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As Pete and Eleanor’s story so vividly shows, talking about money can allow you to build the life you want. In fact, we believe that financial security begins with a conversation—whether between spouses, between a parent and a child, or between an adult and an aging parent.
But these conversations aren’t easy, especially in the beginning. Most of us are used to chatting casually about the stock market or mortgage rates, but when it comes to candid, personal conversations about how much money we’ll need for retirement or how we’ll possibly be able to pay for our children’s college educations, the talk is much tougher. In a wealthy country where millions of investors have money in the stock market, there is still a desperate shortage of honest, candid talk about how we should be planning for the future.
And unfortunately, as Pete and Eleanor’s story also points out, not communicating about financial matters, from spending to investing to planning for the future, is an almost surefire way to undermine a relationship. So why, despite the obvious payoff and the equally obvious price of avoidance, do most people neither initiate nor participate in these essential family conversations about money? Because money is never just money, especially in the context of a family. For starters, money is tied up with our deepest emotional needs (such as security, comfort, success, and confidence) and fears (such as failure, inadequacy, and poverty) as well as with our sense of self- worth and identity. And ultimately, it becomes a reflection of our relationships. “In the first part of our marriage, there were all these inequalities, and money was a huge unspoken one,” says Pete. “Now it’s more of an equal playing field.”
Like it or not, even your parents’ attitudes about money have likely influenced yours. If your father or mother always tried to save that little bit, you may have adopted the same fiscally restrained habits. Or like a pendulum, you may do the opposite now that you’re an adult, refusing to let those money-saving tactics run your life. Either way, you’re reacting to lessons learned at your parents’ knees.
For example, I have a friend whose father used to drive her crazy with his penny-pinching habits: He phoned her only after five P.M. (he had one of those old-fashioned phone plans where the rates dropped at night), and he parked his car in a lot a mile away from where he was going if he could save a dollar. In response, as a young girl, my friend would call her dad whenever the urge struck, even if it was a mere ten minutes before the rates changed, partially to prove that her actions weren’t being dictated by the chance to save a buck. Valuing time and convenience more than economy, she often took cabs instead of buses and paid a housekeeper for cleaning she could easily have done herself. Figuring that you only go around once, she routinely indulged in expensive wine and topnotch restaurants. Only lately, many years later, has she come to recognize how much all those indulgences compromised her ability to save for her future and the things that mattered more.
My colleague Tom’s financial baggage also stems from his upbringing. Despite a steady income, his parents sometimes ran short of cash. Since Tom consistently held jobs as a kid—doing a paper route or umpiring Little League games—he usually had some cash on hand. “As a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I was proud to always have a few hundred bucks,” he recalls. “I remember my dad and mom borrowing from me a few times to buy groceries or go out to a movie. In those pre-ATM days, I was like their bank for short-term credit.” Not surprisingly, this situation made Tom quite resentful in the long run, Thirty years later those emotions continue to affect how he deals with finances and money-related communication, but not in a positive way. Even today Tom never talks to his parents about their Financial position since it brings back uneasy memories. He and his wife don’t talk very much about their financial decisions or long-term p]ans either. While Tom attributes a lot of this silence to juggling two careers and raising two children, he also admits that his early negative money associations may play a part in his current attitude.

