Obama's debate performance

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Obama partisans were disappointed in his debate performance. As many commentators noted, he appeared to be irritated from the get-go, as if he did not want to be at the debate at all. Perhaps his somewhat off-key opening statement, addressed directly to Michelle, “And so I just want to wish, sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million,” reflected just this thought. "Why I am here debating Romney when I could be celebrating my anniversary with Michelle?"

It was evident as well that Obama lacked mental flexibility. When arguing for tax fairness, Obama claimed that companies get tax breaks when they go overseas. Romney responded, "Look I have been in business for 25 years. I have no idea what you're talking about. I maybe need to get a new accountant." Had he been quick, Obama could have referenced Romney's own creative accountants who helped him pay only 13% of his income as tax. In other words he could have said something like, "Look who’s talking. I should contact your accountant!"  Of course, Obama has the innate speed of mind to see and make this connection. But his irritability suppressed his flexibility. 

Perhaps only Obama and his close advisers understand why he was irritable, and why he let this stance get in the way of his performance. What is interesting here is the disjunction between the work, thinking and time that went into Obama's preparation, surely every possible argument was anticipated, and a source of failure, his mood, which could not be anticipated. It was a reminder of the gap between our conscious purposes, in this case to win the debate, and our emotional stance. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal's aphorism, "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing," expresses just this idea.

Performance coaches are of course very familiar with this situation. When they coach an athlete who is clutching, they know that the athlete's emotional stance toward his or her performance is undermining it. For example, the athlete may have become a perfectionist, may feel that failure, after so much success, is shameful, or that succeeding may stimulate the envy of a mentor or peer. However, most coaches don't put their clients "on the couch" to uncover such out-of-awareness feelings. Instead, they help the athlete develop an attitude of overall disinterest in consequences, for example, "what will happen if I fail," and focus solely on the action itself, that is, the arc and follow through of a golf swing, a pitch, or a jump shot.  As a result, the athlete learns to focus on the "here and now" of her performance and to abandon the "there and then” of its results. In fact, these are the conditions under which expert performers often achieve what the psychologist, Mihlay Csikszentmihalyi, calls the state of "flow." This may be one reason Romney demonstrated more resilience. He had nothing to lose. 

There are different techniques for achieving such a stance, for example, by meditating or breathing properly. There are also methods for helping any performer distance himself emotionally from his own performance. For example, coaches who help financial traders improve their game, encourage them to keep a diary of their decisions. The trader becomes a student of his performance, thereby objectifying it.

This perspective on expert performance helps us understand why people who may face considerable emotional conflicts in their everyday lives may nonetheless become skilled performers whether as surgeons, musicians or engineers. Their skill helps them develop a persona that displaces, for the moment, the self that is in conflict with the world. Indeed, it is a common experience that skilled performance helps such people stay sane --it connects them to others in a zone free of emotional conflict-- and why they grow anxious when they are not working. Long ago, the famous psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferenczi, noted that some of his patients suffered from what he called "Sunday neurosis." They became symptomatic on their days off. 

The problem of course is that neither Obama nor Romney is a professional debater. Neither one can commit himself to the level of exercise and attention to debating that a professional in another field achieves in honing her performance. This makes them  both more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of their emotional stance toward a debate. They lack the protection that repeated skilled performances could give them. This is why the debates, despite all their limitations, remain revealing.

The emotional stance a person brings to a performance is often less about character, through sometimes it can be, and more about how he is emotionally related to the situation he is in. In this way of thinking we would not say that Obama was or is irritable, but rather he was in a relationship of irritation to his immediate situation. In the psychoanalytic way of thinking, a person’s relatedness to a situation sets the context for his decisions and actions within the situation. It is like the relationship between climate and weather. The climate establishes the range of possible “weathers.” In this sense, in the absence of repeated performance, the stance trumps the skill. Thinking psychoanalytically, we would say that Obama developed an image of his relationship to the debate, as represented by his opponent, the press, his supporters and the medium of television, which stimulated feelings of irritation. For example, and this is just speculation, he may have experienced the out-of -awareness thought that debating Romney was wasting his time.

