Flotsam and jetsam:

I owe Dan Quayle an apology.

While he said any number of strange things during his career as vice president, he didn’t say, “It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”

In my defense, I didn’t get the quote off the Internet. I got it from a book of Quaylisms, bought in the days when book publishers usually employed fact checkers to prevent that sort of thing.

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Speaking of politicians, we no longer live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We live in the land of ever-dopier statistics.

Case in point: According to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, “The American people have spoken clearly and decisively in favor of Democrats leading the country in a new direction.” In the Senate? Allen lost to Webb by fewer than 8,000 votes in Virginia and Tester beat Burns by 3,000 votes in Montana, so I’m pretty sure “clearly and decisively” is … an exaggeration. The connection to business? Business pundits publish equally inane statistics all the time. Often, people pay good money to buy it.

Oh, okay, I lied. There’s no connection. I just couldn’t resist taking a potshot at something this worthy of ridicule.

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Speaking of ridicule, last week in Advice Line I succumbed to temptation and posted a rant — a bunch of cheap shots directed at a subject about which I know nothing more than anyone else: Voting machines. It was fun. It was satisfying. The only intellectually honest part of the whole thing, though, was my making it clear I know nothing about the subject and was just enjoying myself.

Understand, there’s plenty wrong with the current crop of electronic voting machines, as any number of experts in the field have testified. There is also a lot of commentary out there — about electronic voting machines and any number of other subjects — that comes from the species Punditocratus illiterati. Much of it poses as informed commentary; often its authors just make up their “facts.” Beware of it, especially if you agree with its conclusions. That’s where the greatest danger lies, because due diligence depends on objectivity, not on affection for the subject.

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On a related subject, regular correspondent Leo Heska brought an article from The Wall Street Journal to my attention. The piece, “Some Managers Make It Easy on Themselves With a Ready ‘No'” (Jared Sandberg, October 17, 2006), included an account of research by Professor Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School. Professor Amabile discovered that for most people, relatively dumb criticism sounds smarter than well-informed, well-reasoned praise. Maybe that’s why so many business managers have a hard time delivering a compliment. They don’t want to sound stupid.

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Naysaying usually is the result of a low tolerance for risk. Since saying no prevents anything from happening, it prevents most risk … and, of course, most success. Which might lead you to think that the formula for success is confidence, as extolled in the truly awful book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End (Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 2004). Confidence is aggravating, as only something whose conclusion I like (confidence breeds success) but whose evidence and logic are so … what’s the word I’m looking for? … bad … can be.

While written confidently, it’s also probably wrong. Evidence: An article supplied by another regular correspondent, Arthur Leavitt, “The Problem With Confidence,” by Adam Hanft (Inc. Magazine, September 2005). Hanft reported on research by the Cranfield School of Management in the U.K, about what leads to successful entrepreneurship. The researchers looked at risk tolerance and confidence, and discovered that confidence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Interviewing 50 entrepreneurs, the researchers discovered that the winning combination was high risk tolerance and low self-confidence. Less sure they’re right, these entrepreneurs double check their ideas before investing in them. Low risk tolerance and low confidence did okay, if you’re wondering, but high risk tolerance coupled with high confidence did not. It resulted in sales, but not in profits.

You might not agree with the definition of confidence used by the researchers, by the way, or the metric they developed to assess it: To me, what they called confidence was closer to what I call arrogance. The book, Confidence, makes a similar distinction, although there, Confidence is what results in success while Arrogance is what doesn’t, the proof being that when the result is success, those causing it must have been confident rather than arrogant.

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I sure do enjoy criticizing books written by other people. I’m confident it makes me sound smart, too.

Am I right?