Healthy Influence Blog

Today I took our cat, Turk, to the vet to be put to sleep. About two weeks ago, Turk came into the house for dinner along with Flynn, Rocket, and Newt, but he seemed a little wobbly. His wobbling got worse in the coming days. After first we thought he might have had a small stroke, he’s twelve or more years old, but then we found a bad wound around and in his left ear. He’d apparently been struck by something – we live in the woods and on a country road, so who can know with certainty just what. As time passed we looked for improvement, but he only worsened. The motor coordination problems continued and he began to develop a deepening paralysis on his left side. His vision and hearing deteriorated. He was able to eat and motor around the house and lawn, but always with great and worsening difficulty. He did not show the normal signs of pain that cats in general or Turk in particular show. He did not cry or yelp or pant. He would often pause as he tried to stumble to a new location and seemed confused, frustrated, or tired, but not pained. He would let us pet him and brush him, but he never liked to be held before and now it was no different. He stopped commanding Melanie’s lap with his intense, staring pose.

Our vet, Kelly, did her usual expert job of examining Turk when I brought him in today. After checking him and talking with me, she, too, concluded that Turk’s condition would not likely improve and would probably worsen. She also recommended putting him to sleep. I agreed.

I petted him and got almost no response from him. Since the injury he’d lost the ability to communicate awareness of me or Melanie or much of anything. But, he was warm, alert, and self-contained. Somewhere in his body he seemed to still be Turk.

It had been a good day today. We’ve finally gotten some warming in the slow West Virginia spring, so Turk layed out most of the day on our deck, high in the air, safe, warm in the sun, caressed by the breeze. He came in for dinner and catfully struggled through a generous feeding. He then made his way to a favorite indoor spot by a vent and resumed his nap. About an hour later I put him in his cat carrier, an act that he always hated and resisted in the past, but in his discombobulated state, today, he simply complied with the move. While driving to the vet, he complained only a little and considerably less than usual trips like this.

We waited outside the office for 30 minutes. I opened the rear lid of the Ford and we just sat in the back of the truck, feeling the sun and the wind as the late afternoon wound down. Turk complained infrequently. I would talk to him and pet him in the carrier, but he seemed largely unaware of me. I think the injury diminished his capacity to sense much of the world around him. He could smell and feel the sun and the wind. He could sense motion and he knew if he was being touched, but he was not showing much recognition of me. I took him inside with only one other customer. Turk and I waited quietly in the office and again he complained only a little. The new greeter cat at the vet, Norman, a relaxed, calm tiger boy, watched Turk with interest and jumped down to the floor to investigate. They sniffed and touched each other without any drama. Turk spent a big chunk of his young life on his own in the woods and had the bad habits of a feral cat. He didn’t like any competition and would respond aggressively. Today, he had to know a strange male cat was near him, but he showed no agitation.

When our turn came, I took Turk in his carrier into the lab room. It’s usually a fight to get him out and if you open the door he typically retreats to the back of the carrier and punishes the hand that reaches for him. The routine is to unscrew the pieces that hold the top and bottom of the carrier together, remove the top, and then let Turk step out on his own terms. Today, we just opened the carrier door and he crawled out without a word. There was a thick, heavy blanket on the table and Turk kneaded it like it was Mom or Melanie’s lap. He was relaxed, calm, and trusting.

I named Turk and properly so. He was a tough, mean, independent cat who had trouble learning the rules of a social household with several other cats. For several years we had running dominance battles and Turk was always the one pushing it with the other boys. He wanted Melanie more than anything else in the world, but was still a wild child that required her vigilance. As you will see, he was a handsome fella, strong, thick, and when he was fully Turk he walked like John Wayne – a bit sideways, but you always knew he was coming for you and you’d better be serious about it. He scared everyone else when he played, but he didn’t leave surprises in the house, he didn’t destroy furniture, and he stayed very clean and dapper. I regret we did not have him as a kitten. He would have liked growing up with us.

Instead he became a special needs cat, a rescue cat that we coaxed from the woods in the deep of a winter many years ago. It took a long time to socialize Turk and it many ways he never did get it. There was always a violent sense of independence and self reliance in Turk. He learned to relax quite a bit, but never like our cats like Rocket or Newton or Flynn or Nick or Emily who came to us very young. Turk’s early hard times marked him for life and never left him completely.

