Quiet (9 page)

Many of the students adapt easily to this system. But not Don. He has trouble elbowing his way into class discussions; in some classes he barely speaks at all. He prefers to contribute only when he believes he has something insightful to add, or honest-to-God disagrees with someone. This sounds reasonable, but Don feels as if he should be more comfortable talking just so he can fill up his share of available airtime.

Don's HBS friends, who tend to be thoughtful, reflective types like him, spend a lot of time talking about talking in class. How much class participation is too much? How little is too little? When does publicly disagreeing with a classmate constitute healthy debate, and when does it seem competitive and judgmental? One of Don's friends is worried because her professor sent around an e-mail saying that anyone with real-world experience on the day's case study should let him know in advance. She's sure that the professor's announcement was an effort to limit stupid remarks like the one she made in class last week. Another worries that he's not loud enough. “I just have a naturally soft voice,” he says, “so when my voice sounds normal to others, I feel like I'm shouting. I have to work on it.”

The school also tries hard to turn quiet students into talkers. The professors have their own “Learning Teams,” in which they egg each other on with techniques to draw out reticent students. When students fail to speak up in class, it's seen not only as their own deficit but also as their professor's. “If someone doesn't speak by the end of the semester, it's problematic,” Professor Michel Anteby told me. “It means I didn't do a good job.”

The school even hosts live informational sessions and web pages on
how to be a good class participator. Don's friends earnestly reel off the tips they remember best.

“Speak with conviction. Even if you believe something only fifty-five percent, say it as if you believe it a hundred percent.”

“If you're preparing alone for class, then you're doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone.”

“Don't think about the perfect answer. It's better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in.”

The school newspaper,
The Harbus
, also dispenses advice, featuring articles with titles like “How to Think and Speak Well—On the Spot!,” “Developing Your Stage Presence,” and “Arrogant or Simply Confident?”

These imperatives extend beyond the classroom. After class, most people eat lunch at the Spangler dining hall, which one grad describes as “more like high school than high school.” And every day, Don wrestles with himself. Should he go back to his apartment and recharge over a quiet lunch, as he longs to do, or join his classmates? Even if he forces himself to go to Spangler, it's not as if the social pressure will end there. As the day wears on, there will be more such dilemmas. Attend the late-afternoon happy hours? Head out for a late, rowdy evening? Students at HBS go out in big groups several nights a week, says Don. Participation isn't mandatory, but it feels as if it is to those who don't thrive on group activities.

“Socializing here is an extreme sport,” one of Don's friends tells me. “People go out
all the time
. If you don't go out one night, the next day people will ask, ‘Where were you?' I go out at night like it's my job.” Don has noticed that the people who organize social events—happy hours, dinners, drinking fests—are at the top of the social hierarchy. “The professors tell us that our classmates are the people who will go to our weddings,” says Don. “If you leave HBS without having built an extensive social network, it's like you failed your HBS experience.”

By the time Don falls into bed at night, he's exhausted. And sometimes he wonders why, exactly, he should have to work so hard at being outgoing. Don is Chinese-American, and recently he worked a summer job in China. He was struck by how different the social norms were, and how much more comfortable he felt. In China there was
more emphasis on listening, on asking questions rather than holding forth, on putting others' needs first. In the United States, he feels, conversation is about how effective you are at turning your experiences into stories, whereas a Chinese person might be concerned with taking up too much of the other person's time with inconsequential information.

“That summer, I said to myself, ‘Now I know why these are my people,' ” he says.

But that was China, this is Cambridge, Massachusetts. And if one judges HBS by how well it prepares students for the “real world,” it seems to be doing an excellent job. After all, Don Chen
will graduate into a business culture in which verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success, according to a Stanford Business School study. It's a world in which a middle manager at GE once told me that “people here don't even want to meet with you if you don't have a PowerPoint and a ‘pitch' for them. Even if you're just making a recommendation to your colleague, you can't sit down in someone's office and tell them what you think. You have to make a presentation, with pros and cons and a ‘takeaway box.' ”

Unless they're self-employed or able to telecommute, many adults work in offices where they must take care to glide down the corridors greeting their colleagues warmly and confidently. “The business world,” says a 2006 article from the Wharton Program for Working Professionals, “is filled with office environments similar to one described by an Atlanta area corporate trainer: ‘
Here everyone knows that it's important to be an extrovert and troublesome to be an introvert. So people work real hard at looking like extroverts, whether that's comfortable or not. It's like making sure you drink the same single-malt scotch the CEO drinks and that you work out at the right health club.' ”

Even businesses that employ many artists, designers, and other imaginative types often display a preference for extroversion. “We want to attract creative people,” the director of human resources at a major media company told me. When I asked what she meant by “creative,” she answered without missing a beat. “You have to be outgoing, fun, and jazzed up to work here.”

