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GET HIM IN THE BOX
adapted from
Coercion by Douglas Rushdoff
Dale Carnegie's 1936 classic How to win friends and influence people
has sold more than 15,000,000 copies and is still considered the Bible in
hand-to-hand coercion. The book has four main sections, which serve as a
template for exploiting people's basic emotional needs in order to manipulate
them:
Fundamental techniques in
handling people,
Six ways to make people like
you,
How to win people to your way
of thinking,
How to change people without
giving offense or arousing resentment.
It has provided the basis for decades of much more advanced research
into personality assessment and behavioral control. While more complex, the
methods developed by automobile companies, customer service experts, and even
CIA interrogators are simply more scientific, better camouflaged and precisely
tuned versions of Carnegies classic.
The hundreds of interpersonal coercive techniques developed since
Carnegie's day all still rely on his basic premise that people can be handled,
made to like you, won over and ultimately changed without their knowledge.
Human beings are reduced manageable personality types and friendship is reduced
to a precondition for manipulation. The illusion of an interpersonal social
bond puts a target off-guard. Once sufficiently lulled into a false sense of
security, the new "Friend" can be subjected to more directly coercive
techniques without activating their natural defense mechanisms.
By elevating the coercive process to a philosophy of life, books like
Carnegie's legitimize people-handling. It's a set of techniques so well proven
that the CIA includes it in its interrogation manual. The CIA's
"Kubark" manual, written in 1963, was designed to help their
operatives elicit intelligence from detainees. There are no references to
rubber hoses or waterboarding. Apparently, the mind games of salesmen work
better than overt torture.
The CIA structures its non-coercive interrogations in four main parts,
loosely corresponding to the sections of Carnegie's book.
Before the first phase even begins, the agents use whatever knowledge
they have of the subject such as nationality, military training, and
"hostility level" in choosing the interrogator most likely to develop
"a genuine insight into the source's character and motives … because it is
considered basic to the establishment of rapport." This is called "screening".
In the first stage of questioning, the "opening", the
interrogator works "to generate an initial assumption of good will"
or as Carnegie puts it "to win a friend."
The manual suggests appearing genuinely concerned about the subject's
feelings, developing a mutual set of goals, or defining a common enemy as a
means to develop the illusion of friendship. The opening is about listening,
assessing, acknowledging and befriending.
Interrogators are instructed to not steer the subject toward any topic
in particular, least of all the information they hope to extract.
Instead, they attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the source as an
individual. Experience has shown that many people cannot bring themselves to
provide information that puts them in an unfavorable light, until through a
lengthy "prefatory rationalization" they feel that they can make the
interrogators understand why they acted as they did.
The interrogator watches for subtle reactions that might be revealing
and for non-verbal communications like gestures, posture, blushing, sweat or a
visible pulse in the throat. Unnatural pauses could indicate that questions are
getting close to "sensitive areas".
The process of replacing the world and values of the subject with those
of the interrogator also begins. As the days or weeks go by, the sights and
sounds of the outside world fade away, replaced by the interrogation room, its
two occupants and the relationship between them. This is why interrogation
rooms are generally devoid of windows and all reference to the outside world,
including time of day.
Subjects become completely dependent on the interrogators for all
external stimuli and their sense of self. When so detained for several days,
subjects begin to experience symptoms of "superstition, intense love for
any other living thing, perceiving inanimate objects as alive, hallucinations
and delusions."
In the second stage of interrogation, "reconnaissance", the
interrogator gently directs the subject toward more sensitive areas that have
been chosen through the observation of the subject's body language and tone of
voice.
In the next stage "extraction", the use of language and
leading sentences is extremely important. Instead of questions like "Do
you know anything about Operation Pineapple?", they ask "Do you have
any friends involved in Operation Pineapple?" which presupposes knowledge
of the operation.
If rapport has been
established early on, this more direct manipulation usually yields excellent
results.
This is because the focus has been shifted away from the subject's
resistance to revealing information and to the subject's personal psychological
longings. An expert interrogator can lead subjects to the rationalization that
their information will achieve a greater mutual goal. Since the relationship
with the interrogator is the only way the subject has of judging the progress
towards that goal, the better the relationship gets, the better the subject
feels.
There is also a list of tricks designed to help achieve this difficult
psychological maneuver. They are all designed to disrupt a person's familiar
emotional associations and impair resistance.
When this aim is achieved, the manual explains, "there is an
interval, which may be extremely brief, of suspended animation, a kind of
psychological paralysis that explodes the world that is familiar to subjects
and the image they have of themselves in that world."
When this happens, the source is far more open to suggestion. CIA
interrogators role play in a number of "psychodramas" designed to
bring about this effect.
