I Could Never Sell

Week of February 4.

If you’re selling well and don’t know why, it could all collapse in an instant, couldn’t it?

What would you do? You don’t know. If you don’t know what you’re doing now, you don’t know what you would do then.

You would be bewildered when that day came. You are bewildered now, but don’t know it.  You think otherwise. You think to the contrary. You are exponentially bewildered today. On the day when all your good fortune collapsed around you, you would progress to simple bewilderment, clean and clear and uncompounded.

Think you know what got you here? Let’s ask Marshall Goldsmith (What Got You Here Won’t Get You There).

Marshall Goldsmith takes captains of industry through their final ascent on the summit of power. Half of the biggest economies on earth today are corporations, not countries. Before those corporations hand their fortunes over to a new leader, they hire Marshall Goldsmith and team to surround him for a year.

Marshall Goldsmith and team interview everyone in his life. Above him, below him, beside him. At home, at the office, at the club. His wife, his mother, his kids. Even his dry cleaner.

What’s he like? Marshall Goldsmith asks them all. Turns out the future Master of the Universe is the last person you want to ask. He’s got it all wrong. Everyone knows him better than he does.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith warns, but that’s not the worst news. Worse: What Got You Here Ain’t What You Think.

Or let’s ask another famous success:

The nature of finding a market and customers guarantees that you will get it wrong several times.

– Steven Gary Blank, Successful Strategies for Products That Win

And after you get it right, you may never know why.

Take this fateful example from the world of politics. November 2004:

Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio…

Bush advisor Karl Rove is credited with this clever transaction. What exactly changed hands here?

This was a sale that changed history. A masterpiece, say the campaign consultants and top-paid marketers who sell us national candidates. But does anyone understand this masterpiece in a way that could be repeated?

In one sense, Rove gave support to one cause (amendments banning same-sex marriage) and got support for another (his candidate, Bush). I see what he got. That’s easy. Higher turnout among voters who favor his guy.

…the ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign, political analysts said.

…pushing swing voters in the Appalachian region of [Ohio] toward Mr. Bush… propelling him to a 136,000-vote victory.

…said Robert T. Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, “It helped most in what we refer to as the Bible Belt area of southeastern and southwestern Ohio, where we had the largest percentage increase in support for the president.”

But what exactly did Rove offer, that drew these human tidal waves? Would anyone know how to do it again?

Yes, I think so. I think I’ve found someone who understands just what made that sale work. David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times.

I come from a far-flung Protestant family. Do Protestants need a Pope of their own, I wondered, so they won’t expect the White House to issue decrees on the sacraments of private life? So we can use presidential elections for picking a president?

No, Brooks explains, this is economics, not theology. He calls the family “the nuclear core of human capital formation.”

Only half of American kids can expect to live with both biological parents at age 15 (compared with two-thirds of kids in Western Europe). That has calamitous effects on education and development.

So no, these voters are not voting in behalf of another and better world beyond this one. They are voting for a bigger bite of this world.

This is class struggle and social mobility. The Haves and the Have-Nots. But, explains Brooks, these Have-Nots want manners. Not just funds, jobs, education. Manners that make for success on the job. The social skills and habits and mental traits they see among the Haves. Planning. Saving. Discussing. Negotiating. Keeping cool. Evaluating. Debating. Deal-making. Envisioning. Persuading. Advancing. Even Selling!

David Brooks points us to Annette Lareau and her book Unequal Childhoods. As one parent says:

My kid is already on such a different path from some of his buddies from school. At six years old, their futures are already written on their faces.

The middle class and the working class give their kids different odds of success.

[Middle-class] parents are deeply involved in all aspects of their children’s lives. They make concerted efforts to provide learning experiences.

– Brooks

Hard work for everyone, raising children this way:

Home life involves a lot of talk and verbal jousting. Parents tend to reason with their children, not give them orders. They present “choices” and then subtly influence the decisions their kids make. Kids feel free to pass judgment on adults, express themselves…

– Brooks

For a lifelong payoff:

…children raised in this way know how to navigate the world of organized institutions. They know how to talk casually with adults, how to use words to shape how people view them, how to perform before audiences and look people in the eye to make a good first impression.

