How - Dov Seidman [46]
What does the persnickety lunchroom manager and his signs have in common with the U.S. government and Sarbanes-Oxley? Both reveal a startling truth about rules: Rules respond to behavior; they don’t lead it. Rules don’t govern human progress; they govern the human past. This essential truth shapes our thinking about rules: To succeed, it seems to imply, we must learn to dance with the rules.
DANCING WITH RULES
I believe in the rule of law, and I believe we need rules and laws. Certain laws work. Laws have done a good job of regulating easily quantifiable human actions. Environmental laws, safety laws, child labor laws—these are areas where society unquestionably benefits from hard floors that regulate action. We do not select a bottled water based on how few people it has poisoned, nor do we buy the car least likely to spontaneously combust. If extensive and reliable science exists about how to build a house to best withstand earthquakes and hurricanes, society benefits by codifying that science into law. We should not give builders four options for building something when we know that only one will work. Remember that this book is not about crime, sociopathic behavior, or the desire to undermine or destroy civil society; it is about the habits of mind and behavior that can lead to long-term, sustained success in a hyperconnected, hypertransparent information age. When I talk about rules, I’m talking about the rules that regulate behavior within the mainstream of socially acceptable action.
Likewise, I believe that we should all master the ability to live well within the rules. Mastering the rules is a Hill of B accomplishment. It’s safe, well-defined, and basic. Like all basic knowledge, it is a necessary stage on the path to real understanding. But too many of us get stuck on the Hill of B.
We live in a rule-of-law society, and due to our history of ever evolving toward fairer rule making, we have grown very comfortable with rules. In fact, our reliance on them has become part of the problem; we turn to law to solve too much. If the law says we can, then we do. We’re very good at can versus can’t thinking. Our habits of mind are so strong in this area, in fact, that we’ve become muscle-bound, as overdeveloped as a bodybuilder trying to touch his toes—strong, but inflexible. We overrespect rules, which leads us into a quagmire where all our actions get mucked up in the spectrum of legal permissibility. We’re so strong in this way that we begin to feel like we can do anything as long as we obey the law. We become like Microsoft was in the 1990s, believing that we can crush the competition as long as we don’t break the letter of the law.
As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart suggested, we’ve conflated legal permissibility with permission. Dancing with rules often leads to losing your sense of what is right for the long term. Since rules often blow around with the winds of political expediency, they don’t provide a stable reference with which to steer a true course, especially when the seas are rough and changeable. Microsoft never got into trouble for being a monopoly. There is, in fact, no law in the United States against being a monopoly. No one minded Microsoft being a bull—we like bulls in business—but no one could stand the company conducting itself like a bully. When Microsoft used its position as a virtual monopoly to act unfairly and with belligerence in the marketplace, the U.S. Justice Department and the European Commission prosecuted the company.7 Microsoft never got into trouble for its WHATs; it got into trouble for its HOWs.
It might be easy to assume from all this talk about the limitations of rules that I’m an advocate of breaking them. “Rules are meant to be broken” is a familiar strophe in popular culture and conventional