Early in Josh Hammond's January 28 talk, he asked audience members to shout out adjectives that could apply to teenagers. People suggested words like sloppy, defiant, fearless, ignorant, fitful, know-it-all, conformist, energetic, unpredictable, idealistic, self-conscious, and oversexed.Hammond followed with the observation that all of these words could as easily be applied to the American character. In the aggregate, we are all those things -- it shows up in our politics, in our foreign policy, and in the way we run our businesses. Where the Europeans and Japanese impress with their patience and rationality, we are the eternal jitterbuggers, in too much of a hurry to be very wise.
In the course of the session, Hammond also compared us, at our best and at our worst, to jazz music, baseball, and cowboy movies. (His talk began with the stirring theme from The Magnificent Seven, the remake of the Japanese film The Seven Samurai that is nevertheless inimitably American.) These restless images, he said, are what define us.
Now you may object, and Hammond anticipates that you will, that calling Americans adolescent is an overgeneralization, that you are certainly none of those things, with the possible exception of oversexed. We were taught that it is wrong to deal in stereotypes.
But stereotypes are where it's at, statistically speaking. Hammond says the part of us we think is so unique, our conscious opinions, is only the tip of the iceberg of who we are. More powerful and more pervasive by far are the unconscious individual wants, cultural proclivities, and biological needs that lurk below our waterline.
Still don't like the stereotypes? Then consider that all Americans typically insist they are different from all other Americans. That insistence on our individuality is -- paradoxically -- universal to us all. And it is part of what makes us American.
The theme music by Elmer Bernstein was so stirring and so American that Marlboro cigarettes was later able to co-opt it and lead a struggling tobacco brand to market leadership, stressing the cowboy virtues of independence and grit.
In the movie, you don't know the motivation of the individual gunfighters until the end. Hammond's hope is that, by coming to grips with our "stuff" before our own movie ends, we can better deal with the different stuff other peoples have, and with the inherent limitations of our adolescent-jazz-baseball-cowboy persona.
Here are the Magnificent Seven virtues we find in ourselves:
1. INSISTENCE ON CHOICE
Of all the stuff Americans are full of, choice is the metastuff. Freedom to choose lies at the base not only of our most treasured institutions, but also of our most trivial whimsies, from the soul of democratic rule ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") to restaurants offering eight varieties of salad dressing.
America is all about choice. Indeed, unless you were already here when the Pilgrims arrived, or were brought over in chains, you came to America by choice.
Hammond told about his Portuguese houseguest who complained that American bathrooms have too many kinds of faucets. Except for a few not very successful efforts at prohibiting choice -- the Puritan ethic, Prohibition in the 1920s, the drug crisis and restrictions on tobacco in our own time -- we have been unabashedly committed to individual freedom. We will put up with a lot from others, from charlatans in the pulpit to porn on the Internet, before we take steps to curtail our own freedoms.
2. PURSUIT OF IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS
We talk about goals in business a lot. But we might be better off describing them they way they originate, as dreams. We are less interested in concrete goals and objectives like zero defects -- which the Japanese are enthralled by -- than by putting a man on the moon.
Hammond describes American history as a long string of dreams, from the Pilgrims' dream of a land where one might worship freely (while preventing others from doing the same!) to the dreams each of us has -- for fulfillment, for love, for personal improvement, for riches that put Croesus to shame. To us nothing is impossible, so long as it is not boring.
A problem with dreams is they seldom come to tidy conclusions. Those who live by the dream often come up short in the follow-through department -- one dream begets another, and then another. Saddam Hussein survived our dream of removing him from power. Why? Because we got caught up in other dreams.
3. OBSESSION WITH BIG AND MORE
Grand Canyons, Great Plains, Paul Bunyans, and Ghermezians1 -- we think big in this country. Despite our supposed "root for the underdog" default, we have never minded bigness. Empire State Buildings, world's largest pizzas, Target Greatlands, Cub Foods, walleye sculptures the size of mobile homes -- we love it.
Hammond pointed out that ours is the only large country in the world whose people have settled equally inland and on the coasts. The notion of an infinite frontier has always been part of our personality. And when the geographical frontier began to dwindle, we looked to the remaining frontiers of technology, space, product and service development, market share, and global influence.
Big can be good, but it often is not. Big government, mass assembly, and budget deficits are three big concepts we have been forced to reassess.
4. IMPATIENCE WITH TIME
Hammond's shorthand for this force is simply now. Americans are caught up with a race against the clock. Could Federal Express and the whole concept of overnight worldwide delivery have originated anywhere else? In a world of gradualists, we are inveterate suddenists.
Hammond detailed the story of Larry Bossidy, who when he was hired as CEO of AlliedSignal studied the struggling company's mission statement and said a word was missing: speed. By improving cycle times, Bossidy not only put the company back on the winning path, but also made it true to its own cultural values.
