In the Workplace

The Go-For-It Mentality

The activist, go-for-it mentality is evident everywhere in the workplace, most notably, perhaps, in the way Americans respond to challenges, obstacles, and problems. Not surprisingly, they love them. Nothing excites most Americans more, or more quickly, than figuring out how to do something that has never been done before or how to fix something that s broken ” and if you really want to get an American s attention, tell her or him that something can t be done. Americans love charging into uncharted territory, trying something new, and taking chances , and they re especially fond of a good crisis.

Needless to say, such people are not easily intimidated by adversity, not thrown by setbacks, for example, or worried about failure. They tend to see setbacks and failures as only temporary ” learning experiences, Americans call them ” because they know that if they simply persist, they will prevail. They never admit defeat, in short, because doing so would mean to stop believing in oneself, and that s not in the American genes.

The other side of this bring-on-the-obstacles mentality is the fact that when all the problems have been solved and all the obstacles overcome ” when things, in short, are going smoothly ” Americans lose interest, become restless, and start looking around for something else to fix. They are much better at seeing what s wrong than noticing what works, much better at fixing than maintaining, and much more interested in changing things than letting them be. They want to be challenged, not just busy, and are not above creating challenges so they can have something to do. If it isn t broken, as the saying might go, then break it.

The belief that people can control external circumstances and shape their own destiny also accounts for the so-called proactive approach Americans take to so much of what they do. Americans believe that very little happens by chance. They don t wait for things to happen, in other words, or to see how things will turn out ; they prefer, rather, to make things happen and determine how they will turn out. Americans don t wait for the future as much as they try to create it.

Even Americans don t overcome all obstacles, of course, or always triumph in the face of adversity, but when they do fail, it s in a typically American way: not with the sense that they are unable to accomplish what they intended, but only that they no longer want to. They could have succeeded, in other words, but they lost interest or the goal no longer seemed important. In short, failure American-style doesn t involve doubt or loss of self-confidence ; Americans may sometimes stop trying, but they are never defeated.

Their characteristic self-confidence and the related tendency to trivialize obstacles and challenges ” the we-never-met-a-problem-we-couldn t- solve syndrome ” earns Americans a reputation for swagger and bravado in some quarters and for not being very realistic in others. While American enthusiasm in the face of adversity is often appreciated, non-Americans sometimes wish it could be tempered now and then with a bit more skepticism and understanding. And they especially don t appreciate it when Americans accuse them of not trying hard enough, or giving up too easily when they fail in a particular venture. To people who feel they are trying their damnedest, this kind of observation is not helpful.

Taking Risks and Making Mistakes

A number of basic beliefs come together to form the American perspective on risk. The previous section described how the notions of abundance and opportunity influence risk taking, and in this section we examine the part played by the can-do mentality. In many ways, the American view of risk ” that it is nothing to be afraid of ” is a natural outgrowth of the prototypical American experience of people in completely novel circumstances faced with a bewildering variety of tasks they had never even encountered before, much less performed. In these unprecedented situations, the choice early Americans faced was either to do nothing ” and perish ” or to try out a new behavior and see what happened . Under the circumstances, risk-taking quickly became a way of life.

Small wonder , then, that Americans regard risk as somewhat commonplace, a more or less regular feature of human activity, at least of any significant activity. For an American, taking a risk isn t something one is forced to do when all else fails, after one has considered and rejected all the possibilities that don t involve risk; taking risks is normal and expected. Hence, the relatively casual attitude most Americans have toward risk; they don t see what the fuss is all about and don t waste much time worrying about risks or trying to avoid them. Most Americans don t actually seek out risk, as they are often accused of doing, and even see the merit in trying to manage or minimize it, but they see nothing particularly wrong with taking risks nor anything especially commendable in being afraid of them. Americans value trying almost as much as they value succeeding, and if the United States had a national motto, it would be something very close to Nike s Just do it.

As noted earlier, even if Americans weren t otherwise so favorably disposed to taking risks ” if their historical conditioning had not mandated quite so much experimentation ” they would probably still be ardent risk takers thanks to the protection afforded them by the abundance of resources and opportunity in the New World.

Along with their benign view of risk, Americans have a similarly sympathetic attitude toward mistakes. Mistakes are inherent in risk taking, after all, so it is only natural that a culture that encourages experimentation would not be too hard on people who make a mess of things. By and large, Americans are quite forgiving of mistakes, and people are not normally blamed for them unless the particular mistake was completely avoidable (hence unnecessary) or a person makes the same mistake repeatedly.

