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Craziness can be good. Positive feedback loops can be good. It’s like steak and hot fudge … two good things that aren’t so good when you put them together.

Many businesses need their crazies. They’re the movers and shakers who combine a willingness to do the outrageous with a complete lack of fear. They put the company in harm’s way, forcing everyone else to figure out how to make things work that didn’t seem possible until the consequences of failure made them possible after all.

Without their crazies, many companies would fall into complacency, coasting along until all momentum is lost and the company either closes its doors or is bought by some other, larger company whose executives want no part of craziness either.

The problem with craziness is that every time a crazy does something crazy and it works, it ratchets up the positive feedback loop — the loop that says, “This works, so I should do more of it.”

It’s the loop that says if 16 ounce sirloins are popular, 64 ounce sirloins will be even more popular … and hey, here’s an idea: Let’s just put a steer on a plate instead.

And so it happens that at some stage in a company’s life, its resident crazy publicly commits it to selling a perpetual motion machine … something it can’t build because it can’t be built, but which would be so popular in the marketplace that when the company fails to deliver the goods, it must be the fault of those close-minded engineers who aren’t willing to consider the possibilities.

It must be their fault because it can’t be the crazy’s fault. It can’t be, because part of being a crazy is that everyone is afraid of them. They’re willing to do anything and everything necessary to get their way, and over time they’ve built up so much political capital by making things happen that even the company’s top executives are afraid to rein them in for fear the board of directors will side with the crazy.

Something else about crazies: While they’re very good at insisting other people take responsibility, they’re the best excuse-makers in the galaxy, exceeding even the Flarpswenkers of Tau Ceti IV, who are so good at it that people (well, entities) pay good gimtarkers just to hear them blame-shift.

The crazies, after all, have a track record, so if their next flash of inspiration doesn’t work out as planned, it must be Someone Else’s Fault, and that someone must be Held Accountable for failing to get the job done.

No matter where you sit in the company you’ve probably been the crazy’s victim, because the crazies of the business world have no respect for reporting relationships. If they want something from someone, they ask them directly.

No, that’s not right. The crazy doesn’t ask you. He (or she) tells you. Whatever else you were working on doesn’t matter, because whatever the crazy wants is your top priority if you want to keep your job.

Your existing assignments and responsibilities, which your manager has delegated to you so your workload more or less matches your capacity? When dealing with a Crazy you understand you now have two full-time jobs — the one defined by your manager, and whatever the crazy’s next whim says it is.

Change seats. You’re now the CIO. What can you do about a crazy? Very little, which is better than nothing at all.

One possibility, which has little chance of success but it can’t hurt to try, is to reform the crazy just enough to protect your staff. Your message: Whatever the need, ask you, and you’ll assign it personally, making sure the very best person gets the assignment.

Good luck with that, but what the heck.

Your other alternative is to be patronizing … not with the crazy, but with the CEO about the crazy. Commiserate frequently about the need to accommodate the craziness, even when it means scheduled, important work is put on hold for a while.

Because really, if you and the CEO agree that disrupting the plan is okay, you can tell your employees they don’t have to work double shifts to handle their regular workload and the crazy.

That should get you by until the crazy eventually self-destructs. Which will happen, because if there’s one other thing crazies have in common, it’s a complete lack of regard for building and maintaining relationships.

And that, eventually, is politically fatal in even the craziest environments.

When I was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, the Cubs shaped (warped?) my character every summer.

The team, needless to say, was awful, but we had our great players: Sweet swingin’ Billy Williams, pizza-sellin’ Ron Santo, and, more than anyone else, Ernie Banks, who was the perfect athlete hero for young kids. He was a great player (“Just think how good he’d be if he got to bat against Cub pitchers!” we’d exclaim to each other), he loved playing the game, and he was perennially optimistic and cheerful.

Whenever Jack Brickhouse interviewed Ernie Banks before a game, Ernie would say, “It’s another great day for baseball at beautiful Wrigley Field!” And at the end of every season, Ernie would say, “Next year will be a great season for the Cubs!”

Ernie was a wonderful ball player. I don’t think he’d have made a great executive, though. If I’ve seen one character trait that, more than any other, differentiates truly great executives from the rest of the population, it’s their refusal to let emotions blind them to reality.

Here’s a reality many of us are unwilling to face, but that every successful communicator knows: Your message must be aimed primarily at your audience’s emotions, and only slightly to the intellect. Otherwise, your audience will lose interest and won’t absorb your message.

Sales professionals live and die on this insight. Pretending the world is otherwise, or being unwilling to play the game to win, simply means you don’t belong in sales. (If you’re wondering, I’m not capable of it, and I got my coccyx out of the sales profession just a few months after entering it for that exact reason.) If you deny the validity of this insight into your own decision-making, you’re vulnerable to every sales shyster who learns how to yank your chain.

OK, brace yourself. Here’s an earlier version of the same advice, along with its authoritative source:

“Propaganda’s effect must be aimed primarily at nonintellectual elements of the mind and only, to a limited extent, at the rational intellect. We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

No, this doesn’t mean the sales representatives you deal with are Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or Nazi dupes. It means they’re willing to embrace the realities of their profession, including tactics their competitors will use against them – even if Hitler explained those tactics in Mein Kampf.

How do you deal with uncomfortable realities? Hitler’s actions were horrifying. His effectiveness, though, was unquestionable, and that means you can’t just write off his insights into human behavior as psychotic ravings.

My friend Curtis Sahakian has written a white paper on this subject, titled “Business Application of Propaganda” (The Corporate Partnering Institute, Skokie, IL). It’s practically an inventory of human frailty. By reading it you’ll learn (among other facts) that people:

  • Change their beliefs more easily than their behavior;
  • Filter out messages that conflict with their beliefs;
  • Are strongly influenced by name-calling and innuendo;
  • Have a strong predisposition to perceive patterns in random events; and
  • Will do more out of fear, or to avoid pain, than for any other source of motivation.

Am I advocating unethical behavior by telling you these facts? Are you being unethical by learning them? If you learn the rules of propaganda and use them to your advantage, is that unethical, or are the ethics determined by the consequences of your actions?

I can answer only the first two questions with certainty: No, I’m not advocating unethical behavior by presenting these facts, and no, you aren’t displaying poor ethics by learning them.

Naïveté doesn’t make you ethical. It just makes you an easy victim.