Category: Uncategorized

NYC’s Ranked-Choice Vote: The Killer App for Failed Politics

[My views are my own].

I love a good transformation story. It’s become my life’s work.

There is probably no better story of emerging transformation than the first time use of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) in yesterday’s elections in New York City. I’m super pumped!

It is not perfect, but IT WAS A REALLY IMPORTANT FIRST STEP! And, it is potentially transformational for beginning to fix the polarization of our politics.

Michael Porter — the Harvard professor that developed the framework of competitive advantage — and Katherine Gehl wrote an excellent book on this in 2020 titled The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. I highly recommend it.

In the book, they applied the duopoly model that limits competition to our two political parties. And, to them, ranked-choice voting is the killer app for breaking open the system.

The key takeaways are that:

Electoral incentives are biased against moderation and compromise.

“Members of Congress, state legislators, governors and other state officials have to first win a low-turnout party primary, in which ideologically militant voters are more likely to vote.”

This results in a race to the extremes of ideology for party candidates . . . and for funding. I.E., you don’t want to fund a candidate that can’t win a primary. So fund the most extreme candidate.

This system favors ideology over solutions and gridlock over progress.

The machinery of politics “quietly determine[s] everything from how candidates get on a ballot and how we vote to how a bill becomes law. And both sides of the ideological divide are to blame. Waves of unchecked engineering of these rules and practices — orchestrated jointly by Democrats and Republicans — have optimized the elections and lawmaking machinery to protect and perpetuate the politics industry itself and grow its power, not to produce results.” [Gehl and Porter, The Politics Industry]

“The tragic result . . . is a polarized government unable to compromise to solve the nation’s greatest problems or realize its highest aspirations.”

But, over time, ranked choice voting (RCV) has the potential to fix polarization in politics. It can “ensure that the winner will always have support from the broadest possible portion of the electorate.”

What is ranked-choice voting?

Voters are asked to rank their preferred candidates. For example, for the New York Mayor’s primary, we have been asked to rank our top five.

If a candidate gets 50% plus 1 after all the first-choice votes are counted, then that candidate wins.

If no one gets 50% plus 1, it goes to round two. The candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated and that candidate’s voters’ second choices get redistributed to the other candidates.

This process continues until someone reaches 50% plus 1.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my FREE newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Also, please accept my apology for the sloppy editing, etc. My objective here is to quickly ship work and new ideas . . . not to spend hours making sure the language is perfect. I hope you enjoyed.

Trust & the Repeatable Transformation Playbook

[My views are my own]

For the last several months, I’ve been working on a manuscript to document my “repeatable playbook” of business transformation.

It’s required me to dive a lot deeper than I originally expected.

I started out by compiling and organizing a list of the tactics I’ve used.

At first, it was exhilarating. It felt like flipping through an old high school yearbook.

I quickly realized that the challenge with tactical transformation is that the cutting edge ideas of today quickly become business as usual.

As I pulled one mental thread after another, it became clear that the repeatable playbook of transformation (and the real source of value) is the people/human stuff.

In large organizations, especially those that have matrixed reporting structures, you can’t do it all yourself.

From my experience, the biggest reason transformation, turnaround and innovation efforts fail is because those leaders never build a posse. They end up alone, screaming into the wilderness — and nobody cares.

If you don’t get people on-side, you are going to be blocked at every move. While you may have buy-in from the center or top of the organization, it’s the people in the middle that actually run the business — and they don’t give a shit about your “brilliant ideas.”

For me, the starting point is always trust.

Corporations are packed full of politics, people with hidden agendas, and transactional relationships.

Quickly and radically establishing the envelope of trust has been my cornerstone for building kick-ass teams — and driving change.

There needs to be rapport, and a sense of protection if you want your teams to do big things, and to take risks.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my FREE newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.