People-Watching

I am a people watcher. And an eavesdropper.  Blessed by genetics and medical technology with startlingly good long-distance hearing.  So if you're near me in a restaurant, mall, office, or otherwise, be careful.

Sorry.

One of the many paradoxes in my life is that I enjoy being around people... by myself.  I'm an introvert (defined, as I understand it, an introvert is someone who recharges alone), whose path in life has put him in very social roles - at work, at church, and in my community.  I do enjoy being around people, but I don't like being the center of attention.  I like watching them.  I love teaching, but not because it makes me the center of attention. I love it because I get to bless people and watch them have their own personal realizations.  In the theater, I love being in a pit orchestra.  I love being with those people but not being on the stage with everyone watching me. I am uncomfortable when people clap for me.  Not judging those who enjoy that, it just isn't me.  I used to love running lights; I felt like I was showing everyone something without them focusing on me.  At the mall, I can sit on a bench for hours and watch and listen to people. Sometimes I even engage them - just for fun.

Here's one recent experience:

I am shopping in the produce department.  Most of the people in this particular Rainbow Foods, at this particular time of day, are old.

At the salad bar are a young man and a young woman. (By young, I mean, mid-twenties).  From their conversation and appearance, I can ascertain the following about their relationship.

1. They work together.
2. They were attracted to each other.
3. They did not know each other very well.

The event has the appearance of a lunch date, but probably has not been called that. I imagine that one said to the other "you want to grab some lunch?", and the other got nervous, giddy, and excited, and coolly said "sure."

So here they are at the salad bar. Healthy choice, not coincidentally.  He makes a comment about running.

She says, "Oh, so are you a runner?"

Freeze frame.

At this point, any person of the male persuasion should assume the following: All answers to questions posed by a female, especially in the early stages of a relationship, are going to be heavily interpreted and analyzed.  That's not sexism, it's just life. So be careful.

Unfreeze.

He said "No."

At least, that's what he heard himself say.  Unfortunately, human behavior is not recorded by a courtroom stenographer, sterilized of all body language and expression.  What he really said, to the eyes and ears of this young lady, was: "Are you crazy? People who do that are insane. I'm beautiful the way I am, and I'll be forever young and handsome, so enjoy the eye candy, baby."

You can sense what's coming next, can't you?  Her body language closes off.  Arms closed in around the salad, eyes down, faster pace, conciliatory but affectionate smile.    The feelings of attraction have become unidirectional. She has stopped reciprocating.

And that's as it should be. Why?  Because he doesn't appreciate her. He has know idea what runners do and why they do it.  He doesn't understand the commitment, the weather, the endorphin, the gear, or the goals.  So he may never learn that the physical attraction he feels at this moment happens to be for a woman... who runs.

The meaning of the parable to the marketer is simple: Not hitting your market?  It's not them.  Maybe it's you.

But let's go one level higher:  Why did this apparently well-educated, sociable male completely miss the mark in the first place?

The stereotypical marketer is also outgoing, gregarious.  Marketing is mocked in Dilbert strips as being the department with cocktail parties and where social grace far outshines technical savvy.  But this is the same profession that created the focus group - a caged environment designed to measure how humans "naturally" act.  And then we are surprised by the error in the results.  Why do we walk away from what our gut told us?  It is either because we weren't getting the data needed for our gut to make its instinctive calculations, or because we ignored the gut in favor of the data from the focus group.

That shouldn't happen. There is a part of gut instinct that is not instinct at all; it is the subconscious set of tools at work measuring body language, vocal inflection, and a thousand other pieces of data that are only available when you turn yourself off and become a real observer, and comparing it to a lifetime of feelings and events, drawing conclusions and discarding irrelevancies.

Paradoxically, that is how you mitigate "observer's effect": by becoming the perfect observer. The greatest data collector and processor available to your next marketing experience is you.  So be quiet, open your senses, and let the data flow.

Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

From the Unpublished Archives: A tidbit from March of 2008

Pinky and The Brain is an animated creation of Warner Brothers that features a duo of lab mice trying to take over the world every night. The pair’s purpose? World domination, the complete subjugation of humanity.

