The Culture Code (18 page)

The “perfect” car would be useless to us, because we wouldn’t have the alibi that our old car doesn’t work well enough anymore and we need to change it. On the cortex level, we scorn planned obsolescence (the practice many manufacturers employ of building something that needs to be replaced within a relatively short period), but planned obsolescence is on Code with the American culture. We want things to become obsolete, because when they do we have the excuse we need to buy something new.

At the same time, though, we have a simple and clear quality demand for our products: they need to work. When we turn the keys in the ignitions of our cars, we expect them to start and to take us where we need to go. When we make a call on our cell phones, we expect to get through and are frustrated when the cell network suddenly drops our call. None of our products needs to perform brilliantly (our cars don’t need to be masterpieces of engineering, our cell phones don’t need to provide sonic perfection), but they absolutely need to
perform
. Other cultures might have higher standards for performance or design, but we insist on something simpler: make sure the thing operates the way it was supposed to. Thus the Verizon cell phone campaign “Can you hear me now?”

This ties directly into another fundamental component of our culture. Remember, the Code for health in America is movement. We are a nation of doers. Life, in essence, is movement. When a product works—when it either helps us to keep moving or doesn’t prevent us from moving (the car takes us to our destination, the cell phone connects)—it is on Code. When it fails to work—when it gets in the way of our ability to move (the car spends too much time in the shop, the cell phone cuts off for no reason)—it is off Code.

The cup holder in a car, for instance, is absolutely on Code. What a brilliant notion: a simple device that lets us take our coffee with us. Ten minutes less spent drinking coffee at home means ten minutes more out in the world doing what we need to do. Volkswagen recently introduced an air-cooled glove compartment for its Jetta. Again, this is dead-on. Now we can stick our lunch in the glove compartment and just keep moving.

So what does this mean for a company selling goods and services in America? The most important message is that Americans put a premium on functionality. We are not a bells-and-whistles culture. We would far rather have a cell phone that always operates when we’re in the middle of a call than one that takes pictures, plays music, and allows us to download television clips. A car that reliably gets us to work, the supermarket, or soccer practice is much more valuable to us than one that corners masterfully or has rain-sensing windshield wipers.

BlackBerry offers an on-Code example of functionality with its PDAs. The BlackBerry market consists of on-the-go executives, people who spend a great deal of time on the road, in airports, and in others’ offices. Remote e-mail access is a business essential to these executives, but accessing e-mail remotely can be a chore if you have to spend long minutes logging on to a server and waiting for a wireless link. BlackBerry addresses this by notifying users when they have e-mail (one of the company’s slogans is “You don’t check your e-mail—it checks you”), making it necessary to log on only when you know something is waiting.

Because we equate perfection with death, we don’t expect anyone to make the perfect product. We expect our products to break down. However, because our Code for quality is IT
WORKS
, we expect problems to be resolved quickly and with a minimum of disruption. Americans are far more responsive to good service than they are to perfection (which they don’t believe in, anyway). Crisis is a great opportunity to create loyalty. If a customer comes to you with a problem with a product or service and you solve that problem quickly and minimize the customer’s inconvenience, you will likely earn that customer’s dedication. You have proven yourself to the customer.

Ironically, if your product never breaks down, you never have the opportunity to develop this relationship with the customer. When the customer seeks to replace the product (as he inevitably will), he is likely to look elsewhere, because he hasn’t formed a bond with you. The bottom line is that great service is more important to Americans than great quality.

A colleague of mine recently purchased a Compaq computer. His previous machine, from another manufacturer, worked adequately, but Compaq offered him more computer for his money. Within weeks, the computer exhibited serious performance problems. Perturbed, my colleague called the Compaq tech support line, expecting to wait hours for human help. Instead, within five minutes, a tech support person was guiding him through a series of diagnostics and getting to the core of the problem. He was impressed with this service and happy to get his computer purring once again. A few hours later, however, he was stunned to receive a follow-up call from the same tech support person asking whether everything was okay with his computer and whether he had any further questions. By the time he hung up, he’d become an unofficial spokesperson for Compaq.

Hyundai, the Korean car manufacturer, seems to understand how the promise of great service can dramatically improve the value of something of only modest quality. The challenge for Hyundai was to introduce a new brand—from a country with no proven success in the American market—into the intensely competitive low-end category. Hyundai’s sales foundered until they introduced a ten-year bumper-to-bumper warranty on their cars, including roadside assistance and loaner cars. The message seemed to be “Yes, we know there isn’t much to this car, but we’ll keep you on the road.” That was on Code and it connected with the American public. Hyundai’s sales have risen dramatically since.

NOT
TURNING
JAPANESE

Major American corporations spent huge sums of money in the late 1980s and early 1990s trying to make their quality standards match those of the Japanese. At the cortex level, this makes perfect sense. Higher quality should generate better business. In the end, though, this movement failed. You no longer hear American companies stressing zero defects or continuous improvement. Why? Because it is out of sync with the American culture, and nothing that contradicts the Code of a culture succeeds for any length of time. Americans don’t put a premium on quality. We just want something that works. We don’t believe in perfection, so the concept of zero defects seems like a fantasy. Notions that are a necessary part of the Japanese survival kit are completely off Code here. We therefore rejected them.

We would respond the same way to any other concept incompatible with our culture. Remember how Nestlé tried to convince the Japanese to give up tea for coffee, and how unsuccessful they were? That they even tried seems silly to us now. When one seeks to bring something new to a culture, one must adapt the idea to the culture. It doesn’t work the other way.