Mistakes are more forgivable in younger cultures, like the United States. Older cultures, after all, can look for answers in the past where most mistakes have already been made. But young cultures, like young people, don t have centuries of history and tradition to guide them and therefore must learn primarily by doing. And the first few times you do something, you re bound to make mistakes.

In their book If it ain t broken, break it, Robert Kriegel and Louis Patler tell

a famous story about IBM s founder Tom Watson and big mistakes. One of Watson s vice presidents took the initiative on the development of a new product. The product was a colossal flop and cost the company an estimated $10 million. Watson summoned the man to his office, saying there was something he wanted to discuss with him. When he arrived in Watson s office, [the man] was holding a letter of resignation in his hand. Watson turned and said, Let you go? We just spent ten million dollars giving you one hell of an education! I can t wait to see what you re going to do next . Learning from his father, Tom Watson Jr. [always] said, If you want to succeed, double your failure rate. (1991, 197)

Their attitude toward taking risks and making mistakes also explains in part the American attitude toward improvising. Americans see nothing wrong in winging it, as they sometimes say, or making it up as they go along, or thinking on their feet ” meaning doing things on the spur of the moment without a plan or any forethought. Anything that is not planned can go poorly, but if there are no real consequences when things go poorly, then there s nothing to be afraid of.

Americans ready embrace of risk frightens many non-Americans, especially those from cultures where one doesn t often get a second chance, where opportunities are limited, for example, where mistakes have consequences, and where failure is usually permanent. If you come from such a culture, you will probably find the seemingly breathless ease with which Americans take chances and experiment either completely aweinspiring or utterly irresponsible. And in either case, quite scary. No- body dares to take any risks, a German entrepreneur has observed about his country. You do not want to take a chance with failure because in Germany, unlike in the United States, there are rarely any second chances (Drozdiak 1998, A13).

You can probably understand taking risks when there is no choice, when all the alternatives have been exhausted, but you may not under- stand taking risks before the alternatives have even been examined. You understand taking necessary risks, in short, acting when it s simply not possible to know ahead of time how things are going to turn out. But when it is possible, when research, analysis, or more testing would in fact reveal exactly how things are going to turn out ” when the risk is completely unnecessary ” taking chances in such circumstances is foolish and reckless. Taking risks is what you sometimes have to do when you re unprepared or ill-informed, when your plan fails, but it should never be your plan.

When the Past Is Not Prologue

The experience of the early immigrants imprinted another fundamental characteristic on the American national psyche: an instinctive distrust of tradition and precedent. As noted earlier, when immigrants turned to their European past for guidance on how to cope with life in the New World, they usually came up empty-handed. The past they turned to had played out in a very different world from the one they now lived in, and its lessons were largely irrelevant and in some cases even misleading. As Luigi Barzini has observed,

From the Americans deep-seated awareness that they are entrusted with an experiment never before tried by man derive the national characteristics most baffling to [foreigners]. One is their apparent lack of respect for other people s precedents and experiences and [for] the past in general. (1983, 231)

Without tradition to guide them, Americans were forced to be inventive , to figure out how to do things they had never done before ” invent[ing] brand-new solutions to brand-new problems, Barzini calls it (220) ” as well as new ways of doing familiar things in their strange new environment. Important innovations, Daniel Boorstin has observed, were made simply because Americans did not know any better (1965, 21). Thus was born that creativity and ingenuity that Americans are still justly famous for, greatly abetted, it must be said, by that ready embrace of risk and easy acceptance of mistakes described above. How much easier it is to be creative and ingenious in a society that tolerates error and forgives failure.

This may also explain why Americans tend to trust their instincts so much, why they are as likely to make decisions on the basis of feelings or intuitions as on reason or intellect. Americans talk about having a hunch, a gut feeling about or gut reaction to something, by which they mean a kind of emotional, subjective wisdom that they are quite prepared to rely on as much as book knowledge or objective wisdom based on hard facts and data. In the New World there weren t any hard facts or data, so people were forced to go with their hunches, to act on the basis of how they felt about something rather than what they knew about it. This is not to say Americans don t commission all manner of assessments and analyses leading up to major decisions, but they get impatient with over-analysis and too much discussion.