The merit of such a framing is that we don’t ask the performer, the client, the coachee, or even Obama, to explore his character. Rather we ask him to try to tune into his out-of-awareness thoughts and feelings --the heart’s reasons—that are shaping his immediate relationship to the situation he is about to face. His debating proxies, or his policy experts cannot possibly help him do this. He has to rely on his closest advisers, and they need the courage to risk “stirring him up” just when he is trying settle in.

The Killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens

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The killing of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, raises perplexing questions about taking risks. Stevens was by all accounts extremely competent at his craft. He was action oriented, emotionally connected to Arab culture and the Arab street, fluent in its language, and had a wide network of contacts in the region. On September 11 he was visiting the U.S. consulate’s office in Benghazi, a city known to have extremist militant groups, when demonstrators attacked the consulate. It is unlikely that this demonstration was truly spontaneous as was first thought; a response to the inflammatory anti-Islamic video that had circulated on the web the week prior. More likely, this demonstration was planned to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11. Observers noted that the demonstrators had sophisticated weaponry such as RPGs, and seemed to know the location of a U.S. safe house in the city. As Stevens’ Wikipedia page reports, “A Libyan-American who watched the attack from the Venezia has challenged a version of events that describes protests and demonstrations. ‘There was no demonstration. They came with machine guns, with rockets.’” Moreover, the guards at the consulate were hired locals, not marines, and there is some speculation that a member of the Libyan security forces may have tipped off the demonstrators as to the location of the U.S. safe house. In short, the city was a nest of vipers. In light of this attack and Stevens’ death, some of his friends wondered if he had taken needless risks in going to Benghazi on September 11 without the protection of a security detail.

One question is whether or not Stevens took the risk of going to Benghazi without protection, carelessly or cautiously. One version of his carelessness is the idea, as some observers first suggested, that Stevens was the innocent American, unaware of the potential for violence in a post-revolutionary setting such as Libya. Roya Hakakian, an Iranian-born writer who met Stevens while the latter was running the Iran desk at the State Department, said that Stevens, “displayed the quintessential sunny innocence of Americans.”  

I don’t think this explanation is plausible. After all Stevens had played an important role in supporting the Libyan revolutionaries who overthrew and killed Gaddafi. He had been stationed in Syria and Jerusalem and was no stranger to the violence in the region, and the tempers of a revolutionary situation. Moreover, several days after he was killed, the CIA revealed that it had developed an extensive covert operation in Benghazi, with 12 operatives, to keep track of the different armed militias in the city. In addition, Stevens’ diary, discovered by a CNN reporter two weeks after the attack, reveals that he was aware of the threat that the armed militias posed and worried that he might be targeted.  Stevens, as one reporter writes, “knew Benghazi perhaps better than any U.S. diplomat.”

There is however another kind of carelessness that we can call motivated. We are familiar with this in everyday situations when, for example, a person misplaces an important document that demands both her attention and a consequential decision. We surmise that in losing this important document she is expressing the wish that she should not have to make the decision, that if the document were out of sight, it could truly be out of mind. In this kind of situation, the person experiences a certain pleasure in “rejecting” the document, ridding herself of it so to speak, even though in the end she must retrieve it, consider it, and decide. Of course, this arc of thought and action is not rational per se. The document stands for a situation of some gravity that cannot be wished or whisked away. But, when under press of strong feelings, we often treat a symbol as if it were the thing it stood for. This is why for example people treat a national flag, which after all is only a piece of cloth, as a sacred object. In sum, what may look like carelessness, losing an important document, may in fact be motivated.

The question then is what could motivate Stevens to be careless? All descriptions of his character and his way of working suggest that he was proud of his ability to talk with common people on the Arab street, to haggle in the markets, to listen intently, to immerse himself in the local scene. Days after his death, sympathetic Libyans posted photos of Stevens on an Arabic Facebook page. In one, he is “slouching down with Libyans eating local food with his hand.” Another reporter notes that, “he often signed letters and e-mails to friends as ‘Krees,’ the way many Arabs pronounced his name.” Describing his character, a friend in Jerusalem said that, "Wherever he was living, he was able to let go of everything else and live that place completely." As a result, security regulations that confined his activity frustrated him. "He wanted that human contact, he wanted to be able to speak to Palestinians on the street, and he couldn't because security regulations made him always travel in armored vehicles," she said. "He used to talk about how he felt this was an obstacle to his ability to really be who he wanted to be."

