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Culture Documents
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ISBN 978-0-385-52576-3
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B o o k d e s i g n b y L e o n a r d W. H e n d e r s o n
Jac k e t d e s i g n b y Da n i e l R e m b e r t
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
The Penguin
• • •
Testimony of Dr. Alan Greenspan to the Senate Committee
of Government Oversight and Reform,
October 23, 2008
• • •
But in the last decade (though the roots of the current trend
run back at least to the early 1980s), a series of changes has
triggered a fundamental shift away from this theory of uni-
versal selfishness. First of all, businesses slowly began to learn
the lessons that began with Toyota’s productivity and quality
improvements in its U.S. plants since the 1980s, relative to
its American counterparts; the high-tech industry, personi-
fied in some sense in Google’s playground image, suggested
that relative informality and an emphasis on autonomy and
creativity, as well as social engagement, were critical. More
business school courses and businesses themselves began to
emphasize and experiment with organizational models that
were neither strictly market-based nor as hierarchical as had
been thought necessary in the past. Instead they were built
around the assumption that, given the right conditions,
people would opt to cooperate and collaborate to serve
the collective good of the organization—of their own free
will. More radical still, the rise of peer production on the
Net—from free and open-source software, to Wikipedia, to
collaborative citizen journalism on sites like Daily Kos or
Newsvine, to social networks like Facebook and Twitter—
produced a culture of cooperation that was widely thought
That’s all fine and good in the lab, you might be think-
ing. But what does it mean for us in day-to-day life? Quite
a bit, actually. It means that our existing social and eco-
nomic systems—from our hierarchical business models, to
our punitive legal system, to our market-based approaches
to education—are often designed with the wrong model
of who we are, and why we do what we do. That we don’t
need systems that see individuals solely through the lens of
self-interest, possessing only desires and preferences. Using
control or carrots and sticks to motivate us isn’t effective.
To motivate people, we need systems that rely on engage-
ment, communication, and a sense of common purpose
and identity. In other words, organizations would be bet-
ter off helping us to engage and embrace our collaborative,
generous sentiments, rather than assuming we are driven by
self-interest. As we will see, there are settings where trying
Why Now?