The Basic Tribal Instincts that Drive Us with Michael Morris

in stone, they're not part of our DNA. Tribes vary from culture to culture, from company to company, and that using tribes can be a very effective way to turn a company around that's struggling to change, that's facing all sorts of challenges, and essentially to become the best organization we can be. Full disclosure, The professor has consulted for Bloomberg LP, that's the parent company of Bloomberg Radio, where

he led classes teaching corporate culture and tribalism. I thought the book was really interesting, and I found our conversation to be absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also, with no further ado, My conversation with Professor Michael Morris, author.

style linguistics. It's sort of a more mathy, formal approach

to the mind. And then comparative literature is obviously all about tradition and the collective, the collective representations that shape the discourse in a community over the centuries, and so I think it was kind of natural for me to be interested in how the received culture shapes the thought processes that a group of people have and I had grown up, you know, around people from different parts of the world and didn't seem to me like every but

he thought the same way that everybody didn't seem to have the same common sense. So I started working with people who were rebuilding a field called cultural psychology, which had had existed briefly in Moscow and the twenties but then kind of got shot down by Stalin, and you know, it resurfaced in the mid nineties as people were trying to understand the rise of the Four Tigers in China and Japan and how was it that you could have

multiple modernities, you know, not everyone was becoming Western. And that's sort of the time and place in which my career started.

New York. When I was doing that, it was considered to be sort of fringe, fringe research in psychology, because psychologists at the time liked to think of themselves as natural scientists, you know, part of the natural sciences, and they thought that most of the biases they observed were you know, rooted in a brain structure in one way or another, and they were part of universal human nature. And so what I was doing was a little bit

considered to be critical of that. But at the same time, the business schools of the world, at least the top business schools of the world, were becoming very, very interested in cultural differences, and in particular interested in research on cultural differences that was somewhat objective, you know, that used you know, precise measurements, rather than anthropological field work, which

has a more subjective feeling. Although it's valuable in many ways to the to the economists, you know, running the top business schools, it felt a little vague and impressionistic. And so I was running experiments and precise surveys, comparing you know, professionals and students in these different parts of the world and observing regular differences in some of the cognitive biases, and that led three of the top business schools in the world to all make me job offers.

And so I had not foreseen that this research would carry me into the world of business schools. You know, Brown is not a place that has a business school. You don't have much exposure to it. It seemed like the universe was telling me that what I was doing was of great interest to people in business schools. So my career turned a corner at that point. And then I started at Stanford Business School at age twenty six, you know, before I had even finished my dissertation, and

it was our learning experience. You know, I wasn't the greatest teacher in my first couple of years, but you learn, you know, you learn from teaching. And then I did well there and got promoted early there and then decided to come back to New York where I grew up in the New York area, and that brought me to Columbia. I came back to Columbia in two thousand and one. My first day of teaching at Columbia University was actually nine to eleven. Oh, so that was an interesting introduction.

But you know, I've enjoyed living and working in New York quite a lot. I never thought I would still be living here because I had been in a pattern of moving every five years, you know, But it's an easy solution to life. I take a lot of sabbatical years in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, so I sustain deep collaborations and laboratories there, as well as in some other parts of the world like India and sometimes in Europe.

gold are. Or so it seems. You talk about the difference between how Chinese students behave versus American students, and even when Chinese students are in the US, when they're speaking Chinese, it's a different set of culture, a different set of behaviors, versus when they're same group of people speaking English. It seems like the norms change and the various behaviors change. You've published two hundred articles on behavioral science.

Tell us what you're rea research finds about these various behavioral I don't even want to call them texts, behavioral or just behaviors. The switches when when a cultural factor is impacting people's thinking.

of enjoy, but it's a it's an illusion. You know, what the founding Fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness is not what you and I think of as the pursuit of happiness and what we know today in the pop culture as code switching. It sort of came into the popular discourse when Obama was president, and we've seen

it again this year, as Kamala Harris campaigned. Is this notion that people who've grown up in more than one ethnic subculture that have corresponding dialects will make switches depending on the audience that they're in.

to them changing their ways. Pilots interact because literally planes were flying into mountains because the copilot didn't want to disrespect the senior pilot and say, hey, we're all about to die. Like its amazing. Cultural norms are so strong that rather than risk offending the popot, you lose the plane. It seems bananas, but apparently that's how important culture is.

