Midway between b and b
Mister Starbucks shyly confesses his plans.
I love our country, and I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.
— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) January 28, 2019
In other words he’s hoping to throw another election to the orange criminal by running as a third party-er. So that right there is reason enough to tell him to fuck off.
But also…a centrist independent? Wtf? Center between what and what? Lunatic conservatives and reasonable conservatives? So, what, he’ll be a little bit wack but not as wack as Trump? Gee, that’s alluring.
We don’t need any new “centrists” because we’re already stuck between two conservative parties. People scream in horror about the extremism of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez because she thinks we should have universal Medicare aka a national health service, while all the other developed nations have had universal health insurance for decades. There is no left in electoral politics in the US, there is only right and far right.
Plus, what the hell does Howard Schultz know about being president? No more than Trump did and does. We don’t need more of that. Go away.
There’s a weird consensus between “people who know very little about politics” and “chin-stroking centrist pundits” on the erroneous premises that:
1) Political parties are bad and the cause of gridlock and incivility. We need someone who isn’t a partisan but just Knows How to Get the Job Done.
2) Governing does not require any specialized skill or experience. In fact, political experience is bad. What America Really Needs is a modern-day George Washington, someone who has proven capable in other fields, who will reluctantly agree to be called into service to save his country through sheer force of will and leadership abilities and then retire, like Cincinnatus, to his farm.
3) Rich people are talented at running organizations, and those skills translate to any other field.
Trump exploited the belief in myths (2) and (3). Schultz, like Bloomberg before him (and Perot and others before him), hits the trifecta.
I submit that, in fact:
1) Political parties are good, or at least a necessary evil, on the national and state level, and perhaps on the local level as well. They allow like-minded representatives to band together in effective coalitions for passing legislation or running a government, and they provide convenient shorthands for voters who don’t have the time to research the platforms and histories of every candidate on the ballot for every position.
2) Governing is a skill. It’s not impossible for a political outsider to have the necessary skills, so prior officeholding needn’t be a strict requirement, but we should stop pretending it’s a minus.
3) True of some rich people perhaps, but people get rich for all sorts of other reasons, too: inheritance or other forms of luck, having one really great idea, having a good idea at just the right time, being really knowledgeable and talented in one very specific field.
Unfortunately, while I suspect many of you here agree with me on this, we have a lot of work to do in convincing others.
I’d add:
4) Government should be run like a business.
The purpose of business ultimately is to make money; if you can do that by creating a product that improves the lives of a majority of the people, great, but most businesses that succeed do so while appealing to a small slice of the public, and the products are often at best neutral in their impact on people’s lives. The purpose of business is not (ahem) “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
From a British/European perspective, this is something that has been painfully obvious for as long as I have been paying attention.
You have a centre-right party and an insane-right party.
Yet a lot of people here use “Democrats” and “the left” interchangeably, as in literally alternating between them in conversation. It drives me batty.
What a Maroon – I’ve been saying that for years. My son can’t understand why some of the members of his dad’s family are Trumpists (he understands totally with my family, because he knows they are fundamentalists and free marketeers and just in general hate people who don’t look like them). He actually asked his aunt why she liked Trump, and she told him that he will run government like a business. And he has…he has run it as though the only purpose is to make him and his family and friends richer, while removing money from those not in his circle to add to their own pile of wealth. He has also run it as though there is a CEO and a tiny board of directors who have decision making power, while everyone else just needs to STFU and let them work.
Screechy, you hit another one that has bugged me forever – the idea that anyone can, and should, govern. That idea has given us such gems as Tom DeLay (an exterminator – fitting) and Deb Fischer (a rancher that relies on government permits to make millions). It might give us a really good lawmaker, but as often as not it gives us a lawmaker who has one single agenda related to their own riches. Such as Tom DeLay who decided to run for office because the EPA told him he couldn’t use the most poisonous pesticides without any regulations at all, or Deb Fischer who decided to run for office because she was afraid they might increase grazing fees on public lands (fat chance. The Ag Lobby is powerful).