Americans are not merely wary of tradition or precedent, they love to challenge and debunk it, to turn accepted wisdom on its head, do the unexpected, and otherwise think outside the box. They react strongly to any kind of blind adherence to long-established procedures or hallowed practices. Indeed, almost nothing upsets them more than doing something because that s what we ve always done or that s the way we ve always done it. In the United States, those are arguments against a certain practice or course of action, not for it. Americans dismiss conventional wisdom out of hand, but call something unconventional and you immediately get an American s attention. In the workplace or in business, an original idea often generates much more enthusiasm than a good one, and if you want support for an idea or proposal that s not especially original, you would be wise to repackage it into something that appears to be.

Out with the Old, In with the New

Because they don t trust the past, Americans don t learn from it, which probably explains why they are always reinventing the wheel, coming up with a terrific new idea that is not really new at all. Deep down, Americans are die-hard empiricists; they believe that the only knowledge you can truly rely on is what you have learned yourself. This explains why Americans don t take advice very well and why they prefer to make their own mistakes rather than accept the word of someone else. In the final analysis, the only past an American truly believes in is his or her own.

This empirical turn of mind also explains why you can never really tell an American anything, why they never accept anything at face value, for example, or because someone else speaks favorably of it, or because something worked well in some other setting. Americans question everything and everyone and almost never take a product, an idea, or a process developed by someone else and accept it as it is. If they didn t think of it or develop it, then they don t entirely trust it. While other cultures speak of and believe in what is sometimes known as received wisdom, the accumulated learning of the past, Americans, who don t really believe in the past, are not about to receive any wisdom from it. [T]he person who discovered something in the ˜school of hard knocks through ˜hands-on learning, McElroy has observed, or who created something new and useful as a result of what he had learned on his own by trial-and-error experimentation or independent study, was more greatly respected and admired than the man of book learning (1999, 107).

It should come as no surprise that Americans have a complicated and somewhat conflicted attitude toward experts, especially outside experts. On one hand, they hire many of them and pay them good money, apparently valuing their experience and opinions ; on the other hand, Americans tend to give experts a hard time, don t listen to them, and question whether anyone from the outside can truly understand their organization or business. In the United States, experts often wonder why they were hired . People in other cultures second-guess their experts too, but not quite so readily as Americans.

In the eyes of many non-American observers, Americans take their rejection of the past too far. It s one thing to be a slave of tradition, stuck in the past, as Americans would say, but it s quite another to reject the lessons of history without even knowing what they are. This may strike you as just more of that arrogance you ve come to expect from Americans, taking the form in this instance of the belief that since they are so special and unique, the same past that everyone else tries to learn from has nothing to teach people from the United States. As a non-American, you may find it tedious , worrisome, and even costly to have to wait around while Americans reinvent the wheel or learn from mistakes they could have avoided if they d just done their homework.

Even people who look to the past for guidance accept that there is uncharted territory out there, some things that have never been attempted and for which trial and error is exactly the right approach, but they find it hard to believe that there are quite as many of those things as Americans seem to think. To put it another way, some of the stumbling about in the dark Americans do is just the price one has to pay for innovation, but some of it is merely what happens when one doesn t know where the light switch is.

In their defense, Americans do come by their empiricism more or less honestly. That is, theirs is not a completely unthinking, automatic rejection of the past, just because it s the past; it is, rather, a learned behavior. It just turned out that their traditions came from a society so different from what early Americans found in the New World that relying on that particular past was not helpful. If today s Americans have carried this too far, rejecting even their own past, they can perhaps be forgiven.

The low regard Americans have for tradition and precedent also shows up in the enthusiasm Americans have for anything new. While some cultures are skeptical or even afraid of what is new, Americans have a deep and abiding faith in it, convinced that what is new is not only good but usually better than what came before. Indeed, almost the only claim that has to be made for a product or an idea to make it appeal immediately to Americans is to say it s new. You can add, if you like, that it s also improved ” the phrase new and improved pervades American advertising ” but it s entirely redundant; in the United States, new is improved.

Needless to say, anything that is old, and especially anything that is old-fashioned, has no appeal to Americans. Something that is very old, on the other hand, over 100 years, falls into a different, quite acceptable category and is usually referred to as classic. Hence the decision of the Coca-Cola company a few years ago to name its original drink Classic Coke (not old Coke) when a newer version of Coke failed to catch on with the public.

Americans are so enamored of the new that they get bored easily with anything that is no longer new or with behavior that has become habitual. They don t like to get too used to anything or become too comfortable with how they are doing things. They will often shake things up, meaning make a change simply for its own sake, chiefly because they want to be sure they keep their edge (stay sharp and alert) and not get into a rut, by which they mean getting so used to doing something a certain way that they no longer question it. Being too complacent or satisfied with a product or process are two major sins in the American workplace, while reinventing one s product or division are signs of a dynamic company or organization.

