From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Fairy can help you realize the full potential of your people so you can take your business where it wants to go up. Learn more at corn Ferry dot com slash up. You know, there's always this sense that the voter is going to throw you out. Imagine that that in a workplace environment where you're always a little concerned that the boss is scrutinizing you, and you've got half the office is always against you and working on ways to throw you out. It's a unique job. Welcome to game Plan, a show about our lives at work. I'm Rebecca Greenfield, a reporter for Bloomberg where I cover the workplace, and I am Sam Grobert, a writer at Bloomberg business Week magazine. And since it's election season, we are going to lean into that and we are doing an election theme episode. Who are we to shy away from the allures of this beautiful election season? I mean, nobody cares about anything else, including us. So this week we are talking about the hardest job application in the world, which is running for president of the United States of America. Because that's basically what it is. It's somebody going in front of three million people and saying, please hire me, and and the best person obviously gets the job, like it works in the actual application, total meritocracy every time. Yeah, As we've talked about in a previous episode, the hiring process in the corporate world has its flaws and doesn't always lead to the best person for the best job, and the same as probably true for running for presidents. Perhaps. I'm sure everybody has heard some crazy stories about the hoops that companies like Google or Facebook make their applicants jump through with crazy questions and quizzes and things like that. Those compare not at all to the rigors and the insanity really of running for the presidency the United States. Yeah. To get a better sense of how ridiculous it actually is, we talked to campaign managers who worked with Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and Rand Paul and these are the ways that they described the process. Ran for president is like taking your your personal diary, your resume, your entire life history and putting it out in front of hundreds of millions of people and saying pick me, pick me a baseball guy and I used to be an umpire, and I would equate it to being an umpire where you have to start perfect and get better. It would be like a like a reality TV show, or you walk through fire into a shark's mouth. Every four years, people choose to go through this insane election process. But the more we talked to campaign managers, we realized is a lot like the job application process that we all go through, but of course a million times crazier. Here's how okay, So when we're thinking about the regular person job application process, the first step is to make sure that you're even qualified for the job, right. You have to know yourself, you have to know the position. You have to make sure that those things both make sense. And if there's something that might dis qualify you, like a gap in your resume or a really incriminating social media post, it's probably the time to deal with that or maybe not proceed. And candidates basically do the same thing. Here's Jeff Row, campaign manager for Ted Cruz. I would start with an immediate, deep dive background investigation in their lives. That's the first thing. What at some point in this campaign or we're gonna have to deal with So what is the culture of the campaign. What should people who joy in the campaign? What should there priorities and which what what will they be joining? What are you going to get? What's your value proposition for supporting this candidate? And it really becomes kind of a branding and marketing deep level strategy. Once you've scrubbed your record clean, you've made yourself as presentable as possible, you're going to want to put yourself out there. You have to start talking to people. Even though it is not exactly like our job application processes, that is kind of how the job application process starts. For anybody, you network, you do some networking, and that's exactly what the presidential candidates do, at least according to Jeff Weaver, who is Bernie Sanders campaign manager. It's a little bit like networking. You're bending the metaphor a little bit. But there is only one company, which is the American public. And the question is where are they and what are they looking for? The question is are you a good fit for what the American people are looking for at a given a moment in in our in our nation's history. You know, you really have to do uh, really honest self value about whether you're the person at this particular time in history that the American people will respond to. So the thing about this process is even at the very beginning, once you begin it, it's a full time job, right. It's in addition to the job you probably already have, just like when you're looking for a job yourself. And that to me just sounds like it places extraordinary stresses on your day to day existence. Yeah, it obviously does when you're applying for a job you and me, and it definitely does when you're applying for the job of president. And that is exactly how Terry Sullivan, who was Marco Rubio's campaign manager, explained it to us, just just ridiculously growing it a bang on their courtyard Marriott room door at five am because the Fox News has set up for a live TV hit in the room next door, and you've got to go over and you a smile and look away can alert it by six am in the morning in some hotel room in Iowa and get ball questions whiz that you and then booth you're out and you're down in the lobby, cramming in whatever free breakfast you can before you're onto the next event. You get four or five speeches a day, always in multiple cities, but often in uh in multiple states. You generally are checking into your hotel room at eleven o'clock twelve o'clock at night, ready to do it all over again. And and you know it's something that's striking is working for marcar Roullo. And this is a guy