The Culture Code

by Daniel Coyle

  In a few hours, Johnson & Johnson went from being a provider of medicine to being a provider of poison. The atmosphere at headquarters was a mix of shock and disbelief. The larger problem, from Johnson & Johnson’s perspective, was that the company was not equipped to deal with this crisis. It didn’t have a public affairs division or a system for recalling pills, and its media relations system consisted of a spiral notebook. “It looked like the plague,” said David Collins, chairman of McNeil Products, the Johnson subsidiary that made Tylenol. “We had no idea where it would end. And the only information we had was that we didn’t know what was going on.”

  An office at company headquarters was converted into a makeshift war room. Someone located drawing paper and an easel. As information came in—victims, locations, lot numbers of the pills, location of purchase—it was scrawled on sheets of paper, which were then taped to the walls. Before long the walls were draped with urgent questions to which there were no answers. The only certainty was that Tylenol was finished as a business. “I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name,” Jerry Della Femina, a legendary advertising guru, told The New York Times.

  Burke formed a seven-member committee, who started working their way through the cascade of tough decisions. How should they work with law enforcement? What should they tell the public? Most crucially, what should they do with other Tylenol products that were on shelves around the nation?

  Four days after the poisonings, Burke and other members of the committee flew to Washington, D.C., to discuss strategy with the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FBI and the FDA strongly encouraged Burke to limit the recall to Chicago, since no poison had yet been located outside Chicago. A national recall, they said, would needlessly frighten the public, embolden the poisoner, and encourage copycats. And as the FBI didn’t need to point out, a larger recall would cost Johnson & Johnson millions of dollars.

  Burke and his group thought about it for a while. Then they ignored the advice of the FBI and the FDA and ordered an immediate national recall of every Tylenol product on the market—31 million pills in all—at a cost of $100 million. When Burke was asked for his reasoning behind the decision, the answer came quickly: We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.

  Over the next days and weeks, Johnson & Johnson essentially transformed itself from a pharmaceutical company into a public safety organization. It designed and manufactured innovative tamper-proof packaging; developed exchange, disposal, and refund programs; and built relationships with government, law enforcement, and media. Four weeks after the attacks, it mobilized more than two thousand salespeople to visit doctors and pharmacists to listen to their concerns and inform them of the upcoming changes.

  Burke terrified the company’s lawyers by making the rounds on the national media, openly expressing his grief and regret and sharing the steps the company was making to ensure the public’s safety. Six weeks after the attacks, it introduced new, safer packaging.

  And then something unexpected happened. Tylenol’s market share, after dropping to zero after the attacks, began a slow climb back to previous levels and continued to grow; one pundit termed it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” In ensuing years, Tylenol’s response has become the gold standard for handling corporate crisis.

  “We had to make hundreds of decisions on the fly; hundreds of people made thousands of decisions,” Burke said afterward. “If you look back, we didn’t make any bad decisions, really. We really didn’t. Those thousands of decisions all had a splendid consistency about them, and that was that the public was going to be served first, because that’s who was at stake. So the reason people talk about Tylenol when the Credo discussions come up is that the Credo ran that. Because the hearts and minds of the people who were J&J and who were making the decisions in a whole series of disparate companies…they all knew what to do.”

  On the surface, the story of the Tylenol crisis is about a large group responding to disaster with extraordinary cohesion and focus. But beneath that story lies a curious fact: The key to Johnson & Johnson’s extraordinary behavior can be located in a mundane one-page document. The 311 words of the Credo oriented the thinking and behavior of thousands of people as they navigated a complex landscape of choices.

  The deeper question is: How can a handful of simple, forthright sentences make such a difference in a group’s behavior?

  —

  In the first two sections of this book we’ve focused on safety and vulnerability. We’ve seen how small signals—You are safe, We share risk here—connect people and enable them to work together as a single entity. But now it’s time to ask: What’s this all for? What are we working toward?

  When I visited the successful groups, I noticed that whenever they communicated anything about their purpose or their values, they were as subtle as a punch in the nose. It started with the surroundings. One expects most groups to fill their surroundings with a few reminders of their mission. These groups, however, did more than that—a lot more.

