Mythic Faces

Copyright (c) 1998 by Harvey Robbins & Michael Finley

excerpted from Transcompetition: Combining the best of Competition and Collaboration (McGraw-Hill/Business Week Books, 1998)

The Brute, the Trickster, the Hermit, and the Pawn

More than anything else, more than a study in money or numbers, your organization is a story. It is a story of people and the ideas they were able to come up with. A story of growth, and peril. Of original people learning to take on additional people, and having to teach them, and to trust them, to keep the story going. It doesn't matter if you sell doughnuts or consult to the United Nations -- your story is profound, because it's yours.

The tack we are going to take here is that an ancient struggle lies at the heart of your organization's successes and failures. The battle rages inside us with seemingly contradictory goals -- survival as individuals and connection to one another as a group. We all view the battle a bit differently. Some stress personal history, others place emphasis on group success.

Let us look at a few mythic stories, see what they have to say about competition, and what they imply about our ability to rise above it. These stories will reveal four faces of connectedness: The Brute, The Trickster, The Pawn and The Hermit. We will start with the Brute, and work our way clockwise through the connectedness model to the Trickster.

Unless you co-majored in business and classics, not all these stories will be familiar. Unlike Harvard case studies, they get better with age. Homer's Odyssey was compiled around 700 BC. The book of Genesis was first drafted around 1200 BC.

But let's start way back, with the book of Gilgamesh, the story of a Sumerian warrior-god who may or may not have lived in the fertile valley formed between two rivers in what is present-day Iraq nearly 5,000 years ago.

The Brute

The mere mention of Sumerian literature is enough to send sensible managers heading for the hills. But hold on. The story is about a giant leap forward for humankind, from the realm of Brute action to a new level of connectedness.

There are many stories about Gilgamesh. The earliest were basically shoot-em-ups, stories of how Gilgamesh overcame one monster after another, John Wayne-style. In a land known for brutality from Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein, Gilgamesh was the good brute who always beat the bad brute.

The brute is a member in good standing of most any organization today. The brute is like a dog who will not stop until he has achieved his objective. At his best the brute embodies the will to achievement. The law of the brute is the law of the self:do what I want or suffer the consequences. It is nearly as prevalent in organizations today as it was in Gilgamesh's.

The competition we so admire in sports is a kind of beautiful brutality -- Grant Hill grabbing a rebound, Janet Evans in the 400 meter freestyle. We admire the singleness of purpose -- perfection, not clubbing the other guy on the cranium, is the primary motive. This beauty is the reason we have made sports competition our unofficial religion.

At its worst, of course, the brute is just a bully, like the boss who rules by terror, like the team member who enjoys making the rest of the team look bad, like the first incarnation of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, like so many of the legendary heroes, from Samson to Hercules to Thor, was simply stronger than everyone else, and made everyone else pay.

But something stunning happened in the later versions, composed about 2700 BC. Traditional supercompeter Gilgamesh and a brute monster from the distant hills became collaborators.

The monster was a creature named Enkidu. While early versions of the story described Enkidu as a fierce Brute, in later tellings he mutated into a vegetarian hermit/hero, a combination Samson and Dale Carnegie, friend of nature and seeker of peace. A hunter witnessing Enkidu in action ran to tell his father:

I saw a hairy bodied man today

at the watering place, powerful as Ninurta

the god of war; he feeds upon the grasslands

with gazelles ... he has unset my traps and filled

my hunting pits; the creatures of the grasslands

get away free. The wild man sets them free.

Because of him I am no longer a hunter.

When Enkidu and Gilgamesh first meet, at a wedding feast, they are astonished and threatened by one another's strength, and they engage in a colossal crowd-pleasing battle.

Stormy heart struggled with stormy heart

as Gilgamesh met Enkidu in his rage.

As they vie, their respect for one another grows into a ferocious affection. Gilgamesh appears to have the upper hand, but they break off fighting to embrace and pledge lifelong loyalty to one another. They go off together on many adventures, with the understanding that the two of them together are stronger than any power. Enkidu taught Gilgamesh, and the two continually remind one another, that "Two people, companions ... they can prevail against the terror...."

The story of Gilgamesh is the story of the elevation of consciousness, to the awareness of the value and power of cooperation. They are not enough to save Enkidu or Gilgamesh from death, but they are enough to signal a new spirit in the evolution of humankind.

The Pawn

The story of Adam and Eve plops people down in Paradise, fully cerebrated and ready to go. They eat the apple, the ax falls, and the two are ushered out into the cold hard world where dog eats dog and bread is made with brow sweat.