behavior and a lot of you know, cultural behaviors. The situation with Korean pilots, it was something that was discovered first by Boeing. Boeing researchers, you know, who made the seven forty seven class jet, which requires equal collaboration among copilots and pilots, which wasn't the case with smaller jets. They noticed that there was enormous variants across the world's flagship airlines in safety rates, and the countries that were having the most problems were not the ones that you

might think they were. Taiwan and South Korea. Those were the countries with the worst safety record. And those are not poor countries in particular, or countries with particularly bad weather, but they are countries that are among the highest in the world when you look at hierarchical values what researchers called power distance, and in those societies, if someone is of senior rank, you're not supposed to equally, you're not

supposed to interact with them equally. And it was sufficiently worrying that Boeing actually considered designing a different plane wow for those parts of the world. But then at the same time, this study of cockpit black boxes that are recovered after accidents and have recordings of the cockpit dialogue that came out around the same time and pointed to

a very similar conclusion. And Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliars wrote about the confluence of these these two things, and I think brought it to a lot of people's attention at that time. But what I found even more interesting than the paradox that, you know, a country like South Korea, which is high in technology, high in wealth, etc. Was having problems, was that they managed to get rid of the problems. They made some very simple changes in

Korean airlines and they haven't crashed since. So they went from the world's worst safety record to an unblemish safety record. And the change they made was not firing a bunch of people, was not changing all their procedures. It was changing the official language of the country and the official language of the cockpit from Korean to English. Now, all pilots already spoke English because it's the language of air

traffic control around the world. But when people were speaking to the same colleagues in English, they weren't cued to be deferential because just like in Japan, where you have to call your boss, you know, sato san or something, you know, you have to use certain suffixes in Korea, and there are these complex honorific declensions that you have to use that are constant reminders of the status relative status level, and of course in English we don't have

those things. So it's a remarkable story about the you know, the cultural patterns are not essentialistic or inherents. You know, sometimes if you can just change the environment slightly so that they're not triggered, the same people are totally unencumbered by them.

the top executives here. And through that process, I've developed a playbook or a toolkit for thinking about how to lead through culture, how to use what I know about the malleability of culture and the manageability of culture, so that as a leader you're not thinking of culture as

an obstacle to what you want to get done. But it's a force that you can harness, that you can dial up or dial down, and that you can mount slow campaigns to evolve the culture in a way that you think will support the needed strategy in the future. So I started to write a book sharing that playbook.

But then over the course of the last five years, and I've been writing the book for about five years, there have been a series of conflicts in the world that have evoked people to start using the word tribal

and tribalism much more than they ever did before. And I'm talking about the Red Blue Rift, the you know, the record racial protests in the streets, and the religious strife you know, both at home and around the world, where you start to hear this new discourse about tribalism as a curse, you know, an evolutionary curse, that we are somehow genetically predisposed to hate or to fear and loathing of some other group, and that this will always hinder us and hold us back from the nice things

that we would like to have, like international cooperation or you know, ethnic harmony, harmony, you know, political functioning. So I think that this way of talking about tribalism is part right but part wrong. It is the case that our tribal psychology plays a role in these escalating conflicts. But where the pundits get it wrong is that we don't have a tribal instinct to hate other groups. That wouldn't have been a particularly adaptive instinct, right, like a

warning instinct. You know, there was an archaic human species called Neanderthals that kind of did have that sort of orientation towards neighboring tribes. They practiced cannibalism and warfare, and they went extinct in part because our kind, you know, had a different foreign policy. We made it and traded with other groups and formed these larger networks called tribes that proved to be a lot more adaptive, proved to

be a more winning strategy over time. So there's this kind of fallacy that just because these conflicts involve hostility, that somehow they start from a drive for hostility, and that's just a false diagnosis. That doesn't it doesn't help

us under stand ways to ameliorate these conflicts. It makes for riveting articles about how we're doomed, you know, and the end times are here, but it doesn't make for good policies, and so I as a secondary purpose of the book, I've tried to argue that, hey, we really need to if we want to talk about tribal psychology and tribalism, let's have a science informed view of what tribal instincts are and understand how they do figure in conflicts, but not in a way that curses us to eternal

internestine conflict. It's it's you know, it's a manageable side of human nature that wise leaders have always found their way around.

and that DNA was determinative. But what the book really shows you is we really vary from region to region, from country to country. Cultures are very different and very malleable and they have a big impact on society.

internalize the patterns of communities that nurture us. And what that means is that we can operate as a coordinated group that functions seamlessly and that meshes together based on cultural patterns because we all internalize them unconsciously and we are motivated to follow them, and hence we can have large organizations and cities and things like that that other primates would be completely incapable of. But it's not like we're ants or bees who are wired by their DNA

to behave socially in a particular way. If you go around the world, ant hills are always conical and beehives are always hexagonal because that's genetically programmed. We're not genetically programmed to build our shelters in any particular style. But we do learn culturally, you know, to build a yurt if we're in Kyrgyzstan, or to build to TP if we're planes Native American.

form groups that transcend kith and kin. We can form groups where we are connected to total strangers who share the same cultural heritage as us. So culture is a glue that holds together large human groups and enables us to trust each other in a way that no other animal can. And that was the rubicon that we crossed as a species. That after that we left the rest of the primate pack in our dust, because once we were forming these rich cultures that were shared by large groups,

it was like a collective brain. It was this pool of knowledge that started accumulating across the generations and that individuals could tap into to become more capable than the individuals from prior generations because the cultures became richer and richer.

