Turning your team into a tribe

Michael Morris’s book Tribal covers the codes that bond humans together. It was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award 2024 where it came runner-up to ‘Supremacy’ by Parmy Olson.

He explains that humans are inspired by peer codes, human codes and ancestor codes when it comes to their behaviour.

Make Work Better: Resisting the Enshittification of Work in 2024

Transcript

Bruce

Michael, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do.

Michael
My name is Michael Morris, and I’m a behavioral scientist at Columbia University in New York. And the particular field within behavioral science that I specialize in is called cultural psychology. It’s sort of the study of how cognitive frames in our heads guide our thoughts and our actions. And I teach primarily to business students. So the topic of workplace culture is near and dear to my heart.

Bruce
Fantastic. And tell me just for my own curiosity and fascination really, a lot of your work seems to be adjacent to work that I guess in Europe and elsewhere we’d call social identity work. Is it an adjacent field? Is it just like the difference in expression across the Atlantic?

Michael 
No, there are social identity theorists here in the States as well. I would say that my field cropped up at the interface or the intersection of anthropology and psychology. And it primarily tries to address the questions of anthropology about differences across cultures using the tools of psychology.

Michael
Social identity theory primarily focuses on in-group, out-group dynamics, and it emerged around a different set of questions. Now, there’s certainly some overlap, and I think one of the differences is that we find it useful to distinguish different kinds of cognitive frames that tend to get lumped together in social identity theory. And so that’s…That’s one way in which we differ.

Bruce
And I guess underpinning your work, as far as I understand it, sort of outlined in your new book, Tribe, is the fact that being part of a group, being part of a tribe is energizing for us. actually groups that can tap into that, and actually individuals who can tap into that seem to benefit from an elevation. I wonder if you could just explain the processes at work when that happens. You give some…So quite vivid examples of sports teams that have tapped into this and organizations that have tapped into this. What’s the underpinning science behind why they get that benefit from cohesion?

Michael 
Well, my field is very wedded to evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology. And there have been a lot of breakthroughs in the last 20 years in sort of understanding how the human specific form of social organization evolved. It evolved in several waves. I call them the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct. In the academic literature, they’re sliced a lot more thinly.

Michael 
But the idea is that these are three major waves of adaptations that change the way that we relate to groups and they empowered us and each of them consists of some cognitive habits, but also some deep motivations and it’s those deep motivations that make being a part of a tribe energizing and That’s why it’s such an important tool for a leader to be aware of.

Bruce 
And those three categorizations are quite helpful, I found, in terms of trying to understand the things that mobilize us to be consistent in our own behavior and to drive the benefits. Can we start off with the peer instincts then? So what is it about being around like-minded individuals? What activates that peer instinct?

Michael
Well, the pure instinct, we can recognize it in ourselves today as the sideways glances at coworkers and neighbors and the urge we feel to match their behaviors and to mesh with them. It feels good to conform. we automatically, without even trying to form representations in our heads of the norm.

Michael
normal behavior, normal response, normal thoughts of our group. And that can be a kind of autopilot that gets us through much of life. And we often deride our conformist tendency as something that can limit independent thinking. That’s certainly true, but it enables our collective thinking. It enables everything that we accomplish in groups. And if you take a realistic look at human beings, we are much more impressivein groups than we are as individuals. Even Isaac Newton said, if I see far, it’s by standing on the shoulders of others. It’s our ability to think with other people that enables everything that we accomplish.

Bruce
And so just thinking about that, when you join an organization, those peer instincts might be informed by what the norms are, how people have lunch together, how people turn up on time for meetings or don’t turn up. Is that right? Are these some examples of how peer behavior might generate a culture and transfer it across?

