The Four P's #140: PPPPresidential Pair of Pennies
My two cents on Presidential Inauguration, Inequality, Twitter and Working Moms.
Well, we've arrived at the Inauguration Week of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and I'll admit, this feels both historic and important, but also anti-climactic after two months of post-election drama. Trump exits with a second impeachment attached to his legacy, but given the anything-but-civil transfer of power, all we can say is that ONE long national nightmare is over.
Many others remain: Emboldened white supremacists, millions questioning the legitimacy of our democracy, violent insurrections on the streets and in our Capitol, science and climate change denialism, and the gross mishandling of the Coronavirus pandemic.
That last one kind of stings... COVID vaccine deployment and roll out is just a few weeks in, but it is clearly a mess, with massive supply and distribution issues, appointment cancellations and no coordinated strategy. Some may blame local, state officials, or hospital and medical leaders, but this is the last massive failure of the Trump administration. There was no plan for how to prioritize and coordinate this, and cleaning this up will now take months, if not longer. And then you hear and read about big companies secretly trying to get massive supplies of the vaccine on the secondary market so that its employees can return to work. Fortunately those attempts were unsuccessful, but it speaks to a bigger problem -- maybe THE biggest -- in our society.
(But first, a word from this week’s sponsor: Lowes)
Something Practical: Inequality and Invariance
I'll never forget the first time I read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, as a freshman in college.
It was the mid-90's. The United States was still riding high off of its 1-0 victory in the Cold War. Bill Clinton was on the verge of a landslide re-election. Belief in capitalism as a pillar of the global economy was at an all-time high. The dot.com bubble was still a few years away… and I had just gotten my first ATM card with Mellon Bank!
Fast forward 25 years later, and it's clear that the free market economy is, well, problematic (cue the cries of "socialism!"). For those who have forgotten, and for the many more who never read it, The Wealth of Nations touched upon the division of labor, productivity, and free markets. It continues to serve as a foundation for modern economic and social thought. But it is also misinterpreted...as are terms like capitalism, socialism and free market.
The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. In recent decades, a whole set of economic ideas, often supporting the free market, have come to be hugely influential on how we make policies, and even on how we think. Ideas like game theory, public choice theory, and free-rider thinking have all combined to make a crudely selfish view of the world seem like the norm.
One thing no one debates or questions is wealth inequality. There has always been a gap between the "haves and the have nots," but that gap is getting larger at an accelerated pace. Inequality follows something called a fractal distribution – just like the stock market and snowflakes. If we look at an entire nation’s income and see that the richest 1% gain around 20% percent of all the income, scale-invariance means that if you zoom in, you’ll see that within that richest 1%, the top 1% have 20% of all that income. And so on.
But inequality is not an inevitability. Over the last 30-40 years, inequality has only risen in countries that introduced economic policies heavily favoring free markets (like the U.S. and U.K.). It's not happening everywhere. So why does our social culture deify those who have created, or even tolerated, such inequality.... or worse, encourage it? Just look at those who advocate for decreasing top-tier tax rates in the U.S.. the answer: greed. Those who lack wealth strive to achieve it. Those who have wealth want more of it.
Community and individual health, social justice, civil rights... all of these issues stem from our growing inequality. As we inaugurate a new phase of American leadership, and manage to get COVID back under control, it is imperative that we look at the sources of, and solutions to, the radical inequality that underlie so many other challenges.
Something Political: Government FOR the People
Inequality will be just one of the issues immediately facing the Biden administration. Late last week, President-Elect Biden presented his plan for a $2 trillion relief package, which put vaccination and individual financial relief atop his list of priorities for his first 100 days in office. That will not erase the 400,000 American deaths to date, but better testing, guidance for schools and local governments and disaster relief will tackle the pandemic in a way we have not seen to date.
Yet GOP lawmakers are already criticizing the plan, calling it "too big" and "too much." This attempt to deflect attention from the Capitol riots and other failures are also a diversion from any attempt at achieving unity under a new President. But perhaps more important than the updated plan, itself, is a new tone of leadership rooted in empathy. “Every day matters, every person matters,” he said.
The last time our nation was in such peril and required transformational social leadership, management and execution was when Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office during the Great Depression. His New Deal was the most expansive, coordinated federal effort to lift a nation out of a hole. And it worked. The New Deal put people to work, but also regulated how much the wealthy class could profit from the planned measure. Government intervention saved America.
Yet over the last 40 years, "Big Government" became a rallying cry for conservatives. And here we are again. Business executives have held top positions in government these past four years, and lost total sight of the very principles upon which our government of, by and FOR the people were founded.
