Picture My World

Guy points out this video of Steve Jobs speaking to the Cupertino City Council. Guy comments that this is a great informal presentation, but it seemed very awkward to me (especially the conversation at the end). However, in spite of that or maybe because of it, I do think it was a brilliant example of how to influence people.

If you’ve read Cialdini’s book titled Influence: Science and Practice, you’ll be able to pick out what he did. Jobs didn’t ask for anything, but the council gave him a lot.

Cialdini outlines several influence strategies but I’ll just mention two. “Reciprocity” is the you-rub-my-back-I’ll-rub-yours give and take principle that we often react automatically to. When someone gives us something, we feel compelled to return the favor. “Consistency” is the drive for us to stay self-consistent. For example, if someone can get you to state that you’re charitable, you’ll most likely give more charity in the future. The book goes into much more detail, of course.

I think Jobs does a great job exploiting these two influence principles and it really wouldn’t have mattered how poorly he spoke. First, he doesn’t ask for anything — he just wanted the council to hear the good news. I think the council was actually taken aback a bit. Here’s a busy, important, famous CEO just popping by to give them an update. Wow! The council members seemed surprised and went out of their way to tell Jobs how happy they were that Apple was staying in Cupertino. At the very end, the Vice Mayor told him that an Apple employee should visit with one of their planning committees. There’s reciprocity at work.

The more subtle win, I think, was the fact many of the councilors said how happy they were that Apple was staying in Cupertino (and they all applauded at the end). These comments were driven by the reciprocity principle, too, but they feed into the consistency principle. Now that it’s on public record that they value Apple, their future decisions will be based on that. They will be driven to stay consistent with that outlook. For example, they may vote to give Apple tax breaks because of these simple statements.

Brilliant.

OK, OK, I voted, but look at the results for my riding:

That’s a margin of over 30%.

(And, no, I didn’t vote for Bryce.)

Another minority government for Canada. I suspect this goverment will not last as long as the previous one. The Tories haven’t been in power since 1993 and I’m not sure how many Conservative MPs have governing experience. If it’s a small number, the party will probably stumble early on and we will soon have another election.

At least the crook Svend Robinson didn’t get elected.

Oh yeah — I did vote in the end and it was as useless as I had thought.

I live in the Vancouver-East riding which has voted NDP for 19/21 federal elections since 1930. The incumbent, Libby Davis, won the last election by a margin of 30%. In this working-class riding, there’s really no reason to think anyone else has a chance to beat her (especially with the Liberal backlash and a no-name Conservative candidate).

I am debating whether to even vote this Monday. I don’t even need to give away my political leanings to make my case. If I was an NDP supporter, I’m confident my candidate will win. If I’m not… well, what’s the point?

Sure, there are reasons to vote (if everyone felt that way… the previous generations gave their blood… etc), but are any of them pragmatic in this case? Is it worth even 30 minutes of my time to exercise my democratic right?

Now, if someone could make something like STV understandable for the masses, the voter turnout would undoubtedly increase.

Here’s a piece of chilling future history from the Telegraph: The Origins of the Great War of 2007.  I pray it doesn’t happen but it doesn’t seem that far fetched to me, either.

The election’s over and we have a Liberal minority government, the first such parliament in my memory (I wasn’t paying attention during 1979). Should be interesting, but I’m not looking forward to another election any time soon. I suppose the Liberals and NDP will form a coalition. The NDP has barely enough seats (or do they?! It’s very close now!) to give the Liberals a majority and I can’t see the Grits working with the Bloc, who vocally put Quebec’s concerns ahead of Canada’s.

The weekend paper had a summary of each party’s policies and promises. They are all depressingly similar to each other. I think the only point of regular elections is to keep the ruling party on their toes so they attempt to act honestly during their tenure. It doesn’t matter so much who wins.

This minority government will give the country a small insight into what proportional representation may bring. Some sort of government reform is part of most of the partys’ policies (except the governing party, interestingly enough) and is also being discussed in other forums. The huge downfall of such systems is the never-ending minority governments and frequent elections as coalitions fall apart (witness Israel). On the other hand, smaller parties would finally get a representative or two in the house.

I’m all for trying out a new system, but can we switch back if it doesn’t work out?

The federal election is in 3 days and I realize now that if you want to be an informed voter, you have to do a lot of foot work. This is work I haven’t had time to do.

As for the candidates, they haven’t gone out of their way to contact me. However, there are 115,000 of us to each one of them. Let’s take a closer look at this, though. Each candidate must have staff and volunteers that call around. If each major candidate has an average of 15 callers working per day, that’s 45 callers. Say they can make 6 calls per hour and work 2 hours a day. That’s 540 calls a day. If they worked 30 days prior to the election, they can reach 16,200 people, or 14% of the electorate.

I guess it’s no surprise I haven’t been contacted. But, the fact is I was contacted, but by the candidate from the wrong riding who had us at some other address.

I’ve also been looking for polling results from my riding, but my brief google search turned up nothing except last election’s results.

I sent a question to both Liberal and Conservative candidates in my riding.

The email to Jesse Johl at his posted address, info@jessejohl.com bounced. Twice.

Not impressed.

…politicians.

I caught a bit of the debate last night on the radio on my way home. I don’t know why they bother wasting our time with this rubbish. Most of what I heard I couldn’t understand because the candidates were talking over each other. When they weren’t doing that, they were evading each other’s questions. I’m not sure how this was supposed to influence my vote. One thing is clear, though, without a clear grasp of the issues, it’s hard to critique each party’s platform. Listening to them argue about it only confuses things more — especially when you can’t even hear the entire answer!

On CBC radio this morning, some analyst (specializing in “spin” of all things) quoted a poll from the previous election’s debate. It asked respondents if they thought there was a clear winner from the debate. They then asked if the respondents saw or heard the debate. 48% of those that answered the first question definitely said that they had not seen the debate. How does the media influence our lives again?

I’m still debating how I will vote this time. In Canada’s non-proportional system it comes down to deciding to vote for a party or your representative and don’t vote too fringe or your vote will simply be lost on some nobody that doesn’t stand a chance. In my riding (currently Liberal), that means deciding on Liberal vs. Conservative, assuming it even makes a difference.

Update: Hey! They shifted my riding! My old riding is now just over a block away and I’m in Vancouver-Kingsway… a less afluent area, but still Liberal.