Why is that so? The exposition in the book about just being able to follow each other's gaze because our eyes are white and our corny and irises are dark, which other primates don't have, tell us a little bit about just some of these evolutionary differences.

You know, there's this old idea the eyes of the window to the soul, and the research on this has found a new scientific understanding of what that means, and so our ability to mind read enables us to imitate each other's behavior at a much richer level than other primates can do. It's more like mimicry when one chips

are very inventive but not very collaborative. So if one of them develops a new way to use a stick to get termites, or to use a stick to get fruit from a tree, others may see it, and they may, you know, they may do something that's crudely similar to it, but they don't catch what the method is and what

the intention is. Whereas humans, you know, if somebody invents something new that people around them immediately can replicate it and start doing it, and innovations spread very you know, we all know about fads, right, you know, innovations spread really rapidly. And it's funny because we we say monkey, see monkey, do we have this notion from going to the zoo that that that they are this they are such copycats, such such imitative, But we are far more

imitative than they are. And there's this psychologist named Michael Thomassello who's done this wonderful work because he's a he's one of the world's experts at child cognition, but he's also one of the world's experts at primate cognition, so he can kind of do these comparative experiments between children

and and orangutans and chimpanzees. And what he's found is that if you teach a child how to solve a puzzle to get a treat, you know, through one method, say pushing the yellow button and you get some M and ms. But then you show that child four other children who all work with the same puzzle and hit the red button and get m and ms. Then when you let the first child go again, they'll push the red button. They'll conform to what they see the peers

are doing. When you put a chimp through that same procedure. They stick to what works for them. You know, they can see that other chimps are doing the red button. They stick to what works for them. So we are more imitative, We are quicker to join the consensus than other primates, and we tend to deride that side of us. I call it the peer instinct. It's this impulse to mesh with what the others around us are doing, and we tend to deride it as a herd instinct or

as conformity. And of course it does limit our independent thinking sometimes and sometimes tragically, but we forget that that is the cornerstone of human culture and human collaboration because it allows us to meld minds and mesh actions. And when we are with people who are part of the same in group or part of the same culture, we

can finish each other's sentences. We can, you know, help each other without even a request, in a way that no other species can, because we're we have this just strong impulse to mesh and almost everything important that humans have accomplished, it's not the work of one lone genius. You know. Even Newton said, you know, if I've seen farther than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders

of giants, right. So it's our ability to work with and build on the ideas of others that really responsible for everything that we've accomplished. And it's this peer instinct, this conformative instinct, this conformist instinct, that is largely responsible for that.

wasn't a spoken language. Tell us a little bit about how Homo erectus was able to hunt two million years ago cooperatively and why that was such a evolutionary advantage.

humans had. It's kind of a selective, you know, survivor bias, right, So we tend to think of them as the stones, but of course they had lots of wooden tools and other tools that just aren't around for us to see. But archaeologists have become much much more clever. They use these CSI worthy techniques to learn a lot more from you know, often microscopic traces of things of soil in

these sites that they identify as living sites. And one thing that has become clear is that Homo erectus only invented one tool, the hand axe, which is a sort of tear drop shaped piece of flint that they use. They used to chop, they used to grind, they used to this, and so they were always kind of portrayed as this single tool, simpleton, you know, that was around for a million years and only invented this one tool,

portrayed as more intellectually, more ape than human. But what has become evident from footprints that have been discovered in Kenya, in the footprints that ossified in the mud, is that groups of Erectus, you know, a million and a half years ago, engaged in coordinated hunting of antelopes. And it's long been known that there were antelope bones in erectus sites, but it was thought that, oh, they must have been scavengers, you know, because how could you know? Antelopes can run

fifty miles an hour? Not even usain Bolt could come near them, So how could Homo erectus with just a hand axe stand a chance of getting an antelope? Well, today there are some African peoples who engage in what's called persistence hunting, which is, say you and I are hunters in a group that doesn't really have many weapons.

