The Culture Puzzle
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The Culture Puzzle
Copyright © 2021 by Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry and Greg Urban
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For Robin Komita, as ever
—Mario Moussa
For Carolyn, co-gardener of my most cherished community
—Derek Newberry
For my little family, where community starts for me
—Greg Urban
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Contents
Introduction: The Art of Giving and Getting
PART ONE
THE PHARAOH, THE CEO, AND THE GARDENER
CHAPTER 1
The Pharaoh and the CEO: Seeing What’s Right in Front of
Your Nose
CHAPTER 2
Tribal Conflict in the Workplace: Peeking behind the Org
Chart
CHAPTER 3
The Gardener’s Creed: Harnessing the Four Driving Forces
PART TWO
THE FOUR FORCES OF CULTURE
CHAPTER 4
The Vision Ahead: Writing Your Tribe’s Story
CHAPTER 5
A Tribe of Tribes: Satisfying Interests and Building a
Movement
CHAPTER 6
The Force of Habit: Reinventing the Rules
CHAPTER 7
Bright Ideas: Nurturing the Innovative Impulse
PART
THREE
CHAPTER 8
THE DREAM OF SUSTAINABILITY
The Vigilant Gardener: Pulling Weeds and Cultivating
Wildflowers
Conclusion: The CEO and the Dreamer
Appendix: The Culture Evaluator
Notes
Topical Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Authors and the Illustrator
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INTRODUCTION
The Art of Giving and Getting
One rainy, sweltering morning in rural Brazil during the summer of 1975,
a young anthropologist named Greg Urban sat on the dirt floor of a wooden
hut in a village hundreds of miles from São Paulo. Across from him
squatted an elder named Knowing One. Knowing One had come of age
decades earlier, before his tribe had established peaceful contact with the
Brazilian government. Greg had made the long journey through the jungle
to learn all he could about Knowing One’s unique culture.
Greg began the conversation by asking about customs and beliefs that
stretched back to a distant hunter-gatherer past. He was struck that a strong
spirit of give-and-take permeated every aspect of life in this isolated
community. To the elder and his fellow tribe members, nothing mattered
more than treating everyone with the utmost generosity. This custom helped
ward off evil, selfish witches, who cleverly disguised themselves as humans
in order to prey on hapless victims.
As Greg began to ask another question, Knowing One interrupted by
pointing at the rafters. There perched a brand-new pair of prized Adidas
sneakers that Greg had carefully stored away for use on special occasions.
Knowing One remarked that Greg owned two pairs of shoes. Greg nodded.
Then the venerable elder added, “I have none.”
Greg realized that Knowing One had just issued a polite request that a
tribe member would naturally honor. “I’m not sure the shoes would fit,”
Greg replied.
“Well, let’s see,” proposed the elder.
Greg retrieved the sneakers. They fit perfectly. At that moment, Greg
saw that he had given away his prized possession in exchange for
something far more valuable: a relationship that would last for many, many
years. As time went by, Knowing One helped Greg complete his research,
introducing him to others in the tribe and explaining habits that were
completely alien to a social scientist raised in New Lenox, Illinois
(population 1,000). Greg’s research, in turn, benefited the entire village,
gaining the attention of government officials who provided sorely needed
medical resources and other support.
This encounter taught Greg one of the most important lessons he has
ever learned about culture. As he puts it, “It’s all about giving and getting.”
That distinctively human exchange opens the door to a whole world of
needs, meanings, and aspirations.
Years later, working as a business consultant back in the United States,
Greg began to appreciate that lesson even more as he saw how the most
astute managers operate much like anthropologists performing fieldwork in
the Amazonian jungle. They pay attention to subtle cues that reveal the deep
motivations that people across civilizations have expressed in wondrously
diverse ways: a longing to be part of a group, a desire to receive recognition
for being special, and the drive to do good work. You will never find the
solution to your culture puzzle without knowing how to connect these vital
social and emotional needs to the other pieces of your organization.
Whether you are trying to execute a bold new strategy, make your
business more agile and creative, or pull off a major acquisition, culture will
make or break your efforts. But culture, like the trickiest brainteaser, often
baffles us. Just ask the former CEOs of Uber, Barclays, Wells Fargo, and
any number of other organizations where dysfunctional cultures disrupted
multi-billion-dollar enterprises. Something went terribly wrong at these
companies because executives failed to get a handle on the way culture
really works.
Culture puzzles even the smartest leaders. All too often, they assume it
will take care of itself. Or they treat it as an unsolvable problem. It’s a
puzzle, to be sure, but it is solvable. Yet it never solves itself. You can make
all the hard, practical decisions about running your operation (reporting
lines, incentives, investments, and so on), but they will never resolve the
hardest people issues.
As we write this introduction to our book, we find ourselves facing one
of the biggest culture puzzles in history. How will we and our organizations
endure and rebuild after the global COVID-19 pandemic? What will the
“new normal” look like for businesses? Who do we include and exclude
from our communities? How should we make the crucial decisions that will
affect our livelihoods and our health? What’s fair? What’s just? What’s
important? At every turn, we confront these inescapable questions. To our
minds, culture has become Job One. If we fail to take it on, we will all
suffer decline, apathy, disengagement, and fragmentation. But we can
choose to tackle it wisely and unleash a new era of creativity, productivity,
civility, and prosperity.
Drawing from our combined 75 years of experience as anthropologists
and business consultants, we show you how to harness the forces that shape
your culture and align it with your strategy, goals, and values. Many
business experts will tell you that culture starts at the top, where members
of the C-suite hold the keys to success. But any anthropologist worth their
salt will tell you that culture is everywhere. Everybody holds the keys in
their hands: middle managers, the front-line people who do the hard,
everyday work to bring products and services to market, all the way down
to the folks who wax the floors and swab every surface with disinfectant.
It’s a collective power that’s always circulating, shaping every conversation,
meeting, and decision. In the pages ahead, we will show you how to harness
that power and make it work for your organization.
The great baseball player, amateur social scientist, and cracker-barrel
philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
His wry comment implied that most of the time we aren’t watching. That’s
why we offer one simple rule for beginning your journey toward
understanding and managing culture: Pay attention! Don’t let busyness
distract you from the issues that matter most. When you slow down, take a
good look, and listen carefully, you begin to notice the subtle and not-sosubtle pieces of the culture puzzle. But sometimes we need help interpreting
what we see. As another philosopher, the Nobel Prize–winning Henri
Bergson, said, “We may perhaps see very well, but we do not know what
we are looking at.” Not to worry. We will teach you how to interpret
valuable clues to your culture that you might not otherwise notice.
How This Book Will Help You Solve the Culture Puzzle
Part One: The Pharaoh, the CEO, and the Gardener (Chapters One
through Three) lays out all the pieces of the puzzle, explains how they fit
together, and urges you to lead like a gardener as you mull over how to
design a strong, sustainable culture for your tribe. We define culture as a
process of learning and adaptation that begins when a tribe forms. Four
timeless forces drive that process: vision, interests, habits, and innovation.
We show how they function like the natural forces—soil, water, and sun—
that both shape and satisfy our deepest social and emotional needs.
Part Two: The Four Forces of Culture (Chapters Four through Seven)
plunges more deeply into each of the forces, offering practical guidance to
leaders at all levels of an organization—from global CEOs to team leaders,
managers, and supervisors, and even small business entrepreneurs—on
creating a winning culture. Full of stories and examples, these chapters
provide a step-by-step how-to guide to harnessing and managing the forces
in your organization.
Part Three: The Dream of Sustainability (Chapter Eight and the
Conclusion) shows how to keep your culture healthy and flourishing.
Gardeners dream about the living, blooming profusion of colors that spring
from the fertile earth and express their vision. Yet they know they cannot
just sit back and wait for the harvest. They must cultivate and nurture every
plant, pull a few weeds, and keep supplying the care and nutrients each
plant needs in order to produce the best results.
Throughout this book you will read about athletes, social reformers,
rogues, scientists, misfits, novelists, and business executives who illustrate
the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to culture. From time to time,
we will discuss events that are still unfolding in today’s news, such as
COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. Before we touch on the current state of
affairs, however, let’s transport ourselves 3,000 years back to the sunbaked
Egyptian desert.
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PART ONE
THE PHARAOH, THE CEO, AND THE
GARDENER
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CHAPTER 1
The Pharaoh and the CEO
Seeing What’s Right in Front of Your Nose
He rode with his head held high into the vast luminous valley, gazing
from a white-gold chariot at the surrounding cliffs. To his regal eyes, they
formed a shape reminiscent of the symbol for “horizon.” Instantly, he knew.
In a flash of divine inspiration, he decided to build a great city on that
barren spot. He would call it “The Place Where God Appears.” Then and
there, he celebrated the momentous occasion, kneeling before a makeshift
altar with an offering of bread, beer, plants, fruit, and incense. As he rose to
his feet, he ordered that stone slabs mark the boundaries of the metropolis
from where he would rule the world.
His name was Pharaoh Akhenaten, and he governed Egypt in the
fourteenth century B.C. During his reign, he introduced a dizzying array of
cultural innovations, ranging from novel artistic and architectural styles,
newly coined words and phrases that expressed his self-aggrandizing
ideology, and a thorough overhaul of administrative structures. Most
remarkable of all, he created a radically unorthodox set of religious beliefs
that installed him at the center of the universe as the Sun God. Before
Akhenaten, pharaohs acted as intermediaries between the people and
hundreds of gods. But now the pharaoh was himself a god.
Had you lived under Akhenaten’s rule, would you have appreciated him
as an innovative visionary, or would you have dismissed him as a
megalomaniacal madman? Scholars have vigorously debated this question
for nearly a century. Many have pointed out that his subjects must have
admired his cultural innovations in art, politics, and philosophy, while
others have insisted that few would have easily abandoned deeply ingrained
religious beliefs.
Most of the pharaoh’s subjects, it turns out, did not embrace the big
change. Widespread unrest, a collapsing economy, and Akhenaten’s death, a
mere 17 years into his reign, ended the cult of the Sun God. Akhenaten’s
successor, Tutankhamen, honoring the wishes of the people, reintroduced
the cherished gods and restored their temples.
This tale of a prideful pharaoh who fails to change long-standing cultural
beliefs remains keenly relevant today. Even if you occupy a position of
supreme power—as a supervisor, a project manager, or a global CEO—you
need to understand your organization’s culture. In an era of unprecedented
change, thriving in the “next normal” will take humility and hard work. If
you attempt to exert godlike control, you will end up watching your plans
for a prosperous future join Akhenaten’s vision in the graveyard of failed
projects.
Beginning to Assemble the Culture Puzzle
The history of events in Egypt some 4,000 years ago repeats itself every
day in the world of sprawling corporate campuses when modern managers
choose the path of Akhenaten. Obsessed with building their “shining city,”
they mandate massive cultural changes, hoping an entirely new way of
doing things will propel their organizations to global domination.
“We’re going to cut out the expensive, boring stuff and just build the top.”
Picture “Sphynx, Inc.,” an underperforming multi-billion-dollar
company whose CEO Lyle King experiences a flash of inspiration, a vision
of a whole new set of beliefs and behaviors that will motivate the Sphynx
employees to achieve greatness. “Forget the stodgy old way we’ve done
business in the past,” King declares. “The brand-new Sphynx will make
Apple look like a lemonade stand.”
CEO King dictates the desired changes and sits back to watch the
magical transformation. Do people eagerly embrace the new way of
conducting business? Maybe. Maybe not. They might pay lip service to the
new values, while in their hearts they harbor a tight ball of resentment and
resistance. If so, in subtle yet powerful ways, they will sabotage the culture
change, and 12 months later, with Sphynx’s balance sheet bleeding red ink,
the board will have to show the once godlike CEO the door.
In 2013, Harrison Weber, the editorial director for WeWork, a company
that designs flexible workspaces for organizations and freelancers, listened
to a stunning vision every bit as grand as Lyle King’s and Akhenaten’s. Late
at night, not altogether sober, he was standing on the ledge at the top of the
57-story Woolworth Building in Manhattan. Next to him swayed two tipsy
coworkers and a fellow named Adam Neumann, the six-foot-five
charismatic founder of WeWork, who was sketching his grand vision of a
brave new world where people worked in amazing new environments that
would inspire them to achieve unparalleled results.
Weber vividly recalled the moment. “I was up there with him on the top
of the world, and he said, ‘Everything is going to be amazing.’” Neumann’s
idea for what he called a “physical social network” would, he proclaimed,
transform any business into a sleek new world-beater. As the New York
Times reporter Amy Chozick described it, WeWork would create a space
where “work and play bled into one” and would “elevate the world’s
consciousness.” Weber put it more simply: “It was like, wait, you mean life.
What you’re talking about is just regular life.” Maybe so, yet there was
nothing “regular” about the way investors responded to Neumann’s
WeWork vision. The company quickly attained a $47 billion valuation. But
then a series of failed projects rapidly eroded that sky-high number. By
2020, just seven years after that evening when Neumann and his three
employees had gazed like kings down on the Manhattan cityscape, the
company’s value had plummeted to roughly $9 billion. A failed IPO in late
2019 exposed Neumann’s vision as little more than cult-like hype.
Masayoshi Son, head of the Japanese investment company Soft-Bank, bet a
staggering $4.4 billion on WeWork. Asked to explain the regrettable
decision, Son replied in his tentative English: “Well, he had no business
plan. But his eyes were very strong. Strong eyes, strong, shining eyes. I
could tell.”
Any powerful leader can command sweeping change. But commands
alone do not get the job done. If you merely proselytize from a perch, as
Neumann and Akhenaten did, bulldozing ahead with wildly ambitious
initiatives, you will find yourself mired in a minefield of resistance and
even sabotage. You must solve what we call the culture puzzle.
No other animal species rivals human beings in their ability to learn,
adapt, and cooperate in the pursuit of basic needs and lofty aspirations. You
can scarcely imagine the smartest gorillas, whales, or dolphins founding a
religion or incorporating a global conglomerate. The ability of human
beings to form a culture, adapting the way we think and act to cope with
ever- changing conditions, has enabled us to accomplish astonishing feats.
We have built cities and left footprints on the moon. And yet: toxic cultures
have demolished an endless parade of organizations and societies. Just take
a look at Akhenaten, Neumann, and thousands of other grand visionaries
who have done more harm than good with their ambitious but arrogant
plans for success.
What knowledge and skills do you need in order to build a strong,
vibrant, agile, and adaptive culture, where people eagerly engage in the
meaningful work that will achieve extraordinary results for the
organization? We have written this book to answer that question. We bring a
lot of experience to the undertaking. During a combined 75 years’ worth of
research, teaching, consulting, and training, we have learned a few
fundamental lessons about what makes a culture healthy and how you can
make it grow to meet your goals.
Lesson #1: Success begins and ends with culture. Most culture- building
mistakes occur when a leader views culture as an add-on component, a
mere sideshow to the main concerns of running a successful enterprise. Too
often, strategy, finance, and operational issues occupy the front seats of the
bus, with culture riding along in the back. In our view, culture should take
the wheel. Strategy, finance, operations, and their cousins do not fulfill
basic human needs. Culture does. It fulfills the needs that have been
hardwired into our basic biological makeup, needs as essential to our daily
lives and well-being as food, air, and water. It’s no exaggeration to say that
culture makes us human.
Which leads to Lesson #2: Culture satisfies some of our most important
needs. We all require deep and rewarding relationships, we all love to solve
problems that reap rewards for our group, and we all yearn for dignity and
respect as we get ahead in life. The many different strategies people employ
in the service of those motivations defines their culture. You never do it
alone. In anthropological terms, it takes a tribe. Its members undergo the
most profound education, learning, in the end, how to live in the tribe and
contribute to its success. (Chapter Two examines how tribes form and
evolve.) When leaders talk about building a strong and adaptive culture,
they often forget they are not starting with a blank slate but with a rich
mosaic of teams, units, groups of work buddies, and on and on, each with
its own unique culture. Even if you serve as the CEO of Sphynx, Inc., you
are only one of many culture CEOs finding ways to meet their particular
needs. A culture never emerges solely from a mandate from on high. It
grows out of the many tribes that inhabit every organization. To create a
unified culture, you need to engage with others on their terms, approaching
the task like an anthropologist exploring a new land, with a blank notebook
and an open mind. In other words, to build a productive and prosperous
culture, you must understand and care about all of the people who live and
work in it.
Lesson #3: Culture changes. The natural world changes, societies
change, people change. Why do some top-performing businesses with rocksolid cultures fall apart overnight? When you look at your own
organization, why do terrific teams come together almost magically in one
unit, while in another disgruntled groups seem to spring out of nowhere?
Answer: all of the little cultures in your organization’s bigger culture
constantly grow, evolve, and adapt to change. The moment you think
everyone is finally moving in the same direction, something shifts, forcing
you to rethink and rebuild your culture all over again.
Culture may at times seem like an out-of-control maverick with a mind
of its own, but culture change follows principles as consistent as the planets
and stars traveling across the sky. If you pay close attention, you will see
the patterns emerge. We’ve spent decades looking for those patterns with
the goal of helping leaders understand and harness them. Just as heavenly
bodies follow the laws of physics, organizations follow the laws of cultural
motion, propelled by forces that influence how we fulfill our needs and get
things done together.
Four major forces drive culture: Vision, Interest, Habit, and Innovation.
These forces have shaped every tribe, every organization, every nation,
every society, and every civilization since the beginning of humanity. To
build a strong culture, and bring your tribes together, you must harness all
four forces and channel their collective energy toward supporting your
organizational goals.
The Four Driving Forces
Vision. Every organization maintains a vision, communicated in
mission and values statements, strategic plans, credos and
mottoes, websites, speeches at town hall meetings, standard
operating procedures, rules, and other means of broadcasting an
organization’s culture. Vision tells the story of who you are as
an organization and why you exist. Formal vision statements
usually come from the top, but they mean nothing unless every
member of an organization wholeheartedly embraces this larger
story.
Interest. Everyone, as we have said, is motivated to fulfill basic
needs for strong relationships, meaningful work, and dignity.
Jobs that satisfy these needs fuel the drive to accomplish an
organization’s vision. When people feel energized, they eagerly
collaborate with colleagues, work hard to get results, and take
great pride in belonging to an extended tribe.
Habit. In a strong sustainable culture, desired beliefs and behaviors
become daily habits. What may have begun as a change
initiative gradually becomes a shared routine, or “the way we do
things around here.”
Innovation. While strong, productive cultures endure, they must
constantly and quickly adapt to changes in the marketplace, the
economy, and the competitive environment. Sometimes it even
makes sense to borrow effective strategies from rivals. A tribe
must maintain a delicate balance between continuity and the
need to change and innovate in an increasingly chaotic modern
world. That requires dedication to both vision and innovation.
The forces resemble pieces of a puzzle. (The endnotes review the
extensive social science research that led us to a deeper understanding of
the forces.) When you dump them onto a card table, they look like a
random, confusing, headache-inducing mess.
But once you fit them together, you begin to see how they relate and
interconnect. Now it all looks manageable.
Even at this early stage of your quest to solve the culture puzzle, you can
begin assessing your organization, a prospective employer, one of your
teams, or even a company whose stock you are thinking about buying. You
can use the Culture Evaluator in the appendix to conduct a more complete
assessment of your culture, but for now try answering these questions:
• Tribes. Does your organization operate primarily as one tribe,
many tribes, or even competing ones? Does leadership do enough
to create a feeling of unity among tribes? Do tribes collaborate
with and support each other?
• Vision. Do people understand a clear set of values? Do they
embrace the operating rules that support those values? Can they
cite a credible, motivating plan that illuminates the path to a
successful future?
• Interest. Do people across the organization fully engage with one
another and their work? Do they feel they receive proper
recognition for their work? Do people accomplish impressive
goals and experience a sense of purpose as they do so?
• Habit. Do people follow individual habits and shared
organizational routines that promote success? Does your
organization use rituals to reinforce positive habits and routines?
• Innovation. Do people apply their utmost creativity to solving
the biggest and most pressing problems? Are they always looking
for ways to make incremental improvements? Do they take
divergent viewpoints seriously? Are they open to new ways of
doing things?
As you become more comfortable thinking in terms of the puzzle, the
more you will realize its power to help you make smart and lasting cultural
changes. Based on your initial reflection, where do you think you need to
do the most work?
Knowing When to Go Fast and When to Go Slow
Culture is a timeless, distinctly human, collective process of learning and
adaptation. For millennia, we humans have needed to solve problems
related to our most basic needs and highest aspirations, creating an
environment that strongly supports our efforts to learn and grow. Culture is
the lifeblood of any group that lives and works together. The blood never
stops circulating . . . until the group or organization disbands.
Here’s the puzzling thing: although culture defines organizations and
even our humanity, most of us fail to see it clearly. But you can feel its
effects everywhere. Even if you cannot get a firm handle on it, you can tell
when it falters. Paying attention to the Four Forces model helps you
understand what drives culture and see ways you might get it on track. It
makes the abstract concrete.
What doomed Akhenaten’s big culture change? The people did not
embrace his wild, new vision, which expressed his personal lust for power
and gave scant attention to what mattered most in their humble lives. It did
not satisfy their essential interests in getting their needs met. They quickly
reverted to the old ways after Akhenaten died, failing to turn the new beliefs
into habits. Given all of the other disconnects, it’s no surprise that they
failed to draw on innovation to improve a deteriorating economy.
What caused WeWork to slip and fall from that high precipice?
Neumann’s vision, for all of the rhetoric about community, proved to be an
overhyped, idiosyncratic fantasy about his own greatness. The workspaces
failed to resonate with the actual interests of the people who constituted the
“we” in WeWork. Employees created their own set of habits that had little
to do with the larger strategy. In the end, investors concluded the company’s
business model lacked the true innovation needed to be sustainable.
Such cultural breakdowns happen all the time. Just consider all the highprofile businesses (Uber, Boeing, Wells Fargo, the Weinstein Company, to
name a few) that engaged in stunningly bad, if not outright unethical, and
even illegal behavior. It’s often so bad that journalists, regulators,
politicians, and the general public lament the destructive effects of toxic
cultures. When cultures implode, we always wonder, “What were those
executives thinking?” Well, they weren’t thinking deeply enough about the
culture puzzle.
Failing to think deeply about culture seldom stems solely from malice or
greed. Yes, arrogant leaders might believe that societal norms and laws do
not apply to them, but culture failures almost always trace their roots in part
to simple inattention. So often we have heard: “We just need to hire the
right people, initiate the right strategies, generate profit, and build our
balance sheet, and our culture will take care of itself.” Sorry, but if you pay
little attention to your culture, it will probably grow into one that
disappoints and disempowers you. Though it often seems almost invisible,
culture wields extraordinary power over the decisions you reach, the words
you utter, the plans you form, and the actions you take.
We often compare the typical experience of culture to operating a plane
on autopilot. We ride along without thinking about the controls (forces) that
are keeping it in the air and speeding toward its destination. The Nobel
Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this the “fast mode.”
We go along, doing whatever we’re doing (milking a cow, fastening a
flange to a widget, running a Fortune 500 company), not fully aware of
what we are doing or why. We decide to build a city in the desert, start a
company that elevates human consciousness, or just make dinner, and then
we barrel ahead into action.
Operating in the fast mode works fine in many situations:
• First, going fast helps us operate in a 24/7 business environment
where competitors are plotting day and night to outperform us
and stake a claim to our most valuable customers. It also serves us
well as we move through a time-crunched Saturday afternoon,
ticking items off our to-do list.
• Second, the fast mode does not require a lot of effort. It’s so much
easier to react than reflect. You might like to picture yourself as
Auguste Rodin’s statue The Thinker, with your brow furrowed as
you contemplate Big Ideas, but, by the end of all that deep
concentration, the pensive fellow was probably so worn out from
taxing mental activity that he ended up with little energy to tackle
something practical, like fixing a five-course gourmet dinner or
even tying his shoes.
• Third, the fast mode obeys one of nature’s fundamental laws, the
“conservation of energy.” A successful person saves enough
energy to respond to all of the unexpected threats that pop up
every day in life and business. Barack Obama wore the same gray
and blue suits nearly every day of his presidency to conserve the
valuable mental energy he needed to make big decisions affecting
the world. Your day job may not directly impact the fate of
nations, but all the little decisions required to get through a
typical day can still make you less effective in the moments that
matter.
The fast mode is a comfortable habit. Why tax our brains or strain our
muscles when doing things the way we have always done them requires so
little effort? Why take on the hard work of thinking deeply about and
carefully assembling all those pesky pieces of the culture puzzle, when you
can let culture take care of itself?
The famed psychologist William James developed a comprehensive
“philosophy of habit.” His work on the subject has influenced many
contemporary organizational experts, such as best-selling authors Jim
Collins and Charles Duhigg. In a brief 1887 scientific study called Habit,
James wrote, “When we look at living creatures from an outward point of
view, one of the first things that strikes us is that they are bundles of
habits. . . . Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society.”
When you harness that flywheel of habit in the service of basic human
needs—when, even better, you harness all of the Four Forces to serve those
needs—you will energize your organization and propel it to world-class
status. In this chapter, we have shared examples where the opposite
happened. In later chapters, however, we will tell many stories about
organizations that solved the culture puzzle, assembling all of the pieces
into a satisfying, harmonious whole.
The success stories follow a similar plotline. A keen observer realizes
their culture needs to shift. They take time to evaluate the strengths and
weaknesses of the current culture before they introduce any big changes. In
other words, they go slow before they go fast. To slow down, they imitate
the best aspects of The Thinker, putting their chin in their hand and taking
the time to reflect, but they never withdraw. In fact, going slow often also
means engaging more actively and probing every part of an organization,
for as long as it takes, to understand the current culture. Before making a
list of any new habits they want others to develop, they pinpoint the old
habits that are stalling progress toward results. It’s not easy. We all naturally
prefer to stay in our comfort zones. But it takes time and effort to build the
good habits that breed success. Our research into corporate failures reveals
that all too many of them occurred because their leaders thought themselves
so infallible that they could turn any vision, even a cockeyed one, into a
virtual religion.
Elizabeth Holmes offers an excellent case in point. Like Neumann, she
won initial accolades as a visionary genius. Her biotech company Theranos
achieved a valuation of $9 billion because investors believed her claims that
the company’s automated blood testing devices would revolutionize
medicine by using minute amounts of blood for quick diagnoses. In 2015,
Forbes named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female
billionaire in America. But her perch atop the pyramid did not last long. In
2015, claims that she had defrauded investors and government regulators
made headlines, and, in June 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes
and her lover, former Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh Balwani, on
nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire
fraud for distributing blood tests with falsified results to consumers. By
2020, Holmes’s net worth had plunged to approximately zero.
According to the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou, even as the
claims of fraud made headlines, Holmes announced to remaining
employees that “she was building a religion.” Balwani went further,
insisting that anyone who was unwilling to “show complete devotion” to
the cause should “get the (expletive) out.”
What were they thinking?
You know the answer already. They were going too fast to think much at
all. It’s only natural to avoid expending the energy required to switch modes
from fast to slow and really pay attention, but there are times when your
future and even survival depend on it. To achieve your greatest ambitions
(whether you are launching a start-up, serve as CEO of a Fortune 100
company, have just won the election for mayor of your town, lead an
intramural basketball team, hope one day that the Museum of Modern Art
will hang one of your paintings on its wall, or simply want to do a good job
as a parent, friend, or someone’s significant other), you must, from time to
time, flip the switch from fast to slow and pause to listen deeply to others
and discover what they need. When you listen, you hear about the positive
aspects of a culture that should be kept. You also learn about the parts that,
like Akhenaten’s decrees, are best left in the ash heap of your organization’s
history.
WHAT IS CULTURE?
Culture . . .
• Emerges from the interaction of the Four Forces
• Guides ways of thinking, behaving, valuing, and communicating
• Produces collective accomplishments
• Forms groups and promotes a feeling of belonging
• Changes ceaselessly
As the novelist George Orwell put it, “To see what is in front of one’s
nose needs a constant effort.”
Capturing the Hearts and Minds of the People
Let’s take a closer look at what went wrong with Pharaoh Akhenaten’s
attempt to shift Egypt’s culture. Marsha Hill, a curator at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, summed up history’s verdict: “Everybody
likes revolutionaries at some level. Someone who has a real, good strong
idea that makes it seem like things are going to get better. Of course, it
didn’t work out.”
Akhenaten went fast, moving quickly and systematically to replace longstanding religious practices, myths, and symbols. He also introduced a
blitzkrieg of innovations in language, architecture, and policy. Yet even as
his people outwardly conformed to these massive changes, they protected
the old beliefs that were deeply engraved in their hearts and minds. They
secretly hid away figurines of the traditional gods and molds for casting
amulets in their likeness.
Pharaoh remained oblivious to what his people really thought about him
and his Sun God dreams. Limestone reliefs housed in Berlin’s Neues
Museum depict tender domestic scenes of Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti
snuggling with their children, but historians know now that the people’s
attitude toward the family was harsh and unforgiving. According to the
archaeologist Anna Stevens, “For most people, life was tough, with hard
labor and a basic diet.” More than two-thirds of the population died before
age 35. Stevens speculates that they were literally “worked to death.”
Children suffered as well. Archaeological evidence shows widespread
malnutrition among the younger generation.
Once again, we see how arrogance and a refusal to see what’s right in
front of your nose produce stunning disconnects. Stevens notes that the
tombs of senior officials contain detailed images of the royal family, while
such homages never appear in the cemeteries of the common people.
“There’s no mention of Akhenaten or Nefertiti. It’s like it’s not their place.
You can have very radical changes at the top, but below that, nothing
changes.”
While a culture change often springs from the collective mind of the Csuite, it will not take hold throughout an organization unless it captures
hearts and minds. According to a recent study published in the Harvard
Business Review, CEOs and CHROs (chief human resource officers)
identify “managing and improving the culture” as their top priority for
talent development, yet most contemporary workers do not see the effects
of that belief. They hear the words, but they do not take them to heart:
• 87 percent of employees don’t understand the goals that come
from top management.
• 69 percent don’t believe in the goals (if, in fact, they do
understand the goals).
• 90 percent don’t behave in ways that reflect the goals.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers study confirms these disheartening statistics,
finding that less than a third of workers feel connected to their company’s
purpose and that over half feel less than “somewhat” excited about their
jobs. Bottom line: there’s a serious disconnect between what leaders say
and what their people think and feel about what they say. That gap explains
a lot of the underperformance many organizations suffer today.
The pieces of the culture puzzle begin to fall into place when you realize
that a vision must capture everyone’s imagination. The people may publicly
bow to a leader who announces the latest Big Change, but if they resist
buying into it, they will not devote their best efforts to the cause and will
even sabotage it behind the scenes. Culture change does not work if people
only pay lip service to new beliefs and behaviors. It has to go deeper, much
deeper. Given that, it’s not surprising that it often feels like an impossibleto-implement process that can only end in frustration. “Can’t people just get
it?” you cry. “Why do productivity and profitability keep sagging despite all
of the time and effort we have put into this campaign to do things
differently?”
Well, we would answer those questions without missing a beat: you need
to harness the Four Forces (vision, interest, habit, and innovation) to create
a new culture. When you tap into them, you will assemble a culture that
sustains a whole new way of doing things. Just as important, the tenets of
the new culture must keep evolving to meet new challenges in the business
environment. To come alive, it has to keep endlessly moving, adapting, and
growing. When that happens, you can flip back to the fast mode and, at
least for a while, let the enterprise cruise on autopilot. At the same time, you
must prepare yourself to go slow again if the culture needs an adjustment or
a major overhaul. At those times, you must switch off autopilot and do the
hard work of paying attention to what’s right in front of your nose.
Mastering the Art of Envisioning, Listening, Reflecting, and
Experimenting
We admit our Four Forces Model is deceptively simple. It streamlines a
highly complex process. We could write a long book about each of the
puzzle pieces, with such titles as Managing Relationships, Getting Things
Done, Taking Performance to the Next Level, Creating the Perfect Mission
Statement, Engaging Your Workforce, Making Success a Habit, and
Mastering the Art of Innovation. But those weighty tomes would not tell
you how to put all of it together. That’s why we picture culture as a puzzle.
It’s not one or two things; it’s everything. Our model shows you how to
build, change, or refresh your culture, assembling it piece by piece. In later
chapters, we will go deeper into the steps you can take to manage each of
the Four Forces:
Harnessing the Four Forces to Create a Winning Culture
1. Envision. Engage vision to imagine your desired culture in the
clearest, most concise, and most compelling terms. Begin
thinking in terms of vivid language and stories that will capture
hearts and minds. (Chapter Four)
2. Listen. Tune in to the power of interest by slowing down and
paying attention to the stories your people tell about their
deepest social and emotional needs. Begin forming strategies to
close the gap between what they need and what your
organization delivers. (Chapter Five)
3. Reflect. Facilitate a constructive dialogue with everyone in the
organization about aligning the desired culture with people’s
needs in order to create new habits. Think carefully about
creating rituals that celebrate those habits. Look outside your
walls for ideas about how to get results, searching for
opportunities to learn from other companies, including your
competitors. (Chapter Six)
4. Experiment. Organize and launch innovative small- scale
projects designed to close the gaps you have identified between
what people need and what they actually gain from your
organization. Feel free to stretch a bit with some of the
projects. Think outside the lines and boxes on the org chart.
Carefully assess what works and what doesn’t work in order to
manage the controlled chaos of innovation. (Chapter Seven)
Entrepreneurs Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa followed these steps
when they created the culture that drives the eyewear company Warby
Parker. While still working toward their MBAs at the Wharton School, they
started a little four-person, web-based company that in a relatively short
time grew into a large and highly profitable global brand. The company
began with a simple but compelling vision: providing quality eyeglasses for
those who can barely afford them. They listened not only to what their
prospective customers needed but also to what their employees sought in
terms of fulfilling work. They reflected with those employees on how the
socially conscious vision aligned with how work actually got done day to
day at Warby Parker. They experimented with ways to operationalize their
vision and create a thriving business. Less than a decade after its founding,
the company had achieved “unicorn” status (i.e., a $1B valuation).
Reflecting on the company’s success, Gilboa said, “[Customers] saw that
we tried to make them happy. With 2000 employees now, that’s a lesson we
continue to practice in our corporate culture.” Blumenthal and Gilboa
understand that any solution to the culture puzzle must respect the need for
the distinctly human happiness inspired by helping others.
Sustainable business cultures embody human values. Billionaire Yvon
Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing business Patagonia, emphasized
this fact when he wrote in his book Let My People Go Surfing:
Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet
and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could
dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the
waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take
care of a sick child.
Does your company satisfy the needs of your people and those to whom
they provide products and services? If you feel unsure about your answer,
do not despair. You can harness the Four Forces to energize your
organization and fulfill its highest purpose.
“Wait a second,” you might say. “I’m not in charge, and in fact I’m stuck
with a bunch of dictatorial Sun Gods who dismiss all this soft stuff about
culture.” We hear that all the time. But wherever you sit in your
organization, on the top floor in the C-suite or buried downstairs in the
billing department, you can take steps to turn around the culture. If you
begin to see how the Four Forces move ceaselessly through every single
encounter, conversation, and decision, you can target those moments where
even the smallest effort can make a difference. Sun Gods issue sweeping
orders to their minions, but even a powerful king cannot order a culture to
get in line. Unlike Sun Gods, gardeners design and cultivate a culture the
way they nurture lush vegetation. If you want to make changes happen,
concentrate on influencing the forces that shape your garden. In the
following chapters, you will learn how people in many different roles have
successfully created healthier, more productive working environments.
Many toil away far from the corner office.
Taking Care of Business, Taking Care of People
Lee Nunery received a surprising late-night phone call on March 14, 2001.
“I’ll never forget that date,” he said later. A few hours earlier, Nunery had
buried his wife, Carolyn, who had died from Stage IV lung cancer. At home
in a Philadelphia suburb, not long after he had put his kids to bed, his cell
phone rang. Who, he wondered, could be calling at this time, of all days?
“Lee,” the caller announced, “this is David Stern.”
Since 1999, Nunery had directed Business Services at the University of
Pennsylvania, but he had previously worked for Stern, the commissioner of
the National Basketball Association (NBA). At first, he thought the call was
a hoax. He had not spoken with Stern for many years.
“Don’t (expletive) with me, you (expletive),” he shouted into the phone.
“No, Lee,” replied the voice at the other end of the line. “This is really
David.” He was calling to offer condolences to his former employee and
colleague.
David J. Stern is best remembered as the man who turned around the
moribund NBA. While in 2020 the league employed thousands of people
and boasted a total valuation of $60 billion, in the early 1980s just a few
dozen full-time employees worked for an organization that made barely any
money. The Championship Finals attracted so little interest that CBS
broadcast the games on tape-delay late at night. Stern came aboard in 1984
with a mandate to steer the ailing enterprise toward growth and profitability.
He immediately made two key decisions: he imposed a salary cap on teams
and established a mandatory drug- testing program.
Stern had earned a reputation as a demanding, detail-oriented, and even
dictatorial boss. Nunery learned from firsthand experience that Stern
deserved that reputation. As Nunery recalled, “I’d bring him a two-hundredpage report that I had sweated blood over. He’d give it a quick skim while I
was sitting in his office, notice a misplaced comma, and go ballistic. He’d
still be screaming when I walked out the door.” But Nunery also saw
greatness in Stern. “In terms of brilliance, David was that. I had never met
anyone as studious. He could see around corners, ‘spotting issues’ as he
called it. He saw things other people weren’t seeing.”
Stern applied his detail orientation not only to business but to connecting
with people, a trait that explains his late-night call to Nunery. “He reached
out to everybody he knew.”
According to Nunery, the Hall of Famer Magic Johnson felt the same
way. At the memorial service held after Stern’s death in January 2020,
Johnson said, “This man stood up for me when everyone else was running
away.” In November 1991, when Johnson announced at a Los Angeles press
conference that he was HIV positive, the general public worried that
someone could contract AIDS through something as casual as a handshake.
Stern helped “change the world,” as Johnson put it, by allowing him to play
in the NBA All-Star Game and on the Olympic Dream Team just months
after the announcement.
