CHAPTER 3
Power and the Farb Problem
WHAT IF YOU were in charge for a day?
You’re the president, the pope, or the CEO of a giant company. What are you going to do?
You will search for problems. You will search for problems because it is in problems that you will make yourself consequential. It’s all well and good to be in charge, but if you don’t find any problems, what difference did you make?
Though it sounds like the premise of a reality TV show, legend has it that Saul Wahl was literally king for a day in Poland in 1587. And in that day he identified twenty-six problems and issued more than sixty orders.
Problems may well stop us in our tracks, seeking problems may well start with our primal fear impulses, but problems are also a great source of urgency. A problem is all alarms and action and consequence. A problem is a very seductive thing. And its hold over us is universal. It is not just kings and kings for a day, it’s in all of us, all the time. Everyone feels more important when pointing out problems.
We insert ourselves into problems like police officers giving tickets. Problems make us feel necessary. They make us feel powerful. They make us feel alive. If we don’t have a problem, we have a problem.
* * *
AMID THE MANY treasures that have made their way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from world-famous stages and recording studios sits a weathered piece of paper. There are no lyrics, no melodies, no grand plans for an album or a concert scratched out on it. But the document offers just the barest hint of a revolution that would arrive a decade later and change not only music but pretty much everything. Succinct and precise, John Lennon’s high school report card suggests a rather underwhelming student who never seemed to come up with quite the right answer because he was too busy looking at things differently than everybody else.
Under his mediocre grades, one teacher at the Quarry Bank school wrote in the space for comments that Lennon had achieved “a poor result due to the fact that he spends most of his time devising ‘witty’ remarks.” Lest his meaning be misconstrued, he actually put witty in quotation marks. That is, not only did Lennon waste his time on humor, but he didn’t even have a proper boy’s wit. Certainly he said nothing that his teachers considered amusing or interesting. If only he could put aside his pointless wordplay and frivolity, his teachers thought, maybe he would amount to something.
The juxtaposition of this report of a failure preserved forever in a house of triumph tells us something important about our passion for problems. John Lennon’s teachers had been trained to offer conventional lessons and make conventional measurements in the service of producing conventional success. They believed that stepping outside that process was surely a path to failure, and they were on vigilant watch for the first signs that someone was heading in that direction.
To root out this problem, Lennon was favored with constant discipline. Day after day he was kept for detention. There he sat, crouched over his papers, writing “I must not…” over and over again, before filling in the precise nature of his latest offense. Other days Lennon was made to do chores around the school building. And when the standard punishments had no effect, Lennon was summoned to the headmaster’s office for a caning.
School officials saw the problem very clearly, and they were absolutely certain of the consequences. Lennon had begun Quarry Bank in the A cluster, a group of students offered the most challenging courses and expected to enroll at fine universities. By his second year, he had been downgraded to the B cluster. By the end of his fourth year, he was exiled to the C cluster, of whom very little was expected. By the time he reached the Cs, his report cards no longer offered gentle chiding but spelled out the situation in stark terms. “Certainly on the road to failure,” one year-end report noted. He is, in a word, “Hopeless.” To the headmaster, the evidence was clear and convincing: This boy had no future.
Later, the staff took some satisfaction in Lennon’s performance on the comprehensive exams given to college-bound British students. Lennon failed nine out of nine tests—just as they had warned he would.
No one appreciated the remarkable thoughts and utterly original perspectives their most vexing student was capable of producing. Nor did his teachers—who wore imposing black gowns and lorded over a student body itself decked out in matching black blazers, each bearing the school’s awkward Latin motto (Ex Hoc Metallo Virtutem … From This Rough Metal We Forge Virtue)—ever notice what their student was teaching himself when they weren’t looking.
Out of their sight, John Lennon was a bookworm, reading, writing, drawing, thinking. He created his own journal, the Daily Howl, filled with his own stories, poems, and cartoons. He began devouring a twenty-volume set of the world’s great short stories as a ten-year old. He was, ironically, a model student when he wasn’t in a classroom.