Contemporary ads aimed at businesspeople would give the Williams
Luxury Shaving Cream ads of yesteryear a run for their money. One line of TV commercials that ran on CNBC, the cable business channel, featured an office worker losing out on a plum assignment.

Other ads explicitly sell their products as extroversion-enhancers. In 2000, Amtrak encouraged travelers to “
DEPART FROM YOUR INHIBITIONS
.” Nike became a prominent brand partly on the strength of its “Just Do It” campaign. And in 1999 and 2000,
a series of ads for the psychotropic drug Paxil promised to cure the extreme shyness known as “social anxiety disorder” by offering Cinderella stories of personality transformation. One Paxil ad showed a well-dressed executive shaking hands over a business deal. “I can taste success,” read the caption. Another showed what happens without the drug: a businessman alone in his office, his forehead resting dejectedly on a clenched fist. “I should have joined in more often,” it read.

Yet even at Harvard Business School there are signs that something might be wrong with a leadership style that values quick and assertive answers over quiet, slow decision-making.

Every autumn the incoming class participates in an elaborate role-playing game called the Subarctic Survival Situation. “It is approximately 2:30 p.m., October 5,” the students are told, “and you have just crash-landed in a float plane on the east shore of Laura Lake in the subarctic region of the northern Quebec-Newfoundland border.” The students are divided into small groups and asked to imagine that their group has salvaged fifteen items from the plane—a compass, sleeping bag, axe,
and so on. Then they're told to rank them in order of importance to the group's survival. First the students rank the items individually; then they do so as a team. Next they score those rankings against an expert's to see how well they did. Finally they watch a videotape of their team's discussions to see what went right—or wrong.

The point of the exercise is to teach group synergy. Successful synergy means a higher ranking for the team than for its individual members. The group fails when any of its members has a better ranking than the overall team. And failure is exactly what can happen when students prize assertiveness too highly.

One of Don's classmates was in a group lucky to include a young man with extensive experience in the northern backwoods. He had a lot of good ideas about how to rank the fifteen salvaged items. But his group didn't listen, because he expressed his views too quietly.

“Our action plan hinged on what the most vocal people suggested,” recalls the classmate. “When the less vocal people put out ideas, those ideas were discarded. The ideas that were rejected would have kept us alive and out of trouble, but they were dismissed because of the conviction with which the more vocal people suggested their ideas. Afterwards they played us back the videotape, and it was so embarrassing.”

The Subarctic Survival Situation may sound like a harmless game played inside the ivory tower, but if you think of meetings you've attended, you can probably recall a time—plenty of times—when the opinion of the most dynamic or talkative person prevailed to the detriment of all. Perhaps it was a low-stakes situation—your PTA, say, deciding whether to meet on Monday or Tuesday nights. But maybe it was important: an emergency meeting of Enron's top brass, considering whether or not to disclose questionable accounting practices. (See
chapter 7
for more on Enron.) Or a jury deliberating whether or not to send a single mother to jail.

I discussed the Subarctic Survival Situation with HBS professor Quinn Mills, an expert on leadership styles. Mills is a courteous man dressed, on the day we met, in a pinstriped suit and yellow polka-dot tie. He has a sonorous voice, and uses it skillfully. The HBS method “presumes that leaders should be vocal,” he told me flat out, “and in my view that's part of reality.”

But Mills also pointed to the common phenomenon known as the “winner's curse,” in which two companies bid competitively to acquire a third, until the price climbs so high that it becomes less an economic activity than a war of egos. The winning bidders will be damned if they'll let their opponents get the prize, so they buy the target company at an inflated price. “It tends to be the assertive people who carry the day in these kinds of things,” says Mills. “You see this all the time. People ask, ‘How did this happen, how did we pay so much?' Usually it's said that they were carried away by the situation, but that's not right. Usually they're carried away by people who are assertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they're very good at getting their way. But that doesn't mean they're going the
right
way.”

If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens.
We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types—even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate. In one experiment in which
two strangers met over the phone, those who spoke more were considered more intelligent, better looking, and more likable.
We also see talkers as leaders.
The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to him, which means that he becomes increasingly powerful as a meeting goes on.
It also helps to speak fast; we rate quick talkers as more capable and appealing than slow talkers.

All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight, but research suggests that there's no such link. In one study, groups of
college students were asked to solve math problems together and then to rate one another's intelligence and judgment. The students who spoke first and most often were consistently given the highest ratings, even though their suggestions (and math SAT scores) were no better than those of the less talkative students. These same students were given similarly high ratings for their creativity and analytical powers during a separate exercise to develop a business strategy for a start-up company.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.