>>: I’m Doug Harmine[phonetic]; I’m part of MSR Special Projects. It's my honor to introduce
Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer as part of MSR’s Visiting Speaker series. If you don't
know anything about the book I’ll give you just a couple little highlights. It looks like, looking
from the picture here, we are going to get the Thanksgiving story which is a little bit of
background of how people can go from being cooperative to competitive. I really like how the
books draws on economics, neuroscience, psychology, and animal science, a really kind of
interesting diversity of knowledge that it draws from. One of the things I got out of reading it
was in the case looking at when it might be best to go last in the case of the Olympics. I hope
we hear more about that how it could potentially benefit you, and perhaps they'll tell us about
the E trick which was something that I learned reading about this.
The books got incredibly good reviews, so cited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
Financial Times, New Yorker, National Public Radio, the incredibly high honor, the only book I
know that has the highest recommendation from both the Economist and from Oprah. Just a
couple words, Adam Galinsky is a professor and Business Chair at Columbia University. He was
named one of the world's 50 best B-school professors by Poets and Quants which is a real
citation. I had to go look that up. And then Maurice Schweitzer is a professor of Operations,
Informations and Decisions at the Wharton School at U Penn. So my pleasure and true honor to
welcome Maurice and Adam to Microsoft. Thank you.
>> Maurice Schweitzer: Thank you for the kind introduction and thanks for having us. I want to
start off with a story about Thanksgiving. After lunch I hope it's not making you too hungry, but
I want to think about Thanksgiving and the incredible cooperative sentiment that Thanksgiving
evokes. It's a holiday that's supposed to be about cooperation, celebrating family togetherness,
and yet at the same time we often see Thanksgiving followed by something that can be quite,
quite different from the cooperation that we celebrate.
And here sort of think about this juxtaposition where we have the corporative feelings about
the Thanksgiving meal and then we often see hordes of shoppers basically clamoring for better
deals. And in 2008 in Whitemarsh, New York there was actually a tragic event that happened
where a crowd had amassed outside of a Walmart and somebody had put up a sign that read
blitz line starts here and the group that had assembled was so unruly the local staff there had
called the police. The police had come out, they weren't able to control the crowds, and they
started chanting tear the doors down, tear the doors down, and they ended up streaming into
the store; they streamed into the store and the employees trying to control the crowd formed a
human chain. The doors literally came off the hinges in the store and sadly, Dumar[phonetic],
this one employee who had just hours before celebrated Thanksgiving with his sister, ended up
getting trampled to death.
So I want to think about what it means to shift between cooperation and competition. The
central theme in our book is about cooperation and competition, and I want to think about how
it doesn't happen just once but it happens all the time. So here from the Huffington Post, this is
2013, Holiday Spirit: Shootings, Stabbings and Brawls. Now of course we think about something
different when we think about holiday spirit more broadly. So I want to think about the guiding
principles that really tip us between cooperation, competition, and back.
Now when we think about cooperation and competition it happens in all of our relationships.
So we think about sort of the most intense cooperation we'll ever have between us and our
spouse and say, for example, raising a child, collaborating across the board, but there's some
moments of competition we might have experienced. Who's going to get up at five in the
morning? Who’s going to go change diapers and so on? So we go back and forth and it
happens not just with our spouses it happens with our siblings. So we think about brotherly
love but at the same time we also think about sibling rivalry. We’re collaborating in many
important respects but we are also competing. So as children we compete for parental
attention and other scarce resources, and for twins is happens right in the womb as we are
competing for physical resources right from the start.
So for some of us it's actually before we are born we start the cooperation and competition
dance, and of course at work we collaborate to achieve outcomes. We work together
collaboratively on projects and if we mess up that collaboration things could go badly wrong,
but at the same time we also balance that collaboration with competition where we compete
for recognition, promotion, raises with the same people we’re often collaborating with. So I
want to suggest that we are collaborating and competing and we are both friends and foes.
So there's some balance we need to strike to get it right. So here's a central theme of our
whole book is that we are cooperating and competing all of the time with the same people at
home, at work, and even with our friends. There are three guiding principles. So we want to
build on these three principles. The first principle is scarcity. So there's scarce resources. It
could be time, it could be money, it could be attention, and we'll talk about the scarce resource
of water in a second. And at Walmart this is one of the things that transformed that
cooperative holiday spirit into a very competitive one. So we're going to think about scarcity as
one of the key principles.
Here Grevy’s Zebras form different relationships as a function of water in their environment.
So when there's plentiful water they have these stable collective groups, but when water is
scarce they have much more temporary relationships and their social dynamics are dramatically
influenced by how abundant or scarce resources are in their environment. And that's true for
all of us. The abundance or scarcity of something will shift our relationships and this is one
trigger that can shift us back and forth between cooperation and competition.
A second principle is how social we are. We are effectively hardwired in our brains, the object
of our brains is hardwired for social interaction. We need to be in touch with other people, and
even for those of us that are kind of loners we still crave some social interactions. In fact, the
most intense form of punishment is solitary confinement. With solitary confinement it actually
begins to damage our brain and within just a couple of days people in solitary confinement
began to experience hallucinations, spasms of anger, they become unfit for social interaction
which they also deeply crave. So I suggest that we are hardwired for social interactions and as
we navigate these social interactions we need to balance cooperation and competition.
And the third key principle is dynamic instability. Through the editorial process we were
canceled out of the word stochasticity[phonetic] which I particularly like, but I think the broad
idea is that there's something unstable about our environment. Things change. So like for the
Grevy Zebras the water isn't always abundant, it's not always scarce, it goes back and forth. Or
the availability of low-priced items we have these sales that trigger instability and the instability
as we go back and forth can shift us within this cooperation competition dance, so just to
suggest a lot of things that are stochastic or a dynamic in our world.