But a piece of metal to be forged he was not. He hated regimentation, being told what to do, or when to do it. He hated having to fit within the stifling standards and judgments of the Quarry Bank staff. And so he didn’t.
To be sure, it wasn’t just school officials who marked Lennon as a disruptive and aimless force. Everyone saw that. “I was the one who all the other boys’ parents—including Paul’s father—would say, ‘Keep away from him,’” Lennon later recounted. Imagine if Paul McCartney’s father had been successful in that effort.
Even at home, the aunt who raised him would periodically blow through his room to collect his various stacks of writing and toss them in the garbage lest they clutter the place. In high school, as his devotion to music bloomed, she famously warned him, “The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.”
The problem was obvious to everyone. This boy wasn’t doing what you’re supposed to do. This problem, like all problems, demanded a response. We will push and shove and try with all our might to move problems out of our way. And we will enjoy the exertion because it is pleasing to be right. It is pleasing to know what to do.
Promise and potential and answers, on the other hand, are hard to see. We may have never quite seen it before. We may not recognize it. And even if we did, what do we do with it? How would we nurture it? To admit that Lennon was bright and full of promise, his teachers would have had to surrender to uncertainty and risk their own irrelevance. To admit that Lennon was bright and full of promise they would have had to acknowledge that there might be more he could teach them than they could teach him. Instead, Lennon’s teachers labeled a problem the most extraordinary student they would ever know.
Happily, Lennon never believed the consensus opinion of him. “When I was about 12 I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody’s noticed,” he said looking back on his school years.
A decade removed from Quarry Bank, Lennon heard from his old school again. A student there wrote him a letter. He said they studied his lyrics in English class to decipher their meaning. Could Lennon be of any help in that regard, the student wondered? Lennon found the idea hilarious. Even then, his old teachers were still trying to make sense of him, still trying to impose their standards on his writings, still trying to make him fit into something they understood. In their honor, Lennon wrote the song “I Am the Walrus,” with the sole intention of confounding anyone’s efforts to make sense of the words.
* * *
IT WASN’T THE time she was the only person who was annoyed that the office Christmas lunch had leaked past its allotted time and was still going strong into its third hour of the workday. It wasn’t the time she found herself pulling the curtains closed tight against the sunshine, the view, and the ocean breeze to cut down on the glare as she checked her work messages on her phone during her first vacation in two years. And it wasn’t the time she stepped out into the lobby during the intermission of a touring Broadway musical, only to lose track of time while flipping through messages and to be told the second act had already started and she could not return to her seat in the second row of the theater.
None of these experiences made Linda think that she was way too plugged into the office and that she needed to reexamine her approach to work.
But when she found herself sneaking out of her mother’s hospital room and darting down the hallway to find a quiet place to take a work call, Linda began to suspect she had taken things too far.
Linda doesn’t blame her boss. Or her coworkers. It wasn’t a bad culture that turned her into some kind of always-on office robot. This was a trap she built herself. “It was just me,” she said. “It was who I was, what I needed, or thought I needed.
“I believed the way you proved your value was to be there, be ready to go,” she added. “When you work in the commodities business, you have to realize that everything can change, not just overnight, but in a moment. I thought, How can I afford to cut myself off for a week at a time on vacation, or even for a lunch hour, for that matter?”
Like John Lennon’s teachers, Linda wanted desperately to matter. If there was a meeting, she wanted to be at it. If there was a memo, she wanted to read it first. If there was anything happening anywhere, she wanted to know it. “The nightmare image for me is to be on the wrong side of a closed door,” Linda said. “I want to be on the side where big things happen, not on the side that watches and waits.”
Not surprisingly, what developed was not just an enormous strain on all her time—at work, after work, on the way to work, on vacation—but a never-ending source of stress. “When you put yourself on call like that, every little message is a new emergency. You get the message, and you pounce on it, and you fix the problem,” Linda said. To keep track of everything coming and going out, Linda moved every message out of her email inbox the moment she addressed it. She didn’t leave the office if there was a still a message waiting for her. And she didn’t go to bed until the box was empty again each night.
