CULTURE BOOK excerpts shorter form Nov2014

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7 Methods, 19 Powers, 200 Dimensions, 30+ Cases, Culture Koans
YOUR DOOR TO CULTURE POWER: & ONE Remarkable Simple Approach that Gives You Culture Powers

Greene’s
Creativity Novelty
Sciences
SOLUTIONS STUDIO

COPYRIGHT 2014 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, Registered email: richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu COPYRIGHT 2014 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, Registered email: richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu COPYRIGHT 2014 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, Registered email: richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu

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YOUR DOOR TO CULTURE POWER: ONE Remarkable Simple Approach that Gives You Culture Powers
How to Turn Earthquake and Tsunami Closer to Others, Who Survived, into 3
Meltdowns, 200,000 Permanently Displaced Persons, 5 Dead Towns
Culture in a word is how Tepco turned a natural disaster that was bigger at a nuclear
plant owned by another company into a disaster costing trillions of US dollars and cities
emptied for decades.
The puzzle is Japanese culture is famous for meticulousness, working the details, disci-pline,
thoroughness, total quality, customer first, and the like. How can a culture famous
for that generate perhaps the largest nuclear disaster in history?
Was TEPCO the company that made this disaster--a Japanese company? with Japanese
management? Was Onagawa--a Japanese company? with Japanese management? How
come the world got two such different outcomes from two Japanese companies? How
come Japanese management produced no disaster at Onagawa and great disaster at
TEPCO?
From this we get a lot of important questions:
1. is the culture of a nation or of any other group, consistent across all parts?
2. is one company more Japanese (male, techie, etc.) than other companies?
3. is it the more Japanese firm that creates disaster? or the less Japanese firm?
4. can the culture of a nation guarantee certain types of disaster?
5. is WWII’s result for Japan another example of exactly the same disaster-causing
tendencies of ordinary Japanese culture at work?
6. are Japanese generally, that is, is their culture generally, one of modesty and con-tinual
learning or one of arrogance and continual disaster generation?
7. when in Japan is it safe to do as Japanese do?
8. is the excess maleness of Japan’s history, government, and culture a weakness
causing such disasters?
9. is the gerontocracy, rule by the half dead, aspect of Japan’s culture a cause of
Fukushima?
Something vast, invisible, everywhere, inside everyone,
determining what we notice and what alternatives we
imagine unconsciously, with contents we are generally
unaware of, but that we defend and fight others for, a
cause of wars, and disasters, mostly put into us uncon-sciously
while growing up, adapting us to a world of
parents-teachers that no longer exists
CULTURE IS WHO WE ARE, WHAT WE DO, AND WE MUST
ELIMINATE MOST OF IT (AND THEREFORE OF US) IF WE
EVER ARE TO BECOME ADULT AND EFFECTIVE--
Ardenti-di-Francesco-Mare 1833.
CULTURE POWERS:
Meticulous Japanese Creating 3 Fukushima Nuclear Meltdowns with
200,000 Displaced People 3 Years Later Lacking Decent Housing
1. NAIIC official govenment report: cause of the disaster “made in Japan”
“a mindset of close relations between inspectors and industries inspected”
2. Onagawa Plant, higher tsunami, closer to earthquake, no disruption, Fukushima Plant, 3 meltdowns--why this difference?
safety culture at Onagawa Plant; efficiency culture at Fukushima plant
3. Townspeople fled for safety to the Onagawa Plant during and after the earthquake and tsunami;
Townspeople fled away from the Fukushima plant during and after the earthquake and tsunami.
4. Onagawa management during construction raised the level to 5 times historic highest tsunami level;
Fukushima management during construction decreased a natural mound by 25 meters, lowering the plant to near tsunami level
5. Onagawa management was not good a playing politics, hiring lobbyists, and delaying;
Fukushima (Tepco the owner) was great at politics, lobbying, and delays.
6. Prof. Costas Synolakis, USC Tsunami Research head: “cascade of stupid errors that led to the disaster” at Fukushima
7. Onagawa, lacking status, felt it had to learn and adapt from wiser others’ experience--developing a safety culture.
Tepco, took its domination of Japan’s electric industry as sign of its own flaw-less-ness, and of godlike character of its leaders
8. IAEA Fukushima report on lessons learned there: “instill a safety culture, raise awareness of safety culture....”
“without a safety culture, there will be no constant improvement of nuclear safety.”
9. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “safety culture is the core values and behaviors resulting from a collective
commitment by leaders and individuals to emphasize safety over competing goals to ensure protection of people”
10. NAIIC’s chairman’s press comments after their report: “Japanese management’s fostering of closeness of parties,
refusal of confrontation of all sorts, habits of co-opting disagreers and variant views, agreement by erasure of differences”
“turned an earthquake and tsunami into 3 melt-downs by bad management practices in an industry not forgiving of error”

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Preface
It is my intention to write the best book on culture of the last 100 years, and the next 100
years. I may not achieve that, but that is my intent. It is not as bold a purpose as read-ers
may suppose, because the research literature on culture and the management pub-lishings
on culture are largely interestingly-ineffective over the last 100 years.
Weak Culture Results More than 90% of culture research has fallen into a “dimensions
finding pit” for the last 60 years. The result: lots of dimensions that do not guide prac-tice
and business well.
Cultures in Readers that Avoid and Distort Culture However the main difficulty in
writing a history-best book on culture is this--you, each of my readers, are filled with cul-tures,
national, gender, era, profession, device, and the like. Each of these misses
(hides) certain cultures and culture-derived effects, and distorts culture. For example, if
you are Western, not Asian, you cannot conceive of how alien the confident, initiative-taking,
self responsible self is to most of the world, on the one hand, and how incapable
that sort of individualist self is of forms of mutual care and tolerance common every-where
in Asia for millennia. If you, my reader, are now a Western type of self, you will be
unable to lead anyone in Asia for long--your propensity to “win” arguments is seen by
passive cooperative Asian selves, as vile, barbaric, and childish. You will perceive, natu-rally,
every situation in life for what it offers you--while Asians around you are preceiving
what it offers their group. Asian readers, on the other hand, see a tyranny-of-ideas in
Western ways that tortures people with “rightnesses” and “wrongnesses” harmfully, forc-ing
extremes, de-valuing middles. There is, however, something worse than how your
cultures distort how you see cultures.
Cultures of Elite Institutions, Elites, and Eliteness Worship that are in Readers and
Hinder Culture Perception and Understanding Each of you is also filled with cultures
not commonly in the press or dealt with in textbooks--cutures that operate inside you life
long in many cases directing your attention in directions you are not aware of and keep-ing
you from noticing millions of things in a way that you also are not aware of. Below I
raise questions about MIT (at the time of this writing the world’s best university, alternat-ing
this position with Harvard), then I raise questions about the East Coast culture MIT
and Harvard are steeped in, then I raise questions about the MBA hordes generated at MIT
and Harvard and what they have done to undermine USA business competitiveness over
the years (in the context of how physicians they generated created collectively the least
effective national health system in the industrial world), then I raise questions about the
culture of worshipping elites in my readers so they rarely consider whether highly skilled
people and places like MIT and Harvard (along with their brilliant discoveries and inven-tions),
have giant blindspots and flaws, teach false versions of things, and turn out grads
who are astonishingly selfish, narcissistic, and willing to hurt millions of others for the
sake of “returns” to self--boats, homes, cocaine addiction programs for their kids. I
taught in Weston Public Schools (while an undergrad at MIT) where most MIT Harvard fac-ulty
send their kids to high school and therefore my attacks have both a basis in first hand
experience, but also, better than that, a basis in research I conducted at Weston on child
ability to handle metaphor and how parents helped or hindered child creativity by how
parents handled it.
Flawed Academic Cultures that Study Culture There is a third difficulty, presented in
detail below: the cultures that study culture. These are primarily academic cultures of
the American sort (publish-or-perish). Below I look at documented flaws in American
academic culture (top ten institutions only, which I attended, graduated from, and
taught at) and their effect on what we all know and how we handle culture. It turns out
academic culture grossly distorts and omits huge portions of culture based phenomena.
More on that will be given later in this book. Now back to the first diffculty above--how
100 years of study of culture fell into a “dmensions finding pit” that made for interest-ingly-
ineffective results.
We can understand all this via two examples Clyde Kluckhorn and Hofstede. Their goal
and accomplishment was “dimensions”: we can distinguish cultures via their differing
values along a few dimensions. For Kluckhorn these were five “values”:
Human Nature (people seen as intrinsically good, evil, or mixed);
Man-Nature Relationship (the view that humans should be subordinate to nature, dominant
over nature, or live in harmony with nature);
Time (primary value placed on past/tradition, present/enjoyment, or future/posterity/
delayed gratification);
Activity (being, becoming/inner development, or doing/striving/industriousness);
Social Relations (hierarchical, collateral/collective-egalitarian, or individualistic).