Accomplishing that world-changing mission would require the support
of key members of the organization. As Nunery tells the story, Stern told
Johnson, “I want you to play on the Dream Team, but you have to convince
[Michael] Jordan and [Larry] Bird to play too.” In his mind, it all depended
on people doing the right thing with the right people. It also involved giveand-take. That bedrock truth holds true for all great cultures.
Stern appreciated that creating a successful, results-driven business
culture involved discovering and respecting the needs of others and
instilling that trait in everyone associated with the organization. He pushed
people hard, down to the last comma. But he treated them like family too.
Looking back on the years spent working for his tough boss, Nunery
observed, “He was invested in the stories of the people around him, because
the stories say a lot about how people are going to react. He wanted to get
to your heart.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Start thinking about how to assemble your culture puzzle.
• Know when to go fast and when to go slow.
• Capture hearts and minds.
• To change a culture, harness the Four Forces.
• Take care of people, and they will take care of business.
OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER 2
Tribal Conflict in the Workplace
Peeking behind the Org Chart
Ryan wakes up screaming every night, tormented by flashbacks of his
deployments to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. With excruciating clarity, he
remembers the detonation of an improvised explosive device near his guard
post. “When the actual blast went off, it was chaos everywhere,” he recalls.
“I had to stop and put that part behind me. I needed to focus and ensure that
the folks who had been injured or disoriented were taken care of.” For
years, the aftereffects of that traumatic event have left him feeling angry
and agitated.
Like Ryan, Jared, another combat veteran, found it hard to reenter
civilian life. Jared grew up in a warm, supportive midwestern family, but he
feels his military experience in Afghanistan transformed him from a
“happy-go-lucky farm boy” into a “frightened soldier.” Though he earned a
graduate business degree after he returned home, he decided to work as a
self-employed plumber. “I couldn’t work in a beehive office,” he admits. “I
just need to control my personal space.”
In researching difficult and often tragic transitions like these, combat
reporter Sebastian Junger reached an unexpected conclusion. “As awkward
as it is to say,” Junger observed, “part of the trauma of war seems to be
giving it up.” For all of the terror of armed conflict, soldiers develop a
strong emotional connection with comrades and the battlefield experience,
one they cannot easily duplicate in a conventional office. According to
World War II veteran Win Stracke: “For the first time in our lives, we were
in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear. I
liked that feeling very much. It was the absence of competition and
boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved
about the Army.” The feeling Stracke describes is perfectly understandable,
because, for most of human history, tribal collaboration has ruled the day.
Now take yourself back to 1945. You and Win Stracke have taken off
your battered and soiled uniforms before strolling into the buttoned-down
IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. Everywhere you look you see
employees isolated in cubicles and corner offices. That’s a far cry from
eating and sleeping and fighting alongside your fellow soldiers in combat
conditions. Can you forge similar bonds with these clean-cut “corporate
citizens”? Can the company provide a life-or-death mission that totally
engages you and your fellow workers? At first blush, that’s hard to imagine.
Even when you go home at night, you might feel somewhat alienated from
your family and friends. You still pine for the tight-knit wartime band of
brothers that faced life-or-death situations every day and gave you that
longed-for tribal feeling.
What does this longing tell us about the modern workplace, and what
does it mean for you as a culture-builder?
Balancing the Cultural Instincts for Collaboration and
Competition
Human beings are Jekyll-and-Hyde creatures. More than any other animal,
we excel at collaboration. We make friends, we form teams, we launch
start-up businesses, we found countries. Yet social life is also full of conflict
with our fellow Homo sapiens. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we kill. What’s
wrong with us?
Well, we’re only human. We constantly ride herd on two conflicting
impulses: one pushing us toward collaboration within groups, the other
pulling us toward competition between groups. This push-pull phenomenon
can wreak havoc at work.
A look at our evolutionary history explains why this happens. Research
by biological anthropologists reveals that our earliest primate ancestors
bonded together in groups, not in pairs, because these small communities
gave them the best chance of survival. Over time, the instinct to connect
with and identify with groups has become hardwired into our DNA.
Neuroscience research shows that social bonding is our default mode. The
moment we stop doing any kind of independent activity, such as crunching
numbers in a spreadsheet or reading a book, the socially oriented parts of
our brain light up, ready for the next interaction with our companions.
When we feel shunned and ostracized from others, it pierces our hearts like
a sharp dagger. Vivek Murthy, U.S. surgeon general under Barack Obama,
looked through the relevant literature to pinpoint the roots of loneliness. He
found that “we evolved to have brains that are wired to seek connection, to
focus our thoughts on other people, and to define ourselves by the people
around us.”
What does all this tell us about culture? A relatively small group of
people forms a tribe and develops a shared way of doing things to maximize
the group’s chances of survival. Members of the group pass this legacy
down to subsequent generations until a distinct culture emerges. As soon as
it does, the Four Forces come into play—Vision, Interest, Habit, and
Innovation—combining to shape how we meet our need to get things done
together with others in a community.
Yet as the tribe grows bigger or comes into contact with other tribes,
tensions erupt as another instinct appears. This instinct propels us to
compete with others. In evolutionary terms, competition has figured into
our survival because we have often needed to deal with intruders who
threaten our safety or resources. Like the spirit of cooperation,
competitiveness is hardwired into our DNA. Leading social psychologists
Yarrow Dunham, Andrew Scott Baron, and Susan Carey conducted a series
of revealing experiments to prove the point. They separated children into
two groups: red shirts and blue shirts. With no information other than the
color of their shirts, the children quickly engaged in tribal competition. The
red shirts would help other red shirts (“the good guys”) and would ascribe
any bad behavior to the blue shirts (“the bad guys”). In an organization, that
tendency can bind a team together and encourage members to protect one
another. It can also cause a lot of grief. In large organizations, small groups
inhabit “silos” that protect them from those in other silos and enable them
to engage in subtle and not-so-subtle competition for resources. Marketing
competes with Accounting, Research and Development competes with both
Marketing and Accounting, and managers struggle to keep everyone
working together to achieve the organization’s overall goals. It’s much more
than mere child’s play.
Just take a look at what happened to Procter & Gamble employees after
the company’s merger with Gillette, a $57 billion deal that the “Oracle of
Omaha” Warren Buffett predicted would “create the greatest consumer
products company in the world.” However, it took a lot longer to reach that
goal than investors like Buffett had hoped, with P&G’s stock price lagging
behind its closest competitors and the new Gillette business proving a
burdensome drag on the company’s top line.
Was it due to a clash of cultures? Yes. Was it a result of do-or-die
decisions about major organizational and competitive issues? Maybe. But as
in the experiment with the red and blue T-shirts, it also stemmed from some
pretty small differences. For example, while P&G people had developed the
habit of communicating via written memos, the Gillette people preferred
PowerPoint presentations. A Wall Street Journal account reveals how this
little difference in style caused some giant rifts between the merged teams.
Gillette employees viewed their P&G counterparts as old-fashioned sticksin-the-mud who adhered to a needlessly slow and bureaucratic decisionmaking process. The Gillette tribe also disliked the P&G tribe’s penchant
for acronyms. To them, such expressions as CIB (consumer is boss)
hampered rather than streamlined conversations.
Voila! Competition eroded cooperation to the point that the whole
organization’s overall performance suffered. To put it another way, people
clung to the values of their little tribes at the expense of the needs of the
newly formed bigger tribe. In the overall organization, the natural
preference for your own little tribe can undermine the need to work across
group boundaries. Suppose Company ABC’s business development division
needs to collaborate with the engineering division in order to fulfill the
company’s mission to bring a shiny new coffee grinder to market faster than
archrival XYZ, whose new grinder threatens ABC’s very existence. No
problem. Ah, but wait. Those business development gurus and engineering
wizards speak entirely different languages. Everything about them, from
their clothes to their favorite leisure activities, is so different. It takes a lot
of hard work to translate the two different languages, robbing time and
energy from the urgent need to get that coffee grinder rolling out the door.
As a result, the gurus and wizards just keep doing things the way they
always have, hoping to make themselves look good on the next
performance review. Of course, they run the risk of looking bad if they fail
to set aside their competitive instincts and start collaborating (or at least
appear to be collaborating) as if their lives depended on it.
Getting organizational tribes to work together and build a common
culture requires a clear understanding of this fundamental tension between
collaboration and competition. A strong culture tightly binds internal tribes
together, supports an environment that encourages cross-functional
teamwork, and motivates insiders to compete vigorously with outsiders who
threaten the organization’s well-being and survival.
Cultural anthropologists made a striking discovery about the delicate
balance between collaboration and competition while reviewing the vast
amount of research into the moral codes that govern many of the world’s
societies. These codes, while they differ in many respects from group to
group, all aim to maintain cooperation between potentially competing
individuals and subgroups. A typical code of conduct includes:
• Be helpful: Make sure the tribe takes care of everyone, from the
beloved grandmother to the obnoxious cousin who ruins every
holiday gathering.
• Be brave: Find the courage to take risks and challenge
conventional wisdom when pursuing an important goal.
• Be respectful: Defer to the authority of leaders and welcome the
wisdom of elders.
• Be fair: Return favors to others who have helped you, share
resources with others, and respect their property.
Notice how these rules reflect our need to get along and get things done.
No matter the nature of your tribe (your extended family, your work team in
the office, or your community), you need the support of others, a way of
instilling and rewarding the right behaviors, and a sense of purpose.
Otherwise, collaboration collapses.
Every culture-builder faces this challenge: building a common culture to
fight against the persistent tendency of people to create their own little
tribes. Even a couple of people who meet daily on Zoom can form a tightknit tribe of two. Members of a given tribe tend to view others in an
organization as outsiders. When this gets out of hand, the sense of a shared
culture begins to disappear. Groups can become so isolated from one
another that they threaten the culture even more than an outside force.
Given the fact that less than a third of executives feel they understand their
own organization’s culture, the problem may seem insurmountable.
Fortunately, our Four Forces model can help solve this piece of the culture
puzzle.
Accepting the Reality of Tribal Conflict
All of the boxes and lines on an official organizational chart suggest a
carefully crafted set of relationships among people and between functions.
But the way people relate in that organization never fits snugly into a neatly
arranged diagram. No chart can display the way a culture really operates.
Little tribes develop outside a box’s boundaries, each following its own
rules to maximize its chances of survival, often in ways that run counter to
the overall organization’s stated rules.
A penetrating analysis of one global organization performed by social
network expert Rob Cross provides a vivid illustration of the point. Leaders
of the Fortune 500 company “Omnivore” staked its future on an initiative
aimed at enabling people to share knowledge across technical divisions. But
it was easier said than done. Even though Omnivore’s senior managers
nodded their approval when they heard about the silo-busting philosophy,
their actions told a different story. When Cross and his colleagues studied
the lines of communication that actually took place among eight of
Omnivore’s divisions, they discovered that most people remained
ensconced in their own smaller tribes. Out of the eight numbered divisions
in the research study, only Divisions 3 and 4 communicated fairly well with
each other, while Divisions 7 and 8 pretty much gave each other the silent
treatment, and the rest seemed to share information with others as little as
possible. Far from working as a fluidly communicating collection of highly
collaborative professionals, the divisions conducted business more like a
region of small isolated villages. Trading occurred only when it became
absolutely necessary to obtain vital resources.
Later research by Cross and his colleagues revealed that the disconnect
between desired and actual collaborative behavior occurs almost universally
in large organizations. For example, the leaders of the global consumer
electronics company “Megavolt” wanted to accelerate product development
while simultaneously improving quality. To accomplish this mission, they
directed their mechanical and electrical engineers to collaborate on creating
a lightweight notebook computer. The electrical engineers also needed to
partner with software developers to produce multimedia hardware. Far from
working harmoniously with one another, however, the three groups
inhabited a Tower of Babel where cacophony disrupted decision-making
and created such noisy pileups that the mission failed, and the company
missed a chance to capitalize on a huge market opportunity. Information at
Megavolt flowed up from the engineers to senior management but not
across to other engineers. Senior management cried, “Tear down those
silos,” but the engineers remained safely insulated within the old walls.
Was it a decision-making and workflow problem? No. It was a culture
problem. No matter how desperately the company needed the big tribe to
unite behind the common cause, the little tribes remained ensconced in their
long-established comfort zones.
Megavolt’s leaders had come up through the ranks during a period of
rapid growth and minimal competition. Now they faced a new and
unprecedented challenge. Any further growth would depend on fending off
emergent competition. While they realized that their engineers needed to
work together to meet the challenge, they ended up putting such extreme
pressure on the engineers to perform that no one took the time to tear down
the walls of their silos and bond with other engineering groups. The
engineering groups had developed their own ways of doing things and were
not about to adopt unfamiliar behaviors and values. While one engineering
tribe worried most about making the product user-friendly, others were
deeply concerned about design and portability. Some of the engineers had
worked on multiple projects and had thus gained a more expansive
understanding of the company’s needs, but most project managers, who had
worked solely on one project at a time, maintained a narrow view and felt
harassed by the new demands.
All of this spelled trouble for Megavolt’s strategy. Communication
snafus became the norm, meetings took place at breakneck speed,
benchmark goals fell by the wayside, people grew cynical and suspicious,
and the campaign to bring an innovative product to market fell through the
cultural cracks. All the little tribes kept hunkered down, blaming their
neighboring tribes for the lack of success, and sitting around waiting for
someone else to fix the situation. It turned out that the new organizational
chart with all its neat boxes and lines could not force the desired
collaboration across boundaries.
If you become preoccupied with idealized statements of purpose and
strategy, without taking into account the natural tribal conflict that occurs in
the workplace, you may find your pretty ideas turning into pipedreams. You
will learn the hard way that if you don’t manage the tension between
collaboration and competition, it will manage you. It all begins with
keeping in touch with all the smaller tribes.
Keeping in Touch
Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret, dreamed
up an otherworldly vision for the company’s models. Imagining them as
“Angels,” he transformed the women into lithe colorful creatures with
wings. Resplendent in all their finery, the women strutted down the runway
at the annual fashion show, which the New York Times described as “a
global cultural phenomenon.” According to L Brands, the conglomerate that
owns Victoria’s Secret, the fashion company represents “an aspirational
lifestyle” and helps “customers feel sexy, bold and powerful.” As the Times
journalists observed, it “defined femininity for millions of women.”
“We woke up this morning and suddenly engineering can’t understand marketing and management
can barely understand themselves.”
Not so for the actual models, it turns out. Beneath the surface of all that
glitter and glamor they lived in a grimy and sordid world where they
suffered from unwanted groping and sexual advances, inappropriate sexual
remarks, and retribution. It was a tale of two cultures: one a glossy fantasy
world, the other an “entrenched culture of misogyny.” Casey Crowe Taylor,
a former public relations specialist at the company, commented, “What was
most alarming to me, as someone who was always raised as an independent
woman, was just how ingrained this behavior was. This abuse was just
laughed off and accepted as normal. It was almost like brainwashing. And
anyone who tried to do anything about it wasn’t just ignored. They were
punished.”
The rise of the #MeToo movement exposed what many women have
known all their lives: sexual harassment is “business as usual” in far too
many organizations. Companies like L Brands and the Weinstein Company
may seem wildly different from one another, but during the initial wave of
#MeToo scandals, their cultures were exposed as sharing a toxic cultural
trait, silently condoning offensive and humiliating treatment of women. As
media mogul Harvey Weinstein allegedly told one of his victims, “This is
how the industry works.” Chilling, but he may have been right. In February
2020 justice prevailed when a federal judge sentenced the 67-year-old
Weinstein, once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, to 23 years in
prison for rape and sexual assault convictions.
To its credit, L Brands took steps in the right direction. L Brands
spokeswoman Tammy Roberts Myers responded to questions from the New
York Times by saying the company is “intensely focused (on) workplace and
compliance practices.” Myers continued: “We regret any instance where we
did not achieve this objective and are fully committed to continuous
improvement and complete accountability.”
There’s an important cultural lesson in this sordid but all-too-common
tale of misogyny. Those who view an organization from their perch at the
top can easily lose touch with those who inhabit the lower landscape.
Sometimes culture problems arise due to the behavior of a few toxic
personalities like Ed Razek and Harvey Weinstein. But well-intentioned
leaders can also contribute to culture problems when they fail to unite the
tribes hidden beneath the official org chart. Even senior leaders with the
best of intentions can let their “view from the top” blind them to malignant
cultures growing beneath their gaze.
Applying Innovation to Solve the Right Problems
People love to innovate at work, but this strength, taken to extremes, can
turn into a glaring fault. Take Wells Fargo, where creative problem-solving
escalated into an epidemic of ethical misbehavior. The bank’s creative
cross-selling strategy sounded innocent enough: pitch credit cards, auto
loans, and other products to existing customers. After all, if the company
offers great products, why not push them to everybody? Why not sell
customers three or five or even eight products? John Stumpf, the former
CEO, issued a rallying cry to his people, proclaiming “Eight is great,” soon
shortened to “Gr-eight.” The company offered strong incentives to support
this goal. This may seem like a perfectly sensible business practice, but the
failure to consider how these initiatives would play out among the tribes
further down in the organization propelled the company toward an ethically
impaired culture.
Without even consulting customers, salespeople opened credit card
accounts for them, modified their mortgages, set up new auto insurance
policies, and engaged in many other unethical activities to boost revenue
numbers. The scheme affected hundreds of thousands of customers.
Eventually, in 2016, when the scandal came to light, Stumpf resigned, as
did his successor three years later. Lawsuits erupted, leading to fines
totaling over $1 billion. To prepare itself for future claims stemming from
the company’s “fake accounts,” Wells Fargo set aside billions more. In the
scandal’s aftermath, the company found it hard to attract new customers. It
turned out that a toxic culture can leave its mark long after leaders take
steps to correct it.
What went wrong at Wells Fargo? In retrospect, it all seems so clear, and
sadly predictable. Wells Fargo salespeople felt relentless pressure to meet
sales quotas, and in the absence of a clear imperative to pay attention to
other equally important priorities—namely, ethics and respect for
customers’ real needs—they did whatever it took to reach their sales goals
and keep their jobs. They did what every group does: they created their own
strategies for survival.
One former Wells Fargo employee described it as a “cutthroat”
environment reminiscent of the “do anything to close the sale” culture
portrayed in David Mamet’s film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize–winning
play Glengarry Glen Ross. You may recall the scene where the
nightmarishly aggressive sales manager Blake (played by Alec Baldwin)
barks at a roomful of cynical yet terrorized employees: “A-B-C. A: always,
B: be, C: closing. Always be closing. Always be closing! . . . You close or
you hit the bricks!” At Wells Fargo, where competition was tantamount to a
religion, he would have shouted “Gr-eight! Gr-eight! Gr-eight!”
Sabrina Bertrand, who worked as a personal banker at Wells Fargo at the
time but ultimately left the company to become a middle school teacher,
remembers, “I had managers in my face yelling at me. The sales pressure
from management was unbearable.” A 2015 lawsuit revealed that managers
at Wells Fargo in a Los Angeles sales district reviewed sales numbers with
each employee an astonishing “four times a day, at 11 am, 1 pm, 3 pm, and
5 pm.” What’s a poor sales rep going to do? Just about anything, it turns
out, to hit her numbers. That’s not something any respectable sales manager
would ever want her tribe to do. But disconnected from the everyday reality
of the tribes of their organization, Wells Fargo leadership failed to see how
their positive sales vision would translate into a sell-at-all-costs culture on
the front line.
Avoiding Mismanagement by Abstraction
Discovering, understanding, and managing all the tribes in your
organization should preoccupy you each and every day. It’s hard work. It
takes a lot of effort to force yourself to slow down and see how people
actually implement what, on the surface, seem like perfectly rational
policies. Strategies are like mathematical equations. One plus one equals
two. However, as the scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested on Twitter in
February 2016, “When human behavior enters the equation, things go
nonlinear. That’s why physics is easy, and sociology is hard.” Math results
remain constant; people results can go crazy. Every anthropologist knows
that, in the real world of real people solving real problems, one plus one
often equals less than zero.
An org chart represents a kind of arithmetic. It all adds up. As we
pointed out earlier, however, an organization does not consist of a bunch of
lines and boxes; it’s a big, messy, sometimes unpredictable collection of
individuals and tribes who do not fit snugly into square boxes or follow
perfectly straight lines. You must resist oversimplifying your view of the
organization. Instead of thinking in terms of abstractions, look instead at the
concrete reality that lies beneath the surface layer depicted on the org chart.
That box containing Alice, the CFO? She’s not a number in an equation.
She’s a quirky, self-interested, and utterly unique individual who speaks the
language of her accounting tribe. The line that shows Alice reporting to the
CEO? It’s not perfectly straight. It wobbles as she chats informally with the
CHRO and the COO over lunch.
If you rely too heavily on the mathematically precise org chart, you’ll
fall prey to what we call mismanagement by abstraction. It’s a form of
malpractice that can end up killing the very patient you’re trying to save.
The once-popular trend toward open-plan offices (one casualty of the
COVID-19 pandemic) illustrates how managing by abstraction can yield
unintended and unwanted cultural consequences. When you adopted an
open office plan, you knocked down all the walls in an effort to get people
mingling with one another so that they would engage more freely in idea
sharing, innovation, and teamwork. What a great idea! But a quick look at
articles about the phenomenon reveals an alarming downside. “How to
Make Open-Plan Offices Suck Less” teases an article in the magazine CIO,
while “Open Plan Offices Make the Workplace More Toxic” announces
another piece in Inc.com. If open spaces were such a great idea, then why
did they suck? How did they create a toxic environment? Answer: because
the abstract idea made sense on the drawing board but did not work so well
when you added people to the equation. People want to work together and
get results, but it turns out that open spaces do not automatically fulfill
those essential needs.
Picture this. Jose is sitting at his desk, concentrating on a report due to
his boss at 3 p.m. His teammate Wanda, sitting a few feet away, is shouting
on the phone at a supplier who has failed to deliver parts on time. Jose’s
boss Vonda suddenly taps him on the shoulder and asks if she can have a
word with him about a customer complaint. Jose’s brain begins to sizzle.
The noise, the distractions, all the hubbub of people working their tails off
to get results have given him a migraine. People suffering migraines find it
hard to concentrate on getting results. At two Fortune 500 firms where
leaders mandated the removal of cubicles to create vast open-office spaces,
results fell rather than rose. Why? Paradoxically the anticipated increase in
face-to-face interaction among employees actually declined by about 70
percent.
Two researchers who analyzed this phenomenon concluded that
employees working in open spaces tended to create a kind of “fourth wall,”
the imaginary barrier in a theater that separates the performers on the stage
from the audience. This psychological wall creates “public solitude,”
enabling a worker to concentrate on a task despite the presence of other
people. Over time, the fourth wall becomes as concrete as a real wall in
people’s minds. As the researchers observed, “If someone is working
intently, people don’t interrupt her. If someone starts a conversation and a
colleague shoots him a look of annoyance, he won’t do it again. Especially
in open space, fourth-wall norms spread quickly.” In other words, in the
absence of actual walls, people construct psychological walls in order to get
their work done.
The rush by many organizations to knock down every wall in the office
provides a case study in mismanagement by abstraction. While perhaps an
admirable idea, the effort to bust up silos indicates that an organization’s
leaders think of their people as interchangeable boxes on an org chart,
rather than as many bands of living, breathing humans with distinctive
quirks, habits, and aspirations. The open floor plan also assumes that if an
idea works in another organization, it must work in your own. Practitioners
of mismanagement by abstraction ignore the cultural differences among
people, not to mention the forces that drive them. Initiatives that look good
on paper will accomplish nothing if leaders forget that groups will always
concoct their own strategies to produce results and create a distinctive
culture that works in their particular microenvironment. Such common
disconnects between leaders and employees will gradually create a toxic
culture where people habitually resist and subtly sabotage visions that
cascade from the top of the pyramid and bear scant resemblance to how
work actually gets done.
Peeking behind the Org Chart
If you’re a leader under constant pressure to deliver the results an
organization needs, you may spend a great deal of time and energy creating
high-level plans that look brilliant on paper. “Here, Smith sits in this box,”
you say to yourself. “Jones sits in this one, and Martinez sits in this other
one. This straight line here shows the chain of command.” But if you’re
thinking this way, you are not thinking carefully enough about the tension
between tribal collaboration and competition. To grasp that natural tension,
you need to peek behind the org chart.
As we have seen, people do not always reside comfortably in their
assigned boxes or consistently follow strict lines of communication. The
discomfort caused by constantly needing to figure out ways to get your job
done despite management’s abstractions causes a lot of stress in the modern
workplace. It can lead to a civilian form of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). Recall Ryan and Jared, the soldiers we met at the beginning of the
chapter, who, after returning to civilian life, grew depressed because the
conditions of deployment had made them feel more human than their lives
back home. As one anthropologist who studies these veterans describes the
PTSD experience, “[It’s] a crisis of connection and disruption, not an illness
that you carry within you.”
While the struggles people experience at work hardly compare to the
tragic effects of PTSD, the side effects of disconnection and disruption
created by mismanagement by abstraction can be quite pernicious. It’s what
Atlantic writer Joe Pinsker calls the “Sunday Scaries.” When Sunday
evening rolls around, you may shudder at the thought of trudging back to
work Monday morning. Alec Burks, a 30-year-old project manager at a
Seattle construction company, knows the feeling. “[It’s like] the end of
freedom. In 12 hours, I’m going to be back at my desk. You almost have to
shrink who you are a little bit sometimes to fit in that mold of your job
description.”
In its most extreme form, feeling trapped inside a box can lead to serious
mental health problems. Angie Payden, a banker at Wells Fargo, described
the effects of the crushing sales goals on her mental health: “I started to get
these panic attacks, which I never had before. . . . After a couple times, I
just couldn’t take it anymore. I looked at the hand sanitizer in the bathroom,
and I thought, this has alcohol in it. This may work. And it did.”
For Payden, the side effects of mismanagement by abstraction extended
to customers, who became impersonal boxes on a sales chart. “If somebody
comes to the bank every day . . . here’s the problem: I don’t want to help
that person. I can’t afford to have that person in my office for an hour,
because I will not get anything off of them.”
If you do not fully respect the essential needs of human beings in the
workplace and just keep trying to stick square pegs into round holes, the
organization will never achieve its strategic goals. It will suffer from all the
ailments that plague so many organizations: low engagement, poor morale,
a lack of purpose and meaning, and weak results. But there’s one tried-andtrue cure: you have to climb outside your own box and connect with others.
In almost every organization we have studied over the past 30 years, a
cultural chasm separates senior management from the divisions, units, and
teams below the top of the org chart. Whether large or small, these gaps
invariably stem from the disparity between the cultural statements issued
from C-suites and the words and phrases employees use to describe their
day-to-day experiences at work. The difference can be as dramatic as the
contrast between a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and a Stephen King
horror story. That’s the bad news. The good news is that despite the fact that
the innate tension between collaboration and competition will never
disappear, you can take steps to ameliorate it.
First, you must set aside the abstractions that look good on paper, then
connect to the reality of everyday work in the organization. Experts have
written whole books on the art of managing by walking around, holding
town meetings where people can voice their concerns and ask questions that
reveal their dissatisfaction with policies and procedures, and other
techniques for closing the gap between leaders and the people closest to the
work. Whichever technique you choose, you need to remain honest,
nonjudgmental, and humble in applying it.
Nick Basset knew how to do it. The executive director of population
health at Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and health
professionals that spans Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, Basset embodies the
organization’s commitment to “helping people live the healthiest lives
possible.” He and his colleagues take great care not to let abstract metrics
get between them and the flesh-and-blood people who work for the
company.
Take the treatment of lower back pain, for instance. Studies have shown
that such pain frequently disappears without any active interventions, while
medication and surgery can actually worsen the condition and drive up
costs. In response, senior administrators at Intermountain set a broad goal of
limiting unnecessary treatment and started tracking whether physicians
waited for at least four weeks to pursue active treatment after a patient
reports a problem. That’s a metric approach. And that’s fine. But it can
become an end in itself, encouraging doctors to hold off all lower back pain
interventions with little regard to a patient’s unique situation and needs.
Like the Wells Fargo “eight is great,” it runs the risk of treating patients as
numbers on a report and lends itself to abuse. To avoid this problem, Basset
involved doctors in crafting more specific objectives and designing a set of
incentives that promote the right behaviors. While the broad goal of limiting
unnecessary treatment aligns with Intermountain’s high-level strategy of
providing high-quality low-cost care, the strategy allows for deep
discussions with the people actually doing the work. A doctor who took part
in developing the strategy, Brett Muse, comments, “When I get in front of
physicians and throw data at them, they get glass-eyed.” Instead, he
continues, “[I say] here’s a problem involving quality of care. Let’s try to
solve this problem. And, by the way, here’s some data we can look at to see
how we’re doing.”
At Intermountain, doctors recommended a goal of waiting four weeks
with 80 percent of lower-back-pain patients before pursuing active
treatment. The percentage indicates that 20 percent of patients may require
immediate intervention. By closing the gap between cultural traits leaders
wanted their people to adopt and what actually happens at the point of
contact between doctors and patients, Intermountain avoided the unintended
and potentially damaging consequences of mismanagement by abstraction.
To put it another way, Basset and his colleagues at Intermountain looked
beyond the boxes and lines on the org chart and acquainted themselves with
the real people doing the real work that gets done day in and day out. In the
next chapter, you will learn how many other leaders have connected with
their people in ways that support strong, vibrant cultures.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Balance the instincts for competition and collaboration.
• Accept the fact of tribal conflict.
• Keep in touch with all parts of your organization.
• Apply innovation to solve the right problems.
• Peek behind the org chart.
OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER 3
The Gardener’s Creed
Harnessing the Four Driving Forces
DING! DING! DING!
Tony Hsieh had been fast asleep when his phone’s alarm jolted him
awake at 6 a.m. With a sigh, he tapped the snooze button, then let his head
fall back on the pillow. Twenty minutes later . . . DING! DING! DING! . . .
the alarm clanged again. A quick glance at the screen told him he could stay
in bed a while longer. Three snoozes later, he reluctantly crawled out of bed
to face another day.
Tony recalled that bleak morning. “The last time I had snoozed this
many times was when I was dreading going to work at Oracle. It was
happening again,” he said. Some years back, Tony had been overseeing
business development for the then-fledgling Oracle, long before it had
grown into the second-largest software corporation in the world. After a
brief stint there, he left to create his dream job, cofounding with Sanjay
Madan, a college friend and fellow ex-Oracle employee, the web-based ad
company LinkExchange. Soon, as Tony put it, “I was living the fairy tale.”
In the early days of LinkExchange, Tony could not wait to leap out of
bed and stroll the short distance from his San Francisco apartment to his
downtown office. He loved the energizing “all for one, one for all”
camaraderie among the start-up’s small number of employees. Over time, as
offices opened in Chicago and New York, that tight circle expanded to
include more than a hundred people. That’s when Tony felt the good feeling
slipping away. “It became less fun for me,” he reflected.
Only after Tony moved on could he look back and evaluate what had
happened to his spirit at work. There was no single point at which the fairy
tale turned sour, but he soon realized that the “all for one, one for all” dream
culture had degenerated into an “all against all” nightmare. As he described
it, “It was more like death by a thousand paper cuts.”
In the end, he “decided to step away from the drama.” Hsieh sold
LinkExchange to Microsoft and invested the buyout bonanza in the online
shoe company Zappos, where before long he became CEO. A few years
later, Amazon shelled out $850 million for the company. Along the way,
Tony had recaptured the fairy-tale life. His newfound joy sprang from the
culture he had built at Zappos, a working environment that felt as light,
energetic, and empowering as the “one for all, all for one” atmosphere you
would find at a scrappy start-up.
With Tony at the helm, Zappos for years pursued a clear purpose “to live
and deliver WOW.” That expression of energy and amazement nourished
both employees and customers like water on a thirsty garden. All new hires,
regardless of title or function, spend their first few weeks in the call center,
talking with customers and listening attentively to their complaints. The
experience inspires an all-out commitment to providing service that wows
the socks off every customer. Case in point: one dedicated service rep
bought a plane ticket in order to hand-deliver an expensive piece of jewelry
to a customer whose husband had unwittingly packed it into a return
shipment.
Tragically, when Hsieh stepped away from the company in mid-2020, he
struggled to maintain that sense of purpose in his personal life and died
months later. We think Tony Hsieh, despite his eventual troubles, will be
rightly remembered for how he tended the Zappos garden. As a manager, he
never fell prey to the “mismanagement by abstraction” folly we discussed
in Chapter Two, that all-too-common tendency to oversimplify the task of
solving the culture puzzle by issuing orders and then expecting a wonderful
organization to pop out of the ground like magic.
What, you might ask, does gardening have to do with culture-building?
It’s a useful metaphor. The Four Forces shape your culture the same way
soil, water, and sunlight work in harmony to create and maintain a
flourishing and productive garden plot. Thoughtfully and carefully tending
the culture garden is your #1 job, whether overseeing a start-up business, a
nonprofit enterprise, a product development team, or a publicly traded
global conglomerate. Lou Gerstner, who in the 1990s revived the lumbering
elephant IBM, put it well when he said, “Culture is not just part of the
game. It is the game.”
In this chapter, we will explore how Tony Hsieh and other leaders served
their organizations as gardeners, harnessing the Four Forces to promote full
engagement, continual learning, and a passion for success across their
enterprises.
Leading Like a Gardener
You might assume that the U.S. military always maintains an unbending
top-down culture, but General Stanley McChrystal’s leadership in Iraq
proved otherwise. A career military man, McChrystal oversaw the U.S.
Army’s Joint Special Operations Task Force (TF for short) from 2003 to
2008. The TF was tasked with battling the terrorist organization al-Qaeda
on hundreds of Iraqi city streets. The operation floundered at first.
Conventional tactics did not work well against a nontraditional adversary
composed of shifting networked cells of fighters. McChrystal determined
that his organization needed to change the way it did business—and it
needed to change quickly. McChrystal saw it as a culture challenge. How,
he wondered, could he replace the deeply entrenched culture of follow-theleader with one in which officers on the front lines swiftly adapted to
combat conditions on the streets outside the conventional chain of
command?
The answer came not from McChrystal’s experience on the battlefield
but from his mother—or, as he calls her, “Mom.” McChrystal remembered
Mom ruling over his childhood home like Napoleon. Raised in a solid redbrick house set in a bucolic grassy expanse in rural Kansas, the future
general had scrutinized his mother’s operations in the garden. Though
McChrystal did not work hard in the garden himself, “I did watch and
learn,” he said. Years later, his experience produced an important insight: “I
began to view leadership as akin to gardening.”
Recalling the way Mom mobilized her prized vegetables, he launched a
major culture change initiative designed to improve the efficiency of the TF.
Specifically, he applied three lessons he had learned from observing his
mom at work in her garden:
• A garden’s design must adapt to changing conditions. You
must apply water in a drought and pull new weeds that threaten
your crop.
• A gardener serves as the protector in chief. You must keep your
eyes peeled for every kind of threat, from invisible microbes to
marauding wildlife.
• A gardener does more than grow plants. You must create the
right environment, one that promotes growth and leads to a
bountiful harvest.
Under intense pressure during the faltering early years of his Iraq
command, McChrystal recalled these simple lessons. They began to seem
even more relevant than the principles he had learned decades earlier as a
young cadet at West Point. In that resolutely hierarchical culture, he was
trained to “deliver the right answers” and “deliver them with assurance.”
But in Iraq, he says, “tending the garden became my primary
responsibility.”
Good gardeners do not try to force plants to grow, and they know that a
garden is always changing and growing. Rather than issuing inflexible
commands, they cultivate a nurturing environment in which plants, flowers,
and vegetables flourish. In McChrystal’s opinion, a good leader focuses on
essentials, such as showing that you care deeply for the people you lead and
encouraging feedback through free-flowing conversation. He made it a
point, for example, to use the first names of the analysts who delivered
updates from the field. He always asked a question at the end of a briefing,
even if he already knew the answer. “I wanted to show that I had listened
and that their work matters,” he explained.
Although Tony Hsieh matured as a boss far from a Baghdad command
center, he came to view his role in strikingly similar terms. When reflecting
on his leadership philosophy in an interview with the New York Times’s
Adam Bryant, Hsieh said, “Maybe an analogy is, if you think of the
employees and culture as plants growing, I’m not trying to be the biggest
plant for them to aspire to. I’m more trying to architect the greenhouse
where they can all flourish and grow.”
Recall the way our old friend Akhenaten tried to impose his will from his
Sun God throne. His heavy-handed leadership style displays none of the
wisdom a gardener or greenhouse architect would bring to the undertaking:
The Sun God vs. The Gardener
The Sun God . . .
The Gardener . . .
. . . dictates the right way to
think and act
. . . enables people to think and act on
their own initiative
. . . never deviates from the
required path
. . . imposes strategy
. . . sees individual differences
as a problem
. . . pivots as circumstances change
. . . gathers strategic input from others
. . . welcomes differences as an asset
. . . believes in his or her
infallibility
. . . constantly listens and learns
. . . never ventures far from
the throne
. . . judges and commands
. . . diminishes the importance
of culture
. . . moves among the people
. . . embraces tolerance and humility
. . . harnesses the power of culture
According to the Farmers’ Almanac, a compendium of homespun
wisdom about the natural world published every year since the late 1700s,
gardeners should pay attention to the lunar rhythms of the calendar, noting
opportune times to plant tomato seeds or harvest a crop of peppers. In our
experience, wise leaders display a similar sensitivity to their environment.
At first glance, organizational culture seems like a chaotic wilderness.
Cliques and alliances that cut across the formal org chart seem to emerge
randomly. Sometimes teams mesh incredibly well; other times they fall
apart. Great ideas and high performers flourish in some parts of the
organization, but elsewhere disgruntled foot-draggers emerge out of
nowhere. Culture gets messy because the tension between competition and
collaboration that we described in Chapter Two causes it to continually
evolve and change. But, as in the natural world, the culture follows certain
predictable patterns.