Ironically, even when Linda didn’t get a message, it became stressful to her. “You think, Why aren’t there any messages? Is the system down? Is the problem so big there’s not even time to send out a message?
“It’s ridiculous, but it seems sort of reasonable to you when you’re doing it.”
Living every moment of every day as a problem left Linda exhausted but unable to sleep restfully even when her head hit the pillow. Of course, she had trained her body not for deep rest but for constant alert.
With all her dedication and zeal, Linda had left herself no real time to stop, to digest, to think. Which meant that there was never any time for anything different, or better. She couldn’t give the company a new idea or a better way to do things because she was too busy to ever think of one. Like a car up on blocks, she was spinning her wheels. She was hitting the gas and not going anywhere. Of course, if you do that long enough you wind up right where you started and out of gas.
Not long after slipping away from her mother’s hospital bed, Linda began seriously questioning her approach to work and life. Seeking relevance every moment of the day had required creating a twenty-four-hour-a-day problem, and she was ready to admit that wasn’t working. “I came to the conclusion that you can’t chase importance,” she said, “because you’ll never catch it.” Instead, she’s trying to schedule blocks of time in her day to work without minor interruptions, and she’s even going several hours without checking her messages at night. “At first it was disorienting, like I was being placed in a sensory deprivation chamber. But now I can even watch an entire movie without checking my phone—at least if it’s not a long movie.”
* * *
YOU SAW THE ad in the newspaper. It sounds interesting. It’s an experiment on memory and learning, and they will pay you a few bucks for your time. It specifically says it’s open to people from all backgrounds—accountants, plumbers, whatever you happen to do for a living.
You make an appointment and show up at an office on the local college campus. It turns out that there are two of you who will do the experiment at the same time. You both draw a slip of paper out of a box. Your slip says “teacher”; the other person gets “learner.”
The task ahead is explained to you. As the teacher, you will have two duties. First, you will read various pairs of words to the learner. The learner will try to memorize those word pairs. Later, you will administer a quiz. One more thing … to help the learner concentrate and successfully learn the material, you will have access to an electroshock device. As the teacher, you will administer a brief shock every time the learner makes a mistake. In fact, with each additional error you will administer a higher-voltage shock. That shocking someone aids in the learning process is a premise you accept without questioning it.
You take a seat at a table, with a list of word pairs and the electroshock box in front of you. The learner is taken to the next room, where electrodes are connected to his body. Over the intercom, you begin reading the word pairs.
The electroshock box carries prominent labels. At 15 volts, the shock is labeled “slight.” “Moderate” is 75 volts. At 195 volts, the shock is “very strong,” progressing to “intense” at 255, “extreme” at 315, and “danger: severe” at 375 before reaching the end of the meter, 450 volts, which is labeled only “XXX.”
To the learner’s first mistake, you confidently turn the dial to the 15-volt shock and proceed with the next word pair. With each mistake, you are told to add an additional 15 volts. After the fifth mistake, when you dial up a 75-volt shock, you hear a grunt, the first sign of the learner’s discomfort.
You confidently continue “teaching” the word pairs and raising the voltage even as the grunts turn to screams. At the tenth mistake, however, the learner begins sounding desperate. He’s crying out in pain. He asks to be let out.
Your nerves begin to jump. You start to sweat. You look for guidance and are told, “Please continue.” And you do.
You continue reading the lists. The learner continues to make mistakes. And you dial up increasing shocks. You start to tremble. Bite your lip. Dig your fingernails into the table.
The next shock is 315. It is labeled extreme. The learner makes another error. You pause. You are reminded, “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.”
You laugh nervously and dial up the extreme shock.
And then. Nothing. No cries. No moans. No screams. No sounds.
Is it over? You are told it is not.
You worry what’s happened to the learner. You are told again, “It is absolutely essential that we continue.”
To the next word pair, you get no response. You are told to administer the shock. Again, there’s no response. No cries. No whimpering. Nothing.
Again and again, no response. Finally, there is only one position left on the dial: 450 volts, or “XXX,” as it is labeled. You are told to administer the maximum shock on the board.
And you do.