Nobody loves you: The subject is told that
other detainees are denouncing him. The subject should feel the interrogator
and not their government or organization is their true friend.
The witness: A person emerges from
another interrogation room and pretends to type reports from their notes,
asking the subject how to spell certain words linked to the information they
hope to receive. The interrogator enters and tells the detainee they are not
needed anymore. A flood of desperate information usually follows.
Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd: After a series of lofty and
confusing questions that subjects cannot possibly answer, they are relieved to
finally be able to correctly answer questions about their activities.
The staged escape: Interrogators pretend to be
agents from the prisoner's country. They 'kill' the captors, take the prisoner
to 'safety' and ask them to reveal what information was not obtained by
their captors.
Alice in Wonderland: Interrogators ask bizarre
questions and use strange vocal inflections to make subjects think they are
hallucinating.
Under the spell: Subjects are convinced they
have been hypnotized. They are told their arm will feel warm and do not realize
the chair is heated. If they believe they are controlled by a great force, they
have an excuse to surrender.
Mutt and Jeff: An angry interrogator
accuses the subject of heinous or demeaning offenses before storming out of the
room and threatening violence upon his return. Then the friendly, quiet
interrogator offers to defend the prisoner and gives them a chance to tell
their side of the story.
The most powerful technique of the CIA is induced regression. The
reverts subjects to a childlike, helpless state in which adult responsibility
is transferred to the questioner, who attains a kind of parental authority over
them.
This is done by strictly controlling the environment. Clocks are slowed
and advanced, meals served at odd hours and lights altered erratically. The
goal is to make subjects feel helpless in an environment out of their control.
Once transference is achieved, the interrogator assumes a friendly fatherly
demeanor and offers the subject a number of ways to rationalize their
cooperation:
All the others are doing it,
You're really a good person at heart,
They made you do it.
What these have in common is they are all adult versions of the excuses
of childhood.
The final stage of interrogation is of course necessary only for those
subjects who have survived the interrogation. The objective of this stage is to
assure ongoing cooperation by convincing subjects that they have not been
duped. By bringing subjects out of regression slowly, and making them feel good
about what they've done, the CIA can depend on them in the future.
Games
of weakness (Korda)
(adapted from POWER!
Michael Korda)
It has
been written that nothing helps a person in their journey through life more
than a knowledge of their characteristic weaknesses. One might think that this
is so a person can hide them from others. But in the world of work, displaying
one's weaknesses is, counter-intuitively, a very effective and versatile
strategy.
The
basic move is to simply deny that one has any power at all, thus avoiding the
dangerous act of taking a stand on any issue.
This
game can be seen at its clearest when people who have considerable power are
asked to get their subordinates a raise.
People
whose whole life and soul are wrapped up in the ability to make tough
decisions, and for whom aggressive confrontations are a lifestyle can be
reduced to whimpering helplessness by a secretary who wants a $500 a month
raise. Suddenly they are brought low by the thought of taking action on behalf
of someone else's needs, however small.
An
executive who has just single-handedly closed a $2,000,000 deal might do anything
short of physical violence at the board of directors' meeting to assure their
own raise. But they will plead incapacity, weariness, overwork and above all
powerlessness, to avoid "going to bat" for someone else's $500 a
month. They raise their palms, slump their shoulders and tilt their heads in
the Gallic gesture of resignation that indicates impotent sympathy.
This is
because when it comes to raises, the smaller the amount involved the more
difficult it is to put through. Raising an executive from $150,000 to $200,000
a year is easy and it may even be felt not giving him a large bonus at the end
of the year would be either an insult or a warning of imminent dismissal.
Raising
a secretary from $2000 to $2500 a month on the contrary is sure to involve a bitter
struggle and require emotional appeals, blackmail and personal commitment.
Executive
salaries, no matter how large, are seen as reflections on the corporation and
are thus collective decisions, while smaller pay raises are by
their very nature personal requests, requiring the executive to
put their own prestige on the line.
Thus,
the same executive might ask: "What do you think we ought to do about the
vice president of sales? Don't you think we ought to give him 50?"
But in
asking for a raise of much smaller dimensions, they would be obliged to say:
"I'd like to give my secretary another 200 a month. It's deserved and it
would make my life a lot easier, okay?"
The
smaller the amount of money, the more personal the request will appear, and the
more difficult it will be to achieve. This explains why most executives are
reluctant to undertake such tasks, and why the best way to get a big raise is
to already by making a lot of money.
This is
why Games of Weakness are primarily used as a way of saying "No"
without actually having to use that unpleasant word. Salaries are an excellent
example of this.
