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Piano Keys, Chess Pieces, and Marketing/Persuasion
Jon Gabriel, writing about the failure of the Biden administration and of senior bureaucrats to predict the reactions of the populace to their Covid policies, cited Dostoyevsky: “men still are men and not the keys of a piano”…which reminded me of something George Eliot wrote, back in 1866:
Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own . . . You would be especially likely to be beaten if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.
You cannot do successful marketing/persuasion unless you have a somewhat accurate mental model of your target audience … a kind of empathy, if you will. If you treat them simplistically as piano keys or chess pieces, they will soon demonstrate to you that they are not. And this principle applies not only to political persuasion and business marketing, per se, but also to operations management.
In her excellent book The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton devotes much attention to inventory management and its pathologies. Walmart and Target are both famous for the amounts of data they collect and the uses to which they put it … but:
A former Target cashier said she was under so much pressure to ring up sales as quickly as possible, so if a customer bought 10 bottles of Gatorade–in two flavors–she would scan the first one and then hit the quantity key for ten. The inventory system thought the store had sold 10 lime-flavored Gatorades and no cherry-flavored Gatorades, rather than the mix that had actually just been sold. And the cashier, who had received only 8 hours of training before starting work, probably wasn’t even aware of the problem she was creating via this shortcut.
The author cites a study of another company ($10 billion in sales) which found that the system had the right information for only 35% of the products … for the other 65%, the discrepancies between the system inventory balances and the actual quantities available averaged 5 units … a third of the target stocking levels. In one case, a certain item was continually out of stock, to the frustration of a regular customer. It turned out that the inventory system thought there were 42 of these on hand, whereas there were actually none. AND, since this particular store hadn’t sold any units in several weeks (because they didn’t have any to sell), the system automatically reduced the target stocking level for that item!
There is not much point in spending tens of millions of dollars for an ‘advanced’ computerized inventory-control system if the data that feeds the system is systemically wrong. Yet this is what can happen if you assume that your employees are piano keys or chess pieces that will just do what you tell them, independent of the stresses and incentives to which they are subjected.
(I reviewed Zeynep Ton’s book here. It is far better and more valuable than the general run of business writing, including academic business writing)
I suspect that the problem of failure to understand one’s audience, while always a common problem, has gotten worse in recent years. One likely cause is credentialism: the ‘diploma curtain’ which has established sharper barriers between people running things and the people with whom they are trying to communicate.
The Cabinet official with an Ivy League degree, the Marketing MBA, the corporate ‘digitization’ project manager with dual degrees in operations management and computer science — these people are likely to have life experiences that differ considerably from those of the people they are trying to reach — far more than was the case with their counterparts of a few decades ago.
Another possible cause might involve the intensive exposure of kids to simulated humans in video games from a very early age: Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, in their book A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, suggest that this kind of exposure to simulated humans may make it more difficult to an individual to relate to actual humans.
Whatever the causal factors may be, having some understanding of your audience is very important if you want to persuade them to do or to think something. And this represents a major potential vulnerability of today’s Left: they have, for the most part, an incorrect, even cartoonish, mental model a vast set of their fellow Americans. (This fallacy is by no means non-existent on the Right, but it is less common than on the Left, I think)
Your thoughts?
Published in General
Those darn Ivy Leaguers. They’re such pests. They visit Paraguay and Guinea-Bissau and can’t stop talking about it. They write about Turkish mathematicians – well, one Turkish mathematician – and Nicaraguan poets – well, one Nicaraguan poet. Then they get all smartypants about Slavic grammar and helicopter tail rotors. Who needs this stuff?
Sure, they pretend to be friends of the common man by examining Evel Knievel’s Wikipedia entry. They’ll even look at the Simple English one. Plus they review the latest Old Farmer’s Almanac. But you know what they really want to do is explicate Steely Dan lyrics.
Ivy Leaguers: ban ’em all, let God sort ’em out. It’s the only way to be sure.
Communism (and it’s offshoots) has always disregarded the importance of the individual. Today’s leftists are committed to their agendas, regardless of human cost.
A great example of this is presented in Operation Solo: The FBI’s man in the Kremlin by John Barron. It is the true account of Morris Childs who was a senior leader in the American Communist Party and “made 57 clandestine missions into the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba.” He was also an FBI asset for decades.
Childs started out as a dedicated communist activist until he was bedridden by heart problems. His fellow communists abandoned him and he realized that once he had no use to the party, the party had no use for him. He could not afford medical care and recognized the hypocrisy of his former comrades.
