The Social Animal (40 page)

“Koch was not one for grand plans. He just made constant adjustments. He always used the word ‘stewardship’ to describe his leadership style. He’d inherited something great and he was just taking care of it. He wanted to make sure he didn’t screw it up. I remember he used to follow Peter Drucker’s old advice. Every time he made a decision, he’d write himself a memo about what he expected to happen. Then nine months later he opened it up and read it to find out how wrong he’d been. He wanted to learn the most he could from each and every error.”

Raymond went on in this reminiscent way for a few more minutes. Nothing he said was overtly critical toward Taggert and his team. He kept apologizing for being a backward-looking sentimentalist. He kept saying that of course you can’t go home again, back to the old days, but the contrast between the spirit the company used to have and the denuded atmosphere that now prevailed—well, that was a difference too painful and searing to ignore.

Erica tried to continue the emotional atmosphere he had established. It was not her normal mode. Normally, she liked to be the spitfire in the tight white shirt. But Raymond had set a mellower tone.

She said that she and a bunch of her coworkers had been sitting around brainstorming, and she hoped that maybe a few of their ideas would be helpful to Taggert and his team. She started at the financial end. “One of the things we talked about a lot is the importance of cash,” she said. “You pay your bills with cash. When you have cash in the bank you can withstand an unexpected jolt or two.” But over the past few years, she observed, the company had drained its cash reserves. One sometimes got the impression that the current leaders thought cash was for cowards and that debt was a sign of daring. Over the past few years, the company had piled up debt to make one acquisition after another.

Then she talked about corporate structure. It was so complicated, it was hard to tell who was responsible for what. It was rare that somebody in the company could come in each morning and say, “I’m responsible for
x
” because in each case responsibility was spread around a multilayered decision chain. The Brunch Club, she said, had a few ideas for how to simplify that.

Then she talked about strategy. It’s possible the company has been self-destructively hyperactive, she suggested. The people who make money at the horse track don’t bet on every race. In fact, they seldom bet, and only when they think they have an insight that gives them an advantage. Warren Buffett used to say that most of the money he’d earned over his lifetime came from fewer than ten decisions. The lesson is that leaders can expect to have only a few good insights over the course of their careers, and they shouldn’t be making moves when they don’t have really good insights behind them.

Then she broke down the company’s profit streams. She pointed out that the cable part of the business was still doing fine. It’s just that there was all this other stuff piled on top of it. Maybe it was time to go back to the wonderful business still lying there at the core of the enterprise.

It might be a good idea to cut down on the teleconferences and work harder to get people face-to-face. Most communication is physical—through gestures not words. It’s hard to understand others or share ideas and plans across a video screen. It might be a good idea, she added, to get more people working in what she called multiparadigm teams. Get different groups of people looking at the same problem from different perspectives. In the first place, human beings evolved to work in small bands. And in fact there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that much of the time groups think better than individuals. In one study 75 percent of groups successfully solved a complicated card game called the Wason selection task, compared to only 9 percent of individuals. In the second place, when you get people to look at the same problem they use different analytic modes. If you just rely on one model, you tend to amputate reality to make it fit your model.

“People in this company don’t know each other,” she added. She mentioned that when she’d first joined the company she’d gone to lunch with one of her fellow employees. She’d asked him if he knew a couple of the other people she knew at the company. He replied, “No, but I’ve only been here ten years. I don’t know that many people yet.”

Human beings do not leave their social selves at home when they come to work each day, she said. “It’s going to seem stupid and cheesy, but a lot of people around here would like to have Fun Fridays with special activities. We could turn the cafeteria into a beach for beach-party bingo. We could have softball games and a volleyball court. They’re the sorts of places where friendships are formed.”

Erica went on in this way. She talked about company memos (executives should always mention why they want something done, not just what they want done). She talked about new hiring procedures the company could adopt (maybe people low on the totem pole could be involved in the interview process, too). She talked about mentoring programs, since the most important skills in any job are implicit ones, which cannot be taught but only imparted by sharing and modeling. She suggested that managers could be given slush funds for on-the-spot bonuses, so people could see the immediate results of a job well done. She described some ideas for rebranding the company. Over the past few years, the company had cast itself as a multinational conglomerate, like GE or Citigroup. But there’d been a decline in customer engagement. Maybe the company should again be the determinedly uncool company it had once been. The company used to give out fridge magnets. Now it sponsored golf tournaments. Something had changed.

Raymond and Erica didn’t speak long—about fifteen minutes altogether. Then they handed Taggert the memo they had written, and sat down. Others spoke, too. Some were angry and critical. Some were sycophantic. The meeting didn’t really even accomplish anything. The stock analysts listened only to Taggert’s presentation, not anything that came after. They sent the price down a notch that afternoon. As for the employees and the board members, they didn’t immediately embrace what Raymond and Erica had said. They didn’t rush the stage and anoint them king and queen and ride Taggert out on a rail. But they did nod with approval. They did internalize the message that the company had once been something noble and it had squandered that core idea. And, as the months went by and the stock continued to go down and the debt continued to accumulate and the new acquisitions failed to deliver the company from decline, the atmosphere slowly changed.

The mass of employees and shareholders had once thought Taggert was a corporate star who had come in from the outside to turn everything around. Then they thought he was a well-meaning person who was having some trouble adapting to a new industry. But then, as time went on, key shareholders and members of the board concluded he was a self-admiring braggart who was more concerned with his own image than the company he was supposed to serve. As this conclusion hardened, another one formed alongside it—that this time the company should hire a leader from within, somebody who understood it in his bones and could bring back the excellence it had once possessed. What was needed was a restoration, not a revolution.