I could not get close to Turk. I clashed with him when he went nuts with the other cats and I frequently enforced the social rules of the house. We had a wary relationship that had grown comfortable. I could feed him, pet him, or brush him, but he wouldn’t sit on my lap.

Tonight I hope that I did this right for Turk. He was not in pain or at least not in obvious pain. We’ve tended pets, dogs and cats, into great age, so we know what is bad or tough or hopeless. With Turk, I thought it was hopeless, but not yet bad. He could still eat and get around well enough to do his business out doors, but it was clearly only a matter of days at most before the paralysis and discoordination robbed him of intentional, useful action. Turk would not tolerate the lifestyle of an indoor, pampered cat. So, I made the decision to put him to sleep today rather than wait for those cries of pain I’ve heard from our kits like Creamy who died slowly and painfully from feline leukemia. When I took Creamy to the vet almost 20 years ago (to Kelly’s dad, in fact), I wept like a boy over first, Creamy’s suffering and then, his painless death. We waited much too long with that feral boy and I vowed then to be more watchful and more determined if a death like this lurked on the horizon.

So, after a warming day in the sun on our high deck in the woods, after a good meal that he still could taste and enjoy, and after a good nap under an end table by a vent, I put my Turk to rest.

Farewell, our Turk.

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!

My girl graciously invited me to accompany her for her appearance at the Inaugural Hauser Lecture, delivered at the University of Texas at Pan America (UTPA) this past week. Besides being the McConnell Minx, Empress of ECA, Countessa of Comm Ed, and the girl of my dreams, Melanie is also a highly regarded and wildly successful researcher and professor in the field of Communication Studies. The good folks at UTPA asked her to come down to the Rio Grande Valley and offer her thoughts on all things Communication. I held her purse.

Our hosts, Tim Mottet and Ricardo Gonzalez, toured us through South Texas including a visit to Progresso, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande river. Melanie and I do the standard border line pose here.

It was hot and windy that day, my friend. We pushed over the bridge and into Progresso moving through the friendly inspection of the Mexican authorities. (If you’ve never been to Mexico you need to get ready for young men in fatigues carrying automatic weapons. It’s part of the scene like silver jewelry, rice and beans, and hot sun. I appreciate the security, but it’s just a bit unnerving to see machine guns on parade. The young men, however, all strike me as responsible and trustworthy and almost always just a bit sad. This young man was quick to pose at Melanie’s request. Her Spanish isn’t the best, but somehow or another the men always seem to understand her.)

Progresso has a tight, bustling shopping area just over the bridge. I bought an incredible belt (not pictured here) while our hosts, Tim and Ricardo, shopped for hats.

Oddly, they decided not to make a purchase. We also bought some jewelry and other trinkets. We also ate a late lunch at Arturo’s on the main street. It an excellent restaurant with fabulous servers (older men who actually do this for a living rather than as something while getting through school), lovely decor, live music, and a great menu of very tasty food.

When we travel, we tend to live to eat and it was no different in McAllen, Texas. We ate at the Santa Fe Steakhouse (highly recommended), the restaurant at the Renaissance Marriott (recommended), Mickey D’s (double cheese!), a very nice sushi/martini bar whose name escapes me now (recommended, sorry), Espana (a highly self regarded restaurant that is wildly overpriced, but does provide incredibly cheeky service), and, our favorite, Costa Messa. Here’s Joshua, our server, bringing us a chorizo appetizer.

Joshua provided excellent service and great advice about drinks and food. The chorizo dish was a joy. It is sausage and cheese served hot and mixed with various garnishes like peppers, tomato, and onions. I’m sure it is on the hit list with the Food Police, but they haven’t gotten this far South just yet. Thank God. Here’s a picture of the Costa Messa style on serving chorizo.

Okay, that’s one of the best Marguarita’s I’ve had in my life. We had a bit of a translation problem. Joshua described it as a “Top Shelf” drink. I’m not sure if that referred to the quality of the tequila or another ingredient. But, it was a double and it was double good. Now, note the metal serving stove and the platter on top. That’s the chorizo dish. The stove was wood or charcoal fired which kept things warm and easy to mix. We really liked this place because it is such a great value. Everything about it is well done and at a good price. I’d go to McAllen just for Joshua and Costa Messa.