  When you walk into SEAL headquarters at Dam Neck, Virginia, you pass a twisted girder from the World Trade Center bombing, a flag from Mogadishu, and so many memorials to fallen SEALs that it resembles a military museum. Similarly, walking into Pixar’s headquarters feels like walking into one of its movies. From the full-size Woody and Buzz made of LEGOs to the twenty-foot-tall Luxo Lamp outside the entrance, everything gleams with Pixarian magic. As for the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, its basement theater is less a theater than a makeshift hall of fame, its walls plastered with photos of the Harold teams that have made it big. (You can spot a not-yet-famous celebrity in almost every one.) KIPP schools, the highly successful inner-city charter schools, take a similar approach, naming and decorating each classroom to spotlight where the teacher attended college in order to inspire students to do the same, even adorning the bathroom mirrors with an important question: Where will YOU go to college?

  What’s more, the same focus exists within their language. Walking around these places, you tend to hear the same catchphrases and mottoes delivered in the same rhythms. This is surprising, since you could easily presume that Pixarians would not need to be reminded that Technology inspires art, and art inspires technology, that the SEALs would not need to be reminded that it’s important to Shoot, move, and communicate, and that KIPP students would not need to be reminded to Work hard and be nice, given that they say these words many times each day. And yet that is what they do. These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum. Why?

  The first step toward an answer might begin with a small, ordinary-looking songbird called the starling. Like other birds, starlings sometimes congregate in large flocks. When those flocks are threatened by a predator like a falcon, however, they transform into something more. It’s called a murmuration, and it’s one of the most beautiful and uncanny sights in nature: a living cloud that swirls and changes shape at the speed of thought, forming giant hourglasses, spirals, and tendrils that flow across the sky like a special effect from a Harry Potter movie. A falcon swoops toward a single starling, and at the same instant, on the other side of the flock (thousands of birds away), the other birds instantly sense it and react as one to flow away from the danger. The question, of course, is how so many birds behave like a single entity. Early naturalists theorized that starlings possessed some quasi-mystical ESP to perceive and plan group movements. One British scientist termed it “telepathy”; another called it “biological radio.”

  The real reason, demonstrated in a 2007 study by a team of theoretical physicists from the University of Rome, is that the starlings’ cohesion is built on relentless attention to a small set of signals.
Basically, each starling tracks the six or seven birds closest to it, sending and receiving cues of direction, speed, acceleration, and distance. That shared habit of intensive, up-close watching, amplified through the flock, allows the group to behave as one. In other words, the reason starling flocks can behave so intelligently has nothing to do with telepathy or magic and everything to do with a simpler ability: to pay focused attention to a small handful of key markers.

  This idea helps give us a window into how successful cultures create and sustain purpose. Successful groups are attuned to the same truth as the starlings: Purpose isn’t about tapping into some mystical internal drive but rather about creating simple beacons that focus attention and engagement on the shared goal. Successful cultures do this by relentlessly seeking ways to tell and retell their story. To do this, they build what we’ll call high-purpose environments.

  High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal. They provide the two simple locators that every navigation process requires: Here is where we are and Here is where we want to go. The surprising thing, from a scientific point of view, is how responsive we are to this pattern of signaling.

  A few years ago a professor of psychology named Gabriele Oettingen set out to perform what might rank as the most basic psychological experiment of all time. In fact, you can do it right now. It goes like this:

  Step 1: Think about a realistic goal that you’d like to achieve. It could be anything: Become skilled at a sport, rededicate yourself to a relationship, lose a few pounds, get a new job. Spend a few seconds reflecting on that goal and imagining that it’s come true. Picture a future where you’ve achieved it.

  Got it?

  Step 2: Take a few seconds and picture the obstacles between you and that goal as vividly as possible. Don’t gloss over the negatives, but try to see them as they truly are. For example, if you were trying to lose weight, you might picture those moments of weakness when you smell warm cookies, and you decide to eat one (or three).

  That’s it. It’s called mental contrasting, and it seems less like science than the kind of advice you might come across on a late-night infomercial: Envision a reachable goal, and envision the obstacles. The thing is, as Oettingen discovered, this method works, triggering significant changes in behavior and motivation. In one study, adolescents preparing for the PSAT who used this method chose to complete 60 percent more practice questions than the control group. In another, dieters consumed significantly fewer calories, were more physically active, and lost more weight.

  Mental contrasting has also been shown to improve the ability to interact positively with strangers, negotiate deals, speak in public, manage time, improve communication, and perform a range of other skills. As Oettingen wrote, “The conjoint elaboration of the future and the present reality makes both simultaneously accessible and links them together in the sense that the reality stands in the way of realizing the desired future.”

