Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: This is Master's in Business with Barry red Holds on
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have another extra special guest.
Speaker 1: Professor Michael Morris is a fascinating instructor of social psychology
Speaker 1: and the way tribalism affects us and the way we
Speaker 1: affect tribes. His book, Tribal How the cultural instincts that
Speaker 1: divide us can help bring Us Together is really a
Speaker 1: fascinating discussion of various ways that tribes are not etched
Speaker 1: in stone, they're not part of our DNA. Tribes vary
Speaker 1: from culture to culture, from company to company, and that
Speaker 1: using tribes can be a very effective way to turn
Speaker 1: a company around that's struggling to change, that's facing all
Speaker 1: sorts of challenges, and essentially to become the best organization
Speaker 1: we can be. Full disclosure, The professor has consulted for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg LP, that's the parent company of Bloomberg Radio, where
Speaker 1: he led classes teaching corporate culture and tribalism. I thought
Speaker 1: the book was really interesting, and I found our conversation
Speaker 1: to be absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also,
Speaker 1: with no further ado, My conversation with Professor Michael Morris, author.
Speaker 2: Of Tribal Thank you so much for having me here.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for coming. Let's start out with your background.
Speaker 1: Undergraduate cognitive science and English literature at Brown and then
Speaker 1: a PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan, Go Blue.
Speaker 1: What was the original career plan.
Speaker 2: Well, the original career plan was I wanted to stay
Speaker 2: in school for a little while, right I went to
Speaker 2: do a PhD. I had actually gone to four different
Speaker 2: three different universities in my four years as an undergraduate,
Speaker 2: and so my feet had been moving, and I thought
Speaker 2: I could benefit from going to graduate school, and I
Speaker 2: chose something sort of in the middle of the two
Speaker 2: topics that I studied as an undergraduate. You know, cognitive
Speaker 2: science is a computer science and sort of nom Chomsky
Speaker 2: style linguistics. It's sort of a more mathy, formal approach
Speaker 2: to the mind. And then comparative literature is obviously all
Speaker 2: about tradition and the collective, the collective representations that shape
Speaker 2: the discourse in a community over the centuries, and so
Speaker 2: I think it was kind of natural for me to
Speaker 2: be interested in how the received culture shapes the thought
Speaker 2: processes that a group of people have and I had
Speaker 2: grown up, you know, around people from different parts of
Speaker 2: the world and didn't seem to me like every but
Speaker 2: he thought the same way that everybody didn't seem to
Speaker 2: have the same common sense. So I started working with
Speaker 2: people who were rebuilding a field called cultural psychology, which
Speaker 2: had had existed briefly in Moscow and the twenties but
Speaker 2: then kind of got shot down by Stalin, and you know,
Speaker 2: it resurfaced in the mid nineties as people were trying
Speaker 2: to understand the rise of the Four Tigers in China
Speaker 2: and Japan and how was it that you could have
Speaker 2: multiple modernities, you know, not everyone was becoming Western. And
Speaker 2: that's sort of the time and place in which my
Speaker 2: career started.
Speaker 1: It sounds like, based on exactly how you're describing this,
Speaker 1: it was almost inevitable that you would end up focusing
Speaker 1: on psychology, tribes and management. Tell us a little bit about,
Speaker 1: you know, how you came to focus on this area.
Speaker 2: I started doing work that you can think of as
Speaker 2: sort of East West comparisons. You know, often it was
Speaker 2: comparing college students in China to college students in the US,
Speaker 2: or bank employees in Hong Kong to bank employees in
Speaker 2: New York. When I was doing that, it was considered
Speaker 2: to be sort of fringe, fringe research in psychology, because
Speaker 2: psychologists at the time liked to think of themselves as
Speaker 2: natural scientists, you know, part of the natural sciences, and
Speaker 2: they thought that most of the biases they observed were
Speaker 2: you know, rooted in a brain structure in one way
Speaker 2: or another, and they were part of universal human nature.
Speaker 2: And so what I was doing was a little bit
Speaker 2: considered to be critical of that. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: the business schools of the world, at least the top
Speaker 2: business schools of the world, were becoming very, very interested
Speaker 2: in cultural differences, and in particular interested in research on
Speaker 2: cultural differences that was somewhat objective, you know, that used
Speaker 2: you know, precise measurements, rather than anthropological field work, which
Speaker 2: has a more subjective feeling. Although it's valuable in many
Speaker 2: ways to the to the economists, you know, running the
Speaker 2: top business schools, it felt a little vague and impressionistic.
Speaker 2: And so I was running experiments and precise surveys, comparing
Speaker 2: you know, professionals and students in these different parts of
Speaker 2: the world and observing regular differences in some of the
Speaker 2: cognitive biases, and that led three of the top business
Speaker 2: schools in the world to all make me job offers.
Speaker 2: And so I had not foreseen that this research would
Speaker 2: carry me into the world of business schools. You know,
Speaker 2: Brown is not a place that has a business school.
Speaker 2: You don't have much exposure to it. It seemed like
Speaker 2: the universe was telling me that what I was doing
Speaker 2: was of great interest to people in business schools. So
Speaker 2: my career turned a corner at that point. And then
Speaker 2: I started at Stanford Business School at age twenty six,
Speaker 2: you know, before I had even finished my dissertation, and
Speaker 2: it was our learning experience. You know, I wasn't the
Speaker 2: greatest teacher in my first couple of years, but you learn,
Speaker 2: you know, you learn from teaching. And then I did
Speaker 2: well there and got promoted early there and then decided
Speaker 2: to come back to New York where I grew up
Speaker 2: in the New York area, and that brought me to Columbia.
Speaker 2: I came back to Columbia in two thousand and one.
Speaker 2: My first day of teaching at Columbia University was actually
Speaker 2: nine to eleven. Oh, so that was an interesting introduction.
Speaker 2: But you know, I've enjoyed living and working in New
Speaker 2: York quite a lot. I never thought I would still
Speaker 2: be living here because I had been in a pattern
Speaker 2: of moving every five years, you know, But it's an
Speaker 2: easy solution to life. I take a lot of sabbatical
Speaker 2: years in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, so I sustain deep
Speaker 2: collaborations and laboratories there, as well as in some other
Speaker 2: parts of the world like India and sometimes in Europe.
Speaker 1: So you are not the first person, both academic and
Speaker 1: people working in finance who have said, my original research
Speaker 1: was thought of as fringe twenty years ago and then
Speaker 1: suddenly not fringe. So it just goes to show you
Speaker 1: that if you're outside of the mainstream, outside of the consensus,
Speaker 1: that's where you know, all of the undiscovered veins of
Speaker 1: gold are. Or so it seems. You talk about the
Speaker 1: difference between how Chinese students behave versus American students, and
Speaker 1: even when Chinese students are in the US, when they're
Speaker 1: speaking Chinese, it's a different set of culture, a different
Speaker 1: set of behaviors, versus when they're same group of people
Speaker 1: speaking English. It seems like the norms change and the
Speaker 1: various behaviors change. You've published two hundred articles on behavioral science.
Speaker 1: Tell us what you're rea research finds about these various
Speaker 1: behavioral I don't even want to call them texts, behavioral
Speaker 1: or just behaviors. The switches when when a cultural factor
Speaker 1: is impacting people's thinking.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, let me start by saying this touches on
Speaker 2: the core theme of the book, which is that culture changes.
Speaker 2: There's this myth out there that culture is unchanging and unchangeable,
Speaker 2: that the cultures of the world are permanent fixtures, and
Speaker 2: that the Americans of two centuries ago were the same
Speaker 2: as us. And that's that's an illusion that we kind
Speaker 2: of enjoy, but it's a it's an illusion. You know,
Speaker 2: what the founding Fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness
Speaker 2: is not what you and I think of as the
Speaker 2: pursuit of happiness and what we know today in the
Speaker 2: pop culture as code switching. It sort of came into
Speaker 2: the popular discourse when Obama was president, and we've seen
Speaker 2: it again this year, as Kamala Harris campaigned. Is this
Speaker 2: notion that people who've grown up in more than one
Speaker 2: ethnic subculture that have corresponding dialects will make switches depending
Speaker 2: on the audience that they're in.
Speaker 1: Front of you have a reference to Korean pilots with
Speaker 1: South Korean pilots, where there is a history and a
Speaker 1: culture of deference to seniority, And it reminded me, and
Speaker 1: that leads to problems and airplane crashes, and it reminds
Speaker 1: me of I want to say it was Matthew Sayed
Speaker 1: the book Black Box Thinking, who talked about a similar
Speaker 1: cultural phenomena with South American pilots and it ultimately led
Speaker 1: to them changing their ways. Pilots interact because literally planes
Speaker 1: were flying into mountains because the copilot didn't want to
Speaker 1: disrespect the senior pilot and say, hey, we're all about
Speaker 1: to die. Like its amazing. Cultural norms are so strong
Speaker 1: that rather than risk offending the popot, you lose the plane.
Speaker 1: It seems bananas, but apparently that's how important culture is.
