By John Schwartz | New York Times News Service
I’ve been thinking about dog collars, the ones that deliver electric shocks to keep dogs from straying out of their yards. Why not use them to correct the behavior of our bad boys of tech and finance?
If you’ve been reading the news, you know what I’m talking about. In Brooklyn, New York, Martin Shkreli, pharmaceutical executive, inveterate trash talker and buyer of extremely rare music albums, is in federal court facing charges of securities and wire fraud. At Uber, founder Travis Kalanick resigned as chief executive after a series of legal and ethical scandals. And a startling number of tech investors and entrepreneurs have recently been exposed as having sexually harassed women and have apologized, some in cringe-inducing ways.
What in the world is going on here? These tech bros seem to think that money and position let them do whatever they like, without consequences. At the risk of sounding highfalutin, it sounds like the problem posed by Plato in The Republic about the ring of Gyges. In that tale, a bit of ancient bling renders the wearer invisible. Using his new superpower, the guy with the ring lies, cheats, seduces the king’s wife and takes control of his entire empire. The question then arises: How bad would you be if you thought you wouldn’t get caught, or couldn’t be held responsible for your actions?
The tech world seems to have been field-testing that thought experiment, and the results have not been edifying.
Not that I’m above temptation myself. Who wants to be bound by the behavioral constraints of petty mortals. As a kid, I would fold strips of aluminum foil, stick them into the wall outlet and slap them together to see the sparks: a kind of youthful nerd vandalism. Even today, I have felt the urge to run that red light, or to boisterously split infinitives. I’m a wild man!
In hopes of gaining perspective, I got in touch with Heidi Roizen, a pioneering tech entrepreneur and investor who, in the 1980s and ’90s, ran a tech company, T/Maker, with a word processor that I dearly loved. She pointed me to a couple of blog posts she has written that show this kind of behavior in the world of tech. In one post, she told an eye-popping story of sexual harassment from the days when she was trying to get a lucrative contract for her software company and a computer executive invited her to a fancy dinner to close the deal. In a second blog item, she gives a bit of friendly advice to today’s scandal-ridden entrepreneurs: “To all of you I’d like to suggest something: Grow up.”
Isn’t that the underlying problem here? Adults are expected to act like they have a moral code, even if they don’t really have much of a conscience. But these people act like spoiled children, with no fear of consequence. I’m an outsider, but it looks like that’s part of tech culture, even among companies that aren’t in the uncomfortable spotlight of scandal: Doesn’t the old Facebook engineering motto, “Move fast and break things,” sound like something an articulate toddler would say?
My favorite novel, William Gaddis’s JR, deals with these issues. In the book, an 11-year-old boy becomes a corporate titan. Wheeling and dealing from his school’s pay phone and employing a penniless music teacher as a frontman, little JR builds his improbable business empire precisely because of his childish immorality and greed. I first read the book in college, and recently read it again—and each time, I was struck by how very up-to-date that kid seemed.
For more insight into what drives these enfants terribles, I checked in with Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and author. He boiled things down to a single question: “Was being greedy and entitled the key to the kingdom, or does quick success turn some people into great jerks?”
It was the kind of question my wife and I call chicken-eggy.
Also, Frances did not really use the word “jerks.” His language was stronger. But this publication still has standards, unless we’re quoting politicians.
So what do we do to correct the ways of bratillionaires? It seems to me that sensitivity training is not enough. Nor is public scorn. Even bad publicity is publicity, and it may even encourage bad behavior.
So here’s my brilliant idea: Deal with these men as we would deal with very naughty children. No dessert! You’re grounded! I’d suggest spanking, but that could backfire, too. You never know what some people might be into.
Investors can help: Demand that execs lose a big chunk of their stock options with every grope. If a frat-house sensibility pervades their corporate culture, sell their stock. As we are seeing, the bad behavior is increasingly leading to trouble, and shareholders can let them know that being a jerk carries a high price. Losing money is a shock treatment they might respond to.
But would any of that actually modify the behavior of corporate problem children? What are the tools that are used with actual children? I called Jessica Church-Lang, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and principal investigator at the school’s developmental cognitive neuroscience lab. When I asked her about men behaving like brats, she gently corrected me, saying, “I feel like you’re giving children a bit of a bad rap.”
She explained that “kids are not intentionally jerks,” and that if they misbehave, usually “it’s because they don’t know better, and they are exploring.” Adults, she said, don’t have that excuse. She told me that the best way to deal with problems like oppositional defiant disorder in a child is through positive reinforcement.
In one technique, parents reward good behavior with stickers that can be saved up and turned in for something the child wants, like earning time to play on an iPad. She didn’t like the idea of spanking, or my main inspiration—widespread use of a collar that would deliver painful electric shocks.
“Punishment is definitely not thought to be very productive,” she explained.
She suggested that positive reinforcement might work with the tech bros, but with recalibrated rewards: Their HR director could give them stickers for good behavior, and if they collected enough, maybe they could “turn them in for a boat.”
The problem, Church-Lang said, is that it is best to start early to correct impulsive, destructive behavior, even before children get to school. The longer you wait, the harder it is. But, she added, it can be done with adults, too. Programs in prison, for example, are built on many of the same principles.
It will be difficult, but we should do this. Let’s get out there and test these techniques. We will see if we can civilize these corporate man-babies. If we are lucky enough to succeed, we can move on to an even bigger challenge: Washington. I’ve got a list.
Image credits: Glynis Sweeny/The New York Times