George Bush has
vowed to veto any legislation that would scuttle a plan for the government of the United Arab Emirates to purchase a company that would put it in charge of six large ports in the USA, including New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans. His response to these plans was simple and blunt: "I'll deal with it with a veto."
He asked this question:
"I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."
The answer to that question has to do with
face value.
When I was getting my MBA, I took a class on testing potential employees to help businesses select the best candidates to fill positions in their company. The concept of "face value" was an important one: if a test doesn't have face value, no company will buy it or use it.
What is face value? It's probably best described as "believability". In other words, if a test has face value, those who use the test believe it will do what it is intended to do. For employment screening tests, it means that potential employers believe the test will help them select candidates who will be successful employees in their company.
A classic example is the ACT test. Currently, the ACT test, a college placement test used throughout the country by colleges and universities to determine which students will be invited to their institution is a pencil-and-paper test. It intended to rank students according to their academic potential. The four-hour test is rather grueling, particularly for students who don't do well on written tests. There is a great deal of pressure on the test taker, young high school-aged kids, because their performance on the test determines their collegiate path.
Back in the 80s, a company developed a new type of ACT test. This test, taken on a computer, had only 20 questions. As students answered the questions, they were given a new question based on whether or not they had answered the previous question correctly or not. At the end of the 20 questions, which could be answered in less than 30 minutes, they were given a score. Exhaustive testing of this new test proved that the test accurately predicted the score students would achieve on the longer, four pencil-and-paper test. The correlation was greater than 90%.
So why don't students use this much shorter, less strenuous test? Because it has no face value. Nobody believes that a 20 question test could give the same reliability as the longer traditional ACT test. Students and parents would never accept that such a short test was indicative of the student's level of achievement, particularly because so much rides on the outcome.
So this test, having nearly zero face value, was never adopted.
The answer to George Bush's question "why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company" is that the idea that ownership of these ports by the UAE won't compromise US security has no face value. Almost nobody believes that this situation is acceptable and that our homeland security won't be sacrificed if it goes through.
It comes down to perception. The Bush administration seems to struggle almost daily with perception. They travel in a sphere that is disconnected from the rest of the country, a sphere in which they are never wrong and where their perceptions rule the day.
As business guru, Tom Peters, said in his book "Thriving on Chaos", Customer perception (CP) equals delivery (D) divided by expectation (E). Maximizing CP [by under-promising and over-delivering] is essential in the squishy, real world, where perception of the intangibles is really everything."
Perception is everything. And that's a lesson the Bush administration doesn't seem to understand.