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SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE HAS PROBABLY DONE THIS BEFORE
Plan with Precedents
Examining precedents helps you uncover what has been done before in similar situations to help you meet present challenges. Precedents may include common steps or shrewd maneuvers, logical decisions or risky bets, strategies or strokes of luck, prompt or last-minute adjustments, great achievements or simple mistakes from the arc of your career, from other people, or even from the grand stage of history itself.
If you are a lawyer, you know that there are binding precedents and persuasive precedents in court cases. Binding precedents are imposed on lower courts by higher courts. In business, or life for that matter, precedents are rarely binding but can often be persuasive.
Planning with precedents requires you to be an amateur historian, a detective, and a hobbyist all in one. Precedents should persuade you one way or the other about how to forecast alternative outcomes and develop a strategy.
For example, you may face a situation in which a competitor is undercutting your pricing for a service or product. Because dropping your price is not an alternative, you look for transactions in which you or others have successfully warded off pricing challenges. You uncover instances in which your competitor failed to meet promised distribution times, a factor important to your customers. You make guaranteed delivery dates a key part of your deals instead of reducing prices. Your customers are convinced and you fight off the pricing threat.
On a larger scale, had the United States paid more attention to the dismal precedent of France in Indochina, it is possible that the Vietnam quagmire would not have occurred and the spread of communism would have been dealt with more effectively and with less bloodshed. Indeed, it is shocking how rarely military leaders seem to consider the failures of previous invasions or attacks. I don’t know enough about the history of Iraq to comprehend what led to such a breakdown in the construction of a civil society there. But some mix of political, military, and intelligence leaders must have failed to fully heed the failures of similar efforts.
This is not to advocate a blind devotion to the past. The rapidly changing nature of contemporary business and life may make knowledge of previous events less relevant, or sometimes irrelevant. Take debt, for example: your parents may have warned you about it, but accumulating reasonable debt may not be such a bad thing for a company or a household. A generation ago, careers played out at one or two companies. Today, switching companies regularly instead of growing within an organization may benefit your career. So using precedents well means identifying the fundamental preparation pattern from similar projects that you can apply to the current task.
Credible precedents are also tools for persuading others about a point of view or strategy. I love to draw lessons from biographies, history books, or film and apply them to my personal and business situations. For example, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is a moving film about the fight for Irish independence from England in the first part of the twentieth century. The film dramatized a range of leadership errors made by the British and the Irish opposition leaders in rural towns. The grassroots errors of the local Irish Republican Army were particularly vivid. Two brothers split over a failure to clearly and persuasively articulate their objectives for a free Ireland. The leaders allowed emotion and innuendo to derail efforts to educate their fellow citizens. The pros and cons of a hard-line, get-out-now or a more conciliatory, gradual approach to the British were never clearly and calmly debated. Both sides on the Irish debate lost their focus on the ultimate objective: a free Ireland.
Fratricide resulted as men and women who thought the treaty to be too conciliatory toward the British turned against the treaty makers and their numerous Irish supporters. The assassination of the great Irish leader Michael Collins symbolized the madness of this civil war. The film’s portrayal of a historical precedent provided me with a persuasive example for clearly articulating objectives and redirecting leaders prone to emotional resolution of contentious problems.
The use of precedents applies to both you and your counterpart. That is, you should examine precedents that inform your situation as well as those that may support or strengthen the position of the other side in a deal or negotiation. Imagine yourself the historian of your type of business situation. Gather as best you can the histories that affect, inform, and empower both you and your audience or adversary. You can walk into your presentation or meeting with the force of history behind you. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic.”
LOTS OF HAIR
Early in my legal career, that unforgettable American musical and cultural moment called Hair came to Baltimore. Baltimore is a charming city, but slightly more conservative than New York. Or, at the time, let’s say a bit more than slightly. Just as I was building a law practice, getting involved with politics, and starting to work with Orioles players, I was faced with the delicate challenge of representing the controversial musical, prior to its opening, against the strident challenges it faced from some ultra-conservative and religious groups in town. I have tried to never champion one point of view without considering all the others, so I wanted to represent Hair in a way that recognized all points of view while respecting the First Amendment rights of the producer, actors, and audience.
Hair had already played in a few cities other than New York. The nudity onstage was making headlines nationally and arousing ire locally. I had no special commitment to the show or to public nudity, but I did love the challenge of my first big First Amendment case. So I embraced the value of precedents, both legal and historical, and there began my commitment to a concept that grew into the second principle—precedents—on the Preparation Principles Checklist.
Two kinds of precedents were relevant here: the traditional legal ones as well as the contemporaneous precedents of what had played out in other cities prior to the arrival of Hair in Baltimore. So first my colleagues and I drafted a concise opinion for the producers of Hair on why the display of the human body in those various scenes was a constitutionally protected expression. But we were very careful to analyze the strategies of other lawyers in other cities. In particular, we focused on how these lawyers presented the case to the public as much as to the courts. And we also focused on the strategies and arguments of lawyers representing those advocating the censorship or halt of the shows.
The idea was to pick the language and presentations from these precedents that would best work to appease public opinion in Baltimore while simultaneously making a strong legal case. We used these precedents, in a sense, as persuaders—the show went on and the actors and actresses performed their scene in the buff. Good precedents persuade you how to deal or negotiate, and they also persuade your audience to listen more closely and possibly even accept an approximation of your proposed terms.
Precedents hold an impressive ability to convince. So you likewise have to be careful not to grasp for or cling to precedents as automatic justifications. It reminds me of that old high school lesson about how correlation is not necessarily causation. Precedents can hold such an uncanny power to convince that audiences very often grab onto them without scrutinizing their relevance or their applicability. When precedents are presented clearly and artfully, they become problem solvers, since many of us are almost wired to accept the power of history and of previous examples. They are very useful preparation tools for clarifying issues and an appropriate course of action.
TALKING A FRIEND BACK TO FINANCIAL REALITY
A well-known professional sports general manager called me one evening. His team was in the middle of a hugely successful playoff run. He was the toast of the game and the national press. He was not only immersed in the day-today operations of his club, but also pleased by the growth of his own value in the executive marketplace. He maintained an external modesty, but you could tell that he was running the risk of overpricing his contract value because of his role in the team’s turnaround.
Not surprisingly, he was calling to seek advice about negotiating a new contract for himself as soon as the season ended. And I immediately realized a case as common in the business of sports as in the business world at large. There was no way an owner or a board of directors or a president would give this fellow the money he thought he deserved. So how do you talk a client or a friend down from his or her financial heights? Well, you use precedents.
So I advised this general manager to caucus his network for contractual precedents; to research them; to brainstorm with his very impressive mind. He may have come up with one or two examples to support his self-image. But I was almost certain that he was intelligent enough to learn from his study of contract precedents both how they might be distinguished and how they might be used against him. He would see that he needed to adjust his goals to stay in the contract ballpark.
In a sense, business is built on precedents—from salaries to mergers and acquisitions. The determination of value—with anomalies like the Internet phenomenon or the ten-year, $250 million contract the Texas Rangers gave to Alex Rodriguez—is based on previous determinations of value. Surpassing previous values or prices requires the assembly of historic and current examples that help rationalize a higher point of agreement.
In this chapter, I look at three people who make precedents a fundamental part of their preparation. Money manager Bill Miller uses precedents from prior investments and historical patterns to determine when to buy or sell big positions in stocks. Firefighter Ann Marie Tierney uses a clearly established set of precedents to keep herself and her team out of harm’s way. And the late journalist and critic Johnny Apple shows that the unlikeliest precedent—be it a meal on another continent or a diplomatic treaty decades ago—can inform a seemingly unrelated story. The fact that precedents are so valuable to people in such diverse fields is the best illustration of their value. And it is not surprising to me that these master preparers are devotees of history. Books on history and biographies sit by their bedsides, fit into their briefcases, and rest on their laps during downtime on airplanes.
Precedents are all about history, and you can learn from the history of your career or the history of certain types of deals or companies in the same way you learn from the great books.