Speaker 2: Well. A lot of this is unconscious automatic behavior, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm I'm a copilot, socialize my whole life
Speaker 2: to speak in a deferential way to those of senior rank,
Speaker 2: and so I'm speaking that way. I'm not calculating that
Speaker 2: if I spoke more assertively that might change the pilot's
Speaker 2: comprehension of the urgency of the situation. Yeah, so I
Speaker 2: think that a lot of accidents are caused by automatic
Speaker 2: behavior and a lot of you know, cultural behaviors. The
Speaker 2: situation with Korean pilots, it was something that was discovered
Speaker 2: first by Boeing. Boeing researchers, you know, who made the
Speaker 2: seven forty seven class jet, which requires equal collaboration among
Speaker 2: copilots and pilots, which wasn't the case with smaller jets.
Speaker 2: They noticed that there was enormous variants across the world's
Speaker 2: flagship airlines in safety rates, and the countries that were
Speaker 2: having the most problems were not the ones that you
Speaker 2: might think they were. Taiwan and South Korea. Those were
Speaker 2: the countries with the worst safety record. And those are
Speaker 2: not poor countries in particular, or countries with particularly bad weather,
Speaker 2: but they are countries that are among the highest in
Speaker 2: the world when you look at hierarchical values what researchers
Speaker 2: called power distance, and in those societies, if someone is
Speaker 2: of senior rank, you're not supposed to equally, you're not
Speaker 2: supposed to interact with them equally. And it was sufficiently
Speaker 2: worrying that Boeing actually considered designing a different plane wow
Speaker 2: for those parts of the world. But then at the
Speaker 2: same time, this study of cockpit black boxes that are
Speaker 2: recovered after accidents and have recordings of the cockpit dialogue
Speaker 2: that came out around the same time and pointed to
Speaker 2: a very similar conclusion. And Malcolm Gladwell and his book
Speaker 2: Outliars wrote about the confluence of these these two things,
Speaker 2: and I think brought it to a lot of people's
Speaker 2: attention at that time. But what I found even more
Speaker 2: interesting than the paradox that, you know, a country like
Speaker 2: South Korea, which is high in technology, high in wealth, etc.
Speaker 2: Was having problems, was that they managed to get rid
Speaker 2: of the problems. They made some very simple changes in
Speaker 2: Korean airlines and they haven't crashed since. So they went
Speaker 2: from the world's worst safety record to an unblemish safety record.
Speaker 2: And the change they made was not firing a bunch
Speaker 2: of people, was not changing all their procedures. It was
Speaker 2: changing the official language of the country and the official
Speaker 2: language of the cockpit from Korean to English. Now, all
Speaker 2: pilots already spoke English because it's the language of air
Speaker 2: traffic control around the world. But when people were speaking
Speaker 2: to the same colleagues in English, they weren't cued to
Speaker 2: be deferential because just like in Japan, where you have
Speaker 2: to call your boss, you know, sato san or something,
Speaker 2: you know, you have to use certain suffixes in Korea,
Speaker 2: and there are these complex honorific declensions that you have
Speaker 2: to use that are constant reminders of the status relative
Speaker 2: status level, and of course in English we don't have
Speaker 2: those things. So it's a remarkable story about the you know,
Speaker 2: the cultural patterns are not essentialistic or inherents. You know,
Speaker 2: sometimes if you can just change the environment slightly so
Speaker 2: that they're not triggered, the same people are totally unencumbered
Speaker 2: by them.
Speaker 1: And that's fascinating that they went from the worst safety
Speaker 1: record to one of the best simply by changing the
Speaker 1: language in the cockpit. That's just amazing.
Speaker 2: It is, it is striking, and it really goes against
Speaker 2: this notion of cultures as permanent fixtures or people. You know,
Speaker 2: there are ways of talking about culture like this is
Speaker 2: in our cultural DNA, you know, And it's this equation
Speaker 2: of culture with genetics in a way that I think,
Speaker 2: you know, is a bit of a fallacy because it
Speaker 2: leads us to think of culture as a set of traits,
Speaker 2: whereas culture is a set of lenses that we look through,
Speaker 2: but the lenses are shifting and the lenses change over time.
Speaker 1: I want to stay with this topic because it's so fascinating.
Speaker 1: You've been researching this area for decades. You've been at
Speaker 1: Columbia almost twenty five years. What led you to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: I can triangulate on all these different aspects and turned
Speaker 1: it into a comprehensive book on humanity and tribalism? What
Speaker 1: led you to that path?
Speaker 2: Well? As a business school professor, I do a lot
Speaker 2: of teaching to executives. I also do a lot of consulting.
Speaker 2: As you mentioned, I consult to political campaigns every election season.
Speaker 2: Doesn't always work out the way I wish, you know,
Speaker 2: but I also consult to companies. So ten years ago
Speaker 2: I I ran a course for a couple of years
Speaker 2: at Bloomberg about decision making, biases, culture and leadership to
Speaker 2: the top executives here. And through that process, I've developed
Speaker 2: a playbook or a toolkit for thinking about how to
Speaker 2: lead through culture, how to use what I know about
Speaker 2: the malleability of culture and the manageability of culture, so
Speaker 2: that as a leader you're not thinking of culture as
Speaker 2: an obstacle to what you want to get done. But
Speaker 2: it's a force that you can harness, that you can
Speaker 2: dial up or dial down, and that you can mount
Speaker 2: slow campaigns to evolve the culture in a way that
Speaker 2: you think will support the needed strategy in the future.
Speaker 2: So I started to write a book sharing that playbook.
Speaker 2: But then over the course of the last five years,
Speaker 2: and I've been writing the book for about five years,
Speaker 2: there have been a series of conflicts in the world
Speaker 2: that have evoked people to start using the word tribal
Speaker 2: and tribalism much more than they ever did before. And
Speaker 2: I'm talking about the Red Blue Rift, the you know,
Speaker 2: the record racial protests in the streets, and the religious
Speaker 2: strife you know, both at home and around the world,
Speaker 2: where you start to hear this new discourse about tribalism
Speaker 2: as a curse, you know, an evolutionary curse, that we
Speaker 2: are somehow genetically predisposed to hate or to fear and
Speaker 2: loathing of some other group, and that this will always
Speaker 2: hinder us and hold us back from the nice things
Speaker 2: that we would like to have, like international cooperation or
Speaker 2: you know, ethnic harmony, harmony, you know, political functioning. So
Speaker 2: I think that this way of talking about tribalism is
Speaker 2: part right but part wrong. It is the case that
Speaker 2: our tribal psychology plays a role in these escalating conflicts.
Speaker 2: But where the pundits get it wrong is that we
Speaker 2: don't have a tribal instinct to hate other groups. That
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been a particularly adaptive instinct, right, like a
Speaker 2: warning instinct. You know, there was an archaic human species
Speaker 2: called Neanderthals that kind of did have that sort of
Speaker 2: orientation towards neighboring tribes. They practiced cannibalism and warfare, and
Speaker 2: they went extinct in part because our kind, you know,
Speaker 2: had a different foreign policy. We made it and traded
Speaker 2: with other groups and formed these larger networks called tribes
Speaker 2: that proved to be a lot more adaptive, proved to
Speaker 2: be a more winning strategy over time. So there's this
Speaker 2: kind of fallacy that just because these conflicts involve hostility,
Speaker 2: that somehow they start from a drive for hostility, and
Speaker 2: that's just a false diagnosis. That doesn't it doesn't help
Speaker 2: us under stand ways to ameliorate these conflicts. It makes
Speaker 2: for riveting articles about how we're doomed, you know, and
Speaker 2: the end times are here, but it doesn't make for
Speaker 2: good policies, and so I as a secondary purpose of
Speaker 2: the book, I've tried to argue that, hey, we really
Speaker 2: need to if we want to talk about tribal psychology
Speaker 2: and tribalism, let's have a science informed view of what
Speaker 2: tribal instincts are and understand how they do figure in conflicts,
Speaker 2: but not in a way that curses us to eternal
Speaker 2: internestine conflict. It's it's you know, it's a manageable side
Speaker 2: of human nature that wise leaders have always found their
Speaker 2: way around.
Speaker 1: The Neanderthal approach versus the Homo sapiens approach, I believe,
Speaker 1: and correct me if I'm getting this wrong. Our DNA
Speaker 1: is about one to two percent Neanderthal. So the idea
Speaker 1: of trade and cooperation and mating was obviously well a
Speaker 1: little hindsight bias, but we're the survivors, so that seems
Speaker 1: to have been the approach that worked. But before I
Speaker 1: read the book, I was under the assumption that humans
Speaker 1: were very similar from culture to culture, country to country,
Speaker 1: and that DNA was determinative. But what the book really
Speaker 1: shows you is we really vary from region to region,
Speaker 1: from country to country. Cultures are very different and very
Speaker 1: malleable and they have a big impact on society.
Speaker 2: Fair statement, fair statement. Yeah, it's a position that kind
Speaker 2: of falls in between the traditional nature versus nurture framework
Speaker 2: that you know, people of our age, you know got
Speaker 2: in school what the new consensus is. And there's a
Speaker 2: field of evolutionary anthropology that has had a lot of
Speaker 2: the key insights is that human nature is nurture. That
Speaker 2: we are the species that became wired by evolution to
Speaker 2: internalize the patterns of communities that nurture us. And what
Speaker 2: that means is that we can operate as a coordinated
Speaker 2: group that functions seamlessly and that meshes together based on
Speaker 2: cultural patterns because we all internalize them unconsciously and we
Speaker 2: are motivated to follow them, and hence we can have
Speaker 2: large organizations and cities and things like that that other
Speaker 2: primates would be completely incapable of. But it's not like
Speaker 2: we're ants or bees who are wired by their DNA
Speaker 2: to behave socially in a particular way. If you go
Speaker 2: around the world, ant hills are always conical and beehives
Speaker 2: are always hexagonal because that's genetically programmed. We're not genetically
Speaker 2: programmed to build our shelters in any particular style. But
Speaker 2: we do learn culturally, you know, to build a yurt
Speaker 2: if we're in Kyrgyzstan, or to build to TP if
Speaker 2: we're planes Native American.
