Isn’t it odd that something so highly valued, and universally pursued, can turn out to be so elusive?

Some individuals are said to be successful. There are books on how you, too, can attain success.

And yet, even the dictionary writers find themselves writing in circles. “Successful” is defined as “resulting or terminating in success.”

Your promotion for this evening indicates that I am going to refer to experience in government, other countries, “communications and the mediated life, primary and secondary education, John Carver’s governance theories, and general semantics” in covering this topic in about 45 minutes.

We’ll see.

Let’s start with general semantics.

My father was a psychologist and research scientist who devoted his life to helping others in a variety of ways.

One of those ways, for which he is probably least well known, involved psychological counseling for patients with the usual array of personal problems.

A common condition, he noticed, was a measure of depression. And the more he counseled depressed individuals the more he noticed that there seemed to be a pattern to their problems.

He observed that, as he put it, “Humans are the only animals able to talk themselves into difficulties that would not otherwise exist.”

This is illustrative of his interest in general semantics, and his helping to create what became the International Society for General Semantics.

It’s impossible to do justice to general semantics in one brief evening’s presentation, especially one covering a number of other subjects as well.

The seminal work is a near-impenetrable tomb by Polish count Alfred Korzybski entitled Science and Sanity. There are dozens of interpretive works, including my father’s People in Quandaries, still in print 55 years after its first publication. The principles of general semantics have been usefully applied in virtually every field and profession from anthropology to zoology.

So let me say, simply, that general semantics involves the study of the relationship between language and human behavior. It offers tools to help us think in a much more sophisticated and observant way about the thinking our language does for us. You might think of it as applying the principles of good science, the scientific method, to everyday life. This includes how we go about making and recording observations, the ability to distinguish facts from inferences from hypotheses and opinions, and the precision we apply to our statements.

So what does general semantics have to do with depression?

Dad described depression as the final stage of what he called the IFD disease.

The first stage of the IFD disease, the I, stands for “idealism.” He noticed that all of his patients were aspiring to unrealistically high goals.

The F stands for frustration. To fall short of one’s ideals produces a sense of frustration.

The D is for demoralization. An unending pattern of continual frustration ultimately leads to a sense of hopelessness, depression, or demoralization.

So let’s go back to those ideals, or goals. How can they be unrealistically high? Dad identified three ways.

One is that a goal may be highly valued. Everything rides on its being attained. A young woman in a large high school may want, more than anything, to be elected homecoming queen – or to be admitted to Harvard. When that ideal is not reached the result can be devastating.

A second way an ideal can be high is that it is mathematically unlikely. Of course, this could be the case with the homecoming and Harvard examples just mentioned. It certainly is the case with a hope of winning a lottery.

But the third, and most common, way in which an ideal can be unrealistically high has to do with the language used to describe it.

General semantics helps us see the difference between words that involve specific objects, or measurable phenomena, and words that may be described as non-sense; not nonsense, but non-sense. That is, they have no external referent. There is no way of observing, or measuring, whether the thing or phenomena they seem to refer to exists or not.

To speak of “this chair” invokes a reference something those of us with normal sight can nod and say we see. That it is in fact made up mostly of space containing very tiny particles engaged in very rapid motion is simply to describe it at the molecular level. And one of the things general semantics enables us to do is to identify these so-called levels of abstraction – even when our language provides us every incentive to treat them as identical.

It is revealing how many of our ideals are expressed in a non-sense vocabulary. Teenagers, if not all of us, want to be “popular,” or “attractive.” We all want to be “happy.” Young professionals may want to be “rich.”

We could examine any one of those words, but let’s just look at “rich.” What is rich? How much is rich? Columnist Molly Ivins once described the Texas motto as, “More is better and too much is not enough.” What many who seek to become rich discover is that too much is never enough. No matter how much they earn there is always someone who is earning more.

And they may be a part of the unfortunate crowd that discovers the capacity to spend more than one earns bears little or no relationship to income.

How might we modify this non-sense word, “rich,” into something more precise?

A recent high school or college graduate might say, “My goal is to get a job within six months of graduation that pays at least $35,000 a year including benefits.”

Such an ideal might still suffer from being too high in other ways: too highly valued, or mathematically unlikely. It may be a silly or even counter-productive goal. The better choice might be a job with lower pay that is more rewarding in other ways, or that provides opportunities for more rapid advances in pay.

But it no longer suffers from being too high because it is non-sense and unmeasurable. It is no longer unattainable because it is non-existent, lacking an external referent.

If the graduate gets such a job four months after graduation she meets the goal. If eight months after graduation she does not. If it pays $37,000 she meets the goal. If it pays $32,000 she does not.

She is no longer caught in a verbal web of her own making, no longer frustrated with her inability to attain an ideal so vague that there is no way of knowing whether anyone attains it or not.

Or suppose your ambition is to become a good golfer. What on earth does that mean? And golf is an easily measurable skill.

I once had a golf pro as a father-in-law. He used to say, “If you play golf in the 90s you don’t have any business playing golf. And if you play golf in the 70s you don’t have any business.”

His was a much more precise approach. Rather than “good golfer” a more precise and measurable goal would be, for example, “I want to be able to shoot 90 or below four out of every five times I play 18 holes on my town’s public golf course.”

Now consider the word “success,” from the title of this talk. If anything, it suffers even more than “rich” or “good golfer” from the lack of external measures.

How would we know if we’d ever been successful?

We wouldn’t. We couldn’t. Success is a classic example of a non-sense word.

No matter how much money we earn, awards we win, promotions we enjoy, publicity we receive, or holiday greeting cards that come our way, we can never be “successful.” If that is our ideal we are doomed to a lifetime of frustration and, ultimately, demoralization. We will have injected our minds with the IFD disease.

As it happens, we have built an entire economy on the profits to be made from the spread and manipulation of the IFD disease.

For most of our species' time on earth survival has depended on our grasp of reality. We navigated by the stars. We could tell the healing herbs from the poisonous. What dwelling places would provide the best protection from the weather and wild animals.

There was religion, and legends, and travelling minstrels. But for the most part we lived in the here and now.

During the last 80 years we have increasingly drifted away from that reality. We live and work in climate controlled buildings. Food comes from stores. Water comes from faucets.

And an ever-increasing proportion of our sensory stimulation comes from a variety of forms of media.

I mentioned 80 years because that was roughly the time of radio. But even radio has changed from a single box in most homes to something that may be in every room of a home, automobiles and tractors, offices, and even shirt pockets and purses.

Add to radios the input we get from television – broadcast, cable and satellite – videotapes and DVD. The music from audio tapes and CDs, both from speakers in the home and from the earphones worn by pedestrians. Video games – special video game players, computer games, and the handheld versions. And who can forget the Internet, now a source of distribution of video and audio material as well as text and pictures.

Put it all together and you have to concede we have created, if not a different species from the homo sapiens of 2000 years ago, at least a radically altered form of life.

Imagine for a moment that this input came to us, not through the air, but as a result of electrodes placed on our skulls by the government to reprogram our thinking against our will. We would characterize this project, and properly so, as something much more invasive and offensive than anything attempted by the Nazis or Soviet communists decades ago.

Of course, the reprogramming can take place as easily, and less offensively, through the air. The electrodes are no longer necessary. This is an example of what we mean by “wireless,” such as the TV remote that uses infrared signals rather than a cable.

What makes today’s human programming acceptable is that it is a matter of what we call “marketplace forces” rather than governmental decree. We have been manipulated into choosing to be manipulated, but we can be characterized, nonetheless, as having chosen to be manipulated.

We like it. We stand in line. We save our money to buy the equipment – or charge it on a credit card when we can’t afford it. We choose to spend our time using it rather than doing the other things we might have chosen to do – including interacting with “reality.”

Indeed, I’m not confident of our capacity to fully distinguish reality from fantasy anymore. A family planning a vacation may choose between visiting a rugged national park or forest or going to Disneyland as if they were equals. Moreover, presented as a choice they are likely to choose the artificial over the real.

Promoters are currently trying to sell the Iowa City, Iowa, area on the idea of building an artificial rain forest at a public cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. A part of the sales pitch is that it will improve tourism in Iowa – on the assumption that is not an oxymoron.

Not wishing to dismiss the idea out of hand, I decided to test it on a teenage drugstore clerk in Washington, D.C., during a recent trip.

“Would you ever come to visit Iowa?” I asked.

It was clear by her reaction that she didn’t even know enough about Iowa to confuse it with Idaho and Ohio.

“What if we had a rainforest?” I inquired.

She had absolutely no interest in a rain forest. She would rather visit Disneyland, she said, which she knew to be in California.

“But this is an artificial rain forest,” I continued. “It will be entirely indoors.”

“Oh,” she said, “well that would be different. I’d like to see that.”

I was confused. “Why,” I continued, “would you be interested in an artificial rain forest, but you would have no interest in seeing a real one?”

“Ugh,” she said. “The bugs. I wouldn’t want to be out in nature where there might be bugs.”

As it turns out, one of the problems with our fake rain forest proposal is that there will be bugs; diseases from the tropics that are of some concern to local physicians.

But I didn’t pursue the subject. I just paid her for the Washington Post and made way for the next customer.

Soap opera actors report that when their characters get married, or have babies, wedding or baby shower gifts arrive at the studio for the character. That suggests at least some disconnect between fantasy and reality in the minds of those members of the audience.

It’s a confusion that affected even someone as sophisticated about such matters as a president of the United States with years of experience in the film industry: Ronald Reagan.

A University of California professor, in a “60 Minutes” piece called “Ronald Reagan: The Movie,” documented a number of instances in which the president told stories as true which involved events that never occurred outside of a movie.

Asked by the interviewer whether he thought Reagan was deliberately stretching the truth to make a point, or whether he was genuinely confused, the professor first replied, “Which would be worse?”

But he went on to say he had concluded Reagan actually believed the events had occurred.

Ask yourself if you could pass this test.

For example, how much of what you know about the events we refer to collectively as “Watergate” has come from movies like “All the President’s Men” or “Nixon”? How much has come from the televised Senator Ervin hearings, reading the transcript, newspaper stories or historical accounts? And can you tell the difference?

Once we have deliberately placed ourselves in this mediated world it becomes much easier to manipulate our behavior – to some corporation’s advantage.

First, as with any good cult reprogramming, we must have our self-esteem and prior identity stripped from us. This is done by presenting heroes to us whom we are expected to, but cannot possibly, emulate. They are the "ideal” in our IFD disease.

No man can be as handsome, physically fit, attractive to women, musically or athletically skilled as those who populate his mediated world – especially when stunt doubles are used and special effects are added.

The impact on women is perhaps most severe, and has been spelled out by many authors, including Pipher’s, Reviving Ophelia. Women trying to look like the models in magazines may be trying to emulate a digitally enhanced image that even the model herself never looked like.

The frustration and demoralization quickly follow.

What the multi-hundred-billion-dollar advertising juggernaut is then able to do, again like any good cult, is to rebuild our self-esteem to its advantage and profit.

We are told that we can be as attractive to the opposite sex as the characters in our mediated world. All we have to do is buy the advertised products.

We can buy our identity. We can be all that the advertising tells us we can be if only we will buy, and identify with, the product. We can be a Pepsi or a Mountain Dew, a Ford Explorer or a Chevy Truck.

In short, we will be known by the companies we keep.

The late communications professor, Rose Goldson, was fond of saying, “Even though we know we are being taken, we are still being taken.”

Today, alas, many of us don’t even know we are being taken.

One of the issues in the Iowa City School District was the presence of Channel One in the junior high classrooms. Channel One is a marketing tool for advertisers wishing to reach the teen market. It bribes schools with free TV receivers and VCRs in exchange for the schools’ commitment to broadcast 12 minutes of programming and commercials each school day.

Some school board members questioned the need to provide even more commercial influence in the lives of young students.

No student, that I can remember, opposed the project. Many supported it. “After all,” they’d say, “What harm is there? We’re not influenced by the commercials.”

And yet these were the same kids who wear Nike shoes, designer jeans, and advertising on their shirts and hats.

They don’t even know they are being taken, and argue vociferously with anyone who suggests that they are.

Have we become “successful” once we have acquired all the products? Is it the case, as the saying has it, that “life is a game in which whoever dies with the most toys wins?”

That’s what the advertisers would like us to believe.

I think we need to look for our values elsewhere, our identities within ourselves, not outside.

But the reference to schools brings us to my third and last exploration of “how would we know if we’d ever been successful.”

It has been said that if you don’t know where you’re going the odds of your ever getting there are very slim.

To make the point I have sometimes asserted that if a manufacturing plant has not had a recent going over by an efficiency expert any relatively bright 10 or 12-year-old, with a single walk through, could propose ways of cutting costs 50 percent.

What do I mean by that?

Are the workers, supervisors and manager dumb or unimaginative? No. They’re busy. They’re busy doing what they are doing. Which is performing, not thinking.

The suggestions from the 12-year-old could as well come from a 55-year-old high school dropout assembly line worker – and do, when they’re asked for. Ask him to think and he will. Ask him to mind his own business and meet the widget quota and he’ll do that.

And so it is with board governance; school boards or any other boards for that matter: Fortune 500 for-profits, non-profits, government commissions, and churches.

John Carver, author and consultant on the matter of boards, describes them as incompetent groups of competent individuals.

In short, board members are no more dumb or unimaginative than blue collar workers. But, like those assembly line workers, they are more focused on the task at hand than thinking about their role and purpose.

Carver says that most boards find themselves somewhere along a continuum that runs from micro-manager to rubber stamp.

To use the school board as the example, the micro-manager board member might be interested in the detail of the daily cafeteria offerings at the high school – without tying that interest to the curriculum, student health, or other potential policy issues. Or she might want to get involved in the contract for school bus tires – perhaps suggesting that her brother-in-law really could use the business.

The rubber stamp school board is an even more common model. It’s what I found when I arrived on our school board.

The superintendent literally chose the items for discussion, and prepared what was called the board’s agenda. She sat at the board members’ bench in the board room during board meetings. She supervised the preparation of the reports to the board, and selected the staff presenter.

What was called the board meeting thereby ended up being a superintendent’s meeting at which the board provided an audience.

Because no board member either objected, or expressed much interest in taking on the tasks, we can be grateful she did the board’s work for it. I am reminded of the lyric to the country song, “If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all.” If it weren’t for the superintendent’s agenda and meeting we would have had no board agenda and meeting at all.

Most people joining a board are a little reluctant to question what appears to them to be the customary practices. They may even be a little intimidated as they find challenge enough in learning how the prior board members seem to do business. The last thing they are going to do is to start asking, “What is the purpose of this board anyway? What are we doing? What are we trying to accomplish? How would we know if we’d ever been successful?”

And so the board’s practices continue on, in John Carver’s words, as the work of an incompetent group of competent people.

Carver has simply brought the observations, and obvious suggestions, to the work of boards that our 12-year-old brought to the factory floor.

John Carver has written many books and articles, and has presented thousands of workshops for hundreds of clients. So my comments are necessarily too summary to give his insights the explanation they warrant.

But, in brief, as Carver has thought it through, he has come to the conclusion that, for starters, there is no place along that continuum, from micro-managing to rubber stamp, that is appropriate for a board. Those who focus on improving the process along that continuum simply come up with better and more efficient ways of doing the wrong things.

What boards ought to be doing, he says, are but two things.

1. They should describe in some detail what they want to prohibit the chief executive officer, or CEO, from doing. (In a school district this is the superintendent.) By way of obvious examples, she should comply with all state and federal laws and regulations, and keep the organization solvent.

2. They should identify the “ends policies” for the organization. Ends policies are what would more commonly be called purposes or goals. This is the hard part.

Most school districts have “mission statements.” And most mission statements are filled with non-sense words without external referents or measurable standards. Examples would include the mission of preparing students to participate in democracy, or in a global economy. Not bad as general language goes, but totally useless in providing either guidance for a CEO or a means of evaluating his performance.

Moreover, these ends policies need to be the work of the board. This is their job. There is no reason not to consult with the superintendent and other staff, college of education professors, and others. But there is a big difference between consultation and rubber stamping what the CEO drafts for the board.

One of our district’s ends policies, not surprisingly, involves measures of student achievement in reading at various grade levels. But it took a lot of talk among board members, and subsequent revision based on public input, to come up with the precise ends policy we have.

Once a board has established the organization’s ends policies, and the executive limitations, the day-to-day administration of the operation is up to the CEO. It’s been characterized as “Go until we say ‘stop,’ not stop until we say ‘go.’”

That is to say, the CEO’s job description is to achieve the ends set for the organization. He or she can do that by any means desired – so long as the executive limitations are not violated. It is not necessary to ask the board’s permission at every turn. When it comes time to evaluate the CEO’s performance the questions are simple: “Were the ends policies achieved?”

When teaching “Law of Electronic Media” at the University of Iowa College of Law I sometimes ask the students, “Is cable television more like the telephone or more like over-the-air broadcasting stations?”

The answer, I subsequently explain, is that that is the wrong question. Analogies do not always provide the best analysis of new technologies, public policy and complex legal issues.

Are we “successful” in our organizations? In our daily lives?

It’s the wrong question. It has no answer. It is non-sense and unmeasurable.

Figure out your ends policies – for your organizations and for your life. Express them in terms that can be measured and tested.

You will be much more likely to reach your destination.

And much less demoralized once you get there.