On its face, this wish for contact is laudable. When it results in better intelligence, wider networks, and trusting relationships with locals, it absolutely enhances a diplomat’s effectiveness. The questions is whether Stevens experienced these skills and abilities as tools in the service of his work as or as expressions of his identity, of the kind of person he was in the world. The above quote; security regulations, “were an obstacle to really be who we wanted to be,” suggests that his identity may have been more central to his self-image than the work he was called upon to do.

But why should that be a problem? Consider the following situation. Imagine a surgeon is inexperienced in a particular surgery but fails to consult colleagues before taking up the scalpel. One interpretation of his lapse is that he imagines he should be the surgeon who knows everything and that it is shameful to consult colleagues. Who he is -- the all-knowing surgeon -- becomes more important than the work he has to do. We recognize in this lapse, the “sin of pride,” and understand why, as the biblical proverb suggests, “pride comes before the fall.”

Consider as well the award winning movie, “The Bridge over the River Kwai.” An imprisoned British officer takes pride in building a railroad bridge, with the troops still under his command, which his Japanese captors need for their own war effort in Burma. He becomes so identified with the discipline and organization he instills in his imprisoned and once demoralized troops, that he loses site of his wider responsibilities, which is to undermine the Japanese war effort in any way he can. In the penultimate scene he races to stop a British sapper from blowing up the completed bridge. In both these cases, attention and feelings shift from the work that must be accomplished to the self that must be expressed. Pride fuels this transition.   

This points to one hypothesis about Stevens’ motivated carelessness, if indeed, that is what it was. He was proud of his capacity to thrive on the Arab street, and felt that traveling with a security detail was somewhat shameful. It would communicate his mistrust of the street and undermine his idea of what made him distinctive as a diplomat. He would in effect fail to live up to his idealized image of himself, which was a source of pride, while losing face in front of his Libyan colleagues. In this way of thinking, the danger, rather than inducing cautiousness, reinforced the pride. This is the sense in which his carelessness was motivated.

Of course, this is speculation, and in that spirit, let me consider an alternative hypothesis. I have discussed identifying with one’s work, or identifying with one’s idealized self. Let me add here a third possibility, identifying with one’s ideals. For example, when reading the accounts of the “righteous gentiles” who protected Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, once is struck by their humility, their insistence that what they did was based on common sense rather than extraordinary courage, even as they put their own lives at risk. Surely, it is incorrect to say that they took risks carelessly. Rather, their humility expresses their subordination to a wider ideal that is so self-evident, in this case the ideal of our common humanity, that they had no other choice. The anticipated pain of violating an ideal, pain that comes from feeling ashamed in front of oneself, was more compelling than the danger they faced and realistically confronted.

There is a video of Stevens on the web, (http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/video/state-department-video-featuring-ambassador-chris-stevens/ ), moving in retrospect, in which he introduces himself to the Libyan people. He projects the informal stance of the everyday American, calling himself Chris for example, rather than Christopher. The video describes how he came to embrace the Arab world, reflects his pride in pluralism and democracy, acknowledges that the U.S. achieved these ideals through conflict, and suggests that this too can be Libya’s future. In light of his murder, it is tempting to interpret this video as reflecting his naiveté. But it is striking that a week after his death Libyan demonstrators, backed by government troops, chased the militia held responsible for his killing out of the city. Clearly, he touched people. Perhaps in taking the risk he did, traveling without a security detail, he was interpreting the ideals of pluralism, openness and tolerance as injunctions to refuse himself privileges, to be the equal not the superior of the Libyans, to face the same situation they faced. The ideals this stance represented were more compelling than the dangers he faced. He would have been ashamed in front of himself had he violated them. In this sense we was not careless at all but rather consistent.

Until his diary is published, there is little chance that we can interpret what he did with any confidence. And even then, the diary may not be revealing. In light of this uncertainty it is reasonable to ask what we hope to gain by such speculation. I want to suggest that even if we cannot arrive at an objective truth, we can arrive at an emotional truth by imaginatively projecting ourselves into the situation our speculation leads us to consider. In this way we gain some insight into our shared psychology.