So we watch an antelope herd and then we see maybe one antelope on the margin of the herd, and then you go chase it and you kind of separate it from the herd, and you're tired and it's tired. But then I start chasing it, coordinating with you on the same antelope. It does no good to chase different antelopes around all afternoon, but if we can chase the same antelope, you know, evolution designed antelopes to be sprinters,

not marathoners. Right, allions only charge once and so if you and I and someone else can take turns chasing this antelope in a coordinated way and keeping it separated from the herd, eventually it just keels over from exhaustion and dehydration, and we have an antelope. And so it's become evident from fossilized footprints that even a million and a half years ago, Homo erectus was capable of that

sort of thing. And it's also become evident from other kinds of microscopic particles of burnt stone that they were cooking. And so they were coordinating both with regard to hunting and with regard to gathering, and that suggests that they were sophisticated with regard to social intelligence in ways that goes way beyond the picture of them that archaeology presented,

you know, in prior generations. The first evidence for stone tipped spears is about half a million years ago, I think, because the technology for building spears is that you have to first straighten if it's a throne spear, you have to straighten the shaft of it, and then you have to sharpen the point of it into a needle sharp point, and then you have to somehow halft the spear tip onto the thing. So there's a pretty elaborate process of

making a spear. But that is one of the hallmark innovations of the next big wave of human social evolution, which happened about a half a million years ago, and that involves what I call the hero instinct, which is, if the peer instinct was an instinct to be normal, to do what most people are doing, the hero instinct was this new impulse to be normative, to to be exemplary, to go beyond what other people are doing, to be a key contributor and gain the status and the tribute

that the community accords to those who are the key contributors. And it was an interesting thing to evolve because it was rewarding for the individuals who had the ambition to be a contributor. They got socially rewarded, but it also was very adaptive for the group because it incentivized individuals to build tools that required toiling alone for a long

period of time. It's also around the time when archaeologists start to see the skeletons of people with congenital deformities that survived to the age of adulthood, and that suggests that someone was taking care of a person in their group who probably couldn't reciprocate. And so you know, I'm doing something pro I'm not going to get paid back by the person that I'm helping, but I'm going to get paid back by the group because I'm doing something

noble or is it something good or something exemplary. I'm a hero.

they're doing. The hero instinct corresponds to our upward curiosity about MVPs and CEOs and celebrities, and the weird impulse we have to emulate their quirks, you know, to kind of eat what Lebron James eats for breakfast, or to you know, use the same hand gestures that Barack Obama uses. The ancestor instinct corresponds to the curiosity that we feel about out past generations. You know, when we hear about

the founder. You know, when I used to teach at Bloomberg, I would tell them, you know, when Mike Bloomberg started a company on the first terminal day least, he put it in the trunk of his car and he drove down a wall street and people just hang on every word when you're talking about those formative legends, you know, what the founder did at the beginning of the organization. People are very curious to hear about prior generations of

their family. They're curious about the original family recipe, and they take a deep satisfaction and following those recipes on a holiday. We fetishize antiques, you know, these artifacts from the past. And so all of this is the psychology of nostalgia for the past or sentimentality for the past, and it comes with it a capacity for rote learning.

You know. So when we're learning religious things from our grandparents, we're not supposed to ask questions, you know, we're supposed to repeat the sator dinner exactly the way this dinner was done, you know, by prior generations. And that is what I call the ancestor instinct, is this impulse to learn by wrote about things that the past generations did and then replicate almost compulsively those things in exactly the

way that we've learned them. And it can lead to superstitious learning and hanging on to ways of the past that are no longer adaptive. But it was very adaptive for our evolutionary forebears because it contributed to memory both as an individual, I could I could learn some technique, like a spearmaking technique that might go beyond my understanding. You know, I don't understand why this way of straightening would by soaking it and water works, but it works.

So if I if I just trust and you know, take it on faith and learn learn by rote, then I can continue that expertise and pass it on to the next generations. And for the group it created a kind of tribal memory. Before that, in the archaeological record, what you'd see is that a group in a particular area would develop the throwing sphere and have it for ten generations and then lose it for thirty generations, and then someone would invent it again, so they were reinventing

the wheel a lot. And after the ancestor instinct was also in place. Then you had these three instincts. You had the ancestor instinct, which allowed you to hang on to the lessons of the past. You had the hero instinct, which made people want to go beyond what's already in place, so it turned into building on the expertise of the past.

And then the peer instinct was this mechanism, this engine for kind of spreading and distributing the knowledge we want to conform to what the others around us are doing. And the end result of this was cumulative cultural evolution, that the shared knowledge and a group became richer and more tuned to what works in the environment with each generation, and that collective level learning, more than anything about our brains as individuals, is what enabled our species to become

the dominant species of the planet. And it's still a very powerful resource for us today.

hitting syndrome. Who was coach hit Ink and why did the South Koreans bring him to fix their soccer team.

they were ascendant. And then the Asia Crisis in I think ninety eight, you know, brought down their politicians, brought down some of their banks, brought embarrassing bailouts from the West, and accusations of crony capitalism. And at the same time, their national soccer team, the Reds, was starting to flound. They are usually a regional power, but in the two thousand Asia Cup they couldn't even beat Kuwait, which is a fairly small country not known for its soccer prowess.

