[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
If my mother knew I was standing at the front
of a church in front of hundreds of people,
she'd have a heart attack.
I am very happy to be here.
I would be remiss if I didn't--
my editor, Bill Phillips, is here.
The one who was primarily responsible for the success
of my first two books and heavily involved in the third.
And I want him to stand and this--
[APPLAUSE]
Good.
If you write a book about the collectivity of achievement,
you can't but acknowledge people like Bill.
I was going to give you all a choice.
I can either do a kind of relatively short synopsis
of my book and we can do lots of Q&A. Or I can tell you a story,
which-- and I've thought--
Story.
Story, all right.
I didn't really-- I sort of stacked the deck, I realize.
[LAUGHTER]
So a lot of this book is about culture
and about how culture matters.
And by that I mean how does the where we're from
and who our ancestors were make a difference in how
we do our jobs and how good we are at what
we choose to do for a living.
And that idea takes up the whole second half of the book.
And it's a very--
I think-- profound and sometimes difficult thing
to wrestle with.
And so one of the examples I use in the book
to illustrate this point of how much culture matters is
plane crashes.
I have a whole chapter on plane crashes.
And so what I thought I would do today
is tell a story from that chapter.
And I will warn you, though, that I'm not going
to tell the whole chapter.
I'm taking an excerpt out, and so
what I'm going to tell you makes a good deal less sense
than the version you'll read in the book.
And it's also a good deal scarier
than the version you'll read in the book.
By the way, who in this room will
be flying in a plane in the next month or so?
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry to hear that.
[LAUGHTER]
But I think-- so it is scary.
But the most important thing about this plane crash
that I want to talk about is that it's scary
not because it is unusual.
It is scary because it is typical,
which is a very important thing to keep in mind.
So here goes.
The crash I want to talk about was Avianca 052,
which takes off from Columbia, Medellin, Columbia,
on January 25th, 1990, bound for JFK airport in New York.
And-- as most of you know, Columbia
is not that far from the United States.
It's just on the other side of the Caribbean Sea.
And to get up to New York from Columbia,
you cross the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf,
and you go up the east coast of the United States.
But as it happens, this was January and there was
a nor'easter along the east coast and all kinds of planes
were delayed that night, among them Avianca 052.
So here they were on a relatively routine flight
from Columbia to New York, and the captain of the plane
was a man named Laureano Caviedes.
And the copilot was a man named Mauricio Klotz.
So Caviedes and Klotz are flying this plane,
and they start to get held up by air traffic control.
And they are held up because the weather is so bad-- very, very
thick fog and high winds.
They're held up first above Norfolk, Virginia,
for about 20 minutes, and then above Atlantic City
for 30 minutes, and then again outside of JFK--
about 40 miles outside of JFK for an additional 30 minutes.
So after about an hour and a quarter of delay,
they're cleared for landing, and they come down
into the runway at JFK, and they encounter a really severe wind
shear when they're about 500 feet above the ground.
Now wind shear, as I'm sure most of you know,
is a situation where the wind is blowing very heavily
in the face of the aircraft.
And so you add power to maintain constant speed,
and then at a certain point, the wind just drops off.
Boom, right?
And all of a sudden you're going too fast.
Now, normally, in that kind of situation
what happens in a plane is that the autopilot will adjust,
and you'll be able to land safely anyway.
But as it happens, the autopilot--
for reasons we don't understand--
was turned off on Avianca 052, possibly because it was
malfunctioning.
And so the pilots executed what's called a go around,
which is simply when you're coming in to land
and you realize you can't make the runway, so you pull up
and you circle around.
And they made a big circle over Long Island.
And they re-approached for a second landing.
And as they were flying towards JFK
to come in for this second landing,
the engineer-- the flight engineer--
cries out, flame out on engine number four.
And then flame out on engine number three.
One by one, the engines were just blowing.