They fail not because of the plans themselves but because of some outside factor – usually the sort of ploys one would expect to find in an episode of Gilligan’s Island.

Some of the humor in the show lies in the irony - the fact that the cartooned human race and Brain’s attitude towards it are both characterized in a fairly undesirable way. But here’s the funniest part: The plot itself is plausible.

The mechanisms that Brain uses range from technology to hypnosis, and depend in large part on the gullibility of the masses. If you’d like to take over the world, here are a few forms of modern hypnosis and technology that can easily be used to cause weaker minds to surrender control:

PowerPoint Presentations
PowerPoint is not just for superior intellects like The Brain’s. Modern presentation software puts the power of mind control in the hands of pretty much anyone. If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, would they eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare? Probably not, but I’m pretty sure they could crank out a few decent PowerPoint slides - at least, better than those I’ve been forced to sit through.

One prominent professor blamed the space shuttle disaster of a few years ago on PowerPoint – arguing that how information is presented affects its prioritization and consumption – and that PowerPoint failed NASA more than any single engineering factor. I’d go so far as to say that if you put PowerPoint in cars it would have a similar effect on automobile fatality rates – but not because of distracted drivers; it would be because of drivers deliberately steering into a tree or oncoming traffic to bring sweet relief.

With PowerPoint, you can subjugate your audience in one of two ways:

#1. By presenting entirely unsubstantiated, twisted, or blatantly invented data in a format that lends it credibility.

#2. By attrition, brought about through boring your subjects into submission. If you prefer to use this method (as it’s much less work than #1), start with a ‘company profile,’ a ‘company history,’ and some org charts. Follow on with endless bullet points (don’t forget to read them out loud) and some unrelated photos you stole off a keyword search on Google. End with a Q & A section; statistically speaking, if you have more than 5 people in the room, at least one of them will assist you in bringing about the final subjugation of the group by extending the conversation with non-germane points that were cooked up by free associations they made with the graphs in your presentation.

If your faith in humanity hasn’t completely evaporated yet, here’s another point to ponder: PowerPoint is being taught in public schools to your children (what happened to writing book reports, correcting grammar, and encouraging good writing?). And if it hasn’t already, PowerPoint will undoubtedly make an appearance at your church soon too.

Percentages
Percentages are a mathematical trick that marketers use to fool people in to buying things that are too expensive. In the modern economy, “Save 30%” sounds a lot better than “Save 30 Cents.” Forget the fact that in order to ‘save’ it you have to spend the other 70%.

In business, percentages are used to talk about profitability. The entire reseller/retailer/distributor world gets misty eyed when they hear about 25% profit (even though they have no idea how that was calculated – was it based from the sell price, the buy price, the profit itself? You could get three different numbers!) More importantly, they’d rather sell a $100 product at 25% profit then a $150 product at 20% profit. The only people who seem to have figured this concept out are realtors, selling houses for $300,000, and settling at just 7% profit. Most realtors have convinced their clients that they are doing this purely out of self-sacrifice.

Unfortunately, for the rest of us, we don’t get to pay the rent in percentages – you pay in real dollars. The payment coupons in your car loan book – real dollars. And the grocery, utility, medical bills? You guessed it – real dollars.

It’s not an accident that the government hides tax increases in percentages. And when inflation stays at a ‘typical’ 3% - well, that moves the needle about $350 per year for the ‘typical’ 4-person family for their grocery bill alone.

Graphs
The final key to fooling your friends is the use of graphs. In grade school we were all taught that graphs showed straight relationships. If we were plotting height and weight on the X and Y axis of the graph, it was easy to see which points were ‘average,’ who was really tall and skinny, short and fat, etc.

But the fact is that graphs are more complicated than that – and therefore the single most misinterpreted form of data in business. Usually the most obvious feature in the meaning of a graph (an upward or downward slope) is only the starting point, and the meaningful information in the graph (if there is any) requires more than a second of cognitive activity. And that presupposes good intentions by the graph’s author.

