Outliers (22 page)

So, when the first officer says, “Don’t you think it rains more? In this area, here?” we know what he means by that:
Captain. You have committed us to visual approach, with no backup plan, and the weather outside is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway. But what if we don’t? It’s pitch-black outside and pouring rain and the glide scope is down.

But he can’t say that. He hints, and in his mind he’s said as much as he can to a superior. The first officer will not mention the weather again.

It is just after that moment that the plane, briefly, breaks out of the clouds, and off in the distance the pilots see lights.

“Is it Guam?” the flight engineer asks. Then, after a pause, he says, “It’s Guam, Guam.”

The captain chuckles. “Good!”

But it isn’t good. It’s an illusion. They’ve come out of the clouds for a moment. But they are still twenty miles from the airport, and there is an enormous amount of bad weather still ahead of them. The flight engineer knows this, because it is his responsibility to track the weather, so now he decides to speak up.

“Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot,” he says.

The weather radar has helped us a lot?
A second hint from the flight deck. What the engineer means is just what the first officer meant.
This isn’t a night where you can rely on just your eyes to land the plane. Look at what the weather radar is telling us: there’s trouble ahead
.

To Western ears, it seems strange that the flight engineer would bring up this subject just once. Western communication has what linguists call a “transmitter orientation”—that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. Even in the tragic case of the Air Florida crash, where the first officer never does more than hint about the danger posed by the ice, he still hints
four
times, phrasing his comments four different ways, in an attempt to make his meaning clear. He may have been constrained by the power distance between himself and the captain, but he was still operating within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker.

But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the
listener
to make sense of what is being said. In the engineer’s mind, he has said a lot.

Sohn gives the following conversation as an illustration, an exchange between an employee (Mr. Kim) and his boss, a division chief
(kwacang).

K
WACANG
: It’s cold and I’m kind of hungry.

[M
EANING
: Why don’t you buy a drink or something to eat?]

M
R.
K
IM
: How about having a glass of liquor?

[M
EANING
: I will buy liquor for you.]

K
WACANG
: It’s okay. Don’t bother.

[M
EANING
: I will accept your offer if you repeat it.]

M
R.
K
IM
: You must be hungry. How about going out?

[M
EANING
: I insist upon treating you.]

K
WACANG
: Shall I do so?

[M
EANING
: I accept.]

There is something beautiful in the subtlety of that exchange, in the attention that each party must pay to the motivations and desires of the other. It is civilized, in the truest sense of that word: it does not permit insensitivity or indifference.

But high–power distance communication works only when the listener is capable of paying close attention, and it works only if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time, in order to unwind each other’s meanings. It doesn’t work in an airplane cockpit on a stormy night with an exhausted pilot trying to land at an airport with a broken glide scope.

13.

In 2000, Korean Air finally acted, bringing in an outsider from Delta Air Lines, David Greenberg, to run their flight operations.

Greenberg’s first step was something that would make no sense if you did not understand the true roots of Korean Air’s problems. He evaluated the English language skills of all of the airline’s flight crews. “Some of them were fine and some of them weren’t,” he remembers. “So we set up a program to assist and improve the proficiency of aviation English.” His second step was to bring in a Western firm—a subsidiary of Boeing called Alteon—to take over the company’s training and instruction programs. “Alteon conducted their training in English,” Greenberg says. “They didn’t speak Korean.” Greenberg’s rule was simple. The new language of Korean Air was English, and if you wanted to remain a pilot at the company, you had to be fluent in that language. “This was not a purge,” he says. “Everyone had the same opportunity, and those who found the language issue challenging were allowed to go out and study on their own nickel. But language was the filter. I can’t recall that anyone was fired for flying proficiency shortcomings.”

Greenberg’s rationale was that English was the language of the aviation world. When the pilots sat in the cockpit and worked their way through the written checklists that flight crews follow on every significant point of procedure, those checklists were in English. When they talked to Air Traffic Control anywhere in the world, those conversations would be in English.

“If you are trying to land at JFK at rush hour, there is no nonverbal communication,” Greenberg says. “It’s people talking to people, so you need to be darn sure you understand what’s going on. You can say that two Koreans side by side don’t need to speak English. But if they are arguing about what the guys outside said in English, then language is important.”

Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles when they sat in the cockpit, and language was the key to that transformation. In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain. Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy.

The crucial part of Greenberg’s reform, however, is what he didn’t do. He didn’t throw up his hands in despair. He didn’t fire all of his Korean pilots and start again with pilots from a low–power distance culture. He knew that cultural legacies matter—that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist, long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn’t assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their heritage that did not suit the aviation world, they could change. He offered his pilots what everyone from hockey players to software tycoons to takeover lawyers has been offered on the way to success: an opportunity to transform their relationship to their work.

After leaving Korean Air, Greenberg helped start up a freight airline called Cargo 360, and he took a number of Korean pilots with him. They were all flight engineers, who had been number three, after the captain and first officer, in the strict hierarchy of the original Korean Air. “These were guys who had performed in the old environment at Korean Air for as much as fifteen to eighteen years,” he said. “They had accepted that subservient role. They had been at the bottom of the ladder. We retrained them and put them with Western crew. They’ve been a great success. They all changed their style. They take initiative. They pull their share of the load. They don’t wait for someone to direct them. These are senior people, in their fifties, with a long history in one context, who have been retrained and are now successful doing their job in a Western cockpit. We took them out of their culture and re-normed them.”