AN UNPRECEDENTED MONEY MANAGER
Bill Miller
Few people in the financial world can claim the accomplishments of Bill Miller. Maybe that is because so few money managers prepare with precedents as devotedly as Bill.
On Halloween 2005, Bill Miller arrived at the office dressed as an oil sheik. He was one of the few famous mutual fund managers who didn’t buy into that year’s runup in energy stocks; as a result, he nearly lost his record streak of fifteen years straight beating the return on the S&P 500; he spoofed himself that Halloween and ended up beating the S&P by the end of the Roman calendar year anyway.
On Halloween 2006, I sat with Bill Miller in a conference room at Legg Mason overlooking Baltimore’s harbor. He was dressed as what he called a “money pimp.” Green shirt, long chains, polyester pants. His staff matched his thoroughly prepared outfitting—tennis stars, debutantes, and Evel Knievel roamed the halls. A lot of preparation goes into Bill Miller’s Halloween parties.
His staff that day was also celebrating Bill’s twenty-five years at Legg Mason. In addition to hanging out with cutting-edge scientists as chairman of the Santa Fe Institute in his spare time, Bill runs Legg Mason Value Trust fund and is the chairman of Legg Mason Capital Management. Altogether, he oversees more than $50 billion in capital that large and small investors pour into his hands to try to make better lives for themselves.
When Bill starts talking about preparation, he throws three quotes at you.
First comes Ben Franklin: By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. I thought legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said it. Bill clarified the origins of the quote by tying it back to Ben.
Next: It is not practice that makes perfect; it is perfect practice that makes perfect.
Third: Average people practice until they can win; professionals practice until they can’t lose.
Bill did a lot of research for this conversation about preparation. And what is most striking is the utter lack of self-seriousness with which he discusses his preparation method and his career. Bill has fun preparing. I imagine the insouciant Ben Franklin did, too. Those of you who equate preparation with drudgery or hoop jumping ought to have the good fortune to work for Bill Miller.
Bill’s most impressive preparation skill is his use of precedents. He applies precedents to setting the pattern of his day, to his hiring and assignment of staff, and most important, to his stock picking. He is regularly thinking through the previous event or decision that might inform the current dilemma.
“Precedents by their nature involve an analysis of your prior behaviors or of someone else’s,” Bill said. “I really spend my day doing that: analyzing investor behavior, analyzing a company’s behavior, analyzing my own tendencies and previous decisions.”
A day in the life of Bill Miller is pretty set in stone these days. He has been picking stocks for nearly three decades, and he has obviously looked at his own patterns and settled on a daily format that produces the best results.
“You have to follow a pattern to make sure you are on top of events that are affecting each of the companies in your portfolio,” Bill explained. “I wake up and check the overseas markets, the major news items, changes in currency rates overnight. From there I go to the newspapers and Bloomberg and the wires. Then the markets open and I try to get a sense of how our positions are behaving that day. Then I do my e-mail. Then I go into the office around 1 P.M. I hold this pattern because I can get more done in the morning alone and I couldn’t prepare in the office because I would keep getting interrupted.”
Bill has analyzed his own routines to determine the best pattern for his day and for his staff. He lets them work in peace in the morning on their research and correspondence and presentations. Then in the afternoon they get together and collaborate.
“This pattern is my preparation template on a daily basis,” Bill said. “It is all a system that has been refined with practice into a seven-day-a-week pattern.”
As far as hiring his well-respected team of analysts and traders, Bill essentially uses himself as an example.
“I am not extremely orderly,” he said with a laugh. “And my analysis of myself got me interested in social psychology and behavioral psychology. We have a psychologist do personality assessments during our analyst training to identify the personality styles and types here. Preparation will play a different role for each person depending on the personality type.”
The application of his own self-awareness to his staffing and training techniques is a simple but innovative use of precedents. Bill knows himself—his strengths, weaknesses, intellectual interests, and personal convictions—as thoroughly as any professional I have met. That self-knowledge, and his reading in relevant fields, has led him to a point where he matches personality templates with job profiles.
But Bill does not limit his employment of behavioral psychology to himself and his employees. The study of precedents of market and investor behavior has allowed him to make hugely successful investments at times when financial markets were collapsing and investors were rushing for the exits.