who's got a real life. He'd be on the phone with his kids, face timing with them good night, you know, every night, will be on to the next event, or helping with their homework or things real world things like that, or you know, the issues around the house. The water heater stopped working and he's got to stop and deal with that. And you're running for president United States. So it is a very demanding job that lasts from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. But you also have the same real life things to deal with that you would if you weren't writing for president. It's not like the rest of your world stops. All the campaign managers we talked to described similarly insane schedules, which isn't really surprising. Absolutely. I mean, they basically all we're saying, oh, it's it's not just a marathon or a sprint. It's a marathon and a sprint. Yeah, it's not kind of you know reality for all of these people pursuing this office, and it's like not even possible to do everything that you need to do to properly apply for the job, which is very frustrating, and yet here you are and everybody's watching you do it. Here's Chip Englander, who worked on the Rand Paul campaign, describing a little bit more of that slog. Typically, you have fundraising demands, which can involve both phone calls and in person stuff. There's the meeting of the voters, right the rallies and the meet and greets. There's individual press demands, interviews and the interviews and the such. Then there's the logistical demands, you know, going through the schedule or these events. Are these the things that we want to do, But then because of the presidential campaign, you want to do all of these things everywhere. So all of the sounds insane to me, and you and I have talked about how we don't under stand how anyone, let alone like our two candidates right now who are pushing seventy people, do this without completely burning out. If you think about the stress, you go through on your own job search and maybe the rounds of interviews that you have. I mean, it's very easy to start to feel mentally and physically exhausted. And you know, look, hey, I'm a spry forty two year old, but you know these people are darned close to twice my age, and they're doing it on the road through different time zones, totally freaked out and still have to look totally perfectly polished, although obviously not always in the case of some candidates. Yeah, and and the campaign managers had a couple of different strategies for how they deal with this. One of them was to try their hardest to get the candidates to not work sometimes. And here's Jeff Row on how he did that. Trying to have a can'd rest is key. I mean sleep as a weapon in a campaign, And so you try and keep your candon weaponized. So you warm them up with a small group setting, and then you go into one on one and phone calls one on one individually in person, and phone calls means that it's fact. The matter is, when you run for president, it's hand to hand combat. You're one of these voters one at a time. But it's important in a campaign to try and keep at a minimum of ten and then if you can twelve hours of essentially no interpersonal contact so they can actually be a human for a few minutes. Today, when candidates get tired of when they make mistakes, there's another thing candidates can do to help them through some low energy times, and that's to have a really well developed stump speech. And if you've ever gone through multiple interviews, you know what I'm talking about. You sort of have a prepackaged line or ten about yourself that you're gonna just use over and over again, because of course, to the person who's hearing it, it's the first time for them. And the benefit of this, of course, is that you can do it pretty much in your sleep. In Sanader Sanders a case, you know, he relied very heavily on on a pretty exhaustive stump speech that talked about, you know, a whole lot of issues. It was quite lengthy by the end of the campaign, probably an hour and a half hour and forty five minutes. But his use of a sort of standard stump speech allowed him to do many more events than a lot of other candidates because you know, even when tired, uh, you know he had used that speech so many times he was very familiar with it. All happens when the power and potential of every employee and leader in your workforce is released, and corn Ferry can get you there by aligning your people to your strategy, attracting, developing, engaging, and rewarding them to reach new heights. With corn Ferry, you get a partner who truly understands people, leadership, and the new landscape of work, a partner who knows how to take your business up. Learn more at corn Ferry dot com slash up. If you've done everything right in this process, and you did all the networking, and you have miraculously not burned out, and you wrote a cover letter and a resume, and you you did it all right, you'll make it to the final step of the process. As which for regular job applicants like me and you, it is an interview, and for candidates it is also an interview of sorts, but one that's in front of nine million people. The debate here's Terry Sullivan on that It's not like you're sitting across from one person who's doing the hiring. You're sitting across from millions of people doing the hiring, and honestly a lot of them don't know what they want. It is not as cut and drive as Okay, here's here's the job description for this job that we're hiring for. We need you to do X, or we need you to do why. It is much more an emotional connection. This is someone just you know, live in your living room on the TV set for the next four years. It's not just qualification driven. It's personality driven. And you'd rather have someone that you can drink a beer with than someone that necessarily knows all the answers to all the questions, you know. Back of The funny thing to me about these debates is that, in many ways we talk about them the same way people talk a little bit about job into views. Right, Yeah, there's this idea and job interviews that