NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Sharing Too Much Data With Everybody Doesn't Help Anybody

Don't overload your team with information that can't help them. Here's a four-step guide to who-gets-what.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

 I'm afraid that the latest vogue in information sharing-- radical transparency, where everyone allegedly knows everything about what's going on in your business-- is one of those virtuous endeavors that starts out with the best of intentions and fairly quickly ends up in tears and a swamp of confusion. It's just the latest instance of the ancient caution-- "be careful what you wish for" -- but it's also something that every business, especially new ones, needs to address before things get completely out of hand, with the inmates demanding to run the entire asylum. Watching Netflix and a host of other companies try to drag back the drawbridge, rewrite their corporate philosophies, and explain why not everybody in the company any longer needs to get a "say" in everything is a case in point. Asking your engineers about art direction is like inviting a turkey to Thanksgiving dinner.

But the issue is much broader than simply one of conflicting politics, busybodies, and concerns about transphobia and cancel culture. To do their own jobs well, there's no question that your team needs the proper desire, direction, and data. This is a critical component of both innovation and iteration, which are the keys to progress. But sharing critical and sensitive information isn't an invitation to a free-for-all. People butting in and adding their two cents to the way that everyone else is doing their jobs is a formula for failure and chaos. The fact that they're just trying to help might be an explanation, but it's no excuse. The key is to give your people the resources they need and the tools to track how they're doing and then to get out of their way as long as they stay in their own lanes. If they don't, your job -- among a million others -- is to run interference and back off the butt-in-skis.

To help your folks do their jobs and do their best, there's nothing more essential than timely and relevant metrics. As management guru Peter Drucker said many years ago, you can't manage what you can't measure and that's still largely true. Even more to the point, it's clear that what gets measured is what gets done and, in true learning organizations, what gets measured and modified appropriately gets better over time. Constant iteration and successive approximation mean you're always improving.

But, as with everything else in life, too much of a good thing can simply be too much for an organization to ingest and digest effectively. Bean counting, in and of itself, is never good for business.  If you can't swiftly and successfully integrate the data you're assembling, it's just make-work. And frankly, even in today's hyper-technical world, there are plenty of important but intangible concerns and considerations that you still can't simply measure.

Unfortunately, when there's constant pressure for results and "accountability," there's often a tendency to invent and massage the facts and figures so that the numbers add up. In far too many businesses, a slavish allegiance to budgets and projections and a fetish with false precision and made-up metrics can lead to disaster. When the measurement and the process itself become the goal, you can easily lose sight of the real objectives. If you insist on overdoing it, the very act of measurement will alter whatever it is that you're trying to measure and, most often, not in a good way.

Examples of this kind of make-believe management reporting abound in marketing. While direct mail marketing is completely quantifiable, it's clear that the impact and results of most brand marketing is, at best, a touchy-feely guess. In areas like these the best plan isn't even precision guesswork; it's fencing in the parameters within reason-- taking your best shot at a realistic estimate and moving on. After the fact, when you have some actual numbers and results, you can fine tune your approach and strategy.

Ultimately, the real job is pretty simple. You need to decide who really needs to get what kind of information to do their best work and then make sure they get what they need. Spoiler alert: practically no one in the entire company needs to know what everyone else earns. Compensation issues, competitive comparisons, and constant complaints are the personnel problems that have sunk more startups than just about any other matter. Whatever the alleged benefit might be of widely sharing sensitive and highly personal material like pay or performance rankings, I assure you that the pain is never worth the hoped-for gain.  

So, how do you determine who really needs to know what? Four simple questions.

1) Is the requested information available and readily accessible?

As noted above, for example, impact and effectiveness data for brand marketing is easy to come by, but it's mostly the product of wishful thinking. Call it "anecdata," an intoxicating cocktail of facts and factoids. While it may make people feel better, the data adds little to their future performance or results. Understand, too, that the right data may inform ongoing decision-making, but it's not going to ultimately make the correct choices for your people. The final call and the responsibility are theirs; using the data as a crutch for their decisions is like the drunk using a lamppost for support rather than illumination.

2) Do they need the specific requested information to better do their jobs?

Even if it's good information, you still need to know the difference between nice (or interesting) to have and need to have. Everyone likes to keep score. Showrunners constantly complain that the streaming services don't tell them how their shows are performing until the decision to renew comes up. But telling them after production is complete about some random and relative numbers has nothing to do with the progress, quality or success of the next show they're working on. It's more likely to create anxiety and anger rather than any changed or improved behavior.

3) Can and will the team members use it effectively if it's provided in a timely fashion?

