Discover How to Thrive in Life and Business
How Humans Fight the Laws of Nature – and Lose
By William E. Caswell
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by William E. Caswell
Asset Beam Publishing Ltd., 1 Cleopatra Dr. Suite 202, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K2G 3M9.
All right reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under applicable copyright legislation, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the publisher’s prior written permission.
ISBN 978-0-9810816-4-9
For additional information and to access Book Two (without cost), visit http://www.fightingnature.com.
To Ichak Adizes
who inspired me to search deeper
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I – Laying the Ground Work
Chapter 1. Where the World Stands Today
1.2 The History of the Business Battle
1.4 Compiling Facts and Forming Conclusions
1.5 Good Books that Struggle with the Questions (and Answers)
2.3 Putting a Bit of Meat onto the “Laws” of Nature
PART II – How Human Endeavors Seem to Work
Chapter 3. The Greatest Secret in the World
3.1 Brief Introduction of where The Greatest Secret is coming from
3.4 A Few Conclusions So Far on the Theme of Cooperation
3.5 How Emotions, as a Dominant Force, Are Taken Advantage of
3.12 Summary of “The Greatest Secret in the World”
4.2 The Sexes Really are Different
4.7 Intellectual vs. Primordial
4.8 Intermixing the Priorities of Life
Chapter 5. As Clear as 1, 2, 3 .
5.1 Human Diversity Makes a Complete Picture
5.2 Turning the Best of your Job into Your Best Job
5.4 Summarizing the Power of 1, 2 and 3
Chapter 6. Nature’s Behaviours on Humans
PART III – What the World Needs Now
Chapter 7. How to Run Just About Anything
7.5 Make People Accountable to Themselves
7.6 Putting the Final Pieces into Place
7.7 Maintaining Your Group at Excellence
Chapter 8. Fixing a Disastrous Example
8.1 How Disastrous an Example?
8.2 Starting at the Top Person
8.3 Moving to the Top Body – Parliament
Chapter 9. Final Considerations
Acknowledgements
It is with the greatest sense of appreciation I acknowledge and thank those who have assisted me in this endeavour:
Caroline Warrior of Gatineau, Quebec, Canada Dr. Michel Jullian of Aylmer, Quebec, Canada Sylvia Smith of Midland, Ontario, Canada
Julia Petrakis of Camano Island, Washington, U.S. as well as:
Carole Earle
Don Butler
Dr. Jennifer Decker Dr. Maria Trainer Jessica Skof
Mark Buckshon Ricardo Gomez Upkar Bilkhu Raymond Leveille
All of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Foreword
You and I are observers of a civic leader, an NGO captain, the head of an enterprise, or a president of a company or a university – one who is expected to deliver significant results every year. So you and I ask that person: “How’s it going? Now the true answer, please.”
For most of these people, it is not going as well as was hoped. This book looks at the “mystery” of failed human achievements world wide – war being the most obvious of them. I, with my 40 years of business focus, having seen degrees of substantive failure in almost every organization I have visited, have observed (and lived) the prevalence of unnecessary turmoil and its costly results. It is easy to see that the scope of this picture of human-group failure extends to include hospitals, schools, universities, civic and national politics, oil rigs and beyond. Is there a predictable and correctible reason? Here is a story that answers “yes” and has been designed to show why and how. This treatise does not offer a recipe for efficiency but rather it forces the realization that it is the ignoring of the fundamental and physical laws of nature that frequently gets us into our difficulties – and by extension, observing these laws, can get us out of trouble and get us out relatively quickly.
For those of you, not in the business sector and diligently going about achieving things every day in the other spheres, let me clearly distinguish the difference between business in this book and all the other sectors. THERE IS NONE! This book is about people – more to the point, about people cooperating to achieve things. This story is about human endeavours, about groups of people working together to achieve great things, greater than they would be able to do individually. My own focus, as it happens, is on business after a lifetime in those trenches, so to speak, but almost every word in these pages applies to non-profits, NGOs, charities, universities, hospitals, governments, etc., every bit as well. This subject is all about people working together and finding a way to struggle less to get the innovations and improvements they seek. The answer, in short, is about allowing groups of people to cooperate, because it is more natural to cooperate than not and acknowledging that lack of cooperation is caused by obstacles set up by other humans, usually because they are ignoring natural laws.
Businesses are supposed to know what they are doing, but when one looks at the most successful companies in the world, one will find that even those icons of commerce have considerable and ongoing trouble. (How did General Motors fare in 2009?) Do doctors have trouble removing tonsils? Not so much. Do engineers have trouble building bridges? Not so much. Are leaders of major endeavours as smart as engineers and doctors? I think so and most leaders think so. Something is wrong with human enterprise, if very clever, extremely diligent and clearly industrious teams of people can’t seem to master it, to get the outcomes they predict regularly.
Let us destroy a myth. While there are some business successes, most businesses are not successful. CERTAINLY MOST ARE NOT SUCCESSF UL OVER THE LONG TERM. Where are AddressographMultigraph and Gulf + Western, the darlings of the stock market in the ’60s? Simply look around you for business disasters; the evidence is everywhere. And it has been this way for decades.
The reason non-business people should care about business is, to paraphrase Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.: business makes things work in this world like nothing else. And if businesses succeed, we as a society will progress. The economic catastrophe of 2009, while a business disaster, was a societal failure with a huge loss of jobs, homes, stock market holdings and income. So society and business are inextricably intertwined.
