Post 4
Last week I had some controversial thoughts about how powerless little athletes are overly criticized by certain male coaches. I’m a sports official and it all seems a little bit MeToo-ish for comfort. Not in a sexual way but in regards to power imbalance. After all, in a decade or so, many of today’s 10-year-old girls will encounter a Harvey Weinstein. These men will use their power to prey on aspiring young women. Power is behind the casting couch just as it was behind the culture of abuse that savaged USA Gymnastics.
I also said that women who act unprofessionally aren’t blameless and the women of the first season of The Apprentice didn’t set a good example. “They act like Trump’s tarts,” said Cynthia McKay, after the team of eight women defeated the team of eight men by using sex to sell lemonade. McKay is CEO of Le Gourmet Gift Basket and previewed each episode as a member of my panel of experts.
The women won, and winning is what matters to Donald Trump. When I talked to him one Thursday, I half expected him to say, “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning,” but he saved his best stuff for later.
The women’s team won Episode Two, again using sex to sell, but the advantage came from their brains. They came up with the best advertising campaign for Marquis Jets, so Episode Two was a mighty step forward.
When I first previewed Episode Two in 2004, Marquis Jets operated like a timeshare. When I watched it again this week I realized that it was the genius forerunner of Uber, which launched five years later. Marquis Jets was for executives who didn’t want to own a corporate jet, but wanted to fly one on demand. App stores didn’t come along until 2008 or half of us would have been hailing a jet and the rest of us would have a side hustle as part-time pilots.
The women came up with a sexy campaign for ad executive Donny Deutsch, who acted like Trump’s biggest buddy at the time and is now one of his biggest cable news detractors. I have no idea why Donny and The Donald became estranged. Send me a comment if you know. They’re both from Queens, maybe that explains it.
The women’s winning ad campaign included a corporate jet as a phallic symbol, which Omarosa described as “Tammy’s testicle ad,” a dig at contestant Tammy Lee. The women tacked on an advertising slogan alluding to the size of the fliers’ manhood. It was in the gutter, but the gutter made The Apprentice a ratings success just as it got Trump elected. Gutters open doors. Had I been paying attention I would have learned that the first season on The Apprentice. The gutter led to Stormy Daniels’ remarks bout Trump’s manhood, and to his retaliatory Horseface tweet.
The male team could have as easily created a similar advertising campaign. Trump put them at no biological disadvantage as he did in the lemonade episode. This time it was a fair contest and the women won square.
The women also won in a more professional manner, although Marion Sandler, the late CEO of Golden West Financial, said it was “vulgar shock and awe.” As another member of my panel of experts, Sandler was forever a critic of The Apprentice.
“Del, this is big. This is yuuuuuuge. We’re No. 1,” Trump said in our weekly conversation. “Everybody knows it.”
An exaggeration exactly like we see out of the president today. Nothing’s changed about Trump, but the news media has changed dramatically. The best explanation of this change that I’ve heard comes from journalist Matt Taibbi in this long-form interview with Sam Harris. If you wonder about the state of journalism, make the time to watch it or listen to it in the Sam Harris podcast.
Trump will one day be gone. I don’t want to be among the angry half that failed to enjoy the most entertaining president in history. I saw him a pompous, too pompous to vote for, but i may in 2020. Trump hasn't changed, but he's slowly changing me.
"I'm starting to think that I may never hire a man again,” Trump told me in our weekly conversation fifteen years before nominating two for the Supreme Court.
Back in 2004 I was the corporate leadership reporter at USA Today and I had the opportunity to interview most of the top female CEOs: Sandler, Indra Nooyi of Pepsico, Andrea Jung of Avon, Nancy McKinstry of Wolters Kluwer, Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft Foods and many more including Brenda Barnes of Sara Lee, who died of stroke a few months ago. I wrote chapters about many of them in my book
One of my favorite interviews was with professional poker player Annie Duke, who lost to Joan Rivers in the second season of Celebrity Apprentice. Trump might disagree, but Duke said, “The bluff is a sexy concept but widely overused. It’s going to get you in trouble because people will suspect you are untrustworthy.”
As a bonus, here are Annie Duke’s bullet points from the chapter about her in Advice from the Top: 1001 Bits of Business Wisdom.
• In poker and in business look for patterns. How do opponents behave in comfortable and uncomfortable situations. Gather data so you can predict.
• Understand how opponents perceive you. “If people are perceiving me to be too conservative, then I’ll play in an incautious manner until they readjust their perception."
• Bluff sometimes in adversarial roles, but never in a partnership. Don’t give partners a reason to suspect you’re untrustworthy.
• When decisions are mathematical, take more risk when the return is huge (or yuuuuuuge). Take less risk when it’s small. Know the pot size. You can’t always be right. It’s about being right often enough
• Great poker players free themselves from the worry of being wrong.
• Business is not always fair. The person who does the best job doesn’t always get promoted. It’s more like poker. You can put your money in with aces and your opponent has fives. You win that pot 82% of the time, but the 18% happens.
• There are things you have control over and things that you don’t. When you have a bad outcome, analyze the decision and try to figure out if you did something wrong. “If it’s out of your control, don’t get tilted, which means emotionally upset. That’s when we make poor decisions.”
• Make decisions in your self interest, but self interest is not being overly greedy in the short run. Those on a good streak say, “I’m the best player in the world. Look at me, I’m so wonderful.” Those on a bad streak shift blame to luck or a scapegoat. Neither attitude is helpful.
• Take time off when an extended bad streak affects decisions.
• Smart, successful executives who try something new have to set their egos aside and say, “I’m obviously a very talented individual. I could become good at this, but I have to be willing to learn. I have to open my mind to the possibility that I’m wrong and to listen to other people.” That’s hard for someone who’s gotten to the top.
Annie Duke’s tip specific to women:
• Let men underestimate you. If they think you’re dumb, let them think so. Use it to your advantage. “Women spend too much time trying to prove themselves instead of saying, ‘I hope everybody underestimates me.’”
Her tip specific to men:
• If you see a woman at the table, maybe you can assume she’s not that skilled. But the minute she puts her first chip in the pot, start updating your opinion.
(Del Jones interviewed Trump each Thursday during the first season of The Apprentice. In addition to Advice from the Top: 1001 Bits of Business Wisdom, which includes a chapter on Annie Duke, Jones has published an historical novel, The Cremation of Sam McGee set in the 1898 heyday of yellow journalism. The narrator is a fabricating reporter working for William Randolph Hearst during the Spanish-American War and Klondike gold rush.
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