Page 245 - The Power to Change Anything

234 INFLUENCER

And here’s where Hopkins grins a bit. “We publish lots of
graphs, charts and tables. But none has been more influential
than the Guinea worm race. We harness the natural competi-
tive instincts of people by preparing a racetrack with the names
of each country (or even the faces of the campaign leaders) on
each runner. It’s amazing to see how people respond not just
to how many infections they have, but how many more or less
they have than a neighboring country.”
Do these data influence behavior?
“I was talking with the president of Burkina Faso,” Hop-
kins reports, “and sharing some concerns about the campaign.
I had all kinds of graphs and charts, but the one he wanted to
look at the most was the Guinea worm race. They can’t stand
to be at the bottom. It gets their attention.”
At the corporate level, it’s easy to see how the flow of infor-
mation affects behavior. The fact that different groups of
employees are exposed to wildly different data streams helps
explain why people often have such different priorities and pas-
sions. Different groups, departments, and levels of employees
worry about very different aspects of the company’s success, not
because they hold different values, but because they’re exposed
to different data. For example, frontline employees who inter-
face with complaining customers usually become the customer
advocates. Top-level executives who are constantly poring over
financial statements become the shareholder advocates. And
sure enough, the folks who routinely take quality measures
become the quality advocates. No surprise there.
The problem with passion for a single stakeholder group
isn’t that employees care greatly about someone or something;
it’s just that it’s hard to expect people to act in balanced ways
when they have access to only one data stream. For instance,
members of a group of senior executives we (the authors)
worked with were positively driven by their production num-
bers, which they reviewed weekly. When issues of morale
came up (usually with the issuance of a grievance), they’d