  Oettingen’s work doesn’t line up with how we normally think about motivation and goals. We normally think about them as being intrinsic to a person. People are either motivated or they’re not; accordingly, we describe motivation with terms like desire or heart. But in these experiments, motivation is not a possession but rather the result of a two-part process of channeling your attention: Here’s where you’re at and Here’s where you want to go.

  That shared future could be a goal or a behavior. (We put customer safety first. We shoot, move, and communicate.) It doesn’t matter. What matters is establishing this link and consistently creating engagement around it. What matters is telling the story.

  We tend to use the word story casually, as if stories and narratives were ephemeral decorations for some unchanging underlying reality. The deeper neurological truth is that stories do not cloak reality but create it, triggering cascades of perception and motivation. The proof is in brain scans: When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

  Think for a moment about the jungle of decisions Johnson & Johnson leaders faced in the days after the Tylenol poisonings. It is not easy to spend $100 million against the advice of federal officials (or to explain that decision to stockholders and a board of trustees). It is not easy to repurpose thousands of people into new and unfamiliar roles (or to explain why they should embrace that change). One would presume that these decisions and actions would have felt painful or agonizing.

  And yet Burke doesn’t describe them as painful or agonizing. He describes them as straightforward. “Well, I got a lot of credit for that,” he told a reporter. “But the fact is my job was made not only simple, but…there wasn’t anything else I could have done. Every person who worked for Johnson & Johnson in the world was watching the poisonings….If we had done anything other than what we did, think about how those employees would have felt. I mean, the very soul of the corporation was watching us.”

  In other words, Burke and his team felt a bit like starlings in a flock feel. They moved as one because they were attuned to the same clear signal of the Credo resonating through the group. We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses, and patients; to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. The difficult choices they made weren’t really all that difficult. They were closer to a reflex.

  —

  The main challenge to understanding how stories guide group behavior is that stories are hard to isolate. Stories are like air: everywhere and nowhere at the same time. How do you measure the effect of a narrative?

  Fortunately for us, back in 1965, a Harvard psychologist named Robert Rosenthal found a way. He approached a California public elementary school and offered to test the school’s students with a newly developed intelligence-identification tool, called the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, which could accurately predict which children would excel academically in the coming year. The school naturally agreed, and the test was administered to the entire student body. A few weeks later, teachers were provided with the names of the children (about 20 percent of the student body) who had tested as high-potentials. These particular children, the teachers were informed, were special. Though they might not have performed well in the past, the test indicated that they possessed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.” (The students were not informed of the test results.)

  The following year Rosenthal returned to measure how the high-potential students had performed. Exactly as the test had predicted, the first- and second-grade high-potentials had succeeded to a remarkable degree: The first-graders gained 27 IQ points (versus 12 points for the rest of the class); and the second-graders gained 17 points (versus 7 points). In addition, the high-potentials thrived in ways that went beyond measurement. They were described by their teachers as being more curious, happier, better adjusted, and more likely to experience success as adults. What’s more, the teachers reported that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than any year in the past.

  Here’s the twist: the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was complete baloney. In fact, the “high-potentials” had been selected at random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students.

  What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for inte
llectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors. Rosenthal classified the changes into four categories.

  1. Warmth (the teachers were kinder, more attentive, and more connective)

  2. Input (the teachers provided more material for learning)

  3. Response-opportunity (the teachers called on the students more often, and listened more carefully)

  4. Feedback (the teachers provided more, especially when the student made a mistake)

  The interesting thing about these changes is how small they are, consisting of thousands of tiny behaviors over the school year. Every time the teacher interacted with the student, a connection lit up in the teacher’s brain between the present and the future. Each time the student did something ambiguous, the teacher gave the student the benefit of the doubt. Each time the student made a mistake, the teacher presumed that the student needed better feedback. By themselves, each of these behaviors meant little. Together, they created a virtuous spiral that helped students thrive in ways that exceeded their so-called limits.

  This virtuous spiral can be sparked by other methods as well. A good example was used in an experiment by Adam Grant, an author and organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, whose work we encountered in Chapter 6. A few years back Grant was asked by the University of Michigan to look into the low performance of its call center workers who phoned university alumni and asked them to donate money. The work was repetitive and tedious, and the rejection rate stood at a solid 93 percent. The university had tried several incentives to improve performance, such as prizes and contests, to no avail.