In 2001, when market panic accompanied the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bill and his team maintained their collective cool and profited on irrational panic. The study of previous market crises like the collapse of 1929 and 1987 and a methodical comparison of market conditions with these prior events allowed Miller to determine that the crisis did not merit its market reaction.
Bill called his use of precedents and social and behavioral psychology one of his fund’s “competitive advantages.”
“Investors overweight dramatic events,” he said. “After 9/11, we bought immediately. In 1987, we determined that the crash was a liquidity implosion, not a failing economy. If liquidity were put back in, the economy and market would be fine. Instead of just acting, we looked at economic conditions during similar events and made our decisions accordingly.”
As for specific stock selection, Bill likewise uses precedents from his own portfolio but also from other disciplines.
In the case of his highly successful investment in the Google initial public offering in 2004, Bill reached out to academia to master the complexities of auction theory. Google structured its IPO as more of an auction than the typical IPO in which an offering price is set and a fixed number of shares are offered for investors to purchase. So Bill sought out an expert in auction theory at the California Institute of Technology. The professor explained the mechanics and nuances of auctions to Bill, preparing him to determine appropriate bid prices and strategy for the investment.
Bill assembled a sort of Google task force: one member of his team focused on Google’s long-term growth strategy; another focused on the economics of search engines; a third studied its financial modeling and forecasting. Together they determined that Google’s opportunity for growth was substantial and that the auction afforded an opportunity to amass a large amount of shares at a discount to intrinsic value.
The task force determined that the poor reception of the Google IPO by the news media was a knee-jerk reaction prompted by Google’s unwillingness to provide a large amount of information to investors, their inclusion of a less than shareholder friendly governance schedule, and their timing of the IPO in the summertime. Also, Google minimized the role of investment banks by structuring the deal as an auction so banks could not guarantee a certain number of shares to their best clients.
“Our determination, primarily from our conversations with the auction theorist, was that there was a big opportunity here if we were willing to sit down and work through it,” Bill said. “We also analyzed another precedent in that we already owned Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo. But we were most reassured by the auction theorist who seemed assured that the structure of the auction would allow you to bid what you thought the stock was worth and expect that return. We went into this extremely well prepared and thought that few others would be taking such a big risk.”
The study of specific stock-picking examples, past economic events and trends, and comparables from other fields has contributed to a stunning return for Bill’s shareholders at the fund. He has set a precedent in his industry in large part because of his own unique but methodical preparation.
THE PRECEDENTS OF FIRE
Ann Marie Tierney
In certain jobs, failure to prepare with precedents can get you killed.
Ann Marie Tierney works for Firestorm Wildland Fire Suppression, a company based in Chico, California. She spends fourteen days in a row in forests and national parks. Sometimes she is fighting controlled fires that the Forest Service or park service set intentionally. Sometimes she and her colleagues are trying to beat back wildfires to save towns and lives.
Ann’s story shows that using precedents entails not simply compiling a list but also judiciously applying it to the challenge of the moment. Ann must quickly select from an established list of eighteen precedents that apply to a sudden crisis caused by raging fire. To use the legal analogy, these are not persuasive but binding precedents. In some jobs, the past is a completely reliable predictor of the future.
On October 2, 2004, Ann and her crew were fighting a fire on government land in the Sequoia Kings National Park in California. It was a “controlled burn”—essentially a “prescription” fire where the National Park Service hires Ann’s company to burn off sections of a forest. The objective is to control forest growth and revitalize the forests.
A treetop in the prescribed area caught fire when the wind carried sparks upward. Some in Ann’s group assembled below the tree to discuss cutting it down because they feared that the tree would fall on them while they were working nearby.
Unfortunately, that fear was realized. A six-foot-long piece of the treetop cracked off and clobbered a firefighter. The impact was so strong that he was partially buried in the ground.
“Precedents didn’t fail us,” Ann said. “It was our negligence. There is a clear precedent not to stand under a leaning tree that is on fire. They stood by the tree for about twenty minutes discussing their strategy. We were telling them to move. Most of us heeded precedent. The guy who didn’t got killed.”
