It’s not officially official, but Mrs. Clinton is clearly not going to be the nominee of the Democratic party despite my persuasion logic that predicted over a year ago that it would be hers for the taking to be followed by a general election victory over Mr. Giuliani.

Perhaps, my proxy of prior campaign experience is a poor indicator of persuasion skill?

Perhaps, I’m just an Idiot.

Barack Obama cannot win the General Election and he should not even win the nomination.

So, I’ve been arguing in this Blog for a year. According to my impeccable, unimpeachable, and unperturbable persuasion wisdom, he ain’t got It, with It being the persuasion skill and experience needed for winning in tight situations. He is just too young and inexperienced, more like Dan Quayle than John Kennedy in resume although more like JFK than Quayle in speechmaking.

Today I’ll give you another persuasion reason why Obama won’t win: All bad persuasion is sincere.

This is one of my persuasion rules and one of the most important. When your persuasion efforts come from the heart, authentically express your core beliefs, in other words, are a sincere manifestation of who you are, you’re telling me everything about yourself which is completely irrelevant in persuasion. I don’t care what you think. I care what the “other guy” thinks. Sincerity may attract, but it does not typically persuade and that’s a huge distinction.

As of this writing Obama is taking a lot of heat over the words and actions of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Much of the controversy revolves around race, theology, and politics. Hey, let’s have a quiet, calm discussion about color, God, and elections!

In the face of this controversy, when Obama has the eyes and ears of a lot of voters, what was his response: Sincerity. He told us what he believes and what he sees. I do not doubt for a moment the authenticity of his words. He really does believe it.

But, that’s not the point here. The point here is persuading people to vote for you. And, it appears to me that Senator Obama would rather be right than Presidential, he’d rather be right than wealthy or wise! (Right, a George M. Cohan 1937 musical). And in so doing he has wasted a huge persuasion moment.

Again, please keep the distinction between attraction and persuasion clear. I think that Obama’s sincere speech about race, religion, and politics makes him attractive as hell, but then he’s attracting people who are attracted to him. That’s not persuasion. That’s just walking in the room, taking a closeup, then walking towards everyone who swooned.

Persuasion is taking the measure of the “other guy” then using words to change the way that other guy thinks, feels, or acts. Obama’s speech was not persuasive, it was attractive. And it was attractive because he was sincere.

So, Senator Obama should be a beautiful loser.

Stay tuned!

Yesterday, President Bush delivered a speech on the current economic challenges we face and what to do about them. Whether you agree or disagree with his plans or policy, most folks will agree that he is not a great public speaker and that this speech is yet another bad example of his poor technique. Gail Collins, an editorialist with the New York Times, offers a fair assessment.

This is not the first time Bush’s attempts to calm our fears redoubled our nightmares. His first speech after 9/11 — that two-minute job on the Air Force base — was so stilted that the entire country felt like heading for the nearest fallout shelter. After Katrina, of course, it took forever to pry him out of Crawford, and then he more or less read a laundry list of Goods Being Shipped to the Flood Zone and delivered some brief assurances that things would work out.

O.K., so he’s not good at first-day response. Or second. Third can be a problem, too. But this economic crisis has been going on for months, and all the president could come up with sounded as if it had been composed for a Rotary Club and then delivered by a guy who had never read it before. “One thing is certain that Congress will do is waste some of your money,” he said. “So I’ve challenged members of Congress to cut the number of cost of earmarks in half.”

Besides being incoherent, this is a perfect sign of an utterly phony speech. Earmarks are one of those easy-to-attack Congressional weaknesses, and in a perfect world, they would not exist. But they cost approximately two cents in the grand budgetary scheme of things. Saying you’re going to fix the economy or balance the budget by cutting out earmarks is like saying you’re going to end global warming by banning bathroom nightlights.

I saw the speech on CSPAN and would have to agree with Collins’ evaluation. Like almost every policy speech I’ve seen Mr. Bush deliver, there just not much speaking skill there. (Realize that we’re not talking about the speech content, right, just the delivery.) Especially when he is giving a speech that has any serious persuasive intent, he tends to come across as wooden, rote, somewhat bored, and definitely eager to finish the damn thing so he can finally get to his dessert. I suspect that he really doesn’t like these kind of speeches.