I offer nothing new – it is as old as the Universe – but I offer a different perspective I think you should consider. That perspective is based on observing the fundamentals of nature and of human behaviour. (Some of the “laws” of nature are introduced in Chapter 2.) With a knowledge of fundamentals, one can do things “right” or at least predict what will happen to “Z” if one tweaks “A.” Additionally, I bring the good news that I have tried these methods for the past 10 years, guiding a wide range of peopled groups (companies in high tech and construction; lawyers; not-for-profit arts organizations; medical organizations; wine merchants; manufacturers, etc.) and I have nothing but success to report. In fact, there was never even a hiccup along my way in implementing these common-sense methodologies: results up, morale up, self-esteem up, sales up, profits up, and so on.
In this book you will also discover a multi-billion dollar enterprise that has been following many of these principles for 115 years and stands out because of its continuous success even into this modern era. I hope you find this information worth your further investigation.
Be warned, I am not just crying “Woe is me, what shall we do?” I am providing answers, really practical answers. Those answers stem from the observation that humans have continued and probably will continue to work against the laws of Mother Nature. Since nature has been time-tested for at least 13 billion years, perhaps we should listen to what it says. In fact, we must if we are to be successful. If we fight the laws of nature, we will lose – every time.
Bill Caswell
Ottawa, Canada
Pen first put to paper in May 2010
A Note to Readers about the Organization of this Volume
This volume is unusual in that, essentially concerning a technical subject, it has been presented in as readable a fashion as my engineering mind can do by creating two portions: Book One, text and Book Two, tables. To separate details from ideas, this work has left the details to what is called Book Two in a set of appendices and tables. Book Two has more pages than the Book One text.
Book One is presented here. Our test with readers revealed that 9 out of 10 chose not to read Book Two when it was appended. Therefore, Book Two has been omitted. However, it is available to any reader on request. Simply go to www.fightingnature.com and pick up the soft copy version of Book Two at no charge.
In order not to distract the reader from the ideas presented in Book One, the reference numbers and appendix designations for the ideas are not inserted throughout the main text. Instead, there are several other aids to locate the details:
• The chapter’s References are listed at the end of each chapter.
• Please use the Table of Contents to locate a relevant detail.
• As well, the deep drilling is left within each Appendix of Book Two, which is available without additional cost at www.fightingnature.com. With Book Two, the corresponding text section of Book One to which the appendix refers is shown.
• Reference books, identified in the Bibliography, are referred to by a number in brackets e.g. (6).
• The Alphabetical Index at the end of each book will assist in locating a subject detail.
BOOK ONE
PART I
LAYING THE GROUND WORK
CHAPTER 1
Where the World Stands Today
As I write this, oil pours out of a Gulf of Mexico sea-based source unabated for its 42nd day. Israeli enforcement of its naval blockade on Gaza has left 10 people dead, battles rage all around the world, our Canadian House of Commons appears as a circus to most visitors to the Chambers, even school children. Drug wars rage incessantly in Jamaica, Mexico and Colombia – fuelled by the opiate cravings of the Americas and the rest of modern society. The world is a mess. A new dose of disasters arrives almost every day, delivered to our living rooms by our TVs and newspapers. Deep thinkers abhor this destructive confusion, yet based on the record so far, humankind seems powerless to stop it.
This book will look into the social perspective, beyond business for the most part. However, for the moment bear with me as the next three sections look into my area of specialization, the business viewpoint, after which the remainder of the story will move to society in general.
1.2 The History of the Business Battle
Sad tales about business abound. Yet, how long has this entity called “business” existed? Traders were recorded conducting their commerce in the first acknowledged history book of the world, The Histories by Herodotus, written in 420 B.C. As time moved along to today, the manner of business has changed. For most businesses today, a relatively free market exists, devoid of monopolies and government-induced preferential treatment. The business environment that exists is due to the survival of the fittest. It is difficult to write about how things should work if the deck is already stacked, but we have had enough time in this free market, say 50 years, to see that business is working better than before, yet it is not working so well. Most people in most jobs are not happy. Reports vary. From 42% to 75% of people are not pleased to be in their jobs, and if they are not happy at the vocation that occupies 8 hours per day for most of the year, something is wrong. It is wrong for other reasons: Companies having learned how to do things right, still cannot stay on top of their game. Individuals learn from experience; they just get better much as does a fine wine. Yet, experienced companies teeter and fall on a somewhat regular basis. Look at the shops on your favourite street. How many have changed in the past five years? (Hint: Read “fail” in place of “changed.”)
By the way, small business, despite its “smallness,” dominates the employment scene. In Canada (and similarly in other countries), small business employs far more people than does big business. In my general survey, a further myth of most respondents suggested that business runs at about 30% net profit. How wonderful if it were true. But it is not. A look at America’s largest companies during a recent 5-year span and during a similar span 25 years ago show that profits of the big successful companies lurk at around 4 to 7% of sales in a good year and much less in bad times.
I, active in business, a leader and thinker, like to begin my discussions about profits before a business audience with the proposition that making profits CANNOT be the sole goal of an enterprise, nor can increasing shareholder value be the sole objective of an enterprise.
I do explain that making money—profits and increasing shareholder value—should be some of the goals of an enterprise, and extremely important ones at that. It’s all a matter of balance, but an enterprise has to have a purpose other than money. The founders know it and the early employees know it. However, as time marches on, people lose sight of the original purpose, and the myth of profits seems to raise its head and take precedence as the company’s noblest aim.
Besides, as indicated above, business continually demonstrates its in ability to make profits at all. Even governments are waking up to that fact by shifting their revenue sources from taxation of dwindling profits to taxations of sales (applying value-added taxes in one form or another). Yes, profits are needed by businesses, very much so, but they remain elusive.
