“Quite a lot of businesspeople are frustrated athletes, or they were very good athletes when they were younger,” he says. “They saw how trash talk worked in athletics, and if it worked in athletics, why wouldn’t it work in another competitive environment?”
4.
In the 1890s, bicycling became a popular American pastime, and among the enthusiasts was an Indiana University graduate student named Norman Triplett. Triplett liked sports of all kinds: He ran (and later coached) track, and played on an adult baseball team. But his observations of the behavior of bicyclists led him to conduct a set of experiments for which he’s remembered even today.
Analyzing data from a set of 1897 bicycle races, Triplett observed how the riders’ speeds varied as they raced in one of three conditions: unpaced competition (a single rider striving individually to achieve the fastest time), a paced competition (in which the single rider is assisted by a team that rides ahead at a prescribed pace), and an actual race, in which riders are cycling in real time against one another.
As Triplett analyzed data from over two thousand riders, he noticed that riders following a pacemaker rode at speeds averaging 34.4 seconds faster per mile than unpaced riders. Moreover, riders who competed alongside one another rode nearly forty seconds faster per mile than unpaced riders. Triplett hypothesized several reasons for the faster speeds, including a “suction” or “shelter” theory (in which riders achieve a mechanical advantage by drafting behind the other riders), as well as various psychological theories. For instance, he suggested riders may be hypnotized or put into an autopilot mode by the presence of competitors.
Triplett eventually concluded there’s another force at work, one he called dynamogenic factors. “This theory of competition holds that the bodily presence of another rider is a stimulus to the racer in arousing the competitive instinct,” he wrote, with the other rider providing “an inspiration to greater effort.”
To test this theory, Triplett devised a competition involving a contraption that resembled two side-by-side fishing reels, and used forty schoolchildren as subjects who competed in reeling contests, against each other and against the clock. The result: The head-to-head reelers consistently performed better. Triplett concluded: “[Having] another contestant participating simultaneously in the race serves to liberate latent energy not ordinarily available.”
In other words, we try harder when we’re competing directly against another competitor. And while Triplett’s study doesn’t directly address the best way to prepare for such competitions, it makes sense that thinking about the opponent and your desire to beat him before you begin pedaling would increase motivation and energy, too.
Triplett’s conclusion isn’t very surprising to anyone who’s played a sport. “Competition spurs motivation, one way or another—whether it’s because a competitor wants to win or because a competitor simply doesn’t want to come out on the bottom,” write Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing. “Even when we are dragged into competitions we’d rather not be in, the fact we are being compared to others triggers our competitive instincts and we try harder.” Bronson and Merryman point out that the phenomenon isn’t limited to athletics. “Some of the greatest teams in history were equally well known for the hostility among the collaborators,” they write, citing Abraham Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals,” the scientists leading the Manhattan Project, and the Mercury astronauts.
For many years, managers have tried to harness the power of competition within workplaces. Particularly in the sales function, managers use leaderboards (which tell everyone who’s selling more or less) and contests (often featuring trips or other prizes) to use people’s natural drive to beat others and turn it into revenue. Lately, managers outside the sales function have used “gamification” to utilize the motivational power of competition. Some universities rely on “forced curve” grading systems, which limit how many students can get As and create a built-in zero-sum competitive dynamic in classroom performance. Companies also use forced-curve performance evaluation systems, in which only so many employees can get a top rating. This dynamic isn’t limited to our work lives. If you wear a Fitbit and compare how many steps you’re walking against your friends, you’re gamifying fitness and trying to turn rivalry into a performance enhancer.
Rivalry is related to, but slightly different from, pure competition. While we can compete against anyone (even strangers), rivals are specific opponents with whom we feel an enhanced or special sense of competition. The Yankees and Red Sox qualify as rivals, as do Harvard and Yale. Rivalries are common in business, too: witness Coke and Pepsi, or CVS and Walgreens. And if Norman Triplett is remembered as the psychologist who first proved that competition can help people perform better, a modern-day New York University psychologist named Gavin Kilduff is working to prove that the special kind of competition experienced by rivals can boost performance even more.