--from Wikipedia “Culture”.
For Hofstede these were eight dimensions:
Power distance index (PDI): Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members
of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distrib-uted
unequally. Cultures that endorse low power distance expect and accept power rela-tions
that are more consultative or democratic.
Individualism (IDV) vs. collectivism: The degree to which individuals are integrated into
groups. In individualistic societies, the stress is put on personal achievements and individ-ual
rights. People are expected to stand up for themselves and their immediate family, and
to choose their own affiliations. In contrast, in collectivist societies, individuals act pre-dominantly
as members of a lifelong and cohesive group or organization (note: The word
collectivism in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state).
People have large extended families, which are used as a protection in exchange for
unquestioning loyalty.
Uncertainty avoidance index (UAI): a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. It
reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by mini-mizing
uncertainty. People in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance tend to be more
emotional. They try to minimize the occurrence of unknown and unusual circumstances and
to proceed with careful changes step by step planning and by implementing rules, laws and
regulations. In contrast, low uncertainty avoidance cultures accept and feel comfortable in
unstructured situations or changeable environments and try to have as few rules as possi-ble.
People in these cultures tend to be more pragmatic, they are more tolerant of change.
Masculinity (MAS), vs. femininity: The distribution of emotional roles between the genders.
Masculine cultures' values are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and
power, whereas feminine cultures place more value on relationships and quality of life. In
masculine cultures, the differences between gender roles are more dramatic and less fluid
than in feminine cultures where men and women have the same values emphasizing mod-esty
and caring. As a result of the taboo on sexuality in many cultures, particularly mascu-line
ones, and because of the obvious gender generalizations implied by Hofstede's
terminology, this dimension is often renamed by users of Hofstede's work, e.g. to Quantity
of Life vs. Quality of Life.
Long-term orientation (LTO), vs. short term orientation: First called Confucian dynamism, it
describes societies' time horizon. Long term oriented societies attach more importance to
the future. They foster pragmatic values oriented towards rewards, including persistence,
saving and capacity for adaptation. In short term oriented societies, values promoted are
related to the past and the present, including steadiness, respect for tradition, preserva-tion
of one's face, reciprocation and fulfilling social obligations.
Indulgence versus restraint (IVR): The extent to which members in society try to control their
desires and impulses. Whereas indulgent societies have a tendency to allow relatively free
gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun,
restrained societies have a conviction that such gratification needs to be curbed and regu-lated
by strict norms.
[Compare with other lists, like S. Schwarz’: maintain status propriety, maintain hierarchic
resource allocation, get ahead by mastering self or environment, groups embrace or reject
mental autonomy of members, joy via individual routes or group routes, transcend self
interests to care for others or care only for self, fit environments versus change them.
(Schwarz Ros, 1995)]--from Wikipedia “Culture”
It is not just the number of these dimensions for distinguishing all forms of culture, it is
not just the dimensions themselves, it is not just how they were published and explained,
it is not just how they got applied and used--everything about them from the start, from
their very beginning was flimsy. Very smart men and women in very elite places wasted
years on distinguishing cultures using the best, fewest, most statistically founded sets of
dimensions. What, readers may ask, is so wrong about that?
The Culture of Academia, Exacerbated by the Culture of Males, the Cul-ture
of America, the Culture of East Coast Elites in America
Culture study took place in these cultures, and they are not at all neutral in what they
find worth studying and how they study it, and what kind of results they prefer finding
and reporting. There are many kinds of topic, method of study, and type of results they
strongly refuse to consider, promote, publish, or tolerate. Later I will deal with them in
detail, here I make one overall point about them all, given below.
There is a strong case that that culture that mostly studies cultures (academia of the US
influence publish-or-perish sort) is flawed so deeply that what it finds about culture is of
little practical impact and worth:
--academic culture providing cover stories for private greeds = evils proposed by
Goethe, when he drew the devil, Mephistopheles, as an 800-math-GRE scoring
graduate of the Harvard Kennedy school (speaking metaphorically, and anticipat-ing
Robert McNamara’s pioneering America’s first lost war (Vietnam) using 800
GRE maths skills developed by Harvard),
--academic culture graduating people who create global disasters at regular inter-vals
proposed by commentators on the 2008/2009 global finance crisis initiated
by American financial engineering instruments invented, published, fostered, and
promulgated by MBA faculty at top 5 schools of business,
--academic culture distracting from true sources of business improvement pro-posed
by European viewers of such disasters, noting that not a single major
improvement in business practice over the last 100 years, came from schools of
business, rather all of them came from injection into American cultures of busi-ness,
methods developed by foreign cultures of business:
Drucker as thinly disguised presenter of 1920s ordinary German management
approaches to post-war Americans, who learned in the war some superiorities
of German management (for example how German tank commanders had more
liberty of maneuver using two-way tank radios to tell top commanders local
battlefield conditions while American tanks had one-way radios so top com-

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manders would not be bothered by reports from inferior local tank command-ers).
Lean this and lean that as Japanese total quality tools that Harvard faculty
stripped the word “Japanese” off of, to save American face, for another exam-ple.
Ford Motor Company got so frustrated with lack of US business school
interest in and capability in Japan’s powerful techniques that it set up its own
college---the American Suplier Institute to teach Japanese management tech-niques
to all its own facilities and to its suppliers. Ford could not wait the 20
years it took top US colleges to put token Japanese course contents into their
curricula.
Every year including this year, Fuji Xerox has an annual meeting where more than
1200 workgroups present multi-regression and SEQ models of business prob-lems
and invented new solutions that surpass average MIT PhD dissertation lev-els
of excellence--this done by ordinary blue collar workers not graduates of
elite universities.
At Keio University, I personally experienced visiting MIT faculty teaching systems manage-ment
techniques (QFD, policy deployment, Taguchi optimization, etc.) that were
invented in Japan, in completely distorted ways--the tools made individualistic, elite,
difficult, mathematic, and aimed at purely technical goals--where the Japanese original
tools were team oriented, for all ordinary employees, made deliberately simple, using
sophisticated statistics taught in Japan’s high schools but not in America’s top colleges,
and aimed at social and organization capability goals, not merely technical ones. Stu-dents,
impressed by the very name “MIT” uncritically absorbed grossly American-ized
versions of Japanese world-industry-conquering techniques, and thereby learned pale
facsimiles of the original methods. The “culture of eliteness” here enabled distortion of
technique by the culture of East-Coast-USA. Here, MIT elite faculty by Americanizing
Japan-invented techniques, assimilated all the power out of the techniques and assimi-lated
away all that challenged ineffective non-competitive American habits of doing
engineering and business. It is embarrassing today to find, in course after course,
department after department, America’s top grad schools of engineering teaching Japa-nese
techniques, without the word “Japan” ever showing up anywhere. The cross-cul-ture
nature of vast improvements in global business practice is thereby hidden, and in its
place, faculty erect, not un-self-consciously, the impression that it was clever faculty
mental abilities that improved world business practice. This is both a lie that does great
harm, 30 years ago, today, and probably, unfortuntately for decades into the future.
Readers offended that I find serious flaws in “elite” “worshipped” institutions will be dis-mayed
that there are many other examples of what I just said above. Project Athena was
MIT faculty doing the same with PCs and the web--distorting computing into a bureau-cratic
slow moving centralized nightmare ignored by faculty and students. MIT engineer-ing
faculty, not all but quite a few, have ineffective intuitions and bents--they naturally
drift to distortions of the most effective global methods: individualizing what was team,
elitizing what was done by entire workforces, complexifying what was simplified, simpli-fying
statistics that were much more sophisticated abroad (yet mastered by every high
school student in Japan). Ask Silicon Valley founders for 10,000 examples of this, they
have observed first hand. You my readers, via your own choice of “elites I wish to be like
and join” blind yourself from narrownesses, arrogances, cultural bigotries, and historic
scale murderous side-effects (at times) of what those elites actually do. The culture of
elite worship is one thing this book tries to make readers conscious of and weaken.
Compare health delivery systems in the world’s richest nations to get a rough measure of
the total power and effect of their various elites and top colleges. The US health system
is the worst performing for ordinary people and whole population health by a large mea-sure,
and costs several times more than systems in all other wealthy nations. By that
measure, American elites (quite a few involved in massive whole nation health work)
somehow mastered how to deliver far less for far more cost--where they learned that was
top ten colleges, medical schools, policy departments, business schools. Either Ameri-can
elites are incapable of good results or secretly they do not wish the hassle and
expense of caring for most of their own non-elite population. It is easier to be “innova-tive”
and rich when not caring for the poorest 1/6th of one’s own population!
