Guest Post by Scott Adams
I made the mistake of turning on CNN yesterday and saw all the hypnotized pundits trying to work the secret persuasion word “chaos” into every comment about President Trump. That’s your tell that none of the pundits are offering independent opinions. They are part of the hive mind led by some uncredited persuader on their side. Someone told them to say “chaos” a lot, and so they do. This might signal the return of Godzilla. Reminds me of “dark,” their hive-mind word for the summer of 2016.
It appears that Trump’s counter-persuasion for “chaos” involves framing his administration as “disruptive.” That’s a good persuasion move because it doesn’t deny the observations. A disruption looks a lot like chaos from the outside. Two movies on one screen.
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The interesting question to me is this: How do we know whether President Trump is doing a good job or a bad one? What standard do we use for comparison? If you are not comparing Trump’s performance to some objective standard, you’re not saying anything at all.
Does it make sense to compare President Trump’s performance to an imaginary president who didn’t get elected? I don’t think science recognizes your imagination as the base case for an experiment. It just feels like it should be. That’s an illusion.
Does it make sense to compare President Trump’s performance to past presidents who got a lot done in the first week? Well, maybe, if such a person existed. No one has ever tried moving at Trump’s speed before. We expect the slow-moving traditional leader to create less “chaos” than the entrepreneurial and disruptive leader. But don’t you have to include the benefits in this comparison? The whole point of Trump’s flurry of activity is that he’s trying to create good outcomes. We don’t know if the good outcomes will pan out. All we know is that it was a bit messy at the start.
Is being a bit messy a sign of a problem?
Not if you’re the entrepreneurial, disruptive, candidate of change who just got elected.
Let me explain another management concept that the pundits don’t understand because, generally speaking, they don’t have the right kind of education or experience to analyze a business process.
There are two basic styles of management. One is the cautious style of Fortune 500 companies. The other is the rapid-iteration and A/B testing style of entrepreneurs. Trump is bringing the latter style to the office. The markers for this style of management include:
1. Rapid and decisive hiring and firing.
2. Bias toward action.
3. Rapid A/B testing. Release the early beta version and judge reactions. Adjust accordingly.
4. Emphasis on the psychology of success. Entrepreneurial management includes lots of persuasion and bullshit because entrepreneurs have to fake it until they make it. In other words, they have to create demand via persuasion.
Compare that management style to a large company style. Big companies move slowly in both hiring and firing. They get caught in “analysis paralysis” because no one wants to be seen as making a mistake. And they don’t do rapid testing and iteration with consumers. They try to get it right before any customers see the product.
The world is watching Trump trade some “chaos” to get the benefits of entrepreneurial management. It’s fast and messy, but he’s testing in real time. He’s watching protests. He’s watching news coverage. He’s watching social media. And he’s rapidly adjusting as needed. The net effect of Trump’s bias for action in his first week is that he created a presidential brand of being the most action-oriented president of all time. Your first impression will be sticky. If things work out for Trump, you will forget any temporary “chaos” and remember him as the most effective president in history. Success fixes everything. Every entrepreneur knows that.
The smartest person I know told me that the secret to business success does NOT necessarily involve hiring the right people. We just think it does. The real secret to success is firing the people that you discover to be the wrong fit until eventually you END UP with the right people. No one is psychic enough to do hiring right every time. Job applicants are good at misrepresenting themselves. But a good leader knows which employees to fire and does it quickly and humanely.
Trump fires well. We saw him fire campaign managers as needed to restaff for each phase of his campaign. Lewandowski was perfect for the scrappy first months. Manafort was the right campaign manager to get Trump through the nomination process. And Conway was the right pick as his closer.
I’m not suggesting that everything Trump does is the right move. Quite the opposite. I’m suggesting that he has chosen an entrepreneurial management style that is guaranteed to create more small-scale unforced errors than you might see from a boring Fortune 500 management style. If Trump quickly fixes his unforced errors, you’re seeing a style done right, not wrong.
If you see a pundit crying “chaos” about Trump’s early moves, you’re probably seeing someone with no entrepreneurial management experience. In the startup world, speed has replaced intelligence whenever you can rapidly test*. Doing things quickly, and adjusting as needed, often gets you to a faster/better result than planning a moonshot that has exactly one path to success.
Obviously you want to match the management style to the situation. The messy entrepreneurial style might work great for fixing “systems” in the government, such as healthcare and immigration. It should work against ISIS too. And I expect it will be great for negotiating with other countries because they don’t know what to expect.
But sometimes you need to get it right the first time because the stakes are high. Those situations will be obvious to any president. I wouldn’t worry about President Trump launching some nukes just to see how it turns out.
A good way to tell whether a pundit or citizen understands the field of risk management well enough to critique Trump’s performance is to ask how they view his history of bankruptcies. If a person thinks those bankruptcies are a sign of poor management, they probably don’t know much about business. But if they understand the few bankruptcies – out of hundreds of projects – as part of a diversification strategy with good risk management that siloed off the losers, you might be seeing someone who understands business.