1.4 Compiling Facts and Forming Conclusions
The question of how to make business work much better across the board has plagued business intellectuals for years. So, many such people set about to offer their perspectives on why the current business model doesn’t work, why 85% of new businesses die in the first five years and why around 58% of successful firms can’t seem to keep it together for very long. They gather facts, assemble information, congregate with peers to look at, assess and analyze the data. Then they write a book. These books are valuable as they bring so much information together in one place and offer the results for everyone to see. Let’s look at a few of them:
• Who Moved My Cheese? – Spencer Johnson
• Good to Great – Jim Collins
• In Search of Excellence – Tom Peters
• What (really) works – Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, & Bruce Roberson
The authors and social scientists offer advice from the assembly of facts and the arrival at conclusions that are quite logical based on the empirical data. They answer the question by looking at what the successful firms collectively have done to reach the positive results posted in the public records. Therefore, you probably should follow that advice. I certainly have; there is plenty of worthwhile information to be taken from these documents.
Yet, I have trouble with them, regarding one or more conclusions arrived at.1 The answer in the specific book may be right, but the reason articulated is, in my opinion, often wrong.2 And sometimes, the answer itself is wrong or at least it flies in the face of the fundamentals presented in the pages of this monograph. Why that is so, is open to conjecture. Perhaps the authors themselves may never have played the game by getting into the trenches. (My analogous example is the armchair quarterback sitting before the TV, assembling information on quarterbacks year after year, putting it all together and then writing a book on what makes a good quarterback without themselves ever having played the position or the game.)
It reminds me of James Watson’s comment concerning the life partner, Odile, of Francis Crick, Watson’s co-discoverer of DNA. Odile opined that gravity went only three miles high into the sky. If one observes that airplanes fly, one could surmise that airplanes appear to be no longer bound by gravity, as perhaps Odile may have. That is, if one has a set of observations and then sets out to explain why those observations lead to further behaviours – without probing the fundamentals – it is amazing what conclusions one can draw.
I am not here to criticize these books or the authors. They have filled an invaluable role; I applaud them, have discovered much from them and often refer their works to others. However, they have gaps. I am here to move from the abstract to the concrete, to add information and to enhance current findings. I hope that this book will fill in some of those gaps for you.
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1 Separate papers discussing some of these differences are available from the author.
2 The proof is that a few years after publication of the book, some of the companies presented as examples of business success began to seriously falter.
________________________________________
1.5 Good Books that Struggle with the Questions (and Answers)
On a deeper, more philosophical level, some authors struggle with the direction in which our society appears to be heading. They are asking the same probing questions about the success of human endeavours (although a focus on societal distress has prompted most of these intellectual searches). They leave their ponderings for the reader, hoping that among the participants some answers will start to appear. The readings that have caught my attention and praise are:
• Leadership and the New Science – Margaret Wheatley
• The Spirit Level – Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett
• A Fair Country – John Ralston Saul
• Champlain’s Dream – David Hackett Fischer
Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
A. Leadership and the New Science – Margaret Wheatley
More and more forward thinkers are acknowledging and accepting the wisdom encompassed in the concepts termed “New Science of Management”3 as espoused by Dr. Margaret Wheatley. The popularity of and demand for Dr. Wheatley as a speaker attest to the growing curiosity about her ideas. Her precepts contrast with the prevailing thinking of modern society in which the emphasis remains on orderliness, command-and-control, and top-down thinking in business, universities and governments. Unfortunately, Dr. Wheatley seems to be viewed by all too many leaders as a futurist, unreal today, when in fact, her position is current, if people would only pay attention. Dr. Wheatley offers great thoughts and ideas but no specific fixes in this volume.
B. The Spirit Level – Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett
The Spirit Level, in my opinion, is a “must” read if you care about society. This treatise observes that despite human achievement in this century, collectively, we are a mess, obsessed with over-eating, shopping and spending, drugs, smoking, crime, violence, etc. The book’s conclusion is that it is the scale of inequality in salaries, income, etc., that provides a powerful negative pressure on us. The authors show that both the broken society and the broken economy (of 2009) are a result of the growth of inequality in the societies. The larger the differences between top and bottom rungs, the greater are the societal pressures. In one chapter, the book attempts to suggest how to create greater equality, but not, to my mind, in a very workable fashion.
C. A Fair Country – John Ralston Saul
Canadian author, member of the Order of Canada, John Ralston Saul articulates in A Fair Country the reasons that Canada is such a peaceful caring society. However, he warns that Canada may be on a path that will destroy its human advantages of fairness and concern for others, a reputation that Canada to this point in time, has earned deservedly. He worries greatly about what leaders can do to slow down the negative trends he sees. In response to his concerns, I authored a rather lengthy explanation of how each of these issues, or issues similar to them, have been handled successfully within the scope of The Respect Revolution (2) and its application to the business and non-business world.
D. Champlain’s Dream – David Hackett Fischer
Pulitzer Prize winner4 and historian, David Hackett Fischer, exposed the profound effect that explorer Samuel de Champlain had on Canada and all of North America. Champlain was responsible for the creation of the first permanent French settlements in North America, including the founding of Quebec City and the populating of New France. He developed and nurtured three distinct cultures in Canada: Quebecois, Acadien and Métis, which with millions of descendants endure to this day.5 His positive relationship with the native people permitted him to view the new world as a place where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord, and he actually took steps to make that happen. Champlain viewed the indigenous natives as equals and admired them intensely. He listened to them, learned from them, trusted them and exchanged young people between the French and the native cultures. He embraced the native philosophy of inclusion and round-table meetings. The profundity is that Champlain clearly established a new culture of tolerance and understanding in Canada, one that endures and explains Canada to this day.
In summary, all four books above are highly elegant and worthy thought pieces. The practical solutions they seem to be lacking are presented (I hope you will agree) by this book: How Humans Fight the Laws of Nature – and Lose.