And so this was a moment of panic for the soccer overlords of South Korea because they were about to co host the World Cup and the soccer oddsmakers were betting that they would be the first ever host nation to not advance from group play to tournament rounds, not a distinction that they were hoping would be associated with their a country being the first host not to advance.

So they made a gamble, which is that they called made a long distance call to the Netherlands and called a fellow named Who's Hiddink who was a football or soccer coach in the Netherlands had found a lot of success turning teams around and doing so despite what might be considered an obstacle, which is cultural differences.

way things are done there. So he held open tryouts, which was a first way of ruffling feathers, because you know, the custom there had been that the legends of Korean soccer would automatically be given their standard positions on the team. And he then started noticing that when they would scrimmage that the players were not taking every shot or passing as fluidly as he would like, and so he announced a set of a set of changed policies that were

a bit mysterious to the players. He said, Okay, the next phase of our training camp is not going to be here in South Korea. It's going to be in the United Arab Emirates at an international soccer facility. And the honorific declensions of Korean which he had heard from his assistant coaches were being used on the field, are henceforth banned. He justified it as the need for speed, but it was obvious that some of these things were

also changing the cultural cues around the players. He also didn't allow the South Korean sports press to follow them to the Emirates so that players wouldn't be interviewed by their compatriots after every scrimmage about what they did wrong

and what they did right. And what he was trying to do was sort of remove the daily reminders of these Korean cultural habits that he suspected we're getting in the way of learning what he was trying to teach, which was this Dutch style of football where players swap

positions on the field to throw off defenders. But it means that a twenty year old rookie who is playing next to the legendary midfielder would take that person's position and that person takes the winger position or whatever the other position is, And that just felt wrong to players when they were thinking through the lens of their Korean

social habits. But when they were in the Emirates surrounded by professional football players from various countries, their identity as professional football players came to the fore of their minds rather than their identity as Koreans, and they became more open, both the rookies and the veterans to learning this new tactical system, which was necessary to raise their game to the level where they could compete against it.

It was the first Asian team to ever make it to the semifinals, and it was not just an unlikely run for a soccer team, but it it set off a jubilation that was nationwide, a celebration of what South Korea was capable of if they opened themselves up to, you know, to outside influences and outside ideas. And I think it's partly responsible for the South Korea that we know today, which is a you know, cultural exporter and a much more open society than what was the case.

Then they even changed their citizenship law so that they could make who's hitting an honorary citizen. It was and had been for time immemorial, a blood standard of citizenship where you had to prove that you were Korean to be a citizen, and instead they changed it to one where if you had lived there and done work there, you could become Korean citizens. So literally and figuratively they

opened themselves up to the world. And the South Korea we know today with K pop bands topping the charts and you know movies that are winning Oscars, and you know soap operas that are played all around the world. That's the South Korea that has come from the openness that this event helped to create.

Nadella comes in, does a listening tour you describe in the book and essentially completely changes the culture of Microsoft from a taker to leave it ideology. Tomorrow we're listening tell us a little bit about what made Nadella special and what changes did he effect Well, the.

have a choice because the switching costs were high. But then we enter the cloud computing era, where switching costs are much lower, and there's this new norm of just paying for the features that you use, and that created a premium on knowing your customer, knowing what your customer needed, which was not you know, Microsoft wasn't an extroverted organization.

It was it was introverted. It was it was a cult of technical expertise and such a Nadella had been succeeding in the cloud division, but that was a relatively small division within Microsoft, and he was tapped to be CEO, and he realized that what he had to do was to use the hero instinct, the tendency to follow role models, as a way of reshaping the culture. But it was tricky because he couldn't use his bully pulpit as CEO to you know, shout at people to become better listeners.

You know, that would be an oxymoron, right. He had to instead lead by example and show people what were the set of behaviors that the organization needed and that

would carry prestige in the new era. And so he embarked on a listening tour, you know, words that had never been uttered by the prior CEOs, and went all through the Microsoft ecosystem, you know, to their to their developers, to their salespeople, to their customers, and you know, listened, listened and made a few changes based on what they said.