That is an extraordinarily liberating example. When we understand what it really means to be a good pilot—when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success—then we don’t have to throw up our hands in despair at an airline where pilots crash planes into the sides of mountains. We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.

But first we have to be frank about a subject that we would all too often rather ignore. In 1994, when Boeing first published safety data showing a clear correlation between a country’s plane crashes and its score on Hofstede’s Dimensions, the company’s researchers practically tied themselves in knots trying not to cause offense. “We’re not saying there’s anything here, but we think there’s something there” is how Boeing’s chief engineer for airplane safety put it. Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

14.

Back to the cockpit.

“
Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot.
” No pilot would say that now. But this was in 1997, before Korean Air took its power distance issues seriously. The captain was tired, and the engineer’s true meaning sailed over the captain’s head.

“Yes,” the captain says in response. “They are very useful.” He isn’t listening.

The plane is flying toward the VOR beacon and the VOR is on the side of a mountain. The weather hasn’t broken. So the pilots can’t see anything. The captain puts the landing gear down and extends the flaps.

At 1:41:48, the captain says, “Wiper on,” and the flight engineer turns the wipers on. It’s raining now.

At 1:41:59, the first officer asks, “Not in sight?” He’s looking for the runway. He can’t see it. He’s had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time now. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System calls out in its toneless electronic voice, “Five hundred [feet].” The plane is five hundred feet off the ground. The ground in this case is the side of Nimitz Hill. But the crew is confused because they think that the ground means the runway, and how can that be if they can’t see the runway? The flight engineer says, “Eh?” in an astonished tone of voice. You can imagine them all thinking furiously, trying to square their assumption of where the plane is with what their instruments are telling them.

At 1:42:19, the first officer says, “Let’s make a missed approach.” He has finally upgraded from a hint to a crew obligation: he wants to abort the landing. Later, in the crash investigation, it was determined that if he had seized control of the plane in that moment, there would have been enough time to pull up the nose and clear Nimitz Hill. That is what first officers are trained to do when they believe a captain is clearly in the wrong. But it is one thing to learn that in a classroom, and quite another to actually do it in the air, with someone who might rap you with the back of his hand if you make a mistake.

1:42:20. F
LIGHT
E
NGINEER
: Not in sight.

With disaster staring them in the face, both the first officer and the engineer have finally spoken up. They want the captain to go around, to pull up and start the landing over again. But it’s too late.

1:42:21. F
IRST
O
FFICER
: Not in sight, missed approach.

1:42:22. F
LIGHT
E
NGINEER
: Go around.

1:42:23. C
APTAIN
: Go around.

1:42:24:05. Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS): One hundred.

1:42:24:84. GPWS: Fifty.

1:42:25:19. GPWS: Forty.

1:42:25:50. GPWS: Thirty.

1:42:25:78. GPWS: Twenty.

1:42:25:78. [sound of initial impact]

1:42:28:65. [sound of tone]

1:42:28:91. [sound of groans]

1:42:30:54. [sound of tone]

END OF RECORDING

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rice Paddies and Math Tests

“NO ONE WHO CAN RISE BEFORE DAWN THREE HUNDRED SIXTY DAYS A YEAR FAILS TO MAKE HIS FAMILY RICH.”

1.

The gateway to the industrial heartland of Southern China runs up through the wide, verdant swath of the Pearl River Delta. The land is covered by a thick, smoggy haze. The freeways are crammed with tractor trailers. Power lines crisscross the landscape. Factories making cameras, computers, watches, umbrellas, and T-shirts stand cheek by jowl with densely packed blocks of apartment buildings and fields of banana and mango trees, sugarcane, papaya, and pineapple destined for the export market. Few landscapes in the world have changed so much in so short a time. A generation ago, the skies would have been clear and the road would have been a two-lane highway. And a generation before that, all you would have seen were rice paddies.

Two hours in, at the headwaters of the Pearl River, lies the city of Guangzhou, and past Guangzhou, remnants of the old China are easier to find. The countryside becomes breathtakingly beautiful, rolling hills dotted with outcroppings of limestone rock against the backdrop of the Nan Ling Mountains. Here and there are the traditional khaki-colored mud-brick huts of the Chinese peasantry. In the small towns, there are open-air markets: chickens and geese in elaborate bamboo baskets, vegetables laid out in rows on the ground, slabs of pork on tables, tobacco being sold in big clumps. And everywhere, there is rice, miles upon miles of it. In the winter season, the paddies are dry and dotted with the stubble of the previous year’s crop. After the crops are planted in early spring, as the humid winds begin to blow, they turn a magical green, and by the time of the first harvest, as the grains emerge on the ends of the rice shoots, the land becomes an unending sea of yellow.

Rice has been cultivated in China for thousands of years. It was from China that the techniques of rice cultivation spread throughout East Asia—Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Year in, year out, as far back as history is recorded, farmers from across Asia have engaged in the same relentless, intricate pattern of agriculture.