Every culture has a time orientation, but Americans are the most time obsessed. We are the folks who created personal computers that fail us if they take more than 20 seconds to boot up. We are the folks who came up with reengineering and cycle time reduction, the art of shaving a second here, a second there, off business processes.
Time sense is one dimension of what Hammond calls context. Americans have a relatively low need for context -- we just like to dive in and solve problems. Other cultures require a high degree of context before they can even think about solving problems. Germans need windows in order to work. The Japanese have complex social needs that must be addressed before a group can move forward.
Hammond sees different cultures as having different time orientations. Some countries, like England and Mexico, live in the past. When Americans offered to donate $25 million to Oxford University to fund a chair in American history, Oxford returned the gift, telling us to come back when we had more history.
Heady countries like France idealize their past and mentally live in an equally ideal future. Japan seems to have an ambiguous sense of time. But the USA is unique in being cheerfully indifferent to its past, and too involved in creating an exciting near-term future (Hammond calls it the present/future) to take the time to sit down and eat a decent meal in the present.
5. ACCEPTANCE OF MISTAKES
It is a part of our character that we celebrate the difficulties that befall us before we succeed. We seldom "do things right the first time." Also known as oops -- the temporary setbacks we expect to experience as plow heedlessly into a task, invariably without first reading the instructions -- this is the price Americans pay to maintain their characteristic momentum.
The oops factor, like the dream factor, helps explain why Americans have been less quick than other nations at adopting certain approaches to quality. Where the Japanese are alarmed at all waste and error, and work diligently to avoid it ("Just In Time"), we in our sloppy adolescent way shrug off error as a part of the process of getting things done.
Then there is serendipity. Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpet bopster with the inflated cheeks, did not mean to play a trumpet whose horn pointed up at a 45-degree angle. He stepped on it and liked the way it sounded, and a jazz legend was born.
This is not to say error leads inevitably to success. We are just as likely to quit when we encounter resistance and switch to projects that capture our interest. It ain't tidy, but it's us.
6. URGE TO IMPROVISE
Hammond related the story of the visit of Czech composer Anton¡n Dvoi k to America. Dvoi k toured the United States (including stops in Spillville, Iowa and New Prague, Minnesota) and returned to Europe praising a wonderful new kind of music that only Americans understood. Instead of following page after page of scored notes, the musicians agreed on a scrap of melody and then improvised around it, sometimes for very long periods.
The new music, of course, was jazz, and jazz could not have been created anywhere else in the world. Jazz is more than tootling; it is a state of creative readiness, an openness to the notes inside you and a respect for the notes around you. Whether in music or in the way we work with one another, doing our thing but paying close attention to the things others are doing, jazz is a critical part of the American character and an indispensable foundation to our greatest skill, innovation.
7. FIXATION ON "WHATSNEW"
How dearly we in this country love the merry-go-round of fashions, new ideas, new products, the scene that changes more rapidly than a river. "Whatsnew" is just what it sounds like: green Acer computers, a proposal for a teepee-shaped baseball stadium, whatever is wiggy and with-it in this fast-running current.
Knowledge drives innovation, and corporate accountants are scratching their heads trying to put into a formula the value of the knowledge carried in employee heads. Microsoft is the best-capitalized company not solely because of Bill Gates or even its storied operating systems, but also because of the knowledge its people have about the future of information technology, about "whatsnew."
Our greatest companies, like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and 3M, are those whose soul is in service to innovation. Our fondest business legends are of new products and new applications, like Post-it Notes. Where other countries rhapsodize on past glories and lock into beloved modes of doing, Americans are forever restless, and forever hinky.
So what is the relevance or the use of these familiar traits? First, to know ourselves better -- to identify the weaknesses inherent to our culture and play up our strengths.
Second, they counter our natural arrogance, our false chauvinism toward other peoples. Japan, Egypt, and Peru are not all little Americas who have not developed yet to our advanced state. They are places unto themselves, and people there have their own outlooks, their own unique strengths and weaknesses.
This is no small thing. The percentage of American managers assigned overseas who are subsequently called home, on account of not understanding how the new country works, is high. It's no good embracing a global economy unless we have shaken off our parochial ways of thinking.
Small differences matter. Swedes are more given to teamwork than Norwegians, because they are more likely in Sweden to live clustered together in villages, whereas Norwegians have tended to live in more scattered areas and isolated lifestyles. A cultural anthropologist studying Long Island determined that 119 distinct cultures inhabit the island.
Some time ago Newsweek did a poll to see how people in different cultures felt about taking bribes. Americans, we can be proud to note, said they would take a bribe if it were big enough. Asian businesses would finesse the bribe so that it was hardly visible. Europeans would debate the pros and cons so long the opportunity would be withdrawn.
