
When Those Who Know Won’t Share - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/business/when-those-who-know-wont-share.html?ref=science
======
Htsthbjig
Went I went to the US(Boston, from Europe) I was surprised by the behavior in
University given by the intense private competition.

It is not the difficulty itself, as it is probably harder to study engineering
in Europe or Asia, but the competitive mindset, "every man for himself".

This has advantages, like taking plagiarism very seriously, but also terrible
disadvantages, like not working well in groups.

People like Japanese or Chinese are trained in working in groups with
disrespect for the individual. The American culture is the polar opposite,
they worship individuals disrespecting the team, e.g you wont ever hear them
talking about Edison's team(of which Tesla was one of its members), or Steve
Jobs'.

Americans love to believe that there is a person that does everything.

Having said that, in some companies they don't share because of fear.

If you create a community like Microsoft's four years ago in which for every
team, the "least qualified"(even if all of them are great) is fired, you
create a culture of threat and terror, and people are going to protect their
selves.

You have also to take care, not putting too many leechers in the same place as
the seeders, or the seeders won't be able to solve problems(that they love to
solve) because they are babysitters of the leechers full time(something they
hate to do).

Some companies do not understand the last point, then they comply about people
not sharing.

If you put together a team that admire each other, they share naturally.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _If you create a community like Microsoft 's four years ago in which for
> every team, the "least qualified"(even if all of them are great) is fired,
> you create a culture of threat and terror, and people are going to protect
> their selves._

The other side of the very same coin is when you award top X% people for
performance. When you fix the reward/punishment pool, people have much less
incentive to work together, because every help you give to someone else is
reducing your own chance of success.

I'm not sure why people set up such incentive structures. Is it greed? Or some
kind of stupid belief that a little bit of competition will help? Yes, if you
let every good performer get a bonus regardless of how many others are also
getting it you'll have to pay out a lot of bonuses, because you'll have a lot
of good performers. But isn't it exactly what you want to have?

~~~
emsy
I recently watched an interesting video of an austrian economy professor, who
came to the conclusion that our current competition based society is in effect
because in the past competition was crucial to survive, and thus people
competed. Our current generation competes because we grew up in a competitive
society and in order to be truly cooperative, cooperation needs to become a
part of our "memes". Here's the video, unfortunately in German and no
subtitles are available yet:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oouoee9UvEc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oouoee9UvEc).

I think the main problem with group bonuses is that those who know/think they
worked harder will feel treated unfairly. I have no information on how group
bonuses are perceived or what their effects are. However, I personally think
that the main problems come from teams who don't share the same spirit/culture
and thus, those problems also exist in individually rewarded teams.

~~~
fsloth
"I think the main problem with group bonuses is that those who know/think they
worked harder will feel treated unfairly."

Individual bonuses, if they befall the wrong individuals or are percieved to
be unjust can destroy the will of the entire group or organization. I would
claim that for expert organizations the risks of individual rewards outweight
any benefits they may have. Group bonuses or company wide profit sharing
spread general goodwill. Continuous performance is what counts in the long
run. Continuous performers will get their reward in the form of raises or
promotion. In theory, at least. Note: I'm from an egalitarian nordic country,
culture probably affects my perception.

~~~
emsy
I'm from Germany and bonuses and wages are something we don't talk about with
many people, let alone colleagues. I even had a paragraph in my last working
contracts that forbade me to do so.

------
fidotron
I've initiated large knowledge sharing projects before, and they all failed
because at the time I didn't realize the problem was not a lack of medium for
sharing but a lack of will to share.

This covers the problem where someone hides the very simple knowledge which
keeps them employed (documentation being the enemy of job security) but the
worst is having a culture where if you share something that is later found to
be even slightly wrong it will be used against you. For sharing to work you
have to be tolerant of the right sort of mistakes.

~~~
brazzy
I suspect that most knowledge sharing projects fail because people are not
incentivized to participate and have other things to do that are perceived as
more productive or where there is more (any) pressure to get them done.

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mooreds
“Put in incentives to reward people on team outcomes versus solely on
individual outcomes"

This. You get what you incent. If people are rewarded for working together,
they will work together. If they are rewarded for individual contributions,
they will optimize for that.