One can think of the story of the Fall two ways. Look at it one way and you have an ontology (a legend that explains why things are the way they are) about competition. In this version, God expects us to win our way back into Paradise. To prove our worth we must engage in an endless series of contests or competitive events. In this scenario, all history -- conquering other countries and enslaving their people, selling people things they don't need, brutalizing our employees and cheating our own communities -- are feats we must perform in order to deserve readmission the garden.

This scenario presents God as a kind of cosmological venture capitalist, setting us up to prove our mettle hacking and bashing one another. In this stance, we are barely conscious pawns in a game we don't understand.

This would sound dreamlike and fantastical, except that it is how hundreds of millions of people spend each day, performing rational tasks that make no logical sense to them, and accepting them as the price of daily life.

Adam and Eve were thus Pawns in the free will scheme of a capricious creator. The Pawn is very important in our study because he or she is the basic player in the game of competition. Pawns are all of us who take the situation handed to us and do our best with it, never quite understanding the degree to which we are being manipulated. Pawns never have the information they need to become more powerful. They are not considered to be rational -- they are just out there, like serfs, or cows.

Nature is full of Pawns, and most Pawn species are very successful. They survive by having large litters -- those not taken by predators will live to swell the herds. Their sheer numbers guarantee their continuance.

You may wonder, why is it that we never hear of a competitive individual within a noncompetitive species. Why are there no "fighting deer" or "battling geese"? The reason is that nature has designed Pawn species to be food, not fighters. There is a level of aggressiveness beyond which fitness is lowered, not increased. It may be that, within these species, aggressiveness in males does not turn the females on. Animals who are skittish by nature will not appreciate a lion in their midst, not even a lion in lamb's wool.

Most people's workplace is comprised mostly of Pawns. Most employees are Pawns. Some entire companies -- those content to be plain-vanilla providers, supplying midlist products, and acting as fodder in the corporate bidding process -- are Pawn companies.

Of the four characters of the connectedness model, Pawns seem the most necessary. They are there, it sometimes seems, for Brutes to brutalize and Tricksters to trick. They are like grass underfoot -- their apparent purpose is to be trampled or browsed.

But despite what Brutes and Tricksters want them to think, Pawns don't need to remain Pawns. Because there is a second possible interpretation of Adam and Eve's banishment from the garden. This story is not an ontology of competition but an ontology of collaboration.

Before biting into the apple, there was no sense of teamwork between man and woman, for in Paradise there was no need for teamwork. Problems did not require free flow of information, because there was no information. It was a world innocent of all knowledge. There was not even family. Things being perfect, and conflict and ignorance not posing any survival problems, there was no need for community action.

From this view, banishment from Paradise may have had a very different meaning. God may have been challenging people to see how close we could come on our own to recreating Paradise, on our own. Our tool for simulating paradise would be the things that got us thrown out -- collusion and knowledge.

To remain a Pawn in the face of such a challenge is unacceptable. Thinking ourselves Pawns is, from a biblical perspective, the work of the devil, a lie we tell ourselves to accept our helplessness and to deny responsibility for the condition we find ourselves in. You can practically hear the serpent hissing these cop-outs into our ears: "You can't fight city hall." "What's the use in trying?" "Education is for losers." "You're damned if you do, damned if you don't."

Managers like having Pawns to manage, because they are so manageable. But Pawns pose problems. On the one hand, Pawns are the units of all competitive action, the footsoldiers of competitive wars. If Bill Gates wants to create a networking animation product to go head to head against Corel, he needs his Pawns -- his development team -- to move with brilliant dispatch. But being Pawns, they need a lot of motivating to do their best. The challenge, from kings of long ago to managers today, is how to motivate Pawns to do what they are told without going too far and motivating them to think for themselves. Most motivational schemes -- exhortation, brass bands, pep rallies, awards and recognitions -- deliberately stop at this patronizing level. Henry Ford is credited with this gem: "All I want is a good pair of hands. Unfortunately, they come attached to a person."

So it is odd to hear managers complain when change initiatives stall. Why didn't people respond more favorably to a proposal that might save jobs and extend careers? Might it not be because we trained them to shy away from conscious change? How can we expect Pawns to take our initiatives and become different creatures overnight -- bold, entrepreneurial, and brutal? If they became those new creatures, they would be harder to control.

And yet, with the right inducements, Pawnhood is easily outgrown. True adults do it by assuming responsibility for their circumstances. We also move beyond the condition of haplessness by combining the skills of transcompetition: the rational decision to succeed through a combination of competitive and collaborative measures. Thus we shed the cloak of the unthinking peasant and become true participants in the organizations we are part of and the live we live.