We have spent decades observing these patterns in cultures around the
world in small remote villages and large businesses. We learned how the
Four Forces consistently shape culture in any group, organization, or
society. Great culture-building leaders know that you can never engineer
culture, because trying to control it like a Sun God would not get you very
far. You can’t just yell at plants to make them grow faster. But if you
understand how the Four Forces work, you can cultivate a successful,
sustainable culture. You can be a gardener, responding to changes in the
weather, the climate, and the environment as you cultivate the soil. Or, to
put it another way, you can solve the culture puzzle the same way you
would solve the puzzle of designing a garden.
Think of the Four Forces as the water, soil, sunlight, and skill it takes to
make a garden healthy and productive. Without water, your garden becomes
parched and pale. With it, healthy roots grow deep into the soil. Without
sunlight, delicate plants wither and die. With it, they reach for the sky.
Similarly, satisfied Interests create an engaged workforce, deeply ingrained
Habits promote stability, and constant Innovation nourishes renewal. And
Vision? That’s where the gardener’s skill comes into the equation. We like
to express this idea in the gardener’s creed:
The Gardener’s Creed
I will design my garden to enable all plants to flourish (Vision).
I will provide the water that supports life (Interest).
I will till the soil to nourish healthy roots (Habit).
I will ensure access to ample sunlight (Innovation).
Let’s see how the metaphor of a garden and the gardener’s creed can
help you create and maintain a great culture in your organization.
Designing Your Garden with Vision
Unlike other animals, we are creatures of culture. But who’s in charge? Do
we let culture control us, or do we make the effort to design it? Gardenerleaders choose the right sorts of plants, placing seeds in just the right spots,
and providing all the requisites for growth. But wise gardeners do not act
like controlling gods. They respond to others, they address needs as they
arise, they nurture growth, and they adapt to changes in the environment. It
takes a willingness to listen. If you want to understand your culture, pay
attention to the stories people tell about their work.
Sadly, some self-centered leaders manage to trample nearly all of the
engagement and creativity out of an organization and make it nearly
impossible for others to speak at all. Just take a look at the experience of
Adrienne Miller, whose memoir In the Land of Men chronicles her career in
the elite circles of the New York publishing world. At the once-flourishing
men’s magazine GQ, Miller worked for Art Cooper, an outsize figure and
lover of Frank Sinatra music, multiple-martini lunches, and chain-smoking.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Cooper helped transform the magazine from a
narrowly focused publication for the clothing trade into a trendsetting
showcase for cutting-edge fiction and cultural currents. But his leadership
philosophy boiled down to one terse statement: “Heads are gonna roll!”
Miller described her interactions with Cooper as “terrifying.” During
their first meeting, Miller sat across from him in his office, peering at the
lavish expressionist paintings adorning the walls and a glass-encased
display of fountain pens that “looked like little lacquered missiles.” Every
detail reinforced one impression: “He was a King.” When Cooper asked
Miller how she was faring during her early days at the magazine, she
recalls, her “mind became an abandoned amusement park.” This smart,
highly educated, normally self-confident woman who would go on to serve
as the fiction editor for Esquire magazine could utter only one word:
“Great.”
The anecdote illustrates how a domineering leader with an autocratic
vision can choke off a culture’s air supply, suffocating even the smartest and
most capable people in an organization. Such leaders practice a style that
might succeed in turning around a failing venture, but their “heads will roll
if you don’t do what I tell you to do” attitude does not work in the long run.
Modern-day Sun Gods like Cooper burn people out, crowding out their
thoughts and motivation, and end up ruling over a barren, unproductive plot
of land.
Compare that careless style with that of a master gardener and listener.
Eileen Fisher, a self-described “don’t knower,” started her eponymous
clothing company with a scant $350. She tended it so well that it had grown
to be worth an estimated $200 million in 2020. She frankly admits her own
fallibility. “I never set out to be a clothing designer,” she says. “I was an
uncomfortable person, and so I wanted comfortable clothes.” That led her to
buy a sewing machine she could use to make her own clothes. In her own
opinion, “it was a disaster.” Eventually, however, the business flourished to
the point that she considered taking it public. “But,” she recalls, “it seemed
way too complicated.”
Fisher may not have known much about a lot of things, but she did know
how to cultivate a shared vision that produced a vibrant company culture.
Inspired by the book The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair, Fisher
designed her meetings in a way that encouraged people to speak up.
Assembled in a circle, everyone spent a moment in silence in order to
center themselves; then they engaged in a conversation designed to give
everyone a voice. Sometimes, those attending the meeting passed a gilded
gourd to the person who wished to speak. This simple ritual engendered
respect and encouraged listening. One woman said about holding the gourd
in her hands, “I feel lighter. I feel humbled.” In 1999, Fisher began working
closely with Susan Schor, an organizational development consultant who
eventually became head of the company’s People and Culture area. Schor
and her teammates helped facilitate the circle meetings. They acted “like
therapists,” observed Fisher, who freely admitted to her own thirty-year
history in therapy.
Schor came on the scene during a period her colleagues described as
“hard times.” While the highly profitable company had made Fisher a
wealthy woman, she had decided to bring in a CEO to satisfy “the need,” as
Fisher put it, “for more structure.” But that move sucked out some of the
vital air that had propelled the company to its great success. Schor
described the new environment as “more corporate, more hierarchical, less
collaborative, less caring.” Fisher herself did not disparage the new CEO.
“He was a lovely guy, [but] it was the old paradigm of somebody directing
the action. People would ask me, ‘Do we have to listen to him when he tells
us what to do?’”
The answer was no. That was not the Fisher way. Aware of her own
infallibility, she never liked telling people what to do. She preferred
creating an environment where everyone makes a contribution to the vision
—to make it a shared story about the direction of the company. Hilary Old,
vice president for communications, put it this way: “What we’re trying to
do with this different kind of leadership is to have the leader facilitate the
process, so you get the team in the room together to generate the ideas
together.”
To drive home her preference for a collaborative process, Fisher invoked
the image of a garden. “I know the idea for the company came through me
in some way, but it’s beyond me. I planted the first seed, and now I look
around and there’s this amazing garden. But I’m just an ordinary person.”
Like the “don’t knower” Eileen Fisher, Stanley McChrystal knew that he
didn’t know it all either. To make sure his people received the air they
needed to grow a new battlefield culture, McChrystal relied on the
Operations and Intelligence (O&I) brief. McChrystal did not invent O&I—
military officers had been conducting such sessions for decades—but he did
transform it into a method for cultivating a nonhierarchical, collaborative
culture, introducing what he called “thinking out loud.” He would play back
what he had just heard about an emerging situation in the field, then share
his immediate thoughts about possible responses. Rather than barking out
orders, he shared what he called his “logic trail.” Once he had done that, he
invited his subordinates to share their own preliminary ideas about taking
action. This give-and-take often included what seemed like rather dumb
questions, but those dumb questions often led to brilliant insights.
“Admitting openly ‘I don’t know’ was accepted, even appreciated.” He
provided the space in which effective decision-making flourished. “The
overall message reinforced by the O&I was that we have a problem that
only we can understand and solve.”
Which culture would inspire you more, the one where a Sun God rules
with an iron fist, issuing commands from on high (“Heads are gonna roll!”),
or one where a gardener invites others to create a shared vision and lives it
alongside everyone in the tribe? Eschewing command-and-control edicts,
Fisher and McChrystal created inspiring shared stories about working
together in their organizations. Their gardens flourished.
Watering the Deepest Needs to Satisfy Interest
As we discussed in Chapter One, everyone seeks to satisfy essential needs
for strong relationships, gratifying work, and dignity. When work provides
fulfillment, people fully engage in finding ways to achieve their
organization’s vision. They eagerly collaborate with colleagues, working
hard to get results and bringing their utmost creativity to problem-solving.
Gardeners tap interest by seeking to understand how different tribes in their
organization meet their essential needs. Through empathetic engagement,
gardeners activate cooperative instincts and defuse the competitive impulse
that often leads to destructive infighting.
The story of the relationship between Chip Conley, founder of the
hospitality company Joie de Vivre, and Timothy Leary, the Harvard
psychologist who became the leading psychedelic guru of the 1960s and
was dubbed by Richard Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America,”
offers a fascinating example of understanding differences. To say the least,
the two men were an unlikely pair. As a Stanford undergraduate in the
1980s, Chip made his mark as a member of the crew team, remained at the
school to earn an MBA, then apprenticed at the investment bank Morgan
Stanley, positioning himself to become a capitalist Master of the Universe.
Tim, on the other hand, dropped out of the rat race, turned on, and tuned
into a different vibe. Turning his back on capitalism, Leary wandered
through a technicolor drug-enhanced landscape where he devoted himself to
exploring his inner universe with the help of LSD and other psychoactive
substances.
Despite the dramatic differences in their approaches to life, the two men
became close. At one point in their unlikely friendship, they were sitting
together near a swimming pool, discussing their personal experiences.
Leary listened as the 28-year-old Conley mused about his latest venture, a
successful boutique hotel in one of San Francisco’s down-at-heel
neighborhoods. In the late 1980s, the hotel had become a preferred
destination for up-and-coming rock musicians, such as Sinead O’Connor
and Courtney Love. This venture struck Leary as a far cry from what the
world expected of a man who could have become fabulously rich on Wall
Street. Noting how warmly Conley treated his housekeepers, Leary
commented, “You chose the path of self-actualization. And it looks like
you’re creating self-actualization for the people around you, too.” Then he
whispered, “I might get shot if some of my friends heard me say this, but
businesspeople probably have the greatest potential to transform the world
for the better.”
Conley eventually sold his company to a venture capital firm in a multimillion-dollar deal and went on to serve as a self-styled “Modern Elder”
who helps others find their purpose in the later years of their life. Leary had
recognized the fact that Conley’s approach respected the fundamental
human need for love, recognition, and achievement. In terms of culture,
even the otherworldly Leary understood that the right business with the
right leadership and the right culture could do more than consciousnessexpanding drugs to help people fulfill their deepest needs. Leary’s admiring
words struck such a chord with Conley that he eventually became an
evangelist for the idea that businesspeople are uniquely equipped to help
others achieve their greatest and most important aspirations. He followed
the path of the gardener, knowing in his heart that business must satisfy the
human thirst for growth and accomplishment.
On the path to becoming a Modern Elder, Conley spent years talking
with other businesspeople at conferences around the world, distilling
everything he had learned at Joie de Vivre into a handful of basic rules:
• A great company gives employees a calling, not just a job.
• If a company satisfies only the minimal needs of its customers, it
will lose them to competitors that surpass customer expectations.
• A company’s culture must help people achieve a level of
fulfillment they may not even know they are capable of.
• A leader serves, above all else, as a company’s chief emotions
officer.
In our opinion, you can boil these precepts down to one big idea: while
most company cultures revolve around the central notion that people are
motivated primarily, if not solely, by the immediate need for money, the
most successful companies slake not only that thirst but also the need to do
meaningful, fulfilling work. Water your plants well, in other words, and
they will reward you with a bountiful harvest.
Pixar’s cofounder Ed Catmull knew how to tend a garden too. At Pixar,
the film studio that has produced a remarkable string of hits, including Toy
Story, The Incredibles, and Finding Dory, Catmull, like Conley, Fisher,
McChrystal, and other successful culture-builders, found a formula for
tapping into interest that inspired diverse teams across the company to do
their best thinking. It involves the “Braintrust.” It’s a simple idea. During
the early stages of a film’s development, the director joins a group of other
directors and writers for a luncheon at which they all watch an early version
of a film and provide feedback. Everybody gets fed, both literally and in
other ways too. Next, Catmull enforces a few rules, such as participants
must offer constructive comments that reflect their suggestions for
improvement, not demands for changes. People must feel safe in these
meetings. Notice how this approach closely matches Conley’s ideas about
satisfying peoples’ basic needs. Provide the right amount of water, and your
plants will mature and blossom.
Notice the similar ways in which the different gardener-leaders we have
described use forums, such as the Braintrust, to tap into interest. Eileen
Fisher set up circles to enable her people to express their deepest feelings.
McChrystal’s O&I briefings often occurred via Skype, a virtual space that
allowed people to think out loud with each other. These forums gave each
leader valuable insights into what was really driving their people. Giving
people the opportunity to express their needs is like passing around a jug of
water, inviting others to drink. Too many people spend their days in
meetings feeling parched. When you provide water, you keep your plants
healthy. When you do this across your organization, with all your different
tribes, you build coalitions that can change a culture in profound ways.
Keeping the Roots Healthy with Good Habits
Like the soil, habits create stability. An organization’s habits and routines
grow out of its history, its rituals, the stories people tell, the traditions that
have developed over time, and all of the other customs and conventions that
encompass “the way we do things around here.” Vision alone will not
sustain growth and produce a bountiful harvest if it is not rooted in good
habits.
Tony Hsieh collected his company’s habits in a book. It all started with a
group of Zappos employees meeting informally in a bar. Prompted by Hsieh
to describe the company culture to a new hire, they told stories that he loved
so much that he exclaimed, “I wish we had recorded our past twenty
minutes of conversation so that we could show it to all new hires.” Heads
nodded all around. Somebody said, “Yeah, that would have been cool.”
Hsieh looked thoughtful for a moment, then proposed an idea. “We
should just ask all of our employees to write a few paragraphs about what
the Zappos culture means to them and compile it all into a book.”
From this group session sprouted the Zappos culture book, a
compendium of 100-to 500-word mini-essays by employees about what the
company’s culture means to them. The writings so impressed the boss that
he proposed that the company publish the anthology as written, correcting
only glaring grammatical mistakes. Hsieh’s friend Jen Lim scoffed at the
idea. “That’s crazy!” Crazy or not, Hsieh stuck to his guns. The resulting
book essentially captured the habits that grounded the organization’s
culture. Every year Zappos publishes an updated edition and makes it
available to both employees and the general public online.
Some organizational experts like to compare culture to an iceberg, with
most of an organization’s habits (beliefs, customs, values) hidden beneath
the surface. We prefer to view it as the water in which you swim, with all of
the sea life (vision, interest, habits, innovation) darting, rippling, and
floating right before your eyes. The Zappos culture book makes the
company’s habits transparently clear to everyone, from employees to
customers to investors to anyone interested in working for the company. It’s
an open book. Can you list the habits that would appear in your
organization’s culture book?
Eventually Hsieh invited Jen Lim to collaborate with him on the bestselling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and
Purpose. In it, the authors talk openly about the company’s culture book,
emphasizing that it revealed deep truths about how a winning company can
keep growing season after season, year after year with the proper
cultivation. For instance:
• It’s a process. It’s not just a book. It’s an assembly of artifacts
and rituals that create and reinforce the culture. Just as Eileen
Fisher’s circle meetings and McChrystal’s O&I briefings
provided the soil in which a healthy culture grows, the book
reinforces an ongoing process of learning and adaptation that
spreads its tendrils in and around every person and activity in the
organization.
• It’s a long-term investment. It takes time to grow a bountiful
garden. It costs money too. As Lim pointed out, “Spending money
on printing and shipping a physical book may sound wasteful and
foolish. But over time the investment will pay off manyfold.”
• It’s all about people. A gardener may consult manuals and
textbooks on growing a good crop, but it all comes down to
selecting the right plants and giving them what they need to grow.
The same applies to culture. No matter how much information
you put in a book, in a manual, or on a website, you must reach
peoples’ minds and hearts so deeply that the habits influence
everything they do at work and in their personal lives. As Lim put
it, “By sharing a common belief system, Zappos employees
become the unified brand to the world.”
The basic belief system that drives actions provides the rich soil in which
a culture can flourish.
Using Sunlight to Spur Innovation
A healthy garden requires the right amount of sun to fuel growth and
change. But all plants do not need the same amount of sunlight. Some like a
lot of sun, some prefer partial sun, and others love the shade. With too little
sunlight, seeds struggle to push through the soil; with too much, tender
leaves can burn and wither.
Each of the leaders profiled in this chapter experienced a moment, even
a crisis, that called for the nourishment that sunlight provides. Tony Hsieh’s
original start-up became such a source of headaches that he abandoned it
altogether, taking the lessons he had learned to a new enterprise. Stanley
McChrystal radically altered his West Point style of leadership to
accommodate an unconventional enemy. Even though Eileen Fisher’s
company had made her a fabulously wealthy woman, it eventually fell on
hard times. Such moments require the renewing warmth of the sun.
In Chip Conley’s case, he watched as a perfect storm engulfed his
company: the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the 9/11 attack on New York
and Washington, wars overseas, and the outbreak of the SARS (severe acute
respiratory syndrome) pandemic. These harsh winds nearly destroyed his
garden, threatening him with bankruptcy. When a journalist asked him,
“How does it feel to be the most vulnerable hotelier in America?” Conley
uttered only one word: “Rotten.”
One morning, Conley found himself sitting on a friend’s houseboat
docked across the bay from San Francisco. As he gazed at the muck near
the shoreline revealed by the low tide, he thought about the “muck” in his
business. In an inspired coincidence, his friend chose that very moment to
read a line from a poem by Mary Oliver: “Are you breathing just a little and
calling it a life?” Those words broke open the clouds and let the sun shine
down on Conley. All of the troubles that were threatening Joie de Vivre
were transformed into an opportunity for renewal. “It was a stress test for
me personally,” he recalls.
A few days later, a still-depressed Conley slipped out of Joie de Vivre’s
San Francisco headquarters, eventually wandering into a nearby bookstore’s
psychology section. As he browsed the shelves, he began reacquainting
himself with many ideas he had first encountered 20 years earlier as a
Stanford undergraduate. That day, in the quiet of the bookstore, far from the
turmoil of Wall Street and the conflicts in the Middle East, he spent hours
reading about the fundamental needs that drive people. A fire had begun to
burn in his imagination, a fire that soon propelled him down the path
toward becoming a Modern Elder.
For leaders like Tony Hsieh, Stanley McChrystal, and Eileen Fisher,
moments of crisis can sear the imagination like the explosive heat of the sun
and inspire a renewal of purpose for themselves and for others in their
organizations. You should strive to take advantage of such moments,
turning an existential threat to your business into an opportunity for change.
As with so many tests of strength and character, gardener-style leaders
encountering crisis situations do not sit on a throne, thinking themselves
invulnerable to death and dying, but take a good, hard look at their
organization’s culture. Rather than steeling themselves against the problems
they face, they admit and even welcome feelings of vulnerability.
Great leaders appreciate vulnerability as an essential characteristic. Mark
Costa, the CEO of $10 billion Eastman Chemical Company, certainly did. A
graduate of the Harvard Business School, he once accepted an invitation to
address a group of second-year Harvard MBA students. He was confident.
He exuded energy. He represented everyone’s idea of a great CEO. Imagine
the students’ surprise when Costa confessed that all of the work he had done
over the past 25 years had left him feeling uncertain. “Your greatest fear as
a CEO is that people aren’t telling you the truth.” He went on to explain,
“[You have] to be willing to be vulnerable and be open about your mistakes
so others feel safe.” His conclusion? “If you think you have all the answers,
you should quit. Because you’re going to be wrong.” What does this have to
do with the renewal-conferring properties of fiery sunlight? As best-selling
author and business coach Ivan Misner puts it, “Ignorance on fire is better
than knowledge on ice.”
Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business
School, has devoted much of her career to studying teams and organizations
where both leaders and employees feel safe to admit their ignorance and
vulnerability. Time and again, her research has led her to the conclusion that
cultures imbued with such values empower people to accomplish amazing
feats. How do you create a tremendously empowering environment? How
do you cultivate frank and honest openness? To that end, gardener-style
leaders like Conley and Hsieh give their people the freedom to indulge their
natural inclination to experiment and tinker with new ways of working
together and solving problems, a freedom that lies at the heart of the most
innovative organizations. They model that behavior themselves. Hsieh
admitted that he had messed up the culture at his pre-Zappos startup.
Stanley McChrystal and Eileen Fisher acknowledged that what they had
been doing was not working. And Chip Conley recognized that he had been
meandering down the wrong path until he changed course to become a
Modern Elder.
Edmondson suggests you follow their examples by incorporating a few
simple sentences into your leadership vocabulary:
• “I don’t know.”
• “I need help.”
• “I made a mistake.”
• “I’m sorry.”
Go ahead. The next time you find yourself in a meeting about a
challenging business situation, use one of these sentences to shed light on it.
You will find that, far from embarrassing yourself, it will enliven the garden
of conversation. You will hear frank observations that generate enough heat
for creative solutions to spring from the soil. Admitting your own
vulnerability will, in short, fire everyone up.
In the next four chapters, we will offer a set of tools you can use in
harnessing the Four Forces as you design, cultivate, maintain, and adapt
your garden. Gardener-style leaders use these tools to create a shared vision
of the community their organization can and should be, to listen to others’
interests and create a tribe of tribes, to reflect on ways to create habits and
rituals that sustain a winning culture, and to experiment with innovations
that promote continual growth and transformation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Lead like a gardener.
• Design your garden with Vision.
• Water the deepest needs to satisfy Interests.
• Keep the roots healthy with good Habits.
• Use sunlight to spur Innovation.
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PART TWO
THE FOUR FORCES OF CULTURE
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CHAPTER 4
The Vision Ahead
Writing Your Tribe’s Story
Ready to get psyched? A rock song thunders from killer sound speakers
mounted beside the stage in a large ballroom. The company’s full-time
dance instructor exhorts the crowd to join him as he gyrates onstage. Tables
of men and women whoop and whistle as the event’s facilitator, Andrew
Zinger, a handsome young man who sports a silver suit with peg-leg pants
and a lavender shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, belts out: “I! Work! At
Salesforce!” He beams. “You can now walk up to people on the street and
say that. It gives you a tingly feeling in your body. Like, four-beers-deep
tingly. It’s fantastic. So, welcome.”
Welcome to Salesforce boot camp, a four-day event held by the pioneer
in customer relations management software.
Throughout the four-day training event, Zinger stresses the central role
of storytelling in the company’s culture. “You’ve probably started to
recognize here at Salesforce that storytelling is very, very important,” he
says. That includes personal stories, customer stories, and stories about the
company, one of which tells how founder and CEO Marc Benioff came up
with the idea of Ohana, a native Hawaiian term for kinfolk.
Benioff fell so deeply in love with the idea while on sabbatical in Hawaii
that he decided to make it a core principle of the company he had founded
in 1999. It appealed to him because, as he put it, “are we not all
connected? . . . Isn’t that the point?” Although plenty of CEOs liken their
companies to a family, few of their employees actually feel that way about
the organization. At Salesforce, they do. They have that tingly feeling about
their work.
It all stems from the fact that Benioff combines business savvy with
knowledge of what people really need from their work. In his words:
On their first day of work, we take everyone, and we show them the kitchen and the bathroom
and their office and their desk. Then we take them out and they do service in the afternoon.
They’ll go to a homeless shelter or they’ll go to the hospital or go to a public school. This is a
very core part of our culture. I want a company where people are excited to come to work
every day, where they feel good when they get here, where it doesn’t take from them, but it’s
giving to them, it’s giving to others. Why do people want to be here? It’s not that we have
more amenities than everybody else. We have less. We don’t have a cafeteria. But we have a
stronger purpose and a stronger mission.
He sums up his philosophy with a critique of companies that lack
Ohana. “This idea that somebody put into our heads that companies are
somehow these kind of individuated units that are separate from society . . .
that is incorrect.”
His approach works. Year after year Salesforce has ranked near the top
of every major Best Place to Work list. People who attended one boot camp
summed up their experiences:
“Frigging awesome!”
“Ready to rock!!!!”
“I AM PUMPPPEDDDDDDD!”
Have you ever felt this way about your job? If so, congratulations.
According to a 2018 Conference Board report, you are among the 47
percent of Americans who do. The other 53 percent? Well, they’d rather be
doing something else.
Salesforce people believe in Benioff’s vision that a corporate entity
functions not just as a profit machine but as a society where employees,
customers, and communities share life under one umbrella. They’re all part
of one tribe. The idea of belonging to a tribe has long persisted in the
collective human imagination, based not just on bonds of blood and kinship
but also on a shared set of values and a clear vision. As the political
scientist Benedict Anderson put it, these bonds create “imagined
communities.” All of us live in imagined communities: a neighborhood in
Nairobi, a football fan club in São Paulo, the University of Pennsylvania,
Apple, Australia, the world.
Ohana refers to an imagined community. Whatever you call it, it’s the
glue that holds people together. In a great corporate culture like
Salesforce’s, it connects the leadership team to the HR department, HR to
the marketing team, and marketing to the R&D division. It’s not pretty
words uttered by the CEO or a fancy mission statement posted on the
website. It’s a shared belief in what it means to be a Pinterest Pinployee or a
Warby Parker Warbler (their actual employee nicknames).
The feeling of tribal commitment and loyalty isn’t just a fuzzy emotion.
It’s the engine that drives a company like Salesforce to the top of the list for
employee engagement, customer service, and ethical behavior. It’s the
power of shared vision, the sense of belonging to a tribe, and the feeling
that “we are all in this together.” It inspires engineers to write magnificent
code in the San Francisco office, salespeople to break records for signing up
new clients in Houston, and customers to buy the company’s software in
Tokyo.
This chapter will explore ways to harness the Force of Vision to create a
sense of Ohana in any group, team, or organization. The conventional
wisdom about vision—that it springs from the head of a lone visionary—
recalls the idea of a leader who rules like a Sun God. In fact, the kind of
vision that creates an imagined community imbued with an Ohana-like
spirit springs from all of its members. It doesn’t come from stories told by a
single person or team at the top. It starts with the shared stories that express
a tribe’s history and vision.
Using Stories to Create Imagined Communities
Roll back the calendar 250 years to colonial America, and perch like a fly
on the wall of the cabinet room where two young revolutionaries turned
nation-builders defiantly lock eyes with each other. Bodies tensed, they
prepare to respond to President George Washington’s demand that his
cabinet decide whether to go to war. With the young country still recovering
from a bloody war for independence, Washington must decide whether to
aid France, an ally poised on the verge of fighting its own war. Secretary of
State Thomas Jefferson believes his government must help an ally that
came to the rescue of the Americans in their own hour of need. Secretary of
the Treasury Alexander Hamilton adamantly disagrees, believing that the
frail republic can’t afford to enter another war.
Washington asks Jefferson to lay out his opening argument. A heavy bass
beat thumps in the background as the cabinet gathers close. Jefferson steps
forward and slashes at Hamilton with a cutting bit of bold poetry:
He knows nothing of loyalty
Smells like new money, dresses like fake royalty
Desperate to rise above his station
Everything he does betrays the ideals of our nation.
Onlookers cheer, coattails flapping as they wildly hoot and clap at the
lyrical evisceration they have witnessed.
Well, you probably know that this confrontation did not happen exactly
this way. No, it appeared onstage in the hugely popular musical Hamilton.
The epic Broadway production converted real political disputes into
delightfully entertaining theater as its largely nonwhite cast and
anachronistic contemporary hiphop rhythms and rhymes brought audiences
to their feet.
Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda felt a deep connection to Alexander
Hamilton when he read the best-selling biography by Pulitzer Prize–
winning author Ron Chernow. “I was like, ‘I know this guy.’ I’ve met so
many versions of this guy. . . . That’s a familiar storyline to me, beginning
with my father (a Puerto Rican immigrant) and so many people I grew up
with in my neighborhood.” Centuries later, with strikingly different cultural
roots, Miranda felt a strong bond with the story because it resonated with
his very soul.
Stories. We read them and hear them every day. The best ones ring true
to our ears because they spring from the depths of the soul. They make us
think, “Yes! I can relate to that!” Stories also form an integral part of every
tribe’s communal spirit when they capture the vision and values that help
ensure future individual and mutual prosperity today. They offer a clear
view going forward. It worked for our earliest ancestors. It worked for
Salesforce. It worked for Apple. And it worked for an American people
devastated by the 2020 coronavirus scourge.
Humans display a remarkable ability to cooperate and coordinate on a
large scale, often with people in far-flung corners of the world they will
never meet. A glance at headlines that appeared in newspapers in April 2020
illustrates the point: “The ‘Profoundly Radical’ Message of Earth Day’s
First Organizer,” “The Coronavirus Requires Global Cooperation,” “Oil
Producing Nations Seek Global Deal to Stabilize Market,” “‘Defining
Moment’ in Afghanistan Requires Leaders to Work Together.” What
mobilizes such cooperation? Stories. In a 2015 interview with National
Public Radio, the historian Yuval Harari summarized decades of historical
and anthropological research on the subject when he concluded, “If you
examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is
based on . . . the stories that we tell and that we spread around. This is
something very unique to us, perhaps the most unique feature of our
species.”
The most compelling stories bring a subject to life in a memorable way.
In organizations, they provide guidance on how to behave, how to work
together, and how to solve problems. At Salesforce, the story of Benioff’s
epiphany about Ohana set the tone for everyone who went to work for the
company. Of course, a trainer could tell a recruit that Salesforce values
customer service, but that abstract statement lacks the power of a story
about how, one foggy April day in the company’s early history, Benioff
personally visited an important client in Silicon Valley to troubleshoot a
problem.
Listen carefully to conversations around the proverbial water cooler in
any successful organization and you’ll hear the stories people share about
“the way we do things around here.” Workers tell and retell them during
coffee breaks, over cafeteria lunches, during after-work get-togethers, and
whenever two or more people meet to make an important decision or solve
a pressing problem. While the specific stories vary from company to
company, they usually share certain themes. In a comprehensive study
conducted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, researchers found
that seven prototypical stories circulate in a wide range of organizations:
1. What happens when the boss breaks the rules?
2. Is the boss human?
3. How does the boss react to mistakes?
4. How does the organization deal with challenges?
5. Can the little person rise up?
6. What takes place when people are fired?
7. Will the organization help individuals move up the ladder?
These themes underscore the fact that, while we may think of our tribe as
unique, all groups have been telling broadly similar stories ever since two
humans put their heads together in a situation where more than one person
was required to get a job done. For example, every tribe tells a tale about an
ingenious solution to a problem that enabled a low-status member to rise
from the bottom of the ladder to a position of power and authority. Despite
their commonalities, stories vary in specific details from group to group,
setting each tribe apart from every other tribe. In terms of culture, the
stories grapple with questions about relationships (Does my boss really care
about my success?), achievement (Can I rise up the corporate ladder?), and
fairness (What will happen to me if I make a mistake while I’m doing my
job?).
Whether you lead a sales team or oversee a construction project in the
Gobi desert, you need to tap into the collective stories that illustrate in
concrete and memorable terms “the way we do things around here.” Start
by listening to the mythic workplace stories people tell and retell around
every desk, water cooler, assembly line, and warehouse in your business.
Those stories provide the raw material for creating an authentic vision.
Becoming a Great Story-Listener
In her book Uncanny Valley, Anna Weiner shares her firsthand experience
about toiling amid the endless cubicle fields in Start-Up USA. In her midtwenties, longing for more meaning in her work and her life at the height of
the tech industry boom in Silicon Valley, Weiner left a budding career in
New York book publishing and relocated to San Francisco, where she
landed a job at a big-data start-up.
It was a cultural shock. In New York she had been accustomed to people
using rather erudite formal English to communicate stories and ideas. In
Silicon Valley, she encountered a strikingly different way of talking,
characterized by what she called “garbage language.” What did she mean
by garbage language? It’s how Joe the supervisor insists on the importance
of “value-adds” in interminable meetings that do everything but add value.
It’s the way Linda the overly enthusiastic manager touts “work-life
integration” while her people toil bleary-eyed late into the night. It’s a Sun
God CEO’s pontification in town hall gatherings about how he is
“leveraging synergies” while everyone in the audience is wondering how on
earth they got themselves stuck in this god-forsaken desert. Weiner recalls a
boss incessantly reminding her that she and her slavishly coding coworkers
were all “Down for the Cause,” then the next day laid off Weiner’s best
friend.
Garbage language is the abstract, buzzword-laden verbiage that, like
sugarcoated junk food, contains more empty calories than good nutrition.
“Let’s think outside the box until we get enough traction to monetize a
disruptive strategy in an impactful way.” It’s pure, unadulterated
gobbledygook. To quote William Shakespeare, “It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” These days you can find it in
every nook and cranny of the workplace, but nowhere does it exert its
brain-numbing effect more glaringly than in a lazy leader’s attempt to
articulate vision. As New York magazine writer Molly Young noted in her
sympathetic review of Uncanny Valley, “I hate certain words partly because
of the people who use them.” She’s referring to pompous, know-it-all
leaders who don’t perform the hard work of connecting with others to write
a shared story that creates an imagined community.
Ron Carucci, writing in the Harvard Business Review, noted that at least
15 corporations have recently put “one” in front of their corporate names in
internal materials, as in OneWalmart, to promote a feeling of cultural unity
among employees. But adding that little word doesn’t grab the minds and
hearts of employees who do not feel “Down for the Cause.” Rather,
according to Brian Kurey, vice president for HR research at the advisory
firm Gartner, they shake their heads over the “say/do gaps” between words
and actions. These gaps serve as breeding grounds for the kind of
listlessness, cynicism, and foot-dragging that has brought down the most
powerful leaders and largest businesses.
Why do businesspeople love buzzwords? They provide a quick-and-dirty
shorthand that, presumably, other members of the tribe understand and
appreciate. On the downside, however, buzzwords lose all meaning when
used over and over and over until they begin to sound like mind-numbing
background music. They distract from the challenging but necessary work
of creating a real community. Deep listening resides at the heart of this
work. In order to grasp the authentic stories that circulate and define the
culture, you need to listen with both ears wide open. Until you do this work,
you will never be able to use stories to support real and sustainable culture
change.
Great storytellers are superb listeners. Before you attempt to create new
stories that illustrate desired cultural beliefs and values, you should listen
with a keen ear to the ones, both positive and negative, that currently
circulate in your organization:
1. Listen to the past: Every organization, every team, every
society rests on origin stories that establish a context for
current behaviors. The bridge to the future starts there. In the
words of James Baldwin, “If you know whence you came,
there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
2. Listen to coauthors: Each of your coworkers can share a
unique story that might add an essential aspect of your
organization’s identity. If your organization employs 50,000
people, you can tap the input of 50,000 potential coauthors.
Treat each one as a fellow visionary.
3. Listen for common themes: As you record more and more
stories, look for threads that run through the collection. These
themes provide important clues to what people really think and
do. Don’t be surprised if some of the themes surprise or even
shock you. They may provide important planks in your culturebuilding platform.
Great storytellers devote time and energy to collecting stories. Trying to
shortcut the process by using buzzwords only ends up producing garbage
language. A good story captures the richness of multiple voices and
experiences. Some leaders feel tempted to take shortcuts because it takes
time and energy to become a great listener. But if you resist that temptation,
you will end up with a richer and more compelling mission statement or
strategy. Others won’t hear just your thoughts; they’ll hear their own beliefs
and aspirations articulated in a way that inspires and motivates them.
“In my downtime I’m using this app to learn Corporate-speak, Legalese, and French.”
Mining the Past to Write the Future
How did JetBlue Airways get off the ground? The answer lies in a mythical
origin story told by Mike Barger. JetBlue gained its customers’ respect by
providing exceptional service, a rare commitment in an industry where most
carriers display a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward passengers. Barger, who
went on to serve as a strategic advisor to the University of Michigan’s Ross
School of Business, was a member of JetBlue’s founding team and its chief
learning officer.
The JetBlue story begins in a hotel conference room where Barger and
his teammates had convened to brainstorm how they could reinvent air
travel in a way that would set the company apart from its competitors.
Barger described how the room lit up when attendees realized that their own
personal frustrations were what had brought them all to the table. “Every
person on the start-up team was there because they were disappointed in
their previous experiences as airline leaders,” he recalled. “What motivated
us was the chance to start from scratch. We didn’t start with a list of values.
We rolled butcher block paper around the wall and started writing down
everything that seemed to be broken in the airline industry.” Not satisfied
with just listing a lot of bitter complaints, the group transformed their
negative feelings and frustrations into a positive force for change. “We gave
ourselves a homework assignment that night: Take this long list up to your
room and come back tomorrow morning with specific solutions to these
problems.” That assignment foretold the birth of a new airline that would
cast a shadow over its rivals.
A good origin story functions much like a classic fable. When you listen
to Barger’s, you can see that roll of butcher block paper. You can feel the
frustration in the room. You can envision the team rushing upstairs to their
rooms to search for solutions. Sure, JetBlue would end up with a list of
cultural values it expects its people to honor, but Barger’s mythic tale brings
the values to life and makes them memorable. He still loves to tell the story,
because it captures that particular feeling of Ohana that makes JetBlue
distinctive. It’s not just his story, it’s everyone’s story.
Without well-told, lively, and memorable origin stories, even the most
admirable list of values adds up to little more than a pile of garbage
language. As Barger put it, “One of the main reasons values become
meaningless is people don’t know what they are actually supposed to do in
their day-to-day work.”
By telling origin stories, you build a bridge to an envisioned future.
Steve Jobs used an origin story to turn around Apple. With the once-great
company teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, Jobs drew
on his historical knowledge of its customers and his colleagues. His pivotal
presentation at the 1997 Macworld Expo honored the company’s past,
acknowledged the present crisis, and painted a vivid picture of the future.
Imagine the scene. Hordes of die-hard Apple fans had filed into a large,
dark conference hall where an enormous video screen dominated the stage.
The audience leaned forward as Jobs paced back and forth on the stage.
Almost immediately, the expectant audience burst into raucous boos as their
newly returned leader described a shocking cornerstone of his recovery
plan: partnering with the evil enemy Microsoft. It was as if George
Washington had announced to his fellow Americans that he wished to form
a partnership with Great Britain. But as Jobs sketched his vision of a
prosperous future for the company, the boos turned into mutterings of
approval and, finally, erupted in enthusiastic applause.
Jobs began to win his audience over when he drew on Apple’s origin
myth. “I think you always had to be a little different to buy an Apple
computer,” he began. He went on to recount how Apple had turned the
world of computing upside down: a small box sitting on a desk (in an era
when a mainframe computer filled an entire room), making it possible for
students (a sadly neglected market for small, easy-to-use machines) to use a
device at home and in the classroom. That was the company’s glorious past.