So we think about this dynamic situation as not just with things that are happening but also
with new information. So as new information emerges we can learn new things that can push
us to cooperate or we might learn new information like the salary of somebody else in the
cubicle next to us and that could shift us toward competition. Or it could be a Facebook post, it
could be something that shifts us back and forth between cooperation and competition.
I want to think about some of the dramatic examples. We go through a lot of them, but I think
to me the most optimistic story about the shift from competition to cooperation happened on
an international scale. If we go back to World War II some of the most intense fighting ever
was between the United States and Japan. The United States had firebombed 67 Japanese
cities and that was before the nuclear explosions and the US dropped not one but two nuclear
bombs on Japan. Now what is amazing is how intense that conflict was, how ferocious that
fighting was, and yet the shift to cooperation has been unbelievable. If you survey people
throughout the world and you ask them what their attitudes are of the United States you’ll get
a lot of varied responses. There are many countries out there where the US isn't quite as
popular as it perhaps could be, but one country that's incredibly pro-US is Japan. In fact in a
recent survey 80 percent of Japanese people had favorable impressions of the United States.
That's pretty high.
Here's what happened. The shift from competition to cooperation started right after the war.
It started with Douglas MacArthur. He came in and he instituted rules for Americans in Japan.
Americans it was illegal to strike any Japanese person; it was even illegal for Americans to eat
any Japanese food. Food is very scarce in Japan and the Americans could only eat American
rations. And then on top of that this shift towards rebuilding the Japanese economy became a
cornerstone of that pivot from competition to cooperation, and here in 1960 signing this
cooperation pact, and that transition has been a really incredible one and I think has a lot of
lessons for us to think about in how we look at the foes throughout the world and certainly in
our own relationships and how can they be transformed into friends.
So we have this interplay of these principles: scarcity, sociability, and dynamic instability. We
think of those themes throughout our book but we go through each of the chapters to tackle
some specific constructs and I'll talk about one of them. At the end of each chapter we'll also
talk about finding the right balance. So the right balance between cooperating, you have to
cooperate to get things done, we also have to compete in some respects; and if you find the
right balance, if we hold things in balance, we can get the best outcomes, so the best of both
worlds, and that's where we try to find in each chapter, we talk about finding the right balance
at the end.
So here's the first construct I want to think about. Here’s this idea that if I were to ask you
questions like should you remodel your kitchen? Do you drive a nice car? Do you make a good
amount of money? Are my kids doing well? It's almost impossible for us to answer those
questions in the abstract and instead our mind races toward comparisons. That is we
constantly compare our situation with those of others around us. So people are constantly
checking Facebook, did I have a good vacation? Well, I thought my vacation was pretty good
and then I see everybody else's photos and that looked better. So at least there's something
that might be better out there. So it's hard to deeply dive into social science without referring
to Borat[phonetic]. Here's my neighbor. I get a window from a glass, he must get a window
from a glass. I get a step, he must get a step. I get a clock radio, he cannot afford. Great
success! So what's happening here? What is it about this drive to compare? And here he is
gaining some pleasure from a comparison with somebody less fortunate.
Here I want to think about here’s Larry Bird and Magic. Larry Bird said the first thing I would do
every morning was look at the box scores to see what Magic did. I didn't care about anything
else. Now here this comparison, that is they are both competing who’s the best basketball
player ever, they were playing against each other sort of at the same time. They deeply cared
about how each other was doing and this can be incredibly motivating. So comparisons can
make us miserable, they can motivate us, and they can do some other interesting things also.
Here the UNC Tar Heels, the Duke Blue Devils, both incredibly accomplished basketball teams.
They are rivals. Rivalry is a special type of competition where the psychological stakes get
raised. We care more about those outcomes than about other competitive interactions
separate from the economic outcomes. So there's something special about this rivalry, and I'll
talk about here in 1992 Duke wins the NCAA championship and a year later UNC wins it. Now
sort of think about was it does it take to win a championship? A lot of talent, it takes a lot of
ingredients, but one of the key ingredients is incredible motivation. This social comparison is
driving and motivating people to work really hard. And it happened not just once but it
happened twice where you see this sort of one after the other incredibly motivating contrast.
So these comparisons can motivate us in incredible ways. And across a lot of examples and a
lot of social science we see comparisons increasing motivation, boosting performance. It’s one
way for us to really get motivated. It’s true for a long-distance runners, it’s true for people
performing in school and so on.
A lot of [indiscernible] suggest it's even hardwired. That is we're hardwired so deeply, and here
will draw on a study that looks at Capuchin monkeys. Capuchin monkeys are very clever
monkeys. They're the kind that used to do sort of the music grinders. And you’ll see this
experiment that Frans de Waal did looking at Capuchin monkeys and how they care about
these comparisons.
[demo]
Recently, we videotaped these new monkeys who had never done the task and thinking maybe
they would have a stronger reaction and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is a
monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who
gets cucumber note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine. The first piece he eats.
Then he sees the other one is getting grape and you will see what happens.
So she gives a rock to us, that the task, and we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it.
The other one needs to give a rock to us and that's what she does and she gets a grape and she
eats it. The other one sees that, she gives a rock to us now and gets again cucumber. She tests
her rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us and she gets cucumber again. So this
is basically the Wall Street protest.