This was a large factor in his decision to, when his health improved, go back to work with the communists, while reporting everything to the FBI.
Human Resources and Metrics are such cold words.
Interesting. I am first of all gleeful to see the way that big data operations have been relying on a basic integrity to their data that simply isn’t there. Secondly though I don’t think that more training is the solution. Supposing it works perfectly and the cashiers are now one and all equipped to scan exactly the items before them; you’ve solved the problem at hand but not the next problem. It’s applying a top down solution.
It’s people, processes, and tools. There is nothing else.
What operations planning avoids is the people part. It’s the hardest part, that’s why. Everything else can be engineered or calculated; people cannot. You use a carrot or a stick, but considering the pay scale and that anyone can earn that same money literally anywhere, all the incentives are upside down for people to do it right, every time.
Note that the business included conflicting priorities in the process – we want you to be accurate and fast. Basically, you have to pick one of those things, not both at the same time. Focus on one and you lose the other. Similar to a quality output in any other process. Quick + Cheap + High Quality is usually not the outcome.
One last thing: If you’ve ever noticed that the government’s deliverables are often a) late, b) 2-3-8x what they said it would cost, and c) don’t work, and d) impacted stakeholders in ways unpromised, and e) missed a sh*tload of stakeholders they should have considered, well, there’s a reason. They are literally unaccountable for what they do, for the outcomes. There is no drop in sales that means they’ll get fired.
“Human Resources” as a phrase is right up there with “Arbeit mach frei”
Interesting. It gets at where we’re going and will continue to go as we become ever more top down. The key to the US was bottom up and that even worked as companies became giant and national as long as they were rooted in where they began. As companies become monopolistic they expand influence to government. It makes things cheaper, at least for a while, especially as we source almost all stuff from China. The US economy by itself, is larger than the world economy thirty years ago before China joined in, then took over. Some new digital items have infinite economies of scale but stuff doesn’t. We have to sort this out and return to bottom up and freedom, which will give us greater choice and variety, but slightly higher prices. The direction we’re headed is totalitarian.
I do think that the shows unrealistic expectations. Too often I have seen management make a decision and ignore the obvious effects of that decision. For instance I remember directive that every company car had to have its oil checked every single time. That meant the driver’s supposed to pull the dipstick and check the oil levels. I argued it would be better to have a monthly check. That way you can have one person responsible for the car and a monthly check. They wanted it Checked every single time somebody went to use the car. I thought this was simply incentivizing people to fake reports. Guess what somebody went out to check a car check the oil and it was almost empty. Now by rights everyone who falsifed that report should have been fired. They weren’t.
The failure of the Left to have any understanding of so many of their fellow Americans represents a *tremendous* vulnerability on their part, and it is one that the non-left forces should be taking advantage of.
Also, we need to be sure that we don’t make the same mistake. I see a lot of posts/comments/memes to the effect that Leftists favor the policies they do because “they don’t like to work.” This is true in some cases, but not in general…I know plenty of ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’, some of them fairly extreme, who indeed work hard…as mechanics, in healthcare, as startup entrepreneurs, etc etc. You can probably also think of many such. When we make flat assertions about a class of people that someone recognizes himself as a member of…and when that person knows that the assertion is false…they will tend to minimize or disregards anything else we say.
As I noted in the post, this phenomenon isn’t as common among the non-Leftists…because we mostly live in a Leftist environment/culture, and can observe…but it does exist and is tactically harmful.
One of the chapters in The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1996) that I most vividly remember is one in which the authors discuss the disconnects that result because the people designing policies (typically government policies) for a target population generally assume the target population will make decisions and respond to incentives the same way the policy designers would. But that’s often not true. Teenaged girls who grow up without functional parents in impoverished cities often look at decisions and incentives differently than do girls who grew up with engaged parents in wealthy suburbs and chose to attend elite universities. Boys who grew up admiring the flashy local gangster might make decisions differently from the boys who grew up admiring their engineer or accountant father. Yet the boys and girls who grew up in mostly stable families having lots of options and chose to attend elite universities to become government (and corporate) policy makers often assume the boys and girls from unstable households in fragile or violent neighborhoods who don’t see a lot of options will nonetheless make decisions the same way the policy makers would make those decisions. There are many other areas in which policy makers assume people to which the policies are supposed to apply may not respond the same way the policy makers would (and assume others will).
Who would have thought that paying unmarried women subsidies for them and their children would have led to an epidemic of fatherless homes.