How (11 page)

So let’s briefly summarize the first three chapters of this book, putting the knowledge and behaviors that are easily attained or widely known on the Hill of B, and our newer concepts we have discussed on the Hill of A.

FIGURE II.2
How We Have Been, How We Have Changed

The shifts in society and business over the past decade—from hoarding to sharing, from fortress to ecosystem, from spread-out and easily hidden to hyperconnected and hypertransparent—combine to put new emphasis on the HOWs of human behavior, the way we fill the synapses between us and others. In this second part, we begin our journey to understand and command these HOWs and to put them to work in everything we do. The first step leads us inward, to the thought processes and understandings that shape our decisions and actions toward others. A little biology, a little sociology, a little linguistics, and a little golf: This section is called “How We Think,” and in it, we’re going to begin to build a new framework for understanding a world of HOW.

CHAPTER
4

Playing to Your Strengths

We can’t solve problems by
using the same kind of thinking we
used when we created them.

—Albert Einstein

I
n the movie
Cast Away
, actor Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a fictional FedEx employee marooned on a deserted island for four years after the delivery plane on which he has hitched a ride plummets into the ocean.
¹
He survives armed with nothing but his wits, what he can scrounge on the island, and the contents of several FedEx packages that float ashore after the crash. If you ask most people what the film is about, they will typically mention mankind’s heroic struggle to survive or—propelled as Noland is by the desire to reunite with his fiancée—the power of love to overcome all obstacles. There were two events in the film, however, that sent me a different message. These events so intrigued me that I e-mailed the film’s screenwriter, William Broyles Jr., to ask him what they meant.

The first thing that struck me was the friendship Noland forms with a half-inflated soccer ball rescued from the crash, which he names “Wilson,” after the ball’s manufacturer. Broyles told me that to research the film, he spent time alone on a beach by the Sea of Cortez. During his solitude, he found a volleyball washed up on the shore. “So much are we a social animal,” Broyles wrote me, “so much do we need the spiritual connection to another human being, that I was endowing a volleyball with human characteristics, just because it was so hard to be alone.”
²
You have no need for morals or values when you are stranded on an island (unless you believe you have duties or obligations to palm trees and bananas, a legitimate concern, but off the point). You have no one but yourself to answer to, so how you survive is entirely up to you. By creating this imaginary friend, Broyles acknowledged that there is something in man that calls him to be greater than just himself, to have a purpose to others beyond himself.

The second event that jumped out at me came at the very end of the film, when, four years after he was stranded, Noland completes the delivery of one package that survived the crash, and includes a note that says,
This package saved my life
. “It was a crucial part of who he’d been,” Broyles said. “Noland had been someone who ‘connected’ the world, who made it work, who kept the simple promise of delivering a package from one human being to another. This man of connections, who’d been so long disconnected, reestablished himself as part of the world by fulfilling this commitment.” To survive his ordeal, Noland needed purpose. He realized he was not just a person who moved packages; he was a person who kept promises.
Cast Away
, in my view, is a film about keeping promises to others, about our inherent need as humans to be connected with and to do for one another, and to fulfill what seems to me to be a biological imperative to be more than ourselves alone. I began to wonder, is this something that we have learned as a species, or is there some sort of biological underpinning that makes us this way? Are we, in fact, hardwired to connect to others?

When we talk about the interpersonal synapses between people in a stadium or our horizontal collaborations across global supply chains, we are in a sense talking about biological networks. The brain—that spongy mass between our ears—processes a tremendous amount of information throughout the average day, both consciously and unconsciously. It is responsible for everything from our intake of breath to the kiss we place on a loved one’s cheek at night. The unconscious aspects of the brain’s ability to absorb subtle clues from our environment and to process them through what both nature and nurture provide gives us our ways of acting in and reacting to the world. It is the most complex biological network we know. Academics and scientists, it turns out, have begun to marry advances in their ability to see the brain at work with behavioral research in economics, politics, and other sociological activities, to reveal an inherent, biological human predilection for certain behaviors that increase our ability to be effective and prosperous.
³
The networked brain and the networked world of business have more in common than we ever thought possible.

First, we’ll examine some of this groundbreaking research, and then try to draw some conclusions. Though it may seem at first counterintuitive to launch into a deeper discussion of HOW in an internetworked world by discussing neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology, the workings of the brain can provide us with some keystone understandings about how we think and act. Since most people concede that you get better results from energy invested in improving on what you already do well as opposed to energy spent improving on your weaknesses, understanding the brain’s biological proclivities can give us new perspective on where best to concentrate our efforts. Good science points to the fact that getting your HOWs right may, in fact, mean playing to your strengths.

HELP

You are shopping in a supermarket, pushing your cart, minding your own business, thinking about what brand of soup to buy, when you pass a fairly short person taking a can down from the top shelf opposite you. In so doing, he accidentally knocks a few cans of minestrone off the shelf. He grabs for the falling cans, instinctively trying to steady the other cans on the shelf while catching the falling ones. Without thinking, you reach over and help him steady the cans on the shelf, and when they are secure, reach down and pick up the fallen ones, while he stammers his thanks. Without any conscious thought, you help.

