The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,69

small, informal personal relationships are more effective. “The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plant, if we are not creating good earnings for the company, the peer pressure is unbelievable,” Jim Buckley, a longtime associate of the firm, told me. “This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.” In a larger, conventional sized manufacturing plant, Buckley said, you might get the same kind of pressures. But they would work only within certain parts of the plant. The advantage of a Gore plant is that every part of the process for designing and making and marketing a given product is subject to the same group scrutiny. “I just came back from Lucent Technologies up in New Jersey,” Buckley told me. “It’s the plant where they make cells that operate our cellular phones—the pods, the boxes up and down I 95 that carry the signals. I spent a day in their plant. They have six hundred and fifty people. At best, their manufacturing people know some of their design people. But that’s it. They don’t know any of the salespeople. They don’t know the sales support people. They don’t know the R and D people. They don’t know any of these people, nor do they know what is going on in those other aspects of the business. The pressure I’m talking about is the kind you get when salespeople are in the same world as the manufacturing people, and the salesperson who wants to get a customer order taken care of can go directly and talk to someone they know on the manufacturing team and say, I need that order. Here’s two people. One is trying to make the product, one is trying to get the product out. They go head to head and talk about it. That’s peer pressure. You don’t see that at Lucent. They are removed. In the manufacturing realm, they had a hundred and fifty people, and they worked closely together and there was peer pressure about how to be the best and how to be the most innovative. But it just didn’t go outside the group. They don’t know each other. You go into the cafeteria and there are little groups of people. It’s a different kind of experience.”

What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship. There is a useful concept in psychology that, I think, makes it much clearer what he’s speaking about. This is what University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Wegner calls “transactive memory.” When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them—in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex. Or we memorize the number 411, so we can call directory assistance. Nor do most of us know, say, the capital of Paraguay or some other obscure country. Why bother? It’s an awful lot easier to buy an atlas and store that kind of information there. Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. A few years ago, for example, Wegner set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of the couples were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn’t know. Wegner then asked all the pairs to read 64 statements, each with an underlined word, like “Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur.” Five minutes after looking at all the statements, the pairs were asked to write down as many as they could remember. Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn’t know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. “Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self disclosure,” he writes. “Although it is probably more romantic