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What were they thinking?

To appear forward-looking, Obama spoke between two Grecian columns. McCain, in contrast, proved he understood advanced technology by speaking in front of a huge digital flag instead of the more traditional cloth one.

Ridiculing the candidates is, of course, the American way. If it isn’t, all four candidates and their surrogates are un-American.

But enough fun. Take out the money, ads, speechwriters, and commentariat, and what we have are two candidates interviewing for an executive job. Think of their VP choices as their succession plans.

Imagine you could interview them. Both candidates have mostly ignored the advice my friend Nick Corcodilos frequently gives. They’re supposed to “Do the job in the interview.” Instead, in varying proportions, they’re giving you vague generalities and attacks on the other candidate.

In a real interview you would, of course, unceremoniously send home any interviewee who acted like this. We can only wish: The only attack ad worth your attention this entire campaign season was provided by Paris Hilton.

It’s your interview. What do you ask each candidate?

“Why are you interested in this job?” is a good question to ask any executive. There’s more than one appropriate answer, and you’ll learn something from their response: Some leaders find their gratification developing people; others in building effective organizations. There are those whose focus is accomplishing something important and those who are turnaround specialists.

And there are some who just want the job for the title, prestige and money, and haven’t, amazingly enough, prepared a decent answer.

“Tell me about the best hire you ever made, and the worst one. What made you decide to hire the best one? What made the person so good? And what did you do about the mistake?”

You … we … are hiring someone to run a huge organization. The most important decisions this person will make will be choosing the executive team. For the best hire you would probably want to hear about competence; also about choosing someone who was stretching but had ability and potential. The habits of success and collaboration belong in the answer as well.

You wouldn’t want to hear about loyalty as an important criterion, nor would you want to hear that a candidate likes to hire people who think the same way he or she does.

For the worst hire you might want to hear about trying the person in a different role; definitely about replacing someone who just didn’t work out.

You’ll want to ask some “how would you handle” questions, too — reality based ones that deal with current challenges. “I think we’re overstaffed right now, and our budget is tight. What would you do about it if I hired you?”

If a candidate talks about experience cutting costs you should send that candidate home. If he/she talks about experience cutting costs while maintaining the ability to deliver … about improving efficiency, performance and effectiveness … you have someone who understands what’s needed to run a real organization.

“Okay … we finish this process, I hire you, you get your ID badge. What do you do first, second and third? How do you get started?”

I’ve never regretted asking this question. Some candidates know how to map out a program, one that starts with listening and building relationships, and building an effective organization. The candidates you don’t want to hire are the ones who will start making changes immediately and unilaterally.

Running for office is a bit different, of course: Presidents have almost three months to do this before taking the oath of office, and are expected to change out the entire executive team. Still, most of the principles are the same.

All through the interviews you’d listen hard to get a sense of how each candidate thinks about the line employees who do all the real work. I’m going to pick on McCain here, because he pushed one of my buttons in his speech when he said that Obama’s healthcare plan would, “… put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.”

First of all, private health insurance puts a bureaucrat between me and my doctor right now. And second, what is it about running for president that causes candidates to insult the men and women who will be reporting to them and looking to them for leadership?

Here’s something you wouldn’t do: Waste interview time asking about character and integrity. That’s what reference checks are for.

And anyway, what might a candidate say on these subjects that isn’t simple bragging?

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Which is more important in human behavior — nature or nurture? It’s a classic question, with “nature” in this context meaning inborn tendencies and nurture meaning the consequences of life experience.

People, including academics who should know better, still argue the question today. Those who know more long-ago recognized that it’s a false dichotomy.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, a false dichotomy is an argument that presents as antithetical two possibilities that can, in reality, be simultaneously valid. The roles of nature and nurture in human behavior are, most assuredly, complementary.

Take Michael Jordan’s successful career as a basketball player. Nature or nurture? Anyone who doubts nature hasn’t looked at the average height of an NBA player. Also, anyone who doubts nature has to believe there are no genetic traits that confer above-average strength, stamina or agility. If you’re one of them, I commend to you “Finding the golden genes,” (Patrick Barry, Science News, 8/13/2008).

Those who think genes are the whole story should pay more attention to what Jordan and nearly every other top performer in the history of the world has had to say about the importance of their upbringing and life experiences.

The occasion of Labor Day makes another false dichotomy timely: The question of which matters more for a company’s success — the quality of its managers and leaders, or the quality of its employees.

It’s a false dichotomy because both are necessary conditions for achieving sustainable success, regardless of the nature of the organization you lead.

The importance of top-notch employees is old news in IT. Way back in 1975, Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month described research showing how much more productive great programmers are than average ones. Depending on the metric the answer turned out to be roughly a factor of ten.

Since compensation is based on market value and not delivered value, it’s unlikely any CIO pays top performers ten times more than average ones. Even three times more is a stretch, making top talent an excellent investment. Let’s see: Invest two more dollars a year to get ten back — sounds good to me.

More generally: All of the value-creating work in most companies is performed by its non-managerial employees. They are the ones who design, assemble, market, sell, distribute and support the company’s products and services. Every single step in the chain of events that convert raw materials to finished products is either performed by non-managerial employees, or is performed by automated systems they assemble and program.

It takes a serious act of denial to figure they don’t matter (an act of denial many executives have proven themselves all too capable of).

False dichotomy sorts conclude from logic like this that instead it must be leadership that doesn’t matter. They’re wrong.

The simplest demonstration of this wrongness is a basic fact: Non-managerial employees are hired by managers and executives. When a company has figured out how to attract, recruit, retain, train and promote great employees, the credit belongs to its management team, even as credit for the actual work belongs to its employees.

Leadership matters for more reasons than this. In particular, excellent leadership is the difference between employees expending their efforts at cross purposes, canceling each other out, and employees reinforcing each others’ efforts, extending the reach of the corporation.

It’s a vector thing.

One trend is turning the management/staff false dichotomy into a real one: The executive wage gap.

Thirty years ago, the average CEO made about 40 times the pay of an average employee. That’s now ballooned to 800 times as much. I’ve read that in typical corporations the top four officers draw ten percent of the total payroll.

Beyond the visceral reaction these statistics elicit (unless you’re one of the top four officers, an immediate need for Pepto-Bismol), is a practical business issue: Where the opportunity cost of a 1970s CEO’s compensation was 40 non-managerial positions the company could not afford to hire, the 2008 CEO paycheck costs 800 non-managerial employees — a net loss of 760.

Depending on the size of the company that can be a lot of value-adding labor that isn’t going to happen.

CEO compensation is a Pandora’s box that isn’t going to shut any time soon, so CEOs, and you too, had better concentrate on hiring the best talent available, even if it drives up the average wage (and drives down the CEO-to-employee wage ratio).

Doing anything else will turn a false dichotomy into a false economy.

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