So if you are that rather common kind of suboptimal person who defends American ways
because you happened to be born American and therefore refuse any information that
your ways are lousy--then this book can save you and your career, but is unlikely to do so.
This book assumes a certain base level of adulthood--doubt about the virtue of one’s own
ways. Readers lacking that level of adulthood will find themselves unable to handle this
book and their own lives. Do not turn pages here till you wish to be more adult than you
now are.
Americans are special in this regard--unlike Europeans, they do not commonly cross
national borders many times and do not commonly study in adjacent nations or work on
projects in neighboring nations at anywhere near the rates that Europeans do. So Euro-peans
see suboptimal aspects of their own nation and tolerate other nationals criticizing
their nation at rates far above US rates. Too many Americans, lacking all foreign nation
exposure, assume the whole world wants to be more American, while the whole world,
exposed for decades to intimate details of life in America by globally present US TV
shows and movies, abhors the dictatorial nature of American fathering and bossing, the
street crime and crude self-above-others norms on display in every viewed program.
Americans watching almost nothing made abroad, lack all proportion in judging the worth
of their national traits and situations. Unfortunate but true. So this book is hard on
Americans thusly imprisoned in a lack of self awareness, their lack of getting a sense of
self and nation from how other nations view them. This book can help, but the journey
requires more modesty than Americans, generally, are willing to tolerate.
The Astonishing Uselessness of Culture Dimensions and Decades of Aca-demic
Research on Culture
Here is the argument in a nutshell:
1) here in this Japanese police station, how exactly should I make my reactions more
collectivist so as to fit the collectivist bent of Japan’s culture?
2) so, using five or eight or some other number of dimensions, I find that IBM’s cul-ture
is different than 3M’s culture--now that I know that, what can I do with it?
Say one of them is more “communal” than the other-what do I do with that?
What this has produced is pitiful--decades of:
a) different places are different in a lots of ways
b) some of those ways are more abstract than others and apply therefore to more sit-uations
c) however, a lot of thinkable and obvious situations to which one might apply them,
they do not fit, they fail to be correct about behaviours to expect and generate
d) there are infinitely many diverse ways to be more individualist, to assume people
are basically evil, to be future-oriented, to avoid uncertainty--which of them can
we observe, expect, and should produce
e) if you act in conformance to a particular place and its culture’s ways you will be
more successful and powerful--a nice idea that usually does not work well--even
most of the people native to a culture do not conform to most of its ways most of
the time (when we actually measure instead of merely assume)
f) nearly all publishing and research projects, due perhaps to convenience (laziness),
just use 40 year old traditions by Kluckhorn or Hofstede, applying them without
innovation or insight to another culture--the culture of potato chips, the culture
of Star Trek Conventions, the culture of socks, etc.
g) the most practical, powerful uses of culture that businesses and leaders want to
make, do not need or benefit from such dimensions--decades of research, dis-tracted
by dimensions, have missed the operations most people want and need to
perform on cultures they face--missing tools, hence, missing impact.
I was going to start this book with a rigorous survey of the best 300 articles and book
chapters on culture that I could find over the last 20 years. However, when I analyzed
them, I got so little from them all, that it was hard to stay awake. I did not want early
chapters of this book to put readers to sleep and give them “knowledge” useless in prac-tice.
We have to admit that finding the fewest dimensions that allow academics to dis-tinguish
one culture from others, is intellectually fun, but practically useless. 5 or 8
dimensions simply are too broad and general to be of use to anyone other than academ-ics.
Also, such dimensions change with time, and there are sub-cultures within cultures,
and dimensions appear in some social functions and not others. Dimensions are not now
enough and never were enough. In other words, generations of academics approached
culture from their own mental needs and ignored entirely any need by anyone else to
actually handle culture well and get things done with it. Oh well!
The dimensions approach to culture has badly failed. It has produced--different places
are different in different ways---and we knew that already. Articles proudly announcing
another new place has another new culture feature--do not help or surprise us. They
bore us quite rightly, especially since all such dimensions are so broad, abstract, general,
and vague that they offer no real guidance.
Indeed, when we put all the dimensions sets of various authors together before us, and
look for patterns across them we find ordinary social psychology aspects of mind for them
all. The dimensions of Kluckhorn and Hofstede and all the others are really just common
social psychology functions of all minds, long studied in social psych departments, and
hence, unread in anthropology departments. Later I will demonstrate this in detail.
The Astonishing Power of Culture
Who cares if thousands of academic publishings on culture are not of value to practice?
Well the problem is, culture itself is extreme. It has enormous power and regularly costs
nations, corporations, and persons immense portions of their wealth, time, and viability.
There is a list of examples of gigantic costs of getting culture wrong or ignoring it that
are well known: Euro-Disney lost money for its first ten years mostly due to gigantic cul-ture
oversights; Lincoln Electric built factories in Europe before discovering that they
were illegal (their piece-work pay system was illegal); Xerox engineers, facing bank-ruptcy
from Japanese competition refused to make cycle time shortening a basis of bonus
payments, due to a culture of distrust of the dishonesty of executives, insuring failure of

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Xerox. Motorola, Kodak, Xerox all studied disruption at Harvard and then died as digital
stuff wiped out their analog profits--study had no ability to change analog culture to dig-ital
culture for them, Harvard notwithstanding.
The Nature of This Book
This is a strange book. It finds and uses little nuggets of truth in the research of others,
while keeping itself separate from the culture those others worked and lived and
researched in. It uses results from a culture of academia that it finds flawed and dan-gerous.
Then it goes outside academia, to forms of research shunned there, to get what
we need about culture, to enable the operations we actually need and want to apply to
cultures we face.
This book is about culture and it also extricates itself from various harmful cultures all
the time in every paragraph. You will read a kind of background fight in most sentences
and paragraphs, therefore. This book presents and teaches and it applies and demon-strates
at the same time.
Reading this book will also be such a fight. Readers will find in themselves suddenly on a
certain page and paragraph, attitudes, behaviors, blindspots, flaws that this book makes
appear adolescent, immature, uneducated, uncivilized, barbaric, dangerous, biased,
blind. Any reader who does not think they are all those things now, is probably caught
up in one or another “positive self regard” manias of various nations and school systems
(programs and curricula that flee from critique and edit, negation and flaw for fear of
“discouraging” and “demoralizing” people).
We are all very partial beings and it takes decades of conscious effort and abrupt major
changes of environment to perform in and adapt to, to overcome even some of the biases
and blindnesses, arrogances and evils put into us by where and how we were born and
raised. We are most of what we all first have to overcome in life, should we even try to
become educated adult beings. Most readers of most books have never tried to become
educated beings, heading off to colleges of engineering or business, or medicine, or law
to make money, not to outgrow conditions of birth and slough local dated dangerous ini-tial
contents of self. We encounter them at age 50 with brilliant professional skills sur-rounded
by a much greater body of adolescent attitudes and views never challenged by
any college education: short-order cooks doing heart surgery, rural bigots firing entire
workforces of companies they buy. This book attempts to reduce the prevalence of this.
The Power and Success of This Book
I have developed and taught the contents of this book for over 20 years. It all started as
the contents of the first international business course at the University of Chicago Grad
School of Business, that I created while teaching there. I never, during the 20 years,
wrote this book, because I had no great one point of view, method, tool, approach that
handled all culture opportunities and questions well. I had a collection of scattered
things that each worked in its domain but that did not mesh together. A core insight was
missing.
Suddenly two years ago while teaching culture handling at De Tao Masters Academy in
Shanghai, where I have a design studio, and while teaching culture handling to graduate
engineering students from 40 European nations at Keio University’s Grad School of Sys-tem,
Design, and Management, I got that missing anchor piece, the insight that unified all
the pieces and made them all much easier to teach, explain, use, and handle.
I write this book now because I have tested that central anchor insight for two further
years of teaching and because six of my students have formed their own profitable con-sultancies
based on one or another of the six methods presented in this book. My stu-dents
all over Asia, Europe, and China are making real money by solving government and
business problems using the contents of this book.
Ghosts--Missing Culture Treatments
In a paper on systems engineering, some years ago, I noted that top leaders of NASA, the
US military, the Japanese JAXA Space Program, and other huge enterprises, attributed
the cause of all major systems disasters, to culture. Culture caused, they said, most sys-tems
disasters--from the two Space Shuttles that destroyed astronauts in the USA to the
Concorde disaster that ended that program.
Now here is the interesting point--not a single graduate systems engineering program or
department in any university in the world, not a single journal of systems engineering
anywhere, presents or publishes content on culture powers and their effects on huge sys-tems
(I could find in recent years less than 0.001% of articles published and courses
taught had culture content).