The Hermit

Enkidu, the hairy half-beast wanderer, was the first Hermit in literature. Another Hermit story, written later than Gilgamesh but taking place earlier, occurs at the beginning of human history. It is the story of Cain.

Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. They invented business. Cain, the elder, went into agribusiness, tilling the soil to grow crops. Abel went into livestock.

They also invented religion. Adam and Eve never prayed or sacrificed, that we are aware of. But Cain and Abel, with their industries hanging in the balance, felt it would be wise to offer up their best production samples to God.

And together, they invented crime. When Cain in his competitive jealousy struck Abel and killed him, he became the first murderer.

After killing Abel, Cain fled from all society, becoming a Hermit, the second mythic point on the compass of connectedness. The Hermit forsakes all hope of connecting with people. Betrayed too many times by himself and others, he lives an outlaw existence outside the boundaries of discourse.

The tragedy of Cain is that he had much to offer. He was industrious, entrepreneurial, and inventive. But he pitched his tent too far to the left side of the scale of connectedness. he could not bear that Abel's offering found greater favor with God than his own. As in the competitive ontology many people impose on the story of the Fall, he saw life as a series of contests, and victories as pleasing to God. His competitive instincts aroused, he took violent action. Any further to the left on the scale and he might have eaten Abel.

What lesson should we take from the story of Cain? That unrestrained competition, far from being a spark to human creativity, leads to the deepest kind of social infraction, in which the part cuts itself off forever from the whole?

Every organization has a few Hermits. They are the people who never join in, and never get over their suspicion of the enterprise. "Just leave me alone and let me do my job," is their motto. They operate on the sidelines of teams, providing the minimum requirements and exerting even at the best of times a negative pull on group endeavors. It is not that they are opposed to the goals and objectives of the group, but that they have given up on them. They are afraid of being made a fool, of exhibiting an optimism contradicting their years of perceived betrayal or disappointment. Hired hermits are organizational ghosts, never leaving, never expressing a wish or desire of their own, but haunting the best efforts of all who are near.

The story of the Hermit is not usually one of redemption -- by taking themselves out of the game, they make themselves nearly irredeemable. It is harder for a hermit to change to a more transcompetitive style of connecting to people than it is for a brute to stop beating people every chance he gets. The hermit role must be set aside completely, and a new one adopted.

And none of us is ever far from this state. Organizations are inherently disappointing places. Promises cannot all be kept. Many are waffled on, many more are simply forgotten amid the crunch. When the "partnership" employees believe exists between them and the organization is ignored, the Hermit in each of us chuckles softly and says, I told you so.

The Trickster

The myth of a fallen universe can be found in almost every culture. In ancient Greece it was the Age of Gold, when flawed heroes like Odysseus walked the earth. In Judaism it was the age of Patriarchs, when people like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.

Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic about soldiers returning from the Trojan War, supplies our next mythic character, The Trickster. Not a hunk like Hercules or a god like Zeus, Odysseus was a "modernist," lived by his wits, manipulating other people's knowledge to achieve his own ends. Time after time, adventure after adventure, Odysseus thinks his way out of impossible traps. He was the Captain Kirk of mythology -- always thinking, always pushing the envelope, always willing to sleep with just about anything. In today's business world he would probably be some kind of dazzling super salesman, a Michael Ovitz or Tom Peters.

Jacob was likewise a modernist, a person born too late to be a traditional hero, a person whose character flaws were papered over with tricks, deals, and the savviness of a riverboat gambler.

In the book of Genesis, Jacob was the son of Isaac and the brother of the firstborn Esau. Esau is described as powerful, hairy, and relatively straightforward -- a Brute. One day Esau returns from the hunt and begs for a treat. In the story he appears to be hypoglycemic, and willing in his depleted state to give away his primogeniture (rights as firstborn son) for a "mess of pottage."

A hero would have fed his brother and refused the deluded offer. Jacob not only takes advantage of Esau this way, but later poses as Esau (wearing lambswool on his arms to get the desired hairy look) to obtain his blind and dying father's blessing.

At every step in his early career, Jacob (later named Israel) wheels and deals to get his own way -- perhaps planting the seed of future anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jacob, like Odysseus, eventually becomes a better person, but before he puts his trickery behind him, he is a perfect rascal. God saw something in Jacob though, because it is Jacob, not the more heroic Abraham or Isaac, that is given the new name of "Israel," and becomes the namesake for a nation.

