Back when I was in graduate school, I took an Industrial Psychology class where we studied the works of Fred Herzberg. His work stressed that worker motivation could be divided into two parts. Those that were positive and those that were negative. He felt that business did not put enough focus on the elimination of negative factors. His reasoning was that people tend to remember negative factors much longer and put much more weight on them compared to positive factors. Here is an example. People remember touching a hot stove for life, but forget about eating a great steak in a few days. This is just how people tend to work. Now, the point of this blog.
Compare President Trump and Obama or Biden. As a business executive, President Trump wants to get things done. That is how successful businesses work. In the process of getting things done, it is inevitable that you will step on a few toes, but on balance, the positives out weigh the negatives so the score is a net positive and the business executive wins! Do you agree with that?
Now the politician. The objective of the politician is to not step on any toes. He is not concerned about getting things done that are positive, because he know that people remember and vote more based on negatives than on the positive things that a politician does for them. Look at President Obama. He spent a lot of time playing golf. During that time he was clearly not doing anything good for the voters, but he was also not doing anything bad. You have a hard time coming up with anything that the Obama administration ever did for the voters. but you will also see that he did not step on many toes.
The problem is not with the business executive being elected as President, the problem is with us voters who can not see what Fred Herzberg was trying to teach us. As long as we put more weight on things like style that we see as negative than we put on the positive things, we will get just what we voted for and what is that? We will get life long politicians who are good at avoiding the negative things in the process of doing exactly nothing for the country in the long term. It is not the business executive or the politicians who need to wake up, it is us the voters. I hope this short blog has opened a few of your eye and you will accept that. "we have found the enemy and the enemy is us". What news paper cartoon was that? Does anyone remember?
