Chapter 60

The Power of Crazy

I want to tell you about one more form of personal power and that is the power of crazy. I don’t think that you’ll want to use it very often, but you should know about it. It’s the power of crazy: If you can convince the other side that you’re crazy, you can have power over them.

Just after communist Vietnam opened its borders to non-Americans again, I spent a week in Saigon and Hanoi. In Hanoi, I hired a guide to show me around. She had lived through the war and I was eager to get her impressions. When I asked her whom she thought was the best American president, I realized that she was a government employee (as everyone is under communism).

She thought about it for awhile and then said, “I not know who best president is, but I know the worst. Richard Nixon, he was the worst president. He wanted to drop nuclear bomb on us. He is crazy. He is the worst president of all.” I’m confident that even Richard Nixon did not intend to drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. He and Henry Kissinger cooked up a strategy. They felt that if they could convince the North Vietnamese government that they were crazy, that they could force them to the negotiating table, which is what they did remarkably effectively.

The power of crazy really came into play when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. When that occurred, George Bush had this huge challenge on his hands, and the challenge was to convince Hussein that Bush, might be the crazier of the two. How do you do that, you might ask? The first thing you do is throw your golf bag over your shoulder and go up to Kennebunkport, Maine, for a golfing vacation; and do this during the worst crisis this country had been in since the end of the Vietnam War.

Then you send your Secretary of State James Baker to Montana on a fishing vacation. Then you hide the vice president. Do you know what Dan Quayle was doing all while this was going on? The papers said that he was in Arizona on vacation, but I don’t think that even Dan Quayle is crazy enough to vacation in Arizona in August. I think it terrified Bush that Quayle would have his picture taken in the White House, looking as though he was in charge. Pictures of Saddam Hussein at that time showed his eyes bugging out with fear. Here was a man who had suddenly realized that he was faced with a man who might just be crazier than he was!

In business, the power of crazy translates into the person who is so inconsistent in the way they react that you never know how they’re going to treat you. One day you can walk into their office and they’ll throw their arms around you. The next time you walk into their office they might throw you out. If you can convince someone that you’re crazy you can have power over him.