However, when the speech does not have persuasive intent, Mr. Bush is an effective public speaker. If you’ve seen any of his White House Correspondent’s Dinner speeches, Mr. Bush is funny, at ease, and focused. He enjoys the moment, slows down a bit (for him), and connects with his message and audience. He is also an excellent ceremonial speaker when recognizing others. He comes across as sincere, thoughtful, and, again, connected to the message and the audience. In those ceremonial settings, as when giving awards, he comes across as someone who feels the humanity of the moment and who wants everyone to understand and like the award receipient.

Thus, there is a clear interaction going on here. Mr. Bush is not a poor public speaker. He’s just not a great persuasive public speaker. In persuasive contexts, Mr. Bush’s words are guarenteed to generate conflict, while in ceremonial settings, this conflict is less likely. Then he can relax, not worry too much about how the “opposition” will react and just give a natural, at ease performance.

I further speculate that Mr. Bush has learned through painful professional experience that unless you have great persuasive speaking skill, when you’re in a fight, such speeches will not be the crucial tool in your success or failure.

Please consider this thought experiment. Imagine that Mr. Bush is as good a public speaker as . . . Martin Luther King, Jr. or Winston Churchill or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan . . . but he did everything else (most notably, Iraq) the same way. Do you believe that the editorial board of the New York Times would have a significantly more positive view of Iraq as a result? Wouldn’t he just be a more artful liar?

I strongly believe that persuasive skill in public speaking is a valuable leadership quality, but it is by no means the most important or even crucial attribute. Mr. Bush clearly knows how to develop strong interpersonal networks with key people, then activate those connections to deliver resources when he needs them. He is smarter than many political leaders at identifying correctly the essential people and resources he must attract to achieve his goals. I think he uses persuasive public speaking to generate just enough support from “the people” to keep a hot pot from boiling over.

This offends people who believe in “the word” and the art of speaking - the chattering classes who populate mass media. If you make your living with the word, then a guy like Bush, who clearly doesn’t have the same value, annoys you greatly. But, you need to take a broader view of leadership and persuasion. No one gets to be elected and the re-elected President without having great persuasion skills.

Stop the sticks, there’s a new persuasion tactic that’s guarenteed to work 60% of the time on your unsuspecting customers, marks, and yokels. Named after its creator, Mr. Sullivan, the “Sullivan Nod” goes like this.

You offer a customer a list of options and provide a subtle smile and head nod with one of those options. This “Sullivan Nod” will increase the likelihood that the customer will select the option covered with this nonverbal gesture. Here’s how Mr. Sullivan himself puts it:

This great piece of body language can increase incremental sales as much as 60%. Salespeople should smile and slowly nod their head up and down as they suggest an item to a customer. You’ll be blown away by the fact that over 60% of the time the customer nods right back with you and takes your suggestion! For instance:

Customer: I’d like a vodka/tonic please.
Server: Would you like to try Stolichnaya (nod) or Absolut (nod) in that, sir?
Customer: (mesmerized) Sure. Put em both in there!

The Sullivan Nod even works over the phone for room service orders. It is a powerful tool. I always teach it in my seminars (and it’s featured in our popular MYOB Live! DVD for servers) and I’ve got a file folder of no fewer than 200 hundred letters from salespeople and their managers testifying to its effectiveness.

Wow. And it’s not just with Mr. Sullivan. There’s also a Wikipedia entry that describes this persuasion breakthrough. And it’s confirmed at thatsfit.com, correntewire.com, and boingboing.net, among others (search on “Sullivan’s nod” for more links at your pleasure).

However, not everyone is falling for this one. Some commentors on these postings are deeply suspicious and see only a persuasion benefit for Mr. Sullivan . . . especially regarding that claim of effectiveness over the phone - how do you smile and nod, telepathically?

So, Steve, persuasion maven, dispenser of wisdom, truth, and the scientific method, what’s your take on the Sullivan Nod.

To quote the immortal Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein, “IT . . . COULD . . . WORK!”

Really.

I have not read a good scientific study that tested the Sullivan Nod exactly as described here, but I’ve read enough good research on the variables in play here to know that this is not fool’s gold. For example, I believe that if you ran an experiment that compared the same waiter doing either the Sullivan Nod or a No Nod script identical in all other respects that customers would be more likely to pick the targeted option following the Sullivan Nod. I’d expect the effect size to be at least 10% and if you added another variable like distraction or cognitive load, the effect might increase 30%. To be even more explicit, if the No Nod group chose the target option 20% of the time, I’d predict the basic Sullivan Nod effect to be 30% (20% + 10% = 30%, right?). And, if we had that distraction or load variable, the Sullivan Nod would increase to 50% (20% + 30% = 50%).