When Pete, a longtime colleague of ours, married his wife, Eleanor, in 1973, it would have been safe to assume that she, being a banker, would handle the finances while he, then a schoolteacher, would take a backseat. Then their son was born with a disability and the couple decided that Eleanor should quit her job and stay home with him. Once Pete, who had returned to graduate school and obtained his MBA, became the only breadwinner, he also inherited the financial-decision-maker role. At the same time Pete—a generous, jovial, and articulate man— turned into quite the spender, thinking nothing of buying an expensive suit that he’d wear only two or three times. To compensate for his champagne taste in clothes, Eleanor, when she shopped at all, would do so at discount stores (a detail she kept from Pete, who would have been horrified). Sure, her husband’s income had shot up, but so had his appetite for luxuries, including high-priced cars.
“We moved to California from New York, and I saw everyone driving around in BMWs,” explains Pete with a self-deprecating laugh and the kind of regret that only hindsight can bring. “1 thought that must be the state car, so I went out and bought one.” Over the next fifteen years he bought another and another and another, just as soon as the mileage on the “old” car passed twenty thousand—or a newer model captured his fancy. Despite hefty sports-car price tags, he never thought to consult his wife about those—or any other— purchases.
That attitude, combined with an overall lack of communication, almost cost Pete his marriage. Since the couple never discussed money, let alone a savings or an investment strategy Pete never knew how increasingly resentful his highly educated wife, who had spent ten years in the banking industr)c was becoming about her lack of participation in the Family Finances or Pete’s spending decisions.
Pete and Eleanor may have avoided facing their issues, but they couldn’t escape the downfall of their marriage. After a separation of several months, the couple decided that divorce was inevitable, and together they headed to a financial planner to figure out how to split their assets.
But unlike so many similar stories, this one has a happy ending. “You guys obviously care about and love each other,” the financial planner observed one afternoon after numerous joint meetings. “What are you doing getting a divorce?” Thus prompted, Pete and Eleanor asked themselves the same question and subsequently decided to try to work out their differences. After months of marriage counseling and a lot of hard work, Pete and Eleanor learned how to communicate with each other about money and everything else. They identified what was important to them as individuals and as a couple.
The upshot? At forty-seven, Pete quit his job to devote himself full time to the nonprofit international health-related causes about which he’s passionate. Investments they’ve made together now Finance their lifestyle, one in which they agree on each and every sizable purchase as a team. “Though I’m ashamed of my past behavior, I’m also proud of our courage to stick it out,” says Pete. “It’s so much easier to walk away from very difficult issues than to confront them head-on, I am the better—and we are the stronger—for it.”
Pete and Eleanor’s new financial policies and procedures, along with their.ongoing discussions about values and priorities, led to their recently building a dream house in Sun Valley, Idaho. “In almost thirty years of marriage, this is the first major purchasing decision we ever made together,” admits Pete.
In short, Pete and Eleanor now make a point of dealing with their life together—and their money—as equal partners. Once every three months they meet with their financial advisor to review their finances and make (or revise) their money decisions for the next six months. Then they go out to a nice restaurant and discuss their decisions and plans. What better way to reaffirm your love for each other than to talk about the life you’re living now and your dreams for the future?

A San Francisco science fair recently awarded a prize to a junior high school student whose science project consisted of cutting the head off a live frog with a pair of scissors, to find out whether frogs swim better with or without their brains.
Of course, this is not the only case of frogs being treated cruelly in our schools. They are often dissected by children ostensibly learning “how life works.” But what did this youngster learn through his experiment? I think he learned that it is all right to treat other living things as if they have no feelings, as if they are nothing but machines. I think he learned disrespect for life. And I wouldn’t call that a good thing.
The science fair judges, however, obviously disagree with me, for they commended the boy on his contributions to the forward march of science, predicted great things for his future, and rewarded him for scientifically proving that: “Frogs will not swim with brain missing unless harassed. A frog swims better with head on.”3
The attitude we develop towards animals as children tends to stay with us through the rest of our lives. And it continues to influence our experience, not only of animals, but of other people, ourselves, and life itself. There is a great deal of evidence from all over the world indicating that people who have, as children, learned to care for animals, grow up more capable of caring for themselves, and for other people. By the same token, people who later become criminals have very often abused animals as children. We find high statistical correlations in every country and culture where research has been done.
The way we treat animals is indicative of the way we treat our fellow humans. One Soviet study, published in Ogonyok, found that over 87% of a group of violent criminals had, as children, burned, hanged, or stabbed domestic animals.4 In our own country, a major study by Dr. Stephen Kellert of Yale University found that children who abuse animals have a much higher likelihood of becoming violent criminals.5
Studies of inmates in a number of U.S. prisons reveal that almost none of the convicts had a pet as a child. None of them had this opportunity to learn to respect and care for another creature’s life, and to feel valuable in so doing.
But these attitudes can be reversed, even in criminals. Heartwarming research has been done in which convicts nearing their release dates were allowed to have pet cats in their cells with them. The result? “Of the men who loved and cared for their cats, not a single one later failed as a free man to adjust to society.6 This in a penal system where over 70% of released convicts are expected to return to jail.
The attitudes towards animals shown by the youngster at the science fair, and by the Soviet criminals when they were youths, are not at all unusual. We’ve all grown up in a system that condones such cruelty. Our public stance is basically that animals are ours to treat any way we wish, and that kindness to animals and sensitivity to them as fellow beings is an option some may choose if they want to, but it is no more incumbent upon us than being nice to plastic dolls.