– Brooks

Who has the time? Not the working class:

There was much less talk in the working-class homes. Parents were more likely to issue brusque orders, not give explanations.

– Brooks

After that, working class kids get out-talked everywhere:

Children, like their parents, were easily intimidated by and pushed around by verbally dexterous teachers and doctors. Middle-class kids felt entitled to individual treatment when entering the wider world, but working-class kids felt constrained and tongue-tied.

– Brooks

Ruby Payne knows this inside out, in Crossing the Tracks for Love:

One of the reasons there’s so much violence in poverty is that most people… don’t have the words to resolve conflicts through conversation and discussion.

To resolve a conflict, you have to get away from the level of the personal and go to the level of the issue. To operate on the level of issues, you have to be able to use abstract words…

Worse yet: a single-parent home. If two parents don’t have this kind of time, how would one parent?

So why ban same-sex marriage? Why ask the American Constitution to define marriage? Why limit it to one man and one woman?

Again, this is not theology, and not Biblical. Such one-man-one-woman marriages are more the exception than the rule in the Bible, between the harems of the Old Testament or Tanakh, and the celibates Jesus and Paul in the New.

Here are the father and mother of the prophet Samuel:

And there was a man from Ramathaim-zophim, from the high country of Ephraim, and his name Elkanah son of Jeroham son of Elihu son of Tohu son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. And he had two wives: the name of the one was Hannah and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children but Hannah had no children…. And her rival would torment her sorely so as to provoke her because the Lord had closed up her womb…. and she would weep and would not eat….

Elkanah bred his heirs and his sheep with equal care.

No, the ban on same-sex marriage is economics again, not theology. How? Picture the beachmaster on Wild Kingdom, the male sea lion with a harem of eight or ten females. For each female in that harem, another young male is left to while away the day at water sports with his buddies. Monogamy is even rarer on Wild Kingdom than in the Bible.

To our Have-Nots, marriage and family are the ticket to the world of the Haves. They dread above all else the beachmaster and his harem. Nothing will bring them to the barricades like the cry “One man, one woman. ”

Now we recognize Karl Rove’s social conservatives: the socialists of sex. Share the Wealth! A Woman in Every Kitchen.

Karl Rove has also pushed a ban on abortion. Why? Abortion steals the cheese from the marriage trap. Clears a beach for the beachmaster and his harem. Don’t count the unborn, count the unmatched, unpaired, and unmated.

The “family values” agenda wants to shut down the black market (free market) in sex. Make life tough for the beachmaster and followers. Force all that traffic down the official and regulated marriage chute.

Baffling policies begin to make sense:

There are many cultural ways to strengthen marriage, but financially, the government could extend the earned income tax credit to single males. That would not only induce more young men to enter the labor force, it would also make them more marriageable.

– Brooks

This agenda fights crime too:

How do you encourage marriage at a time when 70 percent of African-American babies are born out of wedlock? How can you embed young men in American cities, or in Iraq, in the constructive world of work, so they won’t drift into the world of violence?

– Brooks

Wait a minute. Iraq? To keep young men from the world of violence? I think Brooks missed a trick here. Iraq is official violence, organized violence, budgeted violence, planned violence, articulate violence, managed violence. Iraq is middle class violence, on a vastly more productive scale than working class violence. It cranks a lot of assembly lines…

For Karl Rove, monogamy is also the secret engine of the economy. Every man with a wife needs an employer, and a mortgage, and a car and car insurance, a refrigerator and washing machine…

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God to join this man and this woman in extended warranty….

In return, Karl Rove can trust his socialists of sex to sniff out socialism wherever he points them. They should know, eh? Count on them to howl on cue, and denounce the estate tax, fines assessed on Enron or Exxon-Mobil, Social Security, public education, universal health insurance….

Such a deal! Diabolically clever. Beat that if you can.