Oh, yeah, there was some work involved here. Tim Mottet invited Melanie to present the first lecture in the Hauser Series. Besides wearing funny hats, Tim is an ambitious, bright Communication scholar who moved to UTPA to help direct its future during a period of phenomenal growth. The Rio Grande Valley in this area is simply booming. I’d expected McAllen to be a little town and then Edinburg, the home of UTPA, to be a village. Instead, it looks like Bethesda or Overland Park or San Diego. I vividly recall Ross Perot’s infamous warning about NAFTA and that “giant sucking sound” as American jobs go to Mexico. Sure don’t look that way today. It’s a rocking place and they wanted to hear what Melanie had to say.

Melanie did her public lecture along with several other meetings with undergraduate and graduate students. We also got to meet many faculty members and had a fun reception (did you have the little quiches?) hosted again by Tim and Rick. And Tim was kind enough to let me talk with a couple of classes about consulting and leadership work. I appreciate the work that Tim Mottet did for this.

And so did Melanie.

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.

Quoting the immortal Howard Beal, “I’m made as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The WSJ represents a standard of writing quality that is unexceeded today, yet is plagued with one particular idiomatic earnestness that turns me purple. From today’s Journal, let me observe from a story about John McCain and Barack Obama:

“He could stop playing politics with the Federal Election Commission in a way that could hamper John McCain’s campaign against, well, Mr. Obama.”

I have no idea which bright writer first drank from that “well” (perhaps it goes back to F. Scott Fitzgerald?), but it has become cliché and rivals “at the end of the day . . .” in the Pantheon of past-their-prime grammatical metaphors (or should I say, “memes?”). I came of age in the 1960s and can still watch film of hippies doing that zombie dance, but if I find yet another “well” in a WSJ story I’ll be forced to have another vodka, not gin, martini or else visit a competitor.

I propose that the editors of the Journal employ a dreaded, familiar, but potentially effective device to curtail this practice. Impose a 500 word penalty on any writer who uses YA”W”. The YA”W” Tariff would restore the standards of excellence, imagination, and, well, greatness, we’ve all grown to associate with the Journal.

Truly,

Steve Booth-Butterfield
Morgantown, WV

Through the primary season Barack Obama is doing a nice impression of Ronald Reagan. Nobody could lay a glove on Reagan and Obama is proving as elusive. In the 1980s, critics called Reagan the Teflon Candidate, then Teflon President because criticisms never seemed to stick to him. Now, Mr. Obama appears to have studied at the foot of the great man and learned many things. The first lesson is this: If they can’t hit you, they can’t beat you.

So, why is Mr. Obama so elusive a target? And, more importantly, how do you hit him?

One answer to both questions emerges from an old line of communication theory related to leadership. Back in the 1950s, a couple of management professors, Tannenbaum and Schmidt, developed a model that had four types of LeaderComm: tell, sell, consult, and join. The four types refer to philosophy and style leaders may develop. The labels mean pretty much what a dead level decoding takes from it. Tell communication is direct, simple, power-based. Sell communication persuades from power as the leader motivates supports for a decision that is going to be made anyway. Consult communication holds the ultimate choice for the leader, but actively seeks input and support from followers. Finally, the Join occurs when the leader follows the followers in their choice and uses the leader positional resources to implement that choice. Clearly the four types vary on two dimensions: Dominance and Relationship.

You don’t have to watch the three leading contenders, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. McCain, more than a few minutes to discern their natural LeaderComm styles. Both Clinton and McCain operate most frequently as Tells. Sure, they will use Sells or Consults, but when you close your eyes and think of them, you see and hear the Tell. By contrast, Mr. Obama is the grooving embodiment of the Consult style.

Just think about that contrast in styles for a minute.

Tell leaders come across as authoritarian, disciplined, power-oriented, dominating, strong, hierarchical. Consult leaders, by contrast, come across as relational, provisional, open, trusting, collaborative.

What happens, then, when Tells criticize Consults? That’s easy: Tells look mean, authoritarian, and traditional while Consults look assaulted, attacked, and aggrieved.