what are you looking for? Are you looking for culture fit, somebody you get along with, somebody you like, someone you can see working at the company, somebody who also likes ping pong? Or are you looking for somebody who has the skills? I mean ideally both, sure, but maybe one colors the decision more than it should. That's right, And I mean the same thing we've seen in politics, right, there's always that sort of proverbial who would you rather have a beer with as opposed to who is the most knowledgeable and competent individual on matters of policy. You know, there's some really talented people that get passed over for this job because they seem a little awkward. I mean, look, you could argue that this was the two thousand twelvers in a nut show. Robney was a guy and came in for the job interview. You saw his resume, it was spot on perfect for the job, but at the end of the day, you just didn't feel like you identified with him as much as you did the other applicant. And it's not just someone I'm hired for a job with someone I want to live with. This ide of picking a president based on style was something that all the campaign managers we talked to almost had a problem with. I mean, somebody brought up how Donald Trump sniffing and Hillary Clinton's glances got more media time than the answer on isis for example, And yeah, you can see how that isn't great. And this sort of increased role of the media, which eventually starts to change the very character of the process so it's no longer actually serving the same goal anymore. It's somebody who can be sort of more entertaining might have an advantage, which you also see that a little bit in job interviews, that like the hail fellow well met can sort of slide his way into jobs that the otherwise better served by other people like the man who interviews Well, we'll get the job even if he can't do the job, which obviously is not what we want for our coworkers or our president. No, not at all, But that was just one of the problems that our campaign managers had with the process. Here are a couple others. The an inordinate amount of money that is required to run a campaign makes it prohibitive for many many, I think, very qualified people to run for president of the United States. So that's the first thing I would change. I would create some kind of, you know, public financing system that was sufficiently generous that an unknown candidate could get his or her name out, but also prevented uh the overwhelming advantage that establishment candidates have in terms of being able to fundraise, And obviously that fundraising doesn't guarantee them success, but it certainly gives them a big leg up in the interview process. And the second thing I would say is that you know, we really need to have and you know, the media plays a role this obviously popular culture does, but we really need to return to a focus on the issues and positions of the candidates rather than a lot of the either personal issues or the sort of style points. So you know, not everybody in life is a saint. I mean, obviously Donald Trump is is the anti saint, and so you know, his behavior is so egregious that it's disqualifying. But there are a lot of other people who I'm sure have had missed at tax deadline or have had some personal failing in their life. And I think there are a lot of really good and qualified people who really don't want to have that sort of dragged out and become the focus of a campaign. And so I think we we just qualify a lot of really good people from running for public office by overly focusing on you know, personal foibles, the impact of the news cycle and the power of the media in politics. And there's gonna have to be something done. Maybe we're in an ally er cycle that won't happen again because Trump is Trump and Clinton is Clinton. But I'm afraid that this is the first of what will be the likeliest of scenarios. Which is the number one indicator of who's going to win a presidential campaign, particularly in the primaries, listed in the general, particularly in the primaries, is who gets the most media share. We spend in our campaigns, and presidential campaigns in general, spend truly almost your entire campaign, outside of fundraising, working on how you're impacting the media share, how do you get the attention? And it killed in the primary system when when you have thresholds for debate stages and you have to get to a certain debate, you know, to get to a certain percentage, you can't advertise grassroots funder. You just can't. You can't buy enough media in a primary to move your numbers. You have to get more media share. Ted Cruz was not going to make the debate stage, the first debate stage. He was right, He's right on the bubble. He publishes a book, and it was, you know, of some sort of symmetrical advantage of the campaign because it was the candidate he was talking about his book, But it was negligible in the polling until The New York Times left him off the best seller list and say didn't sell enough books. And then we had a huge fight with the New York Times. Every media outlet covered it for entire ten days completely. Over the fourth July weekend, his poll numbers moved three point three points because of all the attention in the media share and we make it the main stage comfortably. Now that's kind of ridiculous. Well, we all have to shorten the campaign process, but you just can't do it. This is a big job we're hiring for and trying to put parameters on it and on the application process isn't helpful. And just letting it be raw and be very open, I think is the is the best way to do it. And it's almost a darkwinning kind of thing. A survival of it is. I don't think that we should just accept the flawed process for what it is. I don't agree with that, but I do think that there's something to be said for surviving the process and that being a mark of your ability to be president. Yeah. I mean, if you think about all the things we've been talking about in this episode, and all these campaign managers have been saying, running for president is a test of a