potential inspiration in this story, about knowing what you want and having the moxie to go after it. Don’t let us stop you from pondering that and acting on it. But since this is a book about metaphors for leaders, you could also ask yourself about the “scent” you and your company leave behind, and how that affects your relationships with customers and others.
There was a time when this issue most commonly arose during a scandal or crisis: Johnson & Johnson gained market share because of how it handled its Tylenol tampering crisis; Ford lost it as a result of the denials and apparent disinformation it issued regarding its Pintos’ combustible gas tanks.
But in today’s increasingly transparent and connected world, the aftereffects of any company’s internal and external interactions—its reputation: the scents it leaves behind—may be among the most important factors for achieving enduring success. So argues Dov Seidman in his bestselling 2007 book, HOW.8 The influential columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about Seidman and incorporated Seidman’s views into his own bestseller, The World Is Flat. In a column, Friedman explained:
Seidman’s simple thesis is that in this transparent world “how” you live your life and “how” you conduct your business matters more than ever, because so many people can now see into what you do and tell so many other people about it on their own without any editor. To win now, he argues, you have to turn these new conditions to your advantage.9
The scent Estée Lauder left behind lasted a few days and affected perhaps a few thousand shoppers, yet it was enough to transform her company’s future. Today what you leave behind can reach millions in moments and endure in cyberspace for decades; its potential impact is inestimable.10
Many wise writers have recognized the usefulness of scent as a metaphor for considering our personal lives. Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth says, “Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”; Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself”; and Henry Ward Beecher advised, “A man ought to carry himself in the world as an orange tree would if it could walk up and down in the garden, swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.”11
What are you leaving behind you, at work, at home, and elsewhere, today and in the long run? If you consider it as a scent, what’s it like?
Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell
by Kate Clanchy12
This is simply to inform you:
that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;
that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;
that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,
in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,
hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.
The Baboon Reflex
Fear makes animals, and people, do unproductive things.
Robert Sapolsky is a brilliant scientist with a knack for showing what humans can learn from animal behavior. His bestselling books include Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and A Primate’s Memoir.13
A Stanford professor and winner of a MacArthur “genius” award, he conducts extensive first-hand research among baboons in Africa—he’s been going there for more than 20 years. Here’s a story he’s told about baboon behavior:
When baboons hunt together they’d love to get as much meat as possible, but they’re not very good at it. The baboon is a much more successful hunter when he hunts by himself than when he hunts in a group because they screw up every time they’re in a group. Say three of them are running as fast as possible after a gazelle, and they’re gaining on it, and they’re deadly. But something goes on in one of their minds—I’m anthropomorphizing here—and he says to himself, “What am I doing here? I have no idea whatsoever, but I’m running as fast as possible, and this guy is running as fast as possible right behind me, and we had one hell of a fight about three months ago. I don’t quite know why we’re running so fast right now, but I’d better just stop and slash him in the face before he gets me.” The baboon suddenly stops and turns around, and they go rolling over each other like Keystone cops and the gazelle is long gone.14
Anything like that ever happen in your organization, or your life? Forgetting the team’s goal and worrying instead about who might be gaining on you? These baboons had a goal and they had motivation to achieve it that’s just about as powerful as any motivation could be: food and survival. In today’s terms, they were “highly incented.” But fear undermined them nonetheless.
Makes you think of W. Edwards Deming’s famous pronouncement, “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company,”15 doesn’t it? “The economic loss from fear is appalling,” Deming said.16
Back when AOL acquired Time Warner in 2001 and all the experts were bowing down to this brilliant exercise in the most current business buzzword of the day, “synergy”—that was before the stock price lost 80 percent of its value and the whole enterprise eventually fell apart—one commentator saw the baboons. Under the headline “Reminder to Steve Case: Confiscate the Long Knives,” Wired columnist Frank Rose cautioned that Time Warner had become “a corporate version of the Holy Roman Empire: a loose confederation of fiefdoms that are as likely to be at war with one another as with outsiders. Infighting can break out at any level.”17
Was it a long history of fear and jealousy that created that disastrous culture? Hard to know for sure, but what do you think?
The fear center in the human brain has a hair trigger. An experiment shows how exceptionally susceptible to fear we are. Brain scientists wired up some people as they were watching the 2006 Super Bowl, in order to see which brain parts were activated as the commercials were viewed. Federal Express introduced a commercial in which a caveman is reprimanded by his caveman boss for not using Federal Express to ship an important package. As the reprimanded caveman walks away from the encounter, he is stepped on and crushed by a dinosaur.
Most people might describe this ad as “funny” or “cute,” not frightening, but to our brains, it’s an entirely different