The reason this occurs is not because Tell attacks are wrong or even badly stated. It occurs because while the Tell attack aims at the Consult’s arguments, the Tell attack also unintentionally offends the Consult’s relational ties. Because the Consult style seeks and validates input from followers, Tells can never just attack the Consult’s competence or character without also attacking the Consult’s audience.

Further realize that the blunt, simple, and brief communication style of Tells further works against effective attacks against Consults. Tells will focus on the fundamental issues from a power perspective – what’s the controlling legislation, what are the key facts on the ground, who’s in charge, who are the good guys and the bad guys, what’s the history – and ignore the relational element entirely because from a Tell’s perspective, relationships aren’t as important as the dumb policy statement made by the Consult.

Therefore: When Tells attack Consults they must show relational awareness first.

Let me demonstrate how to do this through the words of another writer. Stephen Hayes has already sharply observed a key Obama consult tactic. When I taught this tactic many, many years ago I called it ERA as both an easy mnemonic and a silly pun on a hot political issue of the day, the late and largely forgotten Equal Rights Amendment (and that tells you way too much about how old I am.) The ERA communication tactic is a three step dance. First, you offer an Empathy statement. Second, you pivot with a Rationale statement. Third, you get to the real point, your Action statement. Mr. Hayes has already provided a perfect illustration of this with Obama, so I’ll quote at length.

His rhetorical gimmick is simple. When he addresses a contentious issue, Mr. Obama almost always begins his answer with a respectful nod in the direction of the view he is rejecting — a line or two that suggests he understands or perhaps even sympathizes with the concerns of a conservative.

At Cornell College on Dec. 5, for example, a student asked Mr. Obama how his administration would view the Second Amendment. He replied: “There’s a Supreme Court case that’s going to be decided fairly soon about what the Second Amendment means. I taught Constitutional Law for 10 years, so I’ve got my opinion. And my opinion is that the Second Amendment is probably — it is an individual right and not just a right of the militia. That’s what I expect the Supreme Court to rule. I think that’s a fair reading of the text of the Constitution. And so I respect the right of lawful gun owners to hunt, fish, protect their families.” [This is the empathy statement, right?]

Then came the pivot:

“Like all rights, though, they are constrained and bound by the needs of the community . . . So when I look at Chicago and 34 Chicago public school students gunned down in a single school year, then I don’t think the Second Amendment prohibits us from taking action and making sure that, for example, ATF can share tracing information about illegal handguns that are used on the streets and track them to the gun dealers to find out — what are you doing?” [A nice statement of Rationale]

In conclusion: “There is a tradition of gun ownership in this country that can be respected that is not mutually exclusive with making sure that we are shutting down gun traffic that is killing kids on our streets. The argument I have with the NRA is not whether people have the right to bear arms. The problem is they believe any constraint or regulation whatsoever is something that they have to beat back. And I don’t think that’s how most lawful firearms owners think.” [The payoff – the desired Action]

Now, I can’t believe that anyone associated with the Obama campaign, indeed anyone in politics, has heard of my ERA idea. But, you don’t have to be a Rocket Scientist or have a doctorate in Communication to see how this ERA communication tactic is the marker of Consult LeaderComm. That first Empathy statement by design includes the “other guy” in a thoughtful, emotional way. “I feel your pain” is another variation on it. But what has this got to do with attacking Obama?

Tell leaders should employ ERA as a template for their attacks on Obama. They should use that Empathy statement to directly address Obama’s supporters in both a thoughtful and emotional way. Only after making those Empathy statements can the Tell leader (either Clinton or McCain) move to their Rationale and Action statements. Please realize that if Tell attacks do not address the relationship issues, attacks on Consult leaders will either backfire or be seriously weakened.

Further understand that ERA tactics in attacks mean that the attacks will require more time to deliver. Normally attacks are short and sweet, direct and jugular. You just look for the opening and jam it in. ERA style attacks, by contrast, will require considerably more thoughtfulness, planning, and setup.

Please realize that I am not saying that Tell leaders should never directly attack Consult leaders. Whether the attacks are direct statements against the competence or character of the opponent or longer ERA approaches should depend upon the issue at hand. When it appears that the Consult position does not have a strong relational element to it, then direct attacks should function as they always do. By contrast, when the Consult position does include that relational decision, Tell leaders must isolate the Consult leader from his followers before making the attack.