When I started teaching graduate engineers from 40 European nations at Keio University’s
grad school of systems design, I ran into obstacles to handling culture effects on huge
many years long multi-nation engineering projects and teams:
the culture of engineering
the culture of males
the culture of Japan
the culture of MBAs
the culture of software technology.
Everyone (of my students) expected cut and dried formulas--plug in the values of leftside
variables and get good results on the right side of equations. Culture has few such for-mulas.
Everyone expected hard, mechanic, physical stuff to handle. Culture is not tac-tile
like that. Everyone in Japan is comfortable talking about other cultures being blind
to Japan’s culture, but mightily resists the suggestion that Japanese are blind to the cul-ture’s
of other nations. Culture handling requires being an educated being, standing
somewhat outside the conditions of one’s own birth and being raised--my students
entered engineering to avoid such interior reflective things. Evereyone feared and many
hated MBAs and their venal psychopath personalities, programs, and effects on business.
The harmful nature of MBA culture and the culture of faculties who recruit MBAs into
investor-priority and efficient-markets religions is undiscussable in normal colleges.
Everyone was uncomfortable with software, invading more and more of all systems. The
culture of the nerds who make software and the autism of the systems they make, affect
everyone, and yet the money to be made with them “bribes” people into “no comment”.
Culture gets ignored for these reasons, therefore. Where are the formulas? Culture
lacks status and won’t get me promoted! Only Japanese can know Japan’s culture, out-sider
views are always false (same for all other nations). Technologies have to serve
investors primarily, and should be as unregulated as possible--economics says so (MBAs
insist without data). Software is king, no one is allowed to suggest that software pro-grammers
and the programs they create are as mentally stunted as the nerds who create
them and the Asperger’s syndrom (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg) people who lead them.
These are initial reactions of my Keio engineer students to any mention of cultures of
design, engineering, products, and management. They are not ready for what creates
most engineering disasters.
It was clear--if you were in there with me--that culture, the kind of thing culture is, dis-gusted
and dismayed engineering students, males, Japanese, MBAs, and software people.
They all have their reasons for avoiding it, resisting it, denying it, bypassing it, minimiz-ing
exposure to it.
Many chose to enter engineering in order to avoid having to face and deal with woozy
emotive, interior, human things like culture. All those cultures--engineering, male,
Japan, MBAs, and software--resist, undermine, and deplore the very idea of culture and
certainly spending extended time modeling and designing it and the handling of it.
Overall this raises the idea of a previous book of mine--The Femininity of Creativity and
Productivity, How and Why Most Improvements in Processes Feminize Them.
Here readers should ask themselves--why do common widespread cultures in every soci-ety
of the world avoid, resist, undermine, and refuse to deal with the very idea and real-ity
of “culture”? This book will provide an amazingly simple, powerful, portentous
answer to that, an answer that will make readers of this book amazingly more productive
and powerful than non-readers.
Sample Powers of Culture--If Handled as This Book Suggests
Selling is perhaps the most fundamental of all life and business skills. We sell to our-selves,
to our kids, to our spouses, to our bosses, to our employees, and to our custom-ers.
We sell ideas, trips, homework, diseases, avoidance of physicians, holidays,
changes of schedule, products, books, experiences, problems. In a previous book I pre-sented
a model of selling obtained from 150 of the world best salespersons. The core of
that model was mapping cultures to find their blindspots, and penetrating cultures with
messages designed to get past their filters. Culture spotting and handling according to
those 150 was central to selling well.
If we can map the culture of a device, interface, or app well and if we can map the cul-ture
of a customer, set of customers, or market segment well, we can use the interac-tions
of these two cultures to predict future versions of product, future sales success,
and the like. This is the most profitable use of culture modeling as this book is being
written. In all modesty I am, at present, the only professor, world-wide, doing these
sorts of interaction matrices.
In my own career, without any plan, intent, or mentorship, I happened to notice the cul-ture
of where I was working and to whom I was selling, or whom I was leading. I hung
around, doing not much, probing to see patterns of response, blindspots, biases.
1) as a child, dislike of my parents’ and hometown’s culture--counting down years to
something magical called “college” which was far away and had different people
2) as an MIT freshman, dislike of the excessively male culture of the place, adult men
pretending that math was difficult when I and my fellow students finished most
college math on our own, without teachers, in elementary school years out of
sheer curiosity and fun, not knowing math was said to be hard by “adults”

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3) as a Wellesley student, noticing how the lack of male challenge and debate, let
poor or weak theories hang on for decades in fields dominated by females
4) as a disciple of Daisetzu Suzuki at MIT, noticing how Christianity omitted cured ills
of ancient Rome and exacerbated problems today, and how it omitted formally
bible books about individual direct access to the divine and included only books on
dependency on priests for all value
5) as a manager in a global NGO, noticing how males in the NGO talked only to males
in the poor villages we served, resulting in aid project funds going to alchohol and
sex, not education and healthcare
6) in Paul Samuelson’s intro economics course 14.01 at MIT, noticing how ridiculous
foolish assumptions were mentioned hastily without discussion in the first 3
weeks, that made the beautiful maths presented later possible by ruling out all
realistic human behavior from all of economics calculation (also noticing with
embarrassment how simple topology, used in General Equliibrium calculations of
Ken Arrow, impressed economists outside MIT)
7) in Japan setting up participatory town meetings where citizens invented their own
needed policies, noticing how Japanese elites, poorly educated Tokyo University
students, could only “lead” by keeping all ordinary Japanese unable to think and
form opinions, no essays written by them at all from six years old till 18 years old
in public schools
8) in Korea, noticing how when women entered any room, the men imperceptibly
moved to an adjacent room, and when women gradually entered there, the men
again “diffused” into another room, constantly going away from female company
9) at the University of Michigan, noticing how my Japanese wife’s papers got graded
down whenever they presented systems in Japan not operating and based on
American confrontational competitive principles (while faculty there were proud
of their globality)
10) at Johnson and Johnson headquarters, noticing six JJ vice presidents asleep
after each of six Coopers Lybrand presentations, with none of the presenters
able to respond to this by not doing the boring PowerPoint thing that six times in a
row had just put six vice presidents to sleep before their very eyes (PowerPoints
are where contemporary cowards hide, a measure of the effect of environment
chemicals on weakening male testes)
11) at EDS, noticing how 2000 sales persons failed to sell anything over a 2 year
period due to their own excesses of malesness and military command hierarchy,
and how feminine tactics did make a breakthru first major sale (something I man-aged)
12) at General Motors, noticing how new technologies, developed and presented by
research Phd’s terrified operation managers and delayed technology use by five or
more years compared to Japanese auto company competitors, where new tech-nologies
were developed and presented by ordinary work teams, not elite Phds
13) at Newt Gingrich’s precinct workers assemblies, noticing how elite campaign
staffs monopolized campaign work and later complained that too few volun-teered,
something fixed by my Election Campaign Circles, that applied Japanese
quality circle techniques to the doing of campaign tasks
14) at N. V. Philips headquarters, noticing how lots of good ideas accumulated with-out
organization ability to spot and develop them soon enough to meet changing
markets, something fixed by Invent Event mass workshop events where 200 people
from a dozen company areas gathered to turn possible ideas into fast-moving
development teams.
There are hundreds more of these examples, from my own career, and dozens more from
careers of my students, scattered throughout this book. Culture spotting and handling
has immense power in modern business, even not considering increases in globaliza-tion.
This book is about power, the development of power in you, from approaching cul-ture
as this book suggests. Master this book and you will become one of the most
powerful people on earth. Many of my students have already done so, in dozens of
nations, professions, and ways.
Massive Culture Interactions in Recent Global Business History--Where
the Actions Is Since Top Business Schools are NOT Where It Is
In the 1970s, top Japanese firms, went from marginal to dominating 11 global industries,
not the least of which was autos and semiconductors. While American business schools
did nothing, Ford set up the American Supplier Institute, GM set up the Crosby College in
Florida, to train entire supply chains and workforces and sets of managers in an entirely
new way of doing and viewing and measuring and improving business. This way became
so dominant that there is today, decades later, not a single big firm anywhere in the
world that does not teach and promote and measure total quality processes and kaizen
improvements by entire workforces.
This was the largest transformation in business history, many have written, especially
when you consider its process and fact-based management culture were what enabled
the internet to be rapidly applied to global business. It was total quality measured pro-cesses
that the web first enabled, and fact based management of those processes that
the web best enabled. Total quality was the way of viewing business that invited web-ization
of globally extended business processes across multi-nation supply chains of
firms.
Now consider the culture work that any and every total quality implementation was:
1) total quality invented, in Japan, by Japanese, as an anti-culture to normal Japa-nese
management culture: from emotion based to fact based managing, from
unmeasured processes to statistically controlled processes, from management by
rank to managing by measure, from vertical pleasing bosses to horizontal pleasing
customers
2) this anti-ordinary-Japanese-management culture applied to the US, to France, to
Indonesia, etc.