If the little Scottish terrier whose monument still stands in Edinburgh is not the most selfless animal who ever lived, a dolphin named Pelorus Jack might well be. For many years, this dolphin guided ships through French Pass, a channel through the D’Urville Islands off New Zealand. This dangerous channel is so fill of rocks, and has such extremely strong currents, that it has been the site of literally hundreds of shipwrecks. But none occurred when Pelorus Jack was at work. There is no telling how many lives he saved.
He was first seen by human beings when he appeared in front of a schooner from Boston named “Brindle,” just as the ship was approaching French Pass. When the members of the crew saw the dolphin bobbing up and down in front of the ship, they wanted to kill him—but, fortunately, the captain’s wife was able to talk them out of it. To their amazement, the dolphin then proceeded to guide the ship through the narrow channel. And for years thereafter, he safely guided almost every ship that came by. So regular and reliable was the dolphin that when ships reached the entrance to French Pass they would look for him, and if he was not visible, they would wait for him to appear to guide them safely through the treacherous rocks and currents. On one sad occasion, a dmnken passenger aboard a ship named the “Penguin” took out a gun and shot at Pelorus Jack. The crew was furious, and when they saw Jack swim away with blood pouring from his body they came very close to lynching the passenger. The “Penguin” had to negotiate the channel without Pelorus Jack’s help, as did the other ships that came through in the next few weeks. But one day the dolphin reappeared, apparently recovered from his wound. He had evidently forgiven the human species, because he once again proceeded to guide ship after ship through the channel. When the “Penguin” showed up again, however, the dolphin immediately disappeared.
For a number of years thereafter, Pelorus Jack continued to escort ships through French Pass—but never the “Penguin,” and the crew of that ship never saw the dolphin again. Ironically, the “Penguin” was later wrecked, and a large number of passengers and crew were drowned, as it sailed—unguided—through French Pass.

You will not find very many monuments to dogs in this world. But in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a public area known as Greyfriar Square, there stands a statue, erected by the local citizens, in honor of a little terrier named Bobby.
Why did the townspeople erect this statue? Because this little dog taught them a lesson in the years he lived with them—a most important lesson. Bobby the Scottish terrier had no owner. And as often happens to smalltown dogs with no master, he was kicked around by just about everybody, and had to scrounge through garbage to get anything to eat. Not what you would call an ideal life, even for a dog.
But it happened that there was in the village a dying old man, named Jock. In his last days, the old man noticed the plight of the sorry little dog. There wasn’t much he could do, but he did buy the little fellow a meal one evening at the local restaurant. Nothing fancy, just some scraps. But it would be hard for anyone to over-estimate the extent of little Bobby’s gratitude.
Shortly thereafter, Jock died. When the mourners carried his body to the grave, the terrier followed them. The gravediggers ordered him away, and when he refused to leave they kicked him and threw rocks at him. But still the dog stood his ground, and would not leave no matter what they did. From then on, for no less than fourteen years, little Bobby honored the memory of the man who had been kind to him. Day and night, through harsh winter storms and hot summer days, he stood by the grave. The only time he ever left the gravesite was for a brief trip each afternoon back to the restaurant in which he had met Jock, in hopes of scavenging something to eat. Whatever he got he would solemnly carry back to the grave, and eat there. The first winter Bobby had almost no shelter, huddling underneath tombstones when the snow was deep. By the next winter, the townspeople were so touched by his brave and lonely vigil that they erected a small shelter for him. And fourteen years later, when little Bobby died, they buried him where he lay—alongside the man whose last gesture of kindness he had honored with such devotion.

Appropriately enough, the idea for the Web came from scientists—just as had the original idea for the Internet.
In 1989 Tim Bemers-Lee, a physicist at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN), proposed the concept of the Web as a system for transferring ideas and research among scientists in the high- energy-physics community.
Berners-Lee’s original proposal defined a very simple implementation that used hypertext but did not include multimedia capabilities. Something very much like this was introduced on Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer system in 1990. The NeXT implementation allowed users to create, edit, view, and transmit hypertext documents over the Internet. The system was demonstrated for CERN committees and attendees at the Hypertext ‘91 conference.
In 1992 CERN began publicizing the World Wide Web (WWW) project and encouraging the development of Web servers at laboratories and academic institutions around the world. At the same time, CERN promoted the development of WWW clients (browsers) for a range of computer systems including X Windows (Unix), the Apple Macintosh, and PC/Windows. (Today, the two most popular and useful of these browsers are Netscape Communicate and Micorosfi Internet Explorer—both of which are available via free download on the Internet.)

The most popular aspect of the Internet is, of course, the World Wide Web. The “Web”—as it is familiarly called—provides access to virtually all those computers (servers) on the Internet that offer hypermediabased information and documentation.
Hypermedia is a technology that presents and relates information by using nonlinear, nonsequential links rather than linear sequences. (Less formally put, hypermedia and hypertext enable users to navigate both the World Wide Web and the documents on it with point-and-click ease. To navigate, one “clicks” on words, phrases, and icons in a document, which provide links that enable you to jump at will to a new location in the document, or even to a new document altogether.) In short, the Web is a uniquely intuitive and information-rich environment.
Additionally, the Web is hospitable to graphic images, photographs, audio, and even full-motion video. Thus the Web has a multimedia capability that is of great value to scientists and those interested in science. Astronomers can view full-color space images on-line. Oceanographers can access real-time “remote sensor” data from key oceanographic sites around the world 24 hours a day. Students of chaos theory on the East Coast can connect and watch fractal trees generate on a minicomputer in Los Angeles. And paleontologists can get audio and image clips of Stephen Jay Gould giving a series of lectures at Harvard.
An additional perk of Web technology is that the Web provides easy tools for inexpensive on-line publication. Combining global connectivity and individual empowerment, the Web enables anyone who has a computer and the proper Internet connection to become a multimedia publisher. With the right tools (most of them available as free downloads from sits highlighted in this book) and a little effort, you can easily translate scientific papers into electronic Web documents (also known as “pages” or “sites”) that the entire world can access. The same goes for reports. calls for papers, conference proceedings, announcements, course catalogs, etc. For more on this see the section later in this chapter entitled “A Few Web Fundamentals/ General Web Resources.”