>> Maurice Schweitzer: So think about here I want to suggest it's just hardwired for us. That is
we compare our outcomes with other people and objectively we might be doing fine, so that is
it’s like the cucumber that's fine and then we see somebody else getting that grape and grape is
better than a cucumber and now we are no longer satisfied with our cucumber. I think I’ll
suggest that it's so hardwired we see this happening in a lot of different contexts. When you
think about gravity payments as they moved up salaries to 70,000 for everybody what does that
do not just the people whose salaries got increased but people who had been there for a long
time; and we know from Scott Crabtree, who experienced this very thing, that is he worked for
years, his salary had increased, they hired a new employee, that new employee was coming in
on a salary very close to his, and work that he found meaningful, enjoyable, work that he loved
became totally upset, demotivated, and was so frustrated he ended up quitting that company.
So he now works at a different company as the chief happiness officer. So we care about these
comparisons, they make us change the way we think about our own outcomes, and sometimes
it's not just for us, it’s not just sort of within our own minds, it’s the way other people are
dealing with us too.
So here this is Rhonda. She took classes to develop her skills, she was identified by senior
leadership as somebody who had great potential, and she ended up taking some time off from
work through her classes to be trained to take on more responsibilities. As a manager we might
look for promising talent, we might sort of groom people for promotion to take on more
responsibility; this is exactly what happened. This is the kind of thing corporations should be
doing. As managers, as colleagues, we should be identifying people that should be groomed for
greater responsibilities and greater rewards. Here's the problem is that this isn't just affecting
Rhonda it's affecting the people around her. So what began to happen is that as Rhonda was
going and taking these other classes she was missing some of the things that were happening
and the other people that she was working with starting to exclude her from lunches, from
parties, from out of work events and also started to undermine her performance at work. They
stopped passing on messages to her, they undermined her ability to succeed at work, because
they resented the special privilege that she was getting.
So we have people that are comparing themselves to us and one of the key ideas I want to
suggest is that people will tell you things like I'm so happy for you, you really deserved it, or it
looks like you had such a great vacation, or let me see your kitchen remodel, they'll tell you
things that oh this is so great but we are all driven to make comparisons and sometimes those
comparisons manifest themselves in a way that can transform friends into foes. So here she
got socially ostracized.
The same thing happens at the corporate level. When Virgin emerged as a real competitor with
British Airways, British Airways engaged in some dirty tricks undermining Virgin. They started
calling customers of Virgin telling customers their flight had been canceled when it hadn't been
canceled, they started spreading rumors about the CEO Branson, they started doing things
because of this comparison; and work that Adam Galinsky and others have done have shown us
how comparisons in intense ways can actually really motivate a lot of unethical behavior too.
Let me share one other story about how things can go badly wrong with comparisons. A lot of
you will have a lot of different experiences with comparisons. Cross-culturally these
comparisons can be really intense. This is a Russian parable related comparisons. A man finds
a lamp, rubs it, and of course a genie appears and the Genie says you can have anything you
want. The one condition is that your neighbor gets double. Think back to the Borat[phonetic]
example how bad that would be. So now the man's pacing back and forth, he's rubbing his
hands, he's thinking, he's thinking, and he finally says I know what I want. I want you to poke
out one of my eyes. Why would we want that? I'm talking to a Russian and she said well, you
have to understand in Russia your neighbor lives right next to you, sort of on top of you. That
doesn't make it better. It’s still deeply disquieting, but I think it underscores this idea of how
primal, how instinctive this comparison process is and I want to suggest we can use these
comparisons for good and then also drives us to be perfectly miserable.
So in the bad comparisons increased resentment and spite but we have to find this balance
between motivation, so to be powerfully motivating, and resentment and there's a way to find
that that balance where you don't overdo it. I'll conclude by thinking about sibling
differentiation where siblings often do this almost instinctively where siblings, as they're
growing up, there's this constant point of comparison.
Twins are the most intense comparisons. That is there's always a ready comparison. How well
is your sibling doing compared to how well you're doing and siblings and naturally differentiate
themselves. So one sibling might be a really good athlete, another one either finds a different
sport or might find something different altogether so they go into drama or become the better
student, they end up differentiating themselves.
For twins this can be a very powerful process because that comparison is so
adversive[phonetic]. Now here's the irony: there's some great twin studies, and if you look at
twins who have been separated at birth, so twins who went up for adoption, raised in totally
different environments, different families, and I'll show you an example in a second of one they
were raised in different religions, totally different places, totally different atmospheres, and yet
they sometimes emerge as more similar than twins raises together. So you'd think twins raised
together they should be more similar, after all they not only share the same genetic makeup
but also the same environment, but sometimes that social comparison can drive them to be
very different and when they are raised separately they can pursue whatever their life passions
were.
Here's these two twins are reared apart. They both owned bodybuilding gyms, they were both
totally fitness freaks, and when they saw each other they said oh my God, we are so similar and
they pursued almost identical paths. So we can see this differentiation when they were raised
together and sometimes you see things that are more similar when they're raised apart. So
that's the social comparison piece. I'm going to turn it over to Adam. Take it away.
>> Adam Galinsky: So I'm going to talk about a couple other topics from the book. So the first
one is I want to tell you a little story about Iris Robinson. She was a rising star in the
Democratic Unionist in Ireland. She owned three homes in the United States and Ireland and
London, and at some point during her rise to power she started having an affair with this 19year-old man and seeded him 50,000 pounds to build a wonderful little cafe. It turns out she
was also double-claiming expenses and employing family members and eventually she was
expelled in disgrace.
Now, to show that it's not just women that engage in this behavior, there's the story about
Mark Hurd, his time at Hewlett-Packard. He started t one of the lowest levels as a junior sales
analyst, rose all the way up to CEO. He also pursued many women who were younger than
himself. He also took them out on lavish dinners and on rides, expensed that to HP, and he was
also fired in disgrace. So trying to understand this behavior of Iris Robinson and Mark Hurd and
what combines them together I think it really comes down to one word which is power.