It takes relatively little effort to find a visual way to represent your ideas with a graph, regardless of what the data actually says. Linear vs. Log rhythmic periods, multiple varieties of trend lines, moving averages over different periods, choosing an appropriate amount of look back in the graph, and even data ‘normalization’, are all available to the savvy graph-maker to massage the data into the best possible appearance.

Emotive argument
Over course, if you can summarize your argument in to something that rings near and dear in your audience’s hearts, the coup de grace is administered easily to your willing audience. Reduce the argument to children, puppies, or wages, and everyone will be on your side instantly.

It’s a ploy we’ve criticized politicians for, to be sure, but even the least educated classes of society have learned how to make a completely nonsensical but compelling point. Both talk radio and public television have aided in training an entire generation with this skill. It makes great fodder for discussion in social situations – resulting in endless cheap entertainment through unproductive discussions.

If you get together a small group of the dumbest people you know for dinner this evening, they’ll have convincingly solved all of the world’s problems in a matter of hours using this method. Invite me along. What am I doing tonight? The same thing I do every night.

I’m going to try to take over the world.

On Benefitting from Stupid Meetings

This one is for my father, who is about to embark on some unwanted training from the government agency that employs him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” (I've quoted this before).

As a corollary to this, there is an intellectual benefit available to observers even as ideas are presented that are completely false - provided that they do not accept the false ideas.

That is why I could sit in a meeting with some of the stupidest men in the world and still gain some insights in to human behavior and motivation, even as they amble languidly from point to point.

Think of it as being the Jane Goodall of the corporate boardroom; the only difference is that chimpanzees are pretty consistent about grooming themselves.

Hopefully this will keep you from gnawing your own leg off to escape the clutches of a meeting.

Just like the public schools, we don't always go in to business meetings meeting to be fed intellectually, at least not directly. As long as we understand that it is a laboratory and not a classroom (or a lunchroom), and we take appropriate precautions, we can benefit from interacting with otherwise toxic substances presented there.

When Trade Shows Die

Question: What do the Iowa Caucuses, Punxatawney Phil, and CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) have in common?

Answer: Relevancy.

For all the press these things get, you would think they would have some bearing on the world.

With the Iowa Caucus, one only has to look at the process itself to recognize how flawed it is. The population sample alone should make statisticians blanch, and any freshman student of the social sciences should be able to root out the other fallacies of making any kind of inference from such a mob-parade process. Since 1972 they've heavily influenced the national landscape during elections. But their rate of success predicting  party endorsement? About 50%-60%. 

The groundhog fares even worse. A .390 would be great if it were Phil's batting average, but we're lucky that surgeons and your local bank have a better track record than that when they're operating on you or your checkbook.

I've been going to CES for a number of years now, and I've found its predictions to be either completely obvious or a consistent failure.  Competitors to the iPad? 3D Television?  Being chosen by the media as a 'winner' at CES is the kiss of death.  And this is not a case of hindsight either. I remember asking many visitors to our booth what they thought of the 3D televisions all over the floor and getting a consistent, accurate prediction from all of them: thumbs down.   Even the reps in the booths seemed to know it instinctively.  One would think they had never heard of a focus group before spending serious marketing dollars on a CES launch. The more likely explanation is political (but still not rational).

The venues and organizations that receive the most hype and credibility are generally unworthy of their plaudits.  Meanwhile, anything with an air of legitimacy gets squashed. 

One tradeshow I attended for years was InfoComm, which is one of a few shows that serves audio-visual professionals. They had an event called the "Projection Shoot-Out."  They lined up the projectors made by several manufacturers against a wall, and buyers could see side by side, ordered by price, and you could walk down the row and compare their pictures for output. The show made a killing - you had to pay a big fee to be in the shoot-out - and if you were a manufacturer and you didn't participate, you had folded.

Then, one year, the shoot-out died.  The biggest guys all decided not to enter the shoot-out (at the same time).  Accusations of collusion between them didn't have an effect; after all you can't force a manufacturer to pay to compete.  The Infocomm show itself is still around, but barely.

A similar thing happened in my industry.  It is a small enough industry so we all knew each other; I have always been on a first-name basis with my competitors.  We used to all attend a show called Replitech. Well, if you didn't go to the show one year, everyone else would start talking about your company's solvency.   Rumors of insolvency can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  So we kept going, even though we knew the show didn't pay off.  The show management at Replitech realized this, and started adding more events in different locations.  It got expensive - not just to exhibit, but to drag big equipment around the world.  Especially when you're seeing the same people at each location (we're a small industry, remember?)  One day, the biggest exhibitors got together, (I think they called themselves "ARES"), and formed a sort of a cartel.  They agreed to put on their own annual show. Replitech died.  And the new show was a success.  So much so, in fact, that they got a little greedy and decided to add a second show...

This is not to say that trade conventions are not useful.  But once they start drinking their own kool-aid, the value crumbles from the inside out.  Long before the media detects the smell of death, the sterling academic and cooperative objectives of the trade association have eroded in to a carefully monetized facade. Those awards and daily publication features?  All bought and paid for by the manufacturers.  The speeches and keynotes?  Either veiled product pitches or hubris.

I remember Comdex, before it died and was replaced by CES.  I used to go to MacWorld (before Apple dropped out of it).  And I will fondly remember CES.  Too soon for an obituary?  I heard Microsoft is not planning on going in 2013...

Understanding the Divide Between Early and Main-Street Adopters

Classical technology marketing , based on the principle of continuous innovation, says consumers go for faster, lighter, bigger display, smaller footprint, higher resolution, larger capacity, and so on.  Paradoxically, the products that blow the doors off almost always leap forward by taking a huge step backwards in one of those areas.  The MP3 player, which via the iPod revolutionized music portability and consequently its distribution, compresses the audio to a lower quality than the Audio CDs.  IPod’s early adopters, enchanted by the new experience, cannot say enough good it. In fact, some actually claimed it had better quality audio than CDs, doubtless causing a collective snicker among its own developers and marketers.

So it is with tablet PCs.  Years of naysayers in technology couldn’t stop its emergence.  A few technological thresholds had to be broken, but in the end businesses and homes are forsaking their desktops and laptops for a computer with, get this: no removable storage, no upgradeability, a smaller screen, and no tactile keyboard.  This flies in the face of conventional technology roadmap wisdom.

My observation for this week is the difference between later and earlier adopters, this time as it applies to phones.  I am, despite being a technology marketer, a relatively late adopter.  I am not a Luddite – I do see value in carrying a smartphone. But I am a late adopter. 

My trusty Blackberry went to rest in the great Cloud in the sky last week.  After shedding a tear or two, I went and got the latest and greatest:  The Samsung Galaxy S2.  Everyone is talking about it.  Countless websites have done side-by-side reviews with the arch nemesis iPhone.  It has a bigger screen, more apps, is growing faster in adoption, and is just generally cooler.  Samsung even poked fun at their rival’s customers, sitting in a line waiting outside the [Apple] store waiting for the new [i]Phone with cult-like expectancy.  The below-the-belt punch comes when one devotee declares that despite its superior features, he cannot stoop to using a Samsung, because he is a creative type - an artist.  The guy in line next to him cuts him down to size in four words.  “Dude, you’re a barista.”  The emperor’s new clothes are off and the arrogance of “Mac” people is exposed as just that.  Or is it?

Ten days later I found myself dumping my S2 at the store and picking up an iPhone – and signing up for the requisite added expense of a new plan.  I had discovered the tradeoff in having the latest and greatest:  The technology on the cutting edge is always the flakiest.  The Android OS is riddled with errors and user interface stupidities that boggle my mind.   

My first clue should have come when I asked the guy in the store to show me how to use the phone.  He said “you just use it however you want.”  He probably thought I was stupid. The feeling was, erm, rather mutual.  Half the things that were intuitive on my outdated blackberry (add an e-mail from an incoming message to my contacts, change my ring tone to a song, visibly know whether or not my ringer was muted) were unavailable or unfindable.  The Market (Android’s App Store) created errors every time I tried to install something on my fresh phone.  And just dialing the phone (if the phone number is stored in a dial-able field at all) seems to take forever.  And menu options and settings are in a different place in every single application. And when I want to clear the screen saver (what is that screen called now?) it takes three or four swipes because I never do it quite right. And… I could go on.