Jeffrey Skilling, the disgraced former head of Enron corporation, knew how this game was played and was richly rewarded for playing it so well. He . . . pushed Enron to change constantly in a quest for the next new thing, an article in the July 29, 2002, Washington Post observed. Each annual report emphasized a different venture that would be its next big score. ˜There was a new message every year, said David Micklewright, a managing director of . . . Enron s advertising firm. ˜Because it made all these changes, it was considered a fluid and brilliant company (p. A11).

Champions of Change

As big fans of the new and different, Americans are also champions of change, which is practically a way of life with them. Change is inevitable, the only constant, in fact, and certainly nothing to worry about or resist. Hence, the prospect or threat of change, of having to do something differently or do a new thing altogether, usually doesn t intimidate Americans or at least would not normally be seen as a valid reason for not doing something. Americans might not like dealing with the details of change any more than most people, such as having to learn a new software program or having to implement a new procedure, but they would not normally question the wisdom or necessity of change. The United States, Michael Kammen has written, may well be the first large-scale society to have built innovation and change into its culture as a constant variable, so that a kind of ˜creative destruction continually alters the face of American life (1980, 115).

Their attitude toward change and the new may also explain the good enough mentality often found in American business. Americans aren t as interested in turning out the perfect widget as they are in making a widget that is good enough. After all, if today s perfect widget is destined to be sidelined by tomorrow s improved version, then what s the point in staying up late to get it exactly right. That preeminent observer of the American character, Alexis de Tocqueville, writes of

accost[ing] an American sailor [to] inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers, without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years. In these words, which fell accidentally . . . and from an uninstructed man, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people direct all their concerns. (1984, 158)

Many cultures, especially older ones, are not nearly as impressed by all things new as Americans are. For people from these countries , the newest or latest thing is not automatically an improvement on what came before; it can be, of course, but it can just as easily be no better than the old, or even worse . Or not even really new at all. One just has to wait and see. For cultures that are more discriminating about what is new, the unhesitating American embrace of the next new thing is just more proof that Americans are too na ve and uncritical.

They also need to be willing to give the old more time. To many non- Americans, Americans run after the new not so much because they genuinely think it s better but because they re just too impatient to give the old a chance. To these observers, Americans simply expect things to happen too fast, so that when they embrace a new idea or process, they expect to see results quickly. If they don t, if there are snags or wrinkles that have to be worked out, as there almost always are with anything new, Americans get impatient. From this perspective, Americans chase after the new not because of any inherent value but because they lack staying power and get discouraged too easily.

A Doing Culture

It should not be surprising that people who have the word do as part of their national nickname would be suspicious of anything that smacks of not doing, activities like thinking and talking, for example, or the products of these activities, such as ideas, concepts, or theories . And it is true that in general Americans have little patience with or enthusiasm for anything not somehow closely related to taking action or making things happen. They are a utilitarian and pragmatic people, in short, who like above all to get things done. Start describing a theory to an American and within a very short time he or she will interrupt you to ask if your theory works, in other words, if it has a practical application; if it doesn t, Americans aren t interested.

If pressed, Americans will admit that they can be somewhat anti- intellectual. The first Americans were too busy taming the wilderness to worry about the meaning of life, and subsequent generations haven t become any more philosophical. As noted, Americans are interested in the practical application of an idea or theory, in putting ideas to use, but they are not especially interested in ideas for their own sake and tend not to be ” and not to value ” intellectuals or deep thinkers. [T]he need to master the wilderness and extract its natural resources, Richard Pells has noted,

to construct great cities and develop a modern industrial nation, had required a practical, problem-solving cast of mind. Consequently, Americans preferred the man of action to the theorist, the person who rejected absolutes in favor of concrete solutions that worked in the particular instance. The classic American hero was the inventor , the engineer, the technological wizard, not the artist or academic. (1997, 178, 179)

In the workplace this preference for action and doing is readily apparent in the way Americans tend to be impatient with the thinking part of a process or undertaking, with analysis, planning, and deliberating. They like to cut to the chase, as they say, meaning get to the exciting part of the work, which for them is the execution and implementation. Dana Mead, former CEO of Tenneco Inc., is interested in results, not best efforts, he says, and

output, not process. You can study and debate issues to death, but eventually you must take action. Employees don t like to sit around and not see tangible activity and results. You can t warm up on the sidelines all the time; you ve got to play occasionally. (Rosen et al. 2000, 343)

Americans have been accused, not without cause, of a Ready, fire, aim approach to getting things done, that is, acting (fire) without adequate preparation (aim). Even Americans accept that actions have to be preceded by a bit of thinking and planning, of course, but this should be kept to a minimum and should never take the place of doing.

