Mitt Romney: Poster child for the left brain

One of my key goals in Right-Brain Brands is to illuminate the limits of left-brain thinking in business and marketing. Left-brain thinking, which favors analysis, linearity and logic, isn’t wrong.  It’s vital!  But it’s also incomplete.  Same with right-brain thinking.  Trouble is, left-brain approaches are usually touted as superior.

Well, here’s Mitt Romney to make my case.  Past presidential candidates have lacked the common touch or The Vision Thing.  Yet never before can I recall a presidential contender so purely left-brained as Mitt Romney.

Lopsidedness as a liability

Romney hails from the worlds of management consulting and private equity, left-brain hotbeds if ever there were.  Despite his intelligence and accomplishments, he is routinely making mistakes that are pure howlers.  Some attribute these to his patrician upbringing, a possible factor.  But there is another explanation for several of his major missteps.  Simply put, they illustrate a woeful imbalance: too much left brain, not enough right.

Left-brain blunders

Here’s a new look at some familiar slip-ups:

Linearity: In NH, Romney tried to show empathy for Americans concerned about job security when he said: “I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re gonna get fired.  There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”

He was trying to relate to people whose experience is vastly different from his.  But he did it in a very literal, clunky way:
You = worried
Me = worried (kinda)

That’s linearity in the extreme.  Surely with a micron of imagination he could draw on conversations with unemployed workers, instead of using an ineffective personal example.

Sequential ordering: The left brain moves through time and sorts things into categories. 

Romney has famously said “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”  He was trying to say his focus is on the middle class, rather than people at either end of the spectrum.  But his mind works in such a sequential, compartmentalized fashion that you can almost see him ticking off the mental boxes:

Very poor = not a concern
Very rich = not a concern
Middle class = concern!

Romney backers would surely have welcomed a little right-brain simultaneous comprehension here, enabling him to grasp and express the major issue at hand.

Right brain, where art thou?

On the spectrum in which pure left- or right-brain thinking anchor the ends with whole-brain thinking in the middle, Romney is an outlier on the left.  Consider the following pairings:

Analysis vs. empathy: Romney characterized his 2011 income from speaking fees as “not very much.”  Analytically, he’s right: $374K in speaking income is only 1.7% of his total income of $21.6 million for the year.  Empathically, this was pure idiocy.   His speaking income alone is over 14 times the average national wage rate of $26,364.  Empathy necessarily considers the thoughts and feelings of others.  Analysis does not.

Logical/mathematical vs. holistic: As Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney supported the individual health care mandate: everyone would have to buy health insurance (including young, healthy people), because that’s the only way to make the numbers work. 

Now, the only way to make a different set of numbers work (winning Republican primaries) requires that he repudiate the “individual mandate”—a centerpiece of President Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act that has become a curse word in Republican politics.  Math and logic fuel both positions, but it’s challenging to reconcile them in the bigger picture.

What can I say but “thanks”?

How things will unfold politically in the months ahead is unclear.  What is clear, however, is the need for a blend of right- and left-brain thinking.  And for someone trying to show the limitations of a pure left-brain approach, Romney is likely to remain the gift that keeps on giving.