Michael 
Precisely. Yeah. Well, one that’s really vivid right now is the transition in my country and I believe yours from an era of work from home pandemic induced to a return to office movement, not necessarily five days a week, but substantially that work should be done. in the office, major decisions, major problems should be worked on in the office. Now, why is that? We can see lots of costs and benefits of working at home or working in the office. One reason is that the companies that did really rigorous studies of productivity, in particular, say Microsoft, which had been doing a very rigorous productivity study for about a year before the pandemic and then just continued it into the pandemic, what they saw is that on measures of individual productivity, Did you get through your to-do list? Did I get through my personal tasks? Productivity went up, if anything, during work from home. But in measures of collective productivity, in particular, measures of coordination, like, I solving problems in ways that also work for your unit, not just for mine? That collapsed when people were not working from the office. And one of the reasons for that is that

Being at the office triggers the frames of the organizational culture as an active guide to your information process and your thinking. When you’re at the office, you you hear the sound of people clicking on their keyboards. You know, you see the building. You may see the portrait of the founder. You may smell the coffee in the coffee room. There’s many perceptual cues that bring up the cluster of associations, which is the internalized organizational culture. And it happens for me and it happens for you. And when that happens, we can mind meld because we both are thinking actively through the lens of the organization’s culture. Now, even the CEOs who are demanding return to office, when they want out of the box thinking about a completely new business unit or a new way of organizing, they’ll hold an off-site retreat at a beach resort or a mountain hotel because they don’t want us to be thinking in terms of the organization’s conventions on that day. They want us to be thinking, you know, blue sky. So it’s neither good nor bad, but the organizational culture, you can turn up the dial of thinking in terms of these norms or conventions by having people together at an office that reminds everybody of that culture.and you can turn the dial down by having them somewhere that’s really different from that.

Bruce
I love the paper that you cited, which was about the UN workers’ traffic violations, where people might find themselves being part of a certain cultural code from where they came from, what the rules were there. And then they were being placed into a different environment. so they’d have those conflicting peer codes playing off each other. Could you just explain that piece of research?

Michael
Yes. Sure. It was a study done by a colleague of mine in the economics department, and he is a very clever fellow. And in the old days in New York, you could always tell who was a diplomat at the UN because they parked directly in front of a restaurant in the no parking zone, and they had diplomatic immunity. You could see it on their license plate, a special license plate. And so they would just accrue lots of unpaid parking tickets during their, three-year term in the US and then go back to whatever country they came from. And what Ray Fissman, my colleague, did was he got the complete set of data from the New York Traffic Cop Bureau, and then he married that with the UN’s personnel records. And so he had for every country in the UN for a 10-year period, all of the traffic, unpaid traffic bills from every person who worked for them. And what he found is that the rates of sort of abusing the privilege of diplomatic immunity correlated very highly with Watchdog International’s corruption index, which exists for all the countries of the world. So the Anglophone countries, the Scandinavian countries, and the occasional country like Singapore typically make up the top 10 and those countries had virtually zero unpaid parking tickets. But some of the countries like, say, in Latin America, which are high on the corruption index, were very high in how people from those countries who were at the UN temporarily, you know, behaved in New York. So it shows that you can take the diplomat out of the country, but you can’t take the…)
out of the diplomat when they come to New York, their habits are still affected by what’s the norm that they’ve been primarily exposed to. Now people who are long-stayers in a country, become bicultural and they have both lenses and then what they’ll do depends a lot on their immediate context or who they’re with or what situations they’ve been in recently.that will determine whether they’re thinking in terms of their heritage culture or in terms of the host country culture.

Bruce
And you pointed something out to us there along, you pointed something out to us there, which was that quite often leaders, when they’re trying to think about reestablishing new codes or changing codes, might take workers off site. And just the mere fact of getting you away from the familiarity of the workplace is one way for you to refresh that. What other tips then would leaders who are thinking to change the peer code,leaders who are seeking to change…the way that we do things around here. What other advice then would the science point towards for that?

