Shortly after his inauguration, President George H. W. Bush counseled freshly minted White House appointees that, “It’s not really very complicated. It’s a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backwards to see that there’s not even a perception of conflict of interest.
.. By holding themselves to the same exacting standards as the rest of the executive branch, they sent a clear message to those serving under them.
.. This tradition came to an abrupt stop with President Trump. By continuing to hold onto his businesses and effectively advertising them through frequent visits to his properties, our leader creates the appearance of profiting from the presidency. As things stand, we can’t know whether policy aims or personal financial interests motivate his decisions as president. Whatever his intentions may be, the resulting uncertainty casts a pall of doubt over governmental decision-making.
.. Every past administration actively supported O.G.E.’s work and respected it for taking stands when necessary. That White House support provided the office with the leverage it needed to fulfill its mission.
.. The Office of Government Ethics has been performing the same service it has always provided with respect to the current administration’s nominees. In fact, I have succeeded in moving President Trump’s nominees on average almost a week (six days to be exact) faster than I moved President Obama’s nominees during the last presidential transition, without compromising O.G.E.’s high standards. I am particularly proud of this accomplishment because this administration’s nominees generally hold far more complex financial interests than the last administration’s nominees, a circumstance that would normally be expected to slow O.G.E.’s work.
.. The press secretary touts one of the president’s commercial enterprises as the “winter White House,” and the State Department has publicized it around the globe.
A White House lawyer made the extraordinary assertion that “many regulations promulgated by the Office of Government Ethics (‘OGE’) do not apply to employees of the Executive Office of the President.”
Appearing to echo this view, the Office of Management and Budget challenged O.G.E.’s authority to collect routine ethics records.
Even some presidential nominees have pushed back against ethics processes with uncommon intensity.
.. the very official charged with responsibility for White House ethics, the counsel to the president. His office recently ginned up ten unsigned, undated waivers, many of which seem intended to have retroactive effect, raising the specter of a possible effort to paper over ethics violations. Worse, the counsel appears to be both issuer and recipient of two waivers.
.. Defenders of the status quo also seem unwilling to acknowledge the existence of a problem absent clear evidence of significant violations. This argument risks legitimizing an approach of bare minimum legal compliance. The existence or absence of identified violations is not the only measure of an ethics program — no program can detect every violation and those detected are often hard to prove.
.. Those systems depend on adherence to ethical norms.
.. Recent experiences have convinced me that the existing mechanism is insufficient. The Office of Government Ethics needs greater authority to obtain information from the executive branch, including the White House. The White House and agencies lacking inspectors general need investigative oversight, which should be coordinated with O.G.E.
.. Because we can no longer rely on presidents to comply voluntarily with ethical norms, we need new laws to address their conflicts of interest, their receipt of compensation for the use of their names while in office, nepotism and the release of tax forms.
.. Disclosure requirements can be refined and the revolving door tightened.
This Thing For Which We Have No Name
[5.12.14]
Whatever you think about McDonald’s—it’s really, really good at not being bad. If you understand satisficing—which would be another concept hugely important to the understanding of human behavior—we think we maximize and we describe our behavior as if we’re maximizing but most of the time we go “I want something that’s pretty good and definitely isn’t awful.” Why do we go to McDonald’s? Is it the best food in town? Probably not. The search cost of finding the best place to eat in town, given that we’ve only got one shot at having a meal in a strange town, would be pretty high. But also when you go into McDonald’s you know you’re not going to be ripped off, you’re almost certainly not going to be ill.
.. One of the single moments where I realized this stuff is really useful is when I first tore up a pair of air tickets. My wife and I had some nonrefundable air tickets to go to Paris for the weekend and the day before we were due to travel, both of us went down with flu and were feeling appalling. We were there packing, thinking, we’ve bought these tickets, they’re nonrefundable, we have to go to Paris. And I suddenly said, “Hold on, we’re now going to spend another 300 or 400 pounds on hotels, art galleries, and everything else in order to feel crap in a hotel room rather than feeling mildly ill at home.” The moment when I tore up those travel tickets that was almost a little Damascus Road experience where I realized some of this thinking is practically useful in everyday life.