The empirical approach to acquiring knowledge mentioned earlier only reinforces the American impatience with the various types of not doing, such as thinking, discussing, and planning. If the only way to truly know something is through personal experience, by actually doing it, then not only are thinking and planning a poor substitute for action, they don t even lead to learning.

Americans are also impatient with talk, not all talk but any talk that seems to be getting in the way of acting. They dislike drawn-out discussions and conversations that don t go anywhere , where no conclusions are reached or no decisions made, and they re not especially fond of meetings (although they have many of them), mainly because they are nothing but talk. When people give presentations (more talk), Americans want them to dispense with the preliminaries and quickly get to the point. Americans don t trust talk and wait to see if people will actually do what they say, or as they sometimes phrase it, if they will put their money where their mouth is. (Americans do believe in small talk, however, a brief exchange of pleasantries ” about the weather, one s family, what one did over the weekend ” before getting down to business.)

How Americans See Others

Americans think non-Americans are negative and complain a lot, which is how Americans tend to interpret expressions of concern or worry about problems, difficulties, or challenges, suggestions of the sort that something might not be possible or not worth the effort. They find people who think like this to be overly analytical, not very ambitious or visionary , or lacking in self-confidence. When people from such cultures pose what they feel are perfectly legitimate questions about the feasibility or advisability of a particular project or proposal, Americans sometimes see this behavior as obstructionist or even defeatist. Americans feel it s okay to ask questions, especially during the discussion stage of an undertaking, but not to have doubts . If as a non-American you do in fact wonder whether something is actually possible or worth trying, by all means let your American colleagues know how you feel, but you would be wise to err on the side of saying that something is not a good idea or not worth the trouble rather than that it can t be done.

Americans are likewise not very kind to people who are afraid of taking risks and making mistakes. Assuming, as Americans do, that there is almost never any legitimate reason to fear risks, they conclude that such people are timid, weak, and overly cautious. Not surprisingly, Americans are also very impatient with and often dismissive of the various stratagems the risk-averse use to weigh or minimize the consequences of risk, such as going out to do one more focus group or test run, doing more re- search, reviewing more studies, or sitting down for more discussion or another analysis. Americans believe there is a limit to just how thorough you can be, to how much you can know ahead of time, and they are very frustrated by people who take forever to make decisions and let opportunity pass them by. These people are not bold enough, and are much more interested in being right than being successful.

Cultures that seek guidance from the past and trust in tradition strike Americans as old-fashioned, behind the times, and not sufficiently open to new ideas and the inexorable march of progress. If people from these cultures don t actually resist progress, they re probably skeptical of it, and this makes Americans, the champions of progress, skeptical of them. Such people are not very creative or original, can t be trusted to enthusiastically support new initiatives or come up with innovations, are too hesitant to question the conventional wisdom, and are not capable of responding quickly to change. They will be a drag on Americans racing to invent the future.

Their strong bias in favor of action and doing and against the various forms of not doing ” studying , deliberating, analyzing, discussing ” causes Americans to view all of these activities somewhat critically and with suspicion. While Americans know that analysis and discussion are important and necessary, their threshold for this sort of thing is very low, so that when people from other cultures are simply trying to be thorough and careful, they can come across to Americans as being timid, using delaying tactics, and otherwise putting up resistance.

Because of the great enthusiasm they bring to almost everything they do, Americans tend to see people who don t quite reach their level of enthusiasm as being hesitant, lukewarm, or even pessimistic. It s not easy to be more excited, to get more worked up about something than Americans, and very hard, therefore, not to disappoint them. People who are merely positive about a proposal or a new idea, for example, or quite interested, or even very hopeful, are still missing that passion that Americans are forever looking for.

Quick Tips: Advice for Working with Americans

• Try not to sound too worried about taking risks or trying something new; Americans may interpret your caution as being pessimistic or defeatist.

• Don t be too afraid of trial and error; Americans admire trying almost as much as succeeding.

• Be careful about too much analysis or planning; Americans may get impatient.

• Don t expect Americans to be impressed by tradition or precedent; they don t trust the past and think new is always better.

• Never act satisfied with the way things are; Americans know they can be better.

• Talk has its limits ” and lots of detractors.