Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [30]
Recall the experience of Les Lewis upon his return to Gore in chapter 1. After several years away, he became a carrier of the bureaucracy virus, and it was only the strength of the culture that Bill Gore had instilled in the company that rejected his virus and prevented him from infecting everyone around him.
Perhaps it was also easier for W. L. Gore & Associates to reject attempts to institutionalize telling and controlling because the firm had been built around freedom from the very beginning. Most companies, by contrast, don’t see anything wrong with telling and controlling, and even when their business becomes so inefficient and the human price rises too high to be hidden, they don’t question their “how” organization—they just try to “reengineer” it. Indeed, it’s tough for an existing “how” company to change, but it can be done. In the following chapters we will discuss several examples—FAVI included—but we acknowledge that each has particular circumstances. Their industries, sizes, histories, or locations may be very different from companies you may be familiar with. But there is one fundamental phenomenon that illuminates the question of whether an existing hierarchical, domination-, and control-based social culture can ever change, and if it can, then how. To explore it, we’ll have to make an unusual detour to the world of primates—this time, real ones.
OUR PEACEFUL BRETHREN
At first, studying primates may seem like a strange way to learn how to run a business. But if primates can change their social habits, ingrained in them over millions of years, it’s possible that humans, too, can learn how to change their work habits, developed over just a few generations.9
Common chimpanzees, unfortunately, don’t provide much encouragement. Not only do they live in extremely hierarchical societies, but they are also violent, murdering and even eating one another from time to time. Primatologists do not have evidence of common chimpanzees changing their cruel and despotic ways. But there is another variety of chimpanzee, pygmy chimps called bonobos. And, boy, are they different from their robust brothers and sisters. Their males are not very muscular; they share food; and if there is domination, it’s not by males but by females. Bonobos resolve social tensions in a pretty unusual way, too—with sex. In fact, in captivity bonobos have sex with everyone—related or not, with any number of individuals, and in such a variety of ways that it often defies Newton’s gravitational laws. Want to say hello, or need to resolve a conflict, reduce stress, or celebrate a good meal in good company? Have sex. This is not a nature film you’d like your kids to watch on the Discovery Channel—it goes far beyond back-scratching.
Unfortunately, it’s also not the way most of us would like to see our businesses run—office romances can quickly go bananas. Besides, bonobo society is still hierarchical, which causes many problems, for which the bonobos have just one, X-rated, solution. In the wild—the dense, remote Congolese rain forests—the sex, in all its charming diversity, was accompanied by violence. Males pull, slap, hit, and bite other males to increase the aggressors’ opportunities for sex. Females do the same to their “sisters” to increase access to certain males and, joined by other females and males, also regularly head gang attacks on males who tried to force sex. So, though bonobos may show that both love and war are ways of life among our primate brethren, pygmy chimps are out, too. Censored!
So much for chimps. Luckily, researchers have also studied Anubis baboon societies living in the East African savanna. At the beginning there was not much to hope for, as far as we’re concerned. Males frequently fight to gain rank in the despotic hierarchy and regularly hit innocent bystanders, too. Females’ ranks are hereditary, so they don’t fight. Unlike males, which transfer between troops at puberty, females stay where they are born, and the high rate of “affiliative” behavior—such as grooming—between females