The fact that Clinton actually had knowledge and experience worked against her (but for some reason, didn’t seem to work against Bernie. A lot of people I know who thought Clinton had been in government too long to be trusted were gung-ho for Bernie. Might have something to do with an extra flap of skin between his legs? Nah, couldn’t be…). Government is a skill, and very few people have that skill or knowledge, and the fact that they do automatically disqualifies them from being elected for many people.
I told my son the next time he asks his family that and hears about “running government like a business”, he should ask them how many businesses hire people who have no skills or experience in the job they are seeking. How many businesses would hire someone who had vowed to break the business once they got the job. How many businesses would allow a person in the top job to accept no advice and no training in the wide diversity of areas covered by a government.
iknklast,
There’s also the fact that Trump ran most of his businesses into the ground. He’s not even a good businessman.
As for the experience question, I’ve argued elsewhere that nearly every non-incumbent elected President since 1932 has been less experienced than the opponent. The only exception I can think of is Bush Sr., but he was basically elected to a third Reagan term. (Nixon-Humphrey is a special case.) It doesn’t make sense, but Americans have decided that experience is a negative when it comes to running the country.
What a Maroon, that was one thing I thought about, too, the bad businessman angle, but for some reason, Trump supporters can’t seem to see that. They think it’s FAKE NEWS!
I recently saw a Trump supporter respond to being told that Trump is unqualified for his role by claiming that being elected automatically gave him the necessary qualifications.
iknklast,
I believe there’s been some focus group studies that show that informing Trump supporters of the truth of his “success” in business actually does move the needle a bit. It’s not a magic bullet for persuading them, but it did discourage something like 5-10% of his supporters, which was better than other tactics performed.
But he’s Rich, so he must be successful, so he MUST be a good businessman. And, for extra bonus points among those of the Prosperity Gospel persuasion, Trump’s wealth is a sign of God’s favour. And at the same time he’s able to convince his supporters that his wealth (into which he was born) and his ostentatious lifestyle somehow, magically, don’t make him part of the “elite.”
The government-as-business idea bothers me too. It also bothers me when professions such as medicine treat patients as “customers”. They are different things, they should be treated in different ways. “The customer is always right”. But the patient certainly is not. Medical professionals have to consider an awful lot more than just what the patient wants.
The idea that any organisation, practice or endeavor should be treated the same way with some vague notion of customer satisfaction being the primary metric for success infuriates me.
Many years ago I worked for a software company. A new MD was brought in suddenly and without warning. His only experience of management was in the automation of mechanical assembly lines. Guess what? Making software isn’t even a tiny bit like making cars. Well, apart from the fact that these days cars have a lot of software in them. I really need to stop arguing with myself.
Anyway, it was a disaster. I have no doubt that some management expertise is transferable between those two domains but this guy had absolutely no idea how to trust the expertise and decision-making skills of the people actually, you know, doing all the work. He had no idea what motivated those people. Which is why everyone left after about three months.
Another software firm I worked for had a manager who had heard about “water cooler meetings”, by which he meant impromptu meetings taking place at water coolers or in the kitchen or whatever. These can be useful because sometimes people from different groups talk and find out something about the product, process or organisation that wouldn’t normally come up. The idea is to change office culture to make these kinds of discussions more likely to happen and to provide routes for any revelations to come into practice.
So this guy scheduled a water cooler meeting every morning at 0830. It was exactly the same as the old daily meeting, with exactly the same attendees, except that we had to stand drinking water instead of sitting drinking coffee. And there was no whiteboard.
You can’t just pick some trait you find admirable (or, more likely, is currently fashionable) in one domain and shoehorn it into another, especially if you don’t understand why (or if) it works in the first place.
latsot
I have to admit that I laughed out loud at the water-cooler meeting story. It reminds me of the manager who told me I should be more chatty at the coffee machine so I could really understand the issues people were facing.
The idea of management being a skill in and of itself is one that I keep on seeing, and it’s obvious nonsense (or should be) to anyone who has worked in more than one industry. And I think it’s safe to assume that the divergence in necessary skills will be even wider when you compare commercial to non-commercial organisations.
