Feyman on an Honest Politician

It has long been a part of the physics folklore that Richard Feynman said that an honest politician can’t win.  While with Harris Corporation in Florida, I mentioned this as a possible analogy for marketing.  The idea is that an “honest marketeer” is at a big disadvantage and/or can’t win.

The best reference to this that I have found is on pages 65-6 in The Meaning of It All, Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1998.  This is on page 28 of my downloaded copy of The Meaning of It All Feynman discusses two politicians running for president.  One goes through the farm section and is asked, “What are you going to do about the farm question?”  And he knows right away – bang, bang, bang.  Now he (the farmer) goes to the next campaigner who comes through.  “What are you going to do about the farm problem?” Well, I don’t know.  I used to be a general, and I don’t know anything about farming.  But it seems to me to be a difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem.  And it must be a hard problem.  So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it….

He continues on for a while and then observes that we would not elect the second politician. 

 In the discussion earlier in the book, Feynman has stated that when it comes to the profound questions (which can appear simple), an honest man will say that he does not know the answers.  The answers are not known to anyone.

The book, copyrighted in 1998, consists of three lectures Feynman gave considerably earlier.  He is dead now and was in 1998.  I believe the lectures were given in the 1960s.

More recently, James Carville and Jim Morris, using polling and focus groups, have helped William Jefferson Clinton have the good sounding bang, bang, bang answers.  Whatever the issue/problem, it was ole Slick’s #1 or “Top” priority.

Translation for 2016:  "Bang, bang, bang answers" translates to a "plethora of plans"; the translation of the second politician is left as an exercise for the student.  [Hint: TBD might be useful.]

As lessons/guidance for Sales/Marketing,

 1)                  Customers/voters like vendors/candidates with products/answers.  If you don’t appear to have the product, you lose the sale.

2)                  An “honest vendor” does not have the (ideal) product.  I have found that it is much easier to “promote” someone else’s work because, in part, I do not know all the weaknesses and so can do so honestly.  This says that you shouldn’t try to understand fully the technical aspects of the product.  The better you do, the harder it is to be a good politician (marketeer).

3)                  Like the political process with respect to “campaign promises”, the marketing process does make it extremely difficult to fulfill “marketing promises.”