.. It is true of quite a lot of progress in human life that businesses, in their blundering way, sometimes discover things before academics do. This is true of the steam engine. People developed steam engines before anybody knew how they worked. It’s true of the jet engine, true of aspirin, and so forth. People discover through trial and error—what Nassim Taleb calls “stochastic tinkering.” People make progress on their own without really understanding how it works. At that point, academics come along, explain how what works works and to some extent take the credit for it. ”
.. I was seduced by economic thinking and the elegance of it, but at the same time having worked in advertising for 15 years, I was also fairly conscious of the fact that this isn’t really how people behave. We’d always known, in those fields of marketing, like direct marketing, where you actually got results—you sent out letters to 50,000 people and saw how many people replied—there was something going on that we didn’t understand. In other words, occasionally you might do incredibly elaborate, complex, and expensive work and have more or less no effect on the uptake of some product. Then someone would redesign the application form and slightly change the order of the questions on the application form, and the number of people replying would double. We knew there was this mysterious kind of dark force at work in human behavior.
The extraordinary thing about the marketing industry is that, by accident, it was pretty good at stumbling on some of these biases which behavioral economics later codified. There’s a wonderful/evil advertisement I mentioned in a recent piece, “How else could a month’s salary last a lifetime?”, which is a De Beers advertisement in about 1953 for engagement rings. Now, that’s a brilliant case of framing or price anchoring. How much should you spend on an engagement ring? We’ll suggest that whatever your month’s salary is, that’s what you should spend.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” is a wonderful example of understanding loss aversion or “defensive decision making”. The advertising and marketing industry kind of acted as if it knew this stuff—but where we were disgracefully bad is that no one really attempted to sit down and codify it. When I discovered Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and the whole other corpus on Behavioral Economics…. when I started discovering there was a whole field of literature about “this thing for which we have no name” …. these powerful forces which no one properly understood—that was incredibly exciting.
.. The idea that capitalism doesn’t work because it’s efficient—that’s a complete myth. Anybody who’s worked in any kind of capitalist enterprise for any length of time will know that it’s not even remotely efficient. There are spectacular inefficiencies all over the place.
Markets work because they’re adaptive. Bad things get killed, good new things sometimes get promoted. But most of the time what you’ll find in business is no one has the faintest idea of why the things that work actually work. What’s very useful here is that finally a group of academics with money, time, and immensely high intelligence were finally sitting down to codify and make sense of things, which we’d been aware of for years but which, to our shame, we’d never attempted to try and systematize.
.. I know that academics go practically deranged at the mention of Malcolm Gladwell. They’ll say some of the things that he says are unrepresentative, or slightly inaccurate, or he misrepresents science, or takes credit for this or that. My view is much more benign, which is, look, if 100,000 business people read his books and wake up the next day being slightly more open-minded or slightly happier to work with the counterintuitive than they were the day before, then that book’s a net victory and I’m not that bothered.
.. But that’s because business and academia are fundamentally different. In academia you have to be right, in business you’ve just got to be less stupid, less wrong than your competitors. And so the approach we have to progress is fundamentally different. We just look for ways to be less wrong. And of course we don’t need to know why something works, just that it does.
.. One of them is the assumptions of neoclassical economics, which basically creates an imaginary species in order to be able to mathematically model it.
.. Homo economicus, not only has it never existed, my contention is that if homo economicus evolved for some peculiar reason, it would die out very, very quickly or we would club it to death with sticks. It’s not in our evolutionary interest to be rational optimizers, by the way. Any species that’s rational also becomes highly predictable, and anybody who’s highly predictable is rapidly dead because you can anticipate his behavior and game it. Sometimes being unpredictable is the best approach.
.. In the commercial world it’s not in the interests of consumers to be rational. If you imagine a world of rational consumers where they all bought cars based on some formula, which was fuel economy multiplied by acceleration divided by depreciation or whatever it may be, what they would end up with would be really, really terrible cars. Car manufacturers would immediately game their predictable and easily understanding preferences and produce cars, which met all the metrics laid down for a desirable car, but the cars would be ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly, and no pleasure to own. It is our interest, in a sense, as consumers to have a degree of unpredictability to our behavior and to be difficult to model. But homo economicus is really a contrivance in order to pretend that humans can be treated as though they were atoms or planets or something like that, which is a fundamental category error.
.. “Well, one way to get men to get tested for cancer more regularly is to make it easier and to use lots of nudges where you book appointments, you confirm appointments by text messaging and all that stuff.” Absolutely true. And I commend that work, by the way.
There’s another thing you can do which is interesting, and no one has tried this, which is to say, “If you have this test, we will give you the results in 24 hours.” Because nobody’s thought that’s relevant. Nobody thought the delay between having the test and getting the result is relevant to the human propensity to have that test. Credit card companies discovered this by accident.
Trump Seems Much Better at Branding Opponents Than Marketing Policies
Donald J. Trump, the master brander, has never found quite the right selling point for his party’s health care plan.
He has promised “great healthcare,” “truly great healthcare,” “a great plan” and health care that “will soon be great.” But for a politician who has shown remarkable skill distilling his arguments into compact slogans — “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “Crooked Hillary” — those health care pitches have fallen far short of the kind of sharp, memorable refrain that can influence how millions of Americans interpret news in Washington.
.. Mr. Trump is much better at branding enemies than policies. And he expends far more effort mocking targetsthan promoting items on his agenda... The word choice is memorable. But it’s also the repetition that’s important. In its simplicity and consistency, that message is textbook marketing.. Marketing research also suggests that the more we’re exposed to a belief or a brand, the more likely we are to believe that others share or use it. And so by repeating the slogan, Mr. Trump also feeds the notion that Mrs. Clinton is widely believed to be crooked... Psychologists have another term for what Mr. Trump does here that is so effective. He “essentializes” Mrs. Clinton and his other opponents, like Lyin’ Ted Cruz... This is the important difference between using a descriptive verb (“Ted Cruz tells lies”) and a noun label (“Lyin’ Ted”). Such minor manipulations of language, psychological research shows, can convey much more deep-seated, stable and central characteristics about a subject. And these labels preclude other identities... The only thing you need to know about Marco Rubio, according to Mr. Trump’s branding efforts, is that he lacks stature. And that’s a deeply embedded quality that the man can never change:.. But the affirmative case for the Republican alternative? None of his language has stuck. When Mr. Trump has tried to brand his party’s health care reform efforts in a positive light, his messages have largely taken the form of unmemorable promises about “better” or “great” health care in the future:.. If any word kept coming up — and this one’s not from his Twitter feed — it was his reference to the House bill as “mean.”.. debates over whether the ban should be called a ban... Mr. Trump for the most part hasn’t done that. He has used the tactic to promote himself: He is, above all, “a winner.” The endless repetition and emotional simplicity seemed to work during the campaign as he promoted the WALL (not a fence!). But now that he’s president, what if he cheered the Republican health plan as doggedly as he scorned “Crooked Hillary”? What if he devoted as much effort to defining the stakes of tax reform as he has spent branding his antagonists in the news media?.. One possibility is that these subjects just don’t interest him as much. Or perhaps it’s much harder to condense the case for complex policies — codified in hundreds of pages of legislation and legalese, devised through countless compromises and trade-offs — down to the size of a hashtag. Either way, one of Mr. Trump’s most remarkable skills hasn’t proved an asset on Capitol Hill.
From Wallflower to Expert Networker
An introvert emulated the communication styles, dress and approaches others use to make good impressions
The ad agency’s flamboyant culture was a shock. “I was one of those button-down engineers who was quiet and held himself in the background,” Mr. Aradhya says. At his first client pitch meeting, a colleague from the creative department showed up in a pirate shirt. Another wore leather pants.
“They held court with clients, and they were completely respected,” Mr. Aradhya says. “I thought, ‘Hey, this is a new world.’
People trained in technology often have to sharpen their social skills to move into jobs that require selling, communicating or managing others. Mr. Aradhya made the shift by learning to explain technology to non-techies and polishing his image and conversational skills.
He traded his dark suits and button-down shirts for stylish shoes and bright-colored shirts, says Tonny Wong, his supervisor at Digitas. Mr. Aradhya also learned to talk about his complex work without making others feel intimidated, says Mr. Wong, now chief consulting officer at HackerAgency, a Seattle marketing company.
Introducing himself to strangers didn’t come naturally when he began attending events. “I had to force myself,” he says. Without a network, he says, “it’s impossible to scale or build anything valuable.”
.. You must “entertain, enlighten or enrich” people to attract positive attention to a brand, he says. He tries to do the same for people he meets, so they’ll remember him and help when they can.
..Mr. Aradyha began window shopping and researching men’s fashions online to figure out how to project a confident, successful image. He swapped his dark suits for jackets of crushed silk or woven with metallic thread, and wears exotic-looking designer shoes by Zota or Fiesso. The look shows he’s not afraid of taking risks, and tends to attract people who are curious and capable, he says. At many events, “I don’t even have to start a conversation,” he says. “People will ask, where did you get those shoes?”.. His style makes him a standout at tech gatherings where “the men are in rumpled shorts and man buns and T-shirts, and you’re tempted to ask them, ‘Have you done your laundry in a month?’” says Diane Darling, author of “The Networking Survival Guide.”“He’s a very memorable figure,” says Lexington, Mass., public-relations executive Bobbie Carlton... He also says something outrageous now and then. The audience was dozing off at a late-afternoon program recently where he was a panelist. He was the last to introduce himself, and he jolted listeners awake by identifying himself as “the king of India” who also happens to run Novus Laurus. “He definitely woke everybody up” and drew a laugh