The Facebook IPO and the role of stories in decision making

     Andrew Ross Sorkin, the well-known business reporter for the New York Times, recently reported on Facebook’s difficulties on the day, May 18, it launched its initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq exchange. The opening share price was $38, but by the beginning of September the stock was selling at $18. As Sorokin writes, “three months after the offering, the company has lost more than $50 billion in market value…To put that in perspective, that’s more market value than Lehman Brothers gave up in the entire year before it filed for bankruptcy.” Sorokin describes this as a "debacle." As the following graph shows, the price was at its peak on the very first day of trading and has been falling ever since,   -->

     To be sure, a company profits when investors overpay for its shares, but the size of the gap between the first day, and its price three months later, undermined the company’s credibility significantly. In addition, while underwriters get a percent of the sales, their customers, for example large institutional investors, hope to profit from the bounce between the value of the stock at the beginning and the end of the first day of trading. If the stock is priced cautiously the bounce can be large. But in the case of Facebook, the opening price on the first day of trading was also the closing price. This meant that the underwriters had many unhappy customers.

     One question is how to interpret this debacle. One hypothesis is that the Facebook’s stock was hyped to begin with. While it has close to a billion users, it is still not clear that Facebook can make enough money by selling advertising. The value of digital ads are falling, Facebook’s revenue per user is falling, and as people increasingly access the site on mobile devices they are less likely to pay attention to ads. According to this way of thinking, either the senior executives of the company believed in the hype, or they purposefully jacked up the price the day of the IPO. 

     The second explanation seems less plausible. After all, it means the firm was willing to sacrifice its reputation for some immediate gains. By contrast, the first explanation seems more plausible because underwriters’ requests for shares on the day of the IPO were in fact very high, suggesting that demand was great. As Sorkin notes, “After a company’s roadshow presentations, investors indicate how many shares they plan to buy. They typically ask for more shares than they expect to receive, sometimes twice as many. But in the case of Facebook, investors, anticipating huge demand, put in requests for triple or quadruple the number of shares they expected to get. The bankers — and Mr. Ebersman (the CFO) — did not seem to appreciate what was happening. They seem to have believed their own hype and took those orders as real, giving them the misplaced confidence to push the IPO to the highest possible price and issue more shares.” In other words, they misinterpreted the demand for shares as evidence of the stock’s value, rather than as evidence for unreasonable expectations about the company’s prospects. 

     This explanation has the merit of confirming the features of any complex situation. As Helga Drummond, the decision theorist notes, “ambiguity always lurks,” data and signals do not connote what they appear to mean, making all important decisions, particular the pricing of an IPO, partly a stab in the dark.

     One question is, how do executives deal with ambiguity? I am drawn to another part of Sorkin’s story. “Another issue that weighed on Mr. Ebersman, as well as the bank underwriters, was the example set by LinkedIn. Its shares rose 110 percent on its first day of trading. That might sound good, but it meant that the company mispriced the shares so badly that it effectively gave investors a gift of nearly $350 million. Mr. Ebersman was intent on making sure Facebook didn’t ‘leave money on the table,’ according to several people close to him. But by leaving investors with little upside, he may have created additional pressure on the stock.”

     Sorkin’s argument highlights the central role stories play when in fact ambiguity lurks. One hypothesis is that we rely on two modes of reasoning when making decisions. The first is algorithmic and depends on logical and quantitative thinking. But when ambiguity lurks we rely more on discursive reasoning through which we dramatize situations.  In this frame of thinking we see the ebb and flow of events as shaped by knaves and fools, or heroes and victims, and we engage in trial runs, before deciding, by alternatively identifying with different characters in the drama. In this way of thinking, we can hypothesize that Ebersman saw himself in the role of LinkedIn’s CFO, facing the prospect that he would experience shame by foolishly leaving money on the table. As this argument suggests, dramas are freighted with emotions that in turn shape our decision-making. 

     One question is why do we dramatize when ambiguity lurks?  One hypothesis is that in the face of ambiguity we may not achieve the conviction we need to make difficult decisions. The data on hand do not reduce our sense of uncertainty. Without conviction we may attenuate our commitment to a course of action when we confront our first unexpected obstacles. But one sure road to conviction is through our emotions when we feel the decision we are about to make, as the phrase goes, “in our gut.” And, as the term “drama” suggests, stories are vehicles for discovering how and what we feel about a situation.

