Two Ways to the Top, One to the Bottom; How Dominance Games Helped Microsoft Lose its Dominance
Plus, Our Other Human Superpower Revealed
If you want a reminder of how odd we human beings are — how unlike the rest of life on Earth — just look at your org chart.
The simple fact that organizations exist sets us apart. As I discussed in my previous post and in my book The Geek Way, no other species on Earth cooperates intensely and in large numbers with non-kin. Our cooperative abilities are a big part of the secret of our success (to appropriate the title of Joe Henrich’s fantastic book on the topic) on this planet.1
In most human communities that cooperation is hierarchical.2 As the org chart reveals, there are tiers. We’re not at all unique in this regard; all social vertebrates have status hierarchies. Chickens really do have pecking orders, as do wolves, elephant seals, chimps, and so on.
What does make us highly unusual in the animal kingdom is that we have two ways to the top.3 Among chickens, wolves, chimps, and so on there’s only one route to higher status: dominance, or “a strategy through which [individuals] gain and maintain social rank by using coercion, intimidation, and power.” Mike Tyson, for example, dominated other boxers.
We humans clearly have dominance hierarchies, but not all dominant humans are physically formidable. In addition to Tysons, there are also Littlefingers. In Game of Thrones Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish gets within hailing distance of the Iron Throne despite the fact that he’s a spindly weasel who’s disliked by everyone in Westeros. He achieves dominance not via formidability, but instead Machiavellianism: skillful coalition building and manipulation of others.4
Humanity’s second kind of status is prestige, or “attaining social rank through the display of valued knowledge and skill”. Yo Yo Ma and Taylor Swift are two highly prestigious people. They made it to high status via a very different route than Littlefinger.
My guess is that the top levels of your org chart contain a mix of Tysons, Mas, Swifts, and Littlefingers. In other words, there are both dominant and prestigious people in high-status roles.
My second guess is that you and your colleagues are constantly playing rich games to gain and maintain status. Actually, that’s about as much a guess as “you and your colleagues are constantly metabolizing oxygen.” Status-seeking is just something that social vertebrates do, because it’s so central to doing the central thing that we’re all designed by evolution to do, which is pass down our genes to later generations.5 As I write in The Geek Way (TGW)
Evolution has wired us to care about status for exactly the same reason that it’s wired chickens, elephant seals, gorillas, and chimpanzees to care about it.
The importance of status for us… is hard to overstate. As journalist Will Storr writes in his book The Status Game, “We are… driven by a multitude of desires. We want power. We want sex. We want wealth. We want to change society for the better. But it’s also true that the status game is deeply implicated in these great human hungers…” We humans like power, but for most of us our desire for more of it tapers off after a while. The same thing is true for money: we like it a lot, but in one survey of office workers fully 70 percent chose a higher-status job over a higher-paying one. Our desire for higher status, meanwhile, appears to be bottomless. In a series of experiments, sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway found that “there was no point at which preference for higher status leveled off.”
Stop These Silly Games
Congrats, you’ve just been promoted to CEO (and all that new status looks great on you, Boss!). Here’s my question: what kinds of status games do you want your people to play? You can’t stop those games, but you can shift the rules and winners. You have a lot of influence over what actions and what kinds of people get rewarded with the trappings of high status: big paychecks and bonuses, big headcounts and budgets, invitations to elite training programs and corporate retreats, and of course moves up and down the org chart.
The reason I ask, Boss, is to keep you from making a mistake. If you follow the late 20th century’s dominant (heh) playbook for running a successful company — the playbook drawn up and evangelized by Jack Welch and other celebrated business leaders of that time — you’ll be encouraging dominance games. And I think that’s a terrible move.
In my previous post here I labeled that playbook “Model 1” (following Chris Argyris) and showed how it led to chronic defensiveness that made companies brittle and hidebound. Here I want to further trash Model 1 by showing that it leads to ruinous dominance games.
Model 1’s governing values, which are put into practice by all kinds of behaviors, include take control, strive to win, and minimize losing. Or dominate, dominate, and don’t let anyone dominate you. Leaders like Welch thought that they were rewarding hard work, ambition, ingenuity, and tenacity with Model 1. And to some extent, they were. But they were also rewarding domineering behavior, Machiavellianism, infighting, gamesmanship, and sabotage.
