Be smart, just not too smart
All executives like to think they “surround” themselves with the smartest associates they can find in the hope the associates will make the executive the best decision maker he or she can be. That’s the type of person the professors in my graduate program endeavored to make us.
Their approach was to teach us the types of decision making techniques Robert McNamara implemented at both Ford Motor Co. and the U.S. Department of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Secretary McNamara’s techniques were intended to make decision makers as rational as possible and were built on a body of statistics and logical reasoning. I’m sure everyone of my professors would have been overjoyed if we ended-up producing the type of analysis Susan Crowe and James Lucas-Vergona describe in their Science Direct article entitled, “What should be done about Illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States” ( www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089571770700091X ).
After an exhaustive analysis of the benefits and costs of twelve alternative solutions to the the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico, Crowe and Lucas-Vergona’s model recommends “Make Current Illegal Immigrants US Citizens” followed by a “Guest Worker Program” as the next best alternative. The least important alternatives were “Deport All Current Illegal Immigrants” and “Institute a Completely Open Border”.
Needless to say and much to the chagrin of my professors I never produced an analysis like the Crowe/Lucas-Vergona analysis, mostly because my superiors wanted us to “be smart, just not too smart”and anything that might have produced recommendations like “Make Current Illegal Immigrants US Citizens” would likely have been so smart, it would have been dumb to even present it as viable.
As a young analyst I quickly learned all executives whether in business or government have constituencies and those constituencies determine the extent of the executives decision-making ability and authority. Many think the term “constituency” is political in nature but it applies as much to the president of General Motors as it does to the President of the United States. Their constituencies may be significantly different in make-up and interests but they are not different in terms of their control over the authority of the executives who depend upon their support. That is why being “too smart’ really means coming up with proposals an executive’s Board of Directors or electorate would find unacceptable for what ever reasons they find the proposal unacceptable.
In 1939 Winston Churchill famously said,
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
Churchill’s words explain how associates might better serve their executives than all the most sophisticated decision-making models in all of academia. They should all work to understand the interests of the constituencies that enable the executive’s authority.
On the surface Robert McNamara appeared to be giving President Johnson the best decision-making advice possible but it caused Johnson, the ultimate politician, to lose touch with his own constituency and to resign the Presidency. Both Roger Ailes of Fox News and John Schantter, founder of Papa Johns Pizza, are recent examples of high profile business executives forced to resign when they lost touch with their constituencies, their Board of Directors.
Losing touch with a constituency is not a new development by any means. It’s exactly what Plato discuses in “The Apology” when he describes how Socrates lost touch with “the men of Athens” and was forced to commit suicide. Socrates last words were “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please don’t forget to pay the Debt”.
Clearly Socrates knew all men are indebted to others in one way or another. Socrates is considered by many to have been the smartest man alive. Perhaps the only lesson he never learned was “it’s good to be smart, just not too smart”