So I'm going to tell you a little about some of the research that I've done and Maurice has done
and others have done over the last couple decades really looking at the psychological
consequences of power. And to understand what that is I want to take us back to generations
ago to a famous biblical figure, Samson. He had hair that made him invincible. What power
does is it makes you feel psychologically invincible. It makes you feel that you can do anything.
Now one of the things that I pioneered over the years is the idea that power is not just a
structural variable, it’s not just about controlling an amount of resources or being in a certain
position of authority, that it's really a psychological state and that we can activate that
psychological state outside of the structural forms of power. Just to give you an example, this is
one of my former students, Jillian Ku[phonetic]. She'd given a job talk at Harvard Business
School and it hadn't gone well at all. It really was a disaster and her confidence was shaken and
then she went to give a job talk at London Business School. And usually when you go there you
do a 90 minute talk, you get inundated with questions by faculty throughout the whole thing,
they're really trying to tear you down to test whether you have what it takes to be a professor.
Now they also give you a little time before your talk to settle in and get ready and so what
Jillian decided to do was she tried to do a little experiment for herself which I had sort of
pioneered many years ago. What she did is she, and I'll show you in a second, what she did this
she said I primed my brain to think more powerfully and so she to recall an incident in her life
when she herself felt powerful and she just wrote out an essay about this and then she went
into the interview and she was in complete command of the entire room. She answered
questions with poise, she was able to counter-argue any sort of claim that was trying to
undermine the validity of her arguments, and she got the job. She now has her tenure at
London Business School and she is very successful.
Now after Jillian’s experience and all these other studies we wanted to test whether this is
actually a true phenomenon we could actually replicate in a real world context. So we went
with some which French business school students who were trying to get into a business school
and they were given opportunity to do mock interviews. The judges were told to pick about
half the people that you think would deserve to get it versus the half that don't. They didn't
know this was an experiment, they didn't know anyone was being primed, but we took some of
those people and we told them to think about a time when they had high power and some we
told to think about a time when they lacked power, when someone else had power over them.
And then they went into these interviews and they were evaluated by three judges, and I’m
going to show you this data.
First of all, it was a control condition that didn't think about anything. They were true to what
the judges were supposed to do. They were about 50 percent probability of getting selected.
Look what happens when people thought about a time when they lacked power. It almost took
away their invincibility and made them visible. They plummeted down to below 30 percent on
acceptance. Now let's look what happened to people that simply thought about a time when
they had power. We can see it went up all the way to almost 70 percent. So simply thinking
about a time when they had power was enough to make them more confident. Power
increases confidence and optimism. That’s one of the good; that's the good in power.
But let's do a little experiment now. What I want you to do is I want you to all hold up your
hand just like this, dominant hand, and I want you to draw a capital E on your forehead as
quickly as possible. Draw a capital letter E on your forehead as quickly as possible. Now it turns
out that you can draw this E in one of two ways. Now here's the correct way. This is what we
call an other-focused E or the correct way. It looks like an E to a person. The only reason to
draw an E on your forehead is so it looks like an E to another person. Now some of you might
have drawn the E like this. This is a self-focused one.
Now why my showing you this? Because an experiment we did back in 2000, so many years
ago, we brought people in the lab and we said some of the people you're in a power high
power condition, you control important resources, you're going to be in charge and we told
some people you are the subordinate position. You're going to be taking directions from
someone else. Someone else controls your resources and they're going to decide how much
you get. And then before they did an activity we asked them all to draw an E on their forehead
privately. What we found is that very few of the low powered people drew the self-focused E
but look what happened in the high-powered condition. It went up three times the level.
Now I'll tell you another little experiment we did when Maurice and I went around to four
publishing houses in one day and we had little pitches about our book and we went at Random
House and we went with the group including sort of the head of the whole division as well
some sort of more senior editors and junior editors and we asked them to drop this E, and low
and behold the most senior members of the team drew the self-focused and the junior
associates and editors drew the other focused E and I think that’s what helped us actually get
the book was getting to see this in real action. But this is one of the problems which is that
power reduces perspective-taking.
So we have the good in power; it's invigorating, confidence, optimism, Samson's hair of
invisibility, and the bad which makes us a little self-focused. So we need to find the right
balance. How do we get that confidence without getting the self-focus, how do we get
confidence and other focus? And to get there I just want to give you a little metaphor of a car.
How do we get from point A to point B? How do we get from Seattle to Redmond, for
example? Well, we have to get through lots of traffic of course, but to get there we need gas,
we need acceleration, we need to speed down the highway, but if we don't have a steering
wheel we crash into things along the way. So power is basically a psychological accelerator but
perspective-taking us a psychological steering wheel and we have to combine these together.
To give you an example of this I want to tell you a little story about Gail and this is when we're
in power we have to remember how our behavior impacts other people. We have to take their
perspective. I'll tell you a little story about Gail. Gail was a doctoral student when I was an
assistant professor at Kellogg and I saw Gail one morning and said hey Gail, can you come by
my office this afternoon? I really need to talk to you about something. Come by about three.
She walked in my office just like this. She's like, what's up? It was something so trivial I can’t
even remember what it was and after our conversation she looked at me and she said, never do
that to me again. I was like you do what? And she said never tell me you need to talk to me.
You scared the hell out of me. All I've been doing the whole day is ruminating about is he mad
at me, am I being punished, did I do something wrong? Don't do that.