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3 New Science of Management is also described in other terms such as: “complexity theory,” “emergence,” “swarm theory,” “chaos theory,” “evolutionary process,” “bottom-up management,” “six degrees of separation,” etc.
4 A professor of history at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a teacher at both Harvard and Oxford, David Hackett Fischer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 2004 book, Washington’s Crossing.
5 The Acadians migrated also to New Orleans and “Acadien” became “Cajun,” the culture for which
Louisiana is now famous.
________________________________________
The word that comes most easily to me to explain our human problem, or in a very simplistic way to solve our human messes, is the idea of “respect.” As a result, my 12-volume business-book series was given the title of The Respect Revolution. Respect will be a constant theme throughout these pages. While people understand the idea of “respect,” few appreciate the little mechanisms that have to be in place to make it happen: never interrupting a speaker, being punctual, not belittling another with sighs or rolling of the eyes, avoiding any threat whatsoever, etc. But more on that later!
References for this chapter in the order in which they appear:
Bracketed notes relate to references in this book’s bibliography. Appendixes are in Book Two available at http://www.fightingnature.com
• The Respect Revolution – Appendix A, (2)
• The Histories by Herodotus (3)
• America’s largest companies – Appendix B
• Why profits are needed by businesses – Appendix C
• In Section 1.4, see Section 1.2
• Who Moved My Cheese? – Spencer Johnson (4)
• Good to Great – Jim Collins (5)
• In Search of Excellence – Tom Peters (6)
• what (really) works – Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, & Bruce Roberson (7)
• James Watson (56)
• Leadership and the New Science – Margaret Wheatley (8), Appendix AB
• The Spirit Level – Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett (9), Appendix D
• A Fair Country – John Ralston Saul (10), Appendix E
• Champlain’s Dream – David Hackett Fischer (11), Appendix AC
CHAPTER 2
The Laws of Nature
Learned scientific discovery tells us the earth is 13.7 billion years old. The evidence comes from not only the simplicity of local carbon dating (5 or 6 billion years) but also, scientists can now look back astronomically and “see” to about 13.7 billion years ago, as reported by George Smoot, what is mainly the afterglow of the Big Bang. His observations coincide precisely with theory developed earlier. This section is not intending to join the argument between the “creationists” and the “evolutionists” (but at least there is some comfort for those who join the debate that some creationists say their doctrine is consistent with evolutionists). In any event, into this grand spectrum comes the evolution of the human. At the moment, archaeology and anthropology clearly show the humanoid as having existed for 1 million years. Recent evidence now postulates that number at 2 million years. Knowledgeable people tell me it is closer to 7 million years but clear evidence is lacking. One or seven million, it matters little. The point is that the humanoid span is but a mere speck of time. It took 13,700 million years to prepare the way for us. We just arrived in the last million or so. But even on the scale of 1 million years, we, as communicators and record keepers, are quite recent as noted in the sketch below.
That is why ancient Romans aren’t really so ancient. They thought like us, lived like us, loved like us and made many of the same mistakes. We have this huge backdrop of history to draw on. What does it tell us?
Over these millennia, natural laws have been at work. We all know most of them, but as my colleagues and I consulted with business and non-profit organizations to make them better enterprises (improved results and more fun to work in), we have run across a few well-known natural laws and facts that people seemed intent on ignoring. I relate them to you in a random list at the moment, but subsequent chapters will cover them in detail and especially connect them to the art and practice of running human endeavours. They include the following:
• You can’t push a rope
• Status is a key priority
• It really is a chaotic world
• Old Ecclesiastes got it right
• No one likes getting attacked
• Humans will pause for beauty
• Survival is most important of all
• Human differences create balance
• Feedback is essential to evolution
• Only one guy can be in charge of the pack
• Having control over our lives is a high priority
• The two sexes are different (most of the time)
• Nature grows in complexity through cooperation
• Things evolve to the best shape over the long term
• The laws of physics are immutable – Momentum = MV, etc.
• The order of existence, upwards, is: DNA, genes, chromosomes, cells, creature
2.3 Putting a Bit of Meat onto the “Laws” of Nature
Let us expand a bit on each of these:
A. You Can’t Push a Rope
If you try to push a 10-pound toy truck with a rope, nothing will happen. Yet, with that same rope you can pull that 10-pound truck with ease.
B. Status Is a Key Priority
Chickens quickly establish their pecking order. Cows go to the stable in an understood order. Wolves and chimpanzees quickly learn who is at the top of the heap, who is at the bottom, and where each, as an individual member, fits in. That is, animals quickly find their status location in their communities and conform to that role. If in doubt, they fight, sometimes to the death, to discover where their status lies. Upon meeting a new person, humans, within seconds, assess what they perceive to be that person’s status vis-à-vis their own.
C. It Really Is a Chaotic World
We know weather is chaotic as is the timing of a volcano that erupts or the earth that issues forth its tremors. We never know in which summer the wasps will be so numerous as to be serious pests or when the locust clouds will plague us. When we look back, we know we could never have predicted five years ago the technical marvels we see today or the very job we are performing now.
D. Old Ecclesiastes Got It Right
He said that the fish that gets caught in the net is no less capable than the one a few meters away which is not snagged. That is, the fish’s success has a huge element of good fortune associated with it. Or, when you stomp on an ant’s nest, those who die underfoot are no less clever than those who escape. Time and fortune continually play their hand and often a major hand.
E. No One Likes Being Attacked
Every animal views an attack as a negative experience, doing whatever they can to avoid it. Humans, too, resist attack. Experience has shown that, although both are reviled, verbal attacks usually affect the individual more than physical attacks.
F. Humans Will Pause for Beauty
Humans not only will pause to examine beauty but will often go out of their way for it because they are deeply moved by it, whether in the form of art, music, athletics, literature, games, the human form, architecture, landscape, etc.
G. Survival Is Most Important of All
If a plant or an animal does not survive, it cannot propagate its species. Thus, the will to live, to survive and to ensure future survival, moves to the top of all our priority lists.
H. Human Differences Remain in Balance
We may not like highly aggressive people or individuals who are so wrapped up in detail and constantly correct us, but we live with these personality types every day. We may not like the loudmouth or the boaster or the obvious status seeker or the one who seems unable to stop talking. Yet all of us have experienced each of these types of people at one time or another. In fact, they seem inescapable. As we look over the recorded history of humankind as laid out in the 2,500 pages of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire it is clear that such people existed 20 centuries years ago, too; in other words, they have been around for a long time. Yet not one of these extreme personality types has dominated society; personality differences have remained in balance over the millennia.
I. The Order of Existence, Upwards, Is: DNA, Genes, Chromosomes, Cells, Creatures
All creatures are made up of cell components that include amino acids, bases, cellulose, chloroplasts, chromosomes, cytoplasm, DNA, enzymes, eukaryotes, genes, mitochondria, mutations, nuclei, polymers, proteins, RNA, starch and sugar – that is, each cell is a very complex, orderly, system.
J. Feedback Is Essential to Evolution
As you drive your auto, your eyes continually provide signals of what is going on out there, suggesting you turn the wheel a little or a lot or, perhaps, slow down. These visual signals feed back to your brain, which in turn signals your hands on the steering wheel. The consumer market continually gets feedback on the products that people like enough to buy so that, in response, the producers make more and better versions of them: video games, computers or automobiles. With feedback, animals improve and adapt to the world around them. For example, the swifter deer will not be caught by the wolves and will be more likely to survive. The slower ones will more likely be devoured. The swift deer live to propagate young fast deer while the slower ones die out. This severe form of feedback provides signals that encourage species improvement. If you don’t think feedback is important, try driving your car for 20 seconds with your eyes closed.
K. Having Control Over Our Lives Is a High Priority
Our own studies have come up with seven parameters for job and life happiness. At the top of the list is “control” over our own domains. We like to be involved in the decisions that will affect us. We prefer to be left alone to accomplish our tasks in our way. We like to make our own choices and our own decisions. This “independence” or “autonomy” or “self-actualization” is a factor that makes a clear difference whether we are able to enjoy our work or life position. Reflect on this yourself as it relates to your current job or personal situation. The automobile gives us control over our own transportation, and that is why America has more autos than driving-age people. The cell phone gives us control over our communications (and often instant feedback as noted in ‘J’ above) and that explains its enormous popularity. Babies seek autonomy to go in their own direction as dad tugs bravely on the harness to force his opinion about direction on the urchin. Old people get testy when control is taken from their hands. Control is a lifelong pursuit.
L. The Two Sexes Are Different (Most of the Time)
Two-sex species evolve more readily than asexual species because asexual species, failing to evolve fast enough to adapt to changing conditions, go extinct more readily than two-sex species. More importantly to this book is the realization that the two sexes feed off each other. As one sex develops a more and more attracting feature (the bronze feathers of the male Cedar Waxwing, for example), the other sex develops more and more interest in those same features – a two-way street, no less.
M. Nature Grows in Complexity Through Cooperation
Several structures within cells (mitochondria and chloroplasts) are reported to have descended from several kinds of bacteria that joined forces 2 billion years ago because of the benefits they could obtain from cooperating with each other. Thus, they formed the eukaryotic cell, which is distinctive from bacteria. Generally, two types of cells exist in the living world: eukaryotic cells (of plants and animals) and bacterial cells. Cell cooperation has increased that complexity from simple organisms to plants to simple animals and ultimately to the human, with 10 trillion or more cells cooperating to make you and me.
N. Things Evolve to the Best Shape, Over the Long Term
Given the long term, things evolve to a sophisticated and essentially highly functional level. It has taken 2 billion years for the human to evolve. Studies show it will take the eye (of a human or other animal) about 300,000 years to evolve from simple cells.
O. The Laws of Physics are Immutable – Momentum = MV, etc.
As we develop this story we will refer to the fact that momentum, the force on a body in motion is described by the equation momentum = mass x velocity.
P. Only One Guy Can Be in Charge of the Pack
Every wolf pack, every gathering of apes, every pride of lions has only one guy in charge – as is the case with most mammalian species. This dominant role is unequivocal, not open for dispute or debate unless it will be a fight to the death to define the sole leader in charge. When you outline a task, put only one person in charge, otherwise there will be trouble.
In subsequent chapters, I will show how each of these affect us in what we do and how it is our habit to ignore these million-year old laws, much to our own detriment as we try to succeed in our various human endeavours.
References for this chapter in the order in which they appear:
Bracketed notes relate to references in this book’s bibliography. Appendixes are in Book Two available at http://www.fightingnature.com.
• Wrinkles in Time, George Smoot (19)
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (20)
• DNA is explained in The Genetic Primer – Appendix F
• 2.3K refers back to Section 4.1
• 2.3M structures within cells (mitochondria and chloroplasts) are in 2.3I
• For oneand two-sex species, see (22)
• The other sex develops more and more interest in those same features (22)
• Plants and animals and bacterial cells – Appendix F
PART II
HOW HUMAN ENDEAVORS SEEM TO WORK
CHAPTER 3
The Greatest Secret in the World
3.1 Brief Introduction to where The Greatest Secret is coming from
The ideas in this book all began10 years ago, as my associates and I founded the company Caswell Corporate Coaching Company (CCCC), which is dedicated to creating significant improvements in company performance. We have successfully achieved this daunting task, time and again. In a nutshell, improved results are attained, repeatedly, by getting cooperative people to cooperate even more. As you well know, most of the time, some people are not cooperating as much as they could be. Simple logic tells us that a group of 50 people cooperating well will probably outhustle a group of 50 people not cooperating so well. In fact, the 50 hustlers may outdo 75 people not cooperating, something that history and sports have demonstrated over and over again for years and centuries. Think of sports franchises that win: The winners usually are those in which team members work together without a focus on the “stars” of the game. Imagine a rowing cox having all the rowing oars in synch. You can visualize its competitors losing if their synchronization (cooperation) is coordinated.
In the course of defining, discovering and delineating cooperation among people, we came across a very simple truth. We call it The Greatest Secret in the World because it affects everything we do, everything that everybody in the world does. Graphically, it looks like the image on page 38.
What it says is that emotion sits at 100 points vs. logic which sits at 1 point. That is, the speed of the emotional processor can be 100 times as fast as our logic processor. Thus, emotion, not logic, forces the direction of almost everything that happens in the world – and that is true in your life, too. However, we all think the reverse is true or should be true. The greatest secret in the world is that emotion trumps logic, because we’re creatures of survival and we must survive before all else. I do not expect you to agree with the outcome from this just-illustrated sketch, because it goes against so much that so many people believe in. Therefore, I will spend the next few sections explaining why I see things this way and at the conclusion, I will return to expand upon the same sketch.
Some evidence for emotion’s dominance probably is on the front page of your favourite newspaper today. Look at the stories there. Circle the ones where the issues are emotional and leave the logical stories alone. I suspect you will find 9 out of 10 newsworthy stories are caused by emotion taking precedence. Or take a look at your company or your organization this past week: how many “stupid” (read emotionally driven) things happened there? Or in your home or your club?
Before we go any further, let’s us talk about cooperation, the subject that brought us to the topic of emotion in the first place. From cooperation comes success. How do we measure success? We all have different ways:
• Building the perfect product or system
• Gaining recognition
• Serving people the way they expect to be served
• Lifting a difficult situation to a workable level
• Accomplishing an “impossible” goal
• Winning the World Series
• Profits
• Growth
Companions to success are:
• Having fun
• Team spirit
• High morale
• Self-motivation
• Low staff turnover
• Higher salaries
How do we achieve success? Our answer is that we get success by getting people to cooperate with one another on a consistent basis. In fact, we can now re-define the role of the company I run: The company is about managing cooperation, and this book is about helping you manage cooperation. No fancier words are needed. Simply put:
• Cooperation makes things work
• Lack of cooperation makes things fail
While many people accept this pair of statements (as illustrated, for example, by the 2010 FIFA Cup-generated statement “Uniti Vinceremo,” United We Will Win [invincible]),others do not necessarily appreciate cooperation’s importance. Even if they do, we are brought back to a basic question: How do you get people to cooperate on a consistent basis? The reality is that most people really do want to cooperate. If a person on the street asks somebody for directions to the next block, most people are anxious to provide the answer. Rarely will an individual say “No, I don’t want to help you.” The reason is that the sense of cooperation stimulates the reward centers in the brain with dopamine, the reward chemical. It also triggers serotonin which improves mood. Cooperating is a positive experience and thus, a normal human reaction. Since most people really do want to cooperate, the real question is why do people decide not to cooperate? The answer is because they feel threatened. Our very delicate egos are easily alarmed by:
• Misunderstandings
• Insults
• Lack of clarity
• Defensive body language
• Negative tone of voice
• Posturing
• Rank or hierarchy
• Things that are different than expected
It doesn’t take much. If we understand why people decide NOT to cooperate, then we are on the road to helping them cooperate.
A. Life Is About Cooperation
We living entities started as unicellular creatures, yet when cells cooperated, more was achieved biologically speaking. Life evolved to a complicated form, bacteria, which had only one component within its cells. Then a further split occurred with the evolution of eukaryotes that carried three or more components, different ones for plants and for animals. That is, the earth had two dominant groups of living entities: eukaryotes and bacteria. The eukaryotes evolved along two lines, plants, with more and more cells, and also animals, with even more cells until finally today we have the human being. Talk about cell cooperation: One cell of the human has 23,000 genes (instructions). The molecular form of those instructions is comprised of thousands of DNA strands. Each cell has full DNA, as much information as 30 Encyclopaedia Britannica sets (not 30 volumes, but 30 sets of volumes) in each cell in our bodies. The human genome has 3,000 million base pairs of DNA strands; that is 10,000 billion cells cooperating in each human = 300,000 billion sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica in our body’s cells. I would tendto conclude that cooperation appears to be the major reason for the successful evolution of humans.
B. Bacteria and Human Beings
If we study the human mouth, we will learn that groups of Streptococci bacteria are deposited on the teeth almost immediately after brushing. Four hours later, Fusobacteria will have formed. Harmless in themselves, the Fusobacteria are a bridge germ that allows gingivitis to build thousands of colonies, towers and condominiums, a regular subdivision of living things in your food-intake cavern. If left unattended, their chemicals get into our circulation system, complicating diabetes and increasing the risk of heart disease. At this point there may be 500 different species growing at the same time in our mouths. Saliva, our protective disinfectant, leeches the iron needed for survival out of germs, killing some; however, saliva has limited powers. The reason we get ill stems from the fact that the bacteria “talk” to each other (with chemical signals) to form an attack quorum.6 That is, they will not attack unless they feel they can win. When the bacteria get the signal that you are tired (that your immune system is not fully vitalized), they will issue the attack-and-multiply command. Note that, more frequently than not, you don’t get ill because a new germ has arrived; you get ill because you have allowed your defences to deteriorate and the thousands of harmful bacteria that are present all the time have now chosen to launch an attack. We saw evidence that a new bacteria (swine flu, for example) did not incapacitate a strong person but was more virulent in a weaker person.
