A narrative developed over the weekend as a result of President Biden’s disastrous press conference last week. That is the “the president asks detailed questions” as a response to doubts raised about his mental acuity. You know the talking points went out about this because it has now come from multiple cabinet and staff officials.
But let’s unpack that, shall we? Is asking a detailed questions REALLY as sign of mental fitness? If the Chief Executive of the United States of America is asking such detailed questions regarding the state of Amtrak that a call had to be placed to Amtrak during a briefing to get an answer, what do we think he’s doing with that level of data? Is he personally developing new schedules for the Acela corridor to boost profitability? Mentally calculating the revenue that could be generated by creating new routes in support of other well-traveled ones? Figuring out if raising the price of coffee on the line will result in a decline in revenue due to price inelasticity of demand for shitty coffee?
Let’s be honest and discuss this through the proper lens. Joe Biden has so much on his plate as POTUS that getting down in the weeds on things like Amtrak should be alarming to us. We have debt issues, a boarder in crisis, war in Ukraine and in Gaza and Lebanon, persistent inflation; and he’s asking detailed questions about AMTRAK? There are few CEOs that are truly able to receive, understand, process and utilize such detailed information. When I worked at JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon was known for this. It made the end of each quarter a pain for many of us. The questions he would ask his line of business heads were such that they would ask their direct reports for more and more detail and on down the line. Now, do I believe that Jamie Dimon ever asked about my personal book of business to the line of business head at the top of my chain? Not a chance (just to be clear, there were about 5 levels of management between me and JD). But you know who did? My boss’s boss. She knew, generally, what I was up to well enough that when she went to another line of business she considered hiring me to head up a group (I ultimately didn’t get the role but did get a fair hearing and the guy that did get it deserved it WAY more than me).
The fact of the matter is that asking detailed questions is as much a sign of a distracted mind as it is of a focused one. How many times have we seen a senior member of a team go down a rabbit hole asking questions that we knew would not really help in making a decision? We have all heard about the 80/20 rule. In business decision-making it goes something like this: you can get 80% of the way to a decision with the first 20% of the time spent on gathering information and data. But to get that last 20% of the way you would need to spend another 80% of your total time getting there. In a world of uncertainty one can never get to 100% perfect information. The art is in knowing where and when to cut off the data mining and reach a conclusion. With major decisions such as attacking on foreign soil or taking out the leader of a terrorist organization getting as close as possible, within reasonable time constraints, to that 100% information standard is highly advisable. But when we hear about Biden drilling down on Amtrak details? We can see what’s really going on.
In all of this, I have not even touched on whether Biden can remember and process the detailed info that he’s receiving. Do I need to? We have all seen with our own eyes his confusing Mitterand with Macron and Mexico with Egypt. Does anyone doubt he’s doing the same with border crossings and Acela ridership?