The present? “I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple
computer. . . . [These users] are the creative spirits in this world.” Then Jobs
took a masterful turn, shifting his focus from customers back to the
company. “We, too, are going to think differently.” In that moment, Jobs
connected the decision that seemed on the surface like an assault on Apple’s
cultural soul to a clear view forward.
By mining the company’s past, Jobs constructed a bridge to a prosperous
future, without once forgetting that Apple must always remain Apple. When
the going gets crazy, the crazy get even crazier. That also applied to Apple’s
customers. “In that craziness, we see genius, and those are the people we’re
making tools for.” When Jobs reconnected both employees and customers
to Apple’s deep roots and showed how those roots could support a whole
new forest of successful products, he launched a strategy that would
eventually turn Apple into the most profitable company on the planet.
The past is mother of the present and father of the future. As our favorite
all-American sage Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are
going, you’ll end up someplace else.” We’d add a little twist to that
homespun wisdom: “If you and the rest of your organization don’t know
where you’re coming from, you’ll all end up in the wrong future.”
Connecting with Coauthors
When Vig Knudstorp became CEO of LEGO in 2004, the company enjoyed
a preeminent position among the toy manufacturers in the world. Its
revenues topped well over $1B. Brand surveys revealed that consumers
ranked the brand among such household names as Disney and Nike. So why
had sales started falling? With the company’s profit margin hovering at –
30%, LEGO was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every day. Soon
after stepping into the top position, Knudstorp put the company on a fivestep turnaround path: Survive, Purpose, Let Growth Loose, Step Up, Leap.
After describing his strategy to a Financial Times journalist in an expansive
interview, Knudstorp concluded, “I apologize for the management lingo.”
No apologies needed. That lingo was not garbage language. It was
authentic enough to guide LEGO back to profitability. But words alone do
not tell the full story. Cultural revitalization required an active, hands-on
approach. When Knudstorp observed that LEGO had “lost its way in terms
of understanding its own self-identity,” he was basically saying that the
company’s leadership had forgotten the company’s story. To correct that
blunder, he centered management discussions on “a fundamental question:
Why do you exist?” The answers would come from a host of coauthors.
A decade before Knudstorp moved into the top position at LEGO, the
company was enjoying such remarkable success that the folks in the C-suite
were actually discussing ways to limit growth and profits. As Christian
Iversen, an executive vice president, recalled, “We had a grip on the
market.” From the perspective of a company controlling 80 percent of the
sales for construction toys, retailers were “a necessary evil.” But such smug
complacency never ends well. Several mid-1990s’ social and economic
changes caught LEGO’s leaders off guard. Falling birth rates, declining
household spending on toys, the disappearance of small traditional toy
stores muscled aside by big box chains, and the burgeoning popularity of
electronic entertainment conspired to hand LEGO its first-ever financial
losses in 1998.
That’s when a guy named Poul Ploughman, nicknamed “Mr. Fix-It” by
the press, rode to the rescue. Having joined the company in 1999 as CFO,
Ploughman soon became COO, taking over every aspect of day-to-day
management. Ploughman, a dyed-in-the-wool, by-the-book businessman,
put the flabby company on a strict “Fitness Program” aimed at reducing
management layers, streamlining processes, tightening up efficiencies, and
installing accountability. Managers found themselves rotated around
various parts of the company at a dizzying speed. Nearly two-thirds of the
100 top executives were fired. Ploughman was sending a stern message:
Produce, or else! Unfortunately, this turnaround strategy failed to take the
company’s cultural soul into account. LEGO was not a generic corporate
behemoth; it was a maker of simple toys that had for decades stimulated
children’s architectural imaginations and inspired countless small-scale
construction projects in family rooms from Arkansas to Zanzibar. Despite
all of his good intentions and military-style proclamations, Ploughman
watched helplessly as sales plummeted by over 25 percent and losses
mounted to more than $100 million. The CFO who had taken Ploughman’s
place commented, “Our business is almost destroyed.”
Ploughman meant well, of course. But he made one supersize mistake:
he appointed himself the sole author of LEGO’s story. Unlike Jobs, he
formulated a vision that did not respect the company’s roots. He played Sun
God, thinking himself the sole author of the story, when the situation
demanded a leader who could recruit many coauthors to the cause. The
most powerful visions spring from shared stories, not from the brain of a
supreme leader. The best visions create a strong sense of Ohana throughout
the organization. They have many mothers and fathers, including
employees and customers. Knudstorp understood that.
He realized that the company had steadily been losing touch not only
with its employees but with the broader LEGO community of customers
and stakeholders. As a result, the shared story had gotten lost in the shuffle.
Christian Madsjberg and Mikkel Rasmussen describe the situation in their
book The Moment of Clarity. In their view, before Knudstorp took charge,
LEGO’s executives were telling themselves the wrong story. They were
basically saying that since today’s overscheduled, overstimulated kids lack
the time needed for creative, deeply involved LEGO-building, the company
should be offering attention-grabbing, instantly satisfying products that
would match customers’ changing preferences.
Knudstorp and his colleagues grasped the fact that children weren’t
connecting with this story. To make matters worse, LEGO’s traditional
research methods supported this false vision. That’s when the company’s
leaders decided to set aside artificially assembled focus groups and start
looking at the problem as if they were anthropologists seeking to
understand an unfamiliar tribe. Knudstorp mined the past in conversations
with Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the grandson of LEGO’s founder. The 35-year-
old Knudstorp impressed Kristiansen as the reincarnated spirit of the 70year-old company. Kristiansen said, “The LEGO brick is more than a toy.
He knows what the brick can be and what it can do for humanity.”
Knudstorp mapped LEGO’s cultural heritage by seeking opinions from a
wide range of coauthors. “I had many discussions with people in and
outside of the LEGO Group to understand our identity, our core business,
our unique capabilities, and the value proposition for customers.” Finally,
with the help of Madsjberg and Rasmussen, he dispatched researchers to
study LEGO customers in the wild. These cultural anthropologists
abandoned the sterile environment of focus groups and went directly into
LEGO families’ homes. They sat alongside kids as they played with toys
and rode along when youngsters went shopping with their parents, doing
the deep listening they needed to do in order to reconnect with the shared
LEGO story.
The executives learned that LEGO’s employees, far from having grown
complacent in their work, retained an abiding passion for producing
challenging, creative play for customers. The fabled brick was more than a
plaything; it was a mythic icon. As the LEGO leaders listened to children
fantasizing about booby-trapping their bedrooms with imaginative
constructions and bragging about racking up high scores in video games,
they discovered that a whole generation of kids who were living bubblewrapped lives pined for the kind of adventurous, self-driven sense of
mastery that came from hours of unsupervised LEGO-building.
Knudstorp drew on what he had learned to craft a visionary motto for the
company: “Inspiring the Builders of Tomorrow.” That simple phrase
resonated through the company’s culture and in the homes of parents eager
to provide stimulating experiences for their children. Most importantly, it
did not spring magically from the CEO’s brain; it came from a great deal of
deep listening to all members of the LEGO Ohana. It arose from the beliefs
of both a middle-aged engineer in Billund, Denmark, and a middle-schooler
in Wilmington, Delaware. Both of them could say, “That’s a familiar
storyline to me.”
The art of deep listening and connecting with potential coauthors works
for any team or organization, whether it’s a Fortune 100 global giant based
in France, a two-year-old start-up in Nairobi, or a five-person sales team in
Singapore. They all need a shared story and a clear view of going forward.
Every conversation you have with employees and customers, every
investigation you conduct into what makes your people tick, every meeting
you hold to discuss your organization’s future should help clarify that view.
“Here’s who we are. Here’s where we’ve been. Here’s where we’re going.”
If you know where you’re going, if you rally your stakeholders behind a
central idea that touches everyone’s heart, you stand a very good chance of
getting there.
Defining the Central Idea
Can you describe your organization’s vision in a brief, simple, and
compelling way? Does it expose the heart of your organization? Does it
attract and hold talented employees, motivate customers to buy your
services or products, and attract investors to bet on your firm’s future? Does
it illuminate a path to a bright and prosperous future?
When you can answer these questions with a resounding yes, you have
probably defined the central idea that reflects the essence of your
organization and provides a clear view of the future you hope to achieve.
The phrase “central idea” was coined by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and
Michael Useem, who spent many years teaching business at the Wharton
School and advising global executives and board members about good
governance. They felt that every winning culture depends on adherence to a
central idea.
To clarify the central idea of your business, you should try to write a
250-word story that answers two questions: Why do we exist, and what
steps will we take to achieve the results we need? In the mid-1990s Sunil
Bharti Mittal, unknown and with no money, tapped the strength of his
central idea to penetrate India’s telecom market. He launched Bharti
Telecom Ltd. (later renamed Bharti Airtel) using short-term cash raised
through a pitch that boiled down to “grow faster than our competitors.” In
other words, the central idea of speed and scale defined the startup. Over
the next two decades it propelled the company to a $20 billion future. The
central idea did not come in a fit of individual inspiration; it resulted from
long and careful conversations Bharti conducted with his board, which
ultimately resulted in a short document that included such operational
details as pricing, cost, infrastructure, branding, joint ventures, partnerships,
and recruiting. For example, the one-page statement committed Airtel to
establishing “an exceptional capability for managing supplier partnerships
with vendors such as Sweden’s Ericsson and the United States’ IBM.” As
for talent, Bharti would recruit the best people from “around the world.”
Their compensation would tie directly to the central idea.
Unlike the conventional one-sentence corporate mission statement, the
firm’s central idea is presented in a deeper, more expansive way. And unlike
a mission statement created in a few minutes at an executive retreat, it
resulted from a lot of discussion and listening before Airtel’s leaders felt
they had fully described the principles that would drive their culture. They
shunned garbage language in favor of words and phrases that could infuse
every internal email, every business meeting, and every important decision.
Mittal worked on the statement with his directors day and night for months
in the Airtel boardroom and at home. For him, it was a soul-searching
experience during which he wrestled continuously with the two questions.
Later he recalled, “One of the burning things in my story has been to grow
the top line as fast as you can. I have always believed that the bottom line
will come if there is a top line. . . . Speed and always speed has been what
we have done. If you are caught between speed and perfection, always
choose speed.”
Work on writing your one-page story with people whose insight and
judgment you trust. Devote as much time to it as you need. It may take
several weeks to get it right. Pretend you are writing a one-page pitch that
will persuade people to work for your company, buy its products, and invest
in its future. Avoid the temptation to ramble on. It takes time to boil it all
down to 250 words.
Here’s the interesting thing. In the end, it’s not just the words themselves
that matter. It’s all the sweat your team has poured into the undertaking.
Creating a powerful shared story requires a lot of sharing, a lot of roll-upyour-sleeves, put-on-your-thinking-cap hard work. Once you have done the
hard work, don’t sit back and admire your handiwork. Your one-page story
is a living, breathing document you must frequently review, refine, update,
and, when necessary, alter with the fire of renewal.
One final thought about vision and storytelling. You will know when
you’ve crafted the right view of the future and the story that supports it
when you see its principles and values permeating everything your people
do, from devising an innovation that will add efficiency to a production
process to resolving an argument about a new sales and adverting
campaign. Like Lin-Manuel Miranda reading Hamilton’s biography, you
will look around and say, “That’s a familiar storyline to me.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Use stories to create an imagined community.
• Become a story-listener.
• Mine the past to write the future.
• Connect with coauthors.
• Define the central idea.
OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER 5
A Tribe of Tribes
Satisfying Interests and Building a Movement
Trust the process! Trust the process! Trust the process!”
For the first time in recent memory, a stadium-shaking chant filled the
Wells Fargo Arena. It marked a phenomenal turnaround. Philadelphia’s
professional basketball team, the 76ers, had earned a well-deserved
reputation as an epically inept band of losers, but during the 2018–2019
season (before, sadly, injury woes again battered their playoff chances in
2020) they established themselves as championship contenders. How did it
happen?
The amazing run started with Sam Hinkie, the 76ers’ former general
manager, whose brilliant insight inspired fans to chant the now-famous and
ubiquitous phrase, “Trust the process!” Hinkie recognized that every
championship team fields a bright star: a Michael Jordan, a Stephen Curry,
a LeBron James. If the 76ers failed to acquire one, they would continue to
languish in the back of the pack. To avoid that sorry fate, Sixers’
management turned to the NBA draft. In order to win the first-round draft
pick, a player who could lead the way to a championship, the team needed
to play worse than mediocre. They needed to get to the very bottom of the
heap.
While the plan looked good on paper, on the court it produced a long,
hard slog. One sportswriter dubbed the bad-by-design team an “atrocity.”
Fans fled through the exits. Then, when the situation seemed to have gotten
as grim as it could get, along came head coach Brett Brown, much more
people-focused than the analytics-driven Hinkie. Brown connected the
turnaround strategy to the players who actually competed on the court.
Brown understood that although he was the boss on paper, that wouldn’t
be enough to get a group of players, each with his own needs and
aspirations, to come together as one. To build support for the “process”
within the team, he had to tap into a more powerful force than any title or
position on an org chart could generate. We call it the Force of Interest. It’s
what gets people to set aside individual differences and work hard for the
good of the group because they realize that they cannot succeed if it fails.
Brown sparked this force of interest with monthly breakfast meetings
during which players delivered PowerPoint presentations about subjects
that spoke to their hearts. Topics ran the gamut from tattoos to coffee to
snakes. Power forward Dario Saric talked about the Balkan conflict, an
issue that was deeply personal for him.
The exercise enabled a diverse group of players to get to know one
another as three-dimensional people, not just employees, and to connect the
competitive strategy with the team’s core identity. The morning storytelling
sessions might seem like a distraction from the game itself, but the gettogethers facilitated real buyin. After the player Tony Wroten first uttered
the phrase, “Trust the Process!,” the words became the team’s mantra. Fans
began shouting it, and soon it was rolling like a meme tidal wave across the
wider culture. Even a Zen master has embraced the words as spiritual
inspiration.
In business as in sports, there’s always tribal conflict. Absent reasons to
do otherwise, coworkers and teams clash as they come up against others
with different identities and agendas. You must connect with a whole
group’s interests before you can hope to transform a vision or a strategy into
an inspiring movement. Plans that look great on paper but lack a blueprint
for building a unified whole are doomed to fail. But if you successfully tap
into interests, you will create a pervasive sense of trust that spurs everyone
to put their best efforts into achieving success for the tribe. In other words,
it’s the force of interest that builds a tribe of tribes. To tap the power of that
force, you need both the brain of a thinker like Hinkie and the heart of a
connector like Brown.
The former head coach’s disappointing departure in the pandemicshortened 2020 season underscores the importance of connecting. The
cohesive, consistent culture he built with his players never took root beyond
the confines of the court. According to knowledgeable insiders, uncertainty
and unevenness plagued the organization’s other tribes. Those problems
prevented Brown from fully bringing the Process to fruition and bringing
home another NBA championship.
Nevertheless, the 76ers’ improbable saga illustrates a fundamental truth
about tribes: getting people aligned behind a goal requires more pull than
push. This chapter shows how to create pull by paying as much attention to
interests as you do to org charts, incentive systems, and top-down plans.
Targeting the Full Range of Human Interests
Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, lamented that during
her time at the troubled printer company she struggled with what she called
“one thousand tribes.” HP’s tribalism ran rampant, with multiple CEOs
paired with different CFOs. Those executives, according to a member of her
top team, worked to “deliver against their own plans” rather than “improve
the company’s overall results.” While HP during Fiorina’s tenure might
seem like an extreme case, virtually all organizations encompass a
multitude of minicultures.
Left unchecked, the tendency to fragment into smaller tribes can produce
a deeply dysfunctional culture. We once worked with a major financial
services firm where, in one of the credit units, an aisle separated sales
representatives and risk analysts. One of the analysts said, “We stay on our
side. They stay on theirs. You can feel the tension. I can’t talk to them.”
Here they sat, two little tribes intent on getting the same result but unwilling
and unable to communicate with one another. Odd as this may seem, it
happens all the time.
We give our trust and loyalty to the people in our immediate vicinity if
they help us meet our needs. This tendency creates rather tight, limited
inner circles. In other words, it feeds tribalism (the concept that large tribes
consist of little tribes, perhaps as many as a thousand in a nation-state like
the United States) and can undermine the need for broader solidarity,
especially when facing a threat by a competitor. To prevent this from
happening, Sun God leaders usually focus on economic incentives. “Work
hard, get the job done, and we’ll give you a box of carrots.” On the classic
organizational chart, straight lines connect a lot of little boxes or neat,
functional groups. According to Sun God cults, if you create the right
performance management system and dole out the right rewards, you’ll get
all your little boxes working in harmony.
It rarely works out that way. It’s not that people don’t want to satisfy
their interests. It’s that those interests operate on a much deeper, almost
instinctual level of trust. Deep-seated and often unarticulated emotions and
divisions can sabotage even the most well-designed formal system of
reward and punishment (the old carrots and sticks approach). Imagine
Company X, where the tribal impulse that creates a bond among the sales
staff differs dramatically from the one that unites the accountants. Sales will
spend whatever it takes to close a deal; accounting wants to spend as little
money as possible. Voila! The incentive that drives salespeople to succeed
runs smack into the one that motivates accountants to control costs. What
seems perfectly rational to a sales rep looks like pure madness to an
accountant.
Throughout human history, people in an inner circle have striven to
fulfill their needs in ways that outsiders might see as irrational or illogical.
In colonial America, a surprising number of Europeans chose rugged New
World conditions over the comforts of Old World civilization. Many White
colonists, who were captured by Native American tribes and then returned
to live with their fellow Europeans, pined for the sense of belonging they
had found among their captors. In a letter to Peter Collinson, a fellow of the
Royal Society, Benjamin Franklin noted: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends,
and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay
among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our
manner of life . . . and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into
the woods.”
Even in an era dominated by global corporations, everyone in an
organization wants to feel emotionally connected with others, to receive
recognition for their unique talents and contributions, and to do meaningful
work. Yet not everyone defines and meets those needs in the same way.
Smart leaders consequently work to create organizational systems and
processes that allow for differences among individuals and small tribes but
pull everyone together in a unified quest for collective success. You can
find ways to satisfy a wide range of psychological interests without forcing
a breakdown of all the tribes that form the organization as a whole. It all
depends on tuning into many different sets of interests, then establishing
work environments that respect and satisfy them. It sounds pretty obvious,
right? Unfortunately, this basic fact eludes many leaders. According to a
study in the Journal of Affective Disorders, most people today work in
environments that are “sunlight-deficient, competitive, inequitable, and
socially-isolating.” That is, nobody’s talking about the things that really
matter and that needlessly drive people apart.
Coach Brown used the monthly breakfast meetings to make each 76er
player feel like a unique and special piece of the strategy but also an
essential part of a larger group. A vision should work exactly this way: it
engages each person and the whole team in a movement. Of course, you
must do more than just tell people to join the cause. You ask questions,
listen carefully to answers, and initiate conversations about emotions and
agendas until you learn what your people are really thinking and feeling.
Forget the conventional advice to avoid the “meeting before a meeting.”
Use initial sit-downs as low-pressure ways to delve into what makes your
people tick. Ask questions that elicit sharing. Listen more than you talk.
Remember the rule “Give before you get.” Telling a personal story, perhaps
one that even shows a little vulnerability, makes others feel more
comfortable opening up. Given the natural tendency to judge another
person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors according to our own set of
preferences and prejudices, slow down and remember what the novelist
Christopher Isherwood once wrote, “I am a camera.” Be a camera, carefully
observing and recording your impressions without attaching subjective
labels to them.
A strong culture can inspire the sort of intense devotion needed to push
people further past their own boundaries than they ever imagined possible.
It’s not surprising that “cult” and “culture” share the same Latin root of
cultus, which means “cultivation” (in the sense of gardening) but can also
mean “adoration.” Such a powerful feeling can propel people to endure the
harshest threats and most challenging environments in order to accomplish
something they could not do on their own. As we said in Chapter Four,
many of today’s most pressing problems require such accomplishments on a
global scale.
If you want to harvest a lush garden, look past the lines and the boxes on
the org chart to see all the unique personalities and interests that constitute
your culture. Rather than relying solely on economic incentives, ask such
human questions as: What makes each person special? What has drawn
them to join their team? How do individuals define success? Does their
definition of individual success harmonize with their perception of group
success? What binds the team together? How does each team member
contribute their distinctive identity and skills to achieving group success?
The answers to these questions will reveal the keys to building a tribe of
tribes.
Including Everyone in the Movement
If you look at our pictures, you will see three White American men. We try
to keep that identity in mind as we write and consult about culture. That’s
because, unfortunately, in most of the business organizations we work with
and study, White male voices tend to dominate discussions, whether we
realize it or not.
”I sent that memo this morning about being happy at work.
Why haven’t they complied?”
This came home to us painfully during a team-building workshop with a
group of leaders at a large urban hospital. During a discussion of the
problems that arise when you set about connecting people across
boundaries in organizations, “Pamela,” a young Black executive, raised her
hand to share her own personal experience with the challenge. All but a few
other leaders in the room were White, and most of them were men. She
began her story by recounting her struggles with building relationships
early in her tenure.
As she put it, “For a long time, I felt like I had to talk White to get ahead
here.” She worried that if she spoke to colleagues with the words and
inflections she used when she talked to Black friends and family, the
majority of her fellow workers would not take her seriously. The dominant
tribe in the organization would, she feared, restrict her little tribe to the
margin. Pamela went on to talk about the personal cost she incurred by
trying to sound White, a practice social scientists call “code switching,” in
which you adopt the language of another, often more powerful group. At the
end of a long workday, she felt exhausted, having spent a tremendous
amount of mental and emotional energy trying to sound the way she
imagined her White peers expected her to sound. It took years before she
felt sufficiently comfortable with colleagues to abandon the practice.
The pioneering sociologist Howard Becker, author of the book
Outsiders, observed that every group distinguishes between insiders and
outsiders just as Pamela did (and as others did with respect to her) during
her early years at the hospital. Professional language is just one of the
devices people use to distinguish between inside and outside groups. For
example, jazz musicians socialize with other jazz musicians and enthusiasts
and dismiss as squares those who lack the same appreciation for their art
form. A school’s “in crowd”—the football stars, cheerleaders, and student
council members—looks down on the computer and math majors as geeks
or nerds. The nerds, in turn, think of the popular clique as a bunch of
superficial jerks. Wherever you encounter groups, you will find that they
include insiders and outsiders. We stress this point because you must keep it
in mind as you seek to bind all of your tribes into one cohesive group. In a
way, you need to make the larger group the “insiders” who compete not
with one another but with those outside the walls of the organization.
Which brings us back to the tensions we discussed in Chapter Two. How
do you pull people in when others want to push them out? The
anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu gained some insight into this issue when he
studied social hierarchies in the French national school system. He noticed,
for example, that while tribes express cultural differences with their unique
patterns of dress, speech, and behavior, they also wield them as instruments
of power. Like the gangs in the classic Broadway musical West Side Story,
tribe members in effect say: “We’re the Sharks. You can tell we’re Sharks
by our black leather jackets and ducktail haircuts. Take us on, Jets, and
we’ll beat you at any game you want to play.” In other words, we “the
insiders” will win, and you “the outsiders” will lose. Those who succeed
and dominate in a large arena know the rules of the game and use them
strategically to their advantage. A study by the economists Colin Camerer
and Roberto Weber revealed that individuals perceived as outsiders in a
team do not receive the respect their talent deserves. Insiders view the
outsiders as less competent regardless of the experience and skill they bring
to the table. A case in point: women have long known that all too often they
must work harder than men to get the same compensation, opportunities,
and respect in the workplace.
Gardener-leaders effectively connect with diverse groups in their
organizations because they know that they need to get everyone treating
each other like insiders. They become what Pierre Bourdieu called “culture
virtuosos,” adept at reading and working within the wildly different sets of
rules and belief systems that govern the various tribes in their organizations.
In a nutshell, they can see the world through many different lenses. Of
course, adopting many different perspectives, by itself, does not solve the
problem of tribal warfare. You may be able to analyze and articulate a
societal problem like healthcare from both a Democratic and a Republican
point of view, but that is only the first step toward bringing liberals and
conservatives to the table to hammer out a solution.
Everyone finds it difficult to understand the language of someone who
possesses a totally different set of values born from their own special and
deeply entrenched ways of looking at the world. Consider the rifts between
political tribes in our broader society. Studies show that politically liberal
individuals tend to emphasize such values as fairness and justice, whereas
politically conservative individuals tend to prize loyalty and tradition. Both
tribes want the same thing, to create and govern a great country, but they
disagree sharply about how, exactly, to do that. In one study, researchers
asked people of both political persuasions to do their best to convince each
other to change their mind on a policy issue, such as funding for veterans’
benefits. While a skilled negotiator would say you could most easily do that
by framing your position in terms of the values the other person holds dear,
most of the people who participated in the study did just the opposite,
strongly championing their own point of view. That approach does not
change a single mind.
The issue of differences underscores the number one problem you face in
getting tribes to work hand-in-hand to achieve your organization’s goals:
the false belief that we fully understand what makes a given group tick. We
often think we are speaking another group’s language when we’re really
just talking to ourselves. A culture virtuoso, on the other hand, spends a lot
of time looking through the lens with which others see the world. How do
they do that? They ask.
That’s what Barrett Rollins, chief scientific officer at the Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute, did when he had to get some of the world’s leading
scientists to collaborate on multidisciplinary projects. Scientists, like most
specialists in any field, enjoy working on projects that reflect their highly
specific individual interests. For a long time, Dana-Farber’s structure
encouraged just that. According to Rollins, “Scientists had a tremendous
amount of autonomy over how they used institutional resources. As long as
they published their work in high-impact journals and advanced whatever
field they chose, it didn’t matter what they studied.” But eventually it
became clear that the future of cancer research lay in more integrated
programs that span several fields: biology, imaging, treatment, research
methodology, and population monitoring.
The challenge Rollins faced was in getting highly accomplished
scientists with notoriously big egos to work much more collaboratively, and
to do it without wielding any formal authority over fiercely independent
faculty members. Rollins needed to know which big areas of research
would ignite the passion of Dana-Farber’s different scientific tribes and
motivate them to produce world-class research together. So, he asked for
their input. He convened star faculty from the institute’s various divisions.
Once he had gathered the chieftains of the tribes in the same room, he asked
them to identify the 10 most critical areas of future cancer research that
should guide the collaborative efforts of the larger organization.
Those 10 areas became the organizing blueprint for 10 new Integrative
Research Centers, set up alongside the traditional labs. Dana-Farber used
incentives—scientists who volunteered to head these centers received
generous funding—but Rollins knew that he would have to go much further
to get the highly independent and entrepreneurial scientists on board. He
frequently met one-on-one with the new leaders, building relationships and
offering encouragement and leadership coaching. He organized workshops
on collaboration, bringing in outside experts to show how other institutions
did it. He celebrated the success of the integrated programs by tirelessly
telling stories about thrilling breakthroughs that dramatically improved
patients’ lives. An outside researcher who studied the Dana-Farber centers
described Rollins’s 24/7 leadership as “arduous.” In other words, he did a
lot more than “just get the incentives right.”
When culture virtuosos like Rollins engage in frequent and open
conversations with their people about the organization’s vision and mission,
and how it connects to their needs, they create a much stronger bond with
their tribes than incentives can ever provide. Psychologist Harry Reis’s
extensive research on relationship-building identified three foundations for
building these strong, trust-based relationships:
• Understanding: Do they fully grasp my needs?
• Validation: Do they highly value those needs?
• Caring: Do they want to see those needs fulfilled?
Culture-builders must keep these questions in mind as they attempt to rally
people around a vision in a way that turns it into a movement shared by all.
The 76ers’ Brett Brown kept such questions in mind as he guided the
monthly breakfast meetings that included every member of his 76ers team.
The get-togethers had little to do with learning quirky little tidbits about his
players. The real purpose was to prove that he wanted to understand their
needs, validate the importance of those needs, and assure everyone that he
wanted to see those needs fulfilled. He established such an effective process
for communicating with his team that everyone, including the team’s fans,
believed in their hearts that they could “trust the process.” Had he wielded
his power to run the show by ordering people to get on board with the
process, he may have won some temporary, grudging acquiescence. Instead,
he put the team on the road to results by including everyone in the
movement.
Building a Network of Influencers
The visionary leaders of Cayo Inc. set up several regional units in an effort
to align the organization’s structure with a strategy to create a sustainable
operation. Each unit’s leader would, they hoped, work hard to achieve that
goal. However, a talented and charismatic member of one important unit
(nicknamed “Piercing Eyes” for his ferocious, competitive nature) resisted
the plan to align the units with the scheme. He, along with many headstrong
coworkers in other units, soon engaged in what amounted to civil war. As
Lydia Denworth wrote in her book Friendship, “A bloodbath ensued.”
Ultimately, she concluded, Cayo became as “demarcated as a gang-ridden
neighborhood,” with Piercing Eyes leading one particularly fierce gang.
Despite the fervent hopes of the Big Bosses that a diverse collection of
workers would bond as expected, they watched groups form hostile
societies that rarely communicated with one another. Any attempt to cross
gang boundaries resulted in bloody conflict.
If it sounds like the members of the workforce made monkeys out of
their Big Bosses, you’re right. But maybe that’s not so surprising given that
these combative workers actually were monkeys.
Piercing Eyes, a rhesus macaque, received his nickname from the
scientists at the Caribbean Primate Research Center on the island of Cayo
Santiago, not far from the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. His formal name
was 4H2, a label that marked his position in the highly stratified society that
had emerged after the researchers imported the monkeys from other
countries. In the beginning, the researchers expected the monkeys to group
themselves according to their geographic roots, but that did not happen.
Instead, strong-willed characters like Piercing Eyes emerged as de facto
leaders, forming alliances outside the researchers’ imagined org charts. The
resulting subtribes did not match the ones the monkeys had formed in the
distant forests from which they had originally come. To put it another way,
the researchers envisioned a grand strategy that meant nothing to Piercing
Eyes.
Have you encountered such a character in your own organization,
someone who may not occupy a box high up the org chart and may hold no
special title but serves as a de facto leader? Your Piercing Eyes might exert
a profound influence on fellow workers but fly under the radar of senior
leaders. Most organizations employ one or more people with “piercing
eyes.” They are the invisible culture virtuosos who often form bonds across
the organization and play a significant role when a vision or strategy comes
down from on high. People in their informal tribe turn to them, rather than
the Big Bosses, for cues on how to react. If you want to build a tribe of
tribes, you’ve got to get your Piercing Eyes on board. Neglect them, and
they can undermine performance and sabotage even the best strategy
concocted by senior leaders.
It’s not always easy to locate the informal influencers in your
organization. Keep your eyes and ears open for the names of people who
seem to enjoy an uncommonly good reputation not only among their peers
and colleagues but also among people outside the sphere of influence
prescribed by the org chart. Look for people like Chris at General Motors.
Chris was a colleague of one of our fellow business anthropologists,
Elizabeth Briody, who spent several years at GM helping the company
engineer a major cultural transformation. If you ask Elizabeth to name one
of the most effective managers she’s encountered in her work, she puts
Chris near the top of the list. What made him so special? He did all the little
things you need to do to connect at a deep level with others. For example,
Chris would set aside two hours on his calendar every month to shadow a
different job at GM. One month you might find him on the assembly line,
the next in a meeting with engineers. He reminded Elizabeth of an
anthropologist studying all the different tribes in the organization.
Chris’s observation and relationship-building paid off handsomely. He
became one of those hidden influencers people turn to for advice on all
sorts of matters because he spoke their language. Chris wasn’t the most
senior manager, but he was the one whose insight you needed for a new
strategy or initiative. Chris could tell you right away whether it would fly
on the shop floor or in the engineering department. When he climbed on
board, you knew the train would gain momentum.
If you work in a sizable organization, you will never be able to connect
with every one of your Piercing Eyes, but you can form bonds with enough
of them to keep you from doing something that will lead to foot-dragging or
outright sabotage. Bring them in early, keep them constantly in the loop,
and ask them frequently to tell you what’s really going on out there. You
will find them terrific translators when you need to transport your vision
across tribal boundaries.
Expanding the Tribe
In 2008, Howard Schultz, the retired founder and CEO of Starbucks, took
back the reins of the company when it faced a life-threatening crisis amid
that year’s devastating global financial meltdown. Sales had plummeted to
the point where bankruptcy lay right around the corner. How could Schultz
prevent that disaster? He took a giant risk, flying 10,000 store managers to
New Orleans to hear him deliver what some skeptics dubbed the “$30
million-dollar speech.” When his flummoxed peers asked him how he could
possibly justify the expense, he responded, “I’m going to tell them the truth,
the real truth.” It was a grim truth. Starbucks had a mere seven months to
survive on its current trajectory.
Standing before his troops in the massive Superdome stadium, Schultz
made the stakes perfectly clear. An especially remarkable aspect of his talk
was his calm and reasoned tone when he spoke about the severe financial
problems the company faced. Rather than yelling that the sky was falling,
he presented the situation as an opportunity, as “a crucible . . . a test of how
we are going to respond.” He sounded less like a general rallying the troops
than a fellow soldier in the trenches with them, trying to find a way out of a
dire emergency.
That day Schultz began transforming his loose collection of factions into
a tribe of tribes. He knew, like it or not, that every organization is made up
of potentially conflicting groups and that you cannot lead a successful
change effort without uniting them behind a shared vison. In a perfect
world, the little tribes would be harmonious by nature. But such a utopia
would lose something of great value: the diversity of many groups with
their own subcultures that gives life its richness and provides organizations
with a much-needed innovative spark. The trick is managing the groups in a
way that binds them together without dampening their spirit. While
allowing each group its own individuality, you must draw another, larger
circle around all the different tribes, one that makes all of them insiders.
In New Orleans, Schultz expanded the tribe with three proven
techniques:
1. He reminded them of their shared connection. Schultz
opened the meeting with a coffee-tasting event for all 10,000
managers. This long-standing company ritual reminded the
managers that they all belonged to the same larger tribe.
2. He oriented them toward a shared goal. Schultz laid out the
challenge in no uncertain terms when he said, “Please don’t be
a bystander,” and committed himself to doing “everything
humanly possible” to help right the ship.
3. He used the language of “we.” Schultz shared his “pride in
being your partner.” Throughout the speech he stressed “we
need” rather than “you should.” As he later explained, “When
you ask for help, people come toward you.”
The $30 million speech marked a major turning point. In the following
months, the company pulled itself out of the financial mire with the 10,000plus managers pulling together. As the late Martin Coles, then president of
Starbucks International, described the impact: “It’s a stadium full of people,
but in Starbucks terms, it’s 10,000 partners all facing the same direction . . .
all having the same belief in their heart about how we are going to get
there.”
Empowering the Tribe, Then Letting Go
On a spring day in 1980, real estate agent Candy Lightner suffered one of
the most horrific tragedies that can befall a parent. Her 13-year-old daughter
was killed by a drunk driver as she was walking to a church carnival with a
friend. Lightner, with no political experience (she had never even voted),
embarked on a campaign to make sure no other parent lost a child to an
inebriated driver. The nonprofit organization she created, Mothers Against
Drunk Driving (MADD), set in motion a tremendously successful
movement to change attitudes and laws about drunk driving.
If you want to learn the fundamentals of building broad coalitions and
creating enduring change, go beyond the tried-and-true corporate
transformation stories and look into successful social movements like
MADD. Social movement leaders like Lightner offer keen insight into
channeling vision to effect change because they do it at the grassroots level,
not from a position of personal power. In today’s increasingly fragmented
workplaces, you can accomplish much more with informal influence and
relationship-building than you ever will with a title alone. If you want to
build a tribe of tribes, set aside the traditional carrots and sticks and start
planting the seeds of change in the fertile ground of the human imagination.
Georgetown McDonough Business School scholar Leslie Crutchfield
identified a specific quality that turns organizations like MADD into
forceful movements. She calls it “leaderfull.” By that, she means leaders
who strike a delicate balance between top-down and bottom-up efforts to
get the job done. Rather than dictating what each member of the tribe
should do to get needed results, leaders who adopt a leaderfull approach
connect with and empower energetic individuals to take the steps they need
to fulfill the organization’s vision. Giving up control does not create
anarchy. Rather, it empowers tribes to work with a united purpose toward
achieving shared goals. Wise leaders provide the necessary resources to
accomplish the goals, then they get out of the way.
As Candy Lightner’s mission gained attention, she started getting phone
calls from people who were equally passionate about her cause, asking,
“What can I do?” She gave a quick answer: “Start a local chapter.” MADD
soon expanded to 90 such chapters across the country. Instead of
micromanaging the proliferating tribes, Lightner sent them guides, helped
them learn about their local legal ecosystem, and connected chapters so that
they could learn from each other’s experiences. While Lightner gave
chapter leaders plenty of leeway to drive the movement, she didn’t just sit
in the backseat as an interested observer. She focused her efforts on fundraising, building national awareness, and forming alliances with
government and private sector partners.
Business leaders can rip a page from Lightner’s playbook. Barrett
Rollins used similar tactics to pull together some of the smartest people in
the world, scientists with deservedly outsize egos. He connected energetic,
driven individuals with each other, instilled excitement about a common
vision, provided needed resources, and then stepped back, watching as the
movement coalesced and moved steadily forward. It’s not easy for strong
leaders to let go of the reins, but empowering others to do the driving can
pay off in terms of morale and, most importantly, results. It’s in everyone’s
best interest to do so. A movement may start at the top, but it grows at
ground level.
All of the leaders we’ve discussed in this chapter struck a delicate
balance between top-down and bottom-up efforts to fulfill a vision. While
they led vastly different kinds of organizations with their own tribal quirks,
they all embedded the habit of give-and-take in their cultures by rolemodeling the kind of listening and mutual support they wanted others to
embrace. This kind of reciprocity, the sincere willingness to share power,
may not reap an immediate return, but in the long run it works because it
respects a basic component of human chemistry: the desire to get along, get
results, and get ahead.