Here again, the writers and teams that assemble 8-to -12 shows for Netflix or Hulu typically deliver the finished series before even the first episode or three-pack airs. So, telling them how specific episodes performed may make them feel better or worse, but it's not information they can use to revise their completed work. Makers in Hollywood are still treated mainly like mushrooms and management sees no reason to think about changing the rules.

4) Can the data be assembled and provided at a reasonable cost?

Good, clean data isn't cheap. It's essential to determine whether the likely benefits will outweigh the costs before you start down the path because--much like rabbits --both the demand and the dimensions of the undertaking will multiply over a relatively short timeframe since the desire for more and better guidance is perpetually progressive and relatively insatiable. 

Nielsen used to track home TV viewership and even as the only game in town its reports were accepted by the industry, reasonably priced, and fairly valued for the actual quality of the guidance they provided. But then the world changed in two critical ways:  (1) a scrappy new competitor, Comscore entered the market with more advanced and precise measurement technology across multiple media delivery platforms; and (2) the media marketplace fragmented and exploded with viewership in and out of home  on cable, digital, desktop, and mobile delivery systems.  

Today, there are twice as many smart phones in the average American home as TV sets and each one constantly consumes media. Both the challenges of capturing accurate usage and viewership data across an ever-expanding spectrum and the users' costs of acquiring such data continue to grow exponentially.

Every use case in every industry is going to have different data needs that will also change regularly, but never diminish. No one is likely to get the parameters exactly right and make the best choices on a consistent basis, but the critical conversations and the time-sensitive decisions are unavoidable and imminent.

All we know for absolutely certain is that data is the oil of the digital age and that the volume of the data being created and aggregated will grow exponentially forever. Every organization will need to develop strategies and firm but flexible guidelines for its information policies.

It's important to have data, but it's infinitely more important to know how to employ and interpret it. Having more data is not the same as having better information, even if your people want it all.

TRUMP NEVER DID ANYTHING BUT LIE

 

 

HYPOCRITICAL ASSHOLE

 

 

THREE LYING PIGS AND HYPOCRITES FROM FOX

 

 

Now we know the truth on what Trump sought to obscure about Jan. 6

 

 By Ruth Marcus

Deputy editorial page editor

July 23, 2022 at 7:35 a.m. EDT

“The … suggestion that President Trump did not act swiftly enough to quell the violence is absolutely not true. Upon hearing of the reports of violence, he tweeted, pleading with the crowd to be ‘peaceful,’ followed by a tweeted video urging people to ‘go home’ and to do so in ‘peace.’ He and the White House further took immediate steps to coordinate with authorities to provide whatever was necessary to counteract the rioters. … He, like the rest of the Country, was horrified at the violence.”

— Trump lawyers’ trial memorandum, second Trump impeachment, Feb. 8, 2021.

 

Now we know the truth that President Donald Trump and his lawyers sought to obscure about that day.

 

Trump did not “act swiftly” to quell the violence — he barely acted at all, and then too late and only under enormous pressure from his advisers and family. (Except Melania Trump, who was, she insists, blissfully unaware of the insurrection, engaged as she was in “fulfilling one of my duties as first lady of the United States of America,” overseeing the photographing of a new White House rug.)

 

“Upon hearing of the reports of violence,” Trump tweeted … nothing, for hours, and when he did tweet it was more to incite than de-escalate (“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”). That led staffers to resign in disgust.

One of them, deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, testified Thursday night before the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 that, far from “pleading with the crowd to be ‘peaceful,’ ” Trump resisted doing so. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Matthews testified, “looked directly at me and, in a hushed tone, shared with me that the president did not want to include any sort of mention of peace” in the tweet.

 

And Trump took no “immediate steps” to coordinate with law enforcement or military authorities. Vice President Mike Pence, whose own life was at risk, stepped in to fill the breach, ordering Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley and acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller to call out the National Guard.

 

To the extent that Trump had a directive for Milley that day, it was delivered through White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — and it was to make Trump look good: to “kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.”

 

Of course, anyone who was paying attention during Trump’s second impeachment trial knew that his lawyers’ self-serving depiction of Trump as alarmed by the insurrection was full of it. Still, Thursday night’s dramatic — and devastating — portrayal of Trump during the 187 minutes of the insurrection offers an opportunity to look both backward and forward.

 

Backward at the complicit silence of so many who remained mute for months about the appalling dereliction of duty they had witnessed. Perhaps with good reason: Even Thursday night, as Matthews testified, the official House GOP Twitter account attacked her as “Just another liar and pawn in Pelosi’s witch-hunt” — this about someone who worked for House Republicans. The tweet was taken down, but the chilling point remains.

 

Loyalty is a virtue, but the primary duty of loyalty is to country. Where were the administration patriots on Jan. 6 and beyond? Whispering on background, maybe.

