DROOM (Don't Run Out Of Money) with Beth Polish

Jury Duty -- All The Right Answers

I’ve just spent the last few days fulfilling my obligation to serve as a juror in the New York County Criminal Court. While most of people in my jury pool just wanted to do their duty with the least disruption of their normal lives, there were two other large groups. One desperately wanted to be chosen to serve on a jury, and the other desperately wanted not to be. Even though their goals were opposite, members of both groups exhibited remarkably similar behavior. They spent the entire time trying to figure out what the judge, prosecutor and defense attorneys wanted in a juror. They did this so that when it was their turn to be questioned, they would be prepared with all the right answers. Not answers they really believed, but ones they thought would either get them on the jury or get them dismissed outright.

What fascinated me was how good the judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys were at seeing through the roles that these folks were playing. The more questions the prospective jurors were asked, the harder it was for them to maintain an assumed role and, as a result, many of them failed to achieve their objective.

This dynamic is so similar to what goes on in business when companies are seeking to enter into partnerships of all kinds -- from raising capital, to hiring employees, to forging a strategic alliance. Time and again, I’ve seen company management lie (or stretch the truth) by pretending that they cared little (or greatly) about a business deal point, when in fact the opposite was true. Or that they had expertise in an area that they didn’t (at least not yet.) Their intentions were good -- they wanted to close a deal that they believed would be good for their company. And I can’t tell you how often I’ve been asked by entrepreneurs how they should answer certain questions from venture capitalists. The thing is, they weren’t really asking me for help in framing an honest answer. What they wanted to know was what the venture capitalist wanted to hear so they’d invest in the company.

The problem, of course, is that companies (and their senior management teams) can’t pretend for long to be what they’re not, any more than my fellow prospective jurors could. Eventually, management will be asked enough questions and enough due diligence will be performed to expose the truth, and the deal won’t happen. The sad part is it might fall apart largely because of the management team’s lack of transparency and their resulting loss of credibility. Or, worse, the company will enter into the deal and then be unable to fulfill on their obligations or find themselves in trouble because that business deal point they said didn’t matter really did.

The moral of the story is no matter where you are or what you’re doing , you can’t be who you’re not.

Numbers on Trial

I was invited recently to be a juror in a mock trial for Professor Michael Finkelstein’s Statistics for Lawyers class at Columbia University Law School. The core issue of the trial was whether or not a major teaching hospital was discriminating against women, as to promotion and salaries. Students played the roles of prosecutors, defense attorneys, and plaintiff (a woman doctor.) In addition to presenting opening and closing arguments, each side presented an expert witness -- a real-life statistics professor whose job it was to show how the "numbers" supported their respective side’s case (something that business professionals have to do all the time). While the subject of the case interested me, I was a little nervous about my ability to make a decision based on regression and other statistical analyses. But being a business numbers person, I figured I’d give it try. Plus, I thought it might be good practice for jury duty, which I start at the end of May.

Participating turned out to not only be great fun but also a reminder of something that I talk about all the time -- the importance of avoiding jargon and keeping your presentation simple, focusing only on the key numbers that matter to your business, and not bombarding your audience with lots of extraneous facts that end up being a distraction rather than building your case.

Both sides in this case presented mountains of jargon-ridden scenarios based on their warring statistical analyses. No one but a mathematician it would have had a prayer of keeping up. Even the lone college math major on our jury had a hard time keeping track of all the jargon and numbers the lawyers threw at us. When we got in to the jury room, the first thing we did was try to identify which of the myriad statistics mattered. I’m sure we forgot about some of the numbers and misunderstood others. For each of the two counts (promotion discrimination and salary discrimination), we ended up focusing on only one number and tossing out all the rest of the analysis. The numbers we chose were the ones least burdened with fanfare. And we favored the lawyers who presented their case in a straightforward manner and didn’t seem to be hiding behind a cloud of information.

The experience was a great reminder of the importance of simplicity and focus. Numbers are vital to telling the story of a business clearly and completely. Don’t let yours be found guilty of obscuring and confusing.