In the firefighting business, you catch what they call “fire fever.” These people have a passion for fighting fires, for understanding fire, for being around it. Its beauty and heat, the outdoors and hard work all attract them.
But they manage their passion with a method. In the wildfire business, there are what professionals call the “10s and 18s.” The 10s are standard firefighting orders. You obey them at all costs; you obey them to stay alive.
The 18s are called “watch-out situations.” They are essentially precedents that forest firefighters have seen enough to know that they will see them again. They include mistakes in judgment and communication, as well as uncontrollable weather situations. It is worth listing them in their entirety here:
1. Fire not scouted and sized up.
2. In country not seen in daylight.
3. Safety zones and escape routes not identified.
4. Unfamiliar with weather and local factors influencing fire behavior.
5. Uninformed on strategy, tactics, and hazards.
6. Instructions and assignments not clear.
7. No communication link with crew members/ supervisor.
8. Constructing fire line without safe anchor point.
9. Building fire line downhill with fire below.
10. Attempting frontal assault on fire.
11. Unburned fuel between you and the fire.
12. Cannot see main fire, not in contact with anyone who can.
13. On a hillside where rolling material can ignite fuel below.
14. Weather is getting hotter and drier.
15. Wind increases and/or changes direction.
16. Getting frequent spot fires across line.
17. Terrain and fuels make escape to safety zones difficult.
18. Taking a nap near the fire line.
The amazing thing about these precedents is how current they are. They are simple, seemingly obvious, and nevertheless a matter of life and death. Ann and her team likely see several of them on every trip into the forest.
“I am not sure how they were narrowed down to eighteen,” Ann said. “But these are the mistakes and events you tend to see. Even the behavior of fire can be narrowed down.”
Even fire, as wild and fierce as it is, can be largely controlled with proper preparation.
Ann points to precedent number 16, spot fires, as one of the most frequent and dangerous situations that she invariably faces. Her team usually uses the technique of drawing a line and maintaining it as the “no-go zone” for the fire. Every effort is made to contain the wildfire behind that line. Essentially, success means that the fire is no longer wild—its containment is the first step toward its elimination.
And in the case of controlled burns, the line is the fundamental premise of that control.
“With a controlled fire, we cut a line so fire can burn up to it but not beyond it,” Ann said. “But embers carry and will ignite, especially if humidity is low and there is natural fuel on the ground. Sometimes it happens right in front of me. You have to run and cut right in front of it before it expands. And at the same time you have to still identify your safe zone.”
So at any one moment, Ann is cutting a line around the spot fire, keeping an eye on her safety zone, and communicating with her team about the conditions of the immediate environment.
Fire can creep or it can go crazy. Wind is usually responsible for the latter. Precedent number 15, “wind increases and/or changes direction,” also seems to state the obvious. We all know that wind seems to have its own mind. But the fact that the team makes this a formal precedent is not stating the obvious. It is respecting the awesome way in which wind and fire go crazy together.
“Wind makes for the most life-threatening situations,” Ann said. “I have had to run through fire before. You get delirious with the intensity of the heat and the smoke.”
But because of an adherence to precedent numbers 5 (uninformed on strategy, tactics, and hazards), 6 (instructions and assignments not clear), and 7 (no communication link), Ann knows that running through fire is the proper thing to do. The warning in number 7, to maintain a constant communication link, is the critical piece. If a teammate tells Ann to run through fire, she heeds their command.
“Because of our communication, we are usually told when the wind is coming,” Ann said. “We know it is just a wall of fire and not the whole blaze. So in this case you rely on someone else to tell you where to find your safety zone.”
The capacity to keep all the precedents in your head at once is the challenge. There are two impediments to that: exhaustion and complacency. The death of Ann’s colleague when the treetop fell on him may have been a case of complacency.
Prior to being assigned to this controlled burn, the firefighters had been working for several days. They were lulled by a placid spot in the forest. The burning treetop seemed to be the only immediate issue. Moments of peace can provide the pause during which the sheer beauty of fire and the outdoors can seduce the team into complacency.