On the
level above you, after all, your performance is being judged, at least in part,
on your ability to hold salary increases down. Meanwhile the loyalty of those
below you is determined by your ability to get them what they want, which
usually involves more money. In this position the best posture to adopt is one
of uncompromising toughness with your superiors and pathetic weakness with your
subordinates.
In
other words, an executive campaigning for a personal raise can only do so by
holding back everybody else. The more people who don't get raises, the more
they will deserve one. The simple fact is that the structure of most businesses
makes it fairly certain that the person one has to go to for a raise can only
get more money for themselves by refusing to give it.
Denying
power can be fruitful in many other ways as well. Any competent negotiator
knows it is better to curse the management, flaunt their weakness, blame
everything on the computer or the board of directors and by joining their
opponent imply that they are both victims of the same rapacious organization.
Then a lower price can be more easily negotiated.
There
have been places and times where making tough decisions on one's own (or
pretending to) has been in fashion. But generally over time the larger benefits
of playing dead will drive out such temporary aberrations.
Thus
instead of bargaining, which may or may not go a particular bargainer's way,
it's easier to defer responsibility to unnamed, unknown, unknowable forces from
above.
After
all, true negotiation is more difficult and potentially dangerous as things
might not go your way.
It's so much simpler to say: "Well
$100,000 sounds interesting, I'll have to talk to people here about it. It
sounds okay to me, but I don't know what 'they' will think." When you call
back an hour later you offer $50,000 together with many apologies for 'their'
intransigence and general stinginess.
In
fact, there's not that much difference except that bargaining depends on being
willing to humiliate other people while the Game of Weakness requires one to
humiliate oneself. The important thing to note is that the weakness game makes
humiliating oneself into a productive and profitable system.
Self-debasement
then is an effective weapon in the hands of a person who knows how to use it
and doesn't suffer from the misplaced desire to show their power.
Method
acting has become a business asset. Here, the basic trick is to counter any
complain with one's own sufferings. Rather than reason with unwanted requests,
the canny executive sympathizes which is much more effective as it's
much harder to argue against. Samples of this give an idea of the basic
technique:
"I'd
love to talk about it, but not this week. If you could see my calendar, you
wouldn't believe it …"
"I
know, I know, I think you should get more money too! But hell, things are tough
all over. I'm gonna be here till midnight going over these reports, I haven't
had time to answer yesterdays phone calls yet and I haven't had a raise myself
for two years."
"Look,
this just isn't the time. I'm having troubles with the board and if I try to
get more money now, it just won't work. We're just gonna have to be patient a
little while longer, okay?"
Some
even carry this tactic to the lengths of making it a form of preventive
deterrent, complaining bitterly about their lot in order to shame others into
not making embarrassing and difficult demands.
Those
who play this game sigh a great deal, hold their heads in their hands and
project a posture of extreme weariness and defeat in order to prevent others
from adding to their burdens by bringing up their problems, like the fact that
they haven't had a raise in three years.
One
version is to ask any potential petitioner for headache tablets before they can
say anything.
Active
hypochondria is another form of protective armor. An effective player with an
imaginary case of flu can clinch three deals, turn down four requests for
raises and shame their staff into staying at work until seven in the evening.
Certain
illnesses can't be faked and others do no good. Infectious diseases are
definitely out since nobody wants to be quarantined from an important meeting.
Similarly, a broken leg is troublesome to fake and is generally seen as an
unfortunate side effect of good health and sporting enthusiasm. Therefore it
evokes no sympathy. But flu, severe colds, back trouble and sinus headaches are
always effective.
Shamelessness
is the key to winning in Games of Weakness, which makes faking asthma very
popular. After all, attacks are sudden and unpredictable. When negotiations
take a bad turn, one rolls one's eyes and clutches one's throat in a theatrical
manner. By the time someone's brought you a glass of water, found your
bronchial spray and helped you swallow your medicine it will be difficult for
them to go on explaining their exorbitant demands.
It is
also possible to pass down despairing messages through secretaries. This has
the advantage of avoiding face to face contact while holding onto the moral
high ground of working while deathly ill:
"Well,
he isn't feeling well today and isn't coming in. But I did speak to him just
before the doctor arrived and he said that 50,000 isn't really enough and he'd
really appreciate it if you could think about it some more."
There's no winning against
this kind of self-abasement. Unless you're willing to counter every suggestion
of ill health with something even more drastic and grave of your own, you are
lost.
"Nobody is indispensable!" (Korda)
(adapted from POWER!
Michael Korda)
Every
single struggle between management and personnel are contained in the problem
of indispensability. Employees must consider themselves indispensable, even if
they doubt it, while the management must hold the opposite view.
Many
people spend their working lives attempting to make themselves indispensable, a
search for absolute security which seldom pays dividends. First of all, the
management point of view is basically correct, nobody is indispensable. No
matter how important you are, replacing you is at words of question of
inconvenience, expense and time.
People
who attempt to prove their indispensability are obliged to expand at a
geometric rate – they can never have enough talks, titles, duties and
responsibilities to establish their indispensability to their own satisfaction,
just as nobody who requires love to feel secure can have enough love. To expand
in order to get more power, or more money, or more prestige is a feasible
ambition. To expand until you are secure is impossible.
In every
corporation, the people who think themselves indispensable and are generally
regarded as such by their colleagues eventually get fired. The circumstances of
their firing usually differ from more mundane cases.
Typically,
"indispensable" workers are fired for minor, infringements that all
employees indulge in, often with management tolerance. This is the employment equivalent
of imprisoning Al Capone for tax evasion. When an organization really wants to
fire someone, any excuse is as good as any other. It is also one reason many
organizations tolerate seemingly minor everyday breeches of protocol.
In the
immediate aftermath of one of these events, management may go public and make
the departed into a bad example to be avoided, in an attempt to root out those
inclined to challenge authority. Soon after even mentioning the disappeared
employee by name becomes taboo by common agreement.
The
reason for all this is simple, but seldom accepted – no corporation can afford
to believe that is existence is dependent on the health, sanity and good will
of a relatively small number of people, especially if it's true.
A case
study of one man who set out to be indispensable and came very close to
achieving that goal serves as a nice parable of the benefits and dangers of
indispensability.
Not
only were his projects enormously profitable, but he gradually extended a kind
of moral control over the entire office.
Important
files were locked away in his drawers, totemic pieces of furniture were removed
from their places in the middle of the night and carried to his office. The
ancient mahogany boardroom table appeared one morning as his desk. He had the
lock to the lavatory on his side of the office changed so that nobody could go
to the bathroom without coming to him for the key. Constantly fatigued,
harassed and complaining, he involved himself in every problem, from the
company picnic to the typography of the annual report.
What is
more, he had mastered the most important strategy of indispensability, which is
to create an outside legend. A good part of his time was spent in giving
interviews, going to parties and appearing on television and since any
management prefers to believe what they hear and see from the outside rather
than what they can observe for themselves, his claim to indispensability went
unchallenged.
One of
his colleagues relates what the day to day like reality was like:
"For
three years we lived with this legend. All the power gravitated toward this
guy, and if you objected or argued, he would explain how tired he was.
He had
this trick of taking off his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose to
show that he was exhausted - then he'd
tell you that he wasn't sure how much longer he could go on carrying all these
burdens people were heaping on him. 'How much more can flesh and blood bear?'
he would ask. But if you tried to do the smallest thing without asking him, he
would quietly undo whatever you'd done and make you do it his way.
"Nothing
could stop him – if you pushed him too hard, he'd lie down on the floor and
suffer from tachycardia until you went away. You couldn't win. If you got in at
eight in the morning, he'd tell you that he'd been in on Sunday for hours, if
you cam in on Sunday, he'd tell you that he'd been up to four in the morning
trying to make sense of other people's work and wasn't sure just how much
longer he could carry on.
"And
it was true. He made a practice of making at least one change in
everything, however minor, so he could always tell you that he hoped you
wouldn't mind if he added 'the finishing touch', and so he could say to other
people that whatever it was made no sense until he 'saved' it.
"Then one day, he walked out to take another job
and it was like the end of the world. It wasn't just that nobody could be sure
what was in the files, or what it meant, we couldn't even find them.
Everything was so centralized that when he took away
his little pocket address book, we couldn't find the telephone numbers of our
customers – we barely knew who they were.
"Then
I realized what made him powerful – we were lazy. We'd been happy to let him
take over. It simply meant less work for us, and better than that, no
responsibility, because after all he wanted to be responsible for everything.
We'd made him a monster.
"But
within a couple of weeks it was as if he'd never been there. Life went on, it
was lot better in fact. We didn't go bankrupt, and we didn't go to pieces. But
I realized one thing, 'nobody is indispensable'. It's really true and not just
management paranoia either.
The
moment you think you're indispensable, you're doing too much work for what they
pay you. It's a loser's game."
Ultimately,
the more you try to prove how much you're needed, the more you are likely to
attract the attention of people who wonder whether your job is necessary at
all.
Those
who try to make themselves indispensable is like a swimmer clinging to a piece
of flotsam in a raging storm when it might be safer to let go and swim.