In short, being quite good at selling overpriced watery coffee only qualifies you to sell overpriced watery coffee.
;)
That was in Germany. The German reputation for literal-mindedness is not entirely undeserved. It was a terrible job but I had a really cool clean room to play in.
I think some management skills are transferable across domains. For example, whenever I’ve managed teams I’ve tended to think the main goal of management is to keep higher management away from the people doing the work. I think that at least is close to universal. It certainly seems to work in both academic and commercial environments and in cross-discipline teams.
But just expecting different groups of people to have the same values, motivations etc is a common mistake. We coders, for example, are often happy to put in an all-nighter… but generally because we don’t want a problem to beat us rather than to please a boss or to seem like hard-workers. They’re all valid reasons to work late, but we don’t tend to be motivated by by other people’s arbitrary deadlines.
It’s fun to see the light die in manager eyes when they finally understand that software just takes as long as it takes and you can’t just type faster.
Education. Oh, God, education. We are doing so many things now predicated on student as “customer”, consuming a product, which has been identified as a diploma, not as an education. So we begin to structure the education around making the student happy, satisfied with our product, Which, for most students, means doing as little work as possible (and this isn’t a dig against millennials, since every generation of students has had that goal for the most part; there are usually only a handful of students who really desire extensive, intense learning as their goal).
And the arts. So much crap gets put out there and called “art” (not just in the sense of paintings, etc, but all the fine arts) so that the “average” consumer can feel like their tastes are artsy. And almost all theatres, music companies, publishers, etc, are not basing their decisions on what is good, but on what will sell the most. There used to be room for more quality endeavors that have less commercial appeal, but now that the only focus is not only the bottom line, but on a bottom line that is obscenely high, there is less room for that, and a lot of good (and terrible) writers go the self-published route because publishers insist on formulas, happy endings, and everything neat and tidy and looking just like everything else on the shelves. True innovation can happen, but not often. That’s why so many movies have a II, III….LXXIV behind them.
Business is an appropriate tool for business type things, but many things do not, or should not, resemble business in their ultimate goals.
Yes. Education is a better example. I left it alone because while I did some teaching when I was an academic, I didn’t do much. I did supervise PhD and masters students, though, and I had to disabuse all too many of the idea that I gave the slightest flying fuck about how much they were paying the university. I made it clear that I would hold smarter candidates to higher standards than less smart or less committed ones. Because I was selling a training programme, not a degree certificate. If they wanted to learn how to sort coloured blocks there were plenty of people who’d let them do that for a few years. I was only ever interested if candidates wanted to do things I didn’t know how to do.
Yes, of course I kept getting told off by the universities for this. But I also had some students who won awards. No students ever threatened to sue me for not basically doing their entire PhD for them, but it happened to other supervisors at both the universities I worked at.
We all know that education is what you make of it. I did all the optional lab work (and more) during my first degree and lo and behold I graduated well. Because that’s the entire point. There were certainly some lecturers who were terrible and I resent them. I wish the university had measured their performance properly and kicked them out. I wish it had apologised to students for employing shitty teachers in the first place.
But this should have nothing to do with customer satisfaction because – as you say – getting away with doing less work is the most satisfying thing for most students. They are customers, but they shouldn’t get to decide what they are buying. The customer is NOT always right.
Paul @12, “The idea of management being a skill in and of itself is one that I keep on seeing, and it’s obvious nonsense (or should be) to anyone who has worked in more than one industry”
I think that’s an overstatement. There are some common skills, especially in terms of managing people. Being sufficiently informed and involved to be sure that your various teams and departments are working in harmony, without crossing over into micromanaging. How to recognize and handle different personality types, or the different perspectives of various specialties (you generally can’t expect engineers and accountants and marketing people to communicate similarly). Promoting efficiency and weeding out slackers without being a counterproductive penny-pincher or a slave-driver who drives away employees. Recognizing who’s a genuine talent versus who is taking credit for the ideas and achievements of others. Etc.
But that’s on the level of general skills. On the level of details, I agree with you: just because your last company did something one way doesn’t mean it will work in a different industry.