I was cleaning out some old files at work and came across a page I had written called “characteristics of a great sales person”. Looking at the long list 12 years later the page looked ridiculous. The list was compiled from much reading and conversations with consultants and psychologists. What I saw years later was than great salespeople never fit the profile that I thought they should; good salespeople were good because they did just a few things consistently and well.

The point here is that the theory I had years ago about what a great salesperson looked like did not fit the reality. I learned this over a decade of observation, hiring failures and being surprised by successes. This is called experience.

Experience is more about learning what does not work, than learning about what does. Such experience, especially in the business world, is not subject to computer modeling or back testing like a laboratory experiment. Such experience recognizes that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

This is why a president with no private sector experience concerns me and why the fact that his administration has the lowest percentage of people from the private sector in history should also concern us. These people are largely academics trying to run our lives with theories that have never been tested, or worse, theories that have been tried and failed and rationalized otherwise. When an academic gets a theory in his head, he doesn’t have a real world experience to test it. They tend to recycle and redefine bad theories to make them look better. It is like polishing a turd.

Obama’s radical and massive bills in his first years have been job killers of the worst kind launched in the middle of the worst economic climate we have seen in decades. That he now wants to call a summit on job creation is laughable. It only shows how completely clueless he is.

Real world experience can lead to theories much better than theories can be applied to the real world. In the private sector new ideas and theories are tried out and quickly disposed when they are seen not to work. In the political and academic world bad ideas are institutionalized and tenured.

That is why we need the private sector represented in the political world. It has never been more underrepresented in a presidential cabinet than it is today.

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