When I returned it, the guy at the store couldn’t believe that I had so many problems.  He has one, and has “NEVER had any problem.” He assumed that it must be defective because he hadn’t ever observed the same issues. But I knew that it was the operating systems, not a defective phone.  Why?  Because, on several occasions I’ve watched multiple other acquaintances struggle with lockups, errors, and not being able to find a commonly-needed function on their Android phone.  And here’s the kicker: ALL of those users also told me straight-faced and sincerely that they haven't had any problems with their phones.

Denial, anyone?

And therein lays the difference.  An early adopter eagerly trades stability for features – to the point of being willing to dogmatically overlook glitches and instability.  So while my new-found Apple friends (who, by the way, showed me exactly how to use everything on my phone in the store, without my asking) may be a cult, the glass house dwellers of Samsung’s Galaxy S2 might reconsider the heft of the stones they are throwing.  Ignoring the obvious drawbacks of the Android OS makes you just as cultish as the Apple-ites. 

Yes, I know that I “can” do all of those things on an S2 that I can do on iPhone. But iPhone is just a better-thought-out, more consistent, more stable user interface. Period. 

Why haven’t the technology reviewers discovered this?  Well, technology reviewers are by necessity early adopters. And they are willing to putter. And to forgive.   

So here’s your homework, my young technology-marketing pupil:  What space is your product competing for right now?  Is it going after the early adopter?  If that is the case, you had better be on leaning on engineering to produce the cutting edge of the spec, or prepare to die.  Are you going after the main market?  If that is the case, you’d better get diverse beta groups using your technology, and stick to a no-tolerance pre-release policy for bugs. 

You can’t do both, and you can’t try to force your technology in to one space or the other based on your own personal preferences.

As for me, hail the Apple cult. Yes, I know that I am paying more money for a smaller screen.  After all, Dude, how much screen does an old-school technology barista like me need?

A New Kind of Literacy Problem: The Junk People Write

Why are you here?  I mean, here on this site.  Right now.  Are you trying to solve a problem? Burn some hours?  Are you interested in learning about marketing, or interested in learning about an author who represents himself as having written something worthy of your time?

Writing about business leadership is the professional equivalent of writing fitness articles about flattening your abs.  There seem to be hundreds or thousands of articles published every month, most of which are not backed up quantitatively. 

The only merit of a white paper that doesn’t have any quantitative backup is the credibility of its source.  And the credibility of the source (me, your dear author), depends entirely on whether or not you agree with them.

Talent Management Magazine, one unfailing monthly source of birdcage liner that arrives at my office unsolicited, has made a living off of mediocre commentary.  (Actually, their living comes because a few advertisers are rolling the dice that the magazine does, in fact, get read by people who might buy their products;. Such is the lot of free magazines.  And the editorial quality suffers accordingly.)  Consider this quote, singled out in large text in their most recent issue: “Leaders search for opportunities to innovate, grow and improve.” I wonder how many hours the co-authors spent cultivating (or verifying) that proverb.  No wonder co-authorship of the 2-1/2 page article was in order; how could something like that be produced by just one person?  Actually, the article turns out to be nothing more than a thinly veiled pitch for the authors’ most recent collaborative book, which will undoubtedly soon move from the business section to the clearance section at your neighborhood bookstore.

Even the publications with the heftiest subscription prices, such as Harvard Business Review, have to be sifted through for gems among the sand.  I was eager about this gift subscription from my kind wife last Christmas, who knew that I regularly dive in to HBR articles suggested to me by my colleagues.   But alas, having a subscription has not greatly improved my access to scholarship; it turns out there are not many more great tidbits there what I’ve already been offered. 