Now, it can be tough to measure and reward team effort, bit if that is what is
important, figure it out!

~~~
TeMPOraL
There is a third way. Evaluate and reward people for their individual
performance, but _don 't make people compete by limiting the prize pool_. That
is, everyone who reaches certain performance level get a fixed bonus,
independent of how many others also receive it. This way, no one stands to
gain anything by witholding knowledge, and everyone has an incentive to help
everyone else because they can except to be helped in need as well. You also
somewhat avoid the free rider problem, because people won't keep helping those
who are clearly just lazy.

Anecdote time! When I was a student, performance scolarships at my faculty
were distributed this way. There were set thresholds, and if your grade
average from the previous year was above a given threshold, you got +X money
in scolarship. We were all extremely cooperative. People helped each other all
the time, we pooled notes, scans, bootleg textbook pdfs, previous year's exam
questions, we passed this knowledge down to younger students, who in turn
passed them further after adding more materials of their own. We'd happily
help each other get better grades.

You bet there was a lot of us on those scolarships. And people who came from
the outside were extremely surprised about how friendly and helpful everyone
is.

After I left, my faculty was forced to make scolarships work the way they work
at every other faculty/university - i.e. make only top X% of students eglible
for rewards. This instantly killed teamwork dead. I know few people who are
still studying and they say there's a clear and visible difference now. People
no longer share things. They don't care about recording exam questions for
others, they don't coordinate the whole year to win something. Students stick
to small groups and are antagonistic to others. If they help at all, they do
it to the degree it doesn't endanger their own chance for scolarships.

Incentives matter. Also greed/stupid costs savings on the part of people
setting up incentive structures matter too.

~~~
rational-future
> don't make people compete by limiting the prize pool

That is an interesting idea and it probably works in some rare situations. But
unfortunately, most of the time, we only have limited resources and so a
limited prize pool. The question, for managers/politicians/capitalists,
usually is how do we get maximum motivation out of a limited rewards budget.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't a reason why it should work only in rare situations. This seems
perfectly suited for companies - after all, you make money directly off
increased productivity of each of your workers. Just keep the reward smaller
than what you'd expect to gain from increased productivity, and it should be
possible to sustain this system.

~~~
rational-future
I have run a few small companies (up to 30 employees/contractors), and FWIW my
experience doesn't match your assumptions. At the end of a year you've made a
limited amount of profit and you want to distribute part of it to the
personal. The most efficient way I found is to give 80% to the few top
performers - the people who work 100+ hour work weeks or have more connections
(sales) or are smarter (IT). The others you can easily replace plus bonuses
don't seem to increase much the productivity of the averagely lazy. Surely
this is just another anecdote.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I haven't run any company myself so I'm just theorizing here anyway. Thanks
for sharing your experience.

------
FranOntanaya
Missing in the article is when you have more information about a generic
request that your partner actually needs.

It's OK for me if a partner discards half of a serve-yourself email, which was
easier to write than doing the whole expert-system style Q&A until you narrow
the answer, but there's always the worry that it will be perceived as wasteful
-- from the other side's point of view that unused information may equal to
days of study and research, or as confusing noise that would delay a solution
if it had to be grokked.

I could see someone in a very large team eventually resorting to simple
answers, just for the sake of not snagging the business flow. Maybe adding
invitations to request further info about certain parts would be in order.

------
junto
I had an interesting chat with a colleague the other day (team lead) who asked
me to pair up with a permanent employee rather than a contractor on a
development task, so that my knowledge of the particular system I was working
on would stay in the company. I noted that in reality, the only member of
staff I could safely count on to stay at the company was called 'wiki'.

~~~
kps

      > I noted that in reality, the only member of staff I could
      > safely count on to stay at the company was called 'wiki'.
    

True, but that flies in the face of Agile™ dogma: “ _The most efficient and
effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is
face-to-face conversation._ ”

Plato similarly argued against literacy. He didn't tell me that face-to-face;
someone wrote it down.

~~~
lotsofmangos
It was Socrates that argued against literacy and Plato who wrote it down.

 _" Nothing that has ever been written whether in verse or prose merits much
serious attention."_

I also think that Plato writing it down was one of the earliest post-modern
jokes.

~~~
kps
I've always thought of _this_ Socrates as a character in Plato's works
inspired by the person, with the degree of fidelity unknown.

~~~
lotsofmangos
That is a reasonable interpretation, especially since Plato was not present in
the dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates, so the whole thing is either
fiction or a dramatised retelling. However, this lends credence to the idea
that Plato was being partly humorous about his own work, when he wrote down
the section dealing with writing.

------
whoisthemachine
I have a burning curiosity to know if there are any out there who are not very
competitive (such as myself) who don't mind sharing and then get treated as a
fool because I share knowledge so freely? It doesn't really bother me since I
consider solving the problem the most important part of the job but it seems
to happen at each job I've had in software development.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm extremely anticompetetive and if I know something that could help someone,
I share without thinking (and often help if I have time to spare). Fortunately
I haven't experienced any negative consequences of this yet - quite the
opposite, I tend to end up in friendly groups in which everyone helps others.

I think such pay-it-forward behaviour is contagious, so it is a small way to
make the world a better place.