Someone once asked the anthropologist Margaret Mead to cite the single
most important event that marked the beginning of human civilization. She
did not hesitate when she said, “Broken bones.” Broken bones? At the dawn
of civilization, a fractured leg spelled certain death for any animal,
including a human being, who immediately became easy prey to infection
or a hungry predator. The earliest evidence in the archaeological record of a
human with a healed broken femur indicated that someone else was willing
to help the injured person, staying close by and waiting for the bone to
mend, despite the fact that doing so might expose both of them to danger. In
short, culture emerged when humans started putting others’ needs before
their own.
Whether you are building a team, connecting others in an organization,
or just trying to build energy around an idea, start with the time-honored
human question: What do you need?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Target the full range of human interests.
• Include everyone in the movement.
• Build a network of influencers.
• Expand the tribe.
• Empower the tribe, then let go.
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CHAPTER 6
The Force of Habit
Reinventing the Rules
A story began circulating among anthropology departments at major
universities some 50 years ago. Eventually it went viral, spreading through
pop culture and ending up on the pages of the magazine Psychology Today.
Like all cultural memes, the story has never stopped morphing. In the
version we heard, a young anthropologist was watching a villager prepare
lunch in her kitchen deep in the Brazilian jungle. Let’s call them “Cheryl”
and “Miranda,” step back, and watch the action unfold.
Miranda, wielding a sharp machete as if it were a meat cleaver, whacked
off the ends of a pork roast, placed it carefully in the middle of a large pan,
then slid it into a wood-burning oven. Cheryl narrowed her eyes, jotted a
few words in her journal, then asked, “Miranda, why did you cut off the
ends of the meat?” Miranda shot Cheryl a confused look. She knew Cheryl
observed her surroundings with a keen eye and often asked hard-to-answer
questions about simple details that nobody else noticed. “I don’t know,”
Miranda said, smiling. “My mother taught me to prepare the meat this way,
and I’ve never thought about it.”
Cheryl decided to pay a visit to Miranda’s mother, who lived a few
houses away, down a narrow path. Cheryl knew the village well, since she
had spent many days doing what the legendary social scientist Clifford
Geertz called “deep hanging out,” building relationships with members of
the local tribe and noting their idiosyncratic habits and shared routines. Like
many careful researchers, Cheryl believed that a culture not only comprises
formal rituals associated with major life events such as birth, marriage, and
death but also includes seemingly insignificant daily activities such as
cooking and cleaning. Cutting the ends off the pork roast? Hmm . . . who
knows? It was worth a little investigation.
Cheryl found Miranda’s mother sitting outside her house and got right to
the point. She asked about the unusual way Miranda had prepared the pork
roast. Where did that practice originate? “I don’t know,” answered the
mother, shrugging her shoulders. “I learned it from my mother.”
Later that day, Cheryl paid a visit to Miranda’s grandmother. After a few
pleasantries, Cheryl asked about the business with the machete. The elderly
woman raised a finger in the air and said, “Ah!” She shuffled over to a
cabinet, pulled out a small pan, and placed it on the kitchen table. She
paused, lowered her eyes, then placed her palms on her knees. “When I was
raising my girls, this was the only pan I owned. To fit the meat into it, I had
to cut the ends off. That’s how I always did it. The girls have just kept doing
it that way.”
Just kept doing it that way. As Cheryl pondered the phrase, she realized
that the way we do things most often mimics the way we have seen others
do the very same things. We watch and we imitate. Our mimicry evolves
into habits that combine with other habits to form collective routines that
define our culture. Far from being fixed for eternity, habits continually
change in both dramatic and imperceptible ways as they become less useful
or desirable. Give Miranda a bigger pan and a smaller butcher knife, and
she might no longer be chopping off the ends of a roast.
Regardless of this fable’s true origin, the moral applies to all cultures,
including those found in the most highly evolved global corporations.
Social life in all of its forms (families, tribes, teams, companies,
governments, world-spanning enterprises), with all of its fine distinctions,
complex hierarchies, and apparently static rules, is an ever-developing, fluid
process, a process of creating the habits for getting work done and creating
a sense of belonging to a group that embraces shared values. Habits exert
power over culture because, like all memes, they operate as if on autopilot,
circulating from one person to another and influencing every aspect of
behavior. The force of habit never stops exerting its influence on us. It
invests our jobs and personal lives with meaning and order.
That’s fine for good habits, of course. But what about bad habits? They
can also exert a powerful force in an organization. Cultures sprout bad
habits all the time, producing toxic environments that make it hard to get
things done. Even good habits can turn bad when they fall out of sync with
the organization’s needs, dragging down the best strategies. It’s not enough
to craft a vision and rally people around it. You need to channel positive
energy into ways of working that, day in and day out, reflect and reinforce
your culture. Get the force of habit moving in the right direction, and your
vision becomes unstoppable, propelled forward through a thousand small
actions that, added together, define your tribe and make it successful.
Creating the Culture’s Rules
William James called the process of acquiring habits that help us get along
and get results the “great flywheel of society.” Adding his own metaphor,
the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu often referred to the phenomenon as
getting a “feel for the game.” When a fastball comes zooming toward the
plate at nearly 100 miles an hour, the slugger knows exactly what to do
because he has developed a keen feeling for the game. Miranda played the
“cut the ends off the roast” game. Businesspeople also get a feel for the
game played in their organizations, or, in cultural terms, “the way we do
things around here.” Knowing and playing by the rules keeps that great
flywheel of society spinning.
We just keep doing it that way.
Because the flywheel ceaselessly revolves as we go about our daily lives
(cooking and conversing, finding mates and raising families, electing
leaders and making laws, building skyscrapers and founding companies),
we often feel as if the rules are strings operated by a puppet master, when,
in fact, each of us participates in small and sometimes significant ways to
create certain rules of behavior. Miranda’s grandmother did not set out to
write a rule about carving meat. She just did what she needed to do, and the
habit cascaded down to her granddaughter. Eventually, Miranda’s daughter,
receiving a bigger pan as a wedding gift, might write a new rule that keeps
the ends on the roast intact.
Sometimes old rules stop working. That’s what happened in the mid1990s when Reed Hastings acquired three companies in 18 months and
proceeded to grow the resulting conglomerate, Pure Hardware, a business
that produced tools for Unix software developers, into a company worth
over half a billion dollars. He conducted meetings with the company’s
executives as if they were gladiatorial contests, earning him the nickname
“The Animal.” As Hastings later reflected, “It was chaos.” All the hand-tohand combat led to an alarming rate of executive turnover. Looking back on
that tumultuous time, Hastings admitted, “We were all young and didn’t
know any better.” Financially, however, the chaos produced results. In 1997
“The Animal” sold Pure Hardware for an impressive $750 million. But that
result left in its wake a perfectly toxic culture. According to a Fortune
magazine profile, “[Hastings] had helped build a company of which he
wanted no part.”
Pure Hardware’s new parent, Rational Software, introduced a much
healthier culture to its acquisition. Hastings gained an important insight
from studying the change. “It was so different how they operated—the level
of trust and the quality of interaction between them was impressive. That
gave me a North Star, something I wanted to grow toward.”
He took that insight to his next project, Netflix, the company he started
after getting fed up with paying one-too-many late fees for DVD rentals.
This time around he wanted to create a cultural environment where he did
want to work. To crystallize his idea about building a robust working
environment, he wrote “Freedom and Responsibility Culture,” a manifesto
he converted into a 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that went viral in
Silicon Valley. Patty McCord, who ran HR at Pure Hardware and then (as
she put it) “relented to work with” Hastings again at Netflix, later wrote a
book about the principles Hastings enunciated in his manifesto. McCord’s
book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, and
Hastings’s manifesto amounted to a detailed operating manual for how
things work at the company. Read it with the eyes of an employee, and you
see a how-to guide:
• How to get along. According to Patty McCord, Netflix is
“combative in that beautiful, intellectual way where you argue to
tease out someone’s viewpoint.” Respect keeps the combativeness
from becoming abusive. Hastings, the man formerly known as
“The Animal,” recalling his tenure at Pure Hardware, said, “I am
much more honest and direct, but not confrontational.” Now,
instead of attacking others, he explores differences with a positive
attitude. In response to an idea he doesn’t like, he might say: “I
don’t understand why you think that is smart. Help me to
understand that.” About his new behavior, Hastings observed, “I
didn’t know how to do any of that at Pure Hardware.” In the past,
getting along was just not a priority.
• How to get ahead. “Compensation,” writes McCord, “is a
judgement call.” What about formal guidelines for basing pay on
performance? As McCord puts it, “Jobs are not widgets, and
neither are people.” While a manager might find benchmark
salary data useful, the ultimate decision about compensation
should take into account an employee’s overall value and pay him
or her accordingly. Some of that value, such as a positive
influence over colleagues or displays of unofficial leadership,
resists quantification. At Netflix, performance feedback deals less
with compensation than with acquiring and sharpening needed
skills. Employees get ahead by becoming better and better at their
jobs.
• How to get results. Job satisfaction at Netflix comes from doing
the work that needs to get done. “If you are looking for perks,”
observes McCord, “this is the wrong place. The fun we have here
is all about building products.” People can have a lot of fun
coming up with disruptive ideas that propel the company’s
dominance over its rivals. Hastings himself got a big bang out of
doing this during the early 2000s, when he foresaw that web-
based delivery would make the delivery of DVDs via the mail
obsolete. That disruptive insight led him to retool operations into
a streaming-video business. Not long after that, he again
transformed the company, turning it into one of the leading
movie-production studios. In 2019, one of its high-profile films,
The Irishman, received nominations for several Academy Awards.
New habits drove the Netflix culture. A close reading of the original
“Freedom and Responsibility Culture” slide deck reveals an astonishing
number of behaviors employees practiced some 25 years later, as they
interact with one another in a “combative, beautiful way,” give and get
constructive feedback to help each other improve, and deliver their services
with a keen eye on what they will need to do in the future to keep beating
the competition.
The Netflix saga illustrates an extremely important aspect of culturebuilding. Hastings and McCord put it all down on paper, transparently
documenting the desired Netflix. Rather than just preaching a new gospel,
they wrote a detailed bible for turning the vision into reality by detailing
exactly what the vision would be in practice. They answered the most basic
question: What will I actually do differently day after day?
Turning Rules into Rituals
Like Hastings and McCord, Ray Dalio, founder of the investment firm
Bridgewater Associates, has also written extensively about his company’s
unique culture. His exceptionally comprehensive and idiosyncratic book,
simply titled Principles, offers more than a few lofty philosophical
observations such as “Money is a by-product of excellence, not a goal.” But
the company has delivered such impressive tangible results that it won him
a spot on the Forbes 400 list, and in the process made many of his clients
extremely wealthy. Dalio’s Principles, like McCord’s Powerful, serves as a
remarkable how-to manual for culture-building. It has enabled
Bridgewater’s people to bring the book’s specific principles to life.
“Ok, I came up with the plan. Now you go and implement it.”
Case in point: each week, Dalio presides over a “What’s going on in the
world?” meeting, assuming the role of a tough-love financial sensei. At one
such gathering, Dalio led a discussion about global commodity prices.
When he asked for opinions about trends in that market, a youngish
associate began to predict a slowdown in the Chinese economy. Dalio
abruptly cut him off, saying, “Are you going to answer me knowledgeably
or are you going to give me a guess?” The associate replied that he could
make a prediction on informed speculation. “Don’t do that,” Dalio replied.
“You have a tendency to do this. We’ve talked about this before.” The
young man pushed back, but Dalio kept up the pressure. Eventually, the
associate relented and admitted he needed to do additional calculations
based on more thorough research.
Although many leaders like the idea of providing this sort of candid
feedback, few do it well. Too often they turn the teaching moment into a
public browbeating. What keeps Dalio’s approach from sinking to that
level? He and the associate publicly rate each other’s performance in the
conversation. This two-way street takes the sting out of what might have
seemed like a pure rebuke of the associate’s prediction. Such exchanges are
not confined to high-level meetings. Throughout the organization,
employees can use an app called the Dot Collector, where they can score
each other on a scale of 1–10 with respect to how well they adhere to the
company’s core principles. Everyone can see everyone else’s most
immediate ratings on such principles as “Fighting to Get in Synch.” That’s
what Dalio and his young colleague did during their sparring match. Had
they waited to share constructive feedback, the delay would have diluted
the learning experience. Does this sound a bit radical? Perhaps, but it
effectively embeds an important component in the Bridgewater culture, one
that provides an antidote to the ego-driven interactions where people push
their own agendas without taking feedback into account and setting aside
their need to prove themselves right or wrong.
The Dot Collector process illustrates one way organizations develop
rituals that reflect and reinforce the defining habits of a culture. Indeed, any
and every interaction in a twenty-first-century organization can function the
same way ritualized social encounters have for thousands of years. In
premodern societies, they marked not only momentous events such as
crowning a queen or starting a war but also common occurrences such as
planting and harvesting crops. Wherever people gather, they engage in
certain rituals that demonstrate “the way we do things around here.”
The British anthropologist Victor Turner called these gatherings “social
dramas” because they resemble theatrical performances with scripts, roles,
and even costumes. Near the end of his career, after decades of fieldwork
and analysis, Turner concluded that these performances have occurred in
every society throughout human history.
Practically embedded in our DNA, rituals drive the habits that make up
culture. Every ritual represents a moment when we reaffirm or change
habits to strengthen or revise existing culture. In every ritualistic encounter,
those involved in the social drama display their support for the “way things
are done around here.” The big social flywheel keeps spinning and
producing culture. You should recognize that every time your team gets
together for a strategic planning project, an offsite team retreat, a weekly
staff meeting, a video conference call, or a conversation about a
performance review, you are engaging with others in a ritual. Every
occasion affords an opportunity to reinforce the organization’s vision and
the principles that drive it.
Re-creating and Reinforcing the Rules
Sometimes it takes decades for a culture to change. Usually a series of
small shifts occur before a big one moves habits in a new direction.
Sometimes it all happens in a flash, literally. That’s why you should always
be checking the environment for subtle signs of impending change as well
as the sound of an ear-splitting blast that announces a major break from the
past.
On July 8, 1853, the culture of an entire country changed in a single
explosion. The story of that day is a parable of dramatic transformation.
United States Navy commodore Matthew Perry entered Tokyo Bay with
two steamers, two sailing ships, and a squadron of heavily armed sailors
and marines. In his hand, Perry held a letter from U.S. president Millard
Fillmore that began: “I have directed Commodore Perry to assure your
imperial majesty that I entertain the kindest feelings towards your majesty’s
person and government, and that I have no other object in sending him to
Japan but to propose to your imperial majesty that the United States and
Japan should live in friendship and have commercial intercourse with each
other.” Perry delivered the written message, then, before leaving, fired
cannon shots into the air.
“It sounded like distant thunder,” a Japanese observer noted, “and the
mountains echoed back the noise of the shots. This was so formidable that
the people in Edo (modern Tokyo) were fearful.” For decades, Japan had
sealed itself off from U.S. commerce. Under the sway of powerful cultural
pride, Japanese leaders felt only they could choose the right trading
partners. Said one influential nationalist thinker, “Japan’s position, at the
vertex of the earth, makes it the standard for the nations of the world.” As
the unnerving sound of the explosions rippled across the bay, even the most
fervent nationalist could hear and see that Japan, lacking the military might
to resist Fillmore’s proposal, had toppled from its position at the earth’s
vertex and could not avoid doing business with the United States.
Dean Baquet had a feeling that a dramatic shift was coming in May 2014
when he became the executive editor of the New York Times. He foresaw
conditions in the near future that would radically alter the newspaper’s
editorial decisions. In the past, the Times’s decision-makers attended a
highly structured “Page One” meeting that had been evolving ever since its
inception in 1946. After discussions at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., the senior editors
would unveil “the lineup” of articles placed on the next day’s A1 front page.
Sitting around an immense conference table, over two dozen desk editors
would pitch their “offers,” or stories. “The desks would come with their
stories and offer them to the Olympic gods, and then would be grilled, and
battle it out to see what would make it,” recalled one participant. Another
editor commented, “The 4 pm meeting became the stuff of lore.”
Then came the cannon blasts. Readers had been steadily migrating to
online news sites, such as the Drudge Report. According to a 2014 Times
internal memo, the readership of the paper-and-ink edition was “waning.”
As for the paper’s website home page, “only a third of our readers ever visit
it.” Baquet, listening as the warning shots reverberated across the
company’s bow, realized that the paper’s culture needed a major overhaul.
The game had changed; the rules had to change. The first ritual and all of its
supporting rules to fall victim to the new game was the old Page One
meeting. Sam Dolnick, an assistant editor on the masthead, explained: “We
changed the meeting as a deliberate way to change the culture and values of
the newsroom. Changing how the editors gathered—what they talked about,
how much time was devoted to what, who got airtime—offered a way to
nudge the culture of the newsroom toward new digital realities.”
New game, new rules. Out went the aircraft carrier–sized conference
table, replaced by a smaller, cozier one. Attendees, sitting in modest green
swivel chairs, could look at a large flat-screen TV displaying the Times
home page, which constantly refreshed with new content. The decisionmakers immersed themselves in the new digital reality. Respecting the
rapid, almost instantaneous pace of the news cycle on the internet, a small
group met at 3:30 p.m. to make decisions about that day’s paper-and-ink
edition, while a larger group convened at 4:00 p.m. to exchange broader
ideas about the next day’s coverage. The biggest shift, however, came when
the Times braintrust stopped dictating content and, instead, started
respecting what the readers wanted to see.
New game. New rules. New habits. New rituals. In an email sent to the
entire staff, Baquet wrote, “The idea is for us to mobilize faster in the
morning so we can get an earlier start on setting news and enterprise
priorities, and to move the discussion of print Page One out of the afternoon
meeting in order to focus on coverage regardless of where it appears, as
well as to plan our digital report for the following morning.” The curtain
had risen on a brand-new social drama.
Changing the Drama to Change the Game
Whenever you decide to change your cultural game, we suggest you borrow
a few ideas from the research conducted by social scientists into the nature
of rituals. It all boils down to four principles for creating moments that
usher in new habits and embed them in your organization’s daily routines.
Set the Stage
To create a meaningful moment, you must carefully prepare for it. Take the
good old meeting, for example. True, meetings come in for a fair share of
disdain. As one wag snarked, “A meeting is an event where minutes are
taken, and hours wasted.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. A welldesigned and well-conducted meeting can engage attendees in finding
creative solutions to problems. As the organizational expert Priya Parker
reminds us, every meeting provides an opportunity to drive home two
points: this is who we are, and this is the way we do things.
In fact, the entire trajectory of a business can turn on the unfolding of the
humble meeting. This fact became dramatically clear in the case of
Southeast Asian bank DBS, an organization that went from a painfully
sclerotic company once mocked as “Damn Bloody Slow” to a leading
digital financial player heralded as one of the best banks in the world by
industry observers. It all started in 2009 when CEO Priyash Gupta realized
that financial institutions that couldn’t master the new technologies would
quickly fall behind more tech-savvy competitors. Could his moribund
organization develop the agility it needed to master a new way of doing
business in the financial arena?
At a meeting of top DBS leaders in Singapore, the group identified one
of the biggest barriers to making the necessary cultural change: their
meetings routinely deteriorated into raucous and aimless debates. People
went into meetings with no clear agenda, sat down, and said whatever
popped into their minds. Arguments over irrelevant issues ensued. Such a
setting thwarted any possibility of attacking problems with the sort of
robust constructive combat that ignites creative thinking. How could DBS
turn its unproductive meetings into the sort of engaging discussions that
would help the organization achieve outstanding results? The answer was
MOJO. MO stood for the designated meeting owner, who made sure the
group stayed on track and covered all the agenda items. JO stood for joyful
observer, the individual who held participants accountable and made sure
they remained fully engaged. As the consultants who introduced this ritual
to DBS describe in their HBR article, “Breaking Down the Barriers to
Innovation,” the JO can act as a wild card, just as likely to call out the MO
for silencing dissent as to command everyone to place their devices in the
middle of the table to eliminate distraction.
MOJO embodied new rituals that promoted a whole new way of thinking
about, talking about, and solving problems. Every time a MOJO drives a
meeting, it confirms Priya Parker’s two points, establishing that this is who
we are, and this is the way we do things.
Step into the Spotlight
Sonia Rhodes, a senior executive at Sharp Healthcare, convinced CEO
Michael Murphy that the company must waste no time dealing with its
service problem. Sonia had become an evangelist for improving the quality
of care after her own father’s disappointing experience at one of Sharp’s
hospitals. “They treated my dad like he was this old feeble person. I wanted
to tell them, ‘He’s a physicist and runs a company that makes satellites!’”
Murphy, Rhodes, and the senior executives spent months researching
and visiting companies known for delivering world-class service. Their
biggest “aha” moment came when they realized that first-rate customer
experiences begin with first-rate employee experiences. Out of this insight
emerged the idea of bringing together all 12,000 Sharp employees for a
grand ritual, a two-day session in the San Diego Convention Center that
would launch a cultural transformation.
Murphy, a finance guy who lives by the numbers, admitted, “I’m not
somebody who wants to go on a big stage.” But he did exactly that. That’s
because he realized that if he wanted to instill new habits, he couldn’t just
issue an edict to do so. He had to show his people that he had committed
body and soul to the cause. When you lead, you’re a symbol of authority.
Others look to you for behavioral cues. They interpret your actions as a
guide to “This is who we are” and “This is how we do things.”
With that in mind, Murphy took the stage. Looking out at thousands of
expectant faces, he said, “This new journey will take courage. We are
charting a different course because we believe we must in order to be the
best.” He marshaled all of his enthusiasm in engaging the crowd. “If
employees have great ideas for making something better, let’s hear them!”
The goal, he proclaimed, was creating the “best health care system in the
universe.”
Kathy Rodean, a nurse who attended the San Diego event, liked what she
saw. “We were used to getting changes through an email on Friday
afternoon,” she observed. Murphy, she said, left no doubt about his
message: “‘This is our vision, and we want you to be part of it, to be able to
get where we want to go.’ That was such a different philosophy that it
really, really brought people together.” After the meeting, she recalled,
“people were crying, hugging, high-fiving. Even the nay-sayers had tears in
their eyes.”
As a culture-builder, you need to take the stage and step into the
spotlight, whether literally or metaphorically. To get the most out of a social
drama and make it meaningful, it’s not enough to talk about the habits you
want people to develop. You have to perform.
Invite Audience Participation
It came as a surprise when in 2018 Ford Motor Company announced that
Jim Hackett would become the next CEO. In a colorful description of the
new CEO, Fortune’s Jerry Useem referred to Hackett as a “furniture
maker.” To be fair, the Ford executive had run the $3B company Steelcase,
one of the world’s leading office-furniture businesses. Still, despite his
stellar corporate background, the news shocked knowledgeable car people
who believed that the automaker needed a more tech-oriented leader at the
helm.
At Steelcase, Hackett had fervently embraced design thinking, a product
development philosophy that trains a laser-like focus on the user
experience. In a somewhat surprising move, he had brought in
anthropologists and sociologists to provide insight into how flesh-and-blood
people actually sat in their chairs and worked at their desks. Now, installed
in the top job at Ford, he applied his belief in design thinking to transform
Ford’s culture. This radical move initially shocked the old Ford culture. All
of a sudden, a whole dictionary of new abbreviations, such as HMI
(Human-Machine Interface), was replacing the terminology long held dear
by Ford veterans. At first, it all sounded like corporate buzzword-speak. As
Darren Palmer, head of global product development, recalled, “People were
talking and just not understanding each other.” A Ford team leader, Phil
Mason, described meetings attended by engineers, programmers, and
marketing specialists as “cats and dogs fighting against each other.” To
Mason’s relief, “after about four days, they said, ‘Hold it. This just isn’t
working.’”
To deal with the problem, the quarreling cats and dogs were asked to
collect stories from drivers who found the Ford customer experience less
than thrilling. Highlights included: “I’m on a camping trip and there’s no
charger! What’s my backup?” and “On a date night, I can’t be bothered with
the navigation system.” Darren Palmer found the experience heartening. “It
helped everyone realize they were speaking a common language.” Mason
agreed. “People want their stuff. If they use Spotify, they want to use
Spotify—not a carmaker’s alternative system.” What lay at the bottom of all
this feedback? A lack of effective design thinking.
The best rituals bring everyone into the fold no matter what jargon they
speak. When everyone lives the new culture together, they can move
forward together. You can aid the effort by getting everybody involved. If
you do it right, others will dash into the spotlight when you leave the stage.
Perform Multiple Encores
It was a tough day for Joe on the factory floor, as he kept struggling to force
a stubborn taillight into a car frame. The company president, taking his
weekly stroll through the manufacturing facility, noticed Joe’s frustration
and stepped over to help. The company had recently introduced new
procedures that encouraged line workers to call for support by pulling a
cord that temporarily stopped production until the problem was resolved.
Failure to do so could result in faulty assembly or, worse, injury.
The president noted Joe’s name tag and said, “Joe, please pull the cord.”
“I can fix this, sir,” Joe replied.
“Joe, please pull the cord.”
“Sir, I can fix this.”
“Joe, please.”
The president took Joe’s hand and together they pulled the cord. The
president then stepped back and bowed.
“Joe, please forgive me. I have done a poor job of instructing your
managers about the importance of pulling the cord when you run into a
problem. You are the most important part of this plant. Only you can make
every car great. I promise you I will do everything in my power never to
fail you again.”
This exchange actually took place in 1984 between a factory worker and
Tetsuro Toyoda, the grandson of the founder of the Toyota Motor
Corporation, a month after the company opened a factory with partner
General Motors in Fremont, California, and well after Joe had received his
training on line procedures. It was a classic ritual performance that became
the sort of legend that constantly cascaded throughout the culture, affecting
line performance in encore after encore.
Rituals reinforce the habits that drive your culture, but it takes encore
performances to make them stick. Cultural memory and repetition embed
the new habits long after a safety training session has ended. Seize
opportunities to continue nudging the behaviors you want to encourage. The
simpler the better, like “pulling the cord.” A mountain of behavioral science
research tells us that behaviors turn into habits when they spring from
simple, memorable experiences. The simpler they are, the more memorable
they are, and the more likely people will perform them day after day after
day.
As organizational development consultants Mary and David Sherwin
have put it, “A team is a choice. Every day, every meeting, every deadline,
individuals make the choice to be a team.” This applies to all tribes, big or
little. In your own tribe, whether you realize it or not, people make choices
every day that reaffirm their membership, their identity as a tribe member,
and the habits that determine “how things are done around here.” Rituals
force you to switch off autopilot to make those choices meaningful.
In the next chapter, we shift our focus from Habit to Innovation, showing
you how to keep your culture fresh by making creativity a central part of
everything you do.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Create the culture’s rules.
• Turn rules into rituals.
• Reinforce and re-create the rules.
• Change the drama to change the game.
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CHAPTER 7
Bright Ideas
Nurturing the Innovative Impulse
A short trip back to the twentieth century reveals a surprising yet timeless
truth about the force of innovation: like the air you breathe, it infuses every
nook and cranny of your organization, sustaining life and fueling new ideas.
If you tap its life-giving energy, you just might join the ranks of such
twenty-first-century game changers as Amazon, Apple, and Google.
In the 1980s, however, unhappy General Motors stockholders watched
the value of their shares sag and the hidebound company’s market share
sink a dismal 15 percentage points, from 60 percent to nearly 45 percent. To
turn that performance around, besieged GM executives rolled out Total
Quality Management (TQM), a newfangled idea that was capturing the
imagination of corporate America. Based on the ideas of W. Edwards
Deming, a statistical engineer who preached the gospel of continuous
improvement, TQM had helped post-WWII Japan become a global
powerhouse as a maker of cars, electronics, and other products. GM’s
leaders hoped to persuade workers to climb aboard the bandwagon. Easier
said than done. It turned out that implementing TQM required a whole lot
more than number crunching. Nothing less than a cultural transformation
could align the traditional GM emphasis on productivity (pushing a specific
number of vehicles out the factory door on every shift) with TQM (pushing
top-quality vehicles off the production line).
Remember Elizabeth Briody, the corporate anthropologist we met in
Chapter Five? She played a supporting role in this saga, spending nearly
two decades helping GM fine-tune its quality program. She even
coauthored Transforming Culture, an award-winning book that detailed her
insider experiences.
How does this relate to the surprisingly timeless truth about the human
drive for innovation? While on the surface the tale of TQM at GM seems
like a familiar business-school case study, pitting GM’s rigid culture against
the need for change, Briody witnessed something often overlooked:
innovation and adaptation sprouting in an unlikely little corner of stodgy
old GM’s culture.
During her stint there, Elizabeth reported interviewing “Bill,” a material
handler on the GM production line. Bill explained an ongoing roadblock to
his team’s performance. “If you admit a particular thing was your fault, you
have to do something about it. It shows that you are not . . . doing your
job.” What did he mean by that? “The first rule of thumb is ‘cover thy ass.’
If you admit you are at fault, you get knocked down in this society,” he
said. The rule of “cover thy ass” only made Bill’s job harder. He needed to
find creative ways to pursue quality while still hitting production numbers.
As a coworker put it, “GM has spent lots of money on quality courses and
working together. They have done their studies but are unwilling to
implement any changes.” Another employee added, “There is the problem
of not being able to get the proper tools we need. We have been trying for
weeks to get another air gun and can’t get it. . . . The system is all screwed
up.” To do their jobs, teams began to compete in a clever game of seek-andhide, finding and squirreling away the parts and tools they needed.
Skillfully playing this game helped players decrease production line
stoppages.
Seek-and-hide illustrates that the natural human impulse to solve
problems never stops working even when air grows scarce. People really do
want to get results. Sometimes, however, that drive can cause workers to
“game the system.” In other words, even if it means bending the official
rules, someone determined to get results will find creative work-arounds to
solve whatever problems pop up. At GM, the production line workers
became adept at playing the internal game of seek-and-hide. In a perfect
world, of course, workers would put all their creative energy into beating
the competition rather than sparring with each other for resources.
Elizabeth witnessed firsthand how innovation can go wrong. But she
also saw that creativity can operate below the radar of senior leaders. In this
chapter, we will show how you can tap into that creativity and harness the
natural force of innovation to get the results you need.
Adapting Conventional Rules to Win the Innovation Game
Bill the material handler spent his shift putting necessary parts in the hands
of the assemblers who actually built the vehicles. That may sound like a
straightforward job, but it demanded constant inventiveness. During the
1980s, despite the advent of TQM procedures, workers did all they could to
hit “the build,” the quantitative target for completed vehicles per shift. Can
you achieve Total Quality when you feel pressured to meet volume goals?
According to another of Bill’s coworkers, “GM wants numbers and
efficiency.” Because no one wanted to risk getting blamed for causing the
line to shut down and lowering throughput, quality often ended up taking a
backseat to productivity. Enter innovation, ensuring that enough parts have
been stockpiled to keep the production line humming along. Bill excelled at
this high-stakes game, performing like a world-class race car driver. He
spent hours zipping around the factory floor in a motorized cart, assemblers
riding shotgun, their eyes peeled for parts they could scarf up.
Bill was a very busy man indeed. One week, he spent a quarter of his
time playing the game. As one of Bill’s accomplices said, “I almost felt like
we were part of a game board or race to see who could locate the parts and
get back to home first.” The game continued relentlessly, the clock always
ticking. “The race really never ends. We went back [one time] and his
foreman handed us two pieces of paper with the word ‘Hot’ written on
them. These parts were needed almost immediately.” However, it didn’t
always matter which parts you collected because you never knew when
some random item might come in handy later. Another handler named
“Steve” admitted, “A lot of people stock up on certain parts and store them
in their lockers, [or] in the wrong stock areas where only they know where
it is.”
Horse-trading also came into play. Steve was good at it. “Sometimes I
am able to bargain with another department for . . . what I need. They may
have [parts that I need] . . . and can’t find anywhere else in the plant.” In
some cases, you just made do with whatever you could scrape together.
“They may say that they can only spare a [few parts]. Well, [that] is better
than none, and it makes me look better than if I had to go without any.”
Brokering deals at a breakneck pace, cart always in motion, Steve played
the game as if his life depended on it.
Every day, all around the world, in organizations large and small,
workers play games like seek-and-hide, whether they realize it or not. To a
leader, playing games might seem like a waste of time and human
resources. And it is, in a way. The Bills and Steves of the world waste
untold hours concocting elaborate work-arounds just to get their jobs done.
But the work-arounds often display amazing ingenuity. If you can find a
way to celebrate and channel such creative problem-solving, you can turn
your people into the engines you need to power your organization to the
highest levels of success.
As we have pointed out, human beings have come to possess a
distinctive knack for inventiveness. According to Harvard researcher Erin
McNulty, evolution has endowed us with “swarm intelligence,” a hardwired
capability that’s activated when groups confront a threat to their collective
survival. Working together, our ancient ancestors devised ways to master
their environments more effectively than bigger, stronger, faster animals. In
all the generations that followed, people have worked together unceasingly
to build sturdier dwellings, to cultivate more bountiful crops, and to develop
elaborate rituals that strengthen their sense of belonging to a tribe. For the
French anthropologist Michel de Certeau, author of The Practice of
Everyday Life, this kind of problem-solving resembles “poaching.” It’s the
timeless process of adapting outmoded rules you have inherited from
yesterday’s generation to get the results you need today. Every team does it
every day, often without thinking about it, as team members figure out ways
to succeed in a challenging, ever-changing environment.
Understanding the True Nature of Innovation
“Innovation” has become a buzzword. Overuse has rendered it almost
meaningless. The actual process, however, is vital to any organization’s
continued success. Whatever you call it, you need to understand the way it
works.
The film director Ron Howard provided a wonderful definition in the
film Apollo 13. Telling the story of the harrowing lunar flight that nearly
ended in disaster after an oxygen tank exploded in the main service module,
Howard shows the frantic engineers in the Houston command center
forming a “tiger team” to create a backup carbon dioxide filter. Their
worried expressions capture the life-and-death pressure. If the team fails,
the astronauts hurtling through space will soon suffocate in the poisonous
atmosphere produced by their own breath. In a tense earthbound conference
room, the head of Flight Crew Operations scatters a random assortment of
materials on the table: hoses, bags, tape, and other odds and ends. Gesturing
at the pile of stuff, he holds up a carbon filter like the one on board the ship
and says, “We gotta find a way to make this fit into a hole for this, using
nothing but that.” The tiger team, working furiously as a unit, tinkering
with one design and then another, finally hit upon a solution. Drawing items
from the mismatched pile, they cobble together a device they dub the
“mailbox.” It works. The astronauts safely circle the moon and return home.
More innovations spring from this kind of tinkering than from a
deliberate, forced, step-by-step search for a solution. It happens while you
are going about your daily business. Picture the math professor sitting
quietly in her study, compiling routine equations, when she suddenly sees a
solution to a problem that has been baffling her for years. Or imagine the
printer’s assistant going through his daily motions when, in a flash of
creativity, he sees how a paperclip could keep his machine from going off
register and wasting a lot of paper. The artist Chuck Close, whose paintings
hang in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, once said, “Inspiration is for
amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around
for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you
are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of
the process; they come out of the work itself.”
Ideas come out of the work itself. That’s the basic principle that guides
Pixar’s Ed Catmull, the animated film producer we met back in Chapter
Three. He organized what he called the Brain-trust, a weekly lunch club
where coworkers gathered to swap reactions to early versions of a film.
Catmull explained the logic behind these sessions: “There’s a tendency in
our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person
or a team of people, but that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre
team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good
team, and they’ll find a way to make it better.” That’s a wise observation.
When you need to solve a problem or improve a product or service, put a
good team on it.
That’s how some of the best ideas came out of the seek-and-hide game
played at the GM plant. The handlers and assemblers needed to keep
vehicles rolling through the production line while trying to ensure top
quality. No manager told them how to do it. They put their heads together
and came up with an approach that actually worked. That’s how people with
the right support keep getting their work done, even in the most challenging
situations. It’s the way the Braintrust keeps cranking out hits. It’s the way
Chuck Close became a much-admired artist. It’s the way the NASA
engineers produced the mailbox. Does the CEO do it? No. Does the senior
leadership team do it? No. Do middle managers do it? No. The people who
do the work do it. And left to their own devices, in the right supportive
environment, they will do it in ways that will surprise their bosses. As de
Certeau put it: “It is always good to remind ourselves that we mustn’t take
people for fools.” Or as Ed Catmull might put it, “Value people over ideas.”
So what is the true nature of innovation and the sort of environment that
fosters it? We have identified three common characteristics:
1. It functions as a cultural, social process of continuous adaptation.
No one would have thought of the GM plant as a hotbed of creativity, but in fact the
innovation process never stopped. It just hummed along under the corporate radar. Bill, Steve,
and their coworkers developed and refined a beautifully elaborate system for finding, hiding,
and trading parts. Think of it as a form of tinkering. The group shared certain cultural traits
and formed a social unit. In other words, they formed a tribe devoted to playing the game.
Even Chuck Close, painting alone in his studio, participated in a cultural and social circle (a
tribe) that included other artists, gallery owners, and art aficionados. When, at age 14, he saw
a Jackson Pollock painting, he resolved to follow in that artist’s footsteps. Later, Close
immersed himself in the downtown New York art scene, where he welcomed the influence of
notable choreographers and composers such as Merce Cunningham and Philip Glass. As the
innovation expert Stephen Johnson puts it, new ideas are rarely created in “glorious
isolation.”
2. It resists heavy-handed management.
Most of the GM workers on the plant floor knew all about the corporate quality initiative. But
they had a job to do, and they wanted to do it as well as they could. So, they adapted, using
the parts they could find and following unorthodox procedures that made sense in the
circumstances they faced. Quality was important, sure, but so was keeping those cars and
trucks rolling off the production line. It was a balancing act. The workers, not the managers
higher up the food chain, managed the process. Had managers tried to quash what they saw as
rebellion, they would have pushed the tinkering underground, making it an even more
subversive activity.
