The Culture Code (17 page)

WORK
AND
MONEY: AN
AMERICAN
MARRIAGE
BUILT
TO LAST

The Codes show that Americans draw a very strong connection between work and money. The sense of “who you are” derived from work is intertwined with the “proof” provided by the money one earns. We are suspicious, and even dismissive, of money gained without hard work. For instance, we have little respect for those who gain sudden wealth through the lottery. Americans don’t regard this as “real” money because it isn’t earned. A lottery winner
proves
nothing by winning the lottery, except that he or she was very fortunate. Lottery winners themselves seem to share some of this sensibility. Their instant wealth makes them anomalies: they don’t truly belong with the rich, because they didn’t work their way into that world, nor do they fit any longer among their peers, because their money separates them. We tend to forget the names of lottery winners within a day or so and never hear from them again.

Interestingly, we look at game show winners differently. Of course, this is on Code. When Ken Jennings won seventy-four consecutive rounds of the quiz show
Jeopardy!
(acquiring more than $2.5 million in the process), he became an instant celebrity. Unlike a lottery winner’s, however, Jennings’s star didn’t fade immediately. He received endorsement deals, speaking engagements, and a place in television history. Ken Jennings earned his money by battling and beating contestants for months; he
proved
himself repeatedly.

Ken Jennings received an opportunity and he made the most of it. This is what we really want as Americans. We may dream of winning the lottery and escaping the rat race. What the Codes for work and money show, though, is that work is an essential part of who we are and that we just want a chance to prove ourselves and receive tangible evidence that we have succeeded.

The Codes for Quality and Perfection

A
s we’ve established, a culture is a survival kit we inherit at birth. Our culture is what it is (and it changes very, very slowly) because it is best suited to the conditions under which its members live. Because of this, attempts to impose changes that are fundamentally opposed to the Code of a particular culture are destined to fail. Our attempts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to adopt a Japanese business model for quality are an excellent illustration of this point. Their failure offers important lessons for how we do business today.

During this period, there was an economic slump in the United States, while the Japanese economy was growing robustly; many American companies questioned why the Japanese were succeeding while they floundered. Many believed the answer was quality. The strict Japanese commitment to zero defects and constant improvement led to their primacy in automobiles, computers, home electronics, appliances, and many other major consumer goods. Their products were cheaper
and
better, a nearly unbeatable combination. American consumers bought Japanese goods at unprecedented levels, boosting the Japanese economy and hindering ours. Many U.S. companies concluded that if they were to compete against the Japanese for the
American
dollar (let alone to compete on the world stage), they must adopt the Japanese approach to quality.

This foray failed. Our quality standards are not appreciably better today than they were in the 1980s, though corporations spent billions of dollars trying to change this. Why? The answer lies in the Codes.

PLUG
AND
PLAY—THAT’S ENOUGH

In the late 1980s, AT&T commissioned me to discover the Code for quality in America. Like many huge American companies, AT&T felt the Japanese had mastered quality and was vexed at our inability to keep pace. The company used the Code to train fifty thousand managers, shared the results with the American Quality Foundation, and developed it into a book,
Incredibly American,
by Marilyn R. Zuckerman and Lewis J. Hatala
¹
.

As always, the Code itself was revealed by the stories people told during our discovery sessions:

My first memory of quality was the first remote control television we got when I was a kid. You had to sit in a specific part of the room to make the remote work, but it was so impressive to me that you didn’t have to get up to change the channels anymore.

—a man in his forties

The first time I remember being aware of quality was when the buzzer on my “Operation” game stopped working. I went crying to my mother and she tried to console me by telling me that things just stop working after a while and that I couldn’t expect a game like that to last. That wasn’t very consoling, actually, but these years later, I know what she means.

—a thirty-nine-year-old man

I had this great clock radio when I was growing up. The reception went in and out, but the alarm always worked. I never missed a day of school from oversleeping with that thing…which, now that I think about it, probably wasn’t a good thing. Maybe I should have talked my mother into getting me a clock radio that didn’t work so well.

—a thirty-six-year-old woman

I don’t have any powerful memories of quality. I have powerful memories of
lack
of quality, though. Like the laptop my parents bought me for my eighteenth birthday. That monster has crashed and wiped out college papers on me more times than I care to remember—and I have to restart it three times every time I use it. I don’t want to complain about it to my parents because I know it cost them a lot of money, but it definitely doesn’t do its job.

—a nineteen-year-old woman

My ’64 Ford Impala was a quality car. That thing was indestructible! Not exactly a luxury automobile, and I don’t even want to think about the gas mileage (which didn’t matter much at the time), but I’ll bet someone is still driving that baby around.

—a fifty-two-year-old man

I’ll tell you something that isn’t quality—the new thousand-dollar dishwasher my wife convinced me to buy. It breaks down every other day. We’ve already had a repairman at the house three times. If it wasn’t under warranty, I’d throw that piece of garbage in the trash heap.

—a fifty-four-year-old man

My mother was quality. I know that probably isn’t what you meant by the question, but that’s my most powerful memory. No matter how she was feeling, no matter how sick she might be, she was always there for us. I’ve never had a better example of quality in my life.

—a sixty-one-year-old woman

It became clear that Americans imprinted the notion of quality in a very different way from the Japanese. In fact, the very first imprint of quality for many of us is a negative one. It comes when something doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. The child’s game quits; the computer crashes; the dishwasher turns the repairman into a family member. Our positive imprints regarding quality focus on functionality rather than the brilliance of the design or the excellence of its performance. The remote control requires one to be in a specific place, but at least it changes the channels. The clock radio isn’t much of a radio, but it’s a reliable clock. The car doesn’t have luxurious amenities, but it keeps on moving.

These stories and the hundreds of similar ones told over the course of the study showed that quality means something different to Americans than it does to the Japanese, something less exalted.

The Culture Code for quality in America is IT
WORKS
.

This standard falls quite a bit short of “zero defects.” Indeed, it invited the question “If quality means merely functionality, then what does perfection mean?” During the discovery sessions for perfection, the messages in the stories were equally declarative:

I have no memories of perfection. Does anyone? To me, perfection is not a part of this life.

—a fifty-seven-year-old woman

The one perfect thing in my life is my six-year-old daughter. I can’t imagine thinking anything else was perfect. Perfection just isn’t reality.

—a thirty-seven-year-old woman

Everything I ever thought was perfect ultimately lets me down—products, people, it’s all the same. Maybe things are perfect in some other universe, but definitely not in this one.

—a forty-eight-year-old man

I’ve never encountered anything perfect in my life. I’m not even sure that I’d want to. If something was perfect then nothing could ever get any better. I don’t like that idea.

—a twenty-six-year-old woman

A buddy of mine bowled a perfect game one night. We bought him beers and had a huge celebration. It was very exciting. The next time we went bowling, he bowled a 143 or something like that—just awful. It made me wonder just how perfect a perfect game was if it went away so quickly.

—a fifty-five-year-old man

Phrases like “not a part of this life,” “just isn’t reality,” and “definitely not in this [universe]” characterized perfection as something abstract and inchoate, something distant and maybe even undesirable. In fact, the quest for perfection seemed to be something most people preferred to avoid, something that defined the end of a process, after which there could be no further movement.

The Culture Code for perfection in America is
DEATH
.

Knowledge of the Codes for quality and perfection helps explain why our attempts at Japanese-level standards in these areas failed to gain traction. Americans understand the concept of “getting it right the first time” at the cortex level, but deeper down they don’t want to do it, might even fear doing it. The cultural reasons for this seem to be twofold. Partly it’s because we are an adolescent culture with an adolescent attitude. We don’t want people telling us what to do and holding us to their standards. We want to discover things and learn how to do things our own way. Even more entrenched, though, is the pioneer spirit that brought us to this country in the first place. When we arrived in the New World, there was no instruction manual teaching us how to deal with the conditions. We had to learn everything ourselves, and we did it the only way we could—through trial and error. Learning from our mistakes not only allowed us to survive, but also helped us to grow into a powerful and hugely successful country. We were rewarded for our ability to pick ourselves up off the ground and do things better the
second
and
third
times.

Trying, failing, learning from our mistakes, and coming back stronger than ever is an essential part of the American archetype. We fluctuate between periods when we are Superman (as we were during and after World War II) and periods when we are a Sleeping Giant (as we were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the Internet revolution). How many times have European “experts” predicted the demise of America? Whenever America “falls asleep” (in the late 1970s, for instance), these people delight in saying that America has become irrelevant. This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the American culture. Failure and fallow periods are part of what makes America what it is, and we always come back stronger and in a more dominant position. The path of American progress is filled with high peaks and low valleys, but the peaks always get higher. Recently, the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian bought a huge number of shares in General Motors. Given the firm’s flagging performance, this seems counterintuitive. Kerkorian is betting that GM is in fact a sleeping giant, which will not only solve its problems but also solve them in a way that returns it to market leadership. He’s betting on the cycle and, given his investment history, there’s every reason to believe he knows what he’s doing. If you look at the headlines and at world opinion today, you might say that our culture overall is in something of a valley; our economy is flat, our foreign policy is stumbling, many government institutions fail to provide essential services. Anyone who believes this valley is an indication of permanent decline hasn’t been paying attention to the larger pattern.

Because our country was so vast and underpopulated when we developed it, we have grown accustomed to a certain level of disposability. If the land we farmed didn’t produce enough, we got new land. If the environment in one part of the country proved inhospitable, we moved. There was no need to improve the quality of one’s house, because it was easier simply to get a new and better house.

This is fundamentally different from the way many other cultures learned to survive. Take, for instance, the Japanese. Their country comprises only 146,000 square miles (compared to the more than 3.7 million square miles of the United States). There was never a vast frontier to explore. The Japanese couldn’t “dispose” of their houses or their property if they grew disenchanted; they needed to make the most of their land and to keep it as productive as possible. In addition, because so many people live in such a small space (the population of Japan is more than 125 million; that’s 43 percent of the American population in 4 percent of the space), efficiency is critical. There’s no room for wasted products or wasted process. Mistakes are costlier. Quality is a necessity. Perfection is premium.

Americans, on the other hand, find perfection boring. If something is perfect, you’re stuck with it for life, and that doesn’t sit well with most Americans. We want a new car every three years. We want a new television every five. We want a new house when we have kids, and another new one when the kids grow up. My fourteen-year-old son, born and raised in this country, exemplifies this attitude. I went shopping for antiques recently and took him with me. We came upon a gorgeous seventeenth-century sofa and I told him how much I liked it. “You like that?” he said, sneering. “Do you know how many asses have sat in that sofa? Why don’t you get a
new
sofa?”