Humans routinely help one another, even if there is no payoff for the helper. We help strangers as well as those we know. This behavior—called
altruistic helping
—is one of the things that separate us from most other animals. Altruistic helping requires a rather complex set of cognitions: You must see another person’s action, understand his intent, understand what is needed to achieve that intention, evaluate his ability to achieve it, evaluate his willingness to accept assistance, and make the decision to intervene despite the fact you receive no immediate or physical reward for so doing. For a long time psychiatrists believed that altruistic helping was a socially induced phenomenon, something learned over time from parental modeling and the observation of human society. This belief sprang from the fact that, at first blush, all this would seem to require higher brain function—reasoning, syntax, empathy, and decision-making skills—abilities that take years of childhood development to achieve.

Recently, however, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology did a revolutionary study that demonstrated that children as young as 18 months of age—prelinguistic or just linguistic and not generally possessed of these complex cognitive abilities—readily helped an unknown adult achieve a series of goals in a variety of situations and, amazingly, were able to make complex judgments about whether help was needed.
⁴
Children helped a stranger reach out-of-reach objects, though not if he had purposefully discarded them. They aided him in stacking books if it appeared he had not yet met his goal. When he struggled to open a cabinet with his hands full, the children opened the door for him, though not if he made an effort to unload his burden on the cabinet top and was therefore able to open it himself. Finally, they retrieved objects from a box for him, though not if they felt he threw them there on purpose. Children with barely developed verbal skills were able to tell the difference between an individual needing help and one who had made a decision that made help unnecessary. From their study, Warneken and Tomasello concluded that “even very young children have a
natural
tendency to help other persons solve their problems, even when the other is a stranger and they receive no benefit at all.” This contradicts the widely held misconception that humans, absent the mitigation of social necessities, tend to act in their own self-interest. It turns out that greed, in the sense of doing
only
for yourself, others be damned, is not only not good, it is not natural.

YOU CAN JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

On September 26, 1960, 70 million people watched the presidential debate between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. This was the first of four so-called Great Debates, and the first ever televised.
⁵
For the first time, the nation as whole was able to watch both candidates interact. Millions more listened on the radio. Nixon—who had been hospitalized most of August with knee surgery—showed up at the studios thin and pale in an ill-fitting shirt, and refused to wear makeup to enhance his complexion and disguise his not-inconsiderable five o’clock shadow. In contrast, the senator from Massachusetts had spent the previous weeks campaigning in California. He was tan, fit, and impeccably tailored. Polled after the debate, radio listeners proclaimed Nixon to be the clear winner. Television viewers, however, came to a different conclusion. Kennedy’s charisma and poised delivery presented television viewers with the marked impression that his vigor and charm discomforted the then vice president, and it swung their allegiance to Kennedy. Viewers were more persuaded by what they saw than by what they heard, according to polling organizations’ results analyzed at the time by Earl Mazzo, head of the Washington bureau of the
New York Herald-Tribune
.
⁶
According to Mazzo’s analysis, in the West, which Nixon carried, 9 percent of adults heard the debate on radio; in the East, which Nixon lost, the radio audience was about 2 percent.

In order to help strangers—or vote for them—you have to overcome the biological fear response that they will harm you when you approach. In other words, you have to decide to trust them. We know that babies bond intensely with their mothers shortly after birth, but how can they know to trust a stranger enough to help them? Isn’t that another series of complex cognitions? Researchers set out to find out. Peter Kirsch, Christine Esslinger, and others at the Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Center for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Justus-Liebig University showed adult subjects a series of photos of various Caucasian men, each displaying basic, neutral facial expressions, while simultaneously scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Scientists asked the test subjects to label the faces as “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy.” The scans showed that a certain portion of the brain, the amygdala, lit up in subjects when they viewed faces they felt to be untrustworthy.
⁷
The amygdala, an almond-shaped set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, is part of the limbic system, the section of the brain that forms neurological structures involved in emotion, motivation, and emotional association with memory. The amygdala enables you to experience fear. (When your father-in-law arrives unannounced for dinner, the amygdala signals fear to the brain stem, the center of arousal and motivation, which conveniently remembers that you left some work at the office that you must immediately leave to retrieve.) Later, the researchers asked the same subjects to rate various characteristics of the faces they had seen. The faces deemed untrustworthy in the first portion of the experiment received more negative ratings for these other characteristics than those deemed trustworthy.

One of the first objects that capture the attention of newborns is the human face, and now, it seems, there are evolutionary, survival reasons for it. First impressions, it seems, do count. Humans are biologically hardwired to make snap decisions to trust or distrust others. Like the 70 million people who watched the Nixon-Kennedy debate, we do tend to judge a book by its cover.