It’s a dynamic that Kilduff first discovered as a child, when he played video games and basketball with friends. Instead of just playing for fun, he constantly tried to increase the competitive dynamic by creating tournaments. He found that he always tried a little harder when competing against his closest friends.
In his research, Kilduff has explored the factors that drive rivalry, and how it can impact performance. In one study, he found that rivalries are driven by similarities between opponents, the frequency with which they compete, and how evenly matched they are. In a study of NCAA basketball teams, for instance, Kilduff found that teams play more efficient defense and block more shots when competing against a rival. In another study that asked people to think back on their own performance, he found that people recalled being more motivated and performing better when competing against a rival; more important than the self-reported results are actual race results featuring long-distance runners, in which competitors facing off against rivals did, in fact, run faster.
Kilduff says that rivalry often features a sense of hostility or animosity, but this isn’t always the case. “One doesn’t have to come with the other,” Kilduff says, citing Larry Bird and Magic Johnson as intense rivals who had a cordial friendship off the court.
In sports, most rivalries evolve organically over time. But when a coach or leader is trying to psych up his team and no natural rivalry exists, there’s an obvious strategy to attempt to utilize the positive effects of this dynamic: You create one.
5.
John Legere works from a relatively modest corner office on the top floor of a building in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington. His desk sits diagonally across the room, and behind it on a credenza rests a computer screen so gigantic at first I mistook it for a big-screen television. Legere, who is fifty-eight but looks younger, has longish dark hair combed straight back, reaching down his neck. On his left hand he wears a gigantic Batman ring. His attire pushes the extreme boundaries of “business casual”: On the afternoon I meet with him, he’s wearing a black and magenta tracksuit over a magenta T-shirt, magenta socks, and custom-made black-and-magenta sneakers. Black and magenta, it turns out, are the corporate colors of T-Mobile. Legere, who is T-Mobile’s CEO, dresses this way every day.
Legere arrived at T-Mobile after a long career at AT&T and Global Crossing, companies where he usually wore a suit and tie. His stint as CEO of the latter company made him rich, and when he left Global Crossing after a 2011 merger, he didn’t really need to work again. But by 2012 he was bored, so when a recruiter called to talk to him about becoming the CEO of T-Mobile, he was intrigued. T-Mobile was owned by a German telecom giant who’d tried to sell it to AT&T, but the Federal Trade Commission blocked the deal. Morale at T-Mobile was horrible. It was then the smallest of the four substantial U.S. wireless carriers and they were struggling. “Employees were beaten down,” says Legere, recalling his first day. But he saw a bright side. “The average age of employees was twenty-seven, and they were pretty easy to wind up,”
he says. “They just needed to be told everything was going to be okay.”
To fix the business, Legere made some basic moves, including inking a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone and taking steps to improve T-Mobile’s poor cellular coverage, long an Achilles’ heel. He led an IPO, to reduce financial reliance on the German parent company. He took steps to try to improve the culture, such as immediately rescinding a policy that retail employees could not have tattoos or facial piercings. But his larger strategy involved relentlessly targeting and calling out his rivals, and to use these constant put-downs of competitors as a way to psych up his own workforce.
Within months of his arrival, he began incessantly taunting T-Mobile’s primary competitors, Verizon and AT&T, as “dumb and dumber.” He publicly called them “pricks.” In his first press conference as CEO, he said, “I’ve seen more honesty in Match.com ads than I’ve seen in AT&T’s coverage maps.” In a Super Bowl advertisement, he ridiculed Verizon’s claim of providing faster data service. In 2013 he joined Twitter, and in less than three years he tweeted more than 17,500 times. Many of his tweets feature him trashing his telecom rivals. By 2016 he had more than three million followers, a fan base so deep that Twitter created an emoji using the image of Legere’s face—an honor previously reserved only for Pope Francis. Fast Company has called Legere the “profanity-spewing shock jock of Corporate America” and said that with his unusual dress and hairstyle, he looks more like a member of the rock band Kiss than a telecom exec.