The Internet. It seems so fundamental to our lives. Looking back over the last few—f n fact, very few—years, we wonder how we ever lived without its numerous, readily-available resources just as we wonder how we ever lived without desktop computers themselves, digital notebooks, and cellular phones.
Of course, most scientists have been on familiar terms with the Internet for quite some time. The fabled network of networks was, after all, first created by scientists themselves with scientists in mind. Up until a few years ago, the Internet was used almost exclusively by engineers, scientists, academics and students as a vehicle for sharing information and research. In 1985 the Internet boasted only 1,961 host computers and numbered its users in the tens of thousands. But as many scientists know only too well, the once-pristine electronic frontier of the Internet has now been overrun by new settlers. In fact, the Internet has doubled in size every ten months for the past ten years. Today the number of Internet users increases by a more than two million new logins each month.
Along with vast numbers of “lay” Internet users have come vast numbers of purveyors of all sorts of information: the new gold of the electronic frontier toward which so many settlers rush. Scientific information certainly continues to have its place in the newly settled territories of the Internet. And scientific resources continue to grow in number. However, scientific information on the Net no longer constitutes the majority share. Scientific information plays second fiddle to financial information, religious information, erotic information, political information, literary information, and so on.
On the “plus” side, the information resources of the Internet seem to increase at almost as fast a rate as do the number of Internet users. The steadily growing profusion of information options—including information options related to the sciences—is wonderful. It is also utterly confusing.

The superlatives to describe the changes underway are never-ending—tectonic shifts, revolutionary changes, a new paradigm, a tsunami of transformation (all adding up to a tsunami of superlatives). Such extreme characterizations don’t arise because the world has acquired a new taste for hyperbole. Rather, the language flows from the attempts of baffled business leaders, boggled academics, and amazed journalists to somehow characterize the world we are entering and how the changes underway are unlike anything before.
Retired General Cohn Powell tells the story of how the first thirty years of his thirty-five year military career were quite straightforward. For those years, the entire strategy of the United States in the world was summed up in one word: containment. The goal was to contain the military, political, and ideological advance of communism. The United States had a unifying systems theory of the world that everyone could understand. There was a single enemy—according to Powell, a “good enemy”—complete with villains like Stalin, who ordered horrible atrocities, and Khrushchev, who pounded his shoe on his desk at the United Nations. The United States built 30,000 nuclear weapons matched by the Soviets’ 30,000 nuclear weapons. Both sides lined up their troops across Europe. And then suddenly it all changed.
General Powell describes a historic meeting with Gorbachev, who was getting frustrated trying to explain how the old model of the world was unworkable. Gorbachev finally leaned across the table to Secretary of State Schultz and said, “You need to understand, Secretary Schultz; today I am ending the cold war.” And then Gorbachev said to Powell, “General, you will have to find yourself another enemy.”
Powell thought to himself at the time, “I don’t want to find another enemy. I’ve got a few years to retirement. You are a good enemy. You can’t just sit there and kick out all of the assumptions, rules, trading systems, political structures that have held the world together for the last 40 years.” And then, in December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a country. The Soviets lost their economic system, their values, their system of beliefs. That ended the bipolar world, the policy of containment, and the uni1ving systems theory of how the world works.
The result today is the new world disorder, unfolding at warp velocity. Previously unimagined changes taking place in the world and their implications for our professional and personal lives are relentless. There is an openness and a volatility that seem rich with opportunity and fraught with danger for your country, for your organization, for you, and for humanity.
With the collapse of the bipolar world, East and West Germany were reunited, but there was more change globally. Nelson Mandela, once unacceptable as an alleged Soviet-supported “communist,’ was freed after twenty-seven years in jail, and a multiracial state was created in South Africa headed by him. There was a war in the Mideast involving twenty countries in a coalition including the USSR and the United States—on the same side. Horrible civil wars broke out in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Bosnia, (thechnya, Croatia, and elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of people in Somalia and half a million people in Rwanda fell victim to the unconstrained new world disorder. Two of the most bitter enemies in modem tiiiies, Israel and the PLO, signed a peace agreement; their respective haclers shook hands at the White House. The United States invaded Haiti. ‘I’Iw United States invaded Somalia. The United States invaded … Peace and war broke out all over the planet.