Michael
Well, I kind of distinguish, you know, one of the big themes in the book is that culture is a lot more changeable than we often assume. And I don’t know exactly why people assume culture to be unchanged and unchanging, but that is a common assumption. Maybe anthropologists have contributed to it. But, you and I are old enough to have lived through different eras of business and different eras of politics. And we’ve seen radically different things, you know, in the US now.We use they as a pronoun for a single person. Very few people did that 10 years ago. But a group of activists can make that change, and a government leader can usher a country into a different cultural era, and a corporate leader can do the same. Now, one way you do this in the short term is by controlling the cues, taking people from.one workplace to a completely different workplace is often something that is useful in transforming a company. Over the longer term, you want to change the frames themselves in people’s heads. And the way that you change peer codes is through what I call prevalence signals. And prevalence signals are information about what is common or prevalent.in one’s group. And so it may seem obvious that if most people in a group are doing X, that people will be inclined to do X. But you don’t need a majority to start a tipping point phenomenon. And one of the things that companies and leaders do is that they’ll induce a behavior that’s desired, maybe through a pilot program or maybe through an

Michael (13:37.18)
incentivizing it or maybe through nudging it, you making it easier for people to do it. And then they will publicize that, you know, either by giving a platform to the employee who’s innovated in a particular way or showing examples on the company internet of, you know, employees doing their work differently, whatever that means in this case. And so you’re creating apparent prevalence to create, to set off the cycle of conformity.

Michael (14:05.97)
which then creates actual prevalence and then increasing conformity. And with any cycle like this, you have early adopters and then the real conformists and then the late adopters and the stragglers, but you can kind of work through the psychology of conformity, which the peer instinct mostly corresponds to, to turn something that’s originally rare into the mainstream. It’s not easy, but…

Michael (14:34.356)
it can happen through, you know, inducing behaviors, publicizing behaviors, not publicizing other behaviors, that those are the levers that a leader can use to gradually shift what the peer codes are in a group.

Bruce (14:51.788)
Yeah. And we sort of set it up at the start that there were three of these sort of hierarchies of codes, peer codes, hero codes, and ancestor codes. So let’s evolve that then and talk about how a hero code might be different. Is that celebrating those who maybe are the icons of an organization right now? Is that right?

Michael (15:04.401)

Mm-hmm, yeah. So the idea here is that, know, peer codes, the psychology of peer instinct, it evolved more than a million years ago, and it enabled coordination, it enabled a hunting party to work as a group from a common goal in a way that no other primates can. And then, you know, that led to a successful human species, but not a very creative one, a Homo erectus. But then about half a million years ago, there was a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, which started to innovate. They started to make tools like stone-pointed throwing spears that hadn’t existed before. They started to do, you start to see in the archaeological record individuals with congenital deformities that survived the age of adulthood. And so that tells us something, that someone else in the group took care of a person who probably couldn’t repay the favor.

Michael (16:15.22)
We start to see at this time shelters that might have been built for aged people. We start to see hunting really large game like woolly mammoths where one person probably had to expose himself or herself to considerable risk in order to make it safe for the rest of the group to come in. And so what we see is it’s not just that people are doing what’s normal. They’re not just conforming. They’re doing what’snormative people are people are doing actions to be exemplary they’re doing what the group needs they’re they’re making a contribution and most likely being paid back in terms of the status or esteem in which they’re held by others and the tribute which they’re given others and we we see it today in hunter-gatherer tribes even the ones that anthropologists used to think are completely egalitarian like like the Bushmen of the Kalahari

Michael (17:13.842)
they have all these rituals that are status leveling. Like there’s one that’s called insulting the meat where when hunters come back, if you, you know, manage to bring down an antelope and I just got a little rabbit, the elders of the village will tease you and they’ll say, your antelope looks like a mouse, you know, and the idea is they don’t want you to get a really big head because it’s a small group and everybody has to work together. Now that was taken as a sign that they don’t make status distinctions, but the contemporary anthropologists,

Michael (17:43.948)
use more sort of biological methods. So they’ll do genetic analyses and track over time hunting success and then track the number of descendants that the different hunters have, you know, over 20 years. And what they’ve discovered is that status predicts reproductive success in these egalitarian tribes just as much as it does in the kingdoms that recognize status very explicitly.