Though you didn’t know it, the assignment of roles was rigged so that you would draw the “teacher” task. The “learner,” meanwhile, was an actor. The responses were entirely scripted, from the mistaken word pairs to the screams of protest. And the experience had nothing to do with memory or learning. The point was to do see what you would do.
When psychologist Stanley Milgram designed this experiment, the experts he consulted said that there was no more than a 1-in-1,000 chance that a person would sit through this entire process and continue administering shocks in response to memory mistakes. When Milgram actually ran the experiment, 82.5 percent kept shocking after the first cries of pain, and the majority of participants sat in the chair and gradually upped the shocks from 15 to 450.9
This classic experiment is considered a warning about obedience to authority, but in reality the subjects were being obedient to a problem. What they were really responding to was the notion that the learner wouldn’t succeed if he didn’t receive the punishment. There is no evidence in any of the versions of this experiment that the subjects would have tortured someone just because they were told to. They were hurting people because they were seduced by the problem—unless you used this training technique, your student would never learn the lesson. They would suffer if you didn’t hurt them.
Today, we have far less trust for those in positions of authority. Yet, when a researcher at Santa Clara University recently repeated the Milgram experiment, he came up with the exact same results.10 All the evolution in our culture, all the vast differences in our relationship with authority, and the results didn’t change at all. How is that possible? Because fundamentally the experiment is about how we respond to a problem. And that has not changed at all. We love problems. We lunge at problems. The problem of a learner who can’t keep his word pairs straight is just as compelling to us today as it was fifty years ago—and thus we keep turning the dial.
A problem is such an invigorating force that it can distract us from our most fundamental beliefs. That was exactly Milgram’s conclusion: “[O]rdinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”
* * *
WHO SEEKS POWER through problems? The short answer is everyone. Milgram showed that there wasn’t any one particular group—the rich or the poor, dropouts or those with academic degrees—who wanted the power of that problem; it was every group. In fact, even people who seem to have significant power seek the consequential feeling of a good problem to tackle.
Say, for example, that a company makes two varieties of the same product. Product A is a big seller. However, nobody loves it. People endure it, like an obligation. Product B doesn’t sell as many units, but buyers love it. They savor it. They build their day around it and they happily come back for more.
The company could go in three possible directions. It could continue to make both products, since both are profitable. It could focus on product B, since it seems likely at some point that the market will move toward the product people actually enjoy. Or there is a third option. The company could dump product B and stick with A.
Would any company stake its future on the product nobody likes, when they not only know it could be better but were actually making a better version of it at the very same time? It turns out, yes. John Pepper, CEO of the largest consumer products company in the world, did just that when he sized up the coffee market in 1992.
At the time, Procter & Gamble had two coffee divisions. One division ran factory assembly lines vacuum-packing Folgers crystals into cans for the American consumer market. The other roasted specialty arabica beans for Italian consumers and cafes.
Pepper looked at the two divisions and decided to sell off his Italian coffee operation. Why? Because it didn’t make any sense to him. It didn’t fit his understanding of the world. Italy was, as Pepper dismissively called it when he announced the sale, “a vastly different” coffee market.
And he was right. It was different. When Pepper and his team got up every morning in Cincinnati, Ohio, they didn’t see people lining up to buy coffee at a ridiculous markup in price. They didn’t see people raving about their coffee and lingering over coffee. They didn’t see a coffee culture with coffee at the center of a new kind of social space.
They saw people slurp down a cup of weak coffee at home as they raced out the door. They saw people slug down another cup of weak coffee at the office. And if people went out to buy a cup of coffee in Cincinnati, they bought bad, cheap coffee in a deli and then they left, like they were supposed to. These people never said their coffee was the highlight of their day. They didn’t celebrate it. They didn’t venerate or mythologize it. They gulped it down and moved on.
In Italy, the coffee Procter and Gamble was making was thick, rich, and basically unrecognizable to Americans. And, oddly, a significant portion of their sales was to cafes where Italians self-indulgently went for the sole purpose of drinking coffee.