And so a few of the team forgot the precedents and one man died because of it. “Most of us knew where we needed to be and went there,” Ann said. “But in the field you can easily lose track of safety avenues built on precedents. We were devastated. We had to have meetings after that, safety briefings, and get our heads picked at. We turned it into a vivid precedent, though. If I see a crown fire now, I will never forget that this is a watch-out situation.”
Ann is as consumed with precedents as she is with fire itself. She realizes that one day sooner or later one of the 18s will save her life. The lesson of Ann Marie Tierney is that, whether a life is at stake or a deal is on the line, preparation with precedents requires that you understand how to apply them once you’ve compiled them.
A PRECEDENTIAL MAN
R. W. Apple Jr.
R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr. was a New York Times foreign correspondent, bureau chief in such places as Saigon, London, and Washington, D.C., and an acclaimed travel and food writer. He was a big man with a bunch of big jobs.
He described the “Q-head,” the name for an analytical story that can appear on page one of the New York Times to help make sense of a momentous event, as “a place to interpret but not opine.” Johnny was the Pavarotti of Q-heads. It is the piece where, as Johnny said, you tell “why it happened and what the consequences might be.” As opposed to an editorial, which prescribes “what ought to be done about it,” or basic reporting, which simply tells “what happened,” the Q-head is all about the connections among events and actors and their historical context.
Johnny was all about connections and context, and he was a legend not least for his ability to write the challenging Q-head. He was also a man of impressive appetites, and his passion for precedents of all sorts—links between wars separated by centuries or between wines from different regions—brought better context to stories as disparate as his coverage of the Biafra crisis or a crab feast in Baltimore.
My coauthor Greg and I were supposed to meet Johnny to discuss preparation the day he died in October 2006. A native of Akron, Ohio, he was eager to talk about the Cleveland Indians, the club my son Mark serves as general manager. The only direct quote we got from Johnny regarding precedents came on the phone a few weeks before when he agreed to be profiled in this book.
“Precedents, well, you have to live a lot and read a lot,” Johnny said with a laugh.
But a lecture he gave in 2005 on Q-heads and other endeavors from his “long and shout-filled career,” and bountiful insights from former colleagues and friends, tell you a lot about how Johnny mined and maintained precedents to establish connections and provide context for the war, meal, or politician’s speech he was analyzing. His approach offers a lesson in using precedents as an organizing principle for critical analysis.
“Q probably stood for ‘queer,’” Johnny said in the lecture, referring to the oddness of the genre when it first started to appear in the paper. The news analysis piece is a relatively new concoction for newspapers. The Q-head evolved, Johnny believed, as newspapers took on some of the role of newsmagazines for readers. Newspapers began to realize that not only did we want the facts when we picked up the paper in the morning, but we wanted to know their implications.
Schooled as a reporter, and mindful of the precedents provided for his career by hardscrabble mentors in the 1960s at the Times, Johnny probably could never stray far enough from his original calling to be able to write an editorial. Yet, his analytical mind, craving for history, and booming voice (be it in his writing or speaking!) made him the perfect match for the Q-head.
“You are really out there on the wire,” Johnny said in his lecture about meeting the deadline and accuracy demands of this peculiar journalistic art form. “You have to get it done, but make it good and make it right.”
How Johnny managed to do all three, despite occasional doubts from editors that he would be able to file his Q-head on time, is a tribute as much to his organizational skills as his powerful memory.
For example, when the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999, Johnny was called at six in the evening by editor Andrew Rosenthal to write a sweeping analysis that captured the sweep of what Rosenthal called a “not since Versailles” type of event. Calvin Trillin described what transpired in his 2003 profile of Johnny in the New Yorker:
Apple, pointing out that his stepdaughter’s rehearsal dinner was to take place at seven-thirty, berated Rosenthal for making such a request at such a time, and, an hour later, filed a Q-head. It was written in clear English. It had historical references to SALT II and the Panama Canal treaties and the tension between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge during the formation of the League of Nations. It was one thousand one hundred and seventy-one words long. Eleven of those words were, like a tip of the hat to Rosenthal, “Not since the Versailles Treaty was voted down in November 1919…”
Eric Schmitt, a former colleague at the Times, saw Johnny’s ability to summon precedents in the heat of battle during the first Iraq war. “Johnny was a notorious deadline filer, pushing copy until the very last moment,” Eric said. “Editors would be pulling their hair out, calling for copy. He’d reach into his piles and pull out just the right pool report he wanted. Or lean over and grab a reference book from the floor, to cite some military precedent. He was an avid reader and student of history—drawing comparisons with campaigns in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, as well as his own experience in Vietnam.”
