Five employees of CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (Richard Nixon), were arrested trying to break into the Watergate Hotel. Their aim had been to plant bugs in the Democratic National Headquarters and steal campaign documents. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, former White House aides also employed by CREEP, were arrested later. All seven men were indicted on 15 September 1972.
Nixon and his close advisers were not unduly alarmed. They were operating a massive slush fund out of Mexico to pay the burglars; now it could be used to buy their silence. The fund was financing campaign fraud, political espionage and sabotage, and illegal wire-tapping. But none of this would have come to light had Nixon not been recording his own conversations with close associates in the White House. Through a chain of accidents the existence of the tapes became public knowledge, and when transcriptions were published they revealed a massive illegal conspiracy and cover-up by Nixon and his key advisers–John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, John Dean and John Mitchell.
Under threat of certain impeachment, Nixon announced on 8 August 1974 that he would quit. The next day, he became the first US president to resign.
For more than two years the President and his top aides had been engaged in massive illegal operations; throughout that period, none of those involved dissented or showed any signs of conscience or regret. There was huge loyalty to the President and, among the conspirators, a universal view that their activities were right and proper. Even senior government figures not involved in the affair were often blinded by their allegiance to Nixon and the importance they attached to his administration’s work. For example, as evidence of Nixon’s wrongdoing mounted and became irrefutable, Henry Kissinger, the distinguished Secretary of State, predicted that history would view Nixon as a great president and relegate Watergate to a minor footnote.36
The Bay of Pigs and Watergate exemplify ‘groupthink’–the drive for unanimity, so that thinking alike becomes a virtue; the division of the world into ‘us’ versus outsiders, who are often stereotyped or stigmatised; the insulation of the group from external information, opinions or data; and a belief that if the group sticks together, it can safely ignore outside criticism. Groupthink is an extreme form of empathy, the glue of cooperation in groups.
Without groupthink, Kennedy’s inner circle could not have merrily ignored the evidence of Castro’s popularity inside Cuba; nor could Nixon’s gang have flouted the law and outraged even Republican lawmakers so blithely. It is a paradox that the strongest and most prestigious groups, comprising highly intelligent members, can sometimes make extremely stupid decisions. Groupthink is often responsible for both the hub’s ascent and its ultimate fall.
Then, there’s authority, which can make matters worse. Here we return to our friend Stanley Milgram, this time in his enlightenment-by-electrocution period, before his envelope period. Recall, the subjects did what they were told by white-coated authority figures, administering what they thought were electric shocks to ‘help’ the hapless, helpless learners. Milgram concluded that his experiments showed ‘the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures’.37
You may feel that his conclusion is a little overwrought, but the direction is clear. In organisations, we tend to do what we are told, whereas in personal life many of us do the opposite. Authority occasionally leads us to do things that our conscience wants to reject–sell a mortgage that we know cannot be afforded, make the numbers say what the boss wants to hear, miss our child’s Christmas play to attend a business meeting.
Another of these dark forces within hubs is conformity. Experiments by the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s attempted to measure this. When subjects were asked to go along with a clearly incorrect statement–to say, for example, that a slightly shorter line was longer than a long one–only one in a hundred concurred when tests were administered individually. But once the subjects were put into groups, and the first people to speak up gave the wrong answer, up to three-quarters of respondents went along with it. They must have known it was wrong, but they wouldn’t rock the boat.
Psychologist Jut Meininger suggests other reasons why we may be reluctant to leave a group, even when we know it’s bad for us:
we all operate within systems of people [in which] very often people will distort themselves, absorbing great pressure or abandoning life-long principles just to accommodate a system [hub], just to remain in it or keep it intact. This holds true for family…as well as business systems.
Time and again, mature business people force themselves to stay in systems detrimental to their personal health…people trap themselves into staying in unhealthy systems out of fear (afraid to leave a job for fear they won’t find another), inadequate planning (by keeping up with the Jones’s, they can’t afford to quit, or spend time looking for another job), or useless ‘Parent’ data (quitting is for cowards, job loyalty supersedes personal goals, no one likes a failure)…such people will usually have to choose between leaving the system or feeling bad within it.
38
Manhattan, 1995, and San Francisco, present day
Razorfish is an international online advertising agency, set up on a shoestring in 1995 by Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick. At first they couldn’t afford an office, so they ran the firm from Jeff’s Manhattan apartment. Razorfish now operates in eight countries, out of more than twenty offices, and has over two thousand professional employees. In 2007 Microsoft paid six billion dollars for aQuantive, the holding company for Razorfish and two other digital advertising agencies.39 Razorfish is highly regarded; last year alone, it won more than seventy-five creative awards.
It is also marked by exceptional employee commitment and morale. Len Sellers, managing director of the San Francisco office, acknowledges, ‘We’ve been accused of creating a cult-like atmosphere here.’ Expecting a denial? Well, Len doesn’t oblige. ‘I used to be an avid sailor,’ he says instead, ‘but haven’t been on a boat in a year. I used to have girlfriends, but they left out of boredom and frustration.’ And the clincher: ‘I used to have a cat, but it moved in with a neighbour.’ His final verdict: ‘It’s one thing when a girlfriend leaves. But it’s another when your cat moves out.’40 Catastrophic.
Redmond, Washington State, present day
Walk around Microsoft’s beautifully manicured grounds any day, any time, and you’ll run across plenty of employees. ‘People are working here twenty-four hours a day,’ an insider says. ‘It’s set up so you never have to go home.’
Lawyer Andrew Brenner recently went to Redmond for a job interview. Everyone he met, he says, ‘seemed to think it was a foregone conclusion Microsoft would take over the world. It’s a very strong culture.’ Too strong for Andrew–he pulled out of the recruitment process.
What is the Microsoft culture? According to Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at information technology research group Gartner, it has ‘four key parts–a tremendous work ethic; Bill Gates is always right; an us-versus-them mentality; and Bill Gates is always right’.41
Dave Arnott, Professor of Management at Dallas Baptist University, says that Microsoft, 3M, Enron and Southwest Airlines have this in common–they were or are all corporate cults. Cults, he says, whether corporate or religious, have three characteristics. They demand complete devotion and subordinate the individual to the organisation. They have a charismatic leader who is ‘always right’. And by being such intense and time-consuming experiences, they separate their followers from the outside world. ‘It starts with a refrigerator in the lunchroom,’ Arnott writes, ‘and ends in a full-blown corporate cult.’42