And so of course they turned to Raymond, who, when it came time to play the starring role, did not back down. He took the job, while never really expecting it. And more or less he succeeded. He was not the sort of
CEO
who makes the cover of
Forbes
. But he restored trust and faith. He shed the other divisions that didn’t serve the core missions. He promoted a few of the mechanical guys—and it was no disgrace to be the sort of person who wears white short sleeve shirts and glasses a decade out of fashion. The company stabilized.

After a few years, Raymond retired. The board hired an outside
CEO
. He did fine and lasted six years in the job. After his tenure, the board decided to hire from inside the company, and after a somewhat Machiavellian process, decided to promote Erica. She was forty-seven when she took over. She had been at Raymond’s side, as Raymond had been at Koch’s side years before. She didn’t revolutionize the company or make any daring breakthroughs. But it grew and adapted to new challenges during her years at the top. She loved the company and made it new in ways that were deeply consistent with the old.

GETTING
OLDER

OVER
THE
COURSE
OF
THEIR
RELATIONSHIPS
,
MOST
MARRIED
couples are compelled to navigate a transition between passionate love and companionate love. Passionate love is the kind that grips a couple in the first heady phase of their affair. Companionate love is the calmer state that comes after, filled more with quiet satisfaction, friendship, and a gentler happiness.

Some couples don’t make the transition. UN data drawn from fifty-eight different societies between 1947 and 1989 suggests that divorce rates peak around the fourth year of marriage. But Harold and Erica seemed to do fine during those years. Erica succeeded Raymond as
CEO
of Intercom around their twelfth year of marriage, while Harold was living in centuries past, writing his books. For the next ten years they spent more time absorbed in their jobs than really being married to each other. They each spent a lot of time at work, they each had their philanthropic causes, and most other parts of their lives faded away, including their ability to communicate with each other.

After they had both established themselves, and could relax a bit, they found they no longer had as much in common as they had supposed. It wasn’t that they fought. They just drifted into different interests and different spheres.

After years of ascent and struggle, they had grown weary of surrendering themselves to others. In her book
The Female Brain
, Louann Brizendine writes that often a middle-aged woman “becomes less worried about pleasing others and now wants to please herself…. With her estrogen down, her oxytocin is down, too. She’s less interested in the nuances of emotion; she’s less concerned about keeping the peace; and she’s getting less of a dopamine rush from the things she did before, even talking with her friends. She’s not getting the calming oxytocin reward of tending and caring for her little children, so she’s less inclined to be as attentive to others’ personal needs.” Men, needless to say, don’t suddenly become more nurturing and communicative either when they and their wives hit fifty.

Erica had become a minor star in the business world. Intercom had rebounded and was registering steady gains. She traveled from conference to conference, gave her presentations to admiring audiences, and it was always something of a comedown to return home and find Harold dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, pecking away at his computer. Their lives had taken different shapes. Erica loved to be on the go, her days stuffed with meetings, lunches, and commitments. Harold liked to be alone, exploring an earlier historical age, with nothing on his calendar. Erica was absorbed with the challenges of leadership. Harold was more and more lost in his world of books, characters, and documents.

To Erica, his endearing traits now began to seem more like signs of deep character flaws. Wasn’t his tendency to leave his socks in the hallway a sign of deep selfishness and narcissism? Wasn’t his tendency to go unshaven a sign of deep laziness? Harold, for his part, was sometimes appalled by Erica’s compulsive need to flatter anybody who might be able to help her company grow. When she dragged him out to receptions and parties, she’d invariably leave him within minutes. He’d be stuck in some pointless conversation, and when he looked around the room, she’d be yards away laughing with some
CEO
she probably privately detested. He was sometimes offended by the compromises she made to get ahead. She was sometimes offended by his essential passivity, which he coated with self-approving smugness.

William James once observed that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” In years past, they might have overlooked each other’s flaws, but now Erica and Harold made silent and contemptuous notations.

As the years went by, they fell out of the habit of really talking, or even looking each other in the eye. In the evening, she’d be on the phone in one part of the house, and he’d be behind his laptop in another. Just as sharing everything had been a habit when they were first married, now not sharing had become a habit. Sometimes Erica would have some thought she wanted to express to him, but their relationship now had an unwritten constitution. It would now be inappropriate to rush into his office with some enthusiastic notion or curious fact.

Harold didn’t even seem to listen when she spoke to him. About once a week, Erica would remind him of some party or task she’d committed them to. “You never told me about that,” he would respond crossly.

“Yes, I did. We talked about it. You just don’t listen to what I say,” she’d answer.

“You must have imagined it. We never talked about this.” They both acted as if they were sure they were right, but deep down they both wondered if they were losing their minds.

Marriage expert John Gottman argues that in a healthy relationship the partners make five positive comments to each other for every one negative one. Harold and Erica weren’t near that bar. They weren’t even in the game, since they didn’t make many comments to each other, positive or negative. Both of them sort of wanted to return to the old days, when they were spontaneous and loving around each other, but they were afraid they would be rebuffed if they tried. So they just withdrew another step from each other. As their relationship withered, they both blamed it on the other person’s character flaws. They both dreamed that they would someday go to a marriage counselor, and the counselor would utterly vindicate their view that the other partner was entirely to blame.