Needless to say, modern organizations don't get very far without their share of Tricksters. They are the ultimate hero of business, creating markets, luring customers, reassuring investors and shaping the perceptions the world has of the organization.

Organizations themselves are Tricksters. Corporations have been described as "legal fictions" whose managers pull a screen over their true intentions while they delicately weave between different constituencies -- workers, investors, customers, government, the industry they are part of -- to secure their ends.

The Machiavellian approach to controlling large numbers of people requires the ability to limit the information each person has. Management itself -- just think about the implications of "managing" people -- is a Trickster's game. Shading, shaving, spinning, hyping -- we live in the age of trickery. When Tricksters control the information, they win much bigger than the most brutal Brute.

Superficially, the Trickster is the easiest of the four types to change, to advance to the more transcompetitive role of Negotiator. The reason is that Tricksters are mentally very capable of considering change -- they can make it in their mind, and then unmake it in a moment. They are naturally flexible characters.

The hard part with them is finding firm enough soil that the change will take root and grow. Conviction is everything in the transcompetitive sphere. Tricksters must believe that community goals matter, and that to be a leader one must have values and be consistent, and believable over the long haul. It is not an impossibility; indeed, for this wily archetype, becoming credible to others and making it stick, is the ultimate trick.

Playing the Survival Game

Brute, Pawn, Hermit or Trickster, all are alike in one regard. Each uses his or her mode of connecting to survive. Deep down, that is all any of us does; what distinguishes us is how we define survival.

Think of life as a tug of war between our animal and angel sides. On the one end of the rope is our need to survive, both individually and as a species. On the other end of the rope is our crying need to be with other people, to play, work, love, to know, and to be known: to be social.

Nature doesn't give us many clues for resolving this tug of war. When animals court and couple, is that survival or social? When they got to war, is it to survive or to have a good time with their buddies? When we bash our colleagues within our companies and double-bash our competitors outside our companies, are we exhibiting a will to live or are we just being jerks?

The four mythic faces see the rope-ends of surviving and being social as being irreconcilable. Transcompetitive personalities, by contrast, have learned to make a lasso of the rope -- to see how each connects to the other.

For animals lower on the food chain, what may look like social behavior is still survival: the need to procreate, to cluster to gather food more efficiently, shelter, and comfort (reduced stress/fear). When a bee gives up its life defending the hive, it is not "sacrificing itself" -- it is defending the only life that matters to it, the life of the group. We personify animals' social behavior by comparing it to our own, but it is run by genetic instincts to continue on.

For humans, while we also are programmed to fight for survival, we have an additional intellectual capability that allows us to see beyond today or tomorrow; to chose to procreate to fulfill whatever political, religious, or social covenant we feel needs fulfilling. We think about our environment and make choices -- some reactive, some proactive. We socialize, in part, to fill a higher need for intellectual stimulation, mental challenge, self-esteem and a good cup of coffee.

This tug of war between our animal past (old brain: instinct for survival), and our human potential (new brain: need for stimulation), creates a push-pull or yin-yang within each of us. We all have the capability to shift between being viciously competitive and compassionately collaborative, depending on the changes to our external and internal environments. This ability to switch from one brain to the other is what makes us transcompetitive.

Our internal circumstances colors our view of our external situation and determines how we react to it. How much sleep you had (or didn't have: sleep deprivation), what you had to eat and when you ate it (blood sugar levels), good news vs. bad news, hormones (men and women both: testosterone, seratonin, acetylcholine, etc.), physical injury or pain (endorphin levels). All these factors help decide how you view your surroundings.

Your inner variations affect your outer variation of behaviors, within a definable range of both competitive and collaborative styles. The extremes of this sociality scale (between competitive and collaborative) can be defined as "antisocial." The social rules of "civility" are designed, therefore, to help people make choices within the normal or functional range.

When the rules of civility are broken, whether supercompetitively or supercollaboratively, people endure the consequences of antisocial behaviors -- social shunning. They go to jail, they are ignored, or they are driven forcibly out of the community.

Within each of the four mythic faces, then, there is moment-to-moment variability. One moment you may be Hermit, the next you are a Brute. Or you can occupy a zone with one foot in both personalities. Or you can be a little of each -- which is what we are after in this book, greater versatility in making competitive decisions. The more stable a person can make this variability (via stress/threat reduction, eating well, exercising, etc.), the more trust that person will engender and deserve.