The T-Mobile chief’s penchant for trash-talking corporate rivals is unusual. At many large companies, executives are loath to even speak the name of the firms they compete against. These leaders look at business as a one-person, against-the-clock-style race; in this scenario, the motivational rhetoric is about simply doing your best instead of beating someone else.
Legere attributes his different mentality to his athletic background. “I grew up as a competitive runner, and I like rivalries. It’s just part of who I am,” he says. (He has run the Boston Marathon more than a dozen times.) “I like winning, but I enjoy it even more when I’m making someone else lose.” He describes a key part of his early strategy at T-Mobile as “picking a villain,” which in this case was AT&T. “AT&T had so dramatically screwed people on their first iPhone experience. There was just this pent-up hatred,” he says. Legere recalls that anytime he was talking to a large group, he could simply ask, “How many people have AT&T as your wireless carrier?” followed by “Now how many of you hate them?” The room would be filled with raised hands.
T-Mobile is playing in an industry in which a rivalry strategy is likely to pay dividends. By now, just about every American adult has a mobile phone, so the industry’s growth rate has stalled. For an individual firm to grow in a saturated market, it has to steal share from competitors. Legere says the strategy also makes sense because dissatisfaction with wireless providers tends to run high, due to what he calls the industry’s “pain points”—the punitive long-term contracts, the opaque and mysterious extra fees for data or roaming, activities over which customers seem to have little control. In response, Legere’s strategy hasn’t just focused on calling out rivals, but on attacking the standard industry practices that the dominant players have institutionalized.
Legere also attributes his fondness for trash-talking, particularly on Twitter, to the fact that even as CEO of a $32 billion company, he has time on his hands. “I’m divorced, and both my daughters are older now,” he says. “I live alone. I have no dog. So this is what I do.” When he’s having a drink alone in a bar, he says, he likes to challenge strangers to speed contests, in which each logs his smartphone into a particular Web site to find out who has the fastest upload and download speeds. (He says his T-Mobile phone always comes out on top.) When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he grabs his phone and begins answering tweets from customers. Listening to Legere describe his lifestyle, one almost begins to feel sorry for him—until you remember that he lives in an $18 million Central Park West penthouse once owned by William Randolph Hearst, where his current neighbor is Giorgio Armani.
Much of Legere’s trash-talking is aimed at consumers, to try to educate them to T-Mobile’s competitive strengths against Verizon and AT&T. But there’s a second audience for this bravado: his employees. “When I go after the other guys, they love it,” Legere says, describing his frequent visits to customer call centers, where the headphone-wearing reps greet him like a rock star. Motivating low-paid employees to slog it out in a call center isn’t easy, but when the reps can witness the CEO giving out his personal e-mail address and trashing T-Mobile’s rivals on Twitter each day, it provides a morale boost. It makes them feel a sense of purpose about heading into a difficult job every morning.
Some of Legere’s stunts seem ridiculously over the top. On at least one occasion, he’s hired skywriting planes to scrawl put-downs in the air above AT&T’s headquarters. The week before I met with him, Legere had bid $21,800 on eBay for the right to put a 9-square-inch temporary tattoo on the shoulder of U.S. Olympic runner Nick Symmonds during the 2016 Summer Games. For Legere, the obvious move would be to put the T-Mobile logo on Symmonds’s arm. But on the day we met, Legere said he was contemplating a different plan, one suggested by his Twitter followers: that instead of promoting T-Mobile, Symmonds’s tattoo should simply read “F—k AT&T.”