Studies of biofilms, a fairly recent discovery, show that bacteria work in groups rather than alone. These films cover our skin with about 120 different species. For the most part they are benign, but when the skin is cut, they can enter the bloodstream and can cause great harm. It is now realized that knee and hip implants can open the door for biofilms to enter the body. As a consequence, these implants result in 40,000 hip-replacement infections annually in the U.S. In fact, 500,000 people die annually in the U.S. of biofilm infection, almost as many as of cancer. Unfortunately, biofilms repel antibiotics. We have to pull the infected implant out, clean it up, disinfect around it or replace it.
Yet, we and the bacteria are symbiotic; we live off each other. We could not digest our food without bacteria in our stomachs helping us. Fortunately, of the 40,000 bacterial species in humans, only 100 are pathogenic. The total numbers boggle the mind: There are 10 bacteria cells for every human cell in an individual for a total count of 100 trillion bacteria per person. Obviously, there is cooperation at all levels.
C. Cities
Cities are getting bigger instead of smaller: Mexico City, São Paulo, Mumbai, and Tokyo, all have populations in the millions. More and more people come to these centers, hoping that cooperation with other humans will improve their lot. It must be working because those cities continue to grow.
D. Conclusion
Cooperation appears to be the common element for success at just about everything. If cooperation is deemed to be so extensive and so beneficial, what keeps us from cooperating as much as we should? The answer lies in the natural law that our number-one living priority is to survive, and when survival is threatened, we cease or reduce our cooperation. So, let’s move on to survival.
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6 Many other life forms work on the basis of an attack quorum. Slime mould in the forest remain as independent entities until, by some quorum signal, they all join together and are then able to walk across the forest floor to a new location to feast. Then they return to their disparate ways.
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Above all else, we (and any other species) must survive. If we do not survive, our progeny will not develop and our species may die. We know it and the bacteria know it. So at the very top of our existence list is survival. It is a primordial command. If our survival is threatened, we will do whatever is necessary to hang on and we quickly forget about all the social and other niceties, hence the panic and fatal trampling of humans during great festivals. We cease to cooperate, and focus on ourselves, on our own survival. If survival is no longer threatened, we return to our other priorities of living.
Our survival is driven considerably by two small glands in our brain called the amygdalas (or amygdalae). They evolved to help us survive, for example, from the sabre-toothed tiger 1 million years ago; or 20 million years ago when we were primitive mammals, mice or rats, the amygdalas helped us react to and survive the snake. The gland triggers the commonly known flight-or-fight reaction. However, here is the key. It has to act quickly because if we spend too much time thinking about what to do, we would be somebody’s breakfast. So, the amygdalas throw all caution to the winds (something that the logic part of the brain would not otherwise permit) and just gets us out of harm’s way as fast as it can. Even if we make a stupid mistake along the way, Mother Nature doesn’t care, because we have lived to see another day and we will probably be able to fix the mistake; it is living that Mother Nature cares about. Notice the simple priority: survival first, everything else next. (You will observe repeatedly throughout this book how Mother Nature seems to always take the route of simplicity.) In your daily lives, while driving, squirrels and chipmunks and deer will react rapidly (and sometimes not so wisely) to the threat of your car and will head very quickly in a direction they think leads away from trouble. It is the amygdala that is guiding the process every time.
I can’t resist a sidebar. As indicated above, the mouse learned to fear snakes. Those mice that didn’t show enough concern for serpents weren’t around very long. As it happens, there is only a difference of 300 genes (of the 23,000 in us) between the human and mouse, leaving 22,700 that are the same. No wonder we still fear snakes – an irrational fear by the way, as snakes have rarely harmed or even threatened most of us. (The 300 gene difference also explains why mice make such good laboratory animals for studying human disease.) Tests with human infants who had no time to learn about snakes showed the babies also reacted immediately to avoid the presence of tiny snakes, whereas they were unconcerned about the presence of tiny rabbits.
Our survival is driven by amygdalas. To ensure we survive, it must dominate the logic processor of our brain. It does this by reacting 10 to 100 times faster than the logic processor, depending upon the degree of importance of the threat. This explains why two hours after an argument in which we had defended our territory or our beliefs or our position, we then think: “Why didn’t I convey that point?” or “Why did I say such a stupid thing?” That was because the amygdala, at the moment of threat, trumped the logic processor and blurted out a protective statement; only after time, did the lumbering logic processor come along and tell us what we should have said or reasoned.
The amygdala is no little action box; it kicks in more than 50 physiological changes to our body: our eyes dilate, our white blood cell count increases (to fend off the infection from the tiger’s bite); we sweat to keep our cool; our adrenalin increases and our hairs stand on end (that is so mouse appears bigger to the snake, who might decide the mouse is too large to swallow). Our bowels move (“He was so frightened, he wet his pants.”) and 45 more physiological changes take place. Thus, when the amygdala kicks in, we can’t just turn it off or tell it to go away. It is readying you for the emergency that could be life threatening. As much as we pretend that the boss screaming at us doesn’t matter, we do sweat and undergo all sorts of bodily changes which take hours to dissipate; we can’t just flick a switch and turn it off.
At this point we come back to the sketch that opened this chapter. What does it say?