The Sullivan Nod operates as an information cue or indicator or suggestion that would affect customers who don’t have or can’t form a strong preference. The smile and nod simply direct the customer to a path of least resistance and if you read the consumer research literature you know that most of the time customers in service situations when faced with a lot of choices often don’t care and can be easily directed with something as simple as a smile.

The Sullivan Nod also contains affective properties. Smiles and nods typically generate favorable affect in both the sender and the receiver, and again, under circumstances where the customer doesn’t have a strong preference, these mild affect moves can direct action.

It’s also possible that there are differences depending upon the gender of the senders and the receivers and the context of the service. Yada-yada, I could go on forever like this, so I’ll stop in the name of all that is good and merciful.

I’ll bet my money on the Sullivan Nod as a simple main effect. If you want to direct people to a particular item in a list of relatively equal options, consistent use of the Sullivan Nod should produce observable benefits to you. You just have to do it ALL THE TIME.

But, you can’t smile and nod over the phone, so Mr. Sullivan is cleverly working us on that one, encouraging us to get him to explain . . . which I’m sure he’ll be happy to do. Maybe won’t even charge a fee. Maybe.

Have to be vocalics.

Wow, are people hating on Sarah Lacy of “Business Week.” She conducted a live interview of Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg in front of a large audience at the Austin South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW). She got the kind of response I experience in nightmares. Here’s a sampling.

I want to get video of the uncomfortable keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week’s Sarah Lacy at SXSW today so I can use it as an object lesson in my journalism classes about how not do conduct an interview. From buzzmachine with Jeff Jarvis.

Lacy’s interview w/Zuckerberg truly embarassing (for her) and awkward (for him and for audience). From valleywag commentor.

“Stop Sarah Lacy before she kills again,” pleaded MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. Also from valleywag.

. . . on-stage interviewer Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed, becoming much more of the story than she should have been and having the capacity crowd turn on her over the course of the hour discussion. From c|net news.

If you do your own search on Ms. Lacy’s name and Mark Zuckerberg, you will find even more graphic evaluations in the same vein. Finally, you can see and hear Ms. Lacy’s take on the interview and audience response to it here. She talks like a Big Kid who can take it, but she was definitely aware of the angst in the audience.

First of all this case is a fabulous illustration of the Internet and the world wide weirdness it creates. This is an event that most people did not experience, but are able to discuss through all the mechanisms available only through the Net. We can read real time blogs (text and images and sounds and video), learn about it from news aggregators like Google’s, and perhaps uncover it from traditional media sources like print, radio, and TV. Finally, virtually human with a computer can comment (as I’m doing here) and possibly interact with other humans in real time and virtual real time. The Internet is a different medium, but remember, we’re all still the same humans we were before.

Second, this event is a massive illustration of attribution theory. Briefly, this theory looks at what factors determine how people view and explain themselves and other people in social situations. It strongly suggests that our perceptions and evaluations are widely and wildly variable not on the basis of physical reality, but of our role in the situation.

Consider, now, the “situation” here. We have Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, a booming Internet business in social networking. Sarah Lacy, a journalist with the respected magazine, “Business Week,” is interviewing him in front of a large audience who knows that an audience Q&A session will follow the formal interview. This all takes place at the South by Southwest Interactive, a “music, film, and interactive conference and festival” held annually in Austin, Texas. Now, add the fact that “we” (meaning me and most of you) did not see the event and have for now only news and blog reports and comments.

This situation contains people who are guarenteed to be as cross-purposes with each other. The audience is part of a large and diverse festival that pulls together music, film, and interactives in both a festival and conference format. The audience itself is composed of people with widely diverse expectations and goals.

Now add Zuckerberg and Lacy. Zuckerberg is trying to run one of those dream/nightmare Internet businesses. The “dream” is that he is famous and rich and powerful. The nightmare is that this thing grew into a monster in just a couple years and Zuckerberg is just 23 years old and definitely swimming with much older and craftier sharks. It could all go south like Pets.com in a flash. What do you think Mark’s goals are?

And, Ms. Lacy. She’s a professional print journalist with a respected weekly magazine. She gets paid to find and make news and here she is with one of the biggest news makers in the world today and she’s got him onstage in front of a live audience. She will not have to worry about being accused of fabricating or twisting things that Zuckerberg says. Literally hundreds of people will witness his response to her questions. What do you think that Sarah wanted here?