Speaker 1: Huh. Really fascinating. So let's get a little basic and
Speaker 1: delve into some fundamentals of your research. And I want
Speaker 1: to start with what is a tribe.
Speaker 2: From the broad evolutionary anthropology perspective, is the distinctively human
Speaker 2: form of social organization. Our nearest neighbors chimpanzees. They can
Speaker 2: form troops of up to about fifty sixty individuals. If
Speaker 2: it gets any larger, it breaks apart into clashing factions
Speaker 2: and bloodshed. We obviously can form much larger groups and
Speaker 2: collaborate in much more sophisticated and adaptive ways. And the
Speaker 2: way that we can do that is that we can
Speaker 2: form groups that transcend kith and kin. We can form
Speaker 2: groups where we are connected to total strangers who share
Speaker 2: the same cultural heritage as us. So culture is a
Speaker 2: glue that holds together large human groups and enables us
Speaker 2: to trust each other in a way that no other
Speaker 2: animal can. And that was the rubicon that we crossed
Speaker 2: as a species. That after that we left the rest
Speaker 2: of the primate pack in our dust, because once we
Speaker 2: were forming these rich cultures that were shared by large groups,
Speaker 2: it was like a collective brain. It was this pool
Speaker 2: of knowledge that started accumulating across the generations and that
Speaker 2: individuals could tap into to become more capable than the
Speaker 2: individuals from prior generations because the cultures became richer and richer.
Speaker 1: One of the things I was kind of fascinated by
Speaker 1: in the book and you mention chimps is that if
Speaker 1: you take a human toddler and an adult chimp and
Speaker 1: an adult and rangutang and you use a tool or
Speaker 1: show them a technique to get something, the five year
Speaker 1: old figures it out pretty quickly can imitate it, but
Speaker 1: the chimps and the rangutangs, you know, not so much.
Speaker 1: Why is that so? The exposition in the book about
Speaker 1: just being able to follow each other's gaze because our
Speaker 1: eyes are white and our corny and irises are dark,
Speaker 1: which other primates don't have, tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about just some of these evolutionary differences.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you know, evolution works in funny ways. Evolution
Speaker 2: is kind of a tinkerer. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that evolution came up with or a mutation came up
Speaker 2: with that then became harnessed by Our social intelligence is
Speaker 2: the whites of our eyes. Other primates don't have white sclare,
Speaker 2: and so they can't track each other. There's gaze as easily,
Speaker 2: and that means they can't read each other's minds as easily.
Speaker 2: You know, there's this old idea the eyes of the
Speaker 2: window to the soul, and the research on this has
Speaker 2: found a new scientific understanding of what that means, and
Speaker 2: so our ability to mind read enables us to imitate
Speaker 2: each other's behavior at a much richer level than other
Speaker 2: primates can do. It's more like mimicry when one chips
Speaker 2: are very inventive but not very collaborative. So if one
Speaker 2: of them develops a new way to use a stick
Speaker 2: to get termites, or to use a stick to get
Speaker 2: fruit from a tree, others may see it, and they may,
Speaker 2: you know, they may do something that's crudely similar to it,
Speaker 2: but they don't catch what the method is and what
Speaker 2: the intention is. Whereas humans, you know, if somebody invents
Speaker 2: something new that people around them immediately can replicate it
Speaker 2: and start doing it, and innovations spread very you know,
Speaker 2: we all know about fads, right, you know, innovations spread
Speaker 2: really rapidly. And it's funny because we we say monkey,
Speaker 2: see monkey, do we have this notion from going to
Speaker 2: the zoo that that that they are this they are
Speaker 2: such copycats, such such imitative, But we are far more
Speaker 2: imitative than they are. And there's this psychologist named Michael
Speaker 2: Thomassello who's done this wonderful work because he's a he's
Speaker 2: one of the world's experts at child cognition, but he's
Speaker 2: also one of the world's experts at primate cognition, so
Speaker 2: he can kind of do these comparative experiments between children
Speaker 2: and and orangutans and chimpanzees. And what he's found is
Speaker 2: that if you teach a child how to solve a
Speaker 2: puzzle to get a treat, you know, through one method,
Speaker 2: say pushing the yellow button and you get some M
Speaker 2: and ms. But then you show that child four other
Speaker 2: children who all work with the same puzzle and hit
Speaker 2: the red button and get m and ms. Then when
Speaker 2: you let the first child go again, they'll push the
Speaker 2: red button. They'll conform to what they see the peers
Speaker 2: are doing. When you put a chimp through that same procedure.
Speaker 2: They stick to what works for them. You know, they
Speaker 2: can see that other chimps are doing the red button.
Speaker 2: They stick to what works for them. So we are
Speaker 2: more imitative, We are quicker to join the consensus than
Speaker 2: other primates, and we tend to deride that side of us.
Speaker 2: I call it the peer instinct. It's this impulse to
Speaker 2: mesh with what the others around us are doing, and
Speaker 2: we tend to deride it as a herd instinct or
Speaker 2: as conformity. And of course it does limit our independent
Speaker 2: thinking sometimes and sometimes tragically, but we forget that that
Speaker 2: is the cornerstone of human culture and human collaboration because
Speaker 2: it allows us to meld minds and mesh actions. And
Speaker 2: when we are with people who are part of the
Speaker 2: same in group or part of the same culture, we
Speaker 2: can finish each other's sentences. We can, you know, help
Speaker 2: each other without even a request, in a way that
Speaker 2: no other species can, because we're we have this just
Speaker 2: strong impulse to mesh and almost everything important that humans
Speaker 2: have accomplished, it's not the work of one lone genius.
Speaker 2: You know. Even Newton said, you know, if I've seen
Speaker 2: farther than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders
Speaker 2: of giants, right. So it's our ability to work with
Speaker 2: and build on the ideas of others that really responsible
Speaker 2: for everything that we've accomplished. And it's this peer instinct,
Speaker 2: this conformative instinct, this conformist instinct, that is largely responsible
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: So I want to stay with the idea of cooperation
Speaker 1: and collaboration and the white sclera of the eyes you
Speaker 1: use in the book an example going back two million
Speaker 1: years ago of Homo erectus, one of our predecessor species,
Speaker 1: and some of the most recent fossil locations and some
Speaker 1: of the more recent findings suggests that this was a
Speaker 1: cooperative species far and both with hunting and cooking game
Speaker 1: much earlier than we had previously believed, even though there
Speaker 1: wasn't a spoken language. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: how Homo erectus was able to hunt two million years
Speaker 1: ago cooperatively and why that was such a evolutionary advantage.
Speaker 2: Somewhat jokingly in the book, suggests that the field of
Speaker 2: archaeology owes a very sincere apology to Homo erectus, because
Speaker 2: for the longest time, archaeology was pretty much the science
Speaker 2: of stones and bones, you know, it's what has survived,
Speaker 2: but it's not necessarily the only tools that these archaic
Speaker 2: humans had. It's kind of a selective, you know, survivor bias, right,
Speaker 2: So we tend to think of them as the stones,
Speaker 2: but of course they had lots of wooden tools and
Speaker 2: other tools that just aren't around for us to see.
Speaker 2: But archaeologists have become much much more clever. They use
Speaker 2: these CSI worthy techniques to learn a lot more from
Speaker 2: you know, often microscopic traces of things of soil in
Speaker 2: these sites that they identify as living sites. And one
Speaker 2: thing that has become clear is that Homo erectus only
Speaker 2: invented one tool, the hand axe, which is a sort
Speaker 2: of tear drop shaped piece of flint that they use.
Speaker 2: They used to chop, they used to grind, they used
Speaker 2: to this, and so they were always kind of portrayed
Speaker 2: as this single tool, simpleton, you know, that was around
Speaker 2: for a million years and only invented this one tool,
Speaker 2: portrayed as more intellectually, more ape than human. But what
Speaker 2: has become evident from footprints that have been discovered in Kenya,
Speaker 2: in the footprints that ossified in the mud, is that
Speaker 2: groups of Erectus, you know, a million and a half
Speaker 2: years ago, engaged in coordinated hunting of antelopes. And it's
Speaker 2: long been known that there were antelope bones in erectus sites,
Speaker 2: but it was thought that, oh, they must have been scavengers,
Speaker 2: you know, because how could you know? Antelopes can run
Speaker 2: fifty miles an hour? Not even usain Bolt could come
Speaker 2: near them, So how could Homo erectus with just a
Speaker 2: hand axe stand a chance of getting an antelope? Well,
Speaker 2: today there are some African peoples who engage in what's
Speaker 2: called persistence hunting, which is, say you and I are
Speaker 2: hunters in a group that doesn't really have many weapons.