candidate's ability to be a CEO, to delegate sponsibility, to handle different issues under a pressure filled environment, and do all of that at the same time and project an image of authority and leadership. I mean, if you can do all of that, one would hope that you can carry those skills into the Oval office. And if you can't, well maybe then the oval office isn't right for you. Yeah. So it's like the first step to showing that you're qualified to being president is being elected president exactly. And now it's time for half big takes. Half fake takes. Half big takes are when we say some opinions right here on this show, that's right as opposed to all the other opinions we've been saying. Right, No, those are well researched. Oh right, you know, right, right right? Half opinions is what we say on half bakedings. All right, so let me just drop this in here for a second. Fellas, here's what I want to hear from you in the men's room. Got it what you did there, that's right. I'm not into the chit chat. I'm not going to ask you how your day's been going or what you're working on. Really, not the time for that. If you feel the need to offer any sort of verbal anything, the only acceptable thing you can say is this, Hey, I think nobody wants to talk in the bathroom mail or not true, not true at all. Some people look at it as a tremendous opportunity, feel uncomfortable and they don't know what to do. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. It's real simple. Not if you want, Hey, if you must, I agree, and that's it. I've definitely agree. I agree. Great, great, half big take. My half big take is about the fun topic of passwords. I was just asked to change one of my three thousand passwords and I started working here where everything on the same password, and now all ten things I signed into are all different things. You can't use old passwords. I'm running out of passwords. It's very strang us full. Basically, I want a solution. That's my half big take. I'm really looking forward to fingerprints. Yeah. I think that's going to ultimately get us where we need to be, where the password doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. I want something to just not have to remember all of these things. I know there's like password software. I've been using a little bit of that, but it's still just a band aid over a much bigger problems. Act fix the problem. That's my half big take, and this has been half big takes, half bag takes. Thanks for listening to game Plan. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at Oursley Greenfield and i am at sam Growbart and if you like the show, head over to iTunes to subscribe, review and rate us. Game Plan is produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts and We'll see you next week. Don't forget to vote by h Get the most from your people and send your business soaring with corn Ferry. From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Ferry knows up is more than a direction, it's your future. Learn more at corn ferry dot com slash up

From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Fairy can help you realize the full potential of your people so you can take your business where it wants to go up. Learn more at corn Ferry dot com slash up. You know, there's always this sense that the voter is going to throw you out. Imagine that that in a workplace environment where you're always a little concerned that the boss is scrutinizing you, and you've got half the office is always against you and working on ways to throw you out. It's a unique job. Welcome to game Plan, a show about our lives at work. I'm Rebecca Greenfield, a reporter for Bloomberg where I cover the workplace, and I am Sam Grobert, a writer at Bloomberg business Week magazine. And since it's election season, we are going to lean into that and we are doing an election theme episode. Who are we to shy away from the allures of this beautiful election season? I mean, nobody cares about anything else, including us. So this week we are talking about the hardest job application in the world, which is running for president of the United States of America. Because that's basically what it is. It's somebody going in front of three million people and saying, please hire me, and and the best person obviously gets the job, like it works in the actual application, total meritocracy every time. Yeah, As we've talked about in a previous episode, the hiring process in the corporate world has its flaws and doesn't always lead to the best person for the best job, and the same as probably true for running for presidents. Perhaps. I'm sure everybody has heard some crazy stories about the hoops that companies like Google or Facebook make their applicants jump through with crazy questions and quizzes and things like that. Those compare not at all to the rigors and the insanity really of running for the presidency the United States. Yeah. To get a better sense of how ridiculous it actually is, we talked to campaign managers who worked with Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and Rand Paul and these are the ways that they described the process. Ran for president is like taking your your personal diary, your resume, your entire life history and putting it out in front of hundreds of millions of people and saying pick me, pick me a baseball guy and I used to be an umpire, and I would equate it to being an umpire where you have to start perfect and get better. It would be like a like a reality TV show, or you walk through fire into a shark's mouth. Every four years, people choose to go through this insane election process. But the more we talked to campaign managers, we realized is a lot like the job application process that we all go through, but of course a million times crazier. Here's how okay, So when we're thinking about the regular person job application process, the first step is to make sure that you're even qualified for the job, right. You have to know yourself, you have to know the position. You have to make sure that those things both make sense. And if there's something