And the captain says at that point,
show me the runway, because he thinks,
if we're close enough to JFK, I can guide this crippled plane
in for landing, and it won't matter that we're
losing all of our engines.
But they can't see the runway, because it's fog,
and also they're nowhere near JFK.
They're still 14 miles away from the airport.
And so they crash.
They come down and they actually crash
in the backyard of John McEnroe's father's estate
on Oyster Bay in Long Island.
And 73 people die, and it's one of the worst
accidents in the New York area in many years.
And the next day, of course, the flight investigators come,
and they comb through the wreckage,
and they retrieve the black box, and they
start their investigation.
And, typically, these investigations
can take weeks to uncover the cause of the crash,
but in this case, it doesn't take weeks.
In fact, they know by the next morning what caused the crash
of a Avianca 052.
And it has nothing to do with the plane.
The plane was in perfect working order.
And it has nothing to do with the pilots.
They weren't drunk or high or sick or--
It was nothing to do, in fact, with the weather,
although the weather was certainly bad last that night.
And it had nothing to do with air traffic control.
They didn't make any catastrophic mistakes.
The cause of the crash was actually really simple.
To put it in the argot of the aviation world,
it was fuel exhaustion.
They'd run out of gas.
Now when I said in the beginning that this was a typical crash,
I didn't mean by that that planes run out
of fuel all the time.
They don't.
What I meant by saying that it was a typical crash was
that it took the form of--
it did not have a catastrophic cause.
We often think that accidents, like plane crashes,
are catastrophes in the sense that something blows up
in the cockpit, and the captain is thrown back
against his seat, and he says, dear God,
and the flight attendant comes rushing in,
and her face is ashen, and in the back,
the passengers are screaming.
That's our mental image of what a plane crash is, right?
That's what we've seen in Hollywood.
But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Plane crashes rarely take that form at all.
In fact, what they tend to be far more
often is a very sort of subtle process that begins very slowly
and gradually overtakes the pilots
until the plane ends up in some kind of irredeemable crisis.
So, for example, if you look at lots of plane crashes, what
you discover is that overwhelmingly they happen
when the weather is poor.
Now, not when the weather is so terrible
that no planes should be in the sky,
but just that the weather is bad enough that the pilot is
under some degree of stress.
You also find that plane crashes invariably
happen when the plane is behind schedule.
Not drastically behind schedule, but enough behind schedule
that the pilots are hurrying.
And we all know that you start to make mistakes
when you hurry.
In an overwhelming number of cases,
plane crashes happen when the two pilots have never
flown together before.
So they don't know each other really well.
So they're not comfortable with working--
particularly in times when things get difficult,
they're not good at working together, yet.
And we also know that plane crashes are overwhelmingly
associated with errors on the part of the pilots.
And not just one or two errors, but a typical plane crash
involves seven consecutive errors, each of which
would not be sufficient to cause an accident,
but in combination is enough to bring down the plane.
And when you look at those errors, what
you discover is that overwhelmingly they
are not examples--
they're not cases of gross pilot negligence.
And they're not examples-- it's not
like the pilot turns left and should have turned right
or pulls down on this lever when they should have pulled up
on that lever.
Rather, when you look closely at what
causes those sorts of errors that lead to a plane crash,
they are overwhelmingly errors of communication.
One pilot is supposed to tell the other pilot something
and doesn't.
Or he tells him something and he doesn't say it
in a form that allows the other pilot to understand.
In other words, when you look closely
at plane crashes, what you discover
is that they are overwhelmingly not
technological or technical phenomenon,
they are social phenomenon.
And that's why Avianca 052 is so typical,
because it is really the kind of quintessential social accident.
One of the things that I did when
I was trying to understand this plane crash
is that I hung out with experts on plane crashes,
and one of the guys that I spent time
with was this really marvelous pilot,
a Sri Lankan named Suren Ratwatte.
And he flies for a very big airline,
and he's an expert on what's called human factors, which
is that-- those are the people who
study the interaction of technology and humans,
which is very much what a plane crash is all about.