No matter how Americans may identify with their ethnic or regional group here in the United States, Hammond said, it quickly becomes apparent that abroad we are all just Americans -- regardless of whether we are African-American, German-American, or Japanese-American.
More to the subject that concerns us, take process improvement, as practiced by the three dominant industrial cultures. The Japanese like to stand and think a while upon a needed improvement, go a little bit forward, then stop and think some more before going forward. This thoughtful incrementalism is the celebrated kaizen, or continuous improvement, the engine that drove Japanese manufacturing to the top of the heap in the 1970s.
The Germans are more research oriented. They stand around a problem asking themselves questions for the longest period. Then, when they have enough data, they advance rapidly toward a solution. On a graph, this approach looks like a hockey stick -- a long gradual period followed by a rapid ramping up.
Americans, Hammond said, follow the metaphor of a pogo stick, jumping on immediately and hopping around until something good happens.
Think about your company and its improvement efforts, Hammond challenged. Is it cerebral and meticulous, like the Japanese and German approaches, or is it frantic and reckless, like the American method? The image of adolescence is visible in the way we do our work.
A classic example of lock-in involves an invention of the grandson of Anton¡n Dvoi k, August Dvorak, who in 1930 mapped out a keyboard that overcame the intentionally slower QWERTY keyboard layout we all know and hate. Unlike QWERTY, the Dvorak keyboard puts the most commonly used keys at the center of the keyboard (see picture, inside back cover).
But despite the fact that Dvorak takes only a few hours to master and stands to save us a bushel-basket of typing hours per year, people have never taken to it. We are already locked in, as a cultural predisposition, to the QWERTY view. Fewer than one in a hundred of us feels confident enough to follow a different standard, even in something as trivial as keyboard layout.
Lock-in is everywhere. It is the reason people use Wintel computers instead of Apples. It's why financial trading all happens on Wall Street. It's why we prefer VHS video to Beta, and why cars are made in Detroit. It's why Americans like big private healthcare and the British like big public healthcare.
What mode of thinking is my organization locked into that it doesn't have to be?
How do our lock-ins prevent us from seeing the value of other cultures' lock-ins?
Is it even possible to unlock what we're locked into, to go against our own culture?
Americans are lucky. Where other cultures are dying because of their rigidity, we are blessed with a dynamic culture that by definition is able to ingest new ways of thinking and doing and incorporate them.
But we must be on perpetual guard against our unique brand of adolescent arrogance -- assuming that our loosey-goosey ways, because they work for us, are best for other people. The French are not likely to embrace Euro-Disney any time soon. The Spanish are not going to change their late-night dining habits to assuage our late-afternoon hunger pangs.
Twenty years from now, we will still be the only people in the world who think nothing of eating a Whopper while driving on the expressway, and our kids will be the only kids anywhere who tear open a box of Legos and immediately discard the instructions.
Dealing with cultural issues takes a level of clarity not all of us are up to. It requires that we reconcile the messages our head tells us (our logic) with the often contrary ones we get from our heart (our culture). We have to decide which cultural biases we can overcome and which we are too locked into to overcome:
The answer is not that we overcome our culture but that we understand it, and occasionally overrule it. Being American does not preclude our doing zero defects or continuous improvement -- we can do it as well as anyone. But we also have to identify the challenges of stepping a little outside our adolescent comfort zone.
Occasionally it means doing the unimpetuous thing -- bringing back a disgraced manager whose knowledge is still valuable, as Coca-Cola did with "New Coke" genius Sergio Zyman.
It means looking our "oopses" in the eye instead of sweeping them under the carpet. Hammond cited two organizations he knows are devoted to exposing errors to the light of day, making them acceptable, and turning them into learning opportunities.
Levi Strauss, the jeans people, is one of the two. Chairman Robert Haas won't begin a meeting until managers 'fess up to their latest screwup. These mistakes are flown as proudly as the flag on the company's intranet bulletin board. The message of this All-American company: sure, we mess up, and then we learn what we did wrong and move on.
The U.S. Army, an even more all-American outfit, is the other organization. Failure data is transmitted throughout the military to avoid repeats. This learning mode is partly responsible for the successes in the Gulf War and in the Somalia and Haiti rescue missions. Mistakes still occur, as the bumper sticker says -- but they don't keep occurring.
What do you call this alertness to opportunity? Hammond calls it jazz, and it is a uniquely American trait -- the willingness to pay attention, bide our time, and when the spotlight comes up on us, let 'er rip. It doesn't matter if we are classicists at heart, like the elder Dvorak, or rock `n roll headbangers by taste. Blue jeans are our true attire, and jazz is our two-step to excellence.
Mike Finley may be contacted at mfinley@mfinley.com. Or visit him at FUTURE SHOES