3) the hidden supports that TQM had in the Japanese environment it arose in, missing
in the US, France, and Indonesia, making implementations there weak
4) the assimilation away by elites in US, France, and indonesia, of all that was chal-lenging
and different, so the TQM methods did not challenge deep local habits,
values, views, and practices, weakening effects greatly.
In nation after nation, the total quality program’s teams did root cause analysis of pro-cess
flaws till they began finding that all important process flaws were caused by bigger
flaws in the character and work habits of executives. At this point, all total quality pro-grams
magically froze, and worked forever-after on peripheral issues and problems. The
culture of total quality was not strong enough to challenge the culture of venal MBA
elites. It was not allowed to challenge them at the root cause of all that was weak and
evil in business practices and processes everywhere in firms.
It is not just the biggest most monumental changes in global business practices that come
from culture work. Much smaller more frequent changes in business practice also
involve mostly culture work. Understanding culture as this book does, makes doing all
these business practices easier and more effective.
The Culture of Avoiding Negatives, Ignoring Evils Results. In graduate classes at the
University of Michigan, I was often, the only person in the room with both respectable
undergraduate experience and powerful career positions and accomplishments in NGOs
and industries, worldwide. The students around me had been in colleges all their lives
and totally lacked commonsense, a sense of realistic proportion, and good judgment.
Their questions were wildly off base in strange ways and their ideas about improvement
and change were ridiculous, both much too harsh and much too wimpy and mis-located.
One particular thing I did, that horrified them, was negation. I was full of the nasti-nesses
of politics in big organizations, the backbiting, lying, sneaky, underhanded rela-tions
among men competing to “get ahead” of each other. The students around me
totally underestimated the harsh dysfunctions of real organizations, and the distortive
career self-promotion forces in them. They viewed me as terribly negative because I
constantly came up with how such forces would toy with and wreck student proposed
ways-to-go.
This book is highly negative at places too--because I know, from years of teaching this
book’s contents, that readers are now in and grew up in cultures that avoid negation,
hide from negatives, avoid feedback on consequences, love unfettered-by-reality talk
and imagining. This book brings negation back into cognition and discourse--reversing
reader cultures that whitewash reality, as if wishing positives were enough to make them
install and endure.
CHAPTER 1: How Knowledge is Devel-oped
and Used--as Knowledge Culture
The world has thousands of professors, gathering data, analyzing it, discussing conclu-sions,
and publishing. No one reads most of those publishings and they proliferate
greatly year by year. More and more knowledge going unused. On the other hand, we
find governments, businesses, and ordinary people constantly making mistakes that many
know how not to make. We find them poorly solving issues others know powerful great
solutions for. The way people do what they do is at terribly low levels of excellence
when we consider how the best people and groups do the same functions elsewhere.
Truth is:
1) Research is very expensive in time and money--so tiny portions of all the vital
questions humanity faces get attention;
2) Methods of research are limited, as are the data affordable, so even where a topic
gets attention, it often takes decades before enough evidence accumulates to
provide guidelines for action of practical worth
3) Results of validated methods confirmed by research are often tiny and have
unknown boundary conditions, so such results do not always work or eventuate,
and where they do appear they are often tiny, weak, small, or useless.
4) The vast marjority of all research results are never read or applied by anyone and
are generated only for academic career building.

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5) Where topics of great moment, value, and worth are researched, any results
obtained honestly and sincerely are, not infrequently, overwhelmed by corporate
foundations doing fake research to hide science results that harm financial inter-ests
(most governments are already bought off by such financial interests and sup-port
policies that protect wealth not general populations).
6) Because of the above 5 points, no major investment gets made in systems to get
institutions aware of and applying newest effects and results found in research,
so, unsurprisingly, nearly no link between publishings and applyings exists.
Nearly all academic research on culture takes place without recognition of and counter-acting
of the six above realities of knowledge handling systems in our era. Everyone
operates in a broken whole society knowledge development and transfer/apply system;
each does his own part and no one fixes the busted whole.
Exceptions to the above tend to fall in small Nordic nations of Europe, where tiny popula-tions
make the connection between population needs, research done, and use of results
of research applied tight and lean. Such small nations do not have the vast amounts of
funds for de-linking need-research-application.
So we have thousands of yearly studies of culture published in journals, with virtually no
one reading them or applying them. We have millions of institution encounters with cul-ture,
using ad hoc or local consultant methods totally untested by research of any sort,
justified by “this worked with my previous clients several of whom you have called and
spoken to”.
Because of this, and crises like global warming, it will be many decades, centuries even,
before solid research results, that practice can use and depend on, result from current
methods of research. People who wait for valid research results die with lives of little or
no impact or accomplishment.
I wish this were a book only of validated results of research---that will not be possible for
a century or more. I wish this book contained only methods of powerful proven impact--
-that I have been able to do, but without the valid data readers deserve. I simply lack
both the time and money to arrange studies for the large volume of items this book pre-sents.
It would take decades, a hundred grad students, and tens of millions of dollars to
conduct such studies.
That is where the genius of this book comes in. I will present very soon to readers a sin-gle
core anchor insight so simple and powerful that it explains everyone else’s stuff on
culture as well as every reader encounter with culture. That is a promise I will keep. I
know that becaause I have already kept that promise to 350 students who each took six
courses in a sequence from me at my various colleges in the USA, the EU, Japan, and
China. That is a promise I will keep because I have had a stellar career in business, in
non-profit NGO work, in academia, and recently in the arts, using methods and
approaches in this book.
There are very few people adept at handling all the kinds of cultures out there, all the
operations we wish to apply to aspects of culture, all the powers of culture, all the traits
of culture we wish changed, all the social processes in which various dimensions of cul-ture
appear, all the dimensions of culture we accept without trying to change them.
This is true because:
1) many cultures inside us all make us avoid, flee from, minimize exposure to cul-tures
of all sorts
2) the vast majority of studies of culture, except this book, emphasize dimensions
handling and ignore traits, social processes, high performance subcultures of a
culture, diverse powers cultures have, operations we wish to perform on any and
all of those
3) the principal images of culture out there in minds of everyone are confused, dif-fuse,
dated, and nearly useless so action guided by those images goes nowhere
and achieves little, making people avoid handling culture at all
4) culture mistakes are usually due to images and approaches shared deeply uncon-sciously
by everyone around the people making the mistake--so to not make that
mistake, some people have to reject and avoid all that everyone around them
expects of them, as commonsense.
The Culture of Truth
A South Korean Asiana airlines Boeing 777 failed to lift off and crashed at the San Fran-cisco
airport. Boeing fought with the airlines over truth. Boeing pushes all accident
investigations towards findings of human error or environment causes; airlines push all
accident investigations towards human factors design errors in the cockpit. Truth as pub-lished
reports ends up a sort of crap game result--the best promoter of their own lies
wins the “public truth contest”. Truth is a fight, fought with politics and money, high
priced outside experts hired to promote one version or another. Final truth occurs on
two times scales--within ten years of the incident, where “what is true” goes to the win-ning
side in the fight for successful truth distortion, and beyond ten years of the incident,
when reports on the moves in the “truth fight” are fully reported, showing how the win-ner
of that fight successfully distorted facts and ultimate causations. Big banks, simi-larly,
boast about their “controls” and “management prowess” until caught stealing and
lying by congressional committees--then suddenly all their top executives claim to have
known nothing about the most vital parts of their business--which is is? Are these firms
managed or drifting without management? Truth is bought and paid for throughout his-tory
and our pity for ancient dead civilizations and their gross failings of leadership and
truth finding, and lack of such pity for our own selves and civilizations, measures how
deluded we are about our own grasp of truths today.
Academia purports to be on the side of ultimate accurate historic truth, however, lack of
replicability for many of social psychology’s major findings, the Losada affair of false
results endorsed by 30+ top professors unmasked by a lone grad student checking the
data, and faculty paid by defense funds to assist massive killing war machineries hint at
deep abiding distortions of truth at work there. Pressures to win, get tenure, get grants
make Harvard and the University of Chicago among the least intellectual environments on
earth, professors report--any idea mentioned gets instantly stollen, without attribution,
by other contending professors and their grad students--so no one at those places says
anything meaningful to anyone else while there (this is not an exaggeration). Everyone
reports the unpleasant nature of contact with any MIT professor--”they are always asking
for money, morning, noon, and night”--so people avoid them at cocktail parties.
Truth from governments--Turkey, China, Russia--is such a threat it is ruled illegal and any-one
publishing it is tortured, beaten, or killed. Truth is the enemy of many, perhaps,
most governments. The CIA spys on congressional committees in the USA investigating
CIA actions. Truth is a fight with victors on two time scales--the fight winner time scale,
and the history of the fight publisher later time scale. Finding corporations, leaders, or
Portrait of an MBA by Cid RigidvonOsterizer

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governments seeking and admitting truth is hard but wonderful when it happens. The
power of those embracing truth is immense in history terms, not personal wealth terms.
Telling truth about culture is also fraught with distortion and difficulty. This book
attempts it nonetheless.
Tourists or Masters of Culture
The world is full of missionaries and their kids, businessmen on foreign assignment living
in enclaves where contact with natives and their ways is minimized, language teachers in
their own and foreign lands, and the like. These people tour for the most part, noticing
differences, and making relationships with specially motivated natives. Many of them
tour for 20 or 30 years or more and in conversation are amazingly worldly. They know so
much about so many places and have had so many unlikely adventures not possible in any
one land and place.
However, seeing a lot, and being a lot of places, and marginal professions in a lot of
places do not constitute being there in the kind of full bodied, risk-filled way that natives
are there. To meet a culture and penetrate and master its ways, you have to get people
to trust you and one measure of that is converting to your religion, another measure of
that is investing in your projects or NGO or businesses, and another is marrying you.
This means readers of this book will gradually see themselves either as culture tourists or
culture masters. The former see a lot, notice a lot, do a lot, but have marginal if any
impact and cannot get anything difficult and hefty done anywhere. The latter are heavy
hitters. They can change the foreign cultures they are in, they can gather investors and
build institutions, they can mobilize dozens or hundreds of volunteers or followers or
employees there. This book is for transforming the culture tourists into culture masters.
A Book with Attitude
I offer here a closing proviso to my readers. This book is filled with challenges. The cul-ture
of the USA, of males, of capitalism, of monkey hierarchies, of Japan, of Wall Street,
of MBAs, of engineers, or business practices, of particular corporations, of entire gen-ders--
these cultures are self-interested and distort their own nature in all public venues
and presentations. We have to look beneath what they feel and think of themselves.
What is more--while readers of this book virtually worship top colleges, elites educated
there, high mental skill, most readers have not admitted such elites might, given their
actual results in the last 50 years, be......evil. Ask Vietnamese in the countryside what
they feel about McNamara from Harvard counting dead Vietnamese in the Vietnam War,
and you get a grandma his bombs killed, a family’s babies his bombs killed. Ask Harvard
students about that war and Harvard’s role in hiding McNamara’s evil results under a
patina of mental skills--800 math GRE scores, etc.--and you get ho-hum responses--who
cares about missing grandmas and babies of poor people far away. What culture reacts
that way--readers will, by this book, be asked, again and again.
This book has attitude in the sense of not skipping obvious implications and evil side-effects
of elite institutions and people. This book does not euphemize. It deliberately
challenges the “culture” in readers of what they unthinkingly worship and kow-tow
to as “elite”--it deliberately looks at historic results achieved by such elites and asks
readers--can those elites, after all, be....evil....though they are so smart and well
paid and what readers aspire to join themselves.
All my life I have confused institutions who hired me in two fundamental ways. One,
those institutions thought they were blessing me with their high status but I did not
agree. In every case I thought the opposite--I was improving their reputation by letting
my light shine on their institution while I was there. Expected to seek tenure by the Uni-versity
of Chicago (my first academic job), I rejected it out of hand--I had an entire world
to explore and could not be tied down. Secondly, I have really enjoyed, and thrived in,
just about every institution I was in, and, at the same time, I have found them all far less
than they thought themselves to be, filled with unadmitted flaws and greeds. Again and
again bosses got perplexed by that contradiction--I was both happy and successful at
working in systems and organizations I had little respect for. They could not fathom how
i could love working in and contributing to and fixing up institutions I thought of as filled
with flaw. It never ocurred to them that I was highly visible and effective in them pre-cisely
because I saw lots of flaws in them. I entered knowing a dozen cultures blinding
them to their own flaws and therefore they were quite easy to improve--I just refused to
get caught up in male culture, the cultuer of bigness, monkey hierarchy games, and the
like.
You will enjoy this book--unless you are trapped by male culture, capitalist culture,
American culture, monkey hierarchy culture, technology culture, bigness culture--and
even those thusly trapped, may find this book their way out of those traps.
But countering that attitude that I fill this book with, is something from my engineering,
software, technology venture launch background. Most books on culture are written by
academics who went smoothly from grad school to assistant professor to old professor.
Else they are written by social scientists in corporations. I have a robust engineering
career, advanced software career, technology venture launch career, NGO founding
career, and this book’s approach to culture reflects my mental training in those fields.
That makes it feel and read quite differently than books by others. I do not apologize
for those differences. They are good differences.
CHAPTER 2: Why Books and Courses
on Culture?
GLOBALIZATION. The combination of free email, SMS communication around the globe,
with next day airfreight transport, and cellphone technology has lowered coordination
costs, and expanded parts of the world that can bid on, do, and participate in every func-tion.
We are far from bandwidth allowing face to face video meetings to compete with
physical body face to face meetings--perhaps decades away from that bandwidth, but
there is much we are doing with the limited video presence to each other, world-wide,
we already have for free on the web.
This means the inputs to all functions are becoming spread out, diverse, global. This
means the outputs and results of every function are becoming spread out, diverse, glo-bal.
Multi-culture inputs transmuted into multi-culture outputs. Culture handling on
the input side and on the outputs side is becoming central, determinative, unavoidable,
and immense in impact, import, and power. This is a trend that future technologies will
only accelerate, not diminish. This is a taste of much more culture centrality in our
future.
SYSTEMS PRODUCTS. The iPod product of Apple Computer introduced system products
and system product imagination to world populations. Suddenly what you had in your
hand was valuable because of networks it connected. In mid conversation, everyone
now does fact-checking of what other people just said to them. Lies have shorter
lifespans these days because the knowledge of the world is in our hands, delivered there
cellularly.
Systems products get their value from global access to global resources--translating lan-guages
where you are, mapping what is around based on your profiled interests, linking
you with people nearby sharing interests, and the like. This too makes lives and minds
multi-cultural, multi-language, multi-located, multi-sourcing, multi-publishing.
EVIL ELITES. Let me tell a story, one widely believed but difficult to gather enough data
on, to prove, and one of telling, vast, import and implications.
One side-effect of the second world war was collapse of Christianity in Europe--it has
failed to stop immense horrors twice in 30 years. The USA, largely untouched by the war
in its homeland, liked God still and liked war still since it had taken credit for hard fought
Russian victories in a neat trick of mis-attribution and wishful thinking. So love of war
and religion stayed in the USA but collapsed in Europe. 30 years after that war, the
Soviet Union collapsed in exactly the way predicted 50 years earlier by Hannah Arendt
(her theory that violence was the absence of power not an aspect of power being con-firmed
thereby). Two vacuums ensued--absence of religion and of any competitor to
capitalism.
Dominant US elites, so this story goes, unleashed by collapse of religion and capitalism’s
primary competitor, turned evil. Top US universities saw themselves as society’s epit-ome,
religion now gone as an epitome, and capitalism victorious over all. Modesty
instanlty evaporated, replaced by an obvious well reported cockiness and arrogance.
Skill and status turned into evil. Agreement on this story is amazingly widespread, world-wide
today, among all elites except US ones (I wonder why?).
Into that vacuum of missing religious constraint and constraint by competition, grew evil
(the story goes), fostered mainly by East Coast elite production machineries at Harvard
and MIT--elitist institutions worshipping maths as “hard” (they are not hard, adolescents
regularly master them without teachers), accepting psychopathically self concerned peo-ple,
and subjecting them to narcissiticly self concerned professors, graduating them
almost autistic in lack of appreciation for non-elite populations around themselves. Lack
of religion accelerated the evil inherent in how Harvard and MIT operate. Lack of a com-petitor
to capitalism unchained evil theories in economists that justified making ridicu-lous
mathematic simplifications and assumptions the center of social policy. The result-
-$13 trillion lost in 2008-9 from the baby boomer generation--paid out to banker third
homes and boats. That money has never been recovered.
If it is good to judge people by their effects, then one can argue that Harvard and MIT are
fundamental evils, ruining the world with their nuclear engineers, not building power sys-tems,
but on Wall Street buying 3rd homes and big boats, with money stripped from
petering out manufacturing, dwindling education quality, and healthcare unavailable to
1/5th of their population. It is easy to get rich when unencumbered with care for any-one
else.

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It is clear, to all but such US elites, the story goes, and especially clear to the 150 Silicon
Valley founders I and my students interviewed over the years, that US MBAs are some-thing
like a disease on world business, optimizing only their own personal wealth at the
expense of entire nations and populations. Their religion of efficient markets (used as a
cover story), is based on math assumptions again and again proven not just wrong but
exploitatively harmful. No major improvement in business practice in the last century
came from any graduate school of business, if we are to believe a number of European
historians of business. Indeed schools of business were generally 20 years late, installing
major changes in practice they had been unable to see till overwhelmingly part of all
major businesses--managing by objectives (German management), total quality (Japa-nese
management), venture spawning clusters (California digital management). In every
case MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard schools of business were decades late to the
party, early opponents, and, at the end, immense distorters of these foreign cultures of
business out-performing US MBA generated systems. Silicon Valley, after all, was built
entirely by engineers not MBAs.
We need books and courses on culture to better understand how handsom, rich, elite
people from our “best” institutions--our “best and brightest” as others have termed
them--turn evil, so we can un-do the evil they do and change such institutions so they
stop spewing evil psychopath people over increasingly unequal squalid societies. We
have seen this story before, elites in Europe and England so elegant, educated, and supe-rior
to their own populations that they grow up despising those populations, losing all
pity and care for them. That led to Marxism, Communism, and war. We do not need to
trod that path again. Yet as this book is written, the US is marching determinedly down
that path--a feeling of entitlement causing billionaire Wall Street CEOs to react with hor-ror
at the idea that they are overpaid and millions of workers are underpaid, at tax loop-holes
for them being closed (even while new taxes are added that prevent middle class
families from developing wealth of their own).
Elite skill as as hiding place for evil is history long, common, well known (Goethe’s paint-ing
of the Devil, Mephistopholes, as an elegant 800 math GRE Kennedy School grad, is the
icon of this insight). Yet today in the USA, publishing anything in this direction is diffi-cult,
doubted, amazing there (why so few TV business comedies in the USA compared to
the EU?)--Americans are so sold on skills as a route to progress that they cannot imagine
Harvard and MIT as possible primary hiding places of evil in our era. They aspire to being
elite themselves so they resist imagining those elites and the institutions that produce
them select psychopaths and narcissists and expose them to psychopath and narcissist
faculty then graduate them as more psychopathic and narcissistic. The high incomes and
status of elite grads there blind them to the mass killing wars and global finance disasters
those grads actually have generated again and again, not accidentally but as results of
the primary beliefs installed in them in top ten US college educations and grad schools.
The cultural work of seeing this overwhelms them. Ivan Illych, fifty years ago, published
books on demystification of professions--seeing them as bastions of self serving power,
hidden by overt skill and eliteness. Seeing modern medicine as aiming at physician
enrichment, not population health, fifty years ago was an “evil Marxist point of view”.
Now, considering US medical system results, it is just an obvious powerful fact--the US
has a system that costs more than all other rich nation systems, produces poorer overall
health results, and pays physicians far more than all comparable systems. The criticism
of that lone voice 50 years ago, is today’s well reported fact. It is not Illych who is evil,
it is Harvard MIT and the elites they produce who are evil (one is forced to say)--who
optimize only their own wealth and have lost even the pretense of serving society. And,
if your institution produces evil elites, decade after decade, can your faculty, overall, be
anything but evil? Remember, colleges are worshipped in most middle class industrial
societies as the doorway to upward middle class mobility--so no one there can imagine
skills, elite skills, from “top” colleges, as hiding places for evil, even when body counts
and trillions of dollars lost in wars mount up again and again and again.
This book can and does contemplate and examine stories like the above--that our top
people might have hurt our civilization fundamentally and may be on balance populated
mostly by narcissist or psychopath elites, chosen by top colleges and exposed to narcissist
or psychopath faculty for years. No one will have good data on this and evaluating the
“on balance” contribution of huge institutions like US top colleges, is fraught and too
expensive for there ever to be good data on it (till perhaps 40 years hence using cell-phone
and web tracking big data). This book differs from others in that it states the
obvious, the elephant in the room, and challenges our habitual valuations and certain-ties.
This book intends to open minds, without telling them what to put into those newly
opened spaces. If readers end up agreeing with me, the author of this book--I will be
truly horrified. I do not need, want, or respect reader agreement--I write to challenge
and educate people.
Like I said early in the Preface of this book, this is not a book for adolescent minds in 50
year old bodies. If you are naive, a liar about yourself and your profession, caught up in
status hierarchies of male societies, then you will find this book a tough read--this book
does not euphemize evil people and the harms they do. It does not skip over or minimize
evil just because it is done by elite, 800 math GRE, people. It does not wait centuries
for multiple-regression studies to validate that “hundreds of years ago, Harvard and MIT
elites’ net effect on the US population was evil”. This book is willing to contemplate
that much and many that we worship and aspire to, are evil. No one is sure, but too
many do not contemplate and doubt what everyone around them worships. Too many.
This book takes the best from best practices and from research literature and reports
those results--wherever they may fall, whatever powers-that-be and psychophantically-worshipped
elites get insulted. This book is ruthless, sophisticated, founded in research
and practice, distilling insights from 8000 of the world’s top people in 63 professions and
41 nations, interviewed in the Excellence Science Research Project of the University of
Chicago. If you have better sources, let me know, but if your sources are only your own
self image and lies to yourself about your worth, don’t waste your and my time arguning
with the statements in this book. Do the research and empirical surveys needed to bet-ter
my data before asserting without basis that elite people like you should never be
doubted or called out on evil results you produce. This book is not for babies in 50 year
old bodies. If this book is too tough and accurate for you, buy some trash common in the
business book section of every bookstore in the world. Wallow there.
CULTURE THINKING, CULTURAL THINKING, THINKING CULTURE. The above section illus-trated
two reasons for books and courses on culture. If the culture of entire societies
and/or the elites they look up to and follow orders or wealth/celebrity of become evil
and that can only be seen by seeing one’s own culture (not something easy for us to do--
fish seeing their own water), then we need books and courses that get cultures, their
elites, and their non-elites to check each others for drift toward evil. Secondly, we have
books and courses on culture to distinguish three kinds of thinking. One, culture thinking
is the shared group patterns of thought that consitute a culture--what people agree to
call “a problem”, “a solution”, “excellent”, “too late”, and so forth. Two, cultural
thinking is that subset of such shared patterns of thought in any culture that people con-sider
“highly cultured” ways of thought--sophisticated, a sort of eptime of “what and
who we are” as a group sharing certain ways. Three, thinking culture, is us standing out-side
our own culture　and outside our unconscious automatic reactions to other
cultures、and thinking what culture does and is. Thinking the culture that operates auto-matically
inside us and thinking the reactions, automatic, to other cultures from us, edit-ing
them for decency, safety, reasonableness, and evility. Books and courses on culture
generally take on a bit of all threse of these forms, usually emphasizing one, not the
other two.
The previous section--what if your society’s elites are evil? what if the US MBA programs
generated a horde of mentally suspect self-interested people who were a net negative
contribution to economies around the world? what if evil usually is found in the best
skilled, the best educated, the most adulated as that is where evil best hides?--was,
from this section’s perspective, an exercise in culture thinking (seeing people respect
and worship elite behaviors that harm them and their society), in cultural thinking (MIT
and Harvard worshipping mathematic models, chasing eliteness of model more than
truth), and in thinking culture (are the casual wars American has repeatedly made and
lost since Vietnam the playing out of a deep sickness in American elites and the top col-leges
that produce them?). Thinking culture is uncomfortable--the way reading the pre-vious
section “Evil Elites” was for you, my present readers. I am not committed to what
that section says--but I am committed to thinking culture, that means, going to such
uncomfortable thought places--places anathema, forbidden, horrifying to normal people
who share a culture. This book goes there--to that horrifying place, where you consider
that what you have respected and worshipped all your life, just might be harmful to you
and all others, and evil as judged by later history. If you fear and will not mentally go
there you are not ready for this book and studying culture at all. Going into thinking the
cultures we are, requires finding, examining, and usually undoing the deepest felt most
basic commitments we have made thus far in life. It is not an easy “ideas only” journey.
EDUCATION. When we go back to our hometowns, old schools, old primary school
friends, it is a museum experience--like visiting past history exhibits, people trapped in
stories and values, habits and routines, errors and blindspots all their lives. Such local
people if sent nationwide, or globally elsewhere, blow up, dysfunction, fail, or are
ignored. Their local ways mark them as uneducated, globally incompetent, failures
everywhere except where they and their routines were born and raised. Trapped perma-nently
in who they were made rather than whom they made themselves into. Local peo-ple
get made by teachers, parents, peers, and schools, and then continue, life long, what
those things made them into--they never make it as far as---making their own selves (by
unmaking what others made them while they were blank-slate helpless kids).
The abysmal failure of all local selves when exposed to national, regional, and global
places, people, and issues, is something nearly everyone has observed. Some transfor-mation
has to happen before such local selves, that we all start out as, made by others,
can perform well in many parts of or most of the world. What is that transformation
that makes local selves, safe and effective outside the locales they arose in?