And he sort of walked me through that accident.
And he points out that it is typical--
I mean as I described before what a typical accident was
all about.
We've got the bad weather here, as you almost always do.
We've got the plane behind schedule,
as we almost always have.
And we've got the malfunction-- the minor malfunction
of the autopilot, which is a contributing factor-- not
something that would cripple the plane,
but just something that adds to the stress of the pilot.
But Ratwatte also makes the point
that one of the things that's very clear when
you look at that plane crash is how tired the captain was.
Caviedes is flying a Boeing 707.
Now that was the previous workhorse.
That's the predecessor to the 737,
which is the current workhorse of the aviation world.
But it's really an old generation plane,
and when you pull all of your levers--
the levers are actually connected with pulleys
to the sheet metal of the plane.
It's an actual-- he said flying a 707 is like rowing a boat.
It's a physical-- I mean, today you use a little joystick.
It's really easy.
But it's actually really hard to fly this thing.
And here you have Caviedes, who is
circling around the East Coast for an hour and a quarter.
And it's actually hard work, and he starts to get tired.
And if you look in the cockpit of a 707,
you see that all of the gauges are like really small.
They're like the size of coffee cups.
Whereas today, they're like this big.
It's really easy to see them when you're working hard.
But in his case, it starts to get really hard,
because he has to squint and to read
all of his various controls.
And we know he's tired, because he starts to ask for things
to be repeated, over and over again--
when we listen to the flight transcript--
which is one thing that happens to you when
you start to get exhausted.
You can't process things as easily and quickly
as you could before.
And he also asked for things to be translated into Spanish
for him, even though he's a fluent English speaker, which
is another thing that happens to us when we get tired.
Our peripheral cognitive processes start to shut down.
And he also starts to make mistakes.
On the first abortive landing--
you have something called a ground proximity warning
system, which tells if you're coming in too low.
And he's coming in too low.
And the ground proximity goes off 15 times.
It's a voice that says, you know--
and he seems to ignore it, as if he's kind of tuned it out.
And we also know he's tired, because he could easily have
asked to land at Philadelphia a good hour before the crash
in New York and doesn't.
It's as if he's kind of locked in on New
York as his destination and can't conceive
of changing his plan in any way, which
is another thing that happens to us when we're exhausted.
So we know that's one thing that's going in that cockpit
is we have a tired pilot.
But the other thing that Ratwatte pointed out
was what's strange about what was going on in
that cockpit was how quiet it is, particularly
Klotz, the copilot, is the pilot who
is responsible for all of the communication with air traffic
control.
He's the one who's supposed to be coordinating bringing
this plane in to landing.
And he seems to be very, very passive in a way that
seems very peculiar.
So, for example, he doesn't tell air traffic control
that they're running out of fuel until the end
of the third holding pattern, which
would be unusual if they are approaching
this kind of crisis.
And when he does tell them that, they immediately say,
Avianca 052, cleared for landing.
But what we think Klotz thought they were saying
was that he was allowed to go-- they were allowing Avianca
to go to the front of the line of all of the planes that were
circling around JFK that night.
He thought they were putting them at the front of the queue
so they could land first.
In fact, they were putting them at the end of the queue
so they could land last of all the ones
that were cleared for landing.
It's a really crucial misunderstanding, and, in fact,
one that would prove fatal for this particular plane.
But Klotz never once tries to clarify.
He never once steps in with air traffic control and says,
are we talking about the front of the line
or the back of the line?
In fact, he doesn't bring up the subject of fuel
again for another 38 minutes.
And when I was talking to Ratwatte,
he kept coming back to this silence issue,
this kind of passivity, because he thought it was really
at the root of trying to understand what went wrong that
night in the cockpit of Avianca 052.
And he tells me this really fascinating story,
Ratwatte does, about what had happened to him that day.
We met him at his hotel in Manhