How Will You Measure Your Life? - Harvard Business Review

How Will You Measure Your Life?

http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1

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July 2010

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

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Harvard Business School’s Christensen teaches aspiring MBAs how to apply management and innovation theories to build stronger companies. But he also believes that these models can help people lead better lives. In this article, he explains how, exploring questions everyone needs to ask: How can I be happy in my career? How can I be sure that my relationship with my family is an enduring source of happiness? And how can I live my life with integrity?

The answer to the first question comes from Frederick Herzberg’s assertion that the most powerful motivator isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute, and be recognized. That’s why management, if practiced well, can be the noblest of occupations; no others offer as many ways to help people find those opportunities. It isn’t about buying, selling, and investing in companies, as many think.

The principles of resource allocation can help people attain happiness at home. If not managed masterfully, what emerges from a firm’s resource allocation process can be very different from the strategy management intended to follow. That’s true in life too: If you’re not guided by a clear sense of purpose, you’re likely to fritter away your time and energy on obtaining the most tangible, short-term signs of achievement, not what’s really important to you.

And just as a focus on marginal costs can cause bad corporate decisions, it can lead people astray. The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. You don’t see the end result to which that path leads. The key is to define what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

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One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.

For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.

Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.

My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is

Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People? - Harvard Business Review

Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People?

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/should-leaders-focus-on-results-or-on-people/

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Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People?

by Matthew Lieberman  |   8:00 AM December 27, 2013

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A lot of ink has been spilled on people’s opinions of what makes for a great leader. As a scientist, I like to turn to the data.  In 2009, James Zenger published a fascinating survey of 60,000 employees to identify how different characteristics of a leader combine to affect employee perceptions of whether the boss is a “great” leader or not. Two of the characteristics that Zenger examined wereresults focus and social skills. Results focus combines strong analytical skills with an intense motivation to move forward and solve problems.  But if a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%. Social skills combine attributes like communication and empathy. If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of the time — a paltry 12%.

However, for leaders who were strong in both results focus and in social skills, the likelihood of being seen as a great leader skyrocketed to 72%.

Social skills are a great multiplier.  A leader with strong social skills can leverage the analytical abilities of team members far more efficiently. Having the social intelligence to predict how team members will work together will promote better pairings.  Often what initially appear to be task-related difficulties turn out to be interpersonal problems in disguise.  One employee may feel devalued by another or think that she is doing all the work while her partner loafs – leading both partners putting in less effort to solve otherwise solvable problems. Socially skilled leaders are better at diagnosing and treating these common workplace dilemmas.

So how many leaders are rated high on both results focus and social skills?  If this pairing produces especially effective leaders, companies should have figured this out and promoted people to leadership positions accordingly, right?  Not hardly.  David Rock, director of the Neuroleadership Institute, and Management Research Group recently conducted a survey to find out the answer.  They asked thousands of employees to rate their bosses on goal focus (similar to results focus) and social skills to examine how often a leader scored high on both.  The results are astonishing.  Less than 1% of leaders were rated high on both goal focus and social skills.

Why would this be?  As I describe in my book, Social: Why our brains are wired to connect, our brains have made it difficult to be both socially and analytically focused at the same time.  Even though thinking social and analytically don’t feel radically different, evolution built our brain with different networks for handling these two ways of thinking.  In the frontal lobe, regions on the outer surface, closer to the skull, are responsible for analytical thinking and are highly related to IQ.  In contrast, regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch, support social thinking.  These regions allow us to piece together a person’s thoughts, feelings, and goals based on what we see from their actions, words, and context.

Here’s the really surprising thing about the brain. These two networks function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got more active, the more the other one got quieter.  Although there are some exceptions, in general, engaging in one of the kinds of thinking makes it harder to engage in the other kind.  Its safe to say that in business, analytical thinking has historically been the coin of the realm — making it harder to recognize the social issues that significantly affect productivity and profits.  Moreover, employees are much more likely to be promoted to leadership positions because of their technical prowess.  We are thus promoting people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.

How can we do better?  For one, we should give greater weight to social skills in the hiring and promotion process.  Second, we need to create a culture that rewards using both sides of the neural seesaw.  We may not be able to easily use them in tandem, but knowing that there is another angle to problem solving and productivity will create better balance in our leaders.

Finally, it may be possible to train our social thinking so that it becomes stronger over time. Social psychologists are just at the beginning stages of examining whether this kind of training will bear fruit.  One exciting prospect, one that would make the training fun, is the recent finding that reading fiction seems to temporarily strengthen these mental muscles.  Wouldn’t that be great — if readingCatcher in the Rye or the latest Grisham novel were the key to larger profits?

More blog posts by Matthew Lieberman

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Dirty money - The Economist

Dirty money

Rich smell

The forum for rich countries issues an overdue mea culpa

Dec 21st 2013  | From the print edition

THE leakage of wealth from poor countries through tax evasion, money laundering and other misdeeds is becoming an ever bigger worry for those who want poor countries to get rich. Global Financial Integrity calculates that such “illicit financial flows” have increased sharply over the past decade and may now be $1 trillion a year or more. Even experts who question the campaigning group’s methodology accept that outflows probably exceed incoming aid and investment combined.

Big rich countries often accuse small offshore financial centres, such as Jersey and the Cayman Islands, of acting as willing conduits for dodgy money. The minnows say they are being bullied: big hypocrites should clean up their own acts first. This case is bolstered by a damning report on its own members by none other than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based club of industrialised countries.

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The report is harshest in its assessment of how international money-laundering standards crafted by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) are implemented. Only 12 of the OECD’s 34 members were fully or largely compliant with a majority of the standards that recent peer reviews have set on customer due diligence and record keeping. Penalties for banks with poor controls are (America apart) mostly feeble. Anonymous shell companies are easier to set up in the OECD (especially in America) than in tax havens. Barely any countries apply the FATF rules to non-financial “gatekeepers”, such as lawyers and incorporation agents, who play an important role in setting up opaque ownership structures.

The rich countries also score poorly on recovering and returning assets looted by kleptocrats and their clans. They repatriated a mere $147m between 2010 and 2012. (To be fair, proving that assets are ill-gotten is hard in places where they tend to be parked, such as Britain and Switzerland.)

The report could have been tougher still. Strong resistance from the OECD’s constituents and some secretariat officials repeatedly delayed its publication and diluted its content. In particular, a section on “transfer mispricing”—trade between related parties, such as two companies in a multinational group, designed to hoodwink tax authorities or manipulate markets—was removed after the OECD’s tax division complained. It was apparently worried about maintaining consensus on an overhaul of international corporate tax.

Fortunately, Canada, Australia and other countries that fared poorly in the international comparisons (see chart) failed in their efforts to have them all taken out. They had argued that such rankings would not reflect improvements made since their last peer reviews. Outside experts counter that these have been modest at best.

Some real progress has been made. Britain, for instance, now backs public registers of corporate ownership. A transatlantic consensus is building on the automatic exchange of tax information. But big rich countries still like to portray themselves as leaders in the fight against black money. In fact they are laggards. In 2014 they should practise what they preach.

From the print edition: International

The Universe Without a Big Bang? --Intriguing New Equations Show a "Phased" Creation - Daily Galaxy

The Universe Without a Big Bang? --Intriguing New Equations Show a "Phased" Creation

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/12/the-universe-created-without-a-big-bang-intruiging-new-equations-show-a-phased-creation-when-time-and-space-are-heated-a.html?utm_content=buffer67850&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer#more

December 11, 2013

The Universe Without a Big Bang? --Intriguing New Equations Show a "Phased" Creation

When time and space are heated, an expanding universe can emerge, without requiring anything like a “Big Bang”. This phase transition between empty space and an expanding universe containing mass has now been mathematically described by a research team at the Vienna University of Technology, together with colleagues from Harvard, the MIT and Edinburgh. The idea behind this result is a remarkable connection between quantum field theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Everybody knows of the transitions between liquid, solid and gaseous phases. But also time and space can undergo a phase transition, as the physicists Steven Hawking and Don Page pointed out in 1983. They calculated that empty space can turn into a black hole at a specific temperature.

Can a similar process create a whole expanding universe such as ours? Daniel Grumiller from the Vienna University of Technology looked into this, together with colleagues from the USA and Great Britain. Their calculations show that there is indeed a critical temperature at which an empty, flat spacetime turns into an expanding universe with mass. “The empty spacetime starts to boil, little bubbles form, one of which expands and eventually takes up all of spacetime”, explains Grumiller.

For this to be possible, the universe has to rotate – so the recipe for creating the universe is “apply heat and stir”. However, the required rotation can be arbitrarily small. In a first step, a spacetime with only two spatial dimensions was considered. “But there is no reason why the same should not be true for a universe with three spatial dimensions”, says Grumiller.

Our own universe does not seem to have come into existence this way. The phase-transition model is not meant to replace the theory of the Big Bang. “Today, cosmologists know a lot about the early universe – we are not challenging their findings. But we are interested in the question, which phase transitions are possible for time and space and how the mathematical structure of spacetime can be described” says Grumiller.

The new theory is the logical next step after the so called “AdS-CFT correspondence”, a conjecture put forward in 1997, which has strongly influenced fundamental physics research ever since. It describes a peculiar connection between theories of gravity and quantum field theories – two areas which, at first glance, do not have much in common. In certain limiting cases, according to AdS-CFT correspondence, statements from quantum field theories can be translated into statements concerning gravitational theories and vice versa. This is almost as surprising as the idea of making statements about a stone falling to the ground by actually calculating the temperature of a hot gas. Two completely different areas are being connected – but it works.

In this kind of correspondence, the quantum field theory is always described in one fewer dimension than the gravitational theory. This is called “holographic principle”. Similar to a two dimensional hologram which can depict a three dimensional object, a quantum field theory with two spatial dimensions can describe a physical situation in three spatial dimensions.

To do this, the gravitational calculations usually have to be done in an exotic kind of geometry – in so-called “Anti-de-Sitter-spaces”, which are quite different from the flat geometry we are used to. However, it has been suspected for a while, that there may be a similar version of the “holographic principle” for flat spacetimes. But for a long time there haven’t been any models showing this.

Last year, Daniel Grumiller and colleagues established such a model (in two spatial dimensions, for simplicity). This led to the current question; phase transitions in quantum field theories are well known. But for symmetry reasons this would mean that gravitational theories should exhibit phase transitions too.

“At first, this was a mystery for us”, says Daniel Grumiller. “This would mean a phase transition between an empty spacetime and an expanding universe. To us, this sounded extremely implausible.” But the calculations showed exactly that. “We are only beginning to understand these remarkable correspondence relations”, says Daniel Grumiller. Which new ideas about our own universe can be derived from this, is hard to say – only spacetime will tell.

The image at the top of the page illustrates the cosmic distance ladder astronomers use to measure the expansion rate of the universe, as well as its size and age. The cosmic distance ladder, symbolically shown here in this artist's concept, is a series of stars and other objects within galaxies that have known distances. 

The Daily Galaxy via http://www.tuwien.ac.at/

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Global outlook: US rebound is key to prospects - Financial Times

Global outlook: US rebound is key to prospects

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December 23, 2013 8:27 pm

Global outlook: US rebound is key to prospects

By FT reporters

©Bloomberg

A detail of the Federal Reserve building in Washington

It is the year of the taper in 2014. By outlining a timetable for scaling back its third round of monetary stimulus starting in January, the US Federal Reserve believes that the world’s largest economy is strong enough to slowly switch off its life-support machine.

This has implications across the globe. If all goes to plan, US demand will pick up the slack in the global economy and suck in exports from across the globe.

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• Bernanke puts the Fed on autopilot

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• EU-US trade tussle brews in beer industry
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• Brazil consumer confidence falls to lowest since 2010
• Global high-yield corporate debt booms

But there are potential pitfalls. For some emerging economies, any reversal of capital inflows further exposes the need for reforms that they will be reluctant to undertake during election years.

The eurozone recovery is fragile at best. In both the currency bloc and the US, disinflationary pressures are evident as wages remain stagnant even if activity is picking up. All this alongside uncertainty over which reforms Beijing will prioritise and what that means for Chinese growth will make 2014 a year with plenty of economic obstacles to negotiate.

US: By Robin Harding in Washington

For the past four years, analysts have predicted an imminent acceleration in the US economy, and got it wrong. The mediocre record is growth of 2.5 per cent in 2010, 1.8 per cent in 2011, 2.8 per cent in 2012 and something around 2 per cent in 2013.

But, undeterred, forecasters say 2014 really will be a year of growth, and they are more confident than ever. The Federal Reserve expects a level of 3 per cent; the Wall Street consensus is a little lower.

“Growth is picking up and unemployment is going down,” said Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund. “So all of that gives us a much stronger outlook for 2014, which brings us to raising our forecasts.”

The reason for this optimism is an expectation that headwinds holding back the US economy will abate. Households have made progress deleveraging their balance sheets so they should be able to borrow again; US fiscal policy is broadly settled for the next couple of years and should not drag on growth; the eurozone economy is more stable if not healthy; and housebuilding is on the rise.

With all of that in place, there is reason to hope for an uninterrupted year of growth. The still-high unemployment rate – it is 7 per cent with many more people sitting out of the labour market – leaves enough slack for the economy to expand faster than its trend rate of growth.

Eurozone: By Claire Jones in London

For a currency bloc that faced financial and economic Armageddon in 2012, the European Central Bank’s growth forecast for next year of just 1.1 per cent represents progress.

Unemployment, close to its record at 12.1 per cent, is unlikely to fall sharply next year, while inflation is set to stay well below the central bank’s target of just under 2 per cent.

Much will depend on whether business investment and consumption pick up, especially in Germany. The region’s largest economy is expected to run close to full capacity and rising confidence among consumers suggests that they could start spending more. Yet all-important business investment remains weak.

And a lack of reform in other large economies is a worry. Spain may have made progress with labour reform, but there are concerns that Italy and France, the bloc’s second- and third-largest economies, have not done enough.

The banking system remains weak and the ECB must balance ensuring that its health check of the sector is tough enough to be credible, while avoiding another market panic. A stronger euro would complicate matters by making much-needed exports less competitive.

If growth disappoints or disinflation worsens, expect the ECB to act. Some believe 2014 will be the year when the central bank resorts to quantitative easing. At present, this is an outside option – a cut in deposit rates or more offers of cheap longer-term loans are more likely in the short term.

China: By Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing

Having spent 2013 consolidating his power, 2014 is the year in which Xi Jinping, China’s president since March, will begin implementing his economic policy agenda in earnest.

Mr Xi wants, among other things, to give non-state companies more freedom to expand their businesses; make it harder for local government to rack up debts; and to speed up the deregulation of interest rates. He wants to give greater play to market forces in the belief that China’s government-led growth model is running out of steam.

Investors have reacted favourably to his plans, but implementation is fraught with challenges. China’s economic outlook for next year will hinge in no small part on whether Mr Xi pushes for difficult reforms first or instead goes for easy options.

In the latter case, it would cost the government very little to allow non-state companies to invest in a wider array of sectors, from banking to energy. Such easier reforms tend also to be more pro-growth. Harder reforms, such as capping local government debt, are bound to run into opposition and immediately limit growth.

The evidence is mixed. Mr Xi has made more progress on easier reforms, like relaxing the one-child policy. At the same time he has let money market rates rise, a move needed to rein in debt accumulation but one that could damp growth next year.

Japan: By Ben McLannahan in Tokyo

It is hard to look beyond April. An increase in consumption tax from 5 per cent to 8 per cent, effective that month, is expected to do damage. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg predict private consumption will drop by almost a tenth from the first to the second quarters, causing the whole economy to shrink at an annualised rate of almost 4 per cent.

If so, it could be the first slippage in the world’s third-largest economy since Shinzo Abe returned to power as prime minister just over a year ago. It might also vindicate those of his advisers who argued against the rise.

Japan’s broader recovery could survive the hit, though. In 2013, real growth of about 1.8 per cent was underpinned by a powerful combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus and in 2014 the same forces could kick in again. Regulatory reforms, too, could have a role to play.

But in November, the government will have to rule on another consumption tax increase, to 10 per cent, for October 2015. The International Monetary Fund says that step is vital if Japan is to get a grip on its debt, almost two and half times the size of the economy. If growth is knocked by the first rise, Mr Abe, facing a party leadership election in September 2015 – may find it easy to push back the second.

Emerging markets: By Delphine Strauss in London

Emerging markets spent much of 2013 in the shadow of the US Federal Reserve’s plans to start scaling back its monetary stimulus. Now the tapering plan is announced, another indiscriminate sell-off is unlikely; but investors remain wary of the structural challenges facing countries that have delayed reforms.

Those that can take advantage of a recovery in the US and other developed economies are likely to do best, such as Mexico, or countries with competitive manufacturing sectors in central and eastern Europe.

However, the effect of stronger US growth will be diluted if it leads the Fed to reduce its stimulus faster than expected. The economies that previously borrowed heavily from abroad to fund growth may struggle, especially since several of those seen as most vulnerable are entering election periods that may hinder reforms.

In Brazil, the government faces inflationary pressures and will be unwilling to address its budget deficit as presidential elections approach. India, Indonesia and Turkey may also be reluctant to tackle reforms as they go to the polls against a much tougher economic backdrop than during previous elections.

But a bigger risk may be that of spontaneous political upheaval. In the past month, anti-government protests have spilled on to the streets in Ukraine, Thailand and Turkey and in many countries, middle-class voters are ever more ready to express dissatisfaction over higher prices, stagnating incomes, political repression or corruption. Yet they may have come to expect faster growth rates than emerging markets can sustain.

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Zuckerberg Selling $2.3 Billion of Facebook Stock - TIME

Zuckerberg Selling $2.3 Billion of Facebook Stock

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He's using most of the windfall to cover taxes.

By Noah RaymanDec. 19, 20131 Comment

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will sell about $2.3 billion worth of shares in the company, slightly reducing his stake and voting power at the social network company, Facebook said Thursday.

Zuckerberg will sell 41.4 million shares as part of the firm’s stock offering of 70 million Class A common shares, reducing his voting power to 62.8 percent from 65.2 percent, according to a public filing by the company. The filing says Zuckerberg will use most of the windfall to pay taxes connected to his exercising an option to buy 60 million Class B common stock, the majority of which is being converted to Class A stock and sold in this offering, the filing said.

Venture capitalist and board member Marc Andreessen will also sell some 1.6 million shares worth about $89 million, and Facebook will sell another 27 million shares.

Facebook’s stock has doubled this year and closed Wednesday at $55.57.

Read more: Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen Selling Stock | TIME.com http://business.time.com/2013/12/19/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-selling-stock/#ixzz2oSqC2b00

The 'war on Christmas': Did Lincoln start it ? - CNN

The 'war on Christmas': Did Lincoln start it?

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/23/opinion/frum-war-on-christmas/index.html?sr=fb122413christmaswar10p

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• David Frum: Lincoln, like many in 1834, didn't observe Christmas as an official holiday
• He says in late 19th century, Americans began to observe Christmas as a public holiday
• Early Americans kept a sharp separation of church and state, Frum says
• Frum: "War on Christmas" flap a reaction to a perceived threat to folkway, not religion

Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, is a contributing editor at The Daily Beast. He is the author of eight books, including a new novel, "Patriots," and a post-election e-book, "Why Romney Lost." Frum was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002.

(CNN) -- In 1834, Illinois voted whether to adopt Christmas as a legal holiday. Among those voting "nay" was the young Abraham Lincoln.

In 1834, Lincoln had not yet grown out of his atheist phase, but the young Lincoln's lack of faith in God -- and his lifelong disbelief in the divinity of Christ -- does not explain his vote. In 1834, a vote against Christmas was a safe, even a conventional vote.

Not a single state in the Union closed its offices for Christmas on December 25 in 1834. Lincoln marked his first Christmas as President, in December 1861, by holding a Cabinet meeting in the morning and a dinner party in the evening. The Lincoln family never had a White House tree and sent no Christmas cards.

Nobody was much shocked by these omissions.

The public Christmas as Americans know it today did not take form until late in the 19th century. George Washington issued a proclamation on Thanksgiving, but he never made any statement about Christmas (or Easter for that matter). The first state to recognize Christmas as a holiday was Alabama, in 1836, but the North and especially New England resisted. Not until 1856 did Massachusetts accept Christmas as a holiday. The federal government took until 1870 to follow.