Now whenever I flip through a biz publication, I feel like I’m sitting in a theater waiting for the latest Rom-Com to start: I am mostly hoping that the funny part that I’ve already seen in the promo trailer aren’t all it has to offer. 

One wonders if the publications aren’t facing the same bloat that the B-Schools are:  Having taken just a little too much of their own medicine, now that they’re handing out MBA certificates to anyone who can write a check and smile pretty for two years.

One of the best books I’ve ever read in the business of business was Jim Collins’ “Good to Great.”  His approach is attractive for three reasons:

1.       He sets out to answer a question that actually presses on the minds of business leaders:  How does a good company become great? 

2.       His discussion of the question moves beyond his own philosophies and anecdotes and includes research methodology designed to test those philosophies.  He identifies a set of businesses that in fact accomplished or solved the problem, and then finds ways to identify their similarities without necessarily imposing his own viewpoint on them.

3.       He includes methodology that eliminates candidates whose performance might be based on other factors (such as industry segment), in order to keep the research pure.

Now if you want to produce the drivel that is flooding the internet today (and simultaneously fail to impress me as a reader), take the opposite approach:

1.       Come up with a hypothesis and re-word it as a legitimate business question.

2.       Choose wording that is both provocative (because it pretends to come from a contrarian position) and resonant (because everyone who has ever worked in an office has felt that way at some point).

3.       Find companies that everyone has heard of and then get quotes from senior executives that support your philosophy.

And, voila! You have a semi-marketable product. Not nearly as profitable as writing vampire novels, but just as intellectually satisfying.  I’ve come up with one to kick it off:

Bringing Pets to Work: Furry Solutions for Turnarounds in a Tough Economy

Recent studies have shown (not that we’ll cite them here) that having a pet makes people calmer and more active.  Innovative leaders have taken those studies in to the workplace.

Joe Corporate Pantsuit has experienced this in his own firm. “When we started letting people bring dogs and cats to work, it was a huge risk for us.  People said I was crazy. But we stuck by our guns.”

And the Fortune 500 Company has reaped the benefits. Last year they posted a 30% increase in revenues, right in the middle of an economy besieged by the housing crisis and foreign currency stress. 

It just goes to show, creative solutions can make all of the difference in a competitive economy.

See?  The air of science by mentioning studies, a legitimate company engaging in the practice, some non-germane dot connecting to balance sheet outcomes, all wrapped up in a trite meaningless closing quote.   

We've got a winner.

Picking a Winner: Shakespearean Tragedy Plays Out in Presidential Elections & Marketing Management

There is something fatalistic in me, something that weighs decisions as if each one will eventually evolve into a cautionary tale.  So at election time, candidates’ characters become the fatal Shakespearean elements – like Othello’s jealousy – in our national tragedy, and in the polling booth I find myself, well, talking to Hamlet’s dead father’s ghost. 

I’m a little obsessive that way.

I hated both of my choices in the last election. It’s not that I don’t espouse a political ideology; I do. But the scant handful of partisan platforms dressed up as political philosophies and trotted out for me to pick from at the ballot box weigh very little when compared to the person wearing the suit.

In the interest of disclosure, I have voted both ways in presidential elections (if you define ‘ways’ as the –R and –D that appear after candidate names).

Here’s my magical wish list for candidate qualities.  These aren’t bad for choosing the leadership in marketing either.

Number one is integrity and self-discipline.  Greed, self-gratification, and rationalization are a no-go with me. The person who would handle your competitor or your customer with anything less than full honesty will also treat you that way as an employer.  We’ve come to tolerate ambition in politicians, but any acceptance of corruption by the populace is a request for more.  I know that the “slippery slope” is regarded as a fallacy by rhetoricians, but there is plenty of evidence to support it in this case.  As evidence I submit infidelity and divorce. If you can’t keep pick the right spouse and keep them happy for life, what business do you have running a country? 

Unfortunately, it’s trickier with employees.  Federal Law prohibits studying parts of their personal background. It also makes it illegal to make decisions based upon those factors (although, how a mental decision’s basis can be legitimately legislated is beyond me).  But with work plenty of clues around a person’s character can be dropped in an interview and through their referrals.  By the way, there may be trustworthy, productive employees out there who have a divorce in their past – but the exception does not make the rule. Caveat emptor.