Whereas most Americans once agreed that government regulation, social welfare programs and infrastructure were critical, our current division is no longer split this way. There are as many, if not more, impoverished Americans who are voting in opposition to their own best interest. White supremacists aside, activist government does more to help more Americans, plain and simple. This is not a bad thing, and needs be reclaimed as a dirty term. President Biden has advocated for a fair economy for all, focusing on an idea of community that highlights the needs of communities of color, minorities, women and children. It's on the rest of us to keep that pressure on, keep pushing and bring America back out of the darkness.
Something Personal: Double Down on Twitter
Four P's, Episode 140... and 140 is a special number, as many of you know, because it was the first Twitter character limit and a number that will always be associated with the digital communication and media network.
Personally, and professional, I've got a very rich history with Twitter. As one of the earliest social marketing agency leads, I pushed big, global brands onto Twitter as early as 2008. For me, it was both a passion project and a fun challenge convincing them of the viability of the platform as a long-term investment.
A few years later, after we won the Kraft-Mondelez business, my first priority was to convert @TheOreoCookie into a well-known feed. But in order to do that, they'd have to change the handle to @Oreo. Unfortunately, that long-inactive username belonged to the Japanese owner of a dead cat named Oreo. Back then, you could just pick up the phone and call Twitter's small, but great, partnership team. It took some work, but we finally got things transferred over to @Oreo. Two years later, our team pushed out a tweet during the Super Bowl that changed digital marketing forever (many argue, changed not for the better).
There was the time when, ghost-writing Ryan Seacrest tweets on behalf of @CocaCola, we accidentally waded into the late night television host debate.
There was the time I created a brand's new Twitter handle for a major global brand, and ran it for six months before we even told them about it.
There were countless times when a colleague, boss, my wife or someone else in my network implored me to delete an ill-advised post.
There was also the time that a quote of mine in the New York Times about Twitter's new video ad options was cut short, and the entire global Twitter leadership team was calling for my head.
Undeterred, I'm pushing 36,000 tweets... most of which could be used against me in some way if I were ever to become famous. But it remains the best tool for expressing, communicating and learning about the world beyond our homes. Twitter has remained a second tier marketing platform for over a decade, but is THE platform for entertainment, cultural moments and "second screen conversations." Some may argue that President Trump pushed Twitter to new levels of engagement, and that may be true. When used properly and fairly, there is no healthier place for discourse. But anonymous trolls, bots and pockets of hateful, violent rhetoric have also contributed to significant social and civil deterioration. On the bright side, after 10+ years or prodding, my wife is not only active on Twitter... She's passionately engaging #RealHousewivesTwitter, #MedicalTwitter, #COVIDTwitter as well as anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and pro-Trump morons with a vigor beyond even my own levels of rancor. I can now say that my work here is complete.
Something Professional: Supporting Mothers in the Workplace
For as long as I can remember, professional, working women have been at the center of my life. My own mother returned to work two months after I was born, and she hasn't slowed down since. Even as I write this, my wife is seeing patients, working weekends, fielding phone calls and balancing motherhood and doctorhood.
Working mothers are a fundamental pillar of our social, economic and family structure, but that balance has not gotten any easier. They face challenges that no one else in the workplace can truly fathom. It's something I've been especially attuned to since entering the workforce more than two decades ago. And while it feels presumptuous for me to speak to, or about, working mothers... and while I have probably made mistakes as a manager over the years... and while I can never truly understand the challenges that women face in the workplace, this conversation is crucial.
Traditional gender roles have provided men with greater flexibility to prioritize their job above all else, but we all have smartphones and laptops, which creates a perception of availability. No matter where you are, no matter what you’re doing, you can be called, emailed, or pinged. It’s an understatement to say the line between professional life and personal life has been blurred.
The blueprint for a better work-life relationship requires striking a balance, yet too many managers and leaders struggle with how best to play a positive, productive, supportive role in the careers, growth and development of, and for, working mothers. To their credit, more and more companies are eager to implement work-life flexibility, but there’s often insufficient guidance on how to do one’s work in less time.
I don't profess to have all of the solutions, but I try to start with employees, first. Being transparent, open and supportive is the bedrock of all of this, for both employees and managers. When we encourage employees to consider and define what they want to achieve, we can better plan and support them in the commitment to their vision. We can acknowledge and reward their courage in asking for what they need. Of course, we all need to learn and understand the federal and state law and company policies. But when people come first, the company culture forges greater loyalty, individual commitment and team success... and we all win.
To hope…