David Frum

There's debate on the point, but it seems that Benjamin Harrison was the first president to allow a Christmas tree inside the White House in 1889.

The tradition of lighting a tree on the White House grounds commenced with Calvin Coolidge in 1923. Dwight Eisenhower sent the first White House Christmas cards. Eisenhower's cards, however, were always determinedly "seasonal." It waited until John F. Kennedy in 1963 to send a card that depicted a nativity scene.

This late flowering of Christmas observance reflects two facts about Christmas that seldom get much attention in our public debates about the "war on Christmas."

In its first century, the national government practiced a separation of church and state far sharper than anything Americans would accept today.

One example: From its founding in 1775, the federal post office delivered mail on Sundays. As evangelical forms of Christianity spread after 1800, the new denominations demanded an end to this desecration of the Sabbath. Some postmasters took it upon themselves to close operations. In response, Congress voted in 1810to require all postmasters to work at least one hour on Sunday, on pain of losing their positions.

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The Americans of the founding generations insisted upon separation of church and state not because they were irreligious, but precisely because so many of them were so very intensely religious. Because religion mattered so much to early Americans, so did religious differences.

Calvinists and Baptists, Methodists and Catholics, the grandest Boston rector and the rawest frontier preacher disagreed, sometimes to the point of outright violence. Anti-Catholic riots ripped apart Boston, Philadelphia and Bath, Maine, between the 1830s and 1850s.

These contending denominations could, however, agree at least that they did not want a remote government in Washington favoring some religious practices over others. Better to deliver the mail on Sunday than debate who was right about the Sabbath. Better to issue no religious proclamations than let presidents pick and choose which holy days to mark and how to mark them.

A second fact also explains the coolness of the early national government to Christianity: the keen awareness of many 19th century Christians of the non-Christian origins of many Christmas traditions.

Christmas is celebrated near the date of the old Roman holiday of Saturnalia. Gift-giving on the day was also a Roman tradition. The Christmas tree, the hanging of wreaths and house-to-house caroling hark back to the pre-Christian German holiday of Yule.

Calvinists had abandoned their outright ban on Christmas observance on the late 17th century. But many Protestant denominations retained a lingering suspicion of the holiday until deep into the 19th century.

Two changes made possible the coalescing of an official Christmas holiday over the 40 years from Calvin Coolidge's outdoor Christmas tree to John F. Kennedy's sacral Christmas card: The fading of distinctions between Christians and the decline of theology within Christianity.

The once all-crucial distinctions between Calvinists and Arminians (whose beliefs came from Dutch reformist Jacobus Arminius) and between even Protestants and Catholics have blurred. The once-vivid mistrust of trees and tinsel and burning logs has vanished, as American Christianity evolved away from a creed in which people believed and into a set of practices that people did. If Christians decorate trees, then tree decorating must be Christian -- no matter how or why the custom started and what the custom meant to the people who started it.

Devout Christian believers can still be counted in the millions of course. Surrounding them, however, is a larger and more nebulous group for whom what was once a faith has become a folkway. For them, a Christmas tree or a nativity scene is less a declaration of individual belief than it is an expression of group identity.

Many Americans feel this group identity to be under threat by changes in recent years.

When they champion "Christmas as it was," they do not mean "Christmas as it was for George Washington or Abraham Lincoln" and much less "Christmas as it was for Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards." They mean, "Christmas as it was when I was young."

That is why we have eruptions such as last week's flap over the whiteness of Santa Claus. If your Christmas celebrates the appearance of God Himself in the form of a human baby, it won't have a lot of room for a gift-giving elf and flying reindeer. But if Santa is at most tangential to the Christmas of faith, he is utterly central to the Christmas of folkway.

It is the Christmas of folkway that is the Christmas so passionately defended by those who talk about "the war on Christmas."

The Christmas of Santa and Rudolph, and trees and stockings, and candy canes and "Merry Christmas" greetings began to be most publicly celebrated in the United States only after -- and only because -- the religious impetus for the holiday had already dwindled away.