Speaker 2: So we watch an antelope herd and then we see
Speaker 2: maybe one antelope on the margin of the herd, and
Speaker 2: then you go chase it and you kind of separate
Speaker 2: it from the herd, and you're tired and it's tired.
Speaker 2: But then I start chasing it, coordinating with you on
Speaker 2: the same antelope. It does no good to chase different
Speaker 2: antelopes around all afternoon, but if we can chase the
Speaker 2: same antelope, you know, evolution designed antelopes to be sprinters,
Speaker 2: not marathoners. Right, allions only charge once and so if
Speaker 2: you and I and someone else can take turns chasing
Speaker 2: this antelope in a coordinated way and keeping it separated
Speaker 2: from the herd, eventually it just keels over from exhaustion
Speaker 2: and dehydration, and we have an antelope. And so it's
Speaker 2: become evident from fossilized footprints that even a million and
Speaker 2: a half years ago, Homo erectus was capable of that
Speaker 2: sort of thing. And it's also become evident from other
Speaker 2: kinds of microscopic particles of burnt stone that they were cooking.
Speaker 2: And so they were coordinating both with regard to hunting
Speaker 2: and with regard to gathering, and that suggests that they
Speaker 2: were sophisticated with regard to social intelligence in ways that
Speaker 2: goes way beyond the picture of them that archaeology presented,
Speaker 2: you know, in prior generations. The first evidence for stone
Speaker 2: tipped spears is about half a million years ago, I think,
Speaker 2: because the technology for building spears is that you have
Speaker 2: to first straighten if it's a throne spear, you have
Speaker 2: to straighten the shaft of it, and then you have
Speaker 2: to sharpen the point of it into a needle sharp point,
Speaker 2: and then you have to somehow halft the spear tip
Speaker 2: onto the thing. So there's a pretty elaborate process of
Speaker 2: making a spear. But that is one of the hallmark
Speaker 2: innovations of the next big wave of human social evolution,
Speaker 2: which happened about a half a million years ago, and
Speaker 2: that involves what I call the hero instinct, which is,
Speaker 2: if the peer instinct was an instinct to be normal,
Speaker 2: to do what most people are doing, the hero instinct
Speaker 2: was this new impulse to be normative, to to be exemplary,
Speaker 2: to go beyond what other people are doing, to be
Speaker 2: a key contributor and gain the status and the tribute
Speaker 2: that the community accords to those who are the key contributors.
Speaker 2: And it was an interesting thing to evolve because it
Speaker 2: was rewarding for the individuals who had the ambition to
Speaker 2: be a contributor. They got socially rewarded, but it also
Speaker 2: was very adaptive for the group because it incentivized individuals
Speaker 2: to build tools that required toiling alone for a long
Speaker 2: period of time. It's also around the time when archaeologists
Speaker 2: start to see the skeletons of people with congenital deformities
Speaker 2: that survived to the age of adulthood, and that suggests
Speaker 2: that someone was taking care of a person in their
Speaker 2: group who probably couldn't reciprocate. And so you know, I'm
Speaker 2: doing something pro I'm not going to get paid back
Speaker 2: by the person that I'm helping, but I'm going to
Speaker 2: get paid back by the group because I'm doing something
Speaker 2: noble or is it something good or something exemplary. I'm
Speaker 2: a hero.
Speaker 1: So let's put this into historical context. Peer instinct, hero
Speaker 1: instinct and ancestor instinct peer instinct. Two million years ago,
Speaker 1: that begins to develop, and it is useful because conformity
Speaker 1: and coordination allows smooth social interaction and collaboration, and that
Speaker 1: leads to a more successful group.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as a working as a united front. And there's
Speaker 2: all these economic analyzes of foraging, you know, both by
Speaker 2: biologists and by and foraging collectively is more efficient and
Speaker 2: risk reducing than each individual for themselves. Right, if we're
Speaker 2: working as a group, there's less likelihood of any of
Speaker 2: us starving.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned the hero instinct, and that was about
Speaker 1: half a million years ago. Tell us about the ancestor instinct.
Speaker 2: Well, the ancestor instinct to a lot of people, when
Speaker 2: I describe it, it sounds like the most primitive of
Speaker 2: all of these instincts, but it's actually the crowning touch
Speaker 2: that enabled us to live in tribes and accrue all
Speaker 2: the advantages of it, and the ancestor instinct, just like
Speaker 2: the other two, we can still recognize it in ourselves today.
Speaker 2: The peer instinct corresponds to the sideways glances at our
Speaker 2: neighbors and our coworkers, and the impulse to do what
Speaker 2: they're doing. The hero instinct corresponds to our upward curiosity
Speaker 2: about MVPs and CEOs and celebrities, and the weird impulse
Speaker 2: we have to emulate their quirks, you know, to kind
Speaker 2: of eat what Lebron James eats for breakfast, or to
Speaker 2: you know, use the same hand gestures that Barack Obama uses.
Speaker 2: The ancestor instinct corresponds to the curiosity that we feel
Speaker 2: about out past generations. You know, when we hear about
Speaker 2: the founder. You know, when I used to teach at Bloomberg,
Speaker 2: I would tell them, you know, when Mike Bloomberg started
Speaker 2: a company on the first terminal day least, he put
Speaker 2: it in the trunk of his car and he drove
Speaker 2: down a wall street and people just hang on every
Speaker 2: word when you're talking about those formative legends, you know,
Speaker 2: what the founder did at the beginning of the organization.
Speaker 2: People are very curious to hear about prior generations of
Speaker 2: their family. They're curious about the original family recipe, and
Speaker 2: they take a deep satisfaction and following those recipes on
Speaker 2: a holiday. We fetishize antiques, you know, these artifacts from
Speaker 2: the past. And so all of this is the psychology
Speaker 2: of nostalgia for the past or sentimentality for the past,
Speaker 2: and it comes with it a capacity for rote learning.
Speaker 2: You know. So when we're learning religious things from our grandparents,
Speaker 2: we're not supposed to ask questions, you know, we're supposed
Speaker 2: to repeat the sator dinner exactly the way this dinner
Speaker 2: was done, you know, by prior generations. And that is
Speaker 2: what I call the ancestor instinct, is this impulse to
Speaker 2: learn by wrote about things that the past generations did
Speaker 2: and then replicate almost compulsively those things in exactly the
Speaker 2: way that we've learned them. And it can lead to
Speaker 2: superstitious learning and hanging on to ways of the past
Speaker 2: that are no longer adaptive. But it was very adaptive
Speaker 2: for our evolutionary forebears because it contributed to memory both
Speaker 2: as an individual, I could I could learn some technique,
Speaker 2: like a spearmaking technique that might go beyond my understanding.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't understand why this way of straightening
Speaker 2: would by soaking it and water works, but it works.
Speaker 2: So if I if I just trust and you know,
Speaker 2: take it on faith and learn learn by rote, then
Speaker 2: I can continue that expertise and pass it on to
Speaker 2: the next generations. And for the group it created a
Speaker 2: kind of tribal memory. Before that, in the archaeological record,
Speaker 2: what you'd see is that a group in a particular
Speaker 2: area would develop the throwing sphere and have it for
Speaker 2: ten generations and then lose it for thirty generations, and
Speaker 2: then someone would invent it again, so they were reinventing
Speaker 2: the wheel a lot. And after the ancestor instinct was
Speaker 2: also in place. Then you had these three instincts. You
Speaker 2: had the ancestor instinct, which allowed you to hang on
Speaker 2: to the lessons of the past. You had the hero instinct,
Speaker 2: which made people want to go beyond what's already in place,
Speaker 2: so it turned into building on the expertise of the past.
Speaker 2: And then the peer instinct was this mechanism, this engine
Speaker 2: for kind of spreading and distributing the knowledge we want
Speaker 2: to conform to what the others around us are doing.
Speaker 2: And the end result of this was cumulative cultural evolution,
Speaker 2: that the shared knowledge and a group became richer and
Speaker 2: more tuned to what works in the environment with each generation,
Speaker 2: and that collective level learning, more than anything about our
Speaker 2: brains as individuals, is what enabled our species to become
Speaker 2: the dominant species of the planet. And it's still a
Speaker 2: very powerful resource for us today.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about some of the
Speaker 1: examples you use of corporate America adapting some of the
Speaker 1: strategies and full disclosure you consult for a lot of
Speaker 1: these companies. You've consulted for Bloomberg and other entities. So
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of fascinating examples of how companies either
Speaker 1: use or don't use the lessons of tribalism. But I
Speaker 1: have to start again in South Korea talking about their
Speaker 1: terrible soccer team. Tell us a little bit about the
Speaker 1: hitting syndrome. Who was coach hit Ink and why did
Speaker 1: the South Koreans bring him to fix their soccer team.
Speaker 2: Well, South Korea as a country that had a very
Speaker 2: difficult twentieth century, you know, of civil war and colonization
Speaker 2: and political turmoil, and then everything was finally coming together
Speaker 2: in the nineties when they reached the elite tier of
Speaker 2: nations and they successfully bid on hosting the World Cup
Speaker 2: with their our tribal Japan, and it really looked like
Speaker 2: they were ascendant. And then the Asia Crisis in I
Speaker 2: think ninety eight, you know, brought down their politicians, brought
Speaker 2: down some of their banks, brought embarrassing bailouts from the West,
Speaker 2: and accusations of crony capitalism. And at the same time,
Speaker 2: their national soccer team, the Reds, was starting to flound.
