Deal Architect has advised hundreds of clients on their software and outsourcing decisions. We run a tight ship, we diligently coach our clients, we keep it unemotional and quantified, we force vendors to follow our scripts, present their positives not their competitor's negatives, we take clients to far corners of the world on due diligence trips, we are tough negotiators on their behalf.
Every 4 years we work with an unusual client - Citizen Vinnie. He hires us early August through middle of October to research political candidates. He forwards all the political mail and email he gets, their voice mails, their text messages. He asks us to tabulate how many TV commercials they run, how many newspapers endorse each candidate, we conduct social media sentiment analysis on them. He asks us to summarize policy papers from their websites and speeches, to grade their debate performance. He asks us to drive around and summarize how many lawn signs support each candidate, recommend the best way for him to vote, the best place to vote in person.
We just presented to him our findings for this year. Here are a couple of tidbits of what we shared with him. We told him this was the most amount of marketing he has even ever been subjected to. We also tabulated our cost of all that marketing. It is sickeningly high for just one citizen. For that, we told him the quality of the mail, TV commercials, social media messages were the poorest quality ever. Mostly negative about the opposition, little about their own qualifications. We told him our staff were traumatized by the material they had to review on social media. Almost as bad as being paid to moderate Dark Web content.
He does not ask us for opinions, just data. So, we apologized for expressing some of our dismay at the materials we reviewed.
He is a registered Independent. He does not share with us what he does with our findings. He has a policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He does not even tell us if he voted.
We help enterprise customers with extremely complex, global decisions. They have plenty of technicians, attorneys and accountants who help them with those choices. The average citizen has little of that help. No wonder so many of them do not bother to vote or vote based on emotion. Those who vote spend hundreds of billions of hours watching politicians spew nonsense, then they agree or argue among themselves especially on social media.
Yes, it is considered a civic duty to vote. A far more urgent duty for each of us is to clean up our political campaigns. Even more important to our economy is for each of us to dramatically lower the time and energy we give to media which thrives on outrage and career politicians whose egos thrive on our attention.
Like we apologized to Citizen Vinnie, we should do same for every citizen this election year. There has to be a much better, way more efficient way to run this railroad.