So one of the things that Microsoft was famous for was a stack rank performance evaluation system where everybody, you know, you have a fixed curve and the lower ten or twenty percent are are fired each year. And that was considered to be something that was inhibiting the collaboration that was needed in the new era, and the employees were quite vocal about that, and he made that change. So listening works better if you're also taking some actions that

shows that you've heard what was said. And then one particular event I think very notable. He went to a conference on women in technology. I think it's called the Grace Hopper conference, you know, after one of the founders of Computer Scientists, who was a woman who was under recognized,

you know, until recently. And in it, he was asked during a Q and A about gender differences in tech salaries, you know, and we know that these gender differences are in part caused by the fact that companies don't regard it as a credible threat when women get an outside offer, because they don't think the woman's husband and family will move, you know, to another city in the way that they do when a man gets an outside So women don't get the same raises, you know, when you have a

star system. It happens in academia, it happens in tech companies. And but Nadella, you know, was tired, and he had answered a lot of questions, and he got the question and he said, well, he said, a lot of these inequalities they even out over time, and so maybe it's just a good idea to let the trust the process and let the process make its corrections, which you know,

might be the right answer. If a junior employee is asking whether he should negotiate hard or you know, but it wasn't considered to be the best answer about this issue, you know, sort of a structural issue related to gender, and so there was some chatter in the blog of sphere about this, and instead of ignoring it, which he could have easily done, he actively publicized the fact that he made this error and then actively went to meet with women in technology groups and labor economists and people

who are experts on this issue and actively showed that he was taking steps to avoid this structural problem at Microsoft. And by sort of enthusiastically owning his mistake and apologizing for it, he was role modeling this set of behaviors, which is, you know, Okay, you're a customer and Microsoft hasn't been listening to you very well and is trying to sell you software with a lot of features that

you don't need. So let's instead apologize for not knowing better, and let's take corrective steps of let's send a sale person to you know, shadow your people, you know for a few weeks and really get to know the day to day at your company, and then we'll come up with, you know, a cloud product that really dovetails with your needs instead of, you know, the way that we've been doing it, and it's considered to be you know, the the uh, the instrumental you know, the critical behaviors that

change Microsoft culture from a know it all culture to a learn it all culture. You know. Such an Adela is also very taken by the research in psychology by Carol Dweck and others about learning orientations and growth orientations as well. You know, there are some orientations of you know, thinking, uh, I'm smart, you know, and I have high intelligence as a fixed entity, and then other people have this mindset that I have the ability to get smarter and such.

An Adella is a big advocate of trying to create this growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset about ability. And Microsoft has really resumed its position on the top of the technology hierarchy. It's made really adaptive moves in the AI space, and it's it's become a very happening place in quantum computing as well. So it's it's not

just in the cloud computing area. You know, the organization got its mojo back, and I think it got its mojo back by leaving behind an organizational culture that worked in the early era of the industry, but didn't work once you're competing with lots of very adaptive organizations and you need to partner better and you need to know your customers better.

you know, the largest consumer bank. But he wanted one more victory at the end of his career, which was, you know, to acquire a Wall Street bank, an investment bank and move into the fast lane of finance. And the financial crisis presented an opportunity because these investment banks had really troubled balance sheets, and a consumer bank was considered to be something that could balance that.

collective imaginations, synonymous with Wall Street. It had the most famous logo in banking, you know, the charging bull and slogans like, you know, Merrill Lynch is Bullish on America. So very strong culture, very strong brand, and it needed a rescue. So it looked like a masterstroke of strategy where Merrill was saving itself and Bank of America had

gotten a prize at discount. But then the full depth of the troubles related to the financial crisis became apparent, you know, with each quarter where there were lots of bad loans on the books at Merrill, and then Bank of America's acquisition of Countrywide in La brought it into the problematic mortgage crisis, and as a result, there were

a lot there was a lot of strain. There was there was some resentment of the Bank of America, you know, the more plebeian consumer bankers who weren't getting a bonus because of the expensive investment bank that had been purchased. And what Lewis and others at Bank of America tried to do was to assimilate Merrill into its Bank of

America culture. They regarded some of the Meral culture as the problem that created the crisis, this excessive risk taking, and so they would hold workshops to try to Bank of americanize the mayoral bankers. But you probably know a lot of former Meryl bankers as I do. They were people who didn't think they had that much in common with the person at the bank branch on the corner. You know. They thought they were in a very different industry and that the Bank of America culture had very

few lessons relevant to them. Even the so called thundering herd of Meral investment advisors you know at offices around the country and abroad, didn't think that it served their business to suddenly have a sign in front saying Bank of America that looked the same as as the standard bank branch or to call themselves Bank of America. You can imagine a career merrill person in Paris or Tokyo suddenly having to, you know, call themselves Bank of America.