Speaker 2: They are usually a regional power, but in the two
Speaker 2: thousand Asia Cup they couldn't even beat Kuwait, which is
Speaker 2: a fairly small country not known for its soccer prowess.
Speaker 2: And so this was a moment of panic for the
Speaker 2: soccer overlords of South Korea because they were about to
Speaker 2: co host the World Cup and the soccer oddsmakers were
Speaker 2: betting that they would be the first ever host nation
Speaker 2: to not advance from group play to tournament rounds, not
Speaker 2: a distinction that they were hoping would be associated with
Speaker 2: their a country being the first host not to advance.
Speaker 2: So they made a gamble, which is that they called
Speaker 2: made a long distance call to the Netherlands and called
Speaker 2: a fellow named Who's Hiddink who was a football or
Speaker 2: soccer coach in the Netherlands had found a lot of
Speaker 2: success turning teams around and doing so despite what might
Speaker 2: be considered an obstacle, which is cultural differences.
Speaker 1: So he and let me jump in right here, because
Speaker 1: in the book you describe a very similar set of
Speaker 1: deferral like co pilot's a pilot, where you would have
Speaker 1: rookies or young teammates who would have open shots and
Speaker 1: defer to the more senior experienced players and pass on
Speaker 1: taking the good shot instead forward the ball to the
Speaker 1: senior player. How did hitting resolve this? How did he
Speaker 1: deal with this?
Speaker 2: Well, he was a very down to earth, egalitarian Dutchman
Speaker 2: and also not terribly knowledgeable about the legends of South
Speaker 2: Korean soccer. He didn't know who There Beckham and who
Speaker 2: there Messi were, and he had watched the game tapes
Speaker 2: and noticed that their style of play was a little
Speaker 2: bit slower and more predictable than what was needed to
Speaker 2: play with the world's best at this time. And so
Speaker 2: he thought, okay, I'm gonna have to just change the
Speaker 2: way things are done there. So he held open tryouts,
Speaker 2: which was a first way of ruffling feathers, because you know,
Speaker 2: the custom there had been that the legends of Korean
Speaker 2: soccer would automatically be given their standard positions on the team.
Speaker 2: And he then started noticing that when they would scrimmage
Speaker 2: that the players were not taking every shot or passing
Speaker 2: as fluidly as he would like, and so he announced
Speaker 2: a set of a set of changed policies that were
Speaker 2: a bit mysterious to the players. He said, Okay, the
Speaker 2: next phase of our training camp is not going to
Speaker 2: be here in South Korea. It's going to be in
Speaker 2: the United Arab Emirates at an international soccer facility. And
Speaker 2: the honorific declensions of Korean which he had heard from
Speaker 2: his assistant coaches were being used on the field, are
Speaker 2: henceforth banned. He justified it as the need for speed,
Speaker 2: but it was obvious that some of these things were
Speaker 2: also changing the cultural cues around the players. He also
Speaker 2: didn't allow the South Korean sports press to follow them
Speaker 2: to the Emirates so that players wouldn't be interviewed by
Speaker 2: their compatriots after every scrimmage about what they did wrong
Speaker 2: and what they did right. And what he was trying
Speaker 2: to do was sort of remove the daily reminders of
Speaker 2: these Korean cultural habits that he suspected we're getting in
Speaker 2: the way of learning what he was trying to teach,
Speaker 2: which was this Dutch style of football where players swap
Speaker 2: positions on the field to throw off defenders. But it
Speaker 2: means that a twenty year old rookie who is playing
Speaker 2: next to the legendary midfielder would take that person's position
Speaker 2: and that person takes the winger position or whatever the
Speaker 2: other position is, And that just felt wrong to players
Speaker 2: when they were thinking through the lens of their Korean
Speaker 2: social habits. But when they were in the Emirates surrounded
Speaker 2: by professional football players from various countries, their identity as
Speaker 2: professional football players came to the fore of their minds
Speaker 2: rather than their identity as Koreans, and they became more open,
Speaker 2: both the rookies and the veterans to learning this new
Speaker 2: tactical system, which was necessary to raise their game to
Speaker 2: the level where they could compete against it.
Speaker 1: And spoiler alert, how did the South Koreans do as
Speaker 1: the host country in the World Cup.
Speaker 2: Well, amazingly they made it out of the group rounds
Speaker 2: to tournament play, and then in tournament play they were
Speaker 2: paired with the teams like Italy and Spain who were
Speaker 2: you know, sort of defending chapions, and they made it
Speaker 2: all the way to the semifinals. And it was one
Speaker 2: of the few times that a team that was not
Speaker 2: either from South America or Europe made it to the semifinals.
Speaker 2: It was the first Asian team to ever make it
Speaker 2: to the semifinals, and it was not just an unlikely
Speaker 2: run for a soccer team, but it it set off
Speaker 2: a jubilation that was nationwide, a celebration of what South
Speaker 2: Korea was capable of if they opened themselves up to,
Speaker 2: you know, to outside influences and outside ideas. And I
Speaker 2: think it's partly responsible for the South Korea that we
Speaker 2: know today, which is a you know, cultural exporter and
Speaker 2: a much more open society than what was the case.
Speaker 2: Then they even changed their citizenship law so that they
Speaker 2: could make who's hitting an honorary citizen. It was and
Speaker 2: had been for time immemorial, a blood standard of citizenship
Speaker 2: where you had to prove that you were Korean to
Speaker 2: be a citizen, and instead they changed it to one
Speaker 2: where if you had lived there and done work there,
Speaker 2: you could become Korean citizens. So literally and figuratively they
Speaker 2: opened themselves up to the world. And the South Korea
Speaker 2: we know today with K pop bands topping the charts
Speaker 2: and you know movies that are winning Oscars, and you
Speaker 2: know soap operas that are played all around the world.
Speaker 2: That's the South Korea that has come from the openness
Speaker 2: that this event helped to create.
Speaker 1: So I want to temporarily leave Asia and talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about Microsoft and a little bit about Bank America.
Speaker 1: Merrill Lynch. Let's start with Sadi and Nadella and Microsoft,
Speaker 1: so long thought of as a monopoly for good reason.
Speaker 1: They come out of a decade where their stock went nowhere.
Speaker 1: When all of their peers, Apple, Amazon go down a
Speaker 1: listen video all did really well. Microsoft kind of wandered
Speaker 1: in the desert for a decade under their prior CEO.
Speaker 1: Nadella comes in, does a listening tour you describe in
Speaker 1: the book and essentially completely changes the culture of Microsoft
Speaker 1: from a taker to leave it ideology. Tomorrow we're listening
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about what made Nadella special
Speaker 1: and what changes did he effect Well, the.
Speaker 2: First two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Bomer were strong
Speaker 2: personalities and you know, sort of intellectually dominant sort of
Speaker 2: figures and sort of the smartest guy in the room
Speaker 2: type of people and led that way. And then that
Speaker 2: worked really well when you know, Microsoft had a virtual
Speaker 2: monopoly and could just load more and more technical features
Speaker 2: on each generation of its software and people didn't really
Speaker 2: have a choice because the switching costs were high. But
Speaker 2: then we enter the cloud computing era, where switching costs
Speaker 2: are much lower, and there's this new norm of just
Speaker 2: paying for the features that you use, and that created
Speaker 2: a premium on knowing your customer, knowing what your customer needed,
Speaker 2: which was not you know, Microsoft wasn't an extroverted organization.
Speaker 2: It was it was introverted. It was it was a
Speaker 2: cult of technical expertise and such a Nadella had been
Speaker 2: succeeding in the cloud division, but that was a relatively
Speaker 2: small division within Microsoft, and he was tapped to be CEO,
Speaker 2: and he realized that what he had to do was
Speaker 2: to use the hero instinct, the tendency to follow role models,
Speaker 2: as a way of reshaping the culture. But it was
Speaker 2: tricky because he couldn't use his bully pulpit as CEO
Speaker 2: to you know, shout at people to become better listeners.
Speaker 2: You know, that would be an oxymoron, right. He had
Speaker 2: to instead lead by example and show people what were
Speaker 2: the set of behaviors that the organization needed and that
Speaker 2: would carry prestige in the new era. And so he
Speaker 2: embarked on a listening tour, you know, words that had
Speaker 2: never been uttered by the prior CEOs, and went all
Speaker 2: through the Microsoft ecosystem, you know, to their to their developers,
Speaker 2: to their salespeople, to their customers, and you know, listened,
Speaker 2: listened and made a few changes based on what they said.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that Microsoft was famous for
Speaker 2: was a stack rank performance evaluation system where everybody, you know,
Speaker 2: you have a fixed curve and the lower ten or
Speaker 2: twenty percent are are fired each year. And that was
Speaker 2: considered to be something that was inhibiting the collaboration that
Speaker 2: was needed in the new era, and the employees were
Speaker 2: quite vocal about that, and he made that change. So
Speaker 2: listening works better if you're also taking some actions that
Speaker 2: shows that you've heard what was said. And then one
Speaker 2: particular event I think very notable. He went to a
Speaker 2: conference on women in technology. I think it's called the
Speaker 2: Grace Hopper conference, you know, after one of the founders
Speaker 2: of Computer Scientists, who was a woman who was under recognized,
Speaker 2: you know, until recently. And in it, he was asked
Speaker 2: during a Q and A about gender differences in tech salaries,
Speaker 2: you know, and we know that these gender differences are
Speaker 2: in part caused by the fact that companies don't regard
Speaker 2: it as a credible threat when women get an outside offer,
Speaker 2: because they don't think the woman's husband and family will move,
Speaker 2: you know, to another city in the way that they
Speaker 2: do when a man gets an outside So women don't
Speaker 2: get the same raises, you know, when you have a
Speaker 2: star system. It happens in academia, it happens in tech companies.
