Dan Erwin

The Upside of Career Flip-Flopping

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Emerson

Given all the deception and obvious dissembling by politicians, government officials and intellectual leaders, I’m beginning to get the notion from opinion writers that changing your mind is an immoral act. I’ve changed my mind over the years on a number of issues, so if you know me you just might think that I’m writing this blog to do some CYA work. That’s not at all the case. Fact of the matter if you check a number of my blogs, you’ll notice that I’ve made a number of significant career changes over the years around a number of issues: politics, relationships, religion. And I’m presently in my third or fourth career change, depending on how you count them. My thinking goes something like this: “I’ve climbed that mountain. How about something more challenging?” And I've always found such changes to be delightful. Building a new world can be just great fun and very meaningful.

So, I’ve always preferred George Bernard Shaw’s orientation rather than Emerson’s. Shaw is much more philosophical and thoughtful: “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

Consistency
In career development, it’s usually the little things that derail a manager or exec. Thus, I typically focus on granular career issues. For example. . .

The Big Issue Is Not Guns or Gun Control

I grew up with guns. My father had a locked cabinet full of guns: shotguns and a couple pistols. Since he went hunting much of the year during the last years of his employment and well into retirement, he was very familiar with their use. He was a farm boy from the Western Kentucky tobacco country and well-versed in their safe use. They were always locked up in a cabinet—and the locks were very sturdy. Not to protect his family, but to make theft very difficult for burglars. I used my grandmother’s 22 rifle on several occasions while I was in college at Murray State. I went hunting with my dad a few occasions but never carried or used a gun on those trips. My trip was solely for the purpose of spending time with my dad and listening to the howling of his “black and tans” chasing racoons or his beagles chasing rabbits.

Here are some key  findings about Americans’ attitudes about gun policy, drawn from recent surveys by Pew Research Center and Gallup (2021).

*Four-in-ten U.S. adults say they live in a household with a gun, including 30% who say they personally own one.

*Personal protection tops the list of reasons why gun owners say they own a firearm.

*Attitudes about gun violence differ widely by race, ethnicity, party and community type.

*Roughly half of Americans (53%) favor stricter gun laws, a decline since 2019.
*Americans are divided over whether restricting legal gun ownership would lead to fewer mass shootings.

Candidly, the basic issue is not primarily gun control, but governance. Dealing with policy has been shown to be a losing issue. Here, finally, is the research on who actually controls policy—or to restate the issue: who actually governs. We aren’t much of a democracy.

Although there are hundreds of studies on the subject of governance, the latest and best work is by Princeton and Northwestern scholars, political scientists and long-term experts on the issues. They work from a huge body of evidence—some quantitative (the statistics), some historical (to make sense out of the statistics), and some actually observational.

The authors of the study reveal that there are “four families” of research: elected politicians, the economic elites (Wall Street and major Hedge Fund directors), interest groups (tending to be millions of ordinary people with differing interests and personal drivers), and biased interest groups with differing targets.

What makes this study highly useful is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years, by one of the authors: Martin Gilens. The study is especially interesting to me because it is not focused on gun research, but on a related issue: who controls public policy?

Well, take a guess.