Number two is judgment. Constitutionally, there is a minimum age for President.  I do not know the scholarly reasons, but having lived past that age myself, I know a little bit about the difference between a twenty-five-year-old and a thirty-five-year-old.  No amount of book smarts, natural IQ, or coaching can substitute the wisdom of experience.  For a U.S. President, I would prefer military experience; besides service as the commander in chief, a military officer gets firsthand knowledge of conflict.  

And so it is with employees.  An MBA guarantees that you have reviewed case studies in ethics and in competitive markets.  But even the most carefully written case studies and thoughtful Socratic discussions cannot emulate real life.  Many non-germane details have already been excluded from them, and the author had, whether explicit or implicit, pre-drawn conclusions about the case study.  Without experience – competitive experience, launch experience, campaign execution experience, you are not ready to manage. You may have been top of your class at an A-list school, but you are still the little boy who won the stock-picking contest: not qualified to play with real money. Even with eidetic memory and a genius intellect, you can’t lead yet. I’m sorry, but there are no Doogie Howsers.  

Of course, Judgment is not a simple equivalent to years of experience either – it goes a step further than that.   If you want to know whether a candidate has judgment, don’t ask them to cite their rehearsed successes in an interview.  Take them to lunch and in the informal chat over a hamburger, share some of the struggles that your company is having. See how they react. See if they identify, listen, understand. See if they’ve had similar experiences.  See if they recommend an impractical or rash solution (“boy, I would’ve fired that guy”), or if they ask more questions about what you’ve tried, or why the situation is there.  You’ll find out more that way than you will peering across the table over their resume.

Number three is a secret sauce, made of flexibility, enthusiasm, growth potential, and teach-ability.  The reason I include it here is because it is tied to judgment. Firstly, because the two overlap (judgment is also about knowing when to compromise and when to stand on principle). But secondly, it is because the wisdom of age often dampens the enthusiasm of youth. In a presidential candidate I would look for private-sector growth experience. Preferably, they need the kind that can only be achieved through leadership and calculated risk-taking, not the kind that is gained through brown-nosing and ladder-climbing.  That’s why career politicians are out in my book.  Sure, governing experience is great.  But even if salt is the most noticeable ingredient in secret sauce, it had better not be the only ingredient.  Run a factory, or a school, or an investment firm, or a hot-dog stand, and show me growth in a tough economy, and I’m with you.

This is also a hard quality to identify. That’s partly because it so hard to describe, as above, but also because the interview process is designed to eliminate candidates without it.  There are a hundred questions that can elicit a failing response. But it’s commonplace, and so candidates are prepared to answer those questions. They’ve rehearsed the right answer. Plenty of incompetent employees know better than to answer an interview question with “even if the building’s on fire, I’m still going to punch out at 4:59," or “I couldn’t get along with my coworkers because I have social issues."  If a couple of interview questions really prevented those issues, well, you wouldn’t have two of those employees on your team already right now, would you?  But you do. So an interview clearly isn't a reliable filter.

Post Mortem

It may be fatalistic, but to compromise on any of these three traits is to buy a used car with no real knowledge of its history. All you know is that it’s been driven and that its previous owner no longer wanted it. Of course, the car salesman (it was just driven by an old lady), the interview (I really felt it was time for me to grow in a different direction), and the party machine (he’s changed, it’s all in his past) are all going to have a handful of explanations for shortcomings at the ready.  But deep down we know there is always more to the story.  A President who can’t stay married, lead a company in a competitive market, or march in a straight line with a platoon can’t be counted on to make decisions that are unpopular or to turn down unethical opportunities.  A marketer entrusted with an advertising or research budget is the same. 

Idealistic? Yes. But I am not alone in appealing to better nature.  We are capable of so much more. Indeed, we are so much more than our base nature.  As said the Bard in Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”  Aim any lower than that, and as we said earlier, caveat emptor. Buyer beware.