~~~
whoisthemachine
Yeah I definitely have no problem helping someone, as long as it doesn't take
away time for me to do my job.

------
Nursie
This is just unprofessional behaviour.

Passing on knowledge and helping each other succeed is just part of the job.
I'm glad I haven't had the misfortune to work with people who deliberately
obstruct each other.

~~~
ysopex
You've obviously never worked in an environment with intentionally ignorant or
lazy workers. I'm all about sharing knowledge and supporting your teammates.
But I've recently discovered people who are simply leaches. They've discovered
that they can get by on generosity of others. My boss sat me down earlier this
year and reprimanded me for spending too much time essentially doing other
people's work for them. It never occurred to me that people would do this
intentionally but now that it's been pointed out to me I see these people
everywhere.

------
jeffreyrogers
It would be interesting to look at the places where sharing has been very
effective (Wikipedia, linux, open source software in general, etc.) and see if
we can learn anything from them about structuring things in such a way to
facilitate sharing. I guess it's mainly an issue of aligning incentives...
people who keep more to themselves are more likely to look intelligent and be
promoted/acknowledge by their bosses (or they think that's what will happen at
least).

~~~
rando289
I wouldn't call those places where sharing has been very effective. A certain
level of knowledge is shared due to it's nature: open source, sometimes
remote, sometimes volunteer run. But beyond that, domain experts who do not
share their knowledge publicly or very freely are just as common as anywhere
else.

------
zw123456
I ran into this phenomenon first had recently when working on a knowledge
engineering project. The idea was to use a rule based system to enhance
network troubleshooting. The "experts" who had the knowledge were very
suspicious and reluctant to share their knowledge because they thought
eventually they would be "replaced by a machine". But I also noticed that they
were very proprietary between each other as well or others, especially people
they considered "outsiders", outside of the little cabal they had set up. It
was a very interesting dynamic. It reminded me very much of a sports metaphor
that the most valuable players are the ones that make their teammates better.
I can definitely saw the antithesis of that in play at this particular
organization. I think it would be a major challenge in implementing AI in
certain situations.

------
Aloha
Often this is not an intentional action on any one actors part - its an
institutional thing - I work for a major european telecoms vendor, and inside
my company almost no one has big picture visibility, projects are sliced up so
many ways from sunday, that to get something that even resembled a big picture
you need to talk to tons of people and maintain a large social network (the
good ol' boys network).

The natural reaction to this lack of visibility is to create process for
everything, and major european telecoms company is a very process oriented
company, everything has a process, and a document thereof (assuming you can
find the document, remember the part about poor visibility) - they are also
very very fond of one-size-fits-all solutions to problems, so everyone gets
the same laptop build, no matter who your end customer is, or what your job is
(from field engineers to accountants).

The key to productivity is knowing when it's best to let the process, no
matter how slow moving it is - bump and grind along at its own pace and become
a self resolving problem, and when to directly (and openly) short circuit it,
whereas other times you might want to call on the 'good ol' boys network' to
solve a problem or get information.

To defend this way of working - there is some logic to these systems, they
provide stability and a largely autonomous system that (albeit slowly) will
provide a resolution to most of the problems the business will run into - they
fail worst when dealing with rapidly emergent problems, exigent circumstances,
when expanding to a new line of business or any time you run into a problem
that can't be grouped into a existing category. Even a process driven
environment however has some ability to adapt, even if it does fall completely
outside the system at first, and so long as you have a reasoned argument,
people often won't tell you no either (even if they might sit on your request
for a bit), so while I dislike the amount of red tape at times, I've also
learned how to work thru it, and around it when absolutely needed.