that might dis qualify you, like a gap in your resume or a really incriminating social media post, it's probably the time to deal with that or maybe not proceed. And candidates basically do the same thing. Here's Jeff Row, campaign manager for Ted Cruz. I would start with an immediate, deep dive background investigation in their lives. That's the first thing. What at some point in this campaign or we're gonna have to deal with So what is the culture of the campaign. What should people who joy in the campaign? What should there priorities and which what what will they be joining? What are you going to get? What's your value proposition for supporting this candidate? And it really becomes kind of a branding and marketing deep level strategy. Once you've scrubbed your record clean, you've made yourself as presentable as possible, you're going to want to put yourself out there. You have to start talking to people. Even though it is not exactly like our job application processes, that is kind of how the job application process starts. For anybody, you network, you do some networking, and that's exactly what the presidential candidates do, at least according to Jeff Weaver, who is Bernie Sanders campaign manager. It's a little bit like networking. You're bending the metaphor a little bit. But there is only one company, which is the American public. And the question is where are they and what are they looking for? The question is are you a good fit for what the American people are looking for at a given a moment in in our in our nation's history. You know, you really have to do uh, really honest self value about whether you're the person at this particular time in history that the American people will respond to. So the thing about this process is even at the very beginning, once you begin it, it's a full time job, right. It's in addition to the job you probably already have, just like when you're looking for a job yourself. And that to me just sounds like it places extraordinary stresses on your day to day existence. Yeah, it obviously does when you're applying for a job you and me, and it definitely does when you're applying for the job of president. And that is exactly how Terry Sullivan, who was Marco Rubio's campaign manager, explained it to us, just just ridiculously growing it a bang on their courtyard Marriott room door at five am because the Fox News has set up for a live TV hit in the room next door, and you've got to go over and you a smile and look away can alert it by six am in the morning in some hotel room in Iowa and get ball questions whiz that you and then booth you're out and you're down in the lobby, cramming in whatever free breakfast you can before you're onto the next event. You get four or five speeches a day, always in multiple cities, but often in uh in multiple states. You generally are checking into your hotel room at eleven o'clock twelve o'clock at night, ready to do it all over again. And and you know it's something that's striking is working for marcar Roullo. And this is a guy who's got a real life. He'd be on the phone with his kids, face timing with them good night, you know, every night, will be on to the next event, or helping with their homework or things real world things like that, or you know, the issues around the house. The water heater stopped working and he's got to stop and deal with that. And you're running for president United States. So it is a very demanding job that lasts from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. But you also have the same real life things to deal with that you would if you weren't writing for president. It's not like the rest of your world stops. All the campaign managers we talked to described similarly insane schedules, which isn't really surprising. Absolutely. I mean, they basically all we're saying, oh, it's it's not just a marathon or a sprint. It's a marathon and a sprint. Yeah, it's not kind of you know reality for all of these people pursuing this office, and it's like not even possible to do everything that you need to do to properly apply for the job, which is very frustrating, and yet here you are and everybody's watching you do it. Here's Chip Englander, who worked on the Rand Paul campaign, describing a little bit more of that slog. Typically, you have fundraising demands, which can involve both phone calls and in person stuff. There's the meeting of the voters, right the rallies and the meet and greets. There's individual press demands, interviews and the interviews and the such. Then there's the logistical demands, you know, going through the schedule or these events. Are these the things that we want to do, But then because of the presidential campaign, you want to do all of these things everywhere. So all of the sounds insane to me, and you and I have talked about how we don't under stand how anyone, let alone like our two candidates right now who are pushing seventy people, do this without completely burning out. If you think about the stress, you go through on your own job search and maybe the rounds of interviews that you have. I mean, it's very easy to start to feel mentally and physically exhausted. And you know, look, hey, I'm a spry forty two year old, but you know these people are darned close to twice my age, and they're doing it on the road through different time zones, totally freaked out and still have to look totally perfectly polished, although obviously not always in the case of some candidates. Yeah, and and the campaign managers had a couple of different strategies for how they deal with this. One of them was to try their hardest to get the candidates to not work sometimes. And here's Jeff Row on how he did that. Trying to have a can'd rest is key. I mean sleep as a weapon in a campaign, And so you try and keep your candon weaponized. So you warm them up with a small group setting, and then you go into one on one and phone calls one on one individually in person, and phone calls means that it's fact. The matter is, when you run for president, it's hand to hand combat. You're one of these