It's not the brand that worked, you know, particularly well in those environments. And so it was failing, and you had a hemorrhaging of talent where you know, brokers can often take their whole portfolio of clients and go across the street to another to the competition and so.

the last honest analyst on Wall Street. And then she was hired at City Bank when they had some problems in their private wealth division, and she stood up for the rights of investors who had been sold certain products that she thought, you know, had some hidden problems and got fired again, but was lauded once again as being a person with integrity, and so she was brought in to restore trust as somebody that you know, had Wall

Street credentials. It didn't seem like she was just this consumer bank person who didn't get what a Meryl broker

or a Meryl investment banker needed. And fortunately she was also from North Carolina, so she could be a translator, a natural bicultural person who could go down to Charlotte and talk to the Bank of America executives and explained to them what the Wall Street people did, and they, ultimately, after a lot of negotiation, allowed her to do the largest ever rebranding, which was called the Bull is Back, and they brought back the Merrill Lynch name, and they

brought back the Bull logo for the private wealth division so that it was once again Merrill Lynch, and almost immediately it restored confidence and it restored collaboration and citizenship within an organization that had always been you know, it was called Mother Merrill. It had always been a very communitarian organization. But when its name was taken away and people were told, you're just a Bank of America employee and nobody identified with Bank of America, it all just

kind of fell apart. And then you see the most successful people leaving for the competition. It was very demoralized, saying, but when she gave them their group boundary back, and she gave them their symbol, the bull back, and she gave them their name and their tradition, Merrill Lynch back. Suddenly you had this just renaissance of collaboration and people working over time to help each other succeed and to convince investors that, uh, you know, the post crash era

was a buying opportunity. And and and suddenly, uh Merrill Lynch was the bright spot on Bank of America's books. And that that went on for a few years. Now.

Ultimately Sally got removed in a political shift. I think that she is widely regarded as having saved the private wealth division through cultural leadership, through understanding how important this sense of group identity, and you know, these logos and these slogans, these are these are very important UH conduits for collaboration, and when you take them away, people are alien and anomic and they don't know how to collaborate.

everyone's cell phone. And what he has been able to discover through very complex statistics is that in the last election season, you know, twenty twenty, twenty sixteen, families that are politically divided have cut short their Thanksgiving dinners during these election years because of the conversations that start to happen, you know, after the second glass of wine. So I wish Americans not just a peaceful, but lengthy Thanksgiving celebrations.

And one of the things I would suggest is to not believe the hype that Americans are more divided now than they ever have been. In eighteen sixty, Abraham Lincoln became president with less than forty percent of the popular vote. Seven states seceded from the Union before his inauguration. The Civil War broke out a week or so afterwards. That's what I would call a real rift. That's what I

would call a challenge, a legitimacy challenge, right. And so what's interesting is what did Lincoln think was the solution to that. In his first inaugural he said, the mystic chords of memory will yet swell the chorus of the Union.

Now that's a bit poetic and cryptic, but what he was suggesting is that collective memory, you know, thinking of our common ancestors, and the gratitude and the obligation that we that we feel and the reverence that we feel when we think of ancestors can get us beyond our

current differences. Our current differences seem large, but when we think in terms of the hundreds of years of the American experiment, since the first settlers, you know, on these shores, we can think of this disagreement between the North and the South as one that we can possibly get beyond. And right around the same time as his more famous Gettysburg address when he talked about our fathers came to

this land. You know, he made reference to ancestors. He did something that he's not often given credit for, which was the proclamation of the Thanksgiving holiday. I learned in school that Americans have celebrated Thanksgiving holidays since sixteen twenty one in an unbroken tradition. That's not true, but a lot of the national folklore of every country is fake lore. It's created retrospectively and projected onto the past. So the Pilgrims did not have a Thanksgiving in sixteen twenty one.

They had a feast that they called a rejoicing, where they shot guns in the air and drank whiskey. And Thanksgiving for them was a religious ceremony, so it was

something very different. But there was a concept of Thanksgiving among the Puritans, this kind of religious ceremony, and George Washington held one of those religious ceremonies after the Revolutionary War, and Lincoln was influenced by some of the thought leaders of the era who thought a national holiday, a sort of autumn harvest feast that we all do at the same time, would be a unifying thing at a time when the country is sort of divided. And Lincoln thought, oh,

that makes sense. But how can I get people to accept a new holiday. Well, I can portray it as something that's already a time honored American tradition. So he described it with reference to the Puritan themes and customs, and he made reference to George Washington's Thanksgiving, a one off event that wasn't meant to be a holiday, and within a few years Americans had embraced it as a sacred national tradition. So Thanksgiving itself is an example of

how culture is mutable. It's not. You know, the differences that we have now are not set in stone. They're not necessarily going to last forever. And we can use our cultural capacities for ritual to move beyond differences. And so by celebrating Thanksgiving, we should remember that we can get beyond much worse political crises than the one we have today.

prospering due to the high traffic of business Singapore. After getting after getting free of the Japanese, it joined the Federation of Malaysia with its northern neighbors. It continued to be less of a free port than it had been under British rule, and some of the local traditions of sort of relationship based business, where you do business with my family, so I give you preferential access to somebody else.