Speaker 2: And but Nadella, you know, was tired, and he had
Speaker 2: answered a lot of questions, and he got the question
Speaker 2: and he said, well, he said, a lot of these
Speaker 2: inequalities they even out over time, and so maybe it's
Speaker 2: just a good idea to let the trust the process
Speaker 2: and let the process make its corrections, which you know,
Speaker 2: might be the right answer. If a junior employee is
Speaker 2: asking whether he should negotiate hard or you know, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't considered to be the best answer about this issue,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of a structural issue related to gender,
Speaker 2: and so there was some chatter in the blog of
Speaker 2: sphere about this, and instead of ignoring it, which he
Speaker 2: could have easily done, he actively publicized the fact that
Speaker 2: he made this error and then actively went to meet
Speaker 2: with women in technology groups and labor economists and people
Speaker 2: who are experts on this issue and actively showed that
Speaker 2: he was taking steps to avoid this structural problem at Microsoft.
Speaker 2: And by sort of enthusiastically owning his mistake and apologizing
Speaker 2: for it, he was role modeling this set of behaviors,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, Okay, you're a customer and Microsoft
Speaker 2: hasn't been listening to you very well and is trying
Speaker 2: to sell you software with a lot of features that
Speaker 2: you don't need. So let's instead apologize for not knowing better,
Speaker 2: and let's take corrective steps of let's send a sale
Speaker 2: person to you know, shadow your people, you know for
Speaker 2: a few weeks and really get to know the day
Speaker 2: to day at your company, and then we'll come up with,
Speaker 2: you know, a cloud product that really dovetails with your
Speaker 2: needs instead of, you know, the way that we've been
Speaker 2: doing it, and it's considered to be you know, the
Speaker 2: the uh, the instrumental you know, the critical behaviors that
Speaker 2: change Microsoft culture from a know it all culture to
Speaker 2: a learn it all culture. You know. Such an Adela
Speaker 2: is also very taken by the research in psychology by
Speaker 2: Carol Dweck and others about learning orientations and growth orientations
Speaker 2: as well. You know, there are some orientations of you know, thinking, uh,
Speaker 2: I'm smart, you know, and I have high intelligence as
Speaker 2: a fixed entity, and then other people have this mindset
Speaker 2: that I have the ability to get smarter and such.
Speaker 2: An Adella is a big advocate of trying to create
Speaker 2: this growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset about ability.
Speaker 2: And Microsoft has really resumed its position on the top
Speaker 2: of the technology hierarchy. It's made really adaptive moves in
Speaker 2: the AI space, and it's it's become a very happening
Speaker 2: place in quantum computing as well. So it's it's not
Speaker 2: just in the cloud computing area. You know, the organization
Speaker 2: got its mojo back, and I think it got its
Speaker 2: mojo back by leaving behind an organizational culture that worked
Speaker 2: in the early era of the industry, but didn't work
Speaker 2: once you're competing with lots of very adaptive organizations and
Speaker 2: you need to partner better and you need to know
Speaker 2: your customers better.
Speaker 1: Really interesting, So Nadella is able to change the culture
Speaker 1: of a single organization, how difficult is it to merge
Speaker 1: the culture of two different organizations. And I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: the financial crisis shotgun wedding of Bank of America and
Speaker 1: Merrill Lynch tell us a little bit about how that
Speaker 1: merger worked out.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a fascinating case. It's a case that we
Speaker 2: you know, we teach at Columbia to our students in
Speaker 2: their very first weeks. You have as a background Peter Lewis,
Speaker 2: you know, who had built Bank of America, starting from
Speaker 2: a very small regional North Carolina bank and swallowing up
Speaker 2: banks even larger than itself to become this bank that
Speaker 2: had one in five Americans as a customer. It was,
Speaker 2: you know, the largest consumer bank. But he wanted one
Speaker 2: more victory at the end of his career, which was,
Speaker 2: you know, to acquire a Wall Street bank, an investment
Speaker 2: bank and move into the fast lane of finance. And
Speaker 2: the financial crisis presented an opportunity because these investment banks
Speaker 2: had really troubled balance sheets, and a consumer bank was
Speaker 2: considered to be something that could balance that.
Speaker 1: FDIC regulated plenty of reserve capital and not in the
Speaker 1: same risk category that old the Wall Street.
Speaker 2: Banks were during the financial crisis, and he actually came
Speaker 2: up to New York and started talking to other banks,
Speaker 2: I think maybe banks that were too far gone, and
Speaker 2: partially through government intervention, he became, you know in conversation
Speaker 2: with Merrill Lynch, and Merrill Lynch was this century old,
Speaker 2: you know, esteemed brand. It was in the in the
Speaker 2: collective imaginations, synonymous with Wall Street. It had the most
Speaker 2: famous logo in banking, you know, the charging bull and
Speaker 2: slogans like, you know, Merrill Lynch is Bullish on America.
Speaker 2: So very strong culture, very strong brand, and it needed
Speaker 2: a rescue. So it looked like a masterstroke of strategy
Speaker 2: where Merrill was saving itself and Bank of America had
Speaker 2: gotten a prize at discount. But then the full depth
Speaker 2: of the troubles related to the financial crisis became apparent,
Speaker 2: you know, with each quarter where there were lots of
Speaker 2: bad loans on the books at Merrill, and then Bank
Speaker 2: of America's acquisition of Countrywide in La brought it into
Speaker 2: the problematic mortgage crisis, and as a result, there were
Speaker 2: a lot there was a lot of strain. There was
Speaker 2: there was some resentment of the Bank of America, you know,
Speaker 2: the more plebeian consumer bankers who weren't getting a bonus
Speaker 2: because of the expensive investment bank that had been purchased.
Speaker 2: And what Lewis and others at Bank of America tried
Speaker 2: to do was to assimilate Merrill into its Bank of
Speaker 2: America culture. They regarded some of the Meral culture as
Speaker 2: the problem that created the crisis, this excessive risk taking,
Speaker 2: and so they would hold workshops to try to Bank
Speaker 2: of americanize the mayoral bankers. But you probably know a
Speaker 2: lot of former Meryl bankers as I do. They were
Speaker 2: people who didn't think they had that much in common
Speaker 2: with the person at the bank branch on the corner.
Speaker 2: You know. They thought they were in a very different
Speaker 2: industry and that the Bank of America culture had very
Speaker 2: few lessons relevant to them. Even the so called thundering
Speaker 2: herd of Meral investment advisors you know at offices around
Speaker 2: the country and abroad, didn't think that it served their
Speaker 2: business to suddenly have a sign in front saying Bank
Speaker 2: of America that looked the same as as the standard
Speaker 2: bank branch or to call themselves Bank of America. You
Speaker 2: can imagine a career merrill person in Paris or Tokyo
Speaker 2: suddenly having to, you know, call themselves Bank of America.
Speaker 2: It's not the brand that worked, you know, particularly well
Speaker 2: in those environments. And so it was failing, and you
Speaker 2: had a hemorrhaging of talent where you know, brokers can
Speaker 2: often take their whole portfolio of clients and go across
Speaker 2: the street to another to the competition and so.
Speaker 1: And just to put a little flesh on on how
Speaker 1: bad this merger was, one banking analyst called it the
Speaker 1: merger from hell. So were they able to realign the
Speaker 1: cultures in any positive way?
Speaker 2: Well, what Lewis did that was a saving a saving
Speaker 2: grace was that he hired a person named Sally Cratchek,
Speaker 2: who was already a sort of legend on Wall Street
Speaker 2: at a young age because she called out some conflicts
Speaker 2: of interests at Bernstein when she was freshly out of
Speaker 2: her Columbia NBA and got fired in the process, but
Speaker 2: became a bit of a hero. The journal called her
Speaker 2: the last honest analyst on Wall Street. And then she
Speaker 2: was hired at City Bank when they had some problems
Speaker 2: in their private wealth division, and she stood up for
Speaker 2: the rights of investors who had been sold certain products
Speaker 2: that she thought, you know, had some hidden problems and
Speaker 2: got fired again, but was lauded once again as being
Speaker 2: a person with integrity, and so she was brought in
Speaker 2: to restore trust as somebody that you know, had Wall
Speaker 2: Street credentials. It didn't seem like she was just this
Speaker 2: consumer bank person who didn't get what a Meryl broker
Speaker 2: or a Meryl investment banker needed. And fortunately she was
Speaker 2: also from North Carolina, so she could be a translator,
Speaker 2: a natural bicultural person who could go down to Charlotte
Speaker 2: and talk to the Bank of America executives and explained
Speaker 2: to them what the Wall Street people did, and they, ultimately,
Speaker 2: after a lot of negotiation, allowed her to do the
Speaker 2: largest ever rebranding, which was called the Bull is Back,
Speaker 2: and they brought back the Merrill Lynch name, and they
Speaker 2: brought back the Bull logo for the private wealth division
Speaker 2: so that it was once again Merrill Lynch, and almost
Speaker 2: immediately it restored confidence and it restored collaboration and citizenship
Speaker 2: within an organization that had always been you know, it
Speaker 2: was called Mother Merrill. It had always been a very
Speaker 2: communitarian organization. But when its name was taken away and
Speaker 2: people were told, you're just a Bank of America employee
Speaker 2: and nobody identified with Bank of America, it all just
Speaker 2: kind of fell apart. And then you see the most
Speaker 2: successful people leaving for the competition. It was very demoralized, saying,
Speaker 2: but when she gave them their group boundary back, and
Speaker 2: she gave them their symbol, the bull back, and she
Speaker 2: gave them their name and their tradition, Merrill Lynch back.