Education in one word is the answer. The Latin roots of that word--education--are “lead
us out from” (ex = out from, duco = lead). Education is dual--leading us out from what
our locale made us into, and leading out of us stuff put in there unconsciously by stronger
others when we were helpless children. Education is escaping the us, made not by us
but mostly by others--parents, teachers, national school systems, media, peers.

page 10
Education, thusly understood, is an operation on culture--the culture we imbibed growing
up, the culture that our own self exudes and sustains. Education is a cancelling of,
escape from, those cultures. Books and courses on culture are made because all of edu-cation
amounts to learning what society put into us growing up and escaping and replac-ing
most of that consciously as young adults. We must understand the culture that
made us and the cultural stuff inside us, in order to become educated beings, capable of
operating everywhere effectively instead of only in some small old place that raised us.
PARENTING. Culture is not an issue for most parents and parenting processes. Most par-ents
are content to raise kids in one area’s ways, as if those ways were right or best.
Thusly, at twenty years old, the kids are dangerous abhorent bigots, assurred in ways
they have never consciously examined, tested, proved via data, or tested against alterna-tive
ways. Indeed, such kids have never been exposed to other ways or alternatives to
how they do things. Most such kids at twenty have not imagination of how utterly ridic-ulous
and dysfunctional their own personalities and ways are in 99% of the world outside
when and where they were raised. Such people are quite dangerous, when not amusingly
incompetent.
Robert McNamara, America’s defense secretary duing the worst parts of the Vietnam War,
is a good example of the millions of people such kids kill when they get power and influ-ence.
Unexamined confidence on one’s own ways, often hardened by a Harvard degree
or two, becomes a casual resource for mass murder of “unimportant poor people far
away”. It never occured to McNamara that killing of millions of Loatians, Cambodians,
Vietnamese would write his name forever in world history as a mass murderer. In his
later years, McNamara wondered, wondered, wondered. Here and there, this interview,
that program, he mused with amazement that apparently he was a mass murderer from
history’s point of view. But, he mused, “how could someone as elite and smart as I (800
GRE math scores) be evil?” “Smart elite people” cannot be evil can they?--he wondered.
So growing up local and staying that way, if it leads to great power, often generates his-toric
fame as an evil genius, whose skills hid mental limits that murdered millions of
innocent weak poor country people. Most of the “great men” in history books are evil,
mass murdering, geniuses--their genius, new better ways to kill more people better
faster. It makes one wonder who writes such books and terms such people “great”.
Well it is people like McNamara, raised local, elite, blessed by Harvard as smart, foisting
dangerous bigotted local ideas and ways on the 99% of the world they know nothing
about. Alexander “the Great” killer, Ghenghis Khan “the Great” killer, Napoleon “the
emperor of ”killing.
So parenting as casually instilling the idea that one’s own people and ways are somehow
“best” is generally evil and generally produces evil results in history. If you aspire to
parenting that create someone, your child, who is not evil, then you have to find a way
to raise the child in one particular culture while at 50 points a day pointing out limits of
that one way, and alternative ways to that one way. This can be done. There are some
mothers in Japan, who used my book Are You Educated? 64 Capabilities of Highly Edu-cated
People to raise their kids in precisely this way--all of those children entering
Japan’s top university save for two, entering Harvard University. There they avoid the
neurotic eliteness and adolescent math worship of elite university culture and hold them-selves
to standards far above Todai and Harvard elites, observing and avoiding the call to
evil hidden-in-skills elite faculty make to young lives there.
Books and courses on culture exist to increase this special kind of parenting that raises
kids so as to be decent and effective in all the world not some one local place.
DIGGING IN. We often encounter adult bodies filled with adolescent minds. Top psychol-ogists
and psychiatrists have models of this--adult men, often our fathers, who get red
faced and angry whenever kids or anyone around them challenges any of their favorite
ideas, values, or opinions; religious people who insist their god is better than all other
gods including the thousands of gods around the world they have never encountered and
know nothing about; young men so hungry for feeling important they use any political or
religious difference as a reason to kill those differing; Harvard grads who use government
power in the US to make war on the world’s poorest tiniest nations and lose those wars,
with whatever the war was for, lost entirely a few years after Americans withdraw from
them; women marrying someone old village men did not choose for them gang raped as
punishment; male professors in the US who describe research showing some business pro-cesses
are more feminine than others, accused of sexual harrassment and drumbed out of
their jobs by self righteous women easily offended by any treatment of any gender topic
in classes; ethnic groups united peacefully under horrible dictators installed by the Brit-ish
empire 100 years ago, erupting into mass murder of each other, when naive Western
democracies weaken such dictatorships in the name of democracy or some other idea
that is right even when it leads to decades of murder.
If any of the above sounds familier, it is--I took each example from the front three pages
of today’s New York Times. Differences are handled, most places today, via digging in
and murdering those who are different. Surely there are more constructive ways to
respond to differences than denigration, grown into discrimination, grown into bullying
grown into mass murder.
There is something vaster and more profound at work here, however.
What Happens to Learning, Knowledge, Civilization When Differences
are Refused, Exacerbated, Politicized
Engineering professors tell me how grateful they are that all they teach is cookie cutter
formulas, without controversy. They keep their jobs because they never have to talk
about anything emotive, personal, human, or social. They constantly observe professors
of social and humanities subjects brought before courts, losing jobs, because some
remark (no one could predict) got judged “harrassment” of any of 30 sorts. These engi-neering
professors, with sighs of relief conclude “we can still teach as long as nothing
educative, personal, emotive, human, and social gets included”. Whew!
A disease of self righteousness has spread worldwide from the top US colleges and inse-cure
gods (and their religions) so that all professors in all departments strip educative,
personal, emotive, human, and social contents from their class and concentrate on literal
repetition of summary sections of printed research papers. Anything beyond that is too
risky--too likely to “offend” and “harrass” someone. In most of the industrial world
today, it is literally illegal to educate anyone by challenging anything they prefer or
believe.
Religions train minds to feel superior to different others, so superior that “we” are
“right” and everyone else is “wrong”--generating millions in classes who object when
some piece of someone’s else’s rightness differs from their own personal preferred ver-sion
of rightness. Education stripped of offense, challenge, demand, argument, dis-agreement,
becomes mere learning, vacuuming up facts that do nothing but sit in brains
incapable of synthesis, judgment, and persuasion. I was challenged, in dozens of often
harsh dismissive ways by dozens of professors with viewpoints other than my own. Stu-dents
I now teach have been habituated to classes that never challenge their ways and
beliefs.
Now imagine a world filled, 99%, with such people say 40 years hence.
We have to make ways of handling differences that are better than mass murder and self
righteous forbidding of all mention of differences for fear of offending someone ignorant
of them and their value.
CHAPTER 3: The Cultures that
Research Cultures
THE CULTURE OF ACADEMIA, STUDYING CULTURES. Earlier this book made the point that
academics have a culture of their own, with a publish-or-perish torture-assistant-profes-sors-
for-seven-years American version spreading to Australia, England, Denmark, Spain,
and other nations. Though academics say this culture produces great knowledge locked
up in difficult journal language, statistically sophisticated observers have shown that up
to 77% of articles published in top psychology journals are statistically invalid with
parameter estimates off by over 200% on average. So we can agree that knowledge in
journal articles is locked up in poor English expression, but we might disagree that that
knowledge is valid. What is more, the topics of the vast majority of those research arti-cles
are tiny, narrow, and not infrequently produce laughter in those reading them. You
publish more in order to get tenure or promotion in academia and the easiest way to pub-lish
more is to chop topics into tiny pieces and publish each peace. You can do a lot of
pieces rapidly this way since they all are really one question and one answer. This chop-ping
up of topics has the statistical effect of publishing effects without magnitudes and
boundary conditions on them. Long Term Capital Management went bankrupt, saved
only by intervention of the US central bank, and ruined the finances of the two Nobel
Prize economists who founded it--because of that lack of boundary conditions telling
when a relationship (equation) failed to anymore apply. In sum we get invalid results,
hidden in bad language, of topics so narrow they imply little or nothing, and effects so
weak a sneeze can undo them, with unknown boundaries of when and where such effects
apply.
• invalid results
• hidden in bad language
• topics so tiny they are useless
• effects so weak they are useless
• unknown boundaries of when and where the effects will be found
• published in journals charging US$40 an article
• journals that virtually no one in the world reads.
Now, if you are a professor, this system of knowledge development and transfer is glori-ous.
You can research anything and publish lots and no one will complain or even know
whether your work is useless or not, and even were they to determine it useless, that
would in no way make it inferior to the vast majority of other research next to it. Societ-

CULTURE BOOK excerpts shorter form Nov2014

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