I’d argue (until I see the video of the interview) that most of the negative evaluation you can find is based on the crossways goals of the people involved. Lacy played the journalist doing a live interview. Zuckerberg played the web wizard trying to swim with the sharks while keeping the fishes happy. The audience wanted . . . gee whiz . . . you could probably find as many different goals and expectations as there were different people.

The negative evaluations I’m reading are coming from the more web literate and technically oriented observers who all appear to be projecting themselves as actors in the situation they are observing. In other words, they are telling us what they would have done if they had been in Sarah Lacy’s role. Except, the SXSW planners didn’t invite them to interview Mark Zuckerberg, so these observers are truly engaged in fantasy projection.

One of my rules is this: You’re always the smartest person in the room when it’s not your job. I try to repeat this to myself like a mantra whenever I’m watching an event like the Zuckerberg-Lacy interview. Of course, I’d act differently than Sarah Lacy if I was up on the stage interviewing this guy. I’m Steve, not Sarah. And simply because I’d do it differently doesn’t mean it would work out any better.

One commentor suggested that Sarah Lacy had failed because she didn’t do any audience analysis prior to the event. The commentor advised that she could have contacted a sample of people (through the ease of the Internet) and gotten a sense of what the audience wanted to hear.

That’s great persuasion and communication advice and I heartily agree. Unless, of course, your goal is not to please that audience, but rather to make and get news for your magazine. And, how can any observer expect that Sarah Lacy, professional journalist with “Business Week,” is NOT interested in a story for her magazine and instead wanting to please the local audience?

Think about it.

Lacy’s behavior in the interview as it is described in currently available sources, sounds like an aggressive journalistic style where she is trying to make her target say and do things the target would prefer to avoid. That’s journalism, kids.  Playing nice with the target to get cheers from an audience of SXSW participants is not journalism.  Get Ryan Seacrest if you want that.

In summary, understand the much of the hubbub here can be understood from a great persuasion and social psychology theory, Attribution.  We’re seeing here a great illustration of the actor-observer effect which demonstrates that our perceptions and evaluations of social events depends upon our role.

Once again we face the menace of new techology dividing the generations. The NYTimes runs a story today detailing fractured family relations, split asunder over cell phones, text messaging, computers, and that annoying shorthand (ykwim, dy?). The writer, Laura Holson, does a nice job stitching quotes from both teams of combatants and manages to get an Ivy League expert from MIT to provide a scientific overview. Did you know that kids are using new media differently than their parents? And that this is going to make those kids different from those parents?

In my previous life as a professor, I taught a large lecture (400 students) intro course on mass media and communication for 12 years. Given my penchant for quantitative and experimental tomfoolery, the course took a strong social science perspective, meaning that if you don’t have theory, randomization, and lots of numbers (including Greek symbols), it’s a bunch of opinionated crap you could get leaning over the fence with your neighbor. For a geek like me, reading such technical stuff is actually interesting, life changing, and perhaps the ticket to eternal salvation!

One of the most curious findings in the social science research on media and communication, especially in America over the past 100 years is the recurring theme of New Media Divides the Generations. It is a smaller example in the genre of topics that ebb and flow, like climate change. One of the strongest research programs ever conducted was the Payne Fund studies aimed exactly at understanding how New Media pitted young versus old. Here’s the fun part: The studies were done in the late 1920s.

Briefly, the Payne Fund was a nonprofit foundation, much like the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations of today, and it provided financial support to a wide range of scholars and scientists who banded together in a loose group to investigate the impact of the relatively new media of the time, motion pictures. The group produced an eight volume series of books that is still available in libraries and bookstores. What makes this series an amazing intellectual achievement is the range of talent, the variety of questions asked, the scope of methods employed, and the general cooperation of these different research teams. In its own miniature way, the Payne Fund studies were like those much larger and more famous research efforts, the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb or the Human Genome Project. It is an effort at Big Research and they did it in the 1920s.

My favorite from the series was written by Louis Thurstone and Ruth Peterson. It described a long series of experimental field studies of the impact of motion pictures on social attitudes, stereotyping, and prejudice. (If you study either or both media and attitudes, you’d find this book compelling. The methodology is rock solid and the results are as meaningful today as they were then. Of course, it lacks an fMRI measurement, so it may be a complete fantasy. Maybe you could write a grant application to replicate these studies with the latest toy in neuroscience. Might actually get funded even if it makes no contribution to theory development or practical application, but, hey, isn’t that the nature of funded research?)