I thought Gail was kind of hysterical, a little neurotic and stuff like that, and then the next day
the chair of my department, a person that would one day vote on my tenure, sent me an e-mail
that said hey Adam, can you come by my office? I need to talk to you today. Then I walked into
her office like hey, oh my God, what's going on? What did I do? And again, it was something
trivial and so that's a great example or demonstration that we need to understand how our
behavior impacts other people.
So here's just one little solution for all of you. If you need to talk to someone who has less
power than you at work either do one of three things: either tell them it’s not a big deal, tell
them exactly what it is and get it over with, or if it is a big deal at least told him that it's a big
deal so they can come prepared for that. So one of the things that we need to do in power is as
we rise up in power our perspective and humility goes down and we need to actively
counteract that.
Now one thing about power, high and low power, is that creates hierarchal differences. The
last thing that Maurice and I want to tell you about is when hierarchy wins and when it kills.
Now some of you may know at the very beginning of their existence Google said we are
engineers, we don't need any stinking managers. We can manage ourselves. It was a total
disaster. Some of you may know that Zappos recently has gone towards holacracy where
they're trying to eliminate management. Now typically in any given year Zappos has two
percent of their workforce quit. On a single day in April 14 percent of their workforce quit over
holacracy. So what did Google find? What is Zappos starting to find? Is that when we don't
have some form of hierarchy we have chaos, confusion, and even people leaving the
organization.
Now to understand this I want to ask you a question: would you rather play a game with your
boss or your best friend? Now most of you would say I'd rather play a game with my best
friend, they’re best friend. I love playing games with them. Let me tell you about a little game
that people in the Netherlands created. You have a choice to make with a partner. You have
two options. Option A over here gives you eight lottery tickets and your boss four lottery
tickets. Option B over here gives your partner eight lottery tickets and you four lottery tickets.
Now here's the one key thing about this game is you both have to pick the same option or you
get nothing. Now when you’re boss it's really easy. You think my boss deserves eight lottery
tickets and I should get the four and your boss says I deserve this and so you coordinate your
behavior and you both win. Now imagine playing the game with your best friend. Now you
might think I'm going to be generous and I'm going to give my best friend eight lottery tickets.
But they think I'm going to be generous and they decide to give you eight lottery tickets and
then you both are at different points and you both get nothing. Or you think I bet they're going
to be generous so I'm going to be selfish but they think the same thing and then they are selfish
and then you both get nothing.
So what you can see here is something really, really important and powerful which is that a
hierarchy allows us to coordinate our behavior because it creates some patterns of deference.
This is one of the curses of co-leadership. Often we think co-leadership is a good idea,
complementary skills, but co-leadership creates problems and patterns of deference and it
makes it very difficult for people to lead. So one of the projects that we did is we looked at
every fashion house in the world that had shown in Milan, London, Paris, or New York and we
had independent journalists and buyers. We did actually have them, a French magazine had
them, and what we found is that in these cases fashion houses that were led by two co-creative
directors had lower creativity. So basically co-leadership killed creativity in these fashion
houses.
Now let me give you sort of another way to think about this is talent. We think more talent is
always better. We want the most talented people. However, when those talented people have
to coordinate their behavior it can be problematic. So this was the Miami Heat. They joined
the forces. But even on the day when they announced that three of the best players were
coming together it was very clear that there is no hierarchy. Wade’s House, LeBron’s Kingdom,
Bosh's Pit. It couldn’t be all three and they were so bad in close games they were 29th on the
30 teams in their first year together. They couldn't coordinate the behavior. Bill Simmons, one
of these famous sportswriters said, until they figure out a pecking order there won't be any
order and they won't be successful. Now what happened with Miami Heat Wade hurt his knee,
became 40 percent of Dwayne Wade and they solved that dueling banjos problem.
But we decided to analyze could we actually find this effect in the NBA? So this is what we did:
we took 10 years of MBA data, we code for how much talent each team had, and we looked at
how they did from the winning percentage. And what you can see here is exactly what you
might think is that as the number of top talented players increased the performance went up
but only up to a point. At a certain point actually it started to have a negative overall effect on
behavior.
So hierarchy helps with ordination, and hierarchy helps with patterns of deference, and it
eventually produces better performance. Now two things I want to say about this: the first is
the too much talent effect doesn't occur when we don't need interdependence. So we
analyzed the same data with baseball and all we found was a positive linear effect always going
forward. Baseball teams, more talent was almost better. So we can see that.
The second thing is even though hierarchy helps us in coordination and cooperation there's a
problem. It often suppresses low power voices. So let me give you sort of one example. It’s a
study that we did that we published last year, some colleagues of mine, is we analyzed every
expedition that's ever gone up the Himalayas in the history of the Himalayas. What we found is
that if they came from a country that was more hierarchical they were more likely to have
people die on the mountain because low-power people didn't feel comfortable speaking up and
expressing their perspective.
Another case where that happens tragically is in surgery. Research has shown that doctors
often skip important checklists that can lead to infection during surgery which can get into the
mainline and have catastrophic effects. Often times the nurses didn't feel comfortable
speaking up even when they noticed that a checklist had been skipped. So hierarchy can
produce disasters because it prevents low-power people from speaking up. So we need to find
the right balance. How do we get the benefits of hierarchy coordination without the silence of
low-power? How do we get coordination with all voices being heard? So I'm going to give you
sort of three examples of this. What did Johns Hopkins do to reduce the rate of infections of
surgical question? He said we are actually going to give the less powerful people on the team
with some authority. So what they did is they said I'm actually going to put nurses in charge of
the checklist and that will empower them to contrast that.
Another example: the producer of The Shield noticed in the story pitch meetings that the
women didn't really speak up very much. He went to them and he said I'm going to be a good
guy. I'm going to go tell them you should feel comfortable speaking up. And he did that. And
then they laughed in his face. They said watch what happens when we do speak up. He
observed. He noticed that when the women spoke up they ended up getting interrupted pretty
quickly. People kind of take their ideas and go with them. So but Greg decided to do was he
created a new rule. No one can interrupt anyone during story pitching. He discovered two
things that were great about this role: the first thing was the women spoke up more and were
more engaged and more involved; the second thing is that it improved everybody's ideas
because as soon as people knew they had the time and space to communicate they expressed
themselves more articulately and they led to better ideas.
The final example, which I think is also really crucial, is getting information privately. If I'm in
the room and I'm a low power person I happen to feel as comfortable speaking up if I have to
do it in front of more powerful people. But if I can express my perspective anonymously and
privately I'm going to feel more comfortable. My colleague at Kellogg has created actually an
app called the Candor App which allows people to express their viewpoints privately. So here
again you can see we need to find the right balance.
So here's the big take away of the book. The big take away of the book is that every
relationship is characterized by tension between cooperation and competition. We are
constantly oscillating back and forth and so we need to find the right balance. Here's the really
important thing: just knowledge of that is incredibly powerful. Aware of the fact that there is
this tension allows us to navigate that attention more effectively.
Now Doug mentioned just a couple other topics of the book and I'll just say two things really
briefly and then we are happy to spend some time answering questions. The first thing is that
we talk a lot about in the book about how do we get people to trust us? What are some of the
things that we can do to get people to trust us? At the same time what are the things that we
can to do to detect deception of other people so we don't get exploited? And then finally
sometimes we are going to misstep. We're all going to misstep. How do we put the pieces
back together through apologies? And Maurice is a world expert on apologies and this chapter
is really amazing. It teaches you about how to apologize, when to apologize, and how to
apologize more effectively.
The final thing which Doug brought up is we also talk a little about when to start your engines.
When do you want to go on competitive interactions? Do you want to be the first one
interviewed or the last one interviewed? Do you want to make the first offer or do you want to
receive the first offer? We answer all of these things. Do you want to be first on the ballot or
lower on a ballot? We answer went to go and how to go in all types of competitive interactions
whether it's a job interview, whether it's a political ballot, whether it's the Olympics or
American Idol, whether it's a negotiation. So we hope that you've enjoyed this, here's some
contact information, but Maurice and I are happy to answer any questions that you’ve got.
Bring on both as friends and foes; ask whatever you want. Thank you so much.
>> Maurice Schweitzer: We're very, very clear.
>> Adam Galinsky: We're so clear there's no questions. Back there, yeah.
>>: On the title of the book there is a how to succeed part. How much of your book is the
academic analysis of your case studies versus the how to part?
>> Adam Galinsky: Two things I'll say about it. First of all, the book is very much simultaneously
a combination of deep analysis into the social science literature and some case studies, but
every chapter ends with a section called: Finding the Right Balance which has very clear
guidelines for how to be more successful. So how to apologize, for example, or how to make
the first offer as another example, or how to find the right balance between nicknames and
slurs, for example. How do we deal with names of effectively? What are the ways that we can
develop trust quickly but not get exploited? So it's got very rich, entertaining case studies but
they are all geared towards giving you some practical feedback for how to be more successful.
And I think that the best compliment that we ever got was the editor of the Atlantic who
described our book as, combines the best of Malcolm [indiscernible] for economics with the
best of better business books. So it's really sort of that intersection of those.
>>: [inaudible]? So the second version is a guy says I want to get a wife [inaudible], a very
beautiful one [inaudible] sexual abilities.
>> Adam Galinsky: That's better than the kidney version.
>>: Writing a book is terribly difficult. I've written a thesis and I find that working on your own
is difficult. How did you both cooperate in writing this book? Why did you choose to cooperate
and why didn’t you choose to write two separate books sharing your own views separately?
>> Maurice Schweitzer: We talk about it a bit in the acknowledgements. The quick story is I was
at a conference, I’d gotten tenure, and I ran to Adam and Adam said oh, what are you going to
do? I said oh, I'm going to write a book. And he said what are you going to write about? I
described my book idea and he said oh, that's stupid. Don't write that book. Let's write a book
together. It will be better. My first reaction was like that’s flipping obnoxious. And then I
thought about it and I’m like you know what, he's right. It's absolutely true of this book. This
book is way better than what I would've done and it's a denser book. There's a lot more
material in here. It's a richer book; I'm delighted by it. It reflects a collaboration. It was hard.
It was hard work, but I think we both poured ourselves into this book and it really reflects the
best of what we both can do. So it was a difficult tension but I think it ended up being>> Adam Galinsky: And I'll just sort of give you two quick ways of thinking about that too is I
brought up co-leadership up there. The benefits that we want is really complementarity and
one of the things that Maurice and I both do research in sort of the broad similar areas but we
also do different topics. So I didn't do any work on work on trust or on deception or on
apologies or on comparisons or very little on comparisons. Maurice did that, but I’d done work
on power and social hierarchy, first offers and negotiation and so then we were able to
combine that. But then even with in chapters we were able to bring in some different
perspectives.
So like on the Comparisons chapter I knew about this research really well, for example that
talked about some negotiation stuff about how you want to think about negotiations to get
yourself motivated but how that can leave you disappointed afterwards, or why it is that many
people live happier lives when they actually graduate in a recession because they don't have
any job comparisons to compare to, they're just happy to get the one they got it. So
[indiscernible] that. But my specialty was a little bit on the names and re-appropriations but
then Maurice had all this great knowledge about where the word doctor came from and why
medical doctors stole it from teachers but now teachers are trying to steal it back by calling
themselves doctors; and so even within the chapters that one of us led we were constantly
adding stuff to it and so was just a lot of disparate knowledge about that.
