YouSaid · the spoken record

Jennifer Aaker

lines on the record: 68
first: 2018-11-28
most recent: 2018-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly. Who were they killing the dog? Which one a man? You know, and then there's the kind of flip side of cultures that get exceedingly loose. And they also have problems. I think we can nominate places like Uber that were loose, but then characterized as being like, you know, really like exceedingly normless. And those contexts are also unsustainable. And they need to kind of introduce some structure into them, which I call structured looseness. So I think it's a dynamic construct where companies and industries, you know, if they fall into these, you know, they veer tighter loose, but then when they get to extreme, they have problems. Tesla might be another good example of this because they took creative, incredible place, but there's a lot of production problems. And it's interesting because innovation, which is, of course, high tech, it requires both tight and loose. It requires the creativity. But if you don't have the people who are going to implement it, the tightness that helps to actually scale it up.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for example, United became, you know, it has to be tight, but obviously people were following rules blindly and they needed to kind of introduce some discretion into that system, some looseness. I call this sort of flexible tightness. So you don't want to change the whole organization. You don't want people in that industry to be like making up all sorts of shit. You don't want them to be following some rules. They'll open this door. Yeah, on the flip side, and I think United is trying to do that after that PR fiasco, which is.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's basically as it sounds it's all in moderation, not too hot, not too cold. And in organizations, even if organizations veer tight or loose for good reasons, if they get to the extreme, they have serious problems. And I think that's one thing we see.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the book, Rulemakers or Breakers, I have a whole chapter on organizations. And it's also kind of this hidden dimensions of organizations as it is with nations. So we have some industries where you need a lot of rules. Like airline industries or nuclear power plants or in the military, like they have more threat, they have more coordination issues. On the flip side, places like tech, advertising, clearly startups, they really have much less threat and they have more diversity and they have more mobility. And so they're much looser. One of the interesting things, I think, though, that I write about is what I call the Goldilocks principle”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's exceptionally loose and wildly creative. And it's really important to look into that context and see why might that be the case? And one of the good reasons for this is that it's pretty diverse, so diversity pushes toward looseness. The other is that the religion promotes debate. There's that kind of funny joke of like there's three Jews talking about something, ten opinions. And I know this actually. That's an oldie but good. My daughter was getting about mitzvah and she starts disagreeing with her Torah portion when she's reading me her speech. I'm like, sweetie, why are you doing that? She's like, whether the rabbi told me to do that. Right, right. You know, there's no set rules. And I think that that is what's overriding some of the threats. So that's really cool exceptions.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We then set out to do that, and then we'll get organizations and households. I did want to mention that there's exceptions, of course, like every theory has their exceptions. So places like Israel is a good example of a place that's pretty threatened.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that makes sense because when you have strong norms, you have to really manage your impulses a lot. And so that has a benefit of order to help with those kinds of threats. You know, on the flip side, loose cultures have much more openness, like to different ideas. They're much more creative, to different people, and to change. So as an example of one of the weird experiments we did, we sent RAs around the world wearing warts on their face. I bought these. You can buy them easily online. Or tattoos or nose rings, or just their normal face. And they ask for help on city streets around the world or in malls asking for help in stores. And across the board, when people look normal, everyone helped them in different cultures. No difference. But tight cultures were much less likely to help people who look different. They're kind of threatening to the order. Loose culture is much more friendly and open. So we could see this sort of trade-off of order and openness that cultures have. And I think, you know.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'll find that they say that more likely to say the same time in places like Germany. And if you're in Greece or Brazil, you're not quite sure what time it is. Things like avert more disorganized. And also, there's more self regulation in Taipei cultures, there's less gambling, less debt, they're even less fat. You know, we actually measure this.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To households that tight cultures give a lot of order. Whose cultures are pretty disorderly, but on the flip side, whose cultures are very open and tight cultures have a lot of problems with openness. And just as an example, crime is much lower in tight cultures. There's a great weight, weight, don't tell me show that was like Japanese police officers need more of what? Everyone's guessing, you know, maybe they need higher salaries, more vacation times. It turns out they need more crime because there's very little crime. So they try to get people on to commit crimes because they're so bored. They also have more synchrony. Synchrony is a really powerful principle, more uniformity, even if you go around the world and you look at city clocks.