Your Tribal Mind

A while back on the Business Shrink we did a segment on the growing trend of Christian entrepreunership with Time magazine reporter Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. Targeting a specific group can make marketing easier, Cullen said, but such an approach has potential pitfalls; an openly Christian business runs the risk of alienating non-Christians.

On today’s show Peter looked at the bigger picture: why do humans sort themselves into groups in the first place? His guest was David Berreby, author of the fascinating new book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind.

Here are some highlights from their discussion:

On the conditions that breed radicalism:

Peter Morris If you look at the situations where these do or die followers are manipulated by evil-minded or power-hungry leaders, it wasn’t just that it took a lot of effort. It was that the underlying conditions were more prevalent. What does that mean?…Poverty, emotional depravity, alienation, physical separation, geographic limitations. And we’re living in a word where a lot of those things don’t exist anymore. I mean, a lot of the ability for people to create crusades related to lack of opportunity, lack of resources.

David Berreby: You have a lot of identities when you have a flourishing life…when you have kids because you can afford to have kids and they didn’t die at age two because there’s immunization, and you have a job, and so you have job identity, and you have a community, so you have community identity. And if you have been stripped of a lot of that by circumstances because the health and economic situations around you, you’re impoverished in this sense as well, and it’s easier to persuade you that the only thing that matters is internationalism, or the only thing that matters is being an Aryan.”

On the virtues of moderation:

Peter Morris: Celebrating the different pieces of our affiliation, attributions, characteristics, experiences, and identifying with them is a wonderful thing, and it’s the opposite of being alienated or feeling alienated, it’s belonging. And yet, if you get into too many overarching simplistic, apocalyptic identifications that etch everything else out, that’s where you get into trouble – it’s in the excesses. Or another way of putting it is, in human nature and psychology, people that are too strident about something in their belief are really covering up the fact that they’re quite ambivalent about it.”

Start Me Up

I am often flummoxed when trying to fathom why businesses succeed or fail. Recently a new café, Ritual Coffee Roasters opened up near my house in San Francisco. It offers a sleek clean decor, good strong coffee from Portland’s Stumptown Coffee, free and reliable wireless access. And it instantly had a line out the door. It seems so simple and effortless. So why have so many cafes and restaurants in my neighborhood failed to catch on?

Although he focused more on venture capital then coffee, The Business Shrink Peter Morris shined some light on that question during his discussion on today’s show, His guest was Joel Kurtzman, author of Startups that Work: The 10 Critical Factors that will Make or Break a New Company. Kurtzman and a research team from PricewaterhouseCoopers spent four years studying 350 companies during the “darkest days of the internet bust” and interviewed hundreds of business people to understand startups from the inside out.

The Business Shrink asked Kurtzman to talk about some of the main obstacles to success.

KURTZMAN: “Well, first of all…too much money often is a real obstacle to companies succeeding. Companies should be hungry at the outset when they’re in the start up phase, and they should conserve their cash, and hoard it if they can. And I have seen, and we’ve observed in our studies, companies that were given lots of capital to begin with often have squandered that capital and failed as a result.

MORRIS: And of course that would seem all too logical, but I’m sure like many things, people don’t always do what’s best and always see clearly

KURTZMAN: Yes, and another really critical negative factor is when the team at the top disagrees as to the strategy going forward. Nothing is worse than when you have the top people who are in a shouting match or war about what the company should do, and who it’s customer’s should be, and how it should reach those customers. That’s lethal. It’s been lethal in the histories of business that I’ve studied; it’s lethal in the 350 companies that we studied. So, strategy really has to be aligned, and everyone in the company has to know it. They have to know what the company is doing, and they have to know where it’s going. That’s very critical, and without it, companies fail.”

The Glick Factor

The Business Shrink Peter Morris talks a lot about the importance of developing skills like self-awareness and empathy in the workplace. But often, it seems like people lacking in those very qualities rise to the top of the business world. I’m reading a novel now that deals with that very issue – What makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg, who also wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront. The book is the rags to riches story of Sammy Glick, who rises from newspaper copy boy to wealthy Hollywood producer in just a few years. Glick has no apparent talent; he succeeds because he is street smart, exploitative and opportunistic. He gets invited to Hollywood after plagiarizing the screenplay of another writer, and builds on that success with similarly devious tactics. I haven’t finished the book (which is definitely dated but a lot of fun) so I don’t know how Glick’s story turns out. But as Enron, Worldcom, and the latest round of business scandals demonstrate, there are a lot of Glicks out there running the nation’s biggest companies (and the federal government, for that matter). I thought about the Glick story when reading about the Judith Miller mess this morning. Miller’s tenacity and in the words of a former editor, “pushiness “ is clearly what made her a successful reporter. But this pushiness and competitiveness must have alienated a lot of her co-workers, because surprisingly few are rallying to her support right now.

The Business Shrink Goes Nuts

On today's show Peter Morris got some welcome news from Gregg Miller, the winner of a 2005 Ig Noble prize for his invention of Neuticles, testicular implants for pets. Recently, the Business Shrink had his toy fox terrier Louis neutered, a procedure which Morris says caused great psychological trauma to the pet – as well as his owners. “I can totally appreciate first hand the merits of your invention,” Morris said. Miller was reassuring, telling Business Shrink that Louis can still be restored with solid-silicone Neuticles. He even offered Morris a complimentary set!

Miller, who mortgaged his house and maxed out his credit cards to mass produce his invention, said he wished his parents were alive to witness the award. “When I was a kid my parents always thought I was an idiot, so I wish they could have seen this.”

The Business Shrink praised Miller and his inventiveness. “I think they would be proud of you – you exemplify my theory of unlimited wealth in America, in our society, and the ability to actually identify a demand that isn’t really known or appreciated,” he said.

Miller agreed. “I am what’s called a product pioneer – I have created a market for something that never existed before – it’s kind of fun.”

Peter Morris on process vs. product

“You have to look at things in terms of process and product and never get the two confused. A lot of times when people try to replicate their success—and are unsuccessful – they are melding the process and the product. If the process were understood people would understand that the only thing that is constant is change.”

Stopping Overshopping

April Benson, a nationally known psychologist who specializes in the treatment of compulsive buying disorder, joined the Business Shrink October 6 to talk about her work with “shopaholics”. Benson specializes in a condition known as overshopping, which she says afflicts 15 million Americans. Peter Morris maintains that he isn’t much of a shopper, unless you include buying hotels and big-ticket real estate properties. And even though Morris is not a formally trained psychologist (he just plays one on the radio), Benson was impressed with the Business Shrink’s take on compulsive buying and related conditions. “What Peter said that I found thoughtful was his comment that overcommercialization and the plague of materialism that's overtaking our country is leading to an increase in attention deficit disorder (which it may or may not be, but it's nevertheless a thoughful idea),” she told me after the show. Due to my short attention span, I don’t remember Peter’s comment on ADD. But it sounds like it was a very interesting discussion. More on Benson’s work can be found here.

A Classy Conversation

As the owner of hotels in such exclusive enclaves as Monte Carlo, the Business Shrink certainly understands the importance of status – or the perception of status - on business. On his live show Monday, Peter Morris talked status with Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management, whose fascinating new book is Status Signals: A Sociological Study of Market Competition. Podolny argues that firms must offer more than just good prices or quality products. They must also know how to manage social and cultural signals. Watch this space for more details of their discussion…

Peter Morris on Tattoo Removal:

"If I had a significant other's name tattooed on me, and if her name was Judy, the first thing i would do if we broke up is look for another person named Judy," -- Peter Morris to his guest Eric Bernstein, laser surgeon and tattoo removal expert, on Friday's show