Michael (18:13.714)
So they may minimize status on the surface, but the contributors are seen and rewarded with social opportunities and other opportunities. The ethnographic record currently makes it pretty clear that even though they may be socialist in some ways, they take care of their contributors in other ways. So it’s basically a reputation game of, I have a motivation to be a contributor, to stand out.

Michael (18:44.076)
And that is like an incentive to figure out what might help the group in a way that goes beyond what currently exists. And I get rewarded for it. I get preferential opportunities. And the group benefits because you have this engine of creativity that is working by people who are seeking status. And as with conformity, we often deride status seeking as like a superficial or vain kind of activity.

Michael (19:12.486)
It’s a part of our psychology that we should honor because it’s the engine of innovation. It’s what makes people want to contribute and go beyond what other people are doing.

Bruce (19:23.246)
So is this quite often when I think about culture, I think of a definition that says the culture of an organization is the behavior of the organization, whether encouraged, rewarded or tolerated. And to some extent you’re covering the rewarded aspect there. You’re saying this is what makes you famous inside an organization. This is what makes you sort of an icon. Is that right?

Michael (19:39.283)
Yeah.

Michael (19:43.636)
Exactly.

Michael (19:44.746)
It’s how you get clout, you know? I mean, there’s always the formal organization of ranks and stuff, but that always lags behind the informal organization of who’s respected, who has clout, who do you go to for advice, who do you want on your team if you’re making new teams? that’s the current prestige is the currency that we care the most about. And…

Michael (20:09.554)
We, at the same time we evolved the motivation to want prestige by contributing, we also developed the cognitive capacity to read prestige. So in a group, we can read the status ordering very easily. Like in juries, it becomes established like within an hour of a group of strangers interacting, and then everybody defers more to the high status people and less to the low status people. And so by this,

Michael (20:38.782)
tendency to read whatever the high status people in the organization or the society or the community are doing as things that are respected and valued by the group. You know, that’s how we figure out what to contribute in order to be rewarded. And it’s a learning reflex that can lead to superstitious learning. In Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs wore these peculiar black turtlenecks every day.

Michael (21:06.534)
and many young tech executives have aped that behavior. It doesn’t always lead them to the strategic brilliance that Steve Jobs had. Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos is probably the most recent example. Many others emulated Steve’s macrobiotic diet. Many others emulated his meditation. We don’t know which of these quirks is the one that really contributed to his exemplary success, but.

Michael (21:35.188)
through this tendency to try to emulate what the high status people are doing, you have a general tendency in a group to evolve in an adaptive way. The young generation looks at who in the older generation is successful lately and moves in that direction. And that’s how, you know, an ancestral tribe that was migrating, you know, from a rainforest into an Arctic step, you know, by the next generation, they would start

Michael (22:05.416)
hunting and gathering slightly differently based on what’s working in the new environment, based on who’s successful and emulating that person who’s successful. So it may appear to be a human folly, but it’s actually a human strength.

Bruce (22:25.13)
If then we could use that to diagnose where there’s a lack of group dynamics, there’s a lack of tribal instinct right now. For the first time, probably in the post COVID era, one of the things that we see manifested in organizations is group dissent. A lot of people not abiding by their company’s return to work policy, people thinking that actually this isn’t a rational approach, so I’m not going to do it, or they go into the office and they don’t feel seen. And so for the first time, actually we’re getting

Bruce (22:55.06)
A sense that bosses and prestige power laying down rules is not always something that the group is going along with. That’s a really interesting phenomenon because people are part, essentially of an organization because they work there, but they’re not abiding by the group codes. I wonder then, is that a sign that your employees no longer feel part of a cohesive unit? You’ve diagnosed that something has gone wrong there where

Bruce (23:23.65)
They no longer feel like the prestige power is being manifested and so impacting them and they are semi-detached. become, their relationship has become less tribal and more transactional. I wonder if you could help me interpret what we’re seeing there then.

Michael (23:39.113)
Yeah.

Michael (23:41.406)
I think you’re right. I would push back that there have been other forms of dissent like the labor movement, right? But that was more of a organized counterculture that was organized around certain goals. But now I think what you’re seeing is more similar to what you see post-merger in some corporations. In my book, I tell the story in some detail about a famous merger in the financial industry.