3. It does not follow a linear path.
Bill and Steve participated in an elaborate underground economy that allocated resources
across the GM production line. In the NASA conference room, engineers played with a
jumbled pile of odds and ends in their quest to jury-rig a novel carbon filter. Members of the
Pixar Braintrust wolf down pizza, kick ideas around, and let their minds meander helterskelter as they strive to develop Pixar’s next box-office hit. A flash of creativity, a striking
new way of seeing a problem, can light up a conversation at any moment. But don’t expect
that you can flip a switch to produce a dazzling insight.
How does a wise gardener cultivate innovation? First, you measure out
the boundaries, and then you set your people free to create their own little
problem-solving cultures and social combinations. Give creativity the space
and time to flourish. Avoid the temptation to impose a strict step-by-step
linear approach to a natural, organic process.
Avoiding Situational Arrogance
If you’ve ever played with a set of old-fashioned Tinkertoys, you know it
takes some creative trial and error to assemble a model steam shovel. But
sometimes even a genius can grow impatient and try to force all the pieces
into place. That rarely works.
Consider the case of Ron Johnson, for example. He boasted a stellar
résumé. Educated at Harvard and Stanford, he spent 12 years at Apple,
designing the retail strategy that birthed the fabulously successful Apple
Stores. He went on to a stint at Target, where, as vice president of
merchandising, he launched the eye-catching line of Michael Graves
products and, according to retail experts, made the stuffy company “hip.”
Then he migrated to J.C. Penney, the ailing low-cost department store
chain, where he assumed the top spot in late 2011. At the time, reflecting on
why he had taken the job, he said, “I don’t just want to run a business, I
want to do what I did at Apple. I want the chance to transform
something. . . . I didn’t come here to improve Penney, I’m here to transform
Penney. I think the industry is ready for it, customers are ready for it, and
we’re going to do it.” Less than a year and a half later, after a stunning $4
billion loss in revenue and a cratering stock price, Johnson exited stage
right. Speaking at Stanford a year later, he admitted: “The reality is, you
know, we moved too quickly. It was too fast for the board, the customers,
employees, and shareholders.” At a Harvard Business School class, he
coined a phrase to express his attempt to transform J.C. Penney: “You can
have what I call ‘situational arrogance.’ It’s when you think, based on your
experience and your contacts, that you know exactly what’s right. . . .
Humility is a great thing and arrogance is a really bad thing. But you’ve got
to look very deep in the mirror to understand where it is.”
It’s only human. You succeed at assembling a little Tinkertoy sports car,
you move on to Legos and build an aircraft carrier, then you tackle a
Rubik’s Cube. But you get so impatient to solve the puzzle that you end up
ripping it apart. Hello arrogance, goodbye humility. Hello Sun God,
goodbye gardener. And we know what happened to the Sun God
Akhenaten: all his efforts to transform Egyptian culture collapsed into
rubble. At first, Sun Gods might seem to rule their world, but in the long
run overconfidence undermines their power, especially when they must
cope with an unexpected challenge. The organizational psychologist Chris
Argyris found that elite consultants from top business schools excel at
dealing with familiar problems with known answers. When tried-and-true
solutions fail, however, the consultants break down and get defensive and
controlling. “Many professionals have extremely brittle personalities,”
Argyris observed. That trait will end up strangling innovation.
Whether you are a globe-striding CEO featured on the cover of Fortune
or a manager directing a three-person IT team at a small midwestern
toymaker, you need to remain open to the idea that, faced with any given
problem to solve, everything you think you know could be wrong. In his
book Leadership IQ, Emmett Murphy coined the phrase “strategic
humility” to describe the single most important skill any leader can bring to
the job. Success can cause humility to fade. It takes conscious and continual
effort to maintain. If you don’t do that, you may end up with a sad,
innovation-starved conclusion to your leadership story.
Listening for Job-Related Innovation Stories
The investigative reporter David Epstein in his book Range draws
fascinating conclusions while exploring the idea that generalists, rather than
narrow specialists, often fare better at problem-solving. He describes how
nimble, adaptive personalities who bring a broad range of skills and
interests to a problem use “circuit breakers” to find creative solutions to
even the most perplexing challenges. Circuit breakers are outside
experiences and analogies that help a person discover new ways to get
things done. Not surprisingly, people with “range” love to hear new stories
from unexpected sources that will change their view of the world and its
problems.
On the GM plant floor, Elizabeth Briody spent a lot of time hunting for
circuit breakers. Unlike many management consultants who spend most of
their time with senior leaders, she sought out stories from lower-level
employees who often do their work below the radar of high-flying
consultants and executives. After listening with both ears to these stories,
she concluded: “What may have seemed like bizarre behavior in the mid1980s allowed plant employees to cope with perceived, expected, and
actual material shortages.” What spurred the workers’ behavior? They
wanted to do a “good job.”
In her summary of the research project, Briody included a vignette about
a supervisor we’ll call “Linda” and a line worker named “Jamie.” Jamie
was “learning on the job” and was doing fine until, as happens to all of us
no matter how conscientiously we perform our jobs, she made a mistake.
An alarm went off. Linda immediately rushed to the shop floor to help
Jamie understand what she had done wrong. Jamie went back to work. Fastforward a couple of hours. The alarm blared again.
Hearing the second alarm, several higher-ups rushed to the scene. Linda
tried to defend Jamie, pointing out that she was learning on the fly because,
as she observed, “there was no one to train her. We only had twenty minutes
to break her in.”
Why was this story important? It contributed to a culture tool Briody
called “story snippets.” This growing anthology of stories became widely
used at the GM plant, helping to transform the quota-driven culture into one
that emphasized quality. The Linda-Jamie snippet drove home the
importance of training in the company’s effort to change its culture. Without
it, people would have continued doing things the way they had always done
them.
As Briody continued amassing stories, she began to see a pattern of
barriers to the culture transformation:
• Micromanagement: Like circling vultures, higher-ups merely
add tension to an already difficult situation and do little to resolve
the underlying issues.
• Ineffective procedures: An alarm may stop work, but it may turn
out that keeping the line rolling would not have done enough
damage to justify stopping work completely. Sometimes sticking
to procedures does more harm than good.
• Tribal tensions: When a middle manager defends someone she
supervises to higher-ups, she circles the wagons around her
people, adding to whatever tribal tensions separate workers from
leaders. Such tribal tension destroys the opportunity to engage in
cross-silo discussion about how to get better results.
Stories provide the sparks that can ignite a wildfire of change as they
blaze through the entire organization. They bring the problems associated
with culture change alive. They capture the imagination. They help people
remember why they are trying to change “the way we do things around
here.”
If you work hard to identify circuit breakers in your own organization,
you can tap into an endless source of creativity and renewal. PayPal, for
example, built a network of “culture journalists” tasked with tracking down
and capturing new stories about fresh ideas. Shared widely, the stories
provide early warning signals that the company culture needs fine-tuning or
a complete overhaul. The culture journalists come from every corner and
level of the organization. Like good anthropologists, they keep their eyes
open and ears to the ground as they observe and listen to the various PayPal
tribes. When they hear a story worth sharing, such as a team that has
bonded by forming a musical group or a division that hates a new corporate
policy, they document it with prose summaries, photos, videos, and quotes
(anonymously, in the case of highly sensitive issues).
Once a year at the PayPal leadership meeting, the journalists take
executives “on tour,” sharing their stories in rich collages of ethnographic
findings. Don’t mistake this for a feel-good, “Aren’t we great!” fistpumping session. One executive describes the presentations as a sometimes
“sobering moment” when leaders see an “extremely unfiltered” view of the
“good, the bad, and the ugly” parts of the PayPal culture they would not see
on their own. The journalists aren’t cheerleaders. They’re collectors of
circuit-breaker stories. They’re agents of the fresh thinking that can shatter
the stodgy old way of doing things.
Doing Innovation Your Own Way
In a 2017 Fast Company article, Noah Robinson anointed Amazon as the
“world’s most innovative company.” Robinson conjured up the image of a
relentlessly hypercapitalist, neighborhood-destroying real-estate developer:
“Over its nearly 22 years, Amazon has moved into one sector after another
and gentrified it, even if that meant tearing down its own existing
structures.” You can find equally awestruck descriptions and praise for
Amazon in Forbes, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and the Harvard Business
Review.
While Amazon may deserve its depiction as the poster child for
innovation, its approach to business can put extreme pressure on its
workforce as the company imposes the same philosophy on its people,
bulldozing anyone who fails to measure up to its exacting if not peculiar
standards of performance. A New York Times 2015 profile described the
company’s culture as “bruising.” CEO Jeff Bezos has reportedly savaged
underperforming colleagues in public by asking, “Are you lazy or just
incompetent?” Should you emulate Amazon when you decide to develop a
more innovative culture in your organization? Short answer: no. As we’ve
pointed out a number of times in this book, “one size does not fit all.”
Does the Amazon style fit you? In a 2019 Harvard Business Review
article by Gary P. Pisano entitled “The Hard Truth about Innovative
Cultures,” the author offers a vivid description of Amazon’s notion of
culture as a life-or-death struggle. A partial list, with our own emphasized
words and phrases, includes the following:
At Amazon, employees are ranked on a forced curve, and the bottom part of the distribution is
culled.
Keeping people who have been rendered obsolete may be compassionate, but it’s dangerous
for the organization.
Being more disciplined about killing losing projects makes it less risky to try new things.
Senior leaders need to model discipline by . . . terminating projects they personally
championed.
“Brutally honest” organizations are not necessarily the most comfortable environments in
which to work.
When leaders set out to change the culture of an organization, they are in a sense breaking a
social contract.
These cultures are not all fun and games.
Culled. Dangerous. Killing. Terminating. Brutally honest. Breaking a
social contract. Not all fun and games. Does that inspire you to submit your
job application to Amazon? Or the other companies profiled in the Harvard
Business Review article, such as Apple or Google? If so, we wish you well
and genuinely hope you enjoy tremendous success.
But you may want to consider a less brutal approach. An analysis of
successful innovative cultures reveals that you need not create a bloody
gladiatorial arena. You can, instead, plant and nurture a garden. Take
Comme des Garcons, the clothing company whose designs have
revolutionized fashion, for example; or Studioilse, the interior design firm
that the Wall Street Journal calls an “industry icon”; or the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose early initiatives
helped launch the World Wide Web and today supports research for
driverless cars and brain implants that cure mental illness. Descriptions of
these and other highly creative organizations do not contain the coldblooded and even violent imagery that accompanies so much writing about
the Silicon Valley creative giants. When you look at the way they do things,
other words come to mind: humane, nurturing, collaborative, and respectful.
Comme des Garcons, founded by fashion designer Rei Kawabuko in the
1970s, looks more like a garden than a battlefield. Kawabuko first achieved
prominence in her native country of Japan and then made a splash on the
global stage with her 1981 Paris show. Her models marched down the
runway, a drum beating in the background, wearing shockingly stark and
tattered designs. According to the New Yorker’s Judith Thurman, critics
were “dumbstruck with rapture” watching this “shock theater.” Thurman
says Kawabuko, awarded Harvard’s Excellence in Design Award in 2000,
tries to “reinvent the wheel” every season. Her work has brought her many
other prestigious awards and a net worth of more than $150 million.
If you toured Comme des Garcons studio, would you see knives at
people’s throats? Hardly. You would more likely hear a soothing aria or
melodic poetry. No fear allowed on the premises. Tsubomi Tanaka, the chief
of production, has worked for the company almost since its founding.
Describing her early years there, Tanaka said, “Even in those days, she had
aura. . . . I have to delve deep into my own understanding because her
words are so few. But there’s always some give to the tautness.” Kawabuko
often begins the production process with an evocative circuit-breaking
phrase, such as “inside-out pillowcase,” that pushes her teams outside of
their normal patterns of creative thinking. Then the staff sets about applying
it to the fabric. They rarely hit the mark the first time around. The chief
patterner, Yoneko Kikuchi, summed it up. “She always asks us to break
down the literalness.” Kikuchi adds: “It’s sometimes hard for patterners
who have come from other companies, because they just want you to tell
them how wide the collar is supposed to be.” Kawabuko is demanding,
capable of showing “anguish and anger,” and all of her collections “start
from zero every time.” But the work also displays a gratifying, deeply
emotional quality. Tanaka concluded, “I’m still moved by the collections.”
Like Kawabuko, Ilse Crawford has made a strong impact on her
particular niche in the design world. Profiles of this creative genius have
appeared in major magazines, from the New York Times to Vogue, and in the
Netflix series Abstract. In 1989 Crawford founded Elle Decoration, the
British interior design publication, then departed London for New York 10
years later to start Donna Karan Home. In 2001, her firm Studioilse opened
for business in London, and by 2020 employed 25 people. One of Ilse’s
major clients, Cathay Pacific Airways, installed her designs in 16 global
flight lounges. One of the airline’s executives flew to her studio and spent
two days trying out different chairs. Crawford explained the thinking
behind this decision-making process. “Renderings always look hard and
cold. They explain space, but they don’t give any idea of what it feels like.
My strategy is to make people feel something first. Because what we touch
is true.” For her, it’s all about human emotions, collaboration, and respect.
Crawford would probably dispute a saying that typifies the Amazon
culture: “Hit the wall, climb the wall.” She would prefer something that
emphasizes empathy, understanding, and support. “Without empathy there
is no design,” she has said. Discussing her firm’s growing number of Asian
projects, she remarked, “That makes it sound like there was a plan. There
wasn’t. My endless fascination has been: What makes us feel at home in the
world, and how can design play a meaningful role in that.”
Everything about the firm’s headquarters signals concern about creating
human connections. Crawford holds meetings at a table she described as a
“sociable oval.” Says Philip Joseph, Studioilse’s design director, “We are
like a family.” Several times a month, Crawford orders a lunch prepared for
her entire staff, served in the studio’s cooking area. “We’re very physical in
the studio,” Crawford observes. “That’s what we’re judged by. How people
feel in a space. We try to create the conditions to start that discussion here.”
Moving from the warm and fuzzy world of fashion design, let’s visit
DARPA. You might expect to find a military-style, hard-nosed, gladiatorial
culture there, but you’d be completely wrong. Created in 1958 by the
Department of Defense, partly in response to the Soviets’ launch of the
Sputnik satellite, the government agency has supported a fantastically
diverse range of projects, from a bit of psychological warfare in the jungles
of Vietnam that included a “loud mouth” aircraft that ordered the Vietcong
to surrender, to an Astrodome-like missile-defense shield composed of
high-energy electrons produced by controlled nuclear explosions. The
group even explored the possibility of developing an intergalactic computer
network. DARPA has funded some ideas the average citizen would find
downright crazy, the ravings of mad scientists. But they would meet a
perfectly ordinary research scientist if they dropped into the office of the
late Nicholas Christofilos, a brilliant physicist, known to his admiring
colleagues as the “crazy Greek.” Christofilos could work for days without
sleeping, feverishly scrawling equations faster than the speed of thought.
He left behind a brilliant legacy, which includes the idea behind a missile
shield to protect the United States from a nuclear attack. Though the
concept never became a reality, a senior administrator commented that there
could be “another planet, with opposing superpowers, where such a shield
might actually be possible.” As the journalist Sharon Weinberger put it, this
organization, with its rich history of out-of-this-world thinking and
groundbreaking work, cannot be reduced to “innovation in a box.”
What keeps DARPA’s innovation culture out of the box? Among other
tools, the DARPA scientists begin their thinking by asking a series of
questions created by George H. Heitmeier, who directed the agency from
1975 to 1977:
• What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using
absolutely no jargon.
• How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
• What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be
successful?
• Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
• What are the risks?
• How much will it cost?
• How long will it take?
• What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?
This process hardly sounds complicated, but it’s deceptively simple. It
strikes at the core of a problem and focuses the researcher’s creative energy
on coming up with the best solution. It stimulates curiosity. It fosters
tinkering. It encourages circuit breaking. Can you imagine this process
working in a “bruising” culture like Amazon’s?
Turning to a softer business sector, let’s drop into Danny Meyer’s
operation. Meyer, one of America’s richest entrepreneurs, has built an
empire of world-class restaurants that include New York’s Union Square
Café and Gramercy Tavern as well as the mass-market chain Shake Shack.
He leads problem-solving sessions in a distinctly non-Amazon manner. He
once began a morning staff meeting by sharing the experience of delivering
his first-ever TED Talk. “I was so nervous,” he said. Then he added: “It was
almost a complete shit show.” Rather than cracking the whip like a Sun God
aboard his chariot, Meyer charmed his audience with a humble admission
of his own limitations.
Far be it from us to denigrate Amazon’s culture or award the Grand
Culture Prize to the other companies profiled in this chapter. You need to
follow the unique path that works best for you and your organization.
A cozy interior design studio. A peculiar high-tech government think
tank. A brutal industry-disrupting online retailer. Ask yourself, “Which
approach to innovation would I prefer? Which culture would work best for
me and my people?” Then ask another question, “What distinguishes my
organization from all the others out there?” Whatever your answers, you
should adapt your approach to innovation in a way that responds to your
organization’s distinctive climate.
Drawing a few principles from the organizations we have discussed in
this chapter, we suggest you keep these points in mind as you begin to
design your own innovation process:
Start with stories. Beware of “innovation in a box”
recommendations from consultants and authors. Listen to your
organization’s stories. Reach out to as many people as you can.
Take into account what you hear as you move forward. You
might encounter some outlandish ideas, but remind yourself
that there’s a reason they’re bubbling up.
Experiment. Support tinkering and circuit breaking. Throw a
bunch of metaphorical parts on a conference table and urge
people to fit them together in wild and crazy ways. Make it a
game. Make it fun. Let creativity happen. Make it something
people will remember and practice when they go back to their
jobs.
Expect mistakes and reversals. Don’t forget the “error” in “trial
and error.” Out-of-the-box experimentation rarely yields results
on the first try. Treat every mistake as a lesson. Keep playing at
it until you hear someone shout, “Wow! That is so cool!”
Plan for surprises. Many great discoveries occur while you’re
looking for something else. The ubiquitous Post-It notes
resulted from a search for a new type of adhesive, not a quest
for a sticky-backed reminder. Look for the hidden value in all
of the ideas your people propose.
Get up close and personal. Bear in mind that the best ideas
almost always come from the people closest to the work. They
feel personally involved in finding the right solution. Roll up
your sleeves and work side by side with your greatest
innovation resource. You just might come up with some
surprising ideas yourself.
In any event, you must never forget that innovation is a social and
cultural process already at work in every team. Creating a culture of
innovation, a goal that has become the holy grail for all organizations, starts
at home, not in the halls of an Apple or Amazon or Google.
Before we conclude this chapter, let’s take a quick trip to India and
watch how Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Tata Group, instilled
innovation in the multinational conglomerate that produces and markets
everything from cars and planes to tea and travel services. A few years ago,
wanting to refresh the culture of the enormous, storied organization, Tata
took a long, hard look at the current state of affairs. He saw a lot of people
who were loyal to the organization and willing to do whatever it took to
keep the company fresh and vibrant. With that in mind, Tata launched a
number of initiatives to revitalize his employees’ creative energies,
including an annual competition for best failed idea. Celebrating a failed
initiative drives home the point that every failure offers an important
teaching and learning moment. For example, an initiative to develop
distance learning software that turned into an impractical boondoggle taught
company leaders that their people valued the idea of flexible learning
options.
By highlighting failures, Tata took an already existing and widespread
process of tinkering and cultivated it as the approved way of doing things.
As the former chairman himself proclaimed, “Failure is a goldmine.” Find
your goldmines and extract the creativity treasures that will keep your
organization fresh and vibrant in this ever more challenging world.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Adapt conventional rules to win the innovation game.
• Avoid situational arrogance.
• Listen for job-related innovation stories.
• Do innovation your own way.
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PART THREE
THE DREAM OF SUSTAINABILITY
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CHAPTER 8
The Vigilant Gardener
Pulling Weeds and Cultivating Wildflowers
Imagine running a Silicon Valley biotechnology company. Would you hire
Kary Mullis? Before his death in August 2019 at age 74, Mullis had earned
a PhD in biochemistry at UC Berkeley and won a richly deserved
reputation:
• Difficult, aggressive, disruptive, and even violent in work settings
• A heavy drinker and an LSD-tripper
• Skeptical that HIV caused AIDS
• An expert on time travel
• A climate-change denier and a confirmed believer in astrology
• An inveterate, highly jealous philanderer
• Lazy and paranoid
• Unreliable
A no-brainer, right? See you later, Kary Mullis! But wait. Before you slam
the door behind Kary as he leaves your office, consider a few more facts
about this seemingly whacked-out character:
• In 1993, Mullis shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work
on developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique.
With PCR, researchers could produce endless copies of a single
DNA molecule, opening up a brand new avenue to scientific
discoveries, ranging from the natural history of wooly mammoths
to the causes of cancer. The proprietary technology eventually
sold in the mid-1990s for over $300 million.
• On the morning that Mullis received the call from the Nobel
committee, he was drunk. When he got off the phone, he dashed
to the beach near his La Jolla, California, apartment and went
surfing.
• In addition to bringing home the Nobel, Mullis won the
prestigious Japan Prize from the Science and Technology
Foundation. The monetary reward that came with that honor made
him financially independent. Speaking in 1995 with a writer from
Spin magazine, he commented, “I’m done. I’m fixed. I’m a free
agent, and it is the most wonderful thing. I can say exactly what I
feel about any issue, and I’m going to do that.”
OK, now would you add Mullis to your team? If you had hired him
before learning of his many foibles, would you fire him when he
misbehaved? Save your answer until you have pondered the points we’ll
make later in this chapter.
Before we go there, let’s change the subject to soccer. Consider Brandi
Chastain, the player who many enthusiasts believe kicked one of the most
memorable goals in the sport’s history. Chastain scored the overtime point
that decided the game for the U.S. team in the 1999 Women’s World Cup
final. Over 90,000 fans roared their approval in the Rose Bowl as Chastain
ripped off her jersey, dropped to her knees, and poured her remaining
energy into a muscle-ripping victory scream. Within seconds, the televised
image rocketed around the world. Would anyone think twice about adding
her to their team? Hold off your answer to that one too.
All of which brings us to one of the most challenging aspects of the
culture puzzle: what to do with “talent on the bubble”—that is, someone
who possesses all the right skills to do a great job but has failed to live up to
expectations. Imagine that person perched atop a bubble. On one side lies
continued decline in performance; on the other, a burst of creativity and
good work. Can you nurture that talent? Or will you let it continue to
decline? These questions lead back to the culture garden.
Your solution to the “talent on the bubble” puzzle depends on a deep
understanding of the plants that can either poison or add new vigor and life
to the garden. The trick comes in knowing which ones to pluck and which
to cultivate. A culture lives, grows, and changes over time, sometimes in
good ways, sometimes in bad. No matter how strong your culture, its
people, those vital yet unpredictable creatures, can and will go their own
way. The larger the organization, the more misfits, rebels, and free thinkers
will crop up. Nurtured properly, some will become top performers whose
achievements nourish the entire organization. Left to their own devices,
however, others can pollute the soil around them, choking off the vitality of
their teammates.
Making Sure the Wildflowers Never Become Weeds
March 12, 2006, will go down in history as one of the darkest days for the
U.S. military mission in Iraq. U.S. soldiers, responding to a call from local
police in the small village of Yusufiyah, found the remains of a gruesomely
slaughtered family. A subsequent investigation led to the prosecution of five
members of a single platoon in the army’s storied 101st Airborne Division.
What at first looked like the horrific actions of a handful of bad actors
turned into a much larger story about a rogue culture in the First Platoon of
Bravo Company. The so-called Black Hearts grew like weeds in a rural
outpost in one of the most dangerous regions of the conflict, until they
committed this heinous act. How did this outlier, toxic culture bloom in an
organization famous for its rigid adherence to strict standards of behavior?
Jim Frederick, in his book Black Hearts, describes the poisonous
environment in which the First Platoon lived for months, one in which a
daily barrage of insurgent gunfire and random explosions from makeshift
bombs put the whole company on edge. As one First Platoon soldier
explained, “Let me put it to you this way. . . . Take something you do every
day, like go to the mailbox. Every day, you go to the mailbox. Now say that
every time you go to the mailbox, there was, say, a 25 percent chance that
the mailbox was going to blow up in your face. . . . But you have to go to
the mailbox. There is no way you cannot go to the mailbox. So, I ask you:
How many times do you think you could go to the mailbox before you
started going crazy?”
This explanation makes sense. But why did other units in Iraq who faced
similarly extreme pressure and suffered tragic deaths go about their
business without committing atrocities? What made First Platoon different?
As Frederick describes, senior commanding officers left the soldiers
undermanned and underresourced as they conducted their dangerous
patrols. At the same time, the leaders piled on meaningless tasks, such as
spreading gravel on the muddy floor of their base.
One commanding officer seemed particularly insensitive to the
conditions under which First Platoon operated, demanding the soldiers
properly roll up their sleeves while laying down defensive wire across a
danger zone in 120-degree heat. When the soldiers tried to raise a red flag
about the difficult conditions they faced, the officer would shut them down,
barking orders like a Sun God berating minions. Over time, First Platoon
became known as a band of screw-up misfits. They naturally bonded around
their outcast status. The company commander began thinking of his own
superiors as the enemy. “I had Al Qaeda . . . and I had Battalion. That’s who
my enemies were.”
Having felt neglected and disowned, a unit that should have flowered in
combat conditions became a weed in the battalion’s culture. Orders from
above were shrugged off with a “We don’t do it that way around here.” In
short, the incident that occurred on March 12, 2006, didn’t happen
overnight. It grew from identifiable roots into a toxic weed as the gardeners
failed to identify and tend it properly. Take a challenging situation, add a
team of well-trained people and a batch of disconnected leaders, and you
could have predicted the result.
Far from the village of Yusufiyah, recent corporate scandals reveal the
more mundane ways weeds can pollute even a lush garden. As we will see
when we return to the stories of Mullis and Chastain, properly managed
misfits can invigorate a culture. That’s why it’s so important for you to spot
and deal with any wildflowers that, left untended, might develop into toxic
weeds.
Cultivating Wildflowers and Pulling Weeds
According to Sports Illustrated, Brandi Chastain’s “redemption shot” stands
as one of the top-ten “most significant goals in U.S. soccer history.” It
happened in the 1999 World Cup quarterfinals against Germany. After a
miscue with the American goalie Brianna Scurry, Chastain committed an
“own goal,” accidentally scoring a point for their opponent. Chastain had
made a backward pass to Scurry, a routine play, but Scurry dashed out of
the goal at that second, leaving both players to watch in horror as the ball
dribbled into their own net. Score! . . . for Germany. Five minutes into the
game, Germany led the USA, 1–0. Chastain felt like a total loser. That was
the last thing she had imagined when she took the field.
The “redemption” came just after the second half started, with Germany
up, 2–1. As Chastain described it, “When I look at it now, when I can
actually watch the goal in slow motion, it was a really good goal. To hit it
on the half-volley you have to be over the ball, you have to stay in control.
So in that way, I’m really proud of that goal, minus the circumstances.”
Then she broadened out the picture, adding: “So many coaches taught me to
do things the right way under pressure.”
In other words, this supreme act of individual achievement, one of the
greatest performances in the history of sport, grew out of good coaching,
leadership, and teamwork. It resulted from years and years of practicing,
training, and talking. No doubt, Chastain rose to the moment and deserves
every one of the accolades lavished on her for her performance under
pressure. At the same time, her achievement sprung from a long,
interconnected set of social events: junior soccer league games and
practices, coaching tips, and excited conversations with other soccer players
and fans. It was a cultural phenomenon.
Think of Chastain’s shocking “own goal” in the quarterfinals as a
wildflower, a surprise mistake by a top performer that became a turning
point for the team. Picture something like that popping up unexpectedly in
your garden. How would you deal with a surprise setback? You might take a
cue from the captain of the U.S. women’s soccer team, Carla Overbeck,
who said to a dejected Chastain, “We need you to just keep playing. We’ve
got this.” As the team’s coach, Tony DiCicco, recalled, “In the locker room
at halftime, there was quiet confidence. No panic whatsoever. We talked
about what we always talked about with that team. They were a team that
was built for big moments, and that’s what this was. A big moment.” He felt
supremely confident in his team’s ability to bounce back from adversity. He
knew the women had it in them. His mother taught him that. “She used to
shoot baskets with me in the driveway,” he said. “She was a great swimmer.
I always knew girls could play, because she played with me.”
Plant wildflowers. Nurture them carefully. Remain vigilant for any
wildflowers that begin to behave like weeds. Catch them early. Turn them
around. If you can’t, pull them. DiCicco was a vigilant gardener, but he did
it with a light touch. As Chastain put it, “Tony had a grace in the simple
way. He didn’t make things overly complicated. He would come in and say,
‘You can do it, you’ve got this, go get it.’ Those words were just enough to
make us go, ‘Yes, we can.’”
Now let’s revisit the case of Kary Mullis. Like Chastain’s goal, his work
flowered into the development of PCR. Unlike Chastain, he was not a team
player. In fact, you could think of him as an anti-team player. However, he
did make a huge contribution to the organization that employed him and
supported the work that won the Nobel Prize.
In a 1989 article published in the prestigious journal Science, the editor
Daniel Koshland Jr. and Ruth Levy Guyer, another researcher, recounted a
brief history of the technology:
The first PCR papers were published in 1985. Since that time PCR has grown into an
increasingly powerful, versatile, and useful technique. The PCR “explosion” of 1989 can be
seen as a result of a combination of improvements in and optimization of the methodology,
introduction of new variations on the basic PCR theme, and growing awareness by scientists
of what PCR has to offer. With PCR, tiny bits of embedded, often hidden, genetic information
can be amplified into large quantities of accessible, identifiable, and analyzable material.
Do you see the name Kary Mullis in this account? There’s not a single word
about him. Nor would you find one in many of the earliest publications
about PCR written by other researchers. In 1986, while employed by the
biotech start-up Cetus, Mullis submitted his first paper about the technique
to Science. The editors unceremoniously rejected it in dry, bureaucratic
language: “Detailed reviews were not as enthusiastic as those for other
manuscripts considered at the same time.”
But Mullis tells a more colorful story of PCR, with some Hollywoodstyle flourishes. In his dramatic rendition, Mullis stars as a genius inventor
whose unique brilliance achieves a stunning breakthrough:
The thing that was the “Aha!” . . . is that you will pull out a little piece of DNA from its
context, and that’s what you will get amplified. . . . That was what I think of as the genius
thing. . . . The fact that I would do it in just the way I did, that made it an invention.
Mullis’s Cetus colleagues deemed him a genius too. One described him
as an “untamed” genius. Another called him a “freewheeling thinker.”
Did that “aha!” moment actually occur the way Mullis recalled it?
Maybe, maybe not. Mullis also remembered driving in 1983 from San
Francisco to his Mendocino cabin on a Friday night, “when the buckeyes
were in bloom,” and thinking about techniques for working with DNA.
Though he could not say for sure if this happened in the spring or fall, he
did paint a precise picture of his internal mental landscape. “Although I did
not realize it at the moment . . . , I was on the edge of discovering the
polymerase chain reaction.” As he neared his mountain retreat, driving
along twisting mountain roads, he wrestled with “nagging questions.” Then,
he related, “I was suddenly jolted by a realization.” About which, looking
back, he exclaimed, “Eureka!”
That weekend, Mullis used every scrap of paper he could scrounge up in
his cabin to scrawl equations about his lightning-bolt insight. Back at work,
he couldn’t stop talking about it. But his clamoring fell on deaf ears. For
months, he didn’t perform any experiments to test the validity of his idea
either. He kept busy in the lab overseeing other projects and, away from
work, managing a rather chaotic love life. When he finally did look for
some experimental evidence to back his theory, he worked so quickly he
obtained inconclusive results. Later, he said, “I did experiments throughout
this part of my career, very impulsively and very rapidly.”
In June 1984 Cetus held its annual scientific conference at a lavish resort
near the Monterey, California, beach. The meeting gave Mullis a perfect
chance to share his thinking about PCR. As researchers typically do at such
gatherings, he displayed his work on a poster. The audience yawned. Later,
at a “blue margarita” party, Mullis got into a shoving match with another
scientist until onlookers physically restrained him and dragged him back to
his room. From there, still agitated, Mullis phoned his boss, Tom White, at
3 a.m. and told him he was a jerk for requiring that Mullis perform
experiments to show that PCR worked.
After the conference, White, who headed up research at Cetus, thought
about firing Mullis. As White recalled, “So here is Mullis, creative, but
none of his ideas up to that point had really been more creative than
anybody else’s.” White continued: “And Mullis is creating havoc, affairs
with people in his lab, threatening people who were going out with his
friend, threatening to kill them. . . . And what to show for it except wild
ideas that were out of his field that people felt wouldn’t work?” In the end,
however, White did not fire this wild man.
Six months later, a Cetus researcher named Stephen Sharf conducted his
own experiments with the PCR technique and wrote in his notebook: “IT
WORKS.” When Mullis learned about Sharf’s results, he resisted
publication because he wanted the process to remain a “trade secret.” White
could not understand this procrastination. Meanwhile, Mullis chattered
endlessly about the idea with friends, artists, English professors, fellow
surfing enthusiasts, other researchers, and basically anyone else who would
listen, at dinner parties. As a result, word about the discovery spread like
wildfire, in nontechnical as well as scientific circles. Finally, Cetus senior
executives felt compelled to go public in order to substantiate its ownership
of the process. In December 1985, Science published an article on the
subject, with Mullis’s name listed fourth among seven other Cetus
researchers.
About a year after Sharf’s breakthrough in the lab, Mullis left Cetus with
no end of hard feelings. “I was really mad at Tom,” he said. “It was the
shabby goddamn way I was treated there.” Mullis received a $10,000 bonus
for his work on PCR, while the other researchers who stayed with the
company each received $1 for their efforts. Three years later Cetus sold the
rights for the technology to Hoffman-La Rouche for $300 million. In
today’s dollars, that would amount to roughly $600 million.
Not surprisingly, Mullis’s colleagues reacted with mixed feelings when
they heard the news about the Nobel Prize. Nevertheless, their observations
tell us a lot about the way innovation really works:
Tom White: “[Science] is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets
dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of
the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning
of the universe.”
Randall Saiki: “It’s a fable; it’s not really how the science was
done at Cetus. It’s Kary’s twist on things. . . . Awarding the prize
to Kary is not right but [awarding the prize to] Kary and other
people is also not right. Our work was good solid work.”
Henry Erlich: “On the one hand, I was delighted to see that PCR as
a technology was recognized by the Nobel Committee, but was
frustrated that awarding the prize to Mullis also certified an
account which Kary had created which was not true. Mullis had
a great idea, which he followed up with years of
misrepresentation and self-promotion. Rewriting history was
more productive than writing papers.”
Erlich added an illuminating point: “Committees and science journalists
like the idea of associating a unique idea with a unique person, the lone
genius. PCR is, in fact, one of the classic examples of teamwork.”
The economists John Kay and Mervyn King define collective, teambased problem-solving as “evolutionary rationality.” It’s how people
working together figure things out. It’s the way people have solved
problems since that moment the first human beings, looking up at the starry
African sky, pondered the question, What’s going on here? At Cetus, the
problem involved a maverick taking credit for everyone’s work. On the
1999 U.S. women’s soccer team, it came down to helping a highly skilled
teammate boot the ball into the opponent’s net at just the right moment.
Gardeners like Tom White and Tony DiCicco create a space for
individual and team problem-solving. What happens next depends on talent,
and more often than not, a little luck. Properly nourished, talent develops
into wildflowers. Left completely to its own devices, talent can develop into
a noxious weed. Even the most talented person can make mistakes, even
giant blunders. Just look at Brandi Chastain. When a talented person like
Mullis misbehaves in outrageous and even dangerous ways, you must take
the right steps to make sure the runaway talent does more good than harm.
It’s a complicated puzzle. The right steps include avoiding the temptation to
oversimplify a situation, to assign blame, to scapegoat, and to accept
mythical stories about “eureka” moments. As we saw in the last chapter,
you need innovation. Talent produces innovation, but you cannot rely on
one-size-fits-all “innovation in a box” to produce the next big idea. Smart
managers step back and view the big picture: talented individuals, teams,
the organization’s overall needs, the competitive arena, customers, and the
whole environment in which their organization operates. What is the story
that makes sense of all the pieces? Only within that context can you decide
which wildflowers to cultivate and which weeds to pull.
So, what do we do about Brandi Chastain and Kary Mullis? Take these
lessons into account before you decide:
• Accept that even top performers make mistakes. Treat
mistakes as “big moments.” Mistakes often fuel a new wave of
innovation. Thomas Edison’s teachers thought him “too stupid to
learn anything.” His bosses fired him from his first two jobs for
being “non-productive.” In the end, the inventor made 1,000
unsuccessful attempts before he invented the lightbulb.
• Tell the right kind of stories. Some leadership experts advise
you to “confront the brutal facts.” But facts never speak for
themselves. Moreover, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget,
human beings learn from stories, not recitations of facts. As he
put it: “The goal of education is not to increase the amount of
knowledge but to create (people) who are capable of doing new
things.” That’s exactly what good managers do.
• Promote problem-solving as a team effort. People in a group
can solve a problem that baffles even the greatest genius, and
usually do. Make sure your stories include tales of successful
teamwork. They will reinforce the importance of this timeless,
wondrous, life-affirming activity.
Innovation in all of its forms—tinkering, creativity, problem-solving—
fuels every great organization’s success. What can you do to make sure
yours has enough of this fuel?
Taking Time for Imagination
When Beth Comstock was working at CBS, in 1993, viewer ratings had
risen so high that people referred to it as the “Tiffany Network.” Then, in a
move that shocked Comstock’s friends as an act of career suicide,
Comstock took a position as a publicity specialist at NBC, which she
herself described as a “national disgrace.” A high-profile scandal on the
Dateline news program (an investigation into Chevy trucks turned out to be
based on faked videos) and David Letterman’s departure for CBS’s Late
Show, among other depressing reversals, led a prominent network producer
to tell Entertainment Weekly, “Morale is in the toilet.” But Comstock took
the job for what she called “spiritual” and “emotional” reasons. Ambitious
and fearless, newly divorced and responsible for a young daughter, she felt
like she needed a change of scenery.