------
justizin
This is called the "Tyranny of Competence", here's a related excerpt from the
book "Deep Change" (
[http://books.google.com/books?id=NDkvbRX9dGQC&pg=PA115&lpg=P...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NDkvbRX9dGQC&pg=PA115&lpg=PA115&dq=Tyranny+of+Competence&source=bl&ots=KpQ1mvIR5t&sig=rkDgOhSisZ5oILIhsVuvgecSm70&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QNZDVPL9EK6CigKJjoCQBQ&ved=0CF8Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=Tyranny%20of%20Competence&f=false)
)

The arguments for competence are powerful and often overshadow or mask a
problem area. An example of such an argument is the comment along the lines
of, "We couldn't survive without Mary. No one else can sell that thing, and it
represents 30 percent of our business." This statement is often so self-
evident that no one thinks to point out the cooperative effort that should be
the essence of the organization has already ceased to survive. People come to
work, but there is a lack of communication, commitment, and cooperation. The
process of slow death has set in.

In one organization, a man of enormous technical competence was allowed to
gain a lot of power, and many of his actions poisoned the climate in the
workplace. People around him hated to come to work and went to great lengths
to avoid dealing with him. Their bad feelings, irrationalities, and
inefficiencies were costing the organization large but undocumented sums of
money. Finally, the situation grew so bad that people united and demanded
change. A senior person intervened in this Tyranny of Competence and tried to
coach the man. The recipient found the feedback incomprehensible and argued
that he was doing his "job" better than anyone else in the place. The
organization was simply out to get him for personal and political reasons.

Note the accuracy of his argument. He was doing his "job" well, and the
organization was out to get him for political and personal reasons. The
problem was his definition of the word "job". His job did not include relating
to other people. Organizational relationships, with their interactions and
political processes, are as real as physical objects. Not disciplining oneself
enough to maintain good relationships is, in fact, destructive behavior.

This man eventually left his job, convinced that he had been politically
rejected (which was correct) for unjust reasons (which was incorrect). The day
he went down the stairs for the last time, people came out of their offices,
held hands, spontaneously danced, and sang, "Ding dong, the wicked witch is
dead!" They discovered that this irreplaceable person was indeed replaceable.
The top executives marveled at the increase in overall performance. They vowed
not to make the same mistake again.

------
cateye
This is a very one sided article from the perspective of the higher
management.

The real contradistinction is that organisations try to reduce costs of the
"workforce". The employees try to maximize their income and value. It is true
that the maximalization can also occure on group level and that this is not
contractually or formally supported in our current economic model. But
treating employees as costs individually or as a group will shift the problem.

It can be questioned that it is not such a radical zero sum game but at the
other hand it feels like this is the most effective and simple behavior.

The inverted question is, what do organisations do to maximize the income of
their employees?

------
aaronem
Ironic that this article in particular should lie behind a pay wall.

------
serve_yay
It's also disappointing when you try to share things with people and they're
not interested. Then later on they say "well I don't know how this works!"

------
michaelochurch
I'm surprised that this is surprising.

That said, there's a difference between malicious "holding out" and being
reserved with political information. I'm not going to hide something that's
purely technical, but political information is (a) dangerous to share, and (b)
often incomplete, meaning you could unduly bias someone with your own half-
knowledge. Besides, while everyone will "listen to" a gossip, no one will
_ever_ defend one.

However, there's a certain room for reciprocity. If I trust that someone will
look out for me, I'll look out for him or her. Your odds aren't good, in the
long run, if you try to walk through this world alone.

I think of modern corporate life as post-apocalyptic, like in _The Walking
Dead_. The HR drones who implement stack-ranking, the mindless backstabbers,
and the self-destructively sadistic middle managers out there are the zombies.
In numbers, inferior but ravenous beings like zombies can overwhelm the living
and strong, and they do so, so often, that they're a primary landscape feature
of this new world. (One place where this metaphor breaks down is that it's not
clear, in the real world, who are the living and who are the zombies. But bear
with me.) For those who haven't figured it out, zombie horror is _really_
about "tyranny of the majority", which is a formidable enemy within an
organization.

You have to know who your friends and your enemies are, and sometimes you have
to make decisions quickly. While you "fight" the zombies (except, you do it by
making them click on ads and mindlessly support brands you invent, not killing
them) you also have to fear the living.

If our parents and grandparents knew what little politicians and fire-starters
we are, as a generation, they'd be horrified. We're not actually _morally_ any
worse. In fact, we're probably better in many ways (less racist, less sexist,
and unlike the Boomers we didn't _cause_ widespread organizational failure
because we were still children during the Reagan Era). We're just post-
apocalyptic (and OK with that). We know that the people in power aren't
looking out for us, so we don't give a shit about them. Compared to our
elders, we care more about _people_ who we actually know and can (sometimes)
trust, but less about organizations and society.