Bruce (23:49.602)
Hmm.

Bruce (23:52.162)
Mm.

Michael (24:11.174)
in the United States where Merrill Lynch, that was one of our most storied Wall Street investment banks during the financial crisis was acquired by Bank of America, which was a sort of growing retail bank from the South that called itself the Walmart of banking. was sort of the opposite culturally of a Wall Street bank. And when Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch, they tried to Bank of Americanize

Michael (24:39.88)
the brokers and investment bankers of Merrill Lynch who had a much different culture. And there was tremendous attrition where a lot of the best bankers and brokers left and went to the competition. And even the ones who stayed, they didn’t contribute in the way that had always been the hallmark of the Merrill culture. It had always been a place that people would…

Michael (25:07.124)
you know, call up someone else and put together a deal and I help you out this time and I know that you’ll help me out next time. And all of that kind of collapsed. And I think part of it, a big part of it was they no longer had a sense of the boundary of their organization. They also no longer had their name, Merrill Lynch, or their prized totemic logo, the charging bull, which was the most famous symbol in finance. And a leader,

Michael (25:34.056)
was brought in to try to stem the outflow of talent and bring people’s motivations back named Sally Krawcheck. And one of the first things she did was bring the bull back, bring the name Merrill Lynch back, redraw the boundary around the investment banking and private wealth division so that people had a sense of the relevant community that they’re member of. And then all of the civic motivations to make a contribution returned.

Michael (26:04.07)
So I think that is, I think perhaps the work from home has eroded the sense of the boundary of the organization. I’m working from home right now and I’m a fan of its advantages, but I do think there are these intangible things like the workplace is a cue and the sense of being part of a distinctive group that is somewhat eroded when people are not working.

Bruce (26:34.018)
Yeah, I wonder if I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of human imagination to think of new ways to build that cohesiveness. certainly know most families don’t spend all the year together, but they can have a wonderful Thanksgiving or wonderful Christmas. So definitely the bounds can be achieved in a different way, but I think it does require corporate imagination. It does require leadership to think about, we’re going to do this a bit more

Michael (26:42.398)
Sure, sure.

Michael (26:57.501)
Yeah.

Michael (27:01.332)
Sure.

Bruce (27:01.898)
actively than maybe we did it before.

Michael (27:04.244)
For a while, people thought that the metaverse was going to be the answer to that question, that we would all strap a piece of plastic onto our faces. And then when we had a company happy hour, we would each go to our mailbox and get a margarita mix. then we would be standing on a simulated beach next to each other, drinking our actual margaritas with a large hunk of plastic strapped onto our face. And I’m not sure people

Bruce (27:10.789)
You

Michael (27:32.926)
quite believe that that’s going to substitute in the way that they did a few years ago. But some companies like Meta are still making major investments with the idea that that will be one way to create, know, being on the same page is very much helped by being in the same room. And, you know, if the metaverse gets good enough, we may start to feel that.

Bruce (27:34.369)
No.

Bruce (27:57.742)

Bruce (27:59.603)
Let’s cover the third form of code, which is ancestor code. It’s the notion of things that have existed for decades, hundreds of years. Talk us through the role of that, I guess in all groups, but then relate it to organizations if you can.

Michael (28:04.201)
Sure.

Michael (28:07.601)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael (28:15.988)
Sure. So if the peer instinct are sideways glances at peers and the hero instinct is our upward peaks at the CEOs and the star contributors, the ancestor instinct is our backward gaze, our sort of nostalgic gaze at prior generations. We have a deep curiosity and a sort of compulsive tendency to want to learn what

Michael (28:44.936)
the prior generation did and to perpetuate it, to carry it forward. And we see this in organizations. There’s a deep interest in the founders and stories about the founders are often important element in an organizational culture. Many organizations even tell the same apocryphal stories about their founder that other organizations do and it still works because traditions don’t actually have to be true historically

Bruce (29:06.018)
Mmm.

