Object lesson?

Reader question:

Please explain this headline, particularly “object lesson”: Beyoncé’s Lemonade is an object lesson in collaboration (TheGuardian.com, April 28, 2016).

My comments:

In other words, Lemonade, the new album by American pop singer Beyoncé is a real example on collaboration, how people should work together to get something great done.

Obviously Lemonade is a great piece of work, from what they’re saying on the Internet.

Sometimes, when one’s name and recognition are as great as that Beyoncé, one feels that they don’t need other people any more, that they can do everything by themselves.

Not Beyoncé. She continues to work with others to enhance her work and art.

At any rate, that’s what we read from a headline like that, “an object lesson in collaboration”.

Literally, an object lesson is a lesson told through using an object – or real example of a person or event.

The importance of collaboration, or co-operation with others, is something abstract, something we cannot hold in our palm, so to speak, and therefore, something difficult to teach.

It’s the same as teaching a young person to be patient and frugal and usually that’s something they do not care to hear. However, if you use an example, of someone who, say, wins the lottery but squanders the money in a week and ends up poorer than before, perhaps they will listen.

Or at least they, being young, will listen and say: “Let me win the lottery first.”

Like I said, you cannot teach the young to be patient.

Joking aside, it really is difficult to share abstract lessons with others, don’t you think?

Anyways, object lessons are lessons told through an object, usually a real example from life.

Here are more media examples to illustrate the point:

1. One of the key issues in any president’s reelection campaign is whether he has kept his promises. So a web video released this week by the Obama campaign, in conjunction with the Iowa caucuses, can be seen as an example of the White House laying the groundwork for making the case that the president has kept his promises.

The video shows Obama making his victory speech four years ago in Iowa, and then interjects it with headlines showing how the president has met his pledge. The overall result is slick, but a careful viewer will note that the words that follow in the headlines do not always quite match up with the president’s words.

The Obama campaign provided extensive documentation--13 pages Obama 2008 speech

“Passed the Affordable Care Act to make health care more affordable for more than 30 million Americans.”

-- headline after his statement

No matter what one thinks of Obama’s health care law, it was certainly a signature legislative achievement—the most sweeping health care law since the creation of Medicare. But notice that Obama said he would bring health care to “every single American,” but the headline simply says “more than 30 million Americans.”

That translates into 95 percent of nonelderly Americans—when the law is fully implemented in 2016. That is certainly an increase over the 82-percent level that would have been expected in the absence of the law, but it is not “every single American.”

- The fine print in Obama’s ‘Promises Kept’ ad, WashingtonPost.com, January 6, 2017.

2. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a technological marvel. It’s built largely of carbon-fibre composites rather than aluminum, which makes it significantly lighter than other planes. Its braking, pressurization, and air-conditioning systems are run not by hydraulics but by electricity from lithium-ion batteries. It uses twenty per cent less fuel than its peers, and so is cheaper to run, yet it also manages to have higher ceilings and larger windows. It is, in other words, one of the coolest planes in the air. Or, rather, on the ground: regulators around the world have grounded all fifty Dreamliners after battery fires in two planes, and Ray LaHood, the Transportation Secretary, has declared that the Dreamliner will not fly again in the U.S. until regulators are “a thousand per cent sure” of its safety. And this is just the latest in a long series of Dreamliner problems, which delayed the plane’s début for more than three years and cost Boeing billions of dollars in cost overruns. The Dreamliner was supposed to become famous for its revolutionary design. Instead, it’s become an object lesson in how not to build an airplane.

To understand why, you need to go back to 1997, when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas. Technically, Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas. But, as Richard Aboulafia, a noted industry analyst with the Teal Group, told me, “McDonnell Douglas in effect acquired Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas executives became key players in the new company, and the McDonnell Douglas culture, averse to risk and obsessed with cost-cutting, weakened Boeing’s historical commitment to making big investments in new products. Aboulafia says, “After the merger, there was a real battle over the future of the company, between the engineers and the finance and sales guys.” The nerds may have been running the show in Silicon Valley, but at Boeing they were increasingly marginalized by the bean counters.

Under these conditions, getting the company to commit to a major project like the Dreamliner took some doing. “Some of the board of directors would rather have spent money on a walk-in humidor for shareholders than on a new plane,” Aboulafia says. So the Dreamliner’s advocates came up with a development strategy that was supposed to be cheaper and quicker than the traditional approach: outsourcing. And Boeing didn’t outsource just the manufacturing of parts; it turned over the design, the engineering, and the manufacture of entire sections of the plane to some fifty “strategic partners.” Boeing itself ended up building less than forty per cent of the plane.

- Requiem for a Dreamliner? NewYorker.com, February 4, 2013.

3. Samuel L. Jackson said he'll always remember this one incident that happened when he was starting his career in Hollywood.

In Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue, the 67-year-old star described the incident that occurred while he was doing a play in Santa Monica during a six-week break from filming “Pulp Fiction.”

“One night, after the play, I went with some friends to a restaurant down the street, Hugo’s. When we were done, we walked outside and stood on the corner for a while, just talking. All of a sudden, five sheriff’s cars screeched up. The policemen surrounded us, guns pointed, lights in our face: ‘Get on the ground!’ he recalled.

He continued “There we were, lying facedown in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. I finally said to the cops, ‘Why are you doing this?’ One of them said, ‘Oh, we got a report of five black guys standing on the corner with guns and bats.’ I said, ‘So when you pulled up and didn’t see a bat -- I mean, maybe we could’ve had a gun concealed on us, but you didn’t see anything that looked like a bat. What-ever.’”

Jackson said the lesson he learned that day is one he still carries with him.

“I was thinking to myself, I’m in Hollywood now, on the verge of breaking through, and this is still going on,” he said. “It kind of put my feet back on the ground in terms of ‘O.K., you’re still just another n***** working in town, so you still got to walk softly.’ And I still do. Just an object lesson for life in L.A.”

- Samuel L. Jackson Recounts Racist Moment as a Young Actor, ABCNews.go.com, February 9, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.