Speaker 2: Suddenly you had this just renaissance of collaboration and people
Speaker 2: working over time to help each other succeed and to
Speaker 2: convince investors that, uh, you know, the post crash era
Speaker 2: was a buying opportunity. And and and suddenly, uh Merrill
Speaker 2: Lynch was the bright spot on Bank of America's books.
Speaker 2: And that that went on for a few years. Now.
Speaker 2: Ultimately Sally got removed in a political shift. I think
Speaker 2: that she is widely regarded as having saved the private
Speaker 2: wealth division through cultural leadership, through understanding how important this
Speaker 2: sense of group identity, and you know, these logos and
Speaker 2: these slogans, these are these are very important UH conduits
Speaker 2: for collaboration, and when you take them away, people are
Speaker 2: alien and anomic and they don't know how to collaborate.
Speaker 1: We're about to head into Thanksgiving. What should family members
Speaker 1: keep in mind about their tribe and tribalism in order
Speaker 1: to have a peaceful Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker 2: Well, there's an economist at UCLA named Keith Chen who
Speaker 2: works with cell phone location data. So he has these
Speaker 2: massive data sets that's basically just tracking the location of
Speaker 2: everyone's cell phone. And what he has been able to
Speaker 2: discover through very complex statistics is that in the last
Speaker 2: election season, you know, twenty twenty, twenty sixteen, families that
Speaker 2: are politically divided have cut short their Thanksgiving dinners during
Speaker 2: these election years because of the conversations that start to happen,
Speaker 2: you know, after the second glass of wine. So I
Speaker 2: wish Americans not just a peaceful, but lengthy Thanksgiving celebrations.
Speaker 2: And one of the things I would suggest is to
Speaker 2: not believe the hype that Americans are more divided now
Speaker 2: than they ever have been. In eighteen sixty, Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 2: became president with less than forty percent of the popular vote.
Speaker 2: Seven states seceded from the Union before his inauguration. The
Speaker 2: Civil War broke out a week or so afterwards. That's
Speaker 2: what I would call a real rift. That's what I
Speaker 2: would call a challenge, a legitimacy challenge, right. And so
Speaker 2: what's interesting is what did Lincoln think was the solution
Speaker 2: to that. In his first inaugural he said, the mystic
Speaker 2: chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the Union.
Speaker 2: Now that's a bit poetic and cryptic, but what he
Speaker 2: was suggesting is that collective memory, you know, thinking of
Speaker 2: our common ancestors, and the gratitude and the obligation that
Speaker 2: we that we feel and the reverence that we feel
Speaker 2: when we think of ancestors can get us beyond our
Speaker 2: current differences. Our current differences seem large, but when we
Speaker 2: think in terms of the hundreds of years of the
Speaker 2: American experiment, since the first settlers, you know, on these shores,
Speaker 2: we can think of this disagreement between the North and
Speaker 2: the South as one that we can possibly get beyond.
Speaker 2: And right around the same time as his more famous
Speaker 2: Gettysburg address when he talked about our fathers came to
Speaker 2: this land. You know, he made reference to ancestors. He
Speaker 2: did something that he's not often given credit for, which
Speaker 2: was the proclamation of the Thanksgiving holiday. I learned in
Speaker 2: school that Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving holidays since sixteen twenty
Speaker 2: one in an unbroken tradition. That's not true, but a
Speaker 2: lot of the national folklore of every country is fake lore.
Speaker 2: It's created retrospectively and projected onto the past. So the
Speaker 2: Pilgrims did not have a Thanksgiving in sixteen twenty one.
Speaker 2: They had a feast that they called a rejoicing, where
Speaker 2: they shot guns in the air and drank whiskey. And
Speaker 2: Thanksgiving for them was a religious ceremony, so it was
Speaker 2: something very different. But there was a concept of Thanksgiving
Speaker 2: among the Puritans, this kind of religious ceremony, and George
Speaker 2: Washington held one of those religious ceremonies after the Revolutionary War,
Speaker 2: and Lincoln was influenced by some of the thought leaders
Speaker 2: of the era who thought a national holiday, a sort
Speaker 2: of autumn harvest feast that we all do at the
Speaker 2: same time, would be a unifying thing at a time
Speaker 2: when the country is sort of divided. And Lincoln thought, oh,
Speaker 2: that makes sense. But how can I get people to
Speaker 2: accept a new holiday. Well, I can portray it as
Speaker 2: something that's already a time honored American tradition. So he
Speaker 2: described it with reference to the Puritan themes and customs,
Speaker 2: and he made reference to George Washington's Thanksgiving, a one
Speaker 2: off event that wasn't meant to be a holiday, and
Speaker 2: within a few years Americans had embraced it as a
Speaker 2: sacred national tradition. So Thanksgiving itself is an example of
Speaker 2: how culture is mutable. It's not. You know, the differences
Speaker 2: that we have now are not set in stone. They're
Speaker 2: not necessarily going to last forever. And we can use
Speaker 2: our cultural capacities for ritual to move beyond differences. And
Speaker 2: so by celebrating Thanksgiving, we should remember that we can
Speaker 2: get beyond much worse political crises than the one we
Speaker 2: have today.
Speaker 1: Really fascinating, all right, So let's go back to Asia.
Speaker 1: You describe Singapore at one point in time as a poor, backwards,
Speaker 1: very corrupt, impoverished islands. How did they manage to turn
Speaker 1: that around? Singapore is now thought of as one of
Speaker 1: the most successful countries in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Singapore is healthier, wealthier, and less corrupt than the
Speaker 2: United States by a substantial margin. That's not to say
Speaker 2: everything about it is great. I lived there a couple
Speaker 2: of years ago for a year, and it's got many virtues,
Speaker 2: but you know, very strict right in New York has
Speaker 2: its virtues as well, right.
Speaker 1: No, No, the famously spinning gum on caning and that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff, but by and large a very successful society.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it was a British colony and then during
Speaker 2: World War Two the Japanese occupied it and shut down
Speaker 2: the port, which the British had a tradition there of
Speaker 2: a free port, so it was a free port for
Speaker 2: a trading open trading zone, and the Japanese kind of
Speaker 2: shut that down, and that led to a sort of
Speaker 2: darker period in Singapore where you had black markets and
Speaker 2: you had a lot of corruption instead of an open
Speaker 2: port that was you know, treating everyone the same and
Speaker 2: prospering due to the high traffic of business Singapore. After
Speaker 2: getting after getting free of the Japanese, it joined the
Speaker 2: Federation of Malaysia with its northern neighbors. It continued to
Speaker 2: be less of a free port than it had been
Speaker 2: under British rule, and some of the local traditions of
Speaker 2: sort of relationship based business, where you do business with
Speaker 2: my family, so I give you preferential access to somebody else.
Speaker 2: That's kind of how business works in that area. There
Speaker 2: are lots of words for it, goan chi, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of network based business, and that was the dominant
Speaker 2: mode of how the port operated. But then a leader
Speaker 2: named Li Kwan Yu, who was Singaporean but who studied
Speaker 2: law in the UK, returned to Singapore to kind of
Speaker 2: try to help its government during the Malaysian period. But
Speaker 2: then in the mid sixties, Singapore gained its independence by
Speaker 2: being ejected from the Malaysian Federation, in part because of
Speaker 2: the ethnic strife between the primarily Chinese Singaporeans and the Malaysians.
Speaker 2: At the time, it had no source of drinking water,
Speaker 2: it had a very high unemployment rate, it had a
Speaker 2: huge malaria problem, and its port had been completely dysfunctional
Speaker 2: for decades since the Japanese occupation. During World War Two,
Speaker 2: a young leader named Li Kwan Yu, who had grown
Speaker 2: up in Singapore but then studied law and practiced law
Speaker 2: in the UK for a while before returning, became elected
Speaker 2: as the first Prime Minister and knew that he needed
Speaker 2: to do something special in order to help Singapore survive
Speaker 2: as an independent country. And what he did was largely
Speaker 2: opposite to what most independence leaders do. Independence leaders tend
Speaker 2: to eliminate any trace of the prior colonial influence. They
Speaker 2: pulled down statues, and they changed the names of things
Speaker 2: back to the local language, and they eliminate western dress
Speaker 2: and put on the ethnic garb le Kwan Yu did
Speaker 2: largely the opposite of that. His political party adopted white
Speaker 2: uniforms reminiscent of the British navy that had ensured the
Speaker 2: operation of the port for many decades in Singapore. He
Speaker 2: made English the official language rather than Melee or Chinese
Speaker 2: or many of the other dialects spoken in the area.