The
world is full of people who will work a fourteen-hour day to hold a job that
could easily be done in seven hours,
exhausting themselves and irritating everyone around them in a useless struggle
to prove that life cannot go on without them.
It's
better by far to make it clear that a great many other people could probably do
your job, some possibly even better, but that for the moment you are
doing it.
Gossip power
(adapted from POWER! Michael Korda)
Gossip has always
come in for bad press and a person interested in power should certainly avoid
gossiping with anyone. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to listen to gossip.
Quite the contrary, all gossip is worth hearing if you are strong enough to
resist commenting on it, embellishing it or passing it along.
It pays to be a
good listener and to cultivate the habit of nodding wisely as if you already
knew about whatever you've been told. By carefully cultivating silence and
reticence it is possible to build a valuable reputation as a person who knows a
great deal and has probably been pledged to secrecy by some higher authority.
Thus if someone
says to you "Have you heard? Did you know Jack is having an affair with
Susan and that Paul is about to be fired?" the proper response is not
"No kidding!" or "Tell me more!". The best option is to sit
impassively and say "mmm". If this is useful information, you can
file it in your mind for later use. If it is not any, you have taken no
position on it. In either case, you have created the impression that you
already knew all about it.
This is even more
important when the gossip concerns your own affairs. If someone comes up to you
with a sad and commiserating expression and tells you how sorry they are to
hear that the promotion you hoped for is going to be given to your rival, the
proper thing to do is to nod sagely and praise the other person's abilities and
human qualities, even though this may be the first hint you've heard that you
have been passed over. Later on, you can rage, or attempt to rectify the
situation, but one of the first rules of playing the power game is that all bad
news must be accepted calmly, as if one already knew and didn't care much.
A good example of
this took place in a company where two rival vice presidents were seeking a
senior management position.
One of them wrote a
long and persuasive memorandum to the CEO explaining why the other person was
temperamentally unsuited for the post. When this unwelcome news was told to the
first person he reacted by calmly praising the wisdom, talents and company
loyalty of his rival.
He managed to
create the impression that he already knew about the memo, indeed that it had
been shown to him. News of his reaction spread swiftly throughout the office and
the memorandum was defused.
Some days later he
meet the CEO in the elevator (by design) and referred to the now famous memo
jokingly. The CEO laughed and dismissed it with a wave of his hand and
indicated the job was his.
There are various
ways in which news, or rumor travels. It works something like a river system.
There is invariably a headwater of mysterious origin, then a mainstream from
which tributaries branch off to every department. Once you have traced the main
river to its source it's perfectly possible to pick up whatever news you want
from the tributaries – the water is the same.
The gossip of
people who have no power and no real knowledge of events is important only if
you already know the stages by which the news traveled to them, since you then
know where it came from and can guess with fair accuracy just how it may have
been distorted and changed in its passage along the channel. By observing who
talks to who in coffee breaks, at lunch, which people commute together you can
fairly easily map the system. If you don't know the geography of the system,
then all gossip is meaningless.
It's also worth
bearing in mind that gossip is often used to test people's reaction to a
decision as a kind of informal polling system
This allows higher
management to gauge the feasibility of a plan or a personnel move. As an
example, imagine that a secretary points out that the whole office is worried
about the health of an executive in his late fifties and you know the channels
through which gossip flows and can trace the story back to a member of the
executive committee.
In such a case you
can be sure that the executive's retirement has been discussed at a very high
level and that ill health will be given as the official reason.
But if the entire
office is indignant about the forced retirement of this executive the idea may
be dropped without anyone having to admit that it was a real possibility. If
the gossip creates no waves then those in positions of power can move forward
confidently.
Plans are not
leaked into gossip channels to test the reactions because business executive
want or need popular support, though they may at times solicit it. The real
reason is that they are often unsure about what to do but are in no position to
ask for advice since that would diminish their authority. If a proposed course
of action seems doubtful then it is always useful to have an informal means of
testing its effects.
Thus gossip plays a
real role in management technique, providing those in charge with a channel of
communication with their employees which can be used without losing face.
Gossip can also be
used to spread bad news before it's officially announced in order to make the
actual announcement less surprising.
It must also be
remembered that gossip, unlike river water, flows both ways. The people who
pass gossip downstream also feed it back upstream and anyone who receives
information is supposed to return the favor.
Very few
companies have any kind of formal
espionage system but almost all organizations have an informal one which is
very effective.
However large or
small an organization the people at the top will find out about what's
happening at the bottom but not through the conventional hierarchy.
At all levels
executives are reluctant to pass along bad news to those above them since it
can be held against them. The informal gossip network means the information
will travel to top management anyway long before they are officially informed.
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