Pepper ran a company that understood soap and cleaning products and so forth—things people rely upon, things people need to have in order to accomplish basic tasks. So he looked at their two coffee operations and saw the Italian division as a luxury-selling aberration in a company that sells necessities. It was different. It didn’t fit. Pepper didn’t want different in his company. So he sold it off.
But as researcher Barton Weitz has pointed out in his study of the decision, this is a classic example of seeing something different as a problem instead of seeing it as an asset. For Pepper, it was a “this doesn’t look right” problem—an unfamiliar market makes strange product demands, which comes to seem not just irrelevant but harmful to your overall business. Just like John Lennon’s teachers, Pepper could only see the downside of something unfamiliar to him and couldn’t even begin to conceive of its future.
In announcing the sale, Pepper emphasized that their Italian division was utterly disconnected and useless to their American coffee division. Weitz faults Pepper for a stunning lack of imagination. “Well, of course they are vastly different markets when you’re peddling industrial freeze-dried Folgers here and fresh, exotic beans there,” Weitz said. “But how long before someone figures out that if you serve people a good cup of coffee, they will literally line up out the door for it? How long before these markets come to look more alike?”
It did not take long. At exactly the same time Pepper was dismissing the idea of people actually liking his coffee, Howard Schultz was laying the foundation of the Starbucks coffee empire. Schultz took his inspiration from—of all things—the Italian coffee business, where he saw espresso bars and cafes that offered not only the quality of the drink but the romance of it. People started their day there—and then they came back later for more. They came day after day after day. And they created something there, something unique that they couldn’t find in any other setting, a feeling both compelling and comfortable.
Procter and Gamble had been making Italian coffee for ten years before Howard Schultz ever set foot in Italy. They had expertise, the resources, even the coffee beans themselves. They had everything necessary to launch the future of coffee. Instead of taking what they knew from Italy and exploiting it in the United States and around the globe, they took what they assumed about the United States and saw everything else as a problematic aberration. They looked at Italy and saw peculiar people drinking peculiar coffee, and wondered why anyone would want something other than a can of Folgers. They had, within their empire, coffee that people craved and coffee that people endured, and they went for what people endured because Italy didn’t fit the model and that was a problem.
Predictably, over time the market moved toward the coffee people loved. Where Folgers once made more in a day than Starbucks did in a year, Starbucks profits are now ten times larger than those of Folgers. And Procter and Gamble, surrendering against a market it could have easily devoured, wound up selling Folgers off and is now entirely out of the coffee business.
For Weitz, the lesson is obvious. “If you find yourself defining something unique as a problem,” he said, “you will learn the difference the hard way.”
* * *
PEOPLE USE PROBLEMS to feel consequential when they are making significant decisions, but they even fall into this trap when they are out to have fun. In fact, the appetite to tap into the power of problems can turn a pretend battle into a social war.
“It’s the total immersion that draws me in,” Cristina explains of her longtime hobby, historical reenactments. “The horses clatter by, kicking up the mud. The men and women speak without relying on probably ninety percent of the expressions they use in daily life. It’s the smell of it, the sound of it—you are in a different time and place, and every nagging detail of your life falls away.”
While reenactors are generally associated with battle scenes, Cristina’s specialty is midwestern frontier life. For her, there is something intriguing about the spare and rugged existence of those who completed perilous journeys to the shores of the American land, only to keep going deeper into the unknown in search of a new world within the new world.
Though Cristina loves the adventure of it and the sense, if only for a moment, that she really has traveled through time, she laments that nobody loves to pick a fight more than a reenactor.
“You could have exactly the right clothes, I mean right down to the buttons, but if they’re too clean, someone will say you’re not being true to the time,” Cristina said. “You could bring bales of hay for your entire village, but someone will say that they wouldn’t have come tethered in that shape in the 1780s.
“Unfortunately, this hobby really lends itself to intolerance and elitism,” she said. “You have the entire regular impulse to judge people magnified by the fact that everyone feels entitled to evaluate every single detail of your presentation. Like everyone here becomes judges in a beauty pageant crossed with a dog show.”