Michael (29:14.938)
in order to feel meaningful to people and companies constantly reconstruct their traditions in order to have a sense of tradition that supports the current strategy. The past of any organization is usually variegated. were many events in the past and we as leaders have to find chapters from the past which rhyme with the currently needed strategy and that gives

Michael (29:44.518)
employees a feeling of continuity and the feeling of meaning and reverence and obligation that comes along with tradition and continuity. So I think sentimentality about the past is another thing that is often regarded as an irrational human folly, but it is connected to some of our greatest strengths, this sort of deep sense of obligation to maintain group traditions. You know, we will make incredible sacrifices if

Michael (30:13.62)
if we think that our traditions are being lost. I think Brexit has some of that going on. When you make people feel like their national traditions are at threat, well, they will give up lots of other advantages. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. And so the kind of learning that goes along with the ancestor instinct,

Michael (30:40.73)
is quite distinct. It’s a sort of rote learning that we engage in, a sort of ritual learning mode. When we are talking to elders from the prior generations, they often will tell us a myth. They’ll tell us a story about the past. And we’re meant to learn it exactly as they told it and to repeat it exactly that way. When it comes to myths, we’re not supposed to improvise.

Michael (31:08.082)
when we are taught a ritual, whether that’s, know, Taco Tuesday at an organization or the annual award banquet of an organization, it’s something that we find meaning in repeating it compulsively exactly the same way every year. It taps into this deep feeling of satisfaction and ease that

Michael (31:35.794)
that comes from being part of a tradition. And anthropologists have all kinds of theories about the underlying roots of this. Some of them think that traditions give us a sense of indirect control over things that we don’t have control over. So funerals make us feel like that life goes on, that it’s a journey to another land. whatever the deep

Michael (32:04.764)
whatever the deep psychological roots, organizations mine their past as a resource to create a sense of tradition that motivates employees. And effective leaders need to be familiar with the past and comfortable talking about the past and comfortable engaging in the kind of myth-making and institution-building that comes from looking at the past as a guide to the future.

Bruce (32:35.49)
You’ve described the importance of rituals there and rituals, think, sort of help encode both current business culture and sort of celebrate the traditional business culture. You work a lot with organizations. Are there any other pointers that you give for organizations as they’re trying to build this sense of feeling like a tribe or the productive group? What direction do you normally give to groups to try and establish and embolden themselves in this vein?

Bruce (33:04.878)
in the source of.

Michael (33:06.056)
Well, the first thing is always to help them understand that tradition isn’t fixed. We have this sort of naive view that the founders and all of their prescience envisioned all the traditions and started all of them and that they haven’t changed since. But each generation, as they learn the tradition, there’s some selectivity in which traditions they pass forward and there’s some shaping of the traditions.

Michael (33:35.496)
There’s a concept by the British historian Eric Hobshaw called the invention of tradition where he points out that, for example, some of the really baroque traditions of the British royal family aren’t actually old. They are things that started for the first time in the 20th century when you had discontinuities in the dynasty that threatened its continuity. And so then you start having weddings and.

Michael (34:03.174)
in the cathedral again with swords and orbs and horses and that sort of thing because it provides this gravitas that is needed at a time when you have an abdication or something like that. So the first thing is just the basic insight that you don’t just receive traditions, you shape them, you construct them. And then how do you construct them? Well, a lot of organizations hire

Michael (34:31.604)
historians to write the official history of the organization. If you look at old British companies like Cadbury or something, they’ve done that several times and they’ve rewritten their history with different themes brought to the foreground in different eras in order to give people a sense of meaning around what the company was doing at that time. We in my country just finished our holiday of Thanksgiving and

Michael (35:01.492)
We are taught at school that Thanksgiving was given to us by the pilgrims who had a feast in 1621 that has been an unbroken tradition ever since. That’s not factually correct. The pilgrims had a feast, but they didn’t call it a Thanksgiving, and it wasn’t repeated every year. But in 1863, almost 250 years later, Abraham Lincoln was president during a civil war, and Abraham Lincoln was a deep believer.