Indeed, it is still remarkable, even if commonplace, that we can moved to tears by obviously fictional accounts, whether in the form of novels, films or plays. Even as we know that what we are experiencing is not true, for example, objectively the movie is an image on celluloid, we are nonetheless moved by the emotional truths works of fiction stimulate. History interprets past events by creating a story about them, and if fiction creates emotional truths, history, which has some basis in fact, should be as persuasive, if not more so, than fiction. This is why for example, we often worry that our generals are always “fighting the last war.” 

     Some management theorists overvalue stories as guides to decision making. They counsel executives to tell subordinates stories that are uplifting and motivating so that people will give it their all to a particular initiative or strategy. But as our worry about the generals suggests, while stories are meaningful, they are not necessarily accurate. For example, the reader may recognize in the Facebook case the operation of what behavioral economists call, “loss aversion.” As economists argue, losing $100 is far more painful than is the pleasure of winning $100. As Sorkin suggests, the LinkedIn story stimulated the fear that Facebook would lose money it was entitled to. In this sense Ebersman was motivated by pain, rather than by greed, and by anticipated shame, rather than by an imagined victory. Stories in other words have all the limitations we associate with day-dreams and fantasies. The unconscious roots of a story, for example loss aversion, can distort judgment as much as it can motivate action. 

     Freud long ago described the difference between what he called the primary and the secondary process. The latter was based on conscious reasoning tied to the logic of cause and effect; the former was based on wishes, fantasies and emotions through which we often sustain contradictory ideas. Today the “object relations” school of psychoanalysis suggests that wishes, fantasies and day-dreams are shaped by our internalized conception of how we relate to others, what roles we play in their dramas as well as in our own. Since, ambiguity always lurks and ambiguity provokes us to rely on stories, this suggests that rationality far from being a foregone conclusion,  is instead an achievement.

Best Buy and Organizational Rationality

 Richard Schulze, the founder and largest shareholder of Best Buy, the “big box” electronic retailer, has announced his intention to buy back the firm by leading a leveraged buyout (LBO). Analysts are skeptical that he can attract the necessary venture capital. He is offering about $25 a share, but the stock is currently trading at about $18. It is unclear why investors would want to pay such a premium. Should he succeed, the company would have to take on an additional $7 billion in debt. If successful, the leveraged buy-out would mean that costs would have to be cut significantly. Moreover, Best Buy is in trouble. While its chief competitor, Circuit City, went bankrupt at the beginning of the Great Recession, it now faces competition from Amazon with its online sales capability, and Apple with its boutique retail outlets. It lost $1.7 billion in the first quarter of this year.

The proximate stimulus for Schulze’s leveraged buyout offer was his forced resignation as the chairman of the board. As the New York Times notes, “Late last year, Mr. Schulze, now 71, received a written statement from an employee “containing specific allegations about a possible inappropriate relationship” between Brian J. Dunn, the 51-year-old chief executive, and a 29-year-old female employee, according to a report by the company’s audit committee. Mr. Schulze confronted Mr. Dunn, who “adamantly denied any inappropriate conduct or romantic relationship with respect to the female employee.” Mr. Schulze accepted his word and viewed the matter as settled. He did not tell any of his fellow board members as was required by the company policy.”  In addition, he told Dunn who had filed the written statement.

The audit committee of the board, commissioned an investigation of Dunn’s behavior. The report concluded that, “The CEO violated Company policy by engaging in an extremely close personal relationship with a female employee that negatively impacted the work environment. He also violated Company policy by soliciting from a vendor a complimentary ticket for the female employee. His relationship with the female employee demonstrated extremely poor judgment and a lack of professionalism, but the inquiry revealed no misuse of Company resources… In addition, as part of the investigation, it was determined that the Chairman of the Board of Directors (the “Chairman”) acted inappropriately when he failed to bring the matter to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors in December 2011, when the allegations were first raised with him.”

It is worth asking why the board took the extreme step of dismissing its chair and founder. He was the architect of the firm’s success, had appointed every prior CEO, was the major shareholder and, as his plan for the LBO suggests, he could create trouble. Indeed, one analyst described the board’s action as a “palace coup.” One hypothesis is that the board’s decision about Schulze was colored by the nature of Dunn’s faulty decision, namely, a decision to conduct a "close personal" relationship that “negatively impacted the work environment.”

The use of the term “close personal” is suggestive. I want to propose that the foundation for a psychologically secure work setting is paradoxically impersonal. In such a setting, a person is only as good as his or her past effectiveness, and should it prove wanting, the organization can fire the person. The organization is obligated to meet customers’ needs, not employees’ needs. To be sure, organizations should not be brutal. But this ethic of impersonality means that there is an element of indifference that shapes the psychological climate of the modern performance organization.

How can such an ethic possibly create a sense of psychological security? Because it also means that supervisors cannot “play favorites” based on personal preference, and people in authority cannot act arbitrarily in allocating tasks and rewards. Personnel decisions should be based only on what contributes best to the organization’s performance People experience such an organizational climate as rational, and this rationality is a partial compensation for the indifference. The climate may be challenging and the setting unkind, but it is not arbitrary. The organization’s rationality is the analogue of civil society’s “rule of law.”

This is an ideal of course. Informal social networks, through which people provide advantages to others who share the same social background, shape organizational life. Personal preferences can matter. But it is a measure of some progress that executives in authority are held accountable for minimizing the impacts of such preferences. This is the basis for most human-resources policies, and for anti-discrimination laws. When a discrimination claim leads to a legal suit, the rule of law and the ideal of organizational rationality are joined.

Yet, there is no reported evidence that Dunn favored the woman with career opportunities or company resources. Moreover, office romances are strikingly common. As one survey of 7,800 workers reports, “Nearly 40 percent of employees say they’ve dated someone at work, and of those almost 30 percent say they’ve hooked up with someone above them in company rank.”

This suggests that there was something egregious or unseemly about Dunn’s behavior. What could that be? The audit committee's report notes that Dunn and the unidentified woman had numerous private meetings and exchanged “hundreds of text messages and phone calls.” Moreover, as the audit committee’s report notes, he had asked a vendor to provide the woman with a free ticket for a concert. One explanation, buttressed by the report, is that what was unseemly was not simply or only his behavior, but his obvious lack of discretion and poor judgment. After all, as the audit committee’s report suggests, people knew about the pair’s relationship, and it is likely that some people observed moments when the couple sought out a setting for a private meeting. Perhaps what upset people the most is that Dunn allowed a sexual attraction, which is never reasoned and is always arbitrary, to undermine his good judgment.  

Why is this upsetting, why does it create a negative work environment? According to this line of thinking people did not imagine that the woman was being favored. Rather, they saw the CEO succumb to sexual impulses, strong enough that they ruled out discretion. As a result he became a poor representative of organizational rationality. As the saying goes, he “fell head over heels.” Of course, there are many times when a CEO may give way to his or her impulses, for example in fits of anger. But these instances are often linked to the tensions of the work itself. In this sense they can be explained, even if they are unreasonable. Succumbing to a sexual attraction has no such explanation. 

This account provides a plausible explanation for the board’s willingness to be so bold as to stage a “palace coup.” They saw Dunn’s behavior and Schulze’s behavior as cut from the same cloth, as part of a single episode.  Just as Dunn failed to represent organizational rationality, Schulze violated it. He did not follow company policies and board rules. Instead, he failed to report the complaint against Dunn to the audit committee, and told Dunn the name of the employee who had lodged the complaint. It is a cardinal rule of organizational rationality that people who lodge complaints against senior executives have the right to remain anonymous. Otherwise they might be punished for their truth telling. Dunn’s poor judgment and lack of impulse control colored the board’s estimation of Schulze’s behavior, which in other circumstances they might have forgiven with a reprimand.  

In this context it is no accident that Schulze wants to take the company private. As a private company Schulze would be less shackled by the “rule of law.” The company would become his private domain. It is also likely that his decision to attempt an LBO has some of the same impulsive qualities that shaped Dunn’s behavior. After all analysts are very skeptical he can succeed. Moreover, taking on too much debt could jeopardize Best Buy, just when it has to restructure its entire operation to remain competitive.  Schulze may be trying “to get even,” a sorry basis for a rational investment decision. One wonders if board members experienced Schulze as increasingly impulsive even prior to the Dunn affair.

There has been a tendency in management literature to poo-poo organizational rationality, as if it were an ideological description of the organization that bears no relationship to real organizations.  Of course there is much irrationality in organization life, as this very case suggests. But that does not mean that the ideal of rationality, when conceived of as the “rule of law,” should be dispensed with.

Romney's choice of Ryan as his running mate: A psychodynamic look.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate. Journalists and bloggers consider the choice to be a bold one since it links his candidacy to the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, and therefore risks losing voters in the center who may still be undecided. Ryan stands for fiscal astringency, reducing social welfare programs, privatizing elements of Medicare and Social Security, all joined to a stout opposition to abortion rights, gun-laws and same-sex marriage. The decision is bold presumably because Romney can now draw a clear line of demarcation between himself and Obama, rather than arguing that he is better able than Obama to pull the economy out of the “Great Recession.” Romney in this sense has “drawn the line in the sand,” highlighting, to the greatest degree possible, his differences with Obama.

There is of course a political discourse to consider in assessing Romney’s choice. For example, does Romney risk losing undecided voters even as he invigorates his base. But I want to propose that we can also look at this decision from a psychodynamic point of view, as a case of how emotions shape executive level of decisions.

Perhaps the most important issue to ask is, to what degree, by selecting Ryan, does Romney now depend on him to define his own place on the political spectrum? The day after the announcement a member of Romney's campaign staff saw fit to tell reporters that the ticket is “Romney/Ryan, not Ryan/Romany.” Similarly, one journalist wondered if, by choosing Ryan for the reasons he did, Romney has to some degree diminished his own stature. It is common for presidential candidates to choose their running mate on the basis of the latter’s distinctive strengths. One is reminded here of Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate. The latter had a political base in the South that Kennedy lacked. But it is less common for a presidential candidate to choose his running mate based on his own weakness or limitations.

I am drawn to a “slip of the tongue” Romney made when first introducing Ryan as his running mate in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Describing Ryan before he joined Romney on the dais, Romney called Ryan, "The Next president of the United States!” The psychoanalytic perspective presumes that slips of the tongue such as this one have meaning, that is, they are motivated rather than random.

Now one simple explanation for this slip is that Romney had imagined hearing, in a kind of daydream or fantasy, the phrase, “The next president of the United States,” over the course of his campaigning. This fantasy would be a simple way of anticipating the relish he would feel upon being introduced in this way after his victory. His slip is simply a way of expressing this relish. Indeed, Obama made the very same slip when introducing Biden as his running mate in 2008. But there was a difference between the two slips. Obama corrected himself immediately, as most people do after a slip, saying “the next president, uh vice president..” Romney corrected himself only after he had left the dais, and returned– to interrupt Ryan - clearly having been coached by aides who let him know what he had said. 

In looking at such a slip are we making a “mountain out of a molehill?” Freud spoke of the "psychopathology of everyday life" to describe how moments of emotional gravity can be revealed in apparently trivial ways.  It is useful in this context, to think how psychoanalysis parses such “Freudian slips.” The slip is the intrusion of an idea or wish that the person considers unacceptable, that is, something you would not acknowledge in public, but that nonetheless is a source of considerable gratification. For example, I recently spoke with a practicing physician, who in describing the outcome of a clinical trial he was conducting for a drug company, referred to its “secondary income.” A slip such as this is funny because the unacceptable idea, in this case he was making extra money by working for a drug company, rides on the back of the acceptable idea, his research had an outcome. In this case, the word “in” sneaks past and displaces the word, “out.”

One hypothesis about slips is that the longer it takes the person to correct the slip, if he ever does, the more powerful is the gratifying idea or wish. The ego, which monitors one’s self-presentation constantly, can’t resist the intensity of the wish. It fails as a censor. But the pleasant day-dream of hearing the phrase, “The next president of the United States,” is an unlikely candidate for such a powerful wish, particularly for a man like Romney who has great self control and tremendous discipline. So if we proceed along this line of argument we are led to speculate about what wish could be powerful enough to escape an ego’s ability to censor it. What wish is gratifying enough for Romney to imagine Ryan, rather than himself as president? 