The Codes for Food and Alcohol

O
ne of the things that intrigued me when I first came to this country was the all-you-can-eat buffet. We didn’t have such a thing in France; in fact, I’d never seen one anywhere in Europe. Yet in America, in every town I visited, I saw signs hanging in numerous restaurants announcing “All you can eat: $9.99 (the price was lower in the 1970s, but you get the point). I found this baffling. My experience with American restaurants was that they always served me
more
than I could eat. Why, then, make a marketing point of serving
all
you could eat? Even more confounding was what I discovered when I visited one of these buffets: people loading up their plates with absurd amounts of various kinds of food and eating it as quickly as they could so they could get back to the buffet.

Why does a $9.99 all-you-can-eat buffet cause a literal feeding frenzy?

Why is fast food an American institution that will never die?

Why is “going out to get drunk” a common social behavior here and extremely unusual in Europe?

As ever, the answers are in the Codes.

FILLING
UP
THE
TANK

Dining in America is an entirely different experience from what it is in France. Here, we want our food as quickly as we can get it, even in a fine restaurant. The French, on the other hand, invented the notion of slow food. Even if they can make a dish quickly, they won’t, because they believe it is important first to set the mood for the diner and to build anticipation of the upcoming meal. In America, we put several different kinds of food—meat, fish, vegetables, starches, sometimes even fruit and cheese—on one plate because that is the most efficient way to serve a meal. In France, each kind of food comes on a different plate, to keep the flavors from mixing and to allow the diner to enjoy the separate qualities of each preparation. Americans want abundant quantities of all food and it is our goal to finish everything served to us. French portions are significantly smaller, and the French consider you vulgar if your plate or wineglass is empty at the conclusion of dinner. Americans end a meal by saying “I’m full.” The French end a meal by saying “That was delicious.”

You can trace many of the American traits to our humble beginnings. Though we are the richest country in the world, as we discussed earlier, at the reptilian level we consider ourselves poor. We start out with nothing and we labor to achieve wealth, and even though we may succeed, the hand-to-mouth attitude remains. The response of poor people to food is consistent throughout the world: they eat as much as they can when they can, because they don’t know whether they will have the opportunity to eat the next day. This attitude is similar to that of many predators: when they capture any prey, they eat as much as possible because they can’t be certain of capturing more prey tomorrow. In this spirit, we eat all of the food available to us and only then do we feel satisfied. When someone eats huge quantities, we sometimes say he “can really put it away.” Unconsciously, this is exactly what he is doing. He is storing as much food as he can to forestall starvation (though the chances of starvation are extremely slim).

This is a situation in which our modest beginnings and our quest for abundance intersect. At the reptilian level, uncertainty about tomorrow’s meal tells us to eat lustily before the food goes away. While our cortexes tell us that the food will be available at the buffet all night, our reptilian brains aren’t taking any chances. In this battle between the brains, as in all such battles, the reptilian wins.

Though other cultures have certainly had their share of hunger and even starvation, many have other influences that moderate the desire to “put it away.” The Italian culture, for instance, is strongly influenced by the model of aristocracy. An aristocrat would never gorge himself at a buffet. An aristocrat would never rush through his meal. An aristocrat tastes each morsel and appreciates the flavor and consistency. This aristocratic approach to food has trickled down to every level of Italian society. Regardless of their station, Italians have a strong sense of refinement when it comes to food and believe that overeating destroys their ability to appreciate taste. It is extremely unusual to find a buffet at any price in Italy.

At the limbic level, Americans strongly connect food with love. Obviously, this comes from our earliest memories of being fed by our mothers. Feeding is associated with being held, cuddled, and made to feel safe. As we get older, though our mothers no longer feed us in the same way (though they continue to ask us, as soon as they see us, whether we want anything to eat), the intense feeling of satisfaction that comes with food remains. In America, food is “safe sex.” Whereas we unconsciously have negative feelings about sex, we find it universally acceptable to take food into our bodies for pleasure. Perhaps that it why so many of us eat so often and to such extremes.

The pleasure we derive from eating, however, pales next to our need for movement, our desire to fill our time with activity. We are a country on the go and we don’t have time to linger over our food. It was recently reported that the average American spends
six minutes
eating dinner. Dallying is for laggards like the French. Eating on the run is a national pastime, and many of us regularly gobble meals (often purchased from a fast-food restaurant) in our cars (keeping the drinks in our cup holders, of course) on the way to our next appointment. There’s nothing either safe or sexy about that experience.

Consider these observations—that we regard food in a different way from the Europeans, that we eat as though we were still poor, that food is “safe sex,” and that we think of eating as an act requiring efficiency—as you read these third-hour stories:

I try to make a nice dinner for my family at least twice a week, but we don’t sit down together all that often. The rest of the time, we’re eating on the fly—on the way to practices, lessons, clubs, and late nights at the office. I try to keep things in the house that will provide good nutrition to the kids and that they can fill up with quickly.

—a forty-one-year-old woman

My most recent memory of food is this deli I found near one of my accounts. They make these huge hero sandwiches that I can eat while I’m going to my next appointment. They taste good and they really keep me going.

—a fifty-year-old man

I’m a health nut and I’m really particular about the food I eat. I limit the fat and carbs I take in and I only eat lean meats and organic vegetables. To me, there’s no point in eating if the food doesn’t help keep you healthy. I plan to live a long time.

—a twenty-seven-year-old woman

I like pasta, but it always makes me sleepy. I figured out a while ago that if I had anything other than protein during lunch, I wasn’t as good in the afternoon. When the Atkins diet came along, I thought it was the best thing in the world. Bacon cheese-burgers for lunch every day—and I actually had more energy.