Briefly Thurstone reported what we still find today: More exposure to a message creates more change and the direction of the message (positive or negative) determines the change. Thus, if people receive a lot of positive messages about a different ethnic or racial group, those people will have more positive attitudes. (Almost rocket science, isn’t it?)

If you trudge over to your favorite research library, you’ll find these books way back in dusty, ill-lit shelves, perhaps even in some ancient reserve building off-campus. Wear a breathing filter mask because you will be exposed to particulate matter from past! When you locate the books, just pull one down and start reading. You’ll actually be a little bit high from breathing in that old air and debris, plus you’ll be learning! Or else contracting tuberculosis!

The main point from these studies is that media messages did affect kids, and adults, too, and in similar and different ways. (Kids usually showed more extreme responses.) And, you’ll be struck at the identical worries people expressed back then to what the New York Times expresses today. In fact, there is a recurring pattern of media effects if you look over the long history of media in America: Kids embrace new media while adults eye it suspiciously. And universally, with every technological innovation you will find a chorus of parents claiming that the New Thing makes kids rude and impolite. Here’s a quote from today’s Times story to illustrate:

Mr. Pence is well aware of how destabilizing cellphones, iPods and hand-held video game players can be to family relations. “I see kids text under the table at the restaurant,” he said. “They don’t teach them etiquette anymore.” Some children, he said, watch videos in restaurants.

You can substitute any Old Media (movies, radio, TV) for the New Media (cellphones, iPods, handhelds) and you can reach back into the Payne Fund and find somebody saying the same thing about kids back then.

My point in this, beyond playing the nagging expert who’s smarter than you because he is willing to risk tuberculosis while going to the library, is to point out the false conflict that often arises in people’s perceptions of daily life. We tend to focus so strongly on our own point of view in real time that we cannot or do not step back and think more broadly about the social and cognitive events we are judging. In persuasion terms, I’d call this an illustration of both biased processing and attribution theory. First, we tend to find what we look for (biased processing - those rude kids nowadays) and second, we tend to explain things with convenient, top of the head reasons (attribution - it’s the damn cellphone!).

If you take a seriously nuanced view on New Media (wouldn’t you expect that from the New York Times?!?) you’ll find that there are reliable patterns of response to it. Sure, younger people seem to “get it” faster and they make more “creative” use of the media compared to older people. Yet, at the same time when you dig deeper, you’ll find kids who hate the New Media and won’t use it unless required; and you’ll find adults who are the inventors and early adopters who always seem to be living like Max Headroom, 20 minutes into the future. Media effects are rarely large, simple, and direct even if that’s the party line at the New York Times.

And one fact never changes: Those youngsters nowadays are just simply rude!

Why do so many different people dislike Hillary Clinton?

The operative term in that question is, “different.” By different I mean people with wildly different political loyalties and philosophies. You would expect a similarity effect with Senator Clinton such that many Democrats or liberal leaning Independents would tend to support her, yet as a commonplace assumption, it is apparent that this similarity effect does not occur. Here’s an example from the Wall Street Journal. Peggy Noonan, former speech writer for President Reagan and conservative editorialist writes about Hillary Clinton and notes:

I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio’s Hugh Hewitt, because, “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

Christopher Hitchens on almost all matters, barring the War on Terror (or whatever term you prefer to use), is a very left leaning thinker and yet Peggy Noonan, a very right leaning thinker, finds his stance on Mrs. Clinton congenial and quote-worthy. This is hardly a strange, unique example and I think that most readers would agree that Mrs. Clinton seems to unite a diverse audience of unhappy observers.

How do you account for this?

Certainly it is possible that Mrs. Clinton is all that Hitchens claims and Noonan quotes, so that sheerly upon the merits of the case any reasonable person would determine that Mrs. Clinton is a soul-less soul, a political Terminator ruthlessly aimed at one goal: Her own power aggrandizement. Put her in the room with Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Slobodan Milosevic or . . . you get the point . . . and Mrs. Clinton would blend nicely into the group photograph. It’s possible.

Consider, now, a psychological explanation: The actor-observer effect.

This effect stems from Attribution Theory, a theory that explains how people make explanations and how these explanations determine their following thoughts, feelings, and actions. Briefly put, the actor-observer effect says that people see the world differently depending upon whether they are the actor in a situation or whether they are observers of other actors in a situation. In other words, how you see things varies when you are actually in charge and making decisions and choices compared to when you are watching people actually in charge. Yet another way, we think we’d act differently when we watch others, but when we find ourselves acting in the same situation, we think and behave differently than we thought when we were observing.

