
The Dollar Coin
In 1979 the United States began issuing a one-dollar coin with the portrait of Susan B. Anthony. The coin was widely confused with the quarter. It “received an overwhelmingly negative reception from the public.”
Production for circulation was suspended in 1981. The dollar bill stayed. The Anthony design was officially retired in 2000.
If It Ain’t Broke
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter’s budget director, is credited with popularizing the saying. In May 1977 the magazine Nation’s Business reported that he wanted the federal government to adopt it as a motto.
Lance explained: “That’s the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing things that are broken.”