voters one at a time. But it's important in a campaign to try and keep at a minimum of ten and then if you can twelve hours of essentially no interpersonal contact so they can actually be a human for a few minutes. Today, when candidates get tired of when they make mistakes, there's another thing candidates can do to help them through some low energy times, and that's to have a really well developed stump speech. And if you've ever gone through multiple interviews, you know what I'm talking about. You sort of have a prepackaged line or ten about yourself that you're gonna just use over and over again, because of course, to the person who's hearing it, it's the first time for them. And the benefit of this, of course, is that you can do it pretty much in your sleep. In Sanader Sanders a case, you know, he relied very heavily on on a pretty exhaustive stump speech that talked about, you know, a whole lot of issues. It was quite lengthy by the end of the campaign, probably an hour and a half hour and forty five minutes. But his use of a sort of standard stump speech allowed him to do many more events than a lot of other candidates because you know, even when tired, uh, you know he had used that speech so many times he was very familiar with it. All happens when the power and potential of every employee and leader in your workforce is released, and corn Ferry can get you there by aligning your people to your strategy, attracting, developing, engaging, and rewarding them to reach new heights. With corn Ferry, you get a partner who truly understands people, leadership, and the new landscape of work, a partner who knows how to take your business up. Learn more at corn Ferry dot com slash up. If you've done everything right in this process, and you did all the networking, and you have miraculously not burned out, and you wrote a cover letter and a resume, and you you did it all right, you'll make it to the final step of the process. As which for regular job applicants like me and you, it is an interview, and for candidates it is also an interview of sorts, but one that's in front of nine million people. The debate here's Terry Sullivan on that It's not like you're sitting across from one person who's doing the hiring. You're sitting across from millions of people doing the hiring, and honestly a lot of them don't know what they want. It is not as cut and drive as Okay, here's here's the job description for this job that we're hiring for. We need you to do X, or we need you to do why. It is much more an emotional connection. This is someone just you know, live in your living room on the TV set for the next four years. It's not just qualification driven. It's personality driven. And you'd rather have someone that you can drink a beer with than someone that necessarily knows all the answers to all the questions, you know. Back of The funny thing to me about these debates is that, in many ways we talk about them the same way people talk a little bit about job into views. Right, Yeah, there's this idea and job interviews that what are you looking for? Are you looking for culture fit, somebody you get along with, somebody you like, someone you can see working at the company, somebody who also likes ping pong? Or are you looking for somebody who has the skills? I mean ideally both, sure, but maybe one colors the decision more than it should. That's right, And I mean the same thing we've seen in politics, right, there's always that sort of proverbial who would you rather have a beer with as opposed to who is the most knowledgeable and competent individual on matters of policy. You know, there's some really talented people that get passed over for this job because they seem a little awkward. I mean, look, you could argue that this was the two thousand twelvers in a nut show. Robney was a guy and came in for the job interview. You saw his resume, it was spot on perfect for the job, but at the end of the day, you just didn't feel like you identified with him as much as you did the other applicant. And it's not just someone I'm hired for a job with someone I want to live with. This ide of picking a president based on style was something that all the campaign managers we talked to almost had a problem with. I mean, somebody brought up how Donald Trump sniffing and Hillary Clinton's glances got more media time than the answer on isis for example, And yeah, you can see how that isn't great. And this sort of increased role of the media, which eventually starts to change the very character of the process so it's no longer actually serving the same goal anymore. It's somebody who can be sort of more entertaining might have an advantage, which you also see that a little bit in job interviews, that like the hail fellow well met can sort of slide his way into jobs that the otherwise better served by other people like the man who interviews Well, we'll get the job even if he can't do the job, which obviously is not what we want for our coworkers or our president. No, not at all, But that was just one of the problems that our campaign managers had with the process. Here are a couple others. The an inordinate amount of money that is required to run a campaign makes it prohibitive for many many, I think, very qualified people to run for president of the United States. So that's the first thing I would change. I would create some kind of, you know, public financing system that was sufficiently generous that an unknown candidate could get his or her name out, but also prevented uh the overwhelming advantage that establishment candidates have in terms of being able to fundraise, And obviously that fundraising doesn't guarantee them success, but it certainly gives them a big leg up in the interview process. And the second thing I would say is that you know, we really need to have and you know, the media plays a role this obviously popular culture does, but we really need to return to a focus on the issues and positions of the candidates rather than a lot of the either personal issues or the sort of style points. So you know, not everybody in life