What it says is that emotion operates 10 to 100 times faster than logic. Emotion trumps almost everything that happens in the world, not logic. Emotion rules most things that happen in your life, not logic, but we all think the reverse is true and want it to be that way. Our logic tells us that it should be logic first, not emotion. Yet we are fighting Mother Nature’s master plan with such reasoning. At this very moment, in all likelihood, your logic processor is saying: “This argument makes sense.” Yet it is competing with your emotional processor (amygdala) which is saying: “I am threatened by an argument that goes against a lifetime of beliefs, so I have a hard time accepting what my logic says.” That is, even in examining this material, your emotion could be moving in to dominate your logic.
3.4 A Few Conclusions So Far on This Theme of Cooperation
Let us wrap up with a summary of conclusions:
Conclusion 1: Emotions always dominate, because survival must always dominate
Conclusion 2: Emotions are a natural, largely uncontrollable human dimension
Conclusion 3: Cooperation stops or is reduced in the face of protective emotions
Conclusion 4: We must neutralize “natural” defensive emotions if we are to cooperate more
Conclusion 5: We need to cooperate more in order to be more successful
3.5 How Emotions, as a Dominant Force, Are Taken Advantage of
As opposed to emotions creating problems, emotions can be used to our advantage, for example using emotions to sell, via:
• Sex appeal (How many ads have beautiful men or women?)
• Fear (“If you don’t get a Smith alarm now, someone will rob you.”)
• Intimidation (Body language, message and tone of voice to get you to capitulate.)
• The need to belong (“Every winner is drinking Ace beer, not the losers.”)
• Re-living the bad experience (“Remember how it felt to be robbed?”)
If emotions do not dominate, why would we waste our time with these sales approaches? Why not pure logic? In fact some organizations do sell with pure logic: accountants, lawyers, engineers. When was the last time you saw an engaging ad for services from any of these?
Now that you know the “greatest secret in the world,” what can you do with it? The directions you can take are to:
1. Be aware of it and think about your reaction to every situation. Awareness is the first step towards increased human power.
2. Introduce steps to move from the emotional phase back to the logic phase (which we will discuss later in Section 3.10).
3. Follow the three hints offered in Section 3.7 of this Chapter.
4. Stop blaming, which simply stirs up emotions. In fact stop criticizing. We will explain “blaming” in more detail later in Section 3.9.
5. Control emotions and you move back to logic, which gets to a solution which provides success at whatever you do; that is, recognize and accept that emotions drive most decisions; logic as the driver is the rare exception. That is why the world is such a mess!
With an approach that neutralizes emotions (the constant barrier to success), 100% success should not be a marvel but an expectation. While making such a statement may seem like arrogance on our part, I can advise you that at first we continued to keep our fingers crossed as one success after another came our way. Then, with time, we realized this approach HAD to be successful because, while it overturned every rock and looked into every nook and cranny, more importantly it removed the biggest obstacle of all, negative emotions. We have experienced this 100% success rate on everything that we have attempted using these methods over the past ten years. To give you a few examples, we have used the improved control-of-emotions approach through a number of processes:
• CCCC does this:
within its Safe Environment
in its process to defuse emotions
in its problem-solving processes
with its employee-management councils
• Career Coaching International (CCI), the former sister company to CCCC, does this with its soothing effect of coaching, namely in neutralizing the employee’s emotion in:
job-searching information meetings
interview handling of “embarrassing questions”
salary negotiations
The result is a clear path to cooperation:
Everything we have discussed so far in this book centers on “respect.” To make the point that respect is the essential framework for guiding people, I have written 12 books, about which you already have been advised, called The Respect Revolution. Every single problem you see in your newspaper, in your enterprise, in your family or throughout the world is caused by a lack of “respect.” “Respect” is appreciating that people around you are different, have different thoughts and values. “Respect” is about allowing those different people to cherish those thoughts without censure from you in any form, whatsoever. You don’t have to agree with them, but you must allow them the right to be the way they are (and if they trespass onto your values, you set boundaries and actions that would be a consequence of such transgressions so that people cannot be disrespectful of you with impunity).
In the context of this discussion, “respect” is also about not springing other people’s defensive emotions into action. It is about your doing work to avoid having people’s negative emotions triggered accidentally by you. That means you do not blame people and you avoid steady criticisms (a subject to be dealt with shortly). It is through this means that you will be most likely to gain and retain their cooperation. In turn, through cooperation, you will get things done:
• the logical way,
• the correct way,
• the guaranteed7 successful way.
As you well know, you can set about to be respectful towards others, but if they are abusive in return, it seems rather pointless to maintain the “respect.” Yes, indeed. Well, not so fast. If “respect” offers us an answer to the world’s chaos, (most of which is caused by disrespect), we must find a way to make “respect” work. We offer two approaches. The first, articulated below, is more or less within your own control. The second applies to the group setting by the imposition of a “respect system” within the group since good intentions are never enough (because anybody’s lightning-fast uncontrollable emotions can intrude at any moment into the most well-meaning plan). This group method, which has been successful for us over this decade, will receive attention in later chapters in this book.
The connection between “The Greatest Secret in the World” and “respect” has now been made. The “greatest secret” is that emotions dominate logic and if allowed to continue unabated, will ruin success almost every time. However, if you are able to defuse emotions, you can practice “respect,” which allows the world to move forward in a less destructive way. That is, “respect” is the mechanism for achieving results, but to achieve “respect,” we must learn how to control (or defuse) our natural defensive emotions. Ergo: The “greatest secret” allows us to practice “respect.”
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7 You have to be careful with guarantees; but I do guarantee you that my own experience has resulted in 100% success in hundreds of endeavours under very difficult circumstances, following these practices. This has led me to believe and say that 100% success is achievable by anyone, repeatedly, but only if the outlined processes are followed as prescribed.