One sort of final quick thing I'll say is that Maurice is a better writer than I am for this sort of
popular press audience. I actually acknowledge that in my acknowledgments to him at the end
of the book. Then Maurice went and wrote acknowledgments that were better written than
my acknowledgments so therefore proving the point. So that’s sort of a good example of that.
There's a hand up over here. Yeah?
>>: So very often when projects succeed not everybody gets credit for it. Based on the research
that you might have done or you’ve observed anecdotally what did people do to ensure that
beyond the team's success the individual success also takes gets the visibility?
>> Adam Galinsky: I think that's one of those inherent tensions, finding the right balance
between you want people to recognize your accomplishments but we get punished if we selfpromote. So we're trying to find this right balance. I think there are a couple things that I think
are really important. One thing the literature shows really well is if Maurice wants to selfpromote and have people know about his accomplishments what Maurice wants to do is he
wants to get me to do that for him. So one of the best things that you can do is if you want
other people to know and you have a team member who you trust and who cares about you if
they can tout your accomplishments you're going to get so much more credit than if you tout
your accomplishment yourself. So one of the things you can all do is one of those little
solutions is I can get other people, and actually one of the women who's done that research is
Christina Fong who’s at the University of Washington right down the road, and I think that's one
of my favorite examples of research that's been successful.
>>: Which of you two is the better author?
>> Maurice Schweitzer: Adam is the best co-author. This book really took us many years to
write. It really integrates our knowledge and we filled in pieces>>: I was looking for something more competitive.
>> Adam Galinsky: I think you have to recognize>> Maurice Scheitzer: We still have a long trip ahead of us.
>> Adam Galinsky: Maurice took a little bit more time today than I did so there’s always that
little bit of competition about that. By the way, one last thing about comparisons that’s sort of
funny is we had a book launch party and the editor was there and the publisher and the agent
and I was saying that we had the best editor that you could ever imagine and then my
roommate from college was like she's like the only editor you've ever had. You actually don't
know if she's any good or not. So even that sense but she was a best editor best editor we
could have had but it's like even that sense it's hard to know.
>>: So you talked about the [inaudible] among peers like you tend to compare with people who
are at your level somehow like your age, your neighbor, same level in the company. How does
it work across different levels? What would be the power dynamic between the boss and a
person who reports to him? Because say like when you're moving up a hierarchy you are
actually gaining power and you might be in power over someone who is higher than you are.
How does that all work and come together?
>>: Maurice Schweitzer: The comparison idea. We compare ourselves with people who are
similar in self-relevant domains, domains we care about, and those are the most intense
comparisons. When people have outperformed us by just a little bit and they’re similar to us,
so the person in the cubicle next to us, our neighbor, our brother-in-law, our siblings, so
somebody who's similar and it’s a domain that we really value, so if we are a long distance
runner and somebody has a good running time we care about it but if somebody wins a baking
competition we might be just happy for them. When the performance is somewhere in the
vicinity of I could have done that those are the most intense comparisons. When somebody is
up from us by a lot then we can be filled with admiration. I couldn’t have seen myself do that
or that’s a domain that so different from me there we can be much more happy.
>> Adam Galinsky: But there are power dynamics. So you see Maurice's expertise in
comparisons, my expertise in power because I think that one of the things we do talk about the
book is phenomenally gets talked a lot about in the popular literature which something called
the Queen Bee phenomenon and this has been empirically validated where they showed that,
you can say it’s women, but it's really any person who is a rare species in a high status group.
So that often is sort of the solo woman in the executive team and they become particularly
punishing towards other women who might be rivals to their throne. So there you can see sort
of one of those examples where that happens. It's not something unique to women, it’s just
you need to, there’s no one also like me here, I like being special, and I like being part of this
high status group; I don't want anyone to invade my territory. That's an example where
someone here is comparing people below them and trying [indiscernible] them.
Another thing that happens though in organizations all the time is two people join an
organization, they’re peers, they’re peers, they’re peers even as they rise up and then one of
them moves up one notch higher. That gets back to Maurice's point about that's really painful
but it's also problematic because I don't know how to interact with this person now. They were
my friend, they were my peer, and now they're my boss. Are they still my friend or are they
now my boss and do I have to treat them differently? So people really suffer and struggle with
those types of relationships.
Maurice and I are writing a piece right now about why it makes us uncomfortable when our
friends ask us to help them get a job at our work. There's lots of reasons why that happens. If
there's our friends and they come to work with us it might ruin our friendship, or they might
outperform us and it's going to be really painful, or they might suck and make us look bad
because we recommended them. So maybe it’s better off there actually are no positions in my
organization and don't pass on the resume. It makes it a little bit more complicated. Yeah.
>>: When does the sort of discontent with comparisons turn into Schadenfreude? What tips it
over?
>> Maurice Schweitzer: so Schadenfreude is sort of delicious construct where we take pleasure
in someone else's downfall. Think of when Martha Stewart got sent to prison the incredible
media coverage about how did she look in pinstripes and what is she baking with the prison
cranberries? We are just enjoying sort of this delicious enjoyment of somebody else's
misfortune. And Schadenfreude, it's an incredibly common phenomenon and we do this with
people that we feel some envy toward and it’s again those ingredients, that is people that
we've been looking up to or people that have made us feel somehow inadequate. So Martha
Stewart is this incredible figure, but she's folding napkins better, her Thanksgiving dinner
always looks better, everything looks so organized, and we see somebody fall who we looked
up to we often find ourselves enjoying that. You see this with gossip, for example. So we'll
serve gossip about that person who we thought always was a little bit sort of better in some
other way and we find out they're not, and we take pleasure in it.
