The Achievement Habit (16 page)

Using names transforms relationships. I should have learned this years ago from my wife’s college biology teacher, who memorized all the students’ names before the first day of class. My wife immediately fell in love with him, as did many of his other students. To this day, fifty-nine years later, she still carries a crush.

Knowing names connects people at a much more satisfying level.

When people work in groups, the question of leadership arises. The issue of who leads and how the group is led can be spoken or unspoken, formal or informal. Much has been written about leadership and leadership styles. Growing up in America, I was brainwashed to believe that every organization needs a formal structure with a leader on top.

When I was in the third grade, the first thing we did when the teacher had us form a group was to elect a president, vice
president, secretary, and treasurer. It was my teacher’s way of preparing us for good citizenship. Nobody seemed to notice that the structure was functionally meaningless.

In the sixth grade we elected a mayor of our school. My friend Seymour was elected mayor of Public School 96 in the Bronx, and because I had mimeographed his election posters, he appointed me police commissioner. I guess it was good training for the real world, because I do remember using my high office to cover up my crimes (such as tardiness and truancy). In retrospect, these two experiences did more to brainwash me into believing we all need to work in a hierarchy than they did to make me into a contributing self-actualized citizen.

My experience at Stanford—regarding leadership, working with groups of colleagues and with groups of students—has been remarkable, and somewhat atypical. Originally I was a member of the mechanical engineering department, which had about twenty-five faculty members grouped into three divisions.

I was a member of the Design Division. The chairman chose a director for each of the three divisions; this was an efficient arrangement because he only had to deal with three professors, instead of all twenty-five. Most of the faculty members were content because someone else was doing their division’s administrative work and they could devote their time to their own research and teaching. However, I started to notice defects in the organizational structure as my career developed.

The chairman could easily influence the division directors’ behavior because he had a lot of control over the assets he allocated to them. If they were young, he also had a lot of control over their future careers. When tough issues came up, I felt the division directors were at times in a position where their own personal interests opposed those of the individuals they were
representing. Furthermore, the directors were often not capable of truly representing the other members of their division. In the Design Division the situation came to a head when the director at that time took a leave, and he and the department chairman, without consulting the faculty in the division, attempted to install an unsuitable replacement.

It was the mid-1970s, and people were reconsidering many things within the social order. It was a time of student unrest, social protest, and the questioning of traditional societal structures and values.

At that time the Design Division had eight faculty members, and we unanimously decided to restructure our group to operate as a flat organization
without
a director. The department chairman raised many objections to our new structure. In rebutting the objections, I came to fully realize what a potentially powerful new form we had created. We had a good idea: that structure has been thriving for forty years, and the Design Division is now much more successful than it ever was.
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Our new structure hinged on an hour-long weekly meeting, open to all Design Division faculty and staff. The meeting had no chairperson; we simply went around the table, taking turns bringing up any issues that required the division’s decision, reporting on past happenings, and announcing future events. We operated by consensus and negotiation, almost never voting on anything. There was almost no acrimony, and people treated each other with respect, collegiality, and a spirit of shared purpose and commitment.

We’d rarely had meetings with each other before this reorganization. Nobody but the director knew what was going on, and people took little or no responsibility for the “commons.” Under the new system, there was a major transformation, and
it was very exciting. We were all in charge, and we all wanted to make it work.

When we started, the department chairman’s main objections were based on the idea that there would not be one director to represent the division’s interests to the chair, and that we would be unmanageable. It turned out to be just the opposite. We now had the most powerful form of organization in the department because we were a large group of people with one voice.

It was impossible for the chairman or the dean to buy one person off. There were now eight faculty members behind each issue. If one of us had trouble getting promoted, a salary issue, or anything else that required support, we could send eight people—or any subset—to meet with the chairman or the dean. It was a powerful new model that allowed for the traditional single-director structure as one of its forms. If needed, we could appoint someone “director for a day”—we never actually did that.

We chose to divide up the jobs and rotate among them in order to be efficient and to make it easy for others to deal with us. One of us was responsible for the finances, another handled course scheduling, another represented us at the chairman’s weekly meeting with the other divisions’ directors; yet another person dealt with staff issues, and the dreariest position of all went to the person who dealt with office and classroom space. (To compensate, we decided to let him have the exalted title of Space Czar.)

All these jobs were regularly rotated, and new positions were created on an as-needed basis. We all had an equal voice. Those who cared most about an issue took on the leadership to get it handled. If nobody cared, we did not do much about that issue until someone wanted it resolved.

The new system went a long way toward creating a unique
and strong culture. Interestingly, whenever we acquired new faculty, by virtue of expansion or to replace people who retired or left for other reasons, they quickly adapted to become fully contributing members to this unique group. We have made some slight modifications to our meetings over the years; we now have a student representative at each meeting, and the nonteaching staff attend every other meeting. We have also added a second hour to allow for philosophical discussions.

I have developed a lot of respect for the power of flat organizations by virtue of my forty years of experience in the high-functioning Design Division. Furthermore, it has led me to believe that the role of many high executives is overrated. Executives tend to get credit for anything that happens on their watch. It often means they get credit they do not deserve, and the hierarchical organizational system seems more effective than it really is. I remember the résumé of a Design Division director who left for a more exalted administrative position at another university. The section listing his administrative achievements showed that, during his directorship, the Design Division budget had tripled. He neglected to mention that the entire increase was due to research grants the faculty had obtained, and that he had had absolutely no part in either raising or spending the money. I don’t fault him; I would have done the same thing.

I also notice how having one person at the head of a group causes bottlenecks. If it is a hierarchical system, leaders need to be available, or things have to wait for them. If the leader is wrong, then the entire enterprise can be brought to ruin. There is a long-standing argument for the idea that one person needs to be in charge. It goes way back to Adam Smith’s writings in
The Wealth of Nations
. Even Friedrich Engels agreed with Smith that “a ship needs one captain.”

I certainly am not an expert on ships, and I hate to disagree with the luminaries of both capitalism and communism, however, this is at variance with my experience. The flat, participatory model we developed worked very well and completely suited my personality. I feel blessed to have worked under it for the main part of my career at Stanford.

I can assure you that the model we developed worked better than the conventional alternatives that abound at Stanford. I strongly encourage readers in academia, industry, and other fields to experiment and find an appropriate model for your own situations. If you can break the thrall of the conventional wisdom, you might find a management structure that strongly supports what you want to accomplish.

You may not have a choice in how a group is led. Whenever there is a hierarchy of positions and pay scales, it’s likely that you’ll also encounter some people who will step on each other as they attempt to climb the ladder.

You’ll know them as the office gossips, the backstabbers, the users, the phonies. I encourage you to steer clear of this entire culture. I can’t tell you that people like that don’t wind up in high positions; they do, and too often. It is important to ask yourself what kind of satisfaction you’ll derive from being that kind of person, even if it does mean you get the title you want. Don’t lose sight of your humanity in the pursuit of a fancier car.

Many businesses and academic organizations use competition as a means of encouraging people to do their best—they literally have contests (sales contests, design contests, etc.) pitting people against each other. Although our culture is habituated to winner-take-all athletics and other zero-sum games, I’m not
a fan of this. While it can have a strong upside for the winner, it has a strong downside for everyone else. It can lower morale, foster jealousy, and hurt relationships.

It’s important to learn to be motivated to do your personal best, regardless of what happens around you. I have found that contests bring out the worst in students, whereas learning to cooperate and share brings out the best.

If students are exposed to a learning environment where there is a strong mutually supportive teaching team as role models, and if they are given enough autonomy, they generate their own sense of excitement and commitment without the defeat and discouragement that is an inherent part of the contest mode. It is generally believed that contests are good motivators. I agree that they are, however, they are not the only motivators. We regularly get extremely high student motivation for—and draw large crowds of spectators to—project presentations that are the result of cooperation rather than competition.
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The positive motivational effects are just as good, without the destructive downside of contests.

Look for ways to be inclusive rather than competitive—for ways to help the whole team win rather than just one individual. As much as possible, it behooves you to erase the idea of competition in the workplace from your mind. Competition leads to backstabbing, gossip, and generally negative feelings, even if you succeed at what you set out to accomplish. Maybe you’ll get the raise, however, you’ll also lose friendships, and may ever after feel that you have to watch your back.

Power dynamics often lead to this competition. When there are multiple levels or layers in an organization, you may have a boss, and a boss’s boss, and so on. Maybe a coworker has more clout than you do, or is making more money.

This is all meaningless. In life—
real
life—none of that matters. You have to be satisfied only with yourself—not worried about what the Joneses are up to.

One great way that we get rid of power struggles is by going for walks together. See, if I have a meeting with a colleague in my office, then I’m the one with power, and vice versa if the meeting is in her office. Instead we walk. The hierarchy is gone.

Whenever you can, eliminate situations in which one person is sitting behind a desk. The desk creates distance and a power imbalance that can make the other person feel self-conscious and “less than.” Meet on neutral ground as equals.

In the Engineering School at Stanford every professor has a closed-off room known as his private office. I had the standard relationship with my private office for forty-three years, and I was happy with the situation.

My office housed my vast collection of books, theses, and offprints of technical papers. It also housed all my paper files and was decorated with framed pictures of a long-ago trip to Chiapas, Mexico. In addition there was a collection of mechanical models that I used in my lectures, to amuse visitors and to remind me of some past experience. Then I got involved in the d.school, and my relationship to my office changed.

There are no private offices at the d.school, just open bullpen arrangements. It was like the space I shared with other lecturers at the City College of New York when I had my first teaching job, and the space I shared with other PhD students at Columbia University. It is hardly the prestigious office that a chaired senior full professor expects. Yet I found that I spent
more and more time in the d.school staff space and less and less in my private office.

This arrangement went on for over four years. Then two major events occurred in my life. After four moves, the d.school finally landed in its permanent home, and the building that held my private Mechanical Engineering Design Group office was condemned. A new, smaller private office was assigned to me in a separate wing of the same building that now houses the d.school.

I donated my collection of books and research documents to a special library at the University of California–Davis and moved the rest of my possessions into my new private office. I hardly ever go there. Instead I lend it to individuals with critical space needs. I spend all my time at the d.school.

At the d.school there are now not even partitions between people’s spaces; a staff of more than twenty shares one common, unobstructed space outfitted with a few desks, many shelflike desktops, portable files, and desktop computers. There is no hierarchy that determines who sits where, and there is periodic spontaneous shifting of home bases.