We already know that journalists don’t know crap about economics. Now we can add management techniques to their list of ignorances.
The ironic thing is that when politicians create some big new program after lots of analyzing and participation by interest groups, they still f__k it up 95% of the time. Look at the bank bailouts after the 2008 crash or Obamacare.
Maybe people should give Trump’s rapid decision, A/B testing approach some time to work. I think he has already shown it does far more good then bad. But then I’m not a liberal wing nut so what do it know.
Worldwide there are 6 major corporations which purvey “news”. All 6 are owned and operated by globalists. They’ll go to any lengths to destroy America. Patriots must be willing to do the same if they hope to save America. Harden your hearts to what’s coming. Know your enemy.
We need to back Trump.
“How do we know whether President Trump is doing a good job or a bad one? ”
If the enemy is furiously retaliating, you know Trump is doing a good job. If he was doing a bad job, the enemy would stay in the shadows and let Trump sink his own ship.
If you can take a lollypop away from a child and not hear screaming and crying, you are qualified to opine about Trump, otherwise….you’re just another voice.
What the left sees as chaos, I see as productive.
A good thing not a bad one, a positive thing not a negative one.
The battle for America is on, one side or the other will be eliminated from future history and I don’t intend for it to be mine.
Trump is doing fantastic job. But the traitorous infrastructure is so extensive, so well-built, and so entrenched, that demolishing it (and that’s exactly what the Don is doing) will definitely spur a massive blowback. Maybe even a low-grade civil war. After all, a lot of people who got fat and happy promoting foreign interests at the expense of the “deplorables” are losing their livelihood as we speak. And they won’t go away quietly.
Trump should keep on going and keep bulldozing Obama’s legacy until nothing is left – and unfortunately, as I suggested before, some kind of martial law might eventually be necessary.
If Trump voters allow themselves to doubt the President because his PR is not sleek enough, then the defeat is inevitable.
“If Trump voters allow themselves to doubt the President because his PR is not sleek enough, then the defeat is inevitable.”
The MSM failed to impress them enough to sit out the election or switch sides, as long as he keeps up with his march to the sea I am pretty satisfied they’ll march along with him picking up stragglers as they go.
The establishment is fighting for its very life while Trump continues to move inexorably forward. Good case is the state of California. While trying to fend off Trump’s moves on immigration it is doubling down and thinking out loud about “California as a sanctuary state (Drudge Report)”. Can they foul the nest any worse?
Oh yes they can and will.
I’ve been thinking of this situation as being like a war. Hell it IS a war. In wartime, if you’ve got the other guy reacting to you, you are controlling the battle and the sequence of events, and will in all likelihood prevail. That’s exactly what Trump is doing, going at the enemy relentlessly, never give them a break. It doesn’t even have to be something huge (yuge) every day, just keep firing. Also, never react to them and thus never let them have the initiative.
One other think I’d like to add is President Trump’s work ethic. Did we ever see Oblunder get this much done is such a short time span? No, he was too busy playing golf and meeting with LGBTQ special interests. Nor was “W” on the job; he was “clearing brush” at his “ranch”.
And during the campaign, there were days when candidate Trump gave 3 speeches in a day.
I’d say he has under-promised and is over-delivering.
trump will put lead life preserver around the dems necks if they continue to hold up his cabinet picks. i would not be surprised if he did not shut the doors on the offices until, the guy has balls and plays hard ball.
go trump go, beat them up, low life lies and cheats
Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m just Trumpified.
Scott Adams may be onto something and we might just get so overwhelmed with his flurry of tweets and EOs that we’ll just lay down and bare our collective asses for Bannon and Sessions.
I’ll try to resist getting brainwashed. It may be a futile resistance.
EC
Read an article today about the Mexican people hating their president almost as much as ours. They have taken to wearing pins that say “Buy Mexican”. Mexicans are ready to split the sheets with the gringos.
They already disliked EPN, having preferred their own Bernie Sanders – Andrés Manuel López Obrador – who, like Bernie, also got screwed by crooked votes, stolen and bought.
The fuckers were blocking the bridge in TJ recently, not letting anybody cross into San Diego.
They were already pissed off about the ‘gasolinazo’ the 20% hike on gas prices.
These are not rational people like us, these are the kind of folks who will beat suspected criminals and child abusers to death, the perp or suspect is lucky and happy to see the cops show up.
BTW, the Night Stalker (RIP) got a taste of that when he was spotted in a neighborhood in East LA, they gave him a good beating before the cops showed up.
Mexican nationals are pack hunters. Pochos tend to be independent, unless they are ghetto kids with daddy issues – then they join gangs for a sense of structure and a substitute father figure.
One day, some fool will earn his PhD with that thesis but you heard it here first from EL Coyote who grew up in the ghetto.
The only chaos is what the Left if doing to try to destroy Trump, blocking his nominations, etc. Let’s not let that happen.