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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

One of the most questionable ideas in this year’s presidential campaign is the asserted importance of “standing up to entrenched interests.”

It does, to be sure, have a resonance that stirs the soul. One hears the phrase and imagines an accompanying chorus of angels.

Now imagine you’re interviewing an executive candidate instead. The imaginary angels vanish, replaced by the ghostly visage of Don Quixote.

Last week’s column explored the questions we might ask Senators McCain and Obama if we could give them job interviews (“A conventional approach to executive interviewing,” Keep the Joint Running, 9/8/2008). Let’s continue pushing the metaphor.

Candidates, be they political or business-executive, who claim they’ll stand up to the entrenched (or special) interests are either grandstanding, or … well, about the best that can be said for them is that they are victims of a false dichotomy. The proper response to entrenched interests is neither standing up nor caving in, not least because “the entrenched interests” isn’t singular, or even a small number.

If you look at political history in more than a completely superficial way, you’ll see an inescapable pattern: What those who achieved important results did with special interests was manipulate them, playing them against each other.

And if standing up to one proved necessary, as in the case of Teddy Roosevelt standing up to the trusts, the lesson is clear: Stand up to just one, and have most of the rest lined up on your side when you do or you’ll look like one of those cartoon characters who’s been run over by a steamroller.

In your company, the “entrenched interests” are such individuals and groups as: Accounting, the Marketing Department, Sales, the Board of Directors, shareholders, and whatever regulatory bodies oversee your industry.

If you were to interview an executive candidate who told you he or she would stand up to these constituencies, I trust you’d have the wisdom to choose someone less likely to destroy the company. What you want to hear is that the candidate will listen to them, understand their priorities, and find ways to move the company forward in ways that harmonize their interests — ManagementSpeak for playing them off against each other.

And another thing: Metaphorically speaking, Senators McCain and Obama are internal candidates no matter how much they claim to be “Washington outsiders.” Given the extent to which both are promising change, they had better be internal candidates. If that isn’t clear, think about interviewing an external candidate for an executive position, who says, “I’m going to shake things up, clean house, and make big changes.”

“Oh, really?” you might plausibly ask. “How do you know shaking things up, cleaning house and making big changes is what we need to do?”

Compare that to an internal candidate — one who knows How Things Get Done Around Here — who makes a similar claim. You’d have two questions for this candidate: (1) In their estimation, what most needs shaking and cleaning; and (2) how they would go about it.

“I’d stand up to the special interests,” is, for any internal candidate, a disqualifier, for this reason: Everyone is a special interest and the most successful are the most entrenched. The only way to stand up to the special interests is to stand up to everyone. That’s the opposite of leading.

Politics, whether corporate or national, is first and foremost a game. As with any game it has players, rules, objectives, strategies and tactics.

Those who play this game play it to gain advantages (not to win, since the game never ends), and they do what they do because they think it will help them.

Anyone who is serious about changing things recognizes that to do so they will have to change something about the game.

In business (and, we can wish, in government) the process is called “root cause analysis.” So with internal candidates what you want to hear is clarity about what needs the most attention, what the key leverage points are, and how that candidate would go about using them to achieve planned changes.

For example: One of the most important pieces of legislation passed in the last hundred years was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lyndon Johnson, who got it passed, was not known for being a nice person.

What he was known for was his skill in playing special interests against each other.

He was, that is, a consummate politician. To be the president of this country, or of a corporation of any size, that’s a big part of the job description.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Sometimes deep analysis isn’t necessary. Simple juxtaposition will do.

For example: You have undoubtedly read the scribblings of opinionators on the subject of oil prices and oil company profits. “Of course they make bigger profits when the price of oil goes up,” they patronizingly say. “What else would you expect?”

You have also undoubtedly read scribblings from the same opinionators regarding air carrier profits and the minus sign preceding them. “Of course they can’t make any money,” they explain. “The price of fuel is skyrocketing. That’s why they need concessions from organized labor.”

Juxtapose: When the cost of a key raw material goes up, the inevitable result is staggering profits. Except when the inevitable result is staggering losses. Of course. Aren’t you embarrassed for not realizing it?

Were anyone remotely honest about these two subjects they’d give you entirely different explanations. Oil companies make record profits because when their raw materials increase in price, so do their finished products, in proportion.

Air carriers are in dire straits because they do a lousy job of negotiating with energy companies, failed to reinvest in their fleets, and, for reasons just as inexplicable as everything else about airfares, they don’t raise prices in response to rising costs.

Somebody … and I know this will come as a shock … isn’t telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Anything except the truth is closer to the mark.

Making matters worse is the extent to which we overestimate our ability to detect falsehood. Yes, we lie to ourselves about our ability to detect when others are lying to us, and we can’t even see through our own self-deception.

As evidence (assuming evidence is still of some value when making a case) I offer “Lie defectives,” (Bruce Bower, writing in Science News, 7/4/2008, reporting on research by Charles Bond Jr. of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published in the July edition of Psychological Bulletin).

Bond states the point succinctly: “When all the evidence is statistically analyzed, deception judgments depend more on the liar than the judge.”

Most of us like to think we’re good judges of character. We assess the appearance, facial expressions, twitches and gestures of those around us and think we can do a pretty good job of deciding who we can trust to give us an honest accounting of things.

It turns out that those appearances, facial expressions, twitches and gestures aren’t very well correlated with honest and dishonest discourse. Which is to say, George W. Bush’s assessment of Vladmir Putin (“I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul,”) was not an exceptional blunder. Other than its impact it was the same sort of blunder each of us makes all the time.

This matters to you.

All executives, not to mention all POTUSes, need a good detector of (ahem) male bovine excreta (MBE). Since CIOs enjoy a wider variety of sources of this aromatic substance than most other executives, with much of it more sophisticated in construction as well, MBE detection is a critical CIO survival skill.

In developing your own MBE detector, you can’t include your presumed ability to quickly and accurately assess character, because it doesn’t work reliably.

Instead, make use of:

  • Juxtaposition: As noted, when two statements, each of which sound plausible, are mutually incompatible, at least one of them must be wrong.
  • Plausibility: What the heck — as long as I’m offending everyone by using current-events examples, here’s another: How many times have you read that tax cuts return more to the public coffers than they cost? Use the back of an envelope: For a one dollar tax cut to return even one dollar to the Treasury, it will have to generate about three dollars in new income (assuming, for simplicity, a 33% tax rate). That’s an average 300% ROI. Highly implausible.
  • Desirability: The more you’d like it to be true, the less likely that it is true. See tax cuts, above.
  • Past performance: You can’t judge someone’s integrity from their clothing, haircut, expression, handshake, twitches, gestures and gaze. You can judge it from experience. If someone stretches the truth, spins it, presents only the more convenient half of it or simply makes it all up because it gets them what they want and you find out … the situation is the opposite of the boilerplate you find on a mutual fund prospectus:

Even if past performance doesn’t guarantee future results, it’s a pretty reliable indicator.

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