Red, White and Radical

What Organisations Can Learn About Change from the Rise of American Conservatism

Warrick Harniess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367149710
• eBook ISBN: 9780429620386
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Red, White and Radical explores how and why America has become so conservative since World War II. In the process, it offers lessons that professional leaders, regardless of their political stance, should heed if they want their organisational change plans to succeed.

Over the past 70 years, a motley crew of suburban activists, libertarian businessmen and political opportunists have radically changed America and its national values. The rise of American conservatism is the greatest modern example of cultural change in the Western world. How did they do it – and what can we learn from this? Red, White and Radical is a manual for organisational change. It tells nine stories from American cultural, political and business history that illuminate how conservatives have pioneered change. From these stories, it extracts a change management lesson for professional leaders and explains how to apply that lesson in the workplace.

These nine lessons are organised into a clear change framework:

1. understanding and motivating people
2. communicating with emotion and authenticity
3. building teams and networks that can deliver lasting change.

Along the way you'll also learn:

• how Marlboro became the world's biggest cigarette brand
• why conservatives love Ronald Reagan but despise Richard Nixon
• the origins of the social media echo chamber
• how Silicon Valley learned to lobby
• the secrets of Donald Trump's populist X Factor.

Red, White and Radical is not for the faint of heart. If you're a passionate business leader who relishes the challenge of delivering true organisational change for the better, then this book is for you.

Part I

People change

Case story 1

Marlboro

Commandment

Use data and your gut to segment your people into employee persona types.

This story starts with Steve Jobs – perhaps a libertarian, but for most people the antithesis of conservatism. For someone who was focused so intently on the future, it was curious that Jobs chose to speak entirely about the past in his commencement speech to the Class of 2005 at Stanford University. It’s likely the previous year’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer still loomed heavy in his mind, despite the reprieve he’d been given by his doctors almost immediately after the diagnosis when a biopsy showed it was operable. Perhaps it was a foreboding of the relapse that would take his life just six years later.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation … On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’ It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

The hitchhiker allusion was deliberate. Its creator, Stewart Brand, later recounted how the idea came to him:

The image I had in my mind was of a hitchhiker at dawn on a road somewhere and the sun comes up and there are trains going by. The frame of mind of the young hitchhiker is one of the freest frames of mind there is. You’re always a little bit hungry and you know you are being completely foolish.

You don’t have to have read The Whole Earth Catalog (I haven’t), nor be nostalgic for the world it came from, to appreciate the power of that image and those words. As art, for the sentiment it expresses, and as advertising for the way it enshrined the Whole Earth legacy, it’s a wonderful piece of work. Look at it. Maybe instead of a hitchhiker, imagine being a cowboy. Tell me it doesn’t look like an advert for Marlboro.

1.1 The Whole Earth Catalog

Most people who have lived on planet Earth long enough to know what Apple is have heard of the Marlboro Man. Even those who are too young to remember the ads on TV or in magazines know what Marlboro Country is. While smoking has fallen out of fashion in the West, Marlboro is still rightly remembered as one of the 20th century’s most brilliant brand creations. As a long-running advertising campaign it has had lasting ­resonance – since 1972 Marlboro has been the world’s most popular cigarette.

The story of Marlboro can teach us a lot about the importance of understanding people in order to motivate them to change their behaviour. A brand that began as an unpopular cigarette for women took on a life of its own, beyond the product it represented, by tapping into the same powerful notions of identity as The Whole Earth Catalog’s final message that so captivated Steve Jobs. It wasn’t a creative accident; rather, it was a brand that was developed by learning from years of investigation by the tobacco industry into what makes people hungry and foolish. And, indeed, conservative. The Marlboro Man, unlike The Whole Earth Catalog, was unashamedly a conservative hero whose appeal transcended political leanings.

In the same Stanford commencement speech, Jobs also said ‘in life, you have to trust your gut’. I’m paraphrasing slightly, but it is absolutely true for understanding people and how best to help them change. Reliable gut feelings are based on familiarity with particular situations, and experienced executives and managers will be very familiar with the ways in which employees behave in different situations, when morale is high and when it is low. Most organisations have a lot of different data on file about their employees, and that data is a good place to start in trying to understand them demographically. But to truly understand a body of people as both a single culture and a series of subcultures you’re going to have to use your gut.

So, the commandment for this case story is: Use data and your gut to segment your people into employee persona types.

The secrets of segmentation

At the beginning of the 20th century the cigarette was taboo, indulged only by effeminate, bohemian men and eccentric upper-class women. World War I and the Jazz Age changed that. Camaraderie in the trenches was expressed with the sharing of a cigarette, and pictures of young men with cigarettes dangling from their lips captured the power of the human spirit amidst the appalling bloodshed of the Great War. As the war ended the American Century began, banishing forever the European notion that life was nasty, brutish and short. American modernity promised the luxuries and convenience of consumer culture and the thrill of individual independence. Recognising that women constituted 50% of any given population, advertisers employed experts from the emerging fields of psychology and public relations to overcome social objections to women smoking. This was accomplished most strikingly with the ‘torches of freedom’ stunt, when young women marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City smoking famously and blowing smoke in the face of traditional ideas about femininity. In a few turbulent years, the cigarette became a totem of social change. Central to this was its flexibility – its capacity to symbolise patriotism and sacrifice at the same time as it represented sophistication and progressiveness.

