Love him or hate him, President Donald J. Trump is unlike any president our country has ever seen. Opinion pieces on op-ed pages and elsewhere have attempted to make sense of his different approach to the presidency, many relying on his words in The Art of the Deal as the starting point, and while deal making is a good part of the essence of the man (President Trump is always negotiating or setting up a negotiation), I believe there are 3 interlocking keys to cracking the Trump code. A better place to start is with culture.
Key 1: Club Culture Man in a Role Culture World
Cracking the Trump code starts with the management classic The Gods of Management in which Charles Handy classifies four different organizational cultures each belonging to one of 4 Greek gods, Zeus (club or entrepreneurial), Apollo (role or bureaucratic), Athena (task or project), or Dionysus (existential or star). Where most presidents hail from other role cultures in state or federal government, President Trump has headed private sector club or entrepreneurial cultures for much of his adult life, and many of his greatest successes and failures as President can be understood through this lens. Whether you agree with the policy or not, his Sherman’s march through Federal regulations has been a singular club success. In club culture, those working with the Zeus figure (Trump) can move quickly as long as they can answer the question, “What would Zeus do?” and those he trusts completely such as Ivanka, Jared, and cooperative cabinet members can help him move quickly in tasks such as these.
Many have noted the high turnover of Trump administration figures, as well as a number of hires that seemed like bad fits from the get go. This, too, is a natural consequence of bringing a Zeus culture to the Oval Office, a place more accustomed to Apollo (role). Some of Trump’s generals could cut it, but perhaps the mismatch of former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the best example of this kind of misfit as can be seen in Tillerson’s own words, “What was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil corporation to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.” Club cultures value quick, intuitive decisions (like Zeus) without a lot of analysis, and “process-oriented” cultures buy pencils with deep analysis and data. Trump-Tillerson was a classic Zeus-Apollo showdown, and Trump’s hire of Mike Pompeo, is an example of someone who appears to be able to work for Zeus and interact with Apollo effectively. More of President Trump’s hires need to follow this example, but finding such people in Washington is easier said than done.
Many have noted the high turnover of Trump administration figures, as well as a number of hires that seemed like bad fits from the get go. This, too, is a natural consequence of bringing a Zeus culture to the Oval Office, a place more accustomed to Apollo (role). Some of Trump’s generals could cut it, but perhaps the mismatch of former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the best example of this kind of misfit as can be seen in Tillerson’s own words, “What was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil corporation to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of says, ‘This is what I believe.” Club cultures value quick, intuitive decisions (like Zeus) without a lot of analysis, and “process-oriented” cultures buy pencils with deep analysis and data. Trump-Tillerson was a classic Zeus-Apollo showdown, and Trump’s hire of Mike Pompeo, is an example of someone who appears to be able to work for Zeus and interact with Apollo effectively. More of President Trump’s hires need to follow this example, but finding such people in Washington is easier said than done.Key 2: Anchors, BATNAs, and Such
Another classic negotiation idea is the anchor. Many have commented on President Trump’s changing narrative surrounding deals, his use of extreme positions, and his lack of concern with linguistic precision. In negotiation theory these are all classic anchoring techniques. President Trump is constantly trying to put an early and favorable position out in public (an anchor) because he understands that the first position articulated in a negotiation has a disproportionate effect on the outcome. For example, President Trump called Kim Jong Un “rocket man” and bragged about his “button” as an anchor to the start of a difficult negotiation. Because President Trump values good deals over linguistic precision or nice behavior, this can be seen by some as inconsistent or worse, but President Trump could care less about being articulate or well regarded. The President uses words to get good deals. He also understands the dynamics of negotiation better than his adversaries and allies alike.Key 3: Tit for Tat and the Evolution of Cooperation
Some are troubled by President Trump’s hitting back in both action and tweets against those who criticize him, and some were perplexed when he withdrew Nancy Pelosi’s government airplane after she withdrew her State of the Union invitation, but those familiar with Bob Axelrod’s 1984 The Evolution of Cooperation would understand. That book describes seminal experiments with strategies in the so-called iterated prisoner’s dilemma problem. In many social and negotiation settings people can cooperate or not (defect) with one another, and the payoff for cooperation or defection is often like the deals on TV crime shows where better deals are given to those who rat out their criminal partners. The hard behavior in such cases is for both criminals to stay true to one another (to cooperate), and it is also the behavior that often gets the criminals the highest joint payoff (little or no jail time).
Axelrod ran a set of tournaments in which computerized bots played an iterated prisoner’s dilemma problem against one another. Surprisingly, the winner of these tournaments was a simple entry by game theorist Anatol Rapoport called Tit-for-Tat (TFT) in which the bot’s strategy was simple: defect when the opponent defects on the previous move and cooperate when the opponent cooperates on the previous move. The TFT strategy was surprisingly robust, and much of President Trump’s behavior can be understood as exercising TFT. The tweeting and counter-tweeting and the airplane-for-invitation withdrawal are current examples. Following the early experiments Axelrod worked with computer scientist Stephanie Forrest using a kind of artificial intelligence called a genetic algorithm, to evolve strategies by computer that were better than TFT. The resulting best amongst these refined strategies can be thought of as a kind of TFT+making-nice. Simple TFT by itself has the disadvantage of getting stuck at low payoff when both parties play tit-for-tat. TFT+making-nice allows a negotiating pair to get unstuck and back to high joint of mutual cooperation.
President Trump’s moves during and following the shutdown are examples of TFT+making-nice. The shutdown and early actions were largely tit-for-tat. Democrats and Republicans crowing or lamenting the President’s reopening the government, misunderstand the President’s effort to make nice and try to get a deal. True, Trump’s tactics may work better in a business context when there are fortunes to be made and both parties have clear interests aligned with a deal, but friends and foes alike should understand that the President’s tactics align well with our best understanding of how cooperation can come about in adversarial situations such as our current political culture.
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David E. Goldberg is Dobrovolny Professor of Entrepreneurial Engineering Emeritus at the University of Illinois and author of Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning, The Design of Innovation, and A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education. He helps transform engineering education for individual freedom and unleashing around the world as a leadership coach from his firm threejoy.com in Douglas, Michigan.