Michael (35:30.758)
in tradition as the only thing that could bring the the Riven nation back together again. And so he instituted a national holiday of Thanksgiving, making reference to the precedent of the pilgrims and making reference to a Thanksgiving celebration that George Washington held as a one-off after the War of Independence. So he was a lawyer. He understood the power of precedence.

Michael (35:58.078)
But he created this new holiday, which is not easy to do. And it had immediate legitimacy because people thought of it as a time-honored tradition because he could point to these precedents that were part of the remembered collective past. And it quickly became a sacred national ritual. Later presidents tried to shift the date of it and almost got mutinied for daring to touch the sacred holiday day of Thanksgiving, which actually was a…

Bruce (36:08.344)
Bye.

Michael (36:26.938)
new, relatively new holiday at the time. And so this is, I think, a good example. And there are companies, not only are there corporate historians, often academic historians who’ve gotten tired of academia and put themselves out for hire, but there’s a company in the United States called the History Factory, which is a consultancy of historians that helps organizations of all kinds mine their past, mine their heritage.

Bruce (36:32.972)
Mmm.

Michael (36:56.678)
for themes that will inspire people to execute the currently needed strategy. And companies like Harley Davidson, which are a time-honored company that really lost its way several decades ago, and then recovered its brand and its loyalty of employees by sort of celebrating its past and making models that were like an homage to the heavyweight bicycles of the past.

Bruce (36:58.922)
Wow.

Michael (37:26.246)
And that’s how Harley Davidson got its mojo back. And that’s what led people to start tattooing Harley Davidson on their arm. Once your customers are doing that, you don’t have to worry about them switching to Honda. Its brand loyalty is inked in. Recently, an organization that did this, working with the History Factory, is the National Football League, our kind of football. And it was in a

Bruce (37:38.636)
Yeah.

Bruce (37:51.266)
Mm.

Michael (37:53.972)
terrible situation about 10 years ago because there was a huge scandal about the head injuries that it causes. There was a scandal that players were refusing to kneel or to stand for the national anthem. And there were lots of domestic abuse cases and other crimes involving current and past players. it was something traditionally called America’s Game, but people were starting to see it as this

Michael (38:22.236)
really destructive and toxic organization. What they did is they realized that their centennial was coming up and they celebrated their centennial in a way that drew a lot of analogies between their storied past and some of their current loved players. And they held all of these rituals, different rituals in each city that paid respect to the team’s distinctive traditions.

Michael (38:51.192)
And by the end of the year, they had substantially rehabilitated their standing in the eyes of their own players and the fans and other stakeholders. So you can refurbish a broken culture by understanding first how traditions work and by recruiting skilled practitioners of history building.

Bruce (39:17.422)
the power of storytelling, I guess, and corporate storytelling sort of come to.

Michael (39:19.366)
Yeah, a lot of it is storytelling.

Michael (39:20.947)
Yeah. You know, we sometimes call our president the storyteller in chief. And I think storytellers like, you know, Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln gained a lot of their power through this capacity to make sense of events and make sense of events by reference to the past.

Bruce (39:41.154)
Michael, as we speak, you’re shortlisted for the FT Book of the Year. As we speak, you don’t yet know the result, but the result will be out in the next few days. So best of luck with that. I found it an absolutely fascinating read and sort of brought a fresh perspective to a lot of things that I think a lot of the people I’ve talked to are wrestling with, how to bring a team dynamic back, how to find the things that…

Michael (39:52.872)
Thank you. Thank you.

Bruce (40:09.432)
previously may have come naturally, how to find a route into them.

Michael (40:11.988)
Right.

Michael (40:13.188)
You know, it’s meant to be a very hopeful book to say that these tribal motivations that are often feared and derided can be harnessed to accomplish, you know, collective action or even cultural change.

Bruce (40:27.148)
Wonderful. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to talk to you. Best of luck with the awards.

Michael (40:31.466)
I’m tremendously privileged to be here. So thank you so much. And it’s really wonderful to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.