All this helped the tobacco industry grow enormously. By the mid 20th century, cigarettes accounted for 1.4% of the US gross national product and 3.5% of consumer spending on nondurable goods. Yet for all its symbolic power, the cigarette was a commodity. Despite research and development efforts to find unique ways of curing and treating tobacco, blind tests showed time and again that smokers found it impossible to discern their brand from the next. In a fiercely competitive industry, the challenge was to create cigarette brands that commanded consumer loyalty better than other brands. Later, when the link between smoking and disease was scientifically established, it became necessary to make a brand more nuanced in the way it communicated the subtle pleasures of smoking to those who wanted to give up or cut back. Commensurate with the industry’s growth, tobacco companies began to spend billions of dollars each year researching consumer behaviour, with the goal of converting ‘pre-smokers’ to ‘starters’, persuading smokers of competitor brands to switch, and reassuring ‘quitters’ that smoking lights or filtered versions of the brand was better than stopping altogether. All of this had to be done without alienating hardcore ‘enjoyers’ who were still committed to a brand’s full-flavour cigarette.

Earlier than most industries, Big Tobacco came to understand that its customer segmentation had to work in three dimensions:

1-D: length of experience as a smoker

2-D: depth of commitment to the habit

3-D: self-identity in terms of preferred cigarette brand.

A brand, accordingly, could not be just a visual image. It would need to be a world into which a smoker was tempted and in which they could be convinced to stay. To design an effective brand world, tobacco marketers needed to understand three things, each related to the dimensions of ­segmentation:

1. why people start smoking
2. why they keep smoking
3. how they select a cigarette brand.

Scientists could explain in part why people keep smoking: the flue-curing method of preparing the ‘bright’ tobacco that was used in cigarettes made their smoke alkaline, which, unlike pipe or cigar smoke, made it possible to inhale. As such, nicotine could be absorbed into the bloodstream and nicotine, it turned out, is highly addictive. Determining why people start smoking and why they choose particular brands was less easy to quantify. But it is theories that answer these two conundrums that led to the creation of Marlboro and that give us powerful insights about how to approach preparing a change campaign in an organisation.

Why people start smoking

One of the hardest things about effecting change in an organisation, especially at the outset, is generating some excitement for it. Most people in an organisation either fear being made redundant or couldn’t care less about what’s happening. Indifference is the most maddening and challenging (non) response. When you’re involved with a change programme and you can’t get people to comment on your internal communications or ask interested questions at ‘town hall’ meetings or sign up to be ‘change ambassadors’, it feels a bit like unrequited love. You take it to heart – what’s wrong with me, why won’t they even glance at me?

I’ve been in this situation a few times. During one of them, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller The Tipping Point. Gladwell popularised the notion of ‘stickiness’ – the ways in which trends catch on. Aspects of The Tipping Point have come in for criticism in recent years, but its case study on teenage smoking is truly insightful. When I first read it all those years ago I knew in my gut that what he wrote about smoking was true, and it revealed to me why no one gave a shit about our change campaign.

In an effort to understand more about why teenagers smoke, Gladwell sent a questionnaire to several hundred people asking them about their earliest experiences with cigarettes. The responses he printed have a kind of lyrical beauty to them. Here are a few:

My mother smoked … and when she smoked she looked so elegant and devil-may-care that there was no question that I’d smoke someday. She thought people who didn’t smoke were kind of gutless.

The first kid I knew who smoked was Billy G … He was the first kid to date girls, smoke cigarettes and pot, drink hard alcohol and listen to druggy music … The draw for me was the badness of it, and the adult-ness, and the way it proved the idea that you could be more than one thing at once.

The first person who I remember smoking was a girl named Pam P … We used to sit in the back of the bus and blow smoke out the window. She taught me how to inhale, how to tie a man-tailored shirt at the waist to look cool, and how to wear lipstick. She had a leather jacket. Her father was rarely home.

Gladwell wrote that there is a certain type of personality who initiates other people into smoking. To sociologists, they exhibit traits like sociability, rebelliousness, sexual impulsiveness, honesty, indifference to the opinions of others, risk-taking and thrill seeking (interestingly, traits that, in the extreme, are associated with psychopathy). To the layperson, these people just seem exciting. Gladwell’s summary is what rocked me though:

Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.

Tobacco isn’t sugar, and no one likes the taste of their first cigarette. Everyone’s first suck-cough-and-splutter puts paid to the idea that smoking in and of itself is cool. Like a good game, smoking at the outset is a form of hard work that we choose for ourselves. Rookie smokers persevere because they sense that, when they finally get it, they won’t just look cool, they’ll actually be cool, like the person who first taught them how to do it (accordingly, the tobacco industry developed a technique they interchangeably called influential seeding and (before the internet was a thing) viral advertising, where ‘cool people’ would be paid to smoke in bars and clubs frequented by students and young people).

Starting to smoke is a way of proving to ourselves that we can change and signalling to others that we have changed. If smoking is, eventually, addictive, the ritual of starting to smoke is a kind of social contagion.

1.2 The spark of romance

How people select a cigarette brand

As the case against cigarettes gathered pace in the 1990s, a French Professor at Cornell University wrote a maudlin elegy to the habit he, like so many other smokers, loved but knew he should quit. In Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein rhapsodises:

A cigarette bespeaks the smoker, as the poem the poet … The cigarette is analogous to what linguists call a shifter, like the word I … The smoker manipulates the cigarette, like the word I, to tell stories to herself about herself – or to another.

If the cigarette as commodity was a totem of social change, the cigarette in context – in a person’s hand as they gesture or their mouth as they pout – is a form of self-expression. And as the advertising supremo Leo Burnett remarked at a time when more than 40% of Americans smoked, ‘outside the clothes and jewellery you wear, a cigarette package is your most frequently exposed possession’. A cigarette brand was fundamentally part of someone’s identity.

The title of Klein’s book, facetious though it seems, speaks to the ways in which humans project contradictory desires onto the products we buy. Seeking to explain why people love thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of images
• About the author
• Introduction
• PART I: PEOPLE CHANGE
• PART II: COMMUNICATING CHANGE
• PART III: LEADING CHANGE
• Epilogue
• Index