That's kind of how business works in that area. There are lots of words for it, goan chi, you know, sort of network based business, and that was the dominant mode of how the port operated. But then a leader named Li Kwan Yu, who was Singaporean but who studied law in the UK, returned to Singapore to kind of

try to help its government during the Malaysian period. But then in the mid sixties, Singapore gained its independence by being ejected from the Malaysian Federation, in part because of the ethnic strife between the primarily Chinese Singaporeans and the Malaysians. At the time, it had no source of drinking water, it had a very high unemployment rate, it had a huge malaria problem, and its port had been completely dysfunctional

for decades since the Japanese occupation. During World War Two, a young leader named Li Kwan Yu, who had grown up in Singapore but then studied law and practiced law in the UK for a while before returning, became elected as the first Prime Minister and knew that he needed to do something special in order to help Singapore survive as an independent country. And what he did was largely opposite to what most independence leaders do. Independence leaders tend

to eliminate any trace of the prior colonial influence. They pulled down statues, and they changed the names of things back to the local language, and they eliminate western dress and put on the ethnic garb le Kwan Yu did largely the opposite of that. His political party adopted white uniforms reminiscent of the British navy that had ensured the

operation of the port for many decades in Singapore. He made English the official language rather than Melee or Chinese or many of the other dialects spoken in the area. He thought a lingua franca that was not connected to any of the local ethnicities and that was associated with this prior period in history when the port was functioning in an adaptive way, would be the right kind of cultural cue. He even put up a statue of Sir Raffles, who was the British founder of the Singaporean colony, Sir

Thomas Raffles, in case somebody didn't get the point. So he didn't try to eliminate all of the traces of the sort of British paradigms from running the port. He tried to restore that by creating an environment that reminded people of that time and brought those habits to the surface. And it was in combination with a few other procedures like very strong anti graft laws and sort of role

modeling the austerity and the uncorruptibility that he wanted. Through role modeling and through these legal changes and through this cultural queueing, he set in motion a new culture of Singapore that proved to be very successful in attracting trade to Singapore rather than to other local ports, and snowballed to become the culture not just of the port in Singapore, but of all of its industries and created the Singapore that we know today.

yu are adept at this. He didn't regard culture as sacred. He was a bit of a cultural engineer at a time when that was regarded as, you know, an impossible thing to do. That. You can't change the culture of a nation. You can't create a new culture. You can't ask a newly liberated people to appropriate aspects of the culture from the former colonial era. But he is somebody who felt like people are a little bit more flexible than they've been given credit for. And he knew that

he himself personally was bicultural. He was very much Chinese but also very much English, and he thought that a lot of the Singaporeans of his generation were also bicultural, and that was a resource that he could draw upon to shape the new culture of independent Singapore.

wired to use race as the basis of categorization. It's something that even in this culture, children only learn later, at like age six, to pay attention to race. But there are certain cues that we seem to be wired to pay attention to in order to recognize who's in what group, and in order to recognize when we're around tribe mates and thus should engage in our tribal norms as a way of coordinating with them. And the number

one thing is language. Babies learn not only their mother's language, but even their mother's dialect when they're in the womb, So when they're born, they will already If you play tape recordings to newborns of their mother's language or another language, they will turn to look at their mother's language. They don't speak yet, they can't understand anything, but they know the patterns of the language. Even dialect is that way,

they will turn to a dialect. And the same kinds of experiments are done where you have two adult strangers in front of a baby and both of them are offering a toy to the baby. Which toy does the baby take? Well, they will preferentially interact and take a toy from a stranger who speaks with their mother's language or even their mother's dialect, as opposed to a stranger who speaks with a different language or a different dialect.

So their brains have recognized languages and dialects as markers of in group, and they preferentially interact with those people and learn from those people. What's fascinating is that babies also seem to be wired to expect that food choices

or cuisines will also be aligned with languages. So if you put babies in an experiment where there is one adult stranger who is speaking one language, say English, and another one who is speaking another language, let's say Hindi, and then they they see the person who's speaking English eating one kind of food, and they see the person

who's speaking Hindi eating a different kind of food. And then a third person comes in, say, speaking English, and it starts eating the food that the Hindi speaking person has been eating. The baby will be startled and look like, oh my god, what's going on here? You're eating the wrong food, you know. So what this tells us is that babies are not wired to be racist, but they are already judging us based on how we speak and what we eat.

And then when I started at Stanford, I had a colleague named Hazel Marcus, who was a wonderful guide to you know, understanding a profession that I had not much introduction to and helped me, you know, avoid making lots of mistakes.

plus years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcast, and check out my new podcast at the Money, short ten minute conversations with experts about issues that affect your money earning it, spending it, and most importantly investing it at the Money wherever you find your favorite podcasts and in the Masters in Business feed I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week.

My audio engineer is Steve Gonzalez. My producer is Anna Luke. Sage Bauman is the head of Podcasts at Bloomberg. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritoltz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.