Management consultant Margaret Heffernan recently made a case for reducing “pecking orders” in the world that struck me as interesting, incomplete and a tad misleading, with a dash of NPR-ish over celebration of radical egalitarianism thrown in for good measure. So for those of you focused on studio culture, below are a few observations drawn from work at the Acton MBA and entrepreneurship:
- Dominance Hierarchies are a fact of nature.
Pecking orders – or more stuffily, dominance hierarchies, seem deeply embedded in our evolutionary nature, from primates to perhaps 300 million years in lobsters. Yes, it feels good to be at the top of the heap, and in ancient times you got the chance to spread your genes more widely.
- There are two types of dominance hierarchies – and it matters a lot which one we reinforce.
Dominance hierarchies can be built based on competence and voluntary exchange, leading to the immense wealth and tolerant freedoms we enjoy in free market democracies, or dominance hierarchies can be based on power and prestige, more attractive at first to radical egalitarians because they seem “fairer,” especially if hard work and taking risks is unappealing, but with a dangerous tendency to deteriorate into totalitarian societies (see the former Soviet Union; pre-capitalist China, Cambodia, Cuba and North Korea for the deadly side effects.)
You need to look no further than the salary distributions on Salary.com to realize that with hard work and a pleasant manner, being in the top 1% of some skill set provides more than enough income for creature comforts kings would have marveled at a century before. Likewise, in a multi-aged Acton Academy studio we’re blessed by so many competency based “pecking orders” that each Hero can discover and hone a gift that will change the world. Nearly endless pecking order opportunities, based on competence, in a civil society may be the magic sauce of Acton Academy.
Of course, this is only true if in middle school we can find a way to break up the popularity and prestige based Peter Pan cliques of boys and similar “mean girl” cliques – something we have not learned enough about yet.
- Human motivation is far more complex than oversimplifying “competition versus cooperation” or denying individual genius.
Heffernan seems to suggest if we just “created more social capital” in organizations and paid less attention to individual genius, the world would be a kinder and better place. I disagree. My experience is that successful companies take on the DNA of their founders, and through hard work and luck succeed in the marketplace – usually for a short time before the creative destruction of the market offers customers better or cheaper choices.
In some cases, like investment banking, you are better off with the culture of a pirate ship. In other industries, at other times, a culture Gandhi could love will prevail. Motivating humans towards a vision requires a complex mixture of competition, cooperation and tribalism; intrinsically, extrinsically and otherwise encourage as shown by the slide below that summarizes the approximately 100 years of management theory we use to create incentives for our Tribe.
Our secret weapon for the Acton Academy network will be a continue focus on Positive Deviance, sharing clues and experiments, influenced by our own biases and hunches but proven and disproven in studios, until we can invent responses to various cultural challenges. There will be no cures for human nature, but I’ll be looking to heroes like Juan Bonifasi of AAG, who I consider orders of magnitude ahead of me in these areas.
Lots to read on this – of course – by I’ve found Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life to have some challenging, if politically controversial insights. Likewise, the work of Nassim Taleb, most recently in Skin in the Game.
Now on to more positive deviance!