Even worse are participants who portray a high-ranking character. “You show me someone playing a general, and watch out,” Cristina laments. “They really get to thinking of themselves as generals, walk and talk as generals, and expect everyone to answer to them before, during, and after the reenactment. And heaven help you if you try to give them an idea or something. No good idea comes from below.”
Adding to the potential for contentious condescension is the inherently imprecise nature of most everything they do. “Self-proclaimed expertise runs rampant in our set,” Christina said. “Is this or that historically accurate? Well, there is no official handbook to consult. So we drown under a thousand different definitive opinions.”
The reenactment culture even has its own putdown for anyone considered to be historically insufficient in some way. “We call people like that a ‘farb.’ We say, ‘Look at that farb over there talking on his cellphone, you know, clear sins like that. But we also say someone is a farby for smelling too good,” she said.
“The next thing you know, he’s a farb, she’s farby. Everybody’s a farb or reeks of farbiness.” And then, instead of time travel, it feels like Cristina’s at an arbitration hearing dressed in funny clothes.
Cristina appreciates the desire to be accurate. “I read as many firsthand accounts as I can,” she said. “I try. And we should have standards to eliminate absurd anachronisms. But if you go back before the 1820s there are no photographs, and it’s not hard to figure out that even when you have a painting or two of a historical event, some of those painters took some pretty big liberties in turning what they saw into what they drew.”
Cristina wants her fellow hobbyists to lose their impulse to put people down and be dismissive toward them. “Nobody enjoys the experience and nobody really learns from it. We have to move toward being accurate without attacking each other. We can have high standards without elitism. Otherwise, really, what’s the point,” she asks. “I mean, we could skip all the history and the horses and the mud and the tents, and just walk around insulting each other, like high school.”
THE TAKEAWAY
Call him a problem, and suddenly your teaching skills are relevant to this vexing child named John Lennon. Call it a problem, and don’t learn a single thing from the Italian coffee market, and Procter and Gamble can reassert that its industrial coffee is best. Call them problems—or, in reenactor-speak, farbs—and your clothes, and your speech, and your hay bales look better than someone else’s. Chase every problem you can find, and you can consider yourself essential every single minute on the job. Call it a problem when someone can’t memorize a list, and you can inflict punishment and make him or her better.
No matter the context, with a problem in hand, we matter. With a problem we are consequential. With a problem, attention must be paid. And so we relentlessly chase problems to make ourselves seem bigger.
We believe in throwing ourselves at problems so fervently that 82.5 percent of us would physically hurt someone to teach him or her a lesson.
With a problem in hand, it’s like we’re looking at ourselves in a fun-house mirror while trying to put makeup on. We look a lot bigger to ourselves that way—but to everyone else we look like we’re just making a mess.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: PUTTING POWER PROBLEMS IN THEIR PLACE
Take less. Al Franken’s big break in comedy came with a catch. Along with his comedy partner, Tom Davis, he had landed a dream job offer from Saturday Night Live. The producers told him they loved the material and wanted to hire them both as writers. But, as a comedy writing team, Franken and Davis were offered only one writer’s salary—if they wanted the job they would have to work for what amounted to half pay. The power problem play would have been to walk away. It was insulting to be treated like half a person. But Franken recognized that working on the show would likely transform his career. Indeed, he says today that he owes everything in his improbable career that took him from comedy to the U.S. Senate to once being willing to work for half pay. As practice against the power problem trap, take less of something today, even if it’s just the smaller half when you break a cookie in two.
Go look at an abstract painting. We don’t do well with uncertainty and ambiguity. We fight it. Run from it. It makes us feel powerless. It makes us throw a bad decision at a problem just for the sake of feeling stronger. But transformative decisions are almost always the product of mastering uncertainty and embracing ambiguity. How do people get better at this? Go look at some works of abstract art. Go to a museum, crack open an art book, or just search for them online. Look at paintings by Jackson Pollock or Frank Stella, or any work of art that isn’t a literal representation of something. Researchers have found that abstract art inspires unease, uncertainty, and a reaction not unlike fright.3 But if you can overcome that impulse to turn away from the discomfort in art, you will have an easier time tolerating uncertainty in daily life without creating problems.