I became acutely aware of the actor-observer effect when I was a scientific administrator in the Federal government. Prior to that experience, I had an observer’s perception of the Executive Branch of the Federal government. I’d watch the President or Cabinet Secretary or whatever the Fed Bureaucrat in action and think to myself, “What an incredibly stupid, naïve, ineffectual person they must be.” Then I had the job myself and had to make decisions in the same situations I’d formerly just observed. For example, I was part of a Congressionally mandated program aimed at improving fire fighter safety. Our research indicated that most fire fighters died from . . . what do you think? Fire, right? Either getting burned to death or maybe asphyxiation, right?

Nope. The leading cause of death for fire fighters is structural collapse. A burning building falls on them either killing them by blunt force trauma or else trapping them so that fire or asphyxiation kills them. If they didn’t get caught in the collapse, they wouldn’t die.

The research team I was part of developed a communication warning program with recommendations for fire fighters based on this research and distributed it nationally. The research we conducted included deliberate, ongoing, and close cooperation with every stakeholder in this issue: union and nonunion organizations, fire fighters and fire chiefs, government units, other safety organizations, scientific groups. It was truly a national, bipartisan, and comprehensive effort aimed at understanding the problem and developing practical solutions to it.

And yet I got some pretty hot messages from various local governments and fire fighter units blaming me for being a pettifogging Washington bureaucrat interfering in the lives of real people with these ridiculous government follies. Some people believed that I was personally motivated by a self-aggrandizing move to power, seeking to lord it over the lives of the “little people” in a relentless and coldhearted pursuit of my own vanity.

Now, I’m not trying to compare myself to Hillary Clinton, but the parallels are important here. If I’d been a fire fighter or fire chief receiving these recommendations from some dumbass branch chief from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, I’d probably have reacted similarly. The recommendations certainly didn’t and couldn’t account for all the variations in fire fighting operations across the country (gee, there were only 36,000 unique units in the US – and we couldn’t develop a one-size fits all solution?). Thus, as an observer the behavior of the actor looks stupid or venal or vain. But, then, since I was on the other side of the problem and actually charged by Congress with finding solutions for it, my view of the situation as an actor was decidedly different.

It’s interesting to note that most observers who disagree with the actions of an actor like Hillary Clinton or President George W. Bush, tend to discover personal flaws in the actor rather than simply looking at the problem and how to solve it. Thus, for observers like Noonan and Hitchens, it isn’t enough to disagree with Clinton policy or perception, but to go farther and determine that personal flaws in Clinton’s character are the problem here. I suspect that if either of these critics were actors in the campaign, they would see things very differently.

Here’s a final illustration of the actor-observer effect. I completed all my paperwork as a professor at WVU on a Friday, ending the academic year of 1997-8. The following Monday, I started as a branch chief in the Federal government. (My drive to work was actually quicker because the NIOSH facility was on the outer loop in town and my office on campus was downtown.) The Fed hired me to continue many of the same duties I performed as a professor – the basic and applied research skill in particular. So, in many ways I just changed jerseys and continued playing the same game just on a new team.

Except a couple of weeks after joining the new team I received a confidential memo from the FBI outlining a potential bomb plot against my new facility. Someone had stolen several tons of ammonium nitrate from a nearby agricultural supply depot. You need to recall this was 1998, just a few years after the domestic terror bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by Tim McVeigh. The Fed was understandably nervous about ammonium nitrate and now law enforcement was warning nearby Federal installations of the potential threat. At the time, my wife, Melanie, was the chairman of my former department and in roughly similar administrative position as mine in the government. I casually asked her if there were any safety warnings at WVU regarding bomb threats and she said, no.

Thus, while I was essentially the same guy I’d always been simply because I’d changed teams, it was now hunting season on me. Because I was now an “actor” in a different organization outside observers felt comfortable seeing me as a threat and potential target.

This experience has led me to have a new perspective on leaders in all contexts, but most especially in public executive government settings. While I was never the big boss who ran for election, I did have legal responsibility as an operational leader in the Executive Branch. I learned to see government from the perspective of the actor rather than as the observer. It’s a different world. And I don’t think that people like Noonan and Hitchens and many other observers don’t appreciate the impact that this role difference plays in how they evaluate political and governmental actors.

Try running things, even in the small capacity, sometime. It will change your point of view and might even make you empathize with hated figures like Hillary Clinton or George Bush.