 

And where are they now? As impressive a job as the select committee is doing, it has failed, through no fault of its own, to secure some critical testimony. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified, finally, but on terms he imposed, unilaterally declaring his conversations with Trump off-limits. Imagine if Cipollone had been compelled to tell the nation what Trump had said on Jan. 6.

 

Other key players, most notably Meadows, have resisted the committee’s order to testify thanks in part to a Justice Department that declined to prosecute them on contempt of Congress charges. Imagine hearing from Meadows, under oath, about what the president said and did that day, as well as in the days preceding? On Jan. 5, according to Meadows’s aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump instructed the chief of staff to call Roger Stone and Michael Flynn and that Meadows planned to go to the “war room” at the Willard hotel set up by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

 

The select committee has performed a vital public service by amassing the record it has, and it is poised to continue. One lesson, especially for those who doubted that this enterprise was worth the effort, is the critical role of congressional oversight, for posterity as well as the present.

 

But another lesson, one manifested during Watergate, is that oversight has its limits. Federal prosecutors possess unrivaled power to assemble evidence and compel testimony, overcoming bogus assertions of privilege and granting immunity when warranted. Are Justice Department officials preparing to deploy that authority when it comes to the events surrounding Jan. 6?

 

We can’t and shouldn’t know. “A central tenet of the rule of law is that we do not do our investigations in public,” Attorney General Merrick Garland noted Wednesday.

 

But he went on to lay out the stakes: “This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into, and we have done so because this effort to upend a legitimate election transferring power from one administration to another cuts at the fundamental of American democracy. We have to get this right.”

 

CAPAG PANEL ON CRYPTO - "A Fad or Here to Stay?"

 

TRUMP'S CORRUPTION NEVER ENDS - THE FILTHY PIG AND HIS BUTT-KISSERS ALSO TRIED TO RIG THE CENSUS

 

“The documents released today demonstrate the depths to which political actors sought to corrupt a basic function enumerated in the Constitution: the counting of all people in America every 10 years,” said John C. Yang, executive director of the Asian American Justice Center, a civil rights organization that was among the litigants over the citizenship question.

New Findings Detail Trump Plan to Use Census for Partisan Gain

A new trove of memos and emails suggest that the plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census aimed to cause an undercount that would favor Republicans.

 

By Miriam Jordan

July 20, 2022Updated 12:13 p.m. ET

A new stash of documents obtained by Congress has confirmed that the Trump administration pushed to add a citizenship question to the census to help Republicans win elections, not to protect people’s voting rights, a House committee report concluded on Wednesday.

The report from the Committee on Oversight and Reform, the culmination of a yearslong investigation, detailed new findings based on drafts of internal memos and secret email communications between political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, and counterparts in the Justice Department.

The documents provided the most definitive evidence yet that the Trump administration aimed to exclude noncitizens from the count to influence congressional apportionment that would benefit the Republican Party, the report concluded, and that senior officials used a false pretext to build a legal case for asking all residents of the United States whether they were American citizens.

 

Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had said in congressional testimony that the government decided to add the question because it required more accurate data on citizenship to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the Supreme Court in June 2019 ruled that the rationale “appears to have been contrived,” and a week later the Trump administration abandoned its quest to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census.

Still, a protracted fight between the House committee and former President Donald J. Trump over the release of a trove of documents that might shed light on the matter stretched to the end of his term. After Mr. Trump left office, the committee entered into an agreement with the departments of Commerce and Justice to obtain the previously withheld documents.

“For years, the Trump administration delayed and obstructed the oversight committee’s investigation into the true reason for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, even after the Supreme Court ruled the administration’s efforts were illegal,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, chairwoman of the committee.

 

“Today’s committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” she said.

 

When some internal communications first came to light in 2018, the Commerce Department said that nothing in them contradicted the rationale Mr. Ross had earlier offered to Congress.

“Executive branch officials discussing important issues prior to formulating policy is evidence of good government,” a department spokesman, Kevin Manning, said at the time.

Read More on the U.S. Census

·   A Slow Process: The Census Bureau said it would not be able to release many of the statistics from the 2020 census until 2023. The pandemic is partly to blame. 

·   Privacy Issues: To shield the respondents’ identities, the bureau relies on technology that produces low-quality data. Those studying the census are not pleased.

·   A Flawed System: The 2020 census undercounted Hispanic, Black and Native American residents, as well as the population of certain states. Some say it’s time to rethink the longstanding model.

·   1950 Census: Federal law kept millions of census forms secret for 72 years. The information recently went online, a bonanza for historians and curious minds.

The committee was expected on Wednesday to mark up a bill to enhance the institutional independence of the Census Bureau in order to prevent political interference in the agency.

The report on Wednesday cites multiple drafts of an August 2017 memo about the citizenship question prepared by James Uthmeier, a political appointee and lawyer at the Commerce Department, that show him initially expressing skepticism and eventually forceful support for inclusion of the question.