Eric fondly recalls that Johnny would summon precedents not only to bolster his stories, but also to buck up young writers: “The 1991 Persian Gulf War was the first time I’d worked with Johnny. I struggled at first to gain some traction in carving out my own niche. But one day Apple gave me a spectacular piece of advice. ‘The best way to get inside the high command’—one of my stated assignments as the resident Pentagon correspondent on the ground—‘is to write about them. Why don’t you write a series of short profiles on the half dozen or so top officers running this war, particularly those readers may not have heard of? You write even a short piece about them and they’re flattered. They’ll take your call again on other subjects.’ It was a technique he’d used in Vietnam to get acquainted with the top brass there, and it paid off in spades for me, and for the paper. Two of the profilees, in particular, became crucial sources for several exclusive pieces.”
In a sense, Johnny’s years as a foreign correspondent provided the precedent for what he did best and loved most toward the end of his career—writing about travel and food. His stories of meals and journeys were rich with comparisons from his own previous trips, associations with food from different continents, and recollections of former dining companions.
Todd Purdum, Johnny’s close friend and former colleague, was one of the people who helped review Johnny’s food and travel files after his death. Archaeology seems to have been the apt metaphor for the system of compiling precedents.
“His filing system helped him easily find a relevant event if he could not readily recall some parallel,” Todd said. “For his travel and food files, every folder he kept was multilayered. Guidebooks, classic books from the area of the story, often a work or two of literature from an area’s dominant author or poet, clippings—it was all like a piece of rock formation.”
Alice Waters, chef and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, spoke at Johnny’s memorial service, saying he illustrated the “connection between commitment and contentment.”
To twist her words, Johnny found much contentment in his commitment to connections—to precedents across time, genres, and geography. For Alice, that led to his understanding that food is a political and cultural phenomenon.
“There seems to be a concept in journalism and in life for that matter that you have to confine your expertise,” Alice said. “Johnny refused that. His writing linked so many fields and events together because his years of reporting and traveling showed him that this was the case. He understood the bigger politics of food like no other.”
Indeed, Alice sees Johnny’s love of food as part and parcel of an insatiable inquisitiveness.
“His smell was fine-tuned, his eyes, his ears, he picked up everything through this palette and took in information a little bit like a wild animal who needs it for its survival,” Alice said. “His awareness of everything around him allowed him to absorb information and use it for that story or years later.”
Johnny Apple shows that precedents can provide a foundation for a more precise way to think. Be it in writing, cooking, or public speaking, his approach showed how to produce a livelier and more comprehensive presentation of a story.
KEY POINTS
PRECEDENTS
• The past is prologue—the maxim applies to almost any endeavor. You can methodically analyze past experiences to shape your preparation for current and future undertakings.
• Planning with precedents can be enriching when you look to other fields and even historical figures for comparables. Once you have defined your objectives, it helps to think about books you have read, people you have worked with, or even movies you have seen to trigger informative analogies.
• Precedents are great persuaders that can be used to make presentations, pitches, and negotiations more forceful.
• Bill Miller bases his incomparable system of stock picking on studying market and company precedents. He is a master at thinking outside the box—drawing historical patterns and ideas from wide-ranging fields and figures to support his decisions.
• Ann Marie Tierney shows precedents at their most fundamental level in fire fighting. Her system of precedents shapes every move she makes to achieve her objective of safely putting out a fire.
• R. W. Apple shows how precedents strengthen your point and enrich your presentation. His lively use of them in journalism is an example for almost any written or oral presentation you make.