is a saint. I mean, obviously Donald Trump is is the anti saint, and so you know, his behavior is so egregious that it's disqualifying. But there are a lot of other people who I'm sure have had missed at tax deadline or have had some personal failing in their life. And I think there are a lot of really good and qualified people who really don't want to have that sort of dragged out and become the focus of a campaign. And so I think we we just qualify a lot of really good people from running for public office by overly focusing on you know, personal foibles, the impact of the news cycle and the power of the media in politics. And there's gonna have to be something done. Maybe we're in an ally er cycle that won't happen again because Trump is Trump and Clinton is Clinton. But I'm afraid that this is the first of what will be the likeliest of scenarios. Which is the number one indicator of who's going to win a presidential campaign, particularly in the primaries, listed in the general, particularly in the primaries, is who gets the most media share. We spend in our campaigns, and presidential campaigns in general, spend truly almost your entire campaign, outside of fundraising, working on how you're impacting the media share, how do you get the attention? And it killed in the primary system when when you have thresholds for debate stages and you have to get to a certain debate, you know, to get to a certain percentage, you can't advertise grassroots funder. You just can't. You can't buy enough media in a primary to move your numbers. You have to get more media share. Ted Cruz was not going to make the debate stage, the first debate stage. He was right, He's right on the bubble. He publishes a book, and it was, you know, of some sort of symmetrical advantage of the campaign because it was the candidate he was talking about his book, But it was negligible in the polling until The New York Times left him off the best seller list and say didn't sell enough books. And then we had a huge fight with the New York Times. Every media outlet covered it for entire ten days completely. Over the fourth July weekend, his poll numbers moved three point three points because of all the attention in the media share and we make it the main stage comfortably. Now that's kind of ridiculous. Well, we all have to shorten the campaign process, but you just can't do it. This is a big job we're hiring for and trying to put parameters on it and on the application process isn't helpful. And just letting it be raw and be very open, I think is the is the best way to do it. And it's almost a darkwinning kind of thing. A survival of it is. I don't think that we should just accept the flawed process for what it is. I don't agree with that, but I do think that there's something to be said for surviving the process and that being a mark of your ability to be president. Yeah. I mean, if you think about all the things we've been talking about in this episode, and all these campaign managers have been saying, running for president is a test of a candidate's ability to be a CEO, to delegate sponsibility, to handle different issues under a pressure filled environment, and do all of that at the same time and project an image of authority and leadership. I mean, if you can do all of that, one would hope that you can carry those skills into the Oval office. And if you can't, well maybe then the oval office isn't right for you. Yeah. So it's like the first step to showing that you're qualified to being president is being elected president exactly. And now it's time for half big takes. Half fake takes. Half big takes are when we say some opinions right here on this show, that's right as opposed to all the other opinions we've been saying. Right, No, those are well researched. Oh right, you know, right, right right? Half opinions is what we say on half bakedings. All right, so let me just drop this in here for a second. Fellas, here's what I want to hear from you in the men's room. Got it what you did there, that's right. I'm not into the chit chat. I'm not going to ask you how your day's been going or what you're working on. Really, not the time for that. If you feel the need to offer any sort of verbal anything, the only acceptable thing you can say is this, Hey, I think nobody wants to talk in the bathroom mail or not true, not true at all. Some people look at it as a tremendous opportunity, feel uncomfortable and they don't know what to do. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. It's real simple. Not if you want, Hey, if you must, I agree, and that's it. I've definitely agree. I agree. Great, great, half big take. My half big take is about the fun topic of passwords. I was just asked to change one of my three thousand passwords and I started working here where everything on the same password, and now all ten things I signed into are all different things. You can't use old passwords. I'm running out of passwords. It's very strang us full. Basically, I want a solution. That's my half big take. I'm really looking forward to fingerprints. Yeah. I think that's going to ultimately get us where we need to be, where the password doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. I want something to just not have to remember all of these things. I know there's like password software. I've been using a little bit of that, but it's still just a band aid over a much bigger problems. Act fix the problem. That's my half big take, and this has been half big takes, half bag takes. Thanks for listening to game Plan. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at Oursley Greenfield and i am at sam Growbart and if you like the show, head over to iTunes to subscribe, review and rate us. Game Plan is produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts and We'll see you next week. Don't forget to vote by h Get the most from your people and send your business soaring with corn Ferry. From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Ferry knows up is more than a direction, it's your future. Learn more at corn ferry dot com slash up