A month after she started the new job, Comstock learned that General
Electric was buying her new employer. It didn’t take long to learn about the
new religion CEO Jack Welch had introduced to 300,000 GE workers: Six
Sigma. Based on a statistical model, it stressed efficiency above all else.
“Do it, or die,” proclaimed the Sun God. As Comstock put it, the Six Sigma
devotees preached “predictability and exactitude,” values that year after
year delivered reliable stock-market returns. The dogma excluded
innovation. Innovation was too risky, too unpredictable. Those who wanted
to get ahead just followed orders and kept marching forward. As Welch
himself famously said, “I can’t be everywhere, so I just say they can’t do
that.” At GE in the 1990s, Six Sigma services were held in the Cathedral of
Command and Control.
Comstock reported directly to Welch. Although she admired him for his
directness, she soon discovered the severe limitations of this efficiencyobsessed, innovation-stifling culture. After hearing a manager respond to an
innovative suggestion by saying, “We just can’t do things that way,” she
came up with an idea to promote creative problem-solving: permission
slips. Imagine filling this out:
Permission Slip
I, __________, give myself permission to use my imagination to think
differently about:
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
Here’s what I need from others to move my idea along:
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
The next step is:
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
__________________________________________________________
________________________________
A simple idea, to be sure, but it worked for Comstock, and it might work
for you. Try handing out a few at your next meeting. Or just say, “Imagine
we give ourselves permission to think wild and crazy thoughts. What would
spring to mind?” Then facilitate a discussion about the ideas, using the
DARPA questions we introduced in Chapter Seven:
• What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using
absolutely no jargon.
• How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
• What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be
successful?
• Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
• What are the risks?
• How much will it cost?
• How long will it take?
• What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?
The sociologist Ray Oldenburg described the setting in which leaders
encourage creative thinking as “The Third Place.” You could designate a
third place in the office, of course, but it usually works best beyond the
confining walls of the organization. Retreats, pizza parlors, cafés, bowling
alleys, and softball diamonds come to mind. Such actual physical places can
foster unrestricted, freewheeling conversations that lead to breakthrough
ideas. The scientific method did not take shape in formal meetings in the
ivy-covered halls of a university but in coffeehouses where early scientists
gathered to kick around ideas. Nineteenth-century Viennese salons gave
birth to modern psychology. Meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in
Silicon Valley during the early 1970s fermented the internet.
Whatever third place you choose, make sure it offers the comfort and
safety that encourage people to speak their minds. Nothing kills
freewheeling discussions more quickly than fear of ridicule or retribution.
Research shows that fear tramples many good ideas. When you worry about
looking silly, a little voice in your head says: “I’m going to keep my mouth
shut, because people will think I’m crazy if I say that.”
We talked a lot about fostering individual and team innovation back in
Chapter Seven. Here we want to emphasize innovation as a key component
of an organization’s culture, where it becomes a way of life. It’s not just
something you do when you need to solve a particular problem. But how do
you make it more than a one-off event? How can you make it sustainable?
Ford CEO Jim Hackett liked to use the term “fitness” to describe a healthy,
innovative culture. Like well-trained athletes, fit organizations are nimble,
adaptable, always ready to compete to the best of their ability. He learned to
appreciate organizational fitness when he was running Steelcase: “I got to
see the company evolve over time. I found myself in a wave pattern, where
I was shrinking the company during recessions, then growing it, then
shrinking it, then growing it. That’s not healthy. We needed to design the
company for all states. . . . That’s part of what I mean by fitness.”
GE’s Jack Welch saw it differently. To him, fitness meant three things:
efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And it worked for GE. When he took the
top job in 1983, the company was worth $13 billion; when he retired, in
2001, that number had mushroomed to $400 billion. He did it by exploiting
every opportunity that came his way. But hold on a second. Did GE’s
success hinge solely on the gospel of efficiency? Not quite. Welch seized
his opportunities during a unique period in U.S. economic history, when
deregulation, demographic shifts, technological advances, and politics did
as much to turn GE into a moneymaking machine as efficiency did. In fact,
GE became a virtual bank.
It began with an ingenious idea. Welch connected GE Capital, the
company’s financial services unit, to other parts of the operation, using
loans to help customers purchase GE manufacturing products and
leveraging the profits from interest rates to finance acquisitions of other
businesses. The Six Sigma juggernaut squeezed dollars and time from the
enterprise, driving cost-cutting in R&D and other areas that did not produce
short-term gains. A 1998 Barron’s article dubbed the company “a hedge
fund in drag.” However, just before Welch stepped down as CEO, in the
early 2000s, a $45 billion deal to buy Honeywell collapsed, dragging the
company’s stock price down. Then 9/11 changed the world. Jeff Immelt
became the ninth CEO in GE history, bringing an end to Welch’s reign. The
House That Jack Built did not survive into the twenty-first century.
Welch created a highly profitable monoculture of financial engineering.
Monocultures, obsessed with one big idea, may run smoothly, but they are
not fit in the sense that Hackett used the term. Before you say “Nuts!” to
that, consider the lowly almond. At one time, you could find almonds
growing in almost every state, from Alabama to Oregon. However, when it
became clear that California’s Central Valley offered near-perfect
conditions for almond orchards, more than 80 percent of the world’s
production capacity migrated to that one spot. While the industry has
delivered impressive returns for many years, business analysts now fret
over several worrisome risks: wildfires and droughts, high manual labor
costs, and epidemics among the bee population that does the essential work
of pollination. One disruption in this fragile ecosystem could cause the
entire industry to collapse. Short-term, efficiency-obsessed thinking can
sow the seeds of any culture’s collapse. How so? Simple: what works today
may not work tomorrow. In fact, it probably won’t. How do you prepare for
that eventuality? Three ways: innovate, innovate, innovate. For GE,
efficiency produced miracles, but it eventually turned into a short-term trap.
As the new millennium dawned, the company lost over 10 percent of its
value in a single day.
It’s easy for us to preach innovation, but it’s a whole lot harder for an
entire organization, especially a big one, to practice what we preach. It
takes constant vigilance, lest the culture slip from “That’s the way we do
things around here” to “That’s the way we always do things around here.”
You must keep giving yourself, your team, and everyone in your
organization permission to think outside the current field of play. That way,
not only can you change when the game changes, but you can become the
game changer.
It takes patience and perseverance. Imagination wins the race, but
sometimes it gets there at a snail’s pace. That can be frustrating if you are
anxious for immediate results. Ask mathematician Dan Rockmore. When he
was a little boy, Rockmore took a short walk with his father, a mathematical
physicist, from their house to the nearby main street of Metuchen, New
Jersey. They were headed for the Corner Confectionery, a local
luncheonette, and were discussing apple pie. Young Rockmore wrestled
with the problem of how to divide a pie fairly among his close friends. His
father listened patiently as Rockmore struggled to solve the puzzle. Then it
hit the lad: 12! Why? Because you can divide 12 by an abundance of 5
different numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6. That was the number that would give him
maximum flexibility in sharing the pie fairly. Rockmore didn’t know it
then, but he had discovered what mathematicians call “abundant numbers.”
Looking back, Rockmore describes the mental activity that consumed
most of the walk to the Corner Confectionery as “worrying.” It was
combined with a physical activity, which helped open up his mind to that
magic moment when everything clicked into place. Isn’t this a bolt-of-
lightning “eureka” experience like the one Mullis described? We don’t think
so. Neither does Rockmore. As he says:
The origin stories of big ideas, whether in math or any other field, generally highlight the
eureka moments. You can’t really blame the storytellers. It’s not so exciting to read “and then
she studied some more.” But this arduous, mundane work is a key part of the process; without
it, the story is just a myth. There’s no way to skip the worrying phase. You work, and you
work, and you work, and then you get a glimmer of understanding.
Aha! Eureka! By golly! That’s right: you work and you work and you
work, and you work some more. You worry, you keep plodding, then,
wham!, it hits you between the eyes. That’s how creative mathematicians
get results. That’s how sustainable cultures get results.
Making Vigilance Your Constant Companion
In a Fast Company interview, Angela Blanchard described how she led the
largest charitable organization in Texas, BakerRipley:
Tend by watering what you want; weed what you don’t. Pay attention to the things that you
want to grow around you and pull out and eliminate those things you don’t. Any gardener
knows it’s not a big ol’ rush to do everything, but a constant tending. And weeding quickly is
best. You want to pull them up fast.
Blanchard has won worldwide fame for her work in community
development. She has delivered a popular TED Talk, and her profiles have
appeared in many major publications. Her leadership philosophy boils
down to watering and weeding.
Sometimes you’re doing the weeding, but sometimes you’re the weed.
Jeff Bezos does a lot of weeding at Amazon, and he has inspired dozens of
awestruck articles about the secrets of Amazon’s business success. Jack
Welch did a lot of weeding too, although he might have yanked out a few
too many. Chastain was never a weed. Mullis was a weed that turned into a
wildflower, though he eventually got pulled, and he won the Nobel Prize.
Akhenaten’s Sun God cult was both weeder and weed. His successor
yanked what Akhenaten had wrought. DARPA nurtured a lot of
wildflowers, winning it accolades among aficionados of innovation.
As you puzzle over the best way to manage your culture garden, you will
find a lot of answers. Some will work. Some won’t. But as you guide your
organization through troubled waters toward an uncertain future, keep
worrying, keep working, keep vigilant. Although you will never find a
perfect solution to the Culture Puzzle, our book will help you get close to it.
It’s like Zeno’s paradox: you walk halfway to the finish line, you walk
halfway again, and you keep walking halfway again and again and again.
You never quite reach it, but you get pretty darned close.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Separate the weeds from the wildflowers.
• Cultivate the wildflowers, pull the weeds.
• Take time for imagination.
• Make vigilance your constant companion.
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CONCLUSION
The CEO and the Dreamer
Richard Branson, serial entrepreneur, billionaire, CEO of Virgin Group,
and knight of the British Empire, likes to dream big. He urges others to
dream big too:
Dreaming is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It champions aspiration, spurs innovation, leads
to change and propels us forward. In a world without dreams, there would be no adventure,
no moon landing, no female CEOs, no civil rights. What a half-lived and tragic existence we
would have. We should all dream big, and encourage others to do so, too.
We also like to dream big, and we encourage you to pursue your highest
aspirations. Branson’s aspirations drove him to build an empire of over 400
companies. But he did not do it alone. It took a village to make it happen.
Call it a village, a tribe, a team, a company, a neighborhood, a community,
or a nation—whatever word you use, it always takes a band of people to
make big dreams come true. Our species believes that we do better together.
And history proves that when we act together, we can solve any problem
and achieve our biggest dreams.
The world has grown complicated in ways we never could have
imagined at the dawn of the 2020s. At the time of this writing,
complications include the COVID-19 pandemic, the drive for social and
racial justice, and a divisive political climate—all of which call for united,
collective action. Through the long, hot summer of 2020, we wrote about
listening to others’ stories and then looked out our windows in Philadelphia
and New York to see throngs of protesters reminding us to listen to their
urgent voices. In our work as consultants and teachers, we joined countless
Zoom calls with business leaders to discuss ways to build high-performing
organizations. We walked through empty streets, wearing our masks,
dreaming about a new dawn on the horizon. All the while, we watched and
listened, and listened some more.
Me-first Sun Gods like Akhenaten also dream. But they dream of their
own power, of aggrandizing themselves over all others, worrying little
about the welfare of the whole village. They inevitably topple, undone by
their own arrogant, self-centered decision-making. The village may seem
quietly obedient, but the villagers will, sooner or later, rebel against the
tyranny of selfish leaders. In the end, Sun Gods leave a legacy of dust and
crushed dreams.
Months before we turned the corner into 2020, the U.S. Business
Roundtable released what now seems like a prophetic statement. The
Roundtable, as you probably know, includes the CEOs of major U.S.
companies, from Amazon (Jeff Bezos) and Apple (Tim Cook) to General
Motors (Mary Barra) and Best Buy (Corrie Barry). According to these titans
of industry, “Each of our stakeholders is essential.” They were talking about
the whole village on which a company depends for its success, not just its
senior executives and shareholders, but all of its employees, community
members, suppliers, and customers. We applauded that inclusiveness. We
applaud it even more today because we need it now more than ever. “We
are in this together” has become a cliché. Like most clichés, it contains a
profound truth.
We have felt encouraged to see so many recent examples of
organizations rising to the challenges of this troubled time by thinking
village rather than self. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
cosmetics company L’Oreal quickly shifted production from skin creams
and beauty products to hand sanitizers, which the company provided
without cost to hospitals and grocery stores. Google awarded its employees
an additional 14 weeks of paid leave to adjust their family situations and
manage childcare. What these and many other organizations did, what
humans have always done in challenging moments that demand change,
was dream about a better future together.
Now that we’ve assembled all of the pieces of the Culture Puzzle, we
encourage you to take a few moments to dream about your own
organization. Construct your dream as you think again about the four steps
to creating a vibrant and adaptive culture:
1. Envision. In clear, simple language, describe the culture you
want to create for your tribe. Use vivid words you hope will
capture people’s hearts and minds. Every year, Tony Hsieh
published a whole book about the Zappos culture. But he was
not the sole author. Anybody at the company could contribute
to it, and anybody could read it. What’s in your book? Who can
help you write it?
2. Listen. Slow down and pay attention to the stories your people
tell about their essential needs for building a common bond
with others, doing meaningful work, and feeling valued and
respected. Look for gaps between what they need and what
your team or organization delivers. Eileen Fisher sits in a circle
with her employees, passes around a gilded gourd, and listens.
One woman who shared her innermost thoughts in the circle
said, “I feel lighter.” What do you hear when you listen? How
are you responding to the say/do gaps you discover?
3. Reflect. Facilitate a reflective dialogue with individuals and
everyone in your organization about aligning the culture with
people’s true needs. Look outside your walls, searching for
opportunities to learn from other companies, including your
competitors. Michael Murphy, CEO at Sharp Healthcare, took
the stage before thousands of employees and said he wanted to
create the “best health care system in the universe.” Kathy
Rodean, a nurse who was listening in the audience, recalls,
“People were crying, hugging, high-fiving. Even the nay-sayers
had tears in their eyes.” What can you say and do to get your
people cheering? What will engage their hearts as well as their
minds?
4. Experiment. Organize and launch small-scale projects
designed to close the gaps between what people need and what
the organization delivers. Feel free to tinker with wild and
crazy ideas. Use this laboratory to forge connections across
tribes. Think outside the lines and boxes on the org chart.
Carefully assess what works and what doesn’t. Rei Kawabuko,
at Comme des Garcons, often jump-starts the creative process
by sharing a fragmentary thought, such as “inside-out
pillowcase.” Then her staff sets to work, seeking to “break
down the literalness.” How will you encourage your people to
tinker and innovate? What will inspire them to reach for the
stars?
We’ve talked a lot about the need for culture-builders to think like
gardeners. Gardeners are dreamers. They foresee a bountiful harvest in the
future, but they know it will take patience and humility and constant
vigilance to get there.
Now we’d like to ask for your patience as you review our final
illustration on the opposite page. It captures everything it takes to create a
strong and sustainable culture. Pause for a few minutes. Look at the
diagram closely. Think about what you can do to turn this dream of a great
culture into a living, breathing reality. Take your time . . .
This brings us to the end of our story. Now it’s time for you to write
yours.
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APPENDIX
The Culture Evaluator
Every organization includes multiple tribes: teams, divisions, units, groups
of work buddies, old college friends, task forces, and so on. The
conventional organizational chart tells only a small part of the story. Once
people come together to form a tribe, culture comes alive and begins to
grow and evolve, often creating unproductive conflicts within and between
groups. We have designed the Culture Evaluator to help you assess the
health of any culture, from that of a small tribe to one shared by the larger
“imagined community.”
The Evaluator will reveal which aspects of a culture demand your
attention. It will also remind you of the many practical end-of-chapter
takeaways that can help you understand and change a culture. Start by
answering the following questions, which assess each of the Four Forces on
a scale of 1 to 10. A score of 10 means that you need to make few, if any,
adjustments, while 1 indicates an urgent need for you to implement some or
all of the four-part process we introduced in Chapter One.
1. Envision. Does the culture embrace a clear and compelling
vision?
2. Listen. Do leaders invite and listen closely to the stories people
tell about their essential interests: relationships, achievement,
and purpose?
3. Reflect. Do leaders engage in constructive dialogues with
everyone in the organization about aligning the desired culture
with people’s needs in order to create new habits?
4. Experiment. Do we consistently organize and launch
innovative small-scale projects designed to harness the
controlled chaos of innovation?
1. Vision. Do people understand a clear set of values? Do they perform
the activities that fulfill the vision? Can they recite a credible,
motivating plan that illuminates the path to a successful future?
Rating for Vision: _______ (1 = low to 10 = high)
2. Interest. Do people in the tribe fully engage with one another
and have satisfying relationships? Do they feel they receive
proper recognition for their work? Do people accomplish
impressive goals and experience a sense of purpose?
Rating for Interest: _______ (1 = low to 10 = high)
3. Habit. Do people follow individual habits and shared
organizational routines that promote success? Does the tribe
use rituals to reinforce positive habits and routines? Is there a
healthy respect for the tribe’s history and how it has shaped
current behaviors and policies?
Rating for Habit: _______ (1 = low to 10 = high)
4. Innovation. Do people think in strikingly novel ways about
pressing issues? Does the work environment encourage the
kind of constant tinkering that often produces surprising new
solutions to old problems? Are people always looking for ways
to make incremental improvements, and do they feel their ideas
will be taken seriously?
Rating for Innovation: _______ (1 = low to 10 = high)
Overall Tribal Health. Has the organization set ambitious but achievable goals? Does the
culture consistently get desired results? Does it ever perform beyond expectations?
Total Score (the sum of the four ratings): (1 to 20 = Low. 30 to 40 = high)
What the Scores Mean
For each of the forces, consider numbers in the lower range (1–4) as a call
to action. A score between 5 and 7 means you should keep an eye on the
situation. If your score falls between 8 and 10, celebrate success in this area
but do not grow complacent. The entire culture will continue to grow and
evolve, sometimes in unproductive or dangerous ways. Assess it from time
to time to see if you need to make any adjustments.
Whenever you decide to take steps to improve an aspect of the culture,
review the relevant chapter in this book:
1. Vision. Chapter Four: The Vision Ahead: Writing Your Tribe’s
Story
2. Interest. Chapter Five: A Tribe of Tribes: Satisfying Interests
and Building a Movement
3. Habit. Chapter Six: The Force of Habit: Reinventing the Rules
4. Innovation. Chapter Seven: Bright Ideas: Nurturing the
Innovative Impulse
5. Overall Tribal Health. Chapter Eight: The Vigilant Gardener:
Pulling Weeds and Cultivating Wildflowers
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Notes
Introduction
Page
2
4
4
“It’s all about giving and getting”: A century ago, the French sociologist Marcel Mauss argued
that the bonds binding human societies together are built on this kind of nontransactional
reciprocity. Even modern economies depend on the power of what he called “the gift”: the
kindness of strangers helping each other out in ways big and small. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift:
Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 2000).
As another philosopher, the Nobel Prize–winning Henri Bergson: Algot Ruhe and Nancy
Margaret Paul, Henri Bergson, an Account of His Life and Philosophy (London: Macmillan,
1914).
how to design a strong, sustainable culture for your tribe: We use the word “tribe”
throughout the book as a catchall expression for the many kinds of groups people form, from
bands to teams to organizations to nations. Even though the word has a checkered past, marked
by colonialist overtones that many social scientists have decried, we think it is the best term in
the English language to describe the enduring social needs we discuss in this book. Ligaya
Mishan has made a compelling case about this point. See “What Is a Tribe?,” New York Times,
April 13, 2020.
Chapter One
Page
9
He rode with his head held high: This story is drawn from several sources. The primary one is
David P. Silverman, Josef W. Wegner, and Jennifer Houser Wegner, Akhenanten & Tutankhamun
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2006).
The other sources are Peter Hessler, “Meet King Tut’s Father, Egypt’s First Revolutionary,”
National Geographic, May 2017; and Alastair Sooke, “Akhenaten: Mad, Bad, or Brilliant?,” The
Telegraph, January 9, 2014.
12 In 2013, Harrison Weber: The WeWork story is based on Gabriel Sherman, “The Fall of
WeWork,” Vanity Fair, November 21, 2019; and Amy Chozick, “The Spectacular Rise and Fall
of WeWork,” New York Times, November 2, 2019.
14 Culture satisfies some of our most important needs: Our thinking about these needs is
influenced by Robert Hogan’s (2006) book, Personality and the Fate of Organizations. In
reviewing extensive literature on motivation, Hogan identified basic needs humans seek to
fulfill, which he shorthands as “getting along and getting ahead.” To this, with an eye toward the
anthropological research, we add getting results. Just as organisms evolve and adapt over time as
the world around them changes, cultures are constantly growing and changing. While every
culture exists to meet the kinds of fundamental needs we have described here, how each of our
19
20
22
23
tribes does so is different. How you get ahead may differ profoundly depending on whether you
are a member of the South American Cubeo tribe or a Toyota assembly line worker. In fact, the
needs of Toyota employees may differ profoundly depending on which part of the assembly line
they occupy. If you don’t understand these cultural differences, you will experience a world of
heartache in getting a strategy, initiative, or change project going in your organization.
Culture is a timeless, distinctly human, collective process: Since Jane Goodall’s (1999)
groundbreaking research of chimpanzees in the wild, it has been known that some of our closest
primate relatives have developed common ways of adapting to and thriving in their
environments. Not only do chimps use tools, but they also teach each other how to do things like
strip a twig of its leaves and use it for fishing termites out of the dirt. We humans have developed
elaborate means of shaping and impacting the world around us in much more complex systems
that define our cultures. One classic system is the division of labor. For example, among the
Cubeo tribe in the Northwest Amazonian region, it’s long been understood that men provide for
the tribe by fishing and hunting, whereas women manage the agriculture (Goldman 1963, 58).
Cultural knowledge of how to do this is passed down from one generation to the next. For
example, everyone learns that one of their staple foods, manioc, contains a poison that has to be
extracted through a special process. The accumulation of small strategies and practices like this
defines a group’s ways of working—which is just another way of describing culture. The Cubeo
tribe’s manioc knowledge is only one example among many: the Human Relations Area Files
(HRAF) maintained by Yale University has a database called Explaining Human Culture, which
is as extensive as its name implies. Search it at https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc and you can spend
untold hours sifting through diverse examples of how humans creatively solve problems in
different contexts. Scale up further and you can see how culture helps entire societies get results.
Another classic and foundational work illustrating this is Emile Durkheim’s ([1893] 1984) The
Division of Labor in Society. Durkheim argued essentially that getting results is not just about
survival; it’s about holding society together. The division of labor creates specialization, and in
doing so ensures that we rely on each other on a day-to-day basis. Even people we have never
met are important to us. Consider how even the first couple of hours of your day depend on the
work of many others whom you will probably never meet: the farmers and laborers who grew
the food you ate at breakfast, the builders who made your home, the electric company workers
who literally keep the lights on. If this sounds at all familiar to you, it probably didn’t come
through Durkheim but through Adam Smith, who put forth the classical economic version of the
division of labor in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ([1776]
1994). Smith uses the famous example of the pin maker to explain the efficiencies specialization
creates in the production process. Smith ([1776] 1994, 4–5) argues that a single individual
working alone could scarcely produce one pin “and certainly could not make twenty” per day.
However, in the factory he describes, if the various tasks involved in making a pin (drawing out
the wire, straightening it, cutting it, pointing it, and so forth) are parceled out among 10 workers,
the group could produce 48,000 or more pins in a day—that is, 4,800 pins per worker. In other
words, each worker would be at least 240 times more productive and as much as 4,800 times. Of
course, the economists will always focus on the productivity gains, but what the anthropological
research in the HRAF and elsewhere teaches us is that tribes specialize to build a common social
bond as well, the bond of a shared culture.
The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast
and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
In a brief 1887 scientific study called Habit: William James, Habit (New York: H. Holt, 1914).
Elizabeth Holmes offers an excellent case in point: For an in-depth account, see: John
Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (New York: Penguin Random
House, 2020).
24 As the novelist George Orwell put it: From “On Truth,” Orwell on Truth (New York: Mariner
Books, 2019).
25 While a culture change often springs from the collective mind of the C-suite: “The Wrong
Ways to Strengthen Culture,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2019.
26 A PricewaterhouseCoopers study confirms these disheartening statistics: Sally Blount and
Paul Leinwand, “Why Are We Here?,” Harvard Business Review, November 2019.
28 Entrepreneurs Neil Blumenthal and David Gilboa: Steve Denning, “What’s Behind Warby
Parker’s Success?,” Forbes, March 23, 2016.
29 Sustainable business cultures embody human values: Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go
Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (New York: Penguin, 2016).
30 Lee Nunery received a surprising late-night phone call: Interview conducted with Lee
Nunery by the authors, January 31, 2020.
Chapter Two
Page
33 Ryan wakes up screaming: Debbie Aragon, “Living with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder,”
Dayton Daily News, July 6, 2018; and “Patient Story: PTSD,” American Psychiatric Association,
accessed January 2021, https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd/patient-story-ptsd.
33 In researching difficult and often tragic transitions like these: Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On
Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, 2016).
34 According to World War II veteran: Quoted in Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.
35 Research by biological anthropologists reveals: Susanne Shultz, Christopher Opie, and
Quentin D. Atkinson, “Stepwise Evolution of Stable Sociality in Primates,” Nature 479 (2011):
219–222. For more on the relationship between human evolution, biology, and culture, see the
work of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, 49), who long ago made the point that
culture is more than an evolutionary layer found on top of our biological makeup. From the start,
it’s been completely mixed up with it: “Our central nervous system—and most particularly its
crowning curse and glory, the neocortex—grew up in great part in interaction with culture.”
More recent research by social scientists (Boyd and Richerson 2009, 3286) confirms that
adaptation “led to the genetic evolution of new, derived social instincts. Cultural evolution
created cooperative groups.” In sum, culture is more than foosball tables and casual Fridays.
Throughout evolution, culture has shaped basic, even instinctual, needs that in turn drive how we
show up at work. In this book, we focus on essential needs that are especially important for
shaping how the tribes of any organization interact: our need for building relationships and a
shared identity with others, our need to shape the world around us in meaningful ways, and our
need to feel respected and valued by those in our tribe.
35 Vivek Murthy, U.S. surgeon general under Barack Obama, looked through the relevant
literature to pinpoint the roots of loneliness: Vivek Murthy, Together: The Healing Power of
Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, digital ed. (New York: Harper Wave, 2020).
The great evolutionary advantage of humans has been the ability to learn from and cooperate
with others through a common culture. Evolution has therefore equipped us with a strong
impulse to create a shared identity that forges social bonds. This desire to build relationships is
the essence of getting along. Within anthropology, a key line of research on the sources of group
identity goes back to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, and especially his classic work The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995). Durkheim observed that rituals and stories
exist in every society. They produce an instinct to care about others, not just our own interests or
36
36
37
38
39
40
42
44
45
47
those of our immediate family. Early on in human development, this mainly took the form of
religious beliefs and practices. But you can see the respect, even reverence, with which we treat
the broader society in the anthems we play at the beginning of sporting events, the way we push
harder in CrossFit classes, or how we gather with family and friends at holidays. Following
Durkheim, social anthropologists looked deeper into the implications of the need for
relationships to understand how they could structure entire societies. Researchers traveled
around the world to conduct ethnographic studies, such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1956, 1969)
descriptions of the Nuer in what is today South Sudan, or Bronislaw Malinowski’s ([1922] 1961)
account of social life among the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of New Guinea. Their research
revealed the degree to which everything we do is oriented toward maintaining some kind of
social order. Even the most basic and mundane activity, like punishing a child for bad behavior,
is significant because of, as one anthropologist put it, “the part it plays in the social life as a
whole and therefore the contribution it makes to the maintenance of the structural continuity”
(Radcliffe-Brown 1965, 180). Because of culture’s central role in supporting and maintaining
social order, thinkers going back at least as far as Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s (2003) De
civitate Dei (City of God), written between A.D. 413 and 426, have been concerned with the idea
of what it means to get along in large groups. Plato and Augustine were writing about the ideal
city-state, but the practice of telling stories and creating visions that try to build a shared
understanding of our identity is one in which people have engaged for as long as humans have
existed.
Like the spirit of cooperation: Yarrow Dunham, Andrew Scott Baron, and Susan Carey,
“Consequences of ‘Minimal’ Group Affiliations in Children,” Child Development 82, no. 3
(May–June 2011): 793–811.
Just take a look at what happened to Procter & Gamble employees after the company’s
merger with Gillette: Ray Fisman, “Culture Clash,” Slate, December 3, 2013,
https://slate.com/business/2013/12/corporate-culture-clashes-what-managers-can-learn-from-therocky-first-days-of-the-procter-gamble-and-gillette-merger.html.
A Wall Street Journal account reveals how this little difference in style: Ellen Byron, “Merger
Challenge: Unite Toothbrush, Toothpaste,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2007.
Cultural anthropologists made a striking discovery: Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin
Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse, “Is It Good to Cooperate?,” Current Anthropology 60, no. 1
(February 2019).
A penetrating analysis of one global organization performed by social network expert Rob
Cross: Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, The Hidden Power of Social: Understanding How Work
Really Gets Done (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2004).
Later research by Cross and his colleagues revealed: Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas,
Driving Results through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for
Performance and Growth (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret: Jessica Silver-Greenberg,
Katherine Rosman, Sapna Maheshwari, and James B. Stewart, “‘Angels’ in Hell: The Culture of
Misogyny inside Victoria’s Secret,” New York Times, February 1, 2020.
As media mogul Harvey Weinstein allegedly told: Jan Ransom, “Weinstein Accuser Says He
Told Her, ‘This Is How the Industry Works,’” New York Times, January 29, 2020.
Take Wells Fargo: Matt Egan, “Workers Tell Wells Fargo Horror Stories,” CNN Money,
September 9, 2016, https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/09/investing/wells-fargo-phony-accountsculture/index.html.
However, as the scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested on Twitter: Neil de Grasse Tyson,
Twitter, February 5, 2016, https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/695759776752496640?lang=en.
49 Two researchers who analyzed this phenomenon: Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber, “The Truth
about Open Offices,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2019.
51 As one anthropologist who studies these veterans describes the PTSD experience: Sebastian
Junger, “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield,” Vanity Fair, June 2015.
51 It’s what Atlantic writer Joe Pinsker calls: Joe Pinsker, “Why People Get the ‘Sunday
Scaries,’” The Atlantic, February 9, 2020.
53 Nick Basset knew how to do it: Michael Harris and Bill Talyer, “Don’t Let Metrics Undermine
Your Business,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2019.
Chapter Three
Page
55 Tony Hsieh had been fast asleep: Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits,
Passion, and Purpose (New York: Grand Central, 2016).
57 General Stanley McChrystal’s leadership in Iraq proved otherwise: Stanley McChrystal,
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015).
61 According to the Farmers’ Almanac: See “How Does the Almanac Predict the Weather?,”
Farmers’ Almanac, accessed December 2020, https://www.farmersalmanac.com/how-wepredict-weather.
63 Just take a look at the experience of Adrienne Miller: Adrienne Miller, In the Land of Men
(New York: Ecco, 2020).
64 Compare that careless style with that of a master gardener and listener. Janet Malcom,
“Nobody’s Looking at You,” New Yorker, September 23, 2013; and “How I Did It: Eileen
Fisher,” Inc., accessed December 2020, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20101101/how-i-did-iteileen-fisher.html.
67 The story of the relationship between Chip Conley: Chip Conley, Peak: How Great
Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (New York: Wiley, 2017); and Chip Conley,
Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder (New York: Currency, 2018).
69 Pixar’s cofounder Ed Catmull knew how to tend a garden too: Ed Catmull, “Inside the Pixar
Braintrust,” Fast Company, March 13, 2014; and Amy C. Edmondson, The Fearless
Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and
Growth (New York: Wiley, 2019).
71 Some organizational experts like to compare culture to an iceberg: See, for example, Edgar
H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
74 Mark Costa, the CEO of $10 billion Eastman Chemical Company, certainly did: See
Edmondson, Fearless Organization (2019).
Chapter Four
Page
79 Ready to get psyched? David Whitford, “Salesforce.com: The Software and the Story,” Inc.,
September 2014, https://www.inc.com/magazine/201409/david-whitford/inc.500-sales-forceboot-camp-produces-modern-salesman.html; David Gelles, “Marc Benioff of Salesforce: ‘Are
We Not All Connected?,’” New York Times, June 15, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/marc-benioff-salesforce-corner-office.html.
81 As the political scientist Benedict Anderson put it: Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2016).
Anderson’s imagined communities concept illustrates the awe-inspiring ability humans have to
not only create culture but reflect on it and change it as well. Greg Urban (2001) initially
explored this force in his book Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World as an
explanation for why and how we essentially create culture about culture. Advertising, for
example, tells people what products they should desire and buy. Rules and plans tell people how
to behave and what to do. We have translated this idea for the business world as “vision.” This is
most often how we describe the leadership ability to reflect on the way things are going in a
team or organization and describe a new course. This concept has deep roots in social thought
and shows up most commonly in social science research on ideology. The word “ideology,”
according to Drucker (1972, 152; 1974, 3), was coined at the end of the eighteenth century by
the French thinker Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy. For him, it meant the science of ideas.
In keeping with Enlightenment ideals, de Tracy sought to clarify the relationship between ideas
and the world, but especially ideas about political life. Use of the word in this sense was taken
up by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who sought to realize their vision for creating a more
perfect union in the United States. Other thinkers were more cynical and suspicious of the dark
power of vision as ideology in social life. Karl Marx came to view such ideas about social
relations as an excuse by the powerful for maintaining the existing social order. Rather than
seeing ideas like economic utility theory as objective, he called these visions “an attempt to
prove that under the existing conditions the mutual relations of people are today the most
advantageous and generally useful” (1998, 437–438). Early twentieth-century thinker Antonio
Gramsci further explored the ability of powerful ideas to not only reflect but change the world in
his concept of hegemony. Gramsci focused his attention on ideology as substituting (in some
measure) for violence as a way of maintaining social relations. The philosopher Louis Althusser
emphasized how ideology gets embedded in social institutions and practices. In the 1960s and
1970s, the entire field of cultural studies sprung up in part around the idea of the shaping role of
culture (Barker and Jane 2016). Analytic philosophers during the twentieth century focused more
on the shaping power of meaning itself. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce argued that we
experience the world through multiple layers of meaning. At a base layer, we experience the
world through tangible qualities; through a higher layer, those qualities yield distinctive things in
the world; and through a still higher layer, those things give birth to understanding (Parmentier
1994). Others have looked at the multiple layers of meaning that impact the world through the
lens of language. J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words argues that words do more than
describe the world; they also create change. As just one small example, consider how the
sentence “I now pronounce you husband and wife” (or husband and husband, wife and wife),
when uttered in the proper context, actually brings into existence a culturally recognized bond
between two people. Pronouncements and commands under the right circumstances bring about
a world they also describe. This was true of Akhenaten, even though the world he created was
short-lived. More recently, the anthropologist Michael Silverstein (1976, 1993) foregrounded the
relationship between language and metalanguage—that is, language that is about language. For
example, a dictionary not only defines words but also implicitly commands us to agree with and
use that definition of the word as opposed to others. It sounds simple, but the point is profound:
words matter. They don’t just help us communicate and describe the world to each other; they
can also change how we understand and act in the world in profound ways. Take, for example,
Descartes’s often repeated cogito, “I think therefore I am.” Philosophers have regarded it as a
fundamental proposition grounding knowledge of the world (Lee 1997). Google cogito ergo sum
and you get 4,280,000 hits. That simple vision has become part of a shared story about how we
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understand our own reality. Leaders who grasp this force are able to powerfully shape the reality
of their own organizations.
Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda felt a deep connection: Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel
Miranda Shapes History,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2015,
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/lin-manuel-mirandahamilton/408019/.
In a 2015 interview with National Public Radio: “We Went From Hunter-Gatherers to Space
Explorers, But Are We Happier?,” interview on NPR, February 7,
https://www.npr.org/2015/02/07/383276672/from-hunter-gatherers-to-space-explorers-a-70-000year-story.
In a comprehensive study conducted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business: Joanne
Martin, Martha Feldman, Mary Jo Hatch, and Sim Sitkin, “The Uniqueness Paradox in
Organizational Stories,” Administrative Science Quarterly 28, no. 3 (1983): 438–453.
In her book Uncanny Valley, Anna Weiner: Anna Weiner, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (New
York: Picador, 2020).
As New York magazine writer Molly Young: “Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak
the Way They Do?,” Vulture, February 20, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-ofcorporate-speak.html#_ga=2.244906501.1431946470.1609258191-1954771714.1609258189.
Ron Carucci, writing in the Harvard Business Review: Ron Carucci, “How Corporate Values
Get Hijacked and Misused,” Harvard Business Review, May 2017.
Rather, according to Brian Kurey, vice president for HR research at the advisory firm
Gartner: “The Wrong Ways to Strengthen Culture,” Harvard Business Review, July–August
2019.
The answer lies in a mythical origin story told by Mike Barger: Interview with the authors
conducted February 28, 2017.
His pivotal presentation at the 1997 Macworld Expo: Keynote address delivered August 6,
1997, at the Macworld Expo conference in Boston.
When Vig Knudstorp became CEO of LEGO in 2004: Keith Oliver, Eduaord Samakh, and
Peter Heckman, “Rebuilding Lego, Brick by Brick,” Strategy+Business, August 29, 2007,
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/07306?gko=813c3; “HBS Cases: LEGO,” Harvard
Business School, March 18, 2013, https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/hbs-cases-lego; “Jorgen
Knudstorp, CEO, on Rebuilding Lego,” Financial Times, December 18, 2016,
https://www.ft.com/content/476acab8-c11c-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a.