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, that's what I showed that across the board in general, tight cultures tend to have more threat, whose cultures have much less threat. I then was looking at the trade-offs of these kinds of things. Like what does it confer to groups? And it turns out to be pretty simple principle applies to nations, to states, to organizations.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The history of these nations, how many times has the place been invaded in the last hundred years? Japan has had a lot of conflict. Germany's had a lot of conflict. United States, you know, we've had our conflicts, but we haven't been worried about Mexico or Canada invading us for centuries. I also measured population density. How many people per square mile, like places like Singapore have 20,000 people per square mile, places like New Zealand have 50 people per square mile, more sheep per capita than people, even as far back as 1500? Like how many people are living in these places? And I measure natural disasters, Mother Nature's Fury. How many times have you had to deal with this sort of disasters that other places don't have to succumb to? Yeah, and the idea is really pretty simple. I predicted that groups that have a lot of threat, whether it's human-made invasions or natural made, will need stronger rules to survive. They need to coordinate. Like in those contexts, these are collective action problems. We need people to follow rules. We don't want defectors.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. They're like almost going to get killed. Or you go to Singapore. Have you ever been there? It's called the Fine Nation because you can get fined or punished for things like spitting or chewing gum. And then you take a short plane right over to New Zealand and people are walking barefoot in banks and a reporter call me and say, why do we do this? It's very permissive culture. So I started seeing some of these contrasts. So I wanted to try to actually assess it with surveys first across, in this case it was across 30 nations, try to put countries on a continuum even all cultures have tight and loose elements. They're rule makers and rule breakers. Some cultures in our data, Japan, Germany, Austria, Pakistan had much stronger rules and other cultures like New Zealand, Netherlands, the United States and general Brazil, Greece, they were much more permissive. So I was really interested in why this evolved? It has to have some functionality. So I started measuring as I was collecting this data across 30 countries, 7,000 people.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I sort of traveled the world. You see these interesting contrasts where you're in Germany and you see people, you know, in general like waiting very patiently on the street corners even when cars are not around and then you go to New York City, maybe San Francisco and you see people like Jaywalking with babies in tow. Or you go to Singapore, the fine country.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, you know, I'm interested in culture very broadly defined. It could be national culture. It could be state culture. It could be organizational culture. It could be even culture in the household. Like, how much does your household focus on rules versus have more permissiveness, something I'm constantly negotiating with my teenagers? And I wanted to know, is there a common principle that we can sort of identify, like in physics or in biology? There's pretty simple principles that help understand phenomena. And that's why I set out to really understand rulemakers and rulebreakers. And it turns out that the psychology of that is very similar across all these different contexts. Their antecedents and the consequences, the trade-offs that they provide for groups and individuals.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like two fish in the water, they say. You know, they're all kind of swimming along, and one older fish comes up and says, Hey, boys, how's the water? And they're like, what the fuck is the water? Right, right. You know, that's what we live in. We live in this water. We have no idea how it's affecting us. And so I went back to Colgate. I was an undergrad there. And I started to say, hey, can I make a career out of studying culture? Use the best scientific tools to study it. Unfortunately, I had to go to Champaign Urbana to get my PhD, but it was a great run with Harry Treandis, who founded the field of cultural psychology.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know I've escaped from Long Island. No offense to people there. And I remember calling my father, this actually made a huge impact on this one phone call. And I said, Dad, it's really weird. He's from Brooklyn that people just travel from London to Paris to the Netherlands on the weekend. And he said to me in his quintessential New York accent, he said, well, think about it like it's going from New York to Pennsylvania. So the next day, literally, I booked a trip to Egypt. I'm like, Pop, it's like going from New York to California. And from then on, I started really. Studying informally culture, this omnipresent force that is invisible all around us.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I took a major pivot when I was in college. I was pre med, and then I went abroad to London. I was sort of a sheltered Long Island kid who saw New York and the world through that famous New Yorker cartoon, went to London and I was totally shocked by the sounds and the...”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who believes rules were made to be broken except for the rules I make, which you had to better fucking follow or else. But in my spare time, I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Michelle Gelfand, a cultural psychologist and distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland. She's the author of a new book called Rulemakers, Rulebreakers, How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our Minds. It's about why countries, societies, businesses, and individuals follow rules and why others do the exact opposite. It's a perfect topic for tech people. Michelle, welcome to recode decode.”
2018-11-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Silicon Valley loves to break the rules. Is that a good thing? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT