My father was in the electronics business, and he once told me about a machine that was, essentially, a giant Cuisinart with an open top.
I have no idea what the machine was supposed to do. I’m sure my father tried to explain it to me, and I pretended to understand him, but for our purposes here, just accept that there’s a spinning machine with an open top and it’s used to do something dangerous.
Here’s what’s interesting about this machine: Even though you only need one person to work it, two people are assigned to it at all times.
The machine spins so quickly that it almost looks like it’s not spinning at all. The interior centrifuge is so fast and so powerful that if you stare at it long enough, which you have to do if you’re going to use it properly, your brain forgets that it’s moving because your eyes are telling it that it’s not moving, so your hand naturally reaches into the machine in an absent-minded way, which is when you lose your hand up to the elbow. Accidents, when they occur, are spectacularly bloody and painful.
That’s what the other person is there for — to remind the first person that the machine is really spinning. That’s the whole job: stand there, eye on the other guy, ready to remind him of what he already knows but could easily forget.
It’s hard to know which job is harder, actually: the first person doing the skilled labor of working the machine or the second person doing the psychological labor of reminding the first person that his brain is lying to him.
In other words, both of those people working together would be excellent marketing and communication professionals: one person to get into stuff and think about stuff and try to shape and influence the policy and the message, and one person to tell that person to stop doing that.
If you think about the most spectacular examples of corporate failure, it’s never because the management team was asleep at the switch. Big companies don’t make errors because they’re not working or thinking hard enough. They mess up when they see the cylinder, think it’s not spinning, and say to themselves, maybe I’ll just reach in and fix this one thing.
In the late 1980s, Coca-Cola, perhaps the most successful consumer brand in world history, decided that the only way to solidify its position as the manufacturers of the most popular drink on earth was by changing the recipe for the most popular drink on earth.
The result was a public relations and sales disaster. People who loved the taste of Coca-Cola, the executives discovered to their shock, did not want that taste to change. What Coca-Cola was selling as “New Coke” was something no one wanted to buy.
The executives and marketers who made that disastrous decision weren’t stupid. On the contrary, they were smart — the smartest people in the room. Armed with charts and surveys and market testing results, they thought and thought and overthought themselves into nearly destroying one of the most iconic brands in the world.
“People want new!” you can hear them say. “People want something different!”
The truth is, at no point in history has anyone, really, wanted anything “new” or “different.” What we want, when we’re really being honest with ourselves and each other, is exactly what we’ve always liked, just maybe a little updated here and there. A new font, say — a “nacho cheese” version.
That often leaves the sellers of the product unfulfilled and dissatisfied. They want to deliver something new, different, revolutionary. They want to put their hands in the machine.
Many very smart people who work in the politics business are wondering what happened on election night 2021. They had poll numbers and focus group results and Twitter feeds that told them that the voters in — oh, just off the top of my head — Virginia wanted to talk about climate change and racial strife and Donald Trump.
What the boring old voters wanted to talk about was what voters pretty much always want to talk about: their children and the economy.
There’s no limit to the damage people can do to themselves when they’re trying to be clever. What a lot of political professionals need is someone next to them at all times, reminding them to stop trying to be smart. Stop trying to strategize. Don’t put your hand in the machine.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