Christian Madsjberg and Mikkel Rasmussen describe the situation in their book The
Moment of Clarity: Christian Madsjberg and Mikkel Rasmussen, The Moment of Clarity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
The phrase “central idea” was coined by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem:
Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, Boards That Lead: When to Take Charge,
When to Partner, and When to Stay Out of the Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review
Press, 2013).
Chapter Five
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100 “Trust the process!”: Max Rapport, “The Definitive History of ‘Trust the Process,’” Bleacher
Report, August 23, 2017, https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2729018-the-definitive-history-of-
trust-the-process; Dan Kopf, “‘Trust the Process’: How Three Years of Losing on Purpose
Turned a Basketball Team into Winners,” Quartz, January 28, 2017.
102 In other words, it’s the force of interest that builds a tribe of tribes: Interest is the force that
drives culture to catch hold and spread. In anthropology, this force is called “diffusion” because
of the way culture has a tendency to move between people and groups (Cameron 2019). Social
scientists going back to the nineteenth century have described this movement as a wave
(Schmidt 1872; Schleicher [1853] 1877), with cultural innovations being like stones dropped
into still water, radiating out to others. Research has explored, for example, the spread of
mythological motifs across cultures, such as a visit to the land of the dead (Thompson 1946).
Diffusion has been important in archaeology, where the spread of culture has been studied in the
way traits like styles of pottery move through space (see, for example, Frobenius [1897] on West
Africa; Schuchhardt [1913] on Western Europe).
Why does some culture spread in this way, while other traits and ideas don’t? The driving
force behind diffusion in all of these studies is implicitly interest. People find in the cultural
element something they themselves desire. For recent technical research on diffusion of culture,
see Henrich (2001), who proposes a mathematical model of the S-curve typically exhibited by
the spread of innovations through diffusion. Labov (2007) examines the role of diffusion in
relationship to inertial transmission in language. Economics explains interest through the lens of
utility, but it is also heavily bound up with the emotional, affective qualities of desire, as
described by theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 2009; [1980] 1987). The concept of
desire as a driving force for culture acquisition goes back at least as far as Aristotle (Pearson
2012), who argued that desire deeply moves people to action. Because the force of interest draws
on affect and emotion, the field of what is called affective neuroscience has influenced our
thinking (Damasio 1994; Panksepp 1998; Panksepp and Biven 2012). This field explores
connections within the brain between learned behaviors and attitudes. For example, Panksepp
identified a “care system” in our brains that powers our drive to adopt new behaviors for
nurturing others. The practical point: to attract others to a new way of doing things, leaders have
to make personal connections that go beyond logic and the bottom line, tapping into emotions
and desires to spread culture, like a wave moving through the organization.
102 The former head coach’s disappointing departure: Haley O’Shaughnessy, “The Sixers Gave
Brett Brown Everything Except What He Needed,” The Ringer, August 24, 2020,
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2020/8/24/21400093/brett-brown-fired-philadelphia-76erscandidates.
103 Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard: Carly Fiorina, Tough Choices: A Memoir
(New York: Portfolio, 2007).
104 In colonial America, a surprising number of Europeans: Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On
Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, 2016).
105 According to a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders: Quoted in Junger, Tribe.
108 The pioneering sociologist Howard Becker: Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the
Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1997).
108 The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu gained some insight into this issue: Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984). The desire for status has been with us since we appeared as a species, and even
longer. Just look at two of our closest relatives in evolutionary terms, chimpanzees and bonobos.
According to biological anthropologists Hare et al. (2012, 576): “Chimpanzees display intense
forms of aggression, both intra and intergroup. Male chimpanzees use aggression routinely to
compete for dominance rank, fight for resources and intimidate females.” Among bonobos,
“being of high rank is an important goal, not only for males but also for females” (Furuichi 1996,
873). In this species, it is females who are empowered. They exercise dominance over males by
forming coalitions (Lewis 2018). We branched off from these primates long ago in the
evolutionary tree, but the desire for status has stuck with us as another basic need we meet
through culture. Even though it doesn’t (usually) show up in the form of physical aggression, it’s
present in all social life. We tend to think of the pursuit of status as being driven by financial
interests. If only we had a nickel for every time we heard someone in business say, “We just need
to get the incentives right!” That’s true in a way, but our need for status goes far beyond the size
of our bank accounts. Before you accuse us of being Western individualists obsessed with
competition and dominance, allow us to point out that getting ahead is really fundamentally
about our desire to be valued and respected by our peers. Just as often, the need is expressed
through embodying the values and norms of our group and being recognized as a good citizen or
a caring parent. Much of the anthropological research on small-scale societies shows that they
are largely egalitarian. Getting ahead in these cases might mean striving to be a great hunter to
benefit the larger group. In many of these societies, as elsewhere, status is also gained through
age, culminating in elderhood (Stewart 1977; Eisenstadt 2003). For example, those of us with a
growing number of gray hairs on our heads would have plenty to look forward to in the Xavante
tribe of Brazil, in which elders traditionally lead council meetings governing the group
(Maybury-Lewis 1967; Graham [1995] 2003).
109 A study by the economists Colin Camerer and Roberto Weber: “Cultural Conflict and
Merger Failure: An Experimental Approach,” Management Science 49(4): 400–415.
110 In one study, researchers asked people of both political persuasions to do their best to
convince each other: Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer, “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do
Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?,” Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin
41(12): 1665–1681.
110 That’s what Barrett Rollins, chief scientific officer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
did: Heidi K. Garner, “Getting Your Stars to Collaborate,” Harvard Business Review, January–
February 2011; and Heidi K. Gardner, Edo Bedzra, and Shereef M. Elnahal, “Ganging Up on
Cancer: Integrative Research Centers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (A),” Harvard
Business School Case 412-029, September 2011 (revised October 2012).
111 Psychologist Harry Reis’s extensive research on relationship-building: Kathleen McGarvey,
“How Do We Relate? Psychologist Harry Reis Puts Human Relationships under the
Microscope,” Rochester Review, January–February 2017,
https://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V79N3/0507_reis.html.
113 As Lydia Denworth wrote in her book Friendship: Lydia Denworth, Friendship: The
Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond (New York: Norton,
2020).
114 Look for people like Chris at General Motors: Elizabeth Briody, Transforming Culture:
Creating and Sustaining a Better Manufacturing Organization (New York: AIAA, 2010).
115 In 2008, Howard Schultz, the retired founder and CEO of Starbucks: Guy Raz, “Live
Episode! Starbucks: Howard Schultz,” podcast episode of “How I Built This” by NPR,
September 28, 2017.
115 Rather than yelling that the sky was falling: Starbucks Coffee, “10,000 Starbucks Partners
Helping New Orleans,” December 31, 2008, YouTube video, 6:33,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEJFelReAd0.
117 On a spring day in 1980: Leslie Crutchfield, How Change Happens: Why Some Social
Movements Succeed While Others Don’t (New York: Wiley, 2018).
Chapter Six
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120 A story began circulating among anthropology departments at major universities some 50
years ago: Madora Kibbe, “The Pot Roast Principle,” Psychology Today, February 8, 2014,
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-makes-it-so/201402/the-pot-roast-principle.
123 William James: William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950). The
idea of habit—the reason we do things a certain way is because we have always done them a
certain way—has deep roots going back to the ancient world. Aristotle (Rhetorica, book I,
chapter 11, p. 1362) wrote: “For as soon as a thing has become habitual, it is virtually natural.
Habit is a thing not unlike nature.” Cicero, in the 45 B.C. work De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum
(V, 74), wrote: “Habit [or custom] produces a sort of second nature.” Habit was central in the
thought of St. Augustine, and the phrase “second nature” continues to appear in the Middle Ages
through to the present, with the philosopher Montaigne (b. 1533–d. 1592) writing: “Custome is a
second Nature, and no lesse powerfull” ([1603] 1906: 176); and Pascal ([1670] 1995, 32): “Habit
is a second nature that destroys the first.” The concept of habit as this “second nature”—the
things we just do over and over without having to think about them—has been around for a long
time (for an overview of the long history of thought about habit, see Sparrow and Hutchinson
[2013]). Anthropologists have understood habit to be a central driver of culture since the earliest
days of the discipline in the nineteenth century. Edward Burnet Tylor ([1871] 1889, 1), in one of
the earliest English-language definitions of culture in the modern sense, calls it “that complex
whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society” (italics added). Over time we have come to
understand how the force of habit helps culture persist not only in individuals but between them
and across generations—like cutting off the ends of pot roasts because that’s the way grandma
did it. Biological anthropologists Boyd and Richerson (1985, 56; see also 2005) argue that
“culture acts like an inheritance system” with strategies and practices being passed down, almost
as if by inertia.
But habit is more than just a passive force. It deeply shapes our psyche, even our bodies, and
enables us to navigate our social environments successfully. This is what Pierre Bourdieu
proposed with his concept of “habitus,” which he developed in Distinction: A Social Critique of
the Judgment of Taste, building on the early research of Marcel Mauss ([1935] 1979) on “body
techniques.” The habitus of an individual includes things as basic and physical as how you
move. Think of how a smooth operator might show off at a nightclub by breaking out her best
dance moves, or how job seekers make a good first impression in an interview with a firm
handshake. These are embedded cultural behaviors, making habit a force that shapes us down to
our bones.
123 That’s what happened in the mid-1990s when Reed Hastings acquired three companies:
Michael Copeland, “Reed Hastings: Leader of the Pack,” Fortune, December 6, 2010; Patty
McCord, “How Netflix Reinvented HR,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2014.
126 Like Hastings and McCord, Ray Dalio: John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine,” New Yorker,
July 18, 2011.
129 The British anthropologist Victor Turner: Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors:
Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975).
130 On July 8, 1853, the culture of an entire country: “Commodore Perry and Japan (1853–
1854),” Asia for Educators, Columbia University, 2020,
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_perry.htm; “The United States and the Opening
to Japan, 1853,” Office of the Historian, accessed December 2020,
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/opening-to-japan; Norimitsu Onishi, “Yokosuka
Journal; Ripples from Perry’s Ships Are Still Felt in Japan,” New York Times, August 11, 2003.
130 Dean Baquet had a feeling that a dramatic shift: Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We
Meet and Why It Matters (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018).
132 This fact became dramatically clear in the case of Southeast Asian bank DBS: Scott D.
Anthony, Paul Cobban, Rahul Nair, and Natalie Painchaud, “Breaking Down the Barriers to
Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2019.
134 Sonia Rhodes, a senior executive at Sharp Healthcare: Sonia Rhodes, “Every Company
Delivers a Customer Experience: Here’s How to Ensure Yours Is a Good One,” Inc., accessed
December 2020, https://www.inc.com/sonia-thompson/how-this-company-transformedcolonoscopies-to-make-their-customers-lists-of-all-time-great-experiences.html; and Chip Heath
and Dan Heath, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).
135 It came as a surprise when Ford Motor Company: Jerry Useem, “Why Ford Hired a Furniture
Maker as CEO,” The Atlantic, March 2019.
136 It was a tough day for Joe: Charles Duhigg, Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power
of Real Productivity (New York: Random House, 2017).
138 As organizational development consultants Mary and David Sherwin have put it: David A.
Sherwin and Mary Sherwin, Turning People Into Teams (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2018).
Chapter Seven
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139 In the 1980s, however, unhappy General Motors stockholders: “Pumping on the Brakes,”
Forbes, January 2, 2007, https://www.forbes.com/2007/01/01/gm-market-share-opedcz_jf_0102flint.html#77bfb3e65e31.
140 Remember Elizabeth Briody: The source for the extended story about “Bill” at General Motors
is Elizabeth Briody, Transforming Culture: Creating and Sustaining a Better Manufacturing
Organization (New York: AIAA, 2010).
143 For the French anthropologist Michel de Certeau: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Anthropologists like de Certeau
have documented the creative ways people not only strategically navigate their cultural
environments, but also change them in the process. Cumulatively, these spontaneous innovations
lead to large-scale cultural change over time, similar to what is referred to as entropy in the
physical sciences. We see this clearly in how languages change over time, as described in the
anthropologist Edward Sapir’s classic work Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech,
published in 1921. Historically, when two groups sharing a common language become isolated,
they accumulate small, seemingly random changes in how they speak until they speak in
completely different tongues and their descendants no longer understand each other. This is what
happened with what are called Indo-European languages, including English, German, French,
Spanish, Russian, Persian, and Hindi, along with many others that split from the same ancestral
language. We also see it in organizations as they grow, and what was once a strong culture
weakens as other subcultures start to spin off in disconnected parts of the business. It doesn’t
always have to be negative and chaotic. This entropic force drives what we think of as creativity,
a process which so often involves serendipity. For this reason, we chose the term “innovation”
for this book. Innovation is critical for the success of businesses, just as it is for the adaptation of
culture to different environments. Creativity has been a focus of recent anthropological research,
although it too has older roots. See, for example, Eitan Wilf’s book, Creativity on Demand.
According to one definition, creativity, as understood anthropologically, consists of “human
activities that transform existing cultural practices in a manner that a community or certain of its
members find of value” (Rosaldo, Lavie, and Narayan 1993, 5). This is the double-edged sword
of the creative chaos inherent in the force of innovation. It causes culture in organizations to
fragment over time, but it is also the source of new ways of doing things that can refresh a
sclerotic culture and help organizations adapt to changing environments. For an illuminating
discussion of “swarm intelligence,” see Douglas Starr, “What Should Crisis Leadership Look
Like?,” New Yorker, October 26, 2020.
144 The film director Ron Howard: Movieclips, “Apollo 13 (1995) - Square Peg in a Round Hole
Scene (7/11),” August 3, 2017, YouTube video, 1:15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry55-J4_VQ.
144 The artist Chuck Close: “Chuck Close,” Age of Ideas, accessed December 2020,
https://theageofideas.com/chuck-close/.
148 Consider the case of Ron Johnson: Gardiner Morse, “What Ron Johnson Got Right,” Harvard
Business Review, April 11, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/04/what-ron-johnson-got-right.
149 The organizational psychologist Chris Argyris found that elite consultants: Chris Argyris,
“Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1991.
149 In his book Leadership IQ, Emmett Murphy: Emmett Murphy, Leadership IQ: A Personal
Development Process Based on a Scientific Study of a New Generation of Leaders (New York:
Wiley, 1996).
149 The investigative reporter David Epstein: David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in
a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).
152 Once a year at the PayPal leadership meeting: Ted Kitterman, “How PayPal Finds Employee
Advocates to Tell Authentic Stories,” PR Daily, December 11, 2019,
https://www.prdaily.com/how-paypal-finds-employee-advocates-to-tell-authentic-stories/.
152 In a 2017 Fast Company article, Noah Robinson: Noah Robinson, “Why Amazon Is the
World’s Most Innovative Company of 2017,” Fast Company, February 13, 2017,
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067455/why-amazon-is-the-worlds-most-innovative-companyof-2017.
152 A New York Times 2015 profile described the company’s culture as “bruising”: Jodi Kantor
and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York
Times, August 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazonwrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html.
153 In a 2019 Harvard Business Review article by Gary P. Pisano: Gary P. Pisano, “The Hard
Truth about Innovative Cultures,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2019.
154 Comme des Garcons, founded by fashion designer Rei Kawabuko: Judith Thurman, “The
Misfit,” New Yorker, July 21, 2014.
155 Like Kawabuko, Ilse Crawford: Sarah Medford, “Inside Ilse Crawford’s Design Firm,” Wall
Street Journal magazine, August 11, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-ilse-crawfordsdesign-firm-1407769202; and “Apiece Apart Woman: Ilse Crawford,” Apiece Apart, accessed
December 2020, https://www.apieceapart.com/apiece-apart-woman-ilse-crawford.
156 Moving from the warm and fuzzy world of fashion design, let’s visit DARPA: The stories
about DARPA are drawn from Sharon Weinberger, The Imagineers of War (New York: Knopf,
2017).
157 What keeps DARPA’s innovation culture out of the box?: “The Heilmeier Catechism,”
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, accessed December 2020,
https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism.
158 Turning to a softer business sector, let’s drop into Danny Meyer’s operation: Daniel Coyle,
The Culture Code (New York: Bantam, 2018).
159 Expect mistakes and reversals: On this point, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How
Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2020).
160 Before we conclude this chapter, let’s take a quick trip to India: Anthony et al., “Breaking
Down Barriers to Innovation”; Rita Gunther McGrath, “Failure Is a Goldmine for India’s Tata,”
Harvard Business Review, April 2011.
Chapter Eight
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163 Would you hire Kary Mullis?: In telling this extended story, we draw extensively on Paul
Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
and on Dorany Peneda, “Kary Mullis, Quirky Nobel Laureate Whose DNA Discovery Changed
the Science World, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2019.
164 Consider Brandi Chastain: Jeff Bradley, “Shot of Redemption,” Sports Illustrated, accessed
December 2020, https://www.si.com/longform/soccer-goals/goal6.html.
165 March 12, 2006, will go down in history: Jim Frederick, Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent
into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death (New York: Broadway Books, 2010).
169 In a 1989 article published in the prestigious journal Science: Science 245 (4922), September
8, 1989, and discussed in Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997).
174 As he put it: BrainyQuote, Jean Piaget quotes, accessed December 2020,
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jean_piaget_751077.
175 When Beth Comstock: Beth Comstock, Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the
Power of Change (New York: Currency, 2018).
178 The sociologist Ray Oldenburg described the setting: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place:
Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a
Community (Cambridge: Marlowe, 1999).
178 Ford CEO Jim Hackett liked to use the term “fitness”: “The Costs of Complexity Are Hard
to See,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-costs-ofcomplexity-are-hard-to-see.
179 The Six Sigma juggernaut squeezed dollars and time: Kathryn Welling, “Smoking Gun,”
Barron’s, September 14, 1998, https://www.barrons.com/articles/SB905554433137077500?
179 Monocultures, obsessed with one big idea, may run smoothly: Roger L. Martin, “The High
Price of Efficiency,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2019,
https://hbr.org/2019/01/rethinking-efficiency.
180 Ask mathematician Dan Rockmore: Dan Rockmore, “The Myth and Magic of Generating
New Ideas,” New Yorker, November 7, 2019.
182 In a Fast Company interview, Angela Blanchard: Evie Nagy, “What Gardening Can Teach
You about Being an Effective Leader,” Fast Company, April 17, 2014,
https://www.fastcompany.com/3029262/what-gardening-can-teach-you-about-being-aneffective-leader.
Conclusion
Page
185 Richard Branson, serial entrepreneur: Catherine Clifford, “If Billionaire Richard Branson
Were 20 Again, Here’s What He Would Do,” CNBC, March 1, 2017,
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/01/why-richard-branson-would-excited-to-be-20-again-andstarting-over.html.
186 the U.S. Business Roundtable released what now seems like a prophetic statement:
“Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That
Serves All Americans,’” Business Roundtable, August 19, 2019,
https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporationto-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans.
OceanofPDF.com
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OceanofPDF.com
Acknowledgments
Several years ago, sitting in Greg’s office at the University of
Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the three of us
first started discussing the distinctive way culture moves and changes. Our
discussion continued over time as we traveled around the world consulting
with clients; taught several undergraduate and graduate courses at Penn and
other universities about organizational culture; and delivered countless talks
on the subject. Now that we have assembled the pieces of the puzzle into
this book, we take great pleasure in acknowledging the tremendous amount
of support we received from many people along the way.
First, we would like to thank our literary agent, Michael Snell. Mike
guided us through every step of the process: brainstorming the big idea
behind the book, drafting and editing the proposal and manuscript, and
attending to every single detail of assembling the final product for the
publisher. Mike was a full member of our writing team.
We also want to thank Berrett-Koehler’s Neal Maillet. Neal helped us
sharpen our thinking and gave us the nudge we needed to start growing it
into the form of eight chapters and all the supporting material in this
garden.
A special thank-you goes to Kendra Allenby, whose cartoons and
illustrations offer a unique visual perspective on the culture puzzle. Kendra
possesses an extraordinary ability to think in images as well as words. She
gave us invaluable input at several points in the writing process.
Finally, we could not have written the book without the encouragement
and understanding of our families. Mario’s wife, Robin Komita, was a
patient and tireless partner throughout the effort. She knows a good story
when she hears one, and offered much help and insight at every stage. Their
three twenty-something kids—Miles, Ella, and Bix—were living at home
for most of the writing because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they
provided unexpected and welcome opportunities to take a break from
toiling at the laptop.
Derek’s wife, Carolyn, was an inspiration as she and her fellow
healthcare workers courageously served on the front lines in New York City
hospitals during the height of the pandemic. Their nightly conversations
during the semi-lockdown period, as the virus raged through neighborhoods
and cries for justice echoed from the streets, kept Derek grounded in the
importance of building strong, inclusive communities. His young daughter,
Dylan, was a source of much-needed levity and optimism as he envisioned
brighter days ahead for his own imagined communities, in NYC and
beyond.
Greg thanks his colleagues in the Penn Museum, Egyptologists David P.
Silverman, Josef W. Wegner, and Jennifer Houser Wegner, who designed
and mounted an exhibit focused on the remarkable story of Akhenaten.
Greg’s daughter Jessica N. K. Urban, aspiring archaeologist and cultural
theorist, has been a key interlocutor, helping to brainstorm and refine
concepts, as well as analyze data. She pulls no punches in signaling when a
passage has taken a wrong turn. Tricia Kent, Greg’s partner of many
decades and Jessica’s mom, is committed to integrative approaches to
psychological health, and kindled his efforts to discover analogies in culture
and social life. Finally, without the prodding and cajoling of his sister, and
former businesswoman, Jennifer Baker, Greg might never have shifted his
focus from indigenous communities in South America to the tribes of the
corporate world.
OceanofPDF.com
Index
Figures are indicated by page numbers in italics.
Abstract (Netflix series), 155
Adams, John, 203n81
Althusser, Louis, 204n81
Amazon, 56, 152–154, 156, 182
Anderson, Benedict, 81, 203n81
anthropology and anthropologists: affective neuroscience, 206n102
Amazonian jungle, 2
chimpanzees and bonobos, 208n108
codes of conduct, 38
creativity and innovation, 213n143
diffusion, 206n102
evolution, role of, 199n35
insights of, 2–3
language study, 213n143
outsiders, 108–109
PTSD comparison, 51
rhesus macaque behavior, 113
“social dramas,” 129
status, 208n108
teamwork for survival, 143
tribes, 14, 35
Apollo 13 (film), 144
Apple, 84, 91–92, 148
Aristotle, 207n102, 210n123
Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 200n35, 210n123
Austin, John L., 204n81
BakerRipley, 182
Baquet, Dean, 130–132
Barger, Mike, 89–91
Baron, Andrew Scott, 36
Barron’s, 179
Basset, Nick, 53–54
Becker, Howard, 108
Benioff, Marc, 80, 84
Bergson, Henri, 4
Berra, Yogi, 4, 92
Bertrand, Sabrina, 46
Bezos, Jeff, 152, 182
Bharti Airtel (Bharti Telecom), 97–98
Black Hearts (Frederick), 165–166
Blanchard, Angela, 182
Blumenthal, Neil, 28–29
Bourdieu, Pierre, 108–109, 123, 211n123
Boyd, Robert, 211n123
Branson, Richard, 185
Briody, Elizabeth, 114, 140, 150–151
Brown, Brett, 101–102, 105, 112
Bryant, Adam, 60
Buffett, Warren, 36
Camerer, Colin, 109
Carey, Dennis, 97
Carey, Susan, 36
Carreyrou, John, 23
Carucci, Ron, 87
Catmull, Ed, 69, 145–146
Cayo, Inc., 112–113
Cetus, 170–173
Charan, Ram, 97
Chastain, Brandi, 164, 167–169, 173, 182
wildflower, 168
Chernow, Ron, 83
Chouinard, Yvon, 29
Chozick, Amy, 12
Christofilos, Nicholas, 157
Cicero, 210n123
Circle Way, The (Fisher), 64
Close, Chuck, 144–146
Coles, Martin, 116
collaboration and competition: Babel, Inc., 43
code of conduct, 38–39
communication within organizations, 39–42, 52–54
culture clash, 36–37
disconnection and disruption, 50–52
ethical misbehavior, 45–47
human evolution and, 33–36, 199n35
independent scientists and, 110–111
mismanagement by abstraction., 48, 50–51, 54
open-plan offices, 48–50
org charts, 45, 47–48, 50, 52, 54
silos, 36, 39, 41–42, 50
tribal competition experiment, 36
Comme des Garcons, 154–155
communication: “culture virtuosos,” 109–113
within organizations, 39–42, 52–54
Comstock, Beth, 175–177
Conley, Chip, 67–68, 72–75
Cooper, Art, 63–64
Costa, Mark, 74
COVID-19, 3, 185–186
Crawford, Ilse, 155–156
creativity and creative organizations, 147, 154–155, 158, 160
organizational fitness, 178
“The Third Place,” 178
Creativity on Demand (Wilf), 213n143
Cross, Rob, 39–40
Crutchfield, Leslie, 117
culture: cultural studies, 204n81
definition of, 24, 106, 211n123
diversity and “code switching,” 107–108
dysfunctional, 2–3
sabotage of, 11–12. See also gardening comparison
culture, lessons of, 13–15
basic human needs, 196n14
employee understanding, 25–26
failures, 20
fast or thoughtful mode, 20–23, 26–27
humans and primates, 196n19. See also Four Forces;
habit; innovation; interest; vision
culture-building, 13, 57, 61, 126–127, 187–188
Culture Evaluator, 18
culture puzzle, 17
Dalio, Ray, 126–128
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 110–111
de Certeau, Michel, 143, 145, 213n143
De civitate Dei (Augustine), 200n35
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 154, 156–
157, 177, 182
Deleuze, Gilles, 207n102
Delivering Happiness (Hsieh, Lim), 71
Deming, W. Edwards, 140
Denworth, Lydia, 113
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude, 203n81
DiCicco, Tony, 168–169, 173
Distinction (Bourdieu), 211n123
division of labor, Cubeo tribe, 196n19
Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim), 197n19
Dolnick, Sam, 131
Dot Collector, 128
Drucker, Henry M., 203n81
Dunham, Yarrow, 36
Durkheim, Emile, 197n19, 199n35
Eastman Chemical Company, 74
Edison, Thomas, 174
Edmondson, Amy, 74–75
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The (Durkheim), 200n35
Elle Decoration, 155
Entertainment Weekly, 176
Epstein, David, 149
Erlich, Henry, 173
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 200n35
Farmers’ Almanac, 61
Fast Company, 152, 182
Financial Times, 93
Fiorina, Carly, 103
First Platoon, Iraq, 165–167
Fisher, Eileen, 64–66, 69, 71–72, 75, 187
Forbes, 23
Ford Motor Company, design thinking, 135–136
Fortune, 124, 135
Four Forces, 4, 15–16, 19, 22, 26–28, 61–62, 189, 191–193. See also
habit; innovation; interest; vision
Frederick, Jim, 166
“Freedom and Responsibility Culture” (Hastings), 124, 126
Friendship (Denworth), 113
gardening comparison, 4–5
Braintrust, 69, 145, 147
changing culture, 59
comparison of styles, 60
environmental awareness, 61–62
Gardener’s Creed, 62
leadership philosophy, 60, 69, 74–75, 98, 182
lessons of, 58–59, 69, 188
thinking out loud, 66
toxic weeds, 165–167, 173, 182
wildflower, 137, 167, 169, 173–174, 182. See also Four
Forces
Geertz, Clifford, 121, 199n35
General Electric (GE), 176, 179–180
General Motors (GM), 114, 139–142, 145–146, 150. See also
innovation
Gerstner, Lou, 57
Gilboa, David, 28–29
Gillette, 36–37
Glengarry Glen Ross (film), 46
Google, 187
Gramsci, Antonio, 204n81
Guattari, Felix, 207n102
Gupta, Priyash, 133
Guyer, Ruth Levy, 169
habit, 15–16, 18, 22, 26, 120, 193
acquisition of, 123
anthropology story, 120–122, 210n123
change and modification, 123–126, 133
cultural change, 129–132
employee change, 134–136
good and bad, 122–123
rules and rituals, 28, 70–71, 75, 128–129, 137, 210n123
Habit (James), 22
Hackett, Jim, 135, 178, 180
Hamilton, 83
Harari, Yuval, 84
“Hard Truth about Innovative Cultures, The” (Pisano), 153
Harvard Business Review, 25, 87, 153–154
Hastings, Reed, 123–126
Heitmeier, George H., 157
Henrich, Joseph, 207n102
Hewlett-Packard, 103
Hinkie, Sam, 101–102
Holmes, Elizabeth, 23
Howard, Ron, 144
How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 204n81
Hsieh, Tony, 55–57, 60, 70–71, 73–75, 187
Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), 197n19
IBM, 57
imagined communities, 81–82
Immelt, Jeff, 179
innovation, 15–16, 18, 26, 72–73, 139, 193
arrogance and, 147–149
barriers to, 151
Braintrust, 145
definition of, 144
Eureka and big moments, 181
evolutionary rationality, 173
failures and, 160
gaming the system, 141–143
generalists or specialists, 149–150
human connections and, 154–156
ignorance and vulnerability, 74–75
management and, 146–147
mistakes as big moments, 13, 173–174
permission slips, 177
problem-solving questions, 157–158, 177
process of, 146, 158–159
roadblocks to, 140–142
“story snippets,” 150–151, 158–159
teamwork, 143–144, 173, 175, 185–186
Total Quality Management (TQM), 140, 142. See also
creativity and creative organizations
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An
(Smith), 197n19
interest, 15–16, 18, 26, 100, 193
individual or group needs, 101–102
memo to be happy, 107
motivation and, 104
tribalism, definition of, 103
tribe building, 102–106
Intermountain Healthcare, 53–54
In the Land of Men (Miller), 63
Isherwood, Christopher, 105–106
Iversen, Christian, 93
James, William, 22, 123, 210n123
Japan, trade with, 130
J.C. Penney, 148
Jefferson, Thomas, 203n81
JetBlue Airways, 89–90
Jobs, Steve, 91–92
Johnson, Magic, 31
Johnson, Ron, 148
Johnson, Stephen, 146
Joie de Vivre, 67–68, 73
Joseph, Philip, 156
Journal of Affective Disorders, 105
Junger, Sebastian, 33
Kahneman, Daniel, 20
Kawabuko, Rei, 154–155, 188
Kay, John, 173
Kikuchi, Yoneko, 155
King, Mervyn, 173
Knudstorp, Vig, 92–96
Koshland, Daniel, Jr., 169
Kristiansen, Kjeld Kirk, 95
Kurey, Brian, 87
Labov, William, 207n102
Language (Sapir), 213n143
L Brands, 43–44
leadership, 60
actions and, 39–40
balanced leadership, 117–118
community and, 81–82
“culture virtuosos,” 109
diversity and, 109
individuals and, 59–61, 65, 72, 105, 111–112
informal influencers, 114–115
Sun God or arrogance, 20, 23, 49, 63–64, 87–88, 103
top-down culture and, 50, 57–58. See also gardening
comparison; Knudstorp, Vig; Wells Fargo
Leadership IQ (Murphy), 149
Leary, Timothy, 67–68
LEGO, 92–96
Let My People Go Surfing (Chouinard), 29
Lightner, Candy, 117–118
Lim, Jen, 71–72
LinkExchange, 55–56
L’Oreal, 186–187
Madan, Sanjay, 55
Madsjberg, Christian, 94–95
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 200n35
Marx, Karl, 204n81
Mason, Phil, 136
Mauss, Marcel, 211n123
McChrystal, Stanley, 57–59, 65–66, 69, 71–72, 75
McCord, Patty, 124–127
McNulty, Erin, 143
Mead, Margaret, 119
meetings: MOJO (meeting owner, joyful observer), 133
transformation of, 133
#MeToo movement, 44
Meyer, Danny, 158
Microsoft, 56
Miller, Adrienne, 63–64
Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 83, 99
Misner, Ivan, 74
Mittal, Sunil Bharti, 97–98
Modern Elder, 73, 75
rules of, 68–69
Moment of Clarity, The (Madsjberg, Rasmussen), 94
monoculture, 179–180
Montaigne, 210n123
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), 117–118
Mullis, Kary, 163–164, 169–174, 181–182
Murphy, Emmett, 149
Murphy, Michael, 134–135, 188
Murthy, Vivek, 35
Myers, Tammy Roberts, 44
Netflix, 124–126
Neumann, Adam, 12–13, 19
New York Times, 43–44, 60, 152
cultural change, 130–132
Nixon, Richard, 67
Nunery, Lee, 30–32
Ohana (kinfolk), 80–82, 84, 90, 94
Old, Hilary, 65
Oldenburg, Ray, 178
Operations and Intelligence (O&I) brief, 66, 69
Oracle, 55
Outsiders (Becker), 108
Overbeck, Carla, 168
Palmer, Darren, 136
Panksepp, Jaak, 207n102
Parker, Priya, 132–133
Patagonia, 29
PayPal, culture journalists, 151–152
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 204n81
Perry, Matthew, 130
Pharaoh Akhenaten, 9, 182, 204n81
failure of, 13, 19, 24–25, 149
Sun God, 10–12, 60, 182, 186
Piaget, Jean, 174
Pinsker, Joe, 51
Pinterest, 82
Pisano, Gary P., 153
Pixar, 69, 147
Ploughman, Poul, 93–94
Powerful (McCord), 124
Practice of Everyday Life, The (Certeau), 143
PricewaterhouseCoopers, 26
Principles (Dalio), 126–127
Procter & Gamble (P&G), 36–37
Psychology Today, 120
PTSD, battlefield experiences, 33–34, 51
Pure Hardware, 124–125
Range (Epstein), 149
Rasmussen, Mikkel, 94–95
Razek, Ed, 42, 45
Reis, Harry, 111
Rhodes, Sonia, 134
Richerson, Peter J., 211n123
Robinson, Noah, 152
Rockmore, Dan, 180–181
Rodean, Kathy, 135, 188
Rollins, Barrett, 110–111, 118
Saiki, Randall, 172
Salesforce: boot camp, 79–80
Ohana (kinfolk), 80–82, 84
Sapir, Edward, 213n143
Schor, Susan, 65
Schultz, Howard, 115–116
Science, 169–170, 172
76ers, 100–102, 112
sexual harrassment, 44–45
Sharf, Stephen, 171–172
Sharp Healthcare, 134, 188
Sherwin, Mary and David, 138
Silverstein, Michael, 204n81
Smith, Adam, 197n19
Son, Masayoshi, 12–13
Southeast Asian Bank (DBS), 133
Spin (magazine), 164
Sports Illustrated, 167
Starbucks, 115–117
Steelcase, 135, 179
Stern, David, 30–32
Stevens, Anna, 25
stories, 91
buzzwords, 87–88
coauthors, 88, 93–96
Corporate-speak, 89
garbage language, 86–87, 89
learning from, 174
listening to, 88
origin stories, 88–90
themes in organizations, 85–86
use of, 82–84. See also Apple; JetBlue Airways; LEGO;
vision
Studioilse, 154–155
Stumpf, John, 45–46
“talent on the bubble,” 165
Tanaka, Tsubomi, 155
Tata, Ratan, 160
Taylor, Casey Crowe, 44
Theranos, 23
Toyoda, Tetsuro, 137
Toyota Motor Corporation, 137
Transforming Culture (Briody), 140
tribe of tribes, 75, 102, 114–117
“Trust the process!” 100–102
Turner, Victor, 129
Tylor, Edward Burnet, 211n123
Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 47
Uncanny Valley (Weiner), 86
Urban, Greg, 1, 203n81
U.S. Business Roundtable, 186
Useem, Jerry, 135
Useem, Michael, 97
Victoria’s Secret, 42–44
Virgin Group, 185
vision, 15–16, 18, 26, 80, 193
central idea, 97–99
change or fad, 97
creating culture, 203n81
domineering or collaboration, 63, 65–67
ideology, history of, 203n81
tribal commitment, 82. See also Salesforce
Wall Street Journal, 37, 154
Walmart, OneWalmart, 87
Warby Parker, 28, 82
Weber, Harrison, 12
Weber, Roberto, 109
Weinberger, Sharon, 157
Weiner, Anna, 86
Weinstein, Harvey, 44–45
Weinstein Company, 44
Welch, Jack, 176, 179, 182
Wells Fargo, 2, 45–47, 51
West Side Story, 109
WeWork, 12, 19
White, Tom, 171–173
Wilf, Eitan, 213n143
Young, Molly, 87
Zappos, 56–57
Zappos culture book, 70–72, 187
Zeno’s paradox, 183
Zinger, Andrew, 79–80
OceanofPDF.com
About the Authors and the Illustrator
Mario Moussa is president of Moussa Consulting and an Affiliated
Faculty member in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. He helps senior leaders build teams, plan for
growth, and grow thriving organizations. He has written The Art of Woo:
Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas (coauthored with Richard
Shell) and Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and
Performance (coauthored with Madeline Boyer and Derek Newberry). He
delivers workshops and talks around the world.
Derek Newberry is an Affiliated Faculty member in the College of Liberal
and Professional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an
organizational development consultant, helping leaders build strong cultures
and great communities in their organizations across a range of sectors and
industries. He also delivers workshops on teams, culture, and
communication at the Wharton School. Derek is coauthor of Committed
Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance and co-teaches
the Culture-Driven Team Building specialization on Coursera.
Greg Urban is the Arthur Hobson Quinn Professor of Anthropology at the
University of Pennsylvania and the current editor of the Journal of Business
Anthropology. He has authored and edited several books, including A
Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths
and Rituals, Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the
Intellect, Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World, and
Corporations and Citizenship. He has also conducted anthropological
research in many businesses, including as a member of a globe-trotting
team with Mario and Derek.
Kendra Allenby is a cartoonist and graphic thinker. She uses humor and
drawings to convey ideas and better understand being human. She draws for
the New Yorker magazine, the Red Cross, and many other publications and
organizations.
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