As it tweaks rivals, it helps that T-Mobile is a smaller player attacking larger companies. Anyone who follows sports has witnessed the inherent appeal of underdog narratives—the way we reflexively support an unlikely team with a so-called Cinderella story. Academic research suggests this dynamic plays out in business, as well. Georgetown professor Neeru Paharia and colleagues have studied why and how consumers respond to businesses that position themselves as underdogs. In one experiment that involved giving coupons to bookstore patrons, for instance, they found consumers who were alerted to the fact that the small bookstore’s primary rivals were “large, multibillion-dollar corporations” purchased more than shoppers given neutral positioning statements. Beyond rooting for smaller, independent brands, consumers “may want to punish stronger competitors, enjoy watching them fail, and gain pleasure as they ‘stick it to the man,’” the researchers write. “In the context of competition, in addition to supporting underdogs, consumers may also want to punish larger, more dominant brands for having too much power.”
Across Lake Washington, in downtown Seattle, lies a company that started out as an underdog but is now dominant in its field: Amazon. In 2014, when I interviewed founder Jeff Bezos, I asked him about the merits of focusing on rivals as a motivating force. “There are companies out there where they wake up in the morning, and they organize their internal thoughts by who the competition is, and how they’re going to beat the competition,” Bezos told me. “That can be a very effective strategy, but it’s not the only one. It’s not the only motivation. The people who tend to do really well at Amazon have more of an explorer’s mentality. They’re waking up in the morning, in the shower, thinking, ‘What can we invent for customers?’ . . . Both models can work, and you do see both models out there. [But] if you have to pick one of those two, I prefer the customer obsession to the competitor obsession. . . . The customer-obsessed culture works better when you’re the leader. One of the problems that competitor-obsessed companies have is that they lose their North Star when they’re number one. They have nothing to think about in the shower.” And then Bezos tilted his head toward the sky and gave his jubilant, uproarious laugh.
Legere points out that a strategy that focuses on an enemy or rival needn’t always focus on an actual enemy. Sometimes the rival can be an animating idea or concept. At Global Crossing, which spent parts of Legere’s tenure teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the idea of bankruptcy became the enemy. Other CEOs might attack ideas like “waste” or “defects” or “complacency” or “bureaucracy” with such a zeal that those ideas become full-blown enemies.<
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Whatever outsiders may think of Legere’s approach, the data shows it is working. When Legere became T-Mobile’s CEO, it had 29 million subscribers; when we met in 2016, it had 66 million. Its stock has more than doubled. Still, the CEO insists that when it comes to calling out rivals, he’s just getting started. “There’s tons more we can do to solve customer pain points, and the bad guys are making it easier all the time.”
Chapter Seven
THE PSYCH-UP PILL
SHOULD WHITE-COLLAR WORKERS MEDICATE THEIR WAY TO HIGHER PERFORMANCE?
Scott Stossel is the editor of the Atlantic and the author of two acclaimed books. He’s a smart, accomplished guy. But when he’s invited to talk about his work on television, at a conference, or at a bookstore, he is, by his own account, a complete basket case. He sweats and trembles. He gets nauseated and has trouble breathing. There’s a chance he may faint.
So Stossel does what a growing number of professionals do to get through their toughest moments at work: He medicates.
His routine begins four hours before he takes the stage, when he takes a .5 milligram of the sedative Xanax. An hour before the event, he takes a second .5 milligram of Xanax and 20 milligrams of Inderal (generic name: propranolol), a beta-blocker that’s become the go-to medicine for people who suffer from performance anxiety. Stossel chases the pills with a shot of vodka; he does a second shot fifteen minutes before he’s due to speak.
As he stands at the podium, Stossel keeps more Xanax and a couple of minibar-sized bottles of vodka in a pocket; if he gets acutely anxious, he may discreetly pop another pill or take another drink during the event. As he recounts in My Age of Anxiety, a candid memoir of his disorder: “If I’ve managed to hit the sweet spot—that perfect combination of timing and dosage where the cognitive and psychomotor sedating effect of the drugs and alcohol balances out the physiological hyperarousal of the anxiety—then I’m probably doing okay up here; nervous but not miserable; a little fuzzy but still able to convey clarity.” But some days, that equilibrium proves elusive. He often overmedicates to the point of seeming slurry; other days he undermedicates, which leaves him sweating profusely, his voice quavering, and creating the possibility that he’ll run off the stage in midsentence.
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