>> Adam Galinsky: I think there's two other things to add about Schadenfreude. First is
Schadenfreude tends to be a little bit asymmetric. So if the slightly less status or lower, less
powerful person that feels more Schadenfruede towards that. So one of the famous days they
did that they looked at German and Dutch fans during the World Cup. Germany was pretty
happy when the Dutch lost especially if they had already lost. So you get much more delighted.
If I’m no longer in it, but the Dutch got particular joy when the Germans lost when they had
been knocked out.
I grew up in Chapel Hill North Carolina and I grew up to hate Duke with all of my heart and soul
and many people in Chapel Hill felt that way but Duke is kind of like Chapel Hill, we don't like
them, but we don't have the same vitriol and Schadenfreude of that Chapel Hill people. He
mentioned the 2010 Championship, if Gordon Heyward from Butler hit the half-court shot it
may have been the greatest moment of my life if that had gone in.
And then just one final thing and then I see two hands up over here. The other thing is how do
we prevent Schadenfreude? It's how we treat people when we have power is really one of the
ways that we can prevent Schadenfreude. If we can be that better perspective taker and treat
people with a level of respect, when we fall people are either going to be there to help rather
than to take delight in our fall.
>>: [inaudible] resentment.
>> Adam Galinsky: Yeah. If you can manage that resentment you're going to be much better
off. There was a hand here and then one back there.
>>: This one is from online. Any thoughts on how to get balances and different dimensions
become part of your natural tendency?
>> Maurice Schweitzer: To make that balance hardwired?
>>: That’s what it sounds like.
>> Maurice Schweitzer: So the question, at least as I'm misinterpreting it, is how do we
basically get this balance hardwired? So there's this balance where we can compete too much,
cooperate too much, we can look at comparisons that sort of drive us to be miserable or can
motivate us. How do we find that balance? I think the first key step is to really recognize this
idea that is we like to naturally classify people and things around us. So we classify people as
engineers or marketing people. At a very young age we classify people as girls and boys; we are
constantly categorizing our world and what we are suggesting is sort of challenge that we are
not friends or foes we are both, and to recognize that the people around us that we are
interacting with, the people on our team, the people at home, we are friends and foes and
we've got to make sure that we share credit and that we make sure we get credit. We need to
make sure that we are making comparisons in a way that will help us and don't always hurt us
and I think that awareness can put us on the right path but it’s a constant challenge.
>> Adam Galinsky: I also think how it’s do you find the right balance that requires a process of
somewhat not constant but somewhat common reflection. Just ask yourself in my relationship
with Maurice do we have a balance? In my relationship with my wife do I have the right
balance? And asking ourselves that question and having that reflection. Even take something
like the best public speaker in the world or the best baseball hitter, the best golfer, they all have
coaches. So even the things that they do really well they still need some help and I think we all
need help and that reflection helps us. So one of the things that Maurice does when he teaches
negotiation is he has everyone write a recollection of every negotiation and then halfway
through he has them ask themselves that question. Am I in balance in my negotiation? Am I
always get good outcomes but then hurting other people along the way, am I always getting
bad outcomes because I'm being too nice, am I finding that right balance between those two
forces? I think his task is a great one, just an opportunity to reflect. Yeah.
>>: You mentioned power dynamics when you talk about the doctors. As you’ve done your
research and you’ve looked at cross-cultures and depending on the country there's different
power [inaudible]? Any trends? Any examples where it's easier to cooperate and compete at
the same time and others where it's not?
>> Adam Galinsky: Hierarchy is very complicated because hierarchy has this a benefit of
creating patterns of deference that create cooperation and so it actually turns out I mentioned
countries that are hierarchical had more people die on the mountain. They also had more
people succeed on the mountain so it's a complex balance between these forces. I think there
generally is a drive in the world towards trying to find ways to have collective intelligence and
ways to get to collective intelligence to make sure that everyone's perspective, even those with
less power, are able to be integrated. One of the ways we see this in the military is military in
the special forces have much less hierarchy and then in the normal other areas of the military
because they have to deal with complex decisions that have to be made it very quickly they
need to be able to integrate everyone's perspective even those that wouldn't have the most
power. So I think there's a trend towards that. We want to get the benefit of hierarchy but
without the downsides and so trying to find ways to do that, avenues to do that is successful.
Candor App is another example of that.
>> Maurice Schweitzer: One more question. Is it a good one?
>>: [inaudible] ask about Zappos. When you say there’s no hierarchy I think [inaudible] people
become more of a ruler and maybe put themselves in charge. So they’re still in the hierarchy
put their own people are in charge, right? [inaudible] is better. [inaudible] is worse.
[inaudible]. Do you think that is like this or different?
>> Maurice Schweitzer: I'll just say very, very quickly. One thing I've learned from Adam
throughout history in every human collective there's always hierarchy. So even when we think
that there's no hierarchy, we naturally find ourselves in some hierarchy. So every human
collective has it. So, whether we call it a holacracy or not there is a hierarchy and I think your
point is exactly right that is we could end up with the wrong people driving decisions if we're
not careful.
>> Adam Galinsky: And I think the final thing which Maurice and I are actually working on a
project about is the idea that we think rules are constricting, but when you don't have any rules
you get the bullies dominate and you have an outcome that is predictable, and so what rules do
is they give equal opportunity for people to compete without having just the bullies sort of
dominate so I think exactly your point is really important. Thank you guys so much.