I am drawn here to Mitt Romney’s very close relationship to his father, George Romney. He regarded him as his mentor and guide and it appears that they had a loving relationship. George Romney was a great success in business, as was Romney, was the governor of a state, as was Romney, and like Romney, campaigned in the 1968 Republican primaries to be the party’s presidential candidate. Though a fiscal conservative, he was a firm supporter of civil rights for African-Americans and therefore opposed Barry Goldwater’s bid for the Republican nomination in 1964. At the time, Mormon Church-doctrine held that African-Americans were inferior, and one church leader wrote George Romney a personal letter warning him of his failure to support church teachings. While he endorsed many “law and order” measures and believed that crime was the result of moral decay, as governor, he also introduced Michigan’s first state income tax. In addition, “he held a series of governor's conferences, which sought to find new ideas from public services professionals and community activists who attended. He opened his office in the Michigan State Capitol to visitors, spending five minutes with every citizen who wanted to speak with him on Thursday mornings, and was always sure to shake the hands of schoolchildren visiting the capitol.  He almost always eschewed political activities on Sunday, the Mormon Sabbath.” Upon withdrawing from the primaries and ceding victory to Richard Nixon, he wrote to Mitt, then a missionary in France, "Your mother and I are not personally distressed. As a matter of fact, we are relieved. We went into this not because we aspired to the office, but simply because we felt that under the circumstances we would not feel right if we did not offer our service. As I have said on many occasions, I aspired, and though I achieved not, I am satisfied."

The picture one gets is of a man who lived on a moral plane, who believed in his own agency, as well as his obligation to serve, who took his religion seriously, had a dramatic conception of his life, and took up the complexities and contradictions of his own background and experience with zest and commitment

There is reason to believe that Mitt shares many of these features, that he has indeed followed in his father’s footsteps. He is a devout Mormon, by all accounts personally very generous, pragmatic, focused on social justice, but also committed to the idea of personal responsibility. These characteristics certainly shaped his attention and commitment to health care insurance reform in Massachusetts. Poor people needed help, but everyone had to contribute. If you were uninsured but used hospital services when sick, you were irresponsible.

One hypothesis is that because politics is now polarized, Romney has been unable to express the complexity of his own political and personal makeup. Political discourse is too black and white. Moreover, the electorate may not tolerate a man motivated by his Mormon beliefs.  This may explain why Romney has appeared stiff and uncomfortable in public and why his candidacy lacks a certain passion. He cannot be wholly himself. By choosing Ryan, he borrows the latter’s single-mindedness and the zeal of the conservatives who see Ryan as their representative. In this sense, we could say that choosing Ryan was not bold, and indeed may have been made out of fear. In this way of thinking, to act courageously, he has to be fully himself in all his complexity, and take the risk that a polarized electorate might reject him. Indeed, it appears that Romney father’s lived out this choice, and this was one reason for his own political defeat. If Romney experiences his father as an ideal, then it makes sense that his own choice, to be evasive and withdrawn, is an act of bad faith and a disappointment to the “father in his mind.”

This line of thinking may shed some light on his slip of the tongue. In describing Ryan, many have noted that, with the difference in Romney’s and Ryan’s age, Ryan could be Romney’s son. Journalists have also commented on how Romney often likes to surround himself with young hard-working men. In other words, he thrives in settings where he is a father figure to sons. Perhaps his slip expresses the wish that he is no longer in the position of a son who needs to follow the example of a father, but that he is now the father whose primary obligation is to support and nurture a son. This wish, to be the father rather than the son, relieves him of the bad faith he feels in not following in his father’s footsteps, since he forgoes his own striving. The more he idealizes his father, the more powerful would this wish be. Perhaps this helps explain why he made his slip of the tongue and did not correct it. It also lends a psychological truth to some observers’ conception that the ticket is Ryan-Romney rather than Romney-Ryan. If this analysis is sound, it suggests that Romney’s choice, even if it were politically astute, was in some degree psychologically compromised.  

My skeptical readers may look askance at this kind of speculation. But I want to emphasize that many observers use an unexamined psychology, we can call it “common sense” psychology, to understand political figures. For example, political figures are regularly presumed to be ambitious, fearful, self-interested, generous, crafty etc. I call it common sense psychology because we often see no reason to justify our inferences. But since we cannot observe any of these traits, only people’s actions, it is fair to say that this kind of psychology is speculative as well.  What is discomfiting about a psychoanalytic psychology is that, as a depth psychology, it presumes that motives are many sided, that people can express contradictory feelings, that family influences on a person are formative but often out of awareness, and that actions, like a slip of the tongue, are unconsciously motivated. So the issue is not whether or not we can speculate, but on what grounds and through what methods we come to our conclusions. I would be interested to hear what people think of this kind of reasoning about political figures.