To drive that point home, here are some quotes from Kurt Eichenwald’s terrific account of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer, when Model 1 reigned and which was characterized by, as Eichenwald put it,
“more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products… what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things… life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success… Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.
Here are a few of the dominance games Eichenwald documented:
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
One Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.”
“I was told in almost every review that the political game was always important for my career development,” said Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer. “It was always much more on ‘Let’s work on the political game’ than on improving my actual performance… It got to the point where I was second-guessing everything I was doing,” he said. “Whenever I had a question for some other team, instead of going to the developer who had the answer, I would first touch base with that developer’s manager, so that he knew what I was working on. That was the only way to be visible to other managers, which you needed for the review.”…I asked Cody whether his review was ever based on the quality of his work. He paused for a very long time. “It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.”
“I wanted to build a team of people who would work together and whose only focus would be on making great software,” said Bill Hill, the former manager. “But you can’t do that at Microsoft.”
As these quotes show, encouraging and rewarding dominance games can get you into real trouble. Such games are time-and zero-sum, if not worse. As the Microsoft example shows, they can cripple a company.
We Learn From the Best
Encouraging and rewarding prestige, meanwhile, doesn’t. In fact, I think it accelerates our second superpower as a species and puts it to work in your organization.
Our first superpower, mentioned above, is intense cooperation with non-kin. The second is learning. Compared to every other living thing on the planet we learn quickly and remember well. This combo allows us to pile learning on top of learning, and to evolve our cultures with dizzying speed. TGW:
The reason we humans have become so successful and dominant on Earth is that we have our own warp drive: a type of evolution possessed by no other species. In addition to biological evolution (which every living thing has), we also have cultural evolution, which is much, much, much faster. If biological evolution is like travel that’s limited by the speed of light, then cultural evolution is humanity’s warp speed.
How do we learn so much, so fast? Textbooks, classrooms, and other aspects of formal learning haven’t been part of any human culture for more than an eyeblink of our history as a species. Other people, meanwhile, have been around for as long as people have.6 Our superpower is learning from them. At some point in our species’ history, we got much better than our evolutionary ancestors and close neighbors like chimps at learning from (science word alert) conspecifics.
But learning from just anyone is inefficient, and maybe even dangerous (it’s a bad idea to emulate that moron over there eating poison berries). Prestige is evolution’s brilliant upgrade over random social learning. Evolution has shaped us humans to accord a separate kind of status — a status called prestige that’s distinct from dominance — to those who are good at important tasks like detoxifying food, building kayaks, writing clean code, and closing deals. Evolution has also shaped us to be prestige-biased when we’re learning the tasks ourselves; to pay more attention to the prestigious and learn more from them. Prestige is a homing device: it guides our learning superpower to the best places.
There’s intriguing evidence for another evolutionary upgrade: becoming more prestigious actually makes you more generous / prosocial / cooperative / altruistic. Think of this as an attempt to combine our two superpowers — cooperation and learning — in a virtuous cycle. Evolution made us prestige-biased so that we learn from the right people. It also made those people more prosocial so that one of the things we learn from them is to become more cooperative. More cooperation means more chances to learn, we learn from the prestigious and accord them status, this status makes them feel good and become more cooperative, we learn from them to become more cooperative ourselves, and so on.
An innovation this clever deserves a GIF in praise of evolution.
So now all we have to do, Boss, is get you the playbook for encouraging prestigious instead of dominant behavior, prestige games instead of dominance ones. We’ll get to work on that in the next post.
And who knows, maybe other planets as well some day
Many hunter-gatherer groups are an exception here; they value egalitarianism to the point of ganging up to stop individuals who are seen to be trying to amass too much power or boss others around. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls this arrangement a “reverse dominance hierarchy.”
I’m again poaching from Joe Henrich and his coauthors here, and a paper titled “Two ways to the top: Evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence”
Coalition building is also important for chimps. The alpha male is typically not powerful enough to resist a group attack, so he forms alliances; he helps other males achieve high status in exchange for their support. These alliances, like Littlefinger’s, are far from stable.
Individual social insects like ants, bees, and termites don’t seek status because they don’t have to in order to pass on their genes. Their mother the queen takes care of that by laying lots and lots of eggs.
That statement does not get more profound the more you read it