Speaker 2: He thought a lingua franca that was not connected to
Speaker 2: any of the local ethnicities and that was associated with
Speaker 2: this prior period in history when the port was functioning
Speaker 2: in an adaptive way, would be the right kind of
Speaker 2: cultural cue. He even put up a statue of Sir Raffles,
Speaker 2: who was the British founder of the Singaporean colony, Sir
Speaker 2: Thomas Raffles, in case somebody didn't get the point. So
Speaker 2: he didn't try to eliminate all of the traces of
Speaker 2: the sort of British paradigms from running the port. He
Speaker 2: tried to restore that by creating an environment that reminded
Speaker 2: people of that time and brought those habits to the surface.
Speaker 2: And it was in combination with a few other procedures
Speaker 2: like very strong anti graft laws and sort of role
Speaker 2: modeling the austerity and the uncorruptibility that he wanted. Through
Speaker 2: role modeling and through these legal changes and through this
Speaker 2: cultural queueing, he set in motion a new culture of
Speaker 2: Singapore that proved to be very successful in attracting trade
Speaker 2: to Singapore rather than to other local ports, and snowballed
Speaker 2: to become the culture not just of the port in Singapore,
Speaker 2: but of all of its industries and created the Singapore
Speaker 2: that we know today.
Speaker 1: So using cultural cues and the right approach to tribal norms,
Speaker 1: you can affect change in countries, in companies, in sports teams.
Speaker 1: Am I missing anything there? Because the book really covers
Speaker 1: a wide range of ways that tribalism influences organizations.
Speaker 2: Yes, all of those are tribes in the sense that
Speaker 2: they are communities with an enduring identity across generations. What
Speaker 2: a generation means is different in a sports team than
Speaker 2: in a society. But there's transmission of culture across generations,
Speaker 2: and the culture is a kind of glue that enables
Speaker 2: people to coordinate, cooperate and have a sense of continuity.
Speaker 2: But we also have levers for activating cultures, and we
Speaker 2: have levers for altering cultures, and leaders like Li Kwan
Speaker 2: yu are adept at this. He didn't regard culture as sacred.
Speaker 2: He was a bit of a cultural engineer at a
Speaker 2: time when that was regarded as, you know, an impossible
Speaker 2: thing to do. That. You can't change the culture of
Speaker 2: a nation. You can't create a new culture. You can't
Speaker 2: ask a newly liberated people to appropriate aspects of the
Speaker 2: culture from the former colonial era. But he is somebody
Speaker 2: who felt like people are a little bit more flexible
Speaker 2: than they've been given credit for. And he knew that
Speaker 2: he himself personally was bicultural. He was very much Chinese
Speaker 2: but also very much English, and he thought that a
Speaker 2: lot of the Singaporeans of his generation were also bicultural,
Speaker 2: and that was a resource that he could draw upon
Speaker 2: to shape the new culture of independent Singapore.
Speaker 1: Hu so fascinatingly, the former president of Singapore was had
Speaker 1: both a Chinese and an English. Identally, how do babies
Speaker 1: cognitively develop unidentality? What is their focus? Do they see
Speaker 1: family members, do they see race? What affects babies cultural identities?
Speaker 2: Well, race is very salient in this country because race
Speaker 2: happens to map on to cultural communities that are different
Speaker 2: from each other. But that's not the case in most
Speaker 2: of the world. You know, in Russia and the Ukraine,
Speaker 2: you can't tell from somebody's face which side they're on.
Speaker 2: In Gaza, you can't tell who's Israeli and who's Palestinian
Speaker 2: based on faces necessarily, and our evolutionary ancestors rarely encountered
Speaker 2: anybody who was physiognomically different from themselves, So we're not
Speaker 2: wired to use race as the basis of categorization. It's
Speaker 2: something that even in this culture, children only learn later,
Speaker 2: at like age six, to pay attention to race. But
Speaker 2: there are certain cues that we seem to be wired
Speaker 2: to pay attention to in order to recognize who's in
Speaker 2: what group, and in order to recognize when we're around
Speaker 2: tribe mates and thus should engage in our tribal norms
Speaker 2: as a way of coordinating with them. And the number
Speaker 2: one thing is language. Babies learn not only their mother's language,
Speaker 2: but even their mother's dialect when they're in the womb,
Speaker 2: So when they're born, they will already If you play
Speaker 2: tape recordings to newborns of their mother's language or another language,
Speaker 2: they will turn to look at their mother's language. They
Speaker 2: don't speak yet, they can't understand anything, but they know
Speaker 2: the patterns of the language. Even dialect is that way,
Speaker 2: they will turn to a dialect. And the same kinds
Speaker 2: of experiments are done where you have two adult strangers
Speaker 2: in front of a baby and both of them are
Speaker 2: offering a toy to the baby. Which toy does the
Speaker 2: baby take? Well, they will preferentially interact and take a
Speaker 2: toy from a stranger who speaks with their mother's language
Speaker 2: or even their mother's dialect, as opposed to a stranger
Speaker 2: who speaks with a different language or a different dialect.
Speaker 2: So their brains have recognized languages and dialects as markers
Speaker 2: of in group, and they preferentially interact with those people
Speaker 2: and learn from those people. What's fascinating is that babies
Speaker 2: also seem to be wired to expect that food choices
Speaker 2: or cuisines will also be aligned with languages. So if
Speaker 2: you put babies in an experiment where there is one
Speaker 2: adult stranger who is speaking one language, say English, and
Speaker 2: another one who is speaking another language, let's say Hindi,
Speaker 2: and then they they see the person who's speaking English
Speaker 2: eating one kind of food, and they see the person
Speaker 2: who's speaking Hindi eating a different kind of food. And
Speaker 2: then a third person comes in, say, speaking English, and
Speaker 2: it starts eating the food that the Hindi speaking person
Speaker 2: has been eating. The baby will be startled and look like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, what's going on here? You're eating the
Speaker 2: wrong food, you know. So what this tells us is
Speaker 2: that babies are not wired to be racist, but they
Speaker 2: are already judging us based on how we speak and
Speaker 2: what we eat.
Speaker 1: Who knew babies were foodies? I would never have guessed that.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating, all right, So our speed round. Tell us
Speaker 1: what you're keeping you entertained? What are you either listening
Speaker 1: or watching?
Speaker 2: Well, ironically enough, what I'm watching is ken Burn's Civil
Speaker 2: War series, which I never saw the first time, and.
Speaker 1: Great.
Speaker 2: I'd written about the Civil War in the book and
Speaker 2: then I wanted to watch it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about mentors who helped shape your career.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as an undergraduate, I had a mentor named Michael Harper,
Speaker 2: who was an African American poet at Brown, and he
Speaker 2: sort of I wasn't African American obviously, but I liked
Speaker 2: poetry and kind of came from a background similar to
Speaker 2: his and unlike most of the people at Brown, And
Speaker 2: you know, he was a great mentor warm figure and
Speaker 2: someone who you know, paid attention to me when I
Speaker 2: needed it. And then when I went to graduate school,
Speaker 2: a guy named Richard Nisbitt who's a leading social psychologist.
Speaker 2: And then when I started at Stanford, I had a
Speaker 2: colleague named Hazel Marcus, who was a wonderful guide to
Speaker 2: you know, understanding a profession that I had not much
Speaker 2: introduction to and helped me, you know, avoid making lots
Speaker 2: of mistakes.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites?
Speaker 1: What are you reading right now?
Speaker 2: I just got yesterday a book called co Intelligence by
Speaker 2: Ethan Mollick. It's a book about AI, but not not
Speaker 2: a dystopian book about AI taking over, but it's about
Speaker 2: how to use AI as your copilot, how to recognize
Speaker 2: what AI is good at and what you're good at,
Speaker 2: and how to use it, which I think I need
Speaker 2: to start teaching my students because I think it's the
Speaker 2: new reality.
Speaker 1: And our final question, what sort of advice would you
Speaker 1: give to a college grad interest in a career in
Speaker 1: either academia, social psychology, or anything related.
Speaker 2: Well, I say this to my nephews who are at
Speaker 2: that age. Learn what AI is good at and also
Speaker 2: learn AI's limitations, because I think that the facility in
Speaker 2: using AI well and not using it poorly is really
Speaker 2: going to be a distinguishing factor in the knowledge economy
Speaker 2: career is going forward.
Speaker 1: Thank you, professor for being so generous with your time.
Speaker 1: This has really been absolutely intriguing. We have been speaking
Speaker 1: with Professor Michael Marris of Columbia Graduate School of Business
Speaker 1: and author of the book Tribal How the cultural instinct
Speaker 1: that divide us can help bring us together. If you
Speaker 1: enjoy this conversation, well check out any of the previous
Speaker 1: five hundred and fifty we've done over the past ten
Speaker 1: plus years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,
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Speaker 1: feed I would be remiss if I did not thank
Speaker 1: the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week.
Speaker 1: My audio engineer is Steve Gonzalez. My producer is Anna Luke.
Speaker 1: Sage Bauman is the head of Podcasts at Bloomberg. Sean
Speaker 1: Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritoltz. You've been listening
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Speaker 2: Conta