“Over two hundred years of precedent, along with substantially convincing historical and textual arguments suggest that citizenship data likely cannot be used for purposes of apportioning representatives,” Mr. Uthmeier said in an early memo.

In later drafts, Mr. Uthmeier and another political appointee, Earl Comstock, altered or removed language that said that adding a citizenship question was likely to be illegal and unconstitutional, the investigators found.

“Ultimately, we do not make decisions on how the data should be used for apportionment, that is for Congress (or possibly the president) to decide,” Mr. Uthmeier said in a later email to Mr. Comstock, to which a revised memo was attached.

“I think that’s our hook here,” he wrote.

Officials also added language to emphasize the commerce secretary’s discretion over adding the citizenship question.

The final memo reached the opposite conclusion of the initial draft, asserting that “there is nothing illegal or unconstitutional about adding a citizenship question” and claiming, “There are bases for legal arguments that the founding fathers intended for the apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants.”

A handwritten note from Mr. Uthmeier to John Gore, a political appointee at the Justice Department, demonstrated that the political appointees had steered the Justice Department to ask the Commerce Department to add the citizenship question, the report said.

The Justice Department ultimately sent a formal request in December 2017 to the Commerce Department requesting that the “critical” information be obtained from households. Mr. Ross stated later that, in adding the question to the 2020 census, the agency was fulfilling that request.

Mr. Ross could not be reached for comment, but a spokeswoman for the office of the Florida governor, where Mr. Uthmeier now works as chief of staff, said in a statement that Mr. Uthmeier had worked to get a citizenship question in the census because “it would be helpful to know how many people are in this country illegally.”

“You wouldn’t think that would be a controversial policy, given that it had previously been on the census surveys for over 150 years,” added the spokeswoman, Christina Pushaw. (Questions related to citizenship were removed from the census after 1950 to improve accuracy and response rates.)

 

Every 10 years, the federal government conducts a census to count all people in the country. Everyone is counted without exception, whether they are adults or children, citizens or noncitizens.

The count is used to allocate funds to federal programs. It also has a significant impact on the nation’s politics, because it is used to apportion representation in Congress, the Electoral College and within state legislatures.

Adding the citizenship question would have meant asking every member of every household in the country about their citizenship status.

The United States is home to some 22 million people who are not citizens but are in the country legally. Among them are green-card holders, professionals on work visas and foreign students. About 11 million are undocumented.

Experts predicted that the citizenship question would have intimidated immigrants — both legal and undocumented — into shunning the census, resulting in an undercount of several million that would most likely have undermined Democrats, by shifting political power from diverse, urban areas to rural ones.

Evidence filed in lawsuits against adding the citizenship question suggested that partisan gain was at least a factor, and most likely its main objective. The new findings seem to confirm this was the case.

 

In Supreme Court arguments in April 2019 over the legality of including the question, the Trump administration argued that the benefits of obtaining more accurate citizenship data offset any damage stemming from the likely depressed response to the census.

And it dismissed charges that the Commerce Department had concocted a justification for adding the question to the census.

During its investigation, the House committee found that as early as 2015, members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including Steve Bannon, began discussing the possibility of adding a citizenship question to the census. And it later surfaced that Thomas B. Hofeller, a political strategist and expert on gerrymandering who died in 2018, had played a role in the decision to add the question.

Mr. Ross, a billionaire businessman appointed by Mr. Trump to head the Commerce Department, led the effort. In announcing his decision to add the question in March 2018, he portrayed it as being based on months of research by the Census Bureau and advice from members of Congress, businesses and groups with a stake in an accurate count.

The committee report said the documents depicted it much differently.

“The documents released today demonstrate the depths to which political actors sought to corrupt a basic function enumerated in the Constitution: the counting of all people in America every 10 years,” said John C. Yang, executive director of the Asian American Justice Center, a civil rights organization that was among the litigants over the citizenship question.

“Secretary Ross chose to pursue his political goals through whatever means available,” Mr. Yang said.

 

The Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act, drafted by Ms. Maloney, would seek to insulate the agency from political pressure by limiting to three the number of political appointees allowed at the Census Bureau, including the agency’s director.

Only the director could make operational, statistical or technical decisions for the decennial count, according to the bill, and only one person could be appointed deputy by the director and that person must be a career civil servant.

Terri Ann Rosenthal, a consultant on census matters to civil rights groups, said legislation was vital to protecting the agency and to restoring public confidence in its integrity.

“There is nothing more critical to a democratic system of governance than objective, trustworthy statistics,” she said. “Political meddling undermines the bureau’s ability to carry out that mission. Our democracy relies on a census at its core.”