A Gallery of Competitive Types

BRUTE	TRICKSTER	HERMIT	PAWN
George Steinbenner, the biggest brute in sports, and living proof that living to win makes winning unachievable.	Wily promoter Don King, destroying boxing with his showmanship and big-bucks baloney.	Howard Hughes one of the world's most powerful men, reduced to using his thumbnail as a flat head screwdriver.	Mother Teresa, who did not allow her peculiar celebrity to distract her from her compassion for the downtrodden of Calcutta and the world.
Chainsaw Al Dunlap, Scott Paper. The amputator of other people's limbs, he jokes that he is the kind of guy who cries during a horror story.	The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Another day, another disguise. All that attention, and nothing much to say.	Robert MacNamara, numbers-driven whiz kid at Ford Motor, then defense chief during the Vietnam War, now atoning for his errors in global economic development.	Farm worker organizer Cesar Chavez, the ultimate little guy who made a difference for his people.
Hotelier Leona Helmsley, doing time upstate because she needed to win uptown. "Taxes are for little people."	Mary Kay Ash, $800 million cosmetics queen. Her sales rallies are like religious revivals. She has made entrepreneurs of thousands.	Ralph Nader, a recluse by nature, he went on to put more ideas into play than a dozen corporations. His feud with Bill Gates is like a fight between brothers.	Charles Harper, ex-CEO, ConAgra: "No charisma, fat, bald, and he stutters," said John Kotter. "But he is a brilliant leader."
The eyes of the world are on Hong Kong governor Tung Chee-hwa, as he makes good on his pledge to combine the best of the collaborative east and the competitive west.	Percy Barnevik, charismatic head of the world's most decentralized organization, ABB. He has grown from a world-class speaker to the world's top listener.	Nelson Mandela, whose character and sense of justice to all, white as well as black, was tempered by 30 years in prison.	Kazuo Inamori of Kyocera, a philosopher-king whose genius is to "value the heart of people." The amoeba is small, he says, but indestructible.
ORCHESTRATOR	COMMUNICATOR	ANALYZER	ENTREPRENEUR

Transcending one's natural competitive or collaborative role means modifying different behaviors for each type. It means beefing up the Pawn, beefing down the Brute, straightening out the Trickster, and luring the Hermit back to the feast.

Put all four of these mythic characters together -- Brute, Pawn, Hermit, Trickster -- and you have a basic typology of the ways people are inclined to connect with one another. In each myth, Gilgamesh, Adam, Odysseus, and Cain, long-term success was severely limited by the individual's personality type. In every myth but the tragic myth of Cain, the characters learned new behaviors to grow beyond the limits of type, to transcend their competitive nature. And we know what Cain had no way of knowing, that even terrible crimes can be atoned for, and learned from. And besides, most hermits don't kill their brothers.

Valent Particles

Valence is a term that you may remember from high school chemistry class. It refers to the characteristic that different substances have at the molecular level to combine. Some atoms are all too happy to fuse with other atoms. They have open doors, begging other atoms to come courting. Other atoms are stony and inert -- they would no sooner take up housekeeping with another substance than they would paint themselves blue.

So it is with human beings. Every team and every organization employs a wide variety of people. Some have a high degree of sociality or valence, and they will not be happy unless they are mixing it up with others, sharing what they know and moving the enterprise forward. Others will be unable to do this; they will insist on their solitariness no matter how the enterprise tries to gather them in.

In his 1974 book Competition, Harvey Ruben (not Harvey Robbins) broke connectedness into two dimensions, aggressiveness and directness. According to his scale, the connectedness of each of us can be pinpointed on a graph showing where our typical social behavior falls. He called them Dag (direct and aggressive), Indag (indirect and aggressive), Dinag (direct and nonaggressive), and Indinag (indirect, nonaggressive).

We liked the scale, but thought the terminology was pretty confusing, so we expanded it into the typology of the four contrapuntal characters we have been discussing: Brute, Trickster, Pawn, Hermit. The images and the scale match up well. The Brute really is a Dag. The Hermit really is an Indinag.

There is more to competition and personality than these four caricatures. The names typify the extremes of each box, the far left or far right. Rather than fence you into predictable behaviors, they indicate what your inclinations are, your default behaviors. Very few of us fall cleanly into any of these four, and a test that simply hung one of these labels on you would be of little practical value. People are complicated, and we tend to be moderate -- for every individual stalking the outer perimeter of Trickster or Brute behavior, there are a thousand of us huddled closer to the middle.

And that's good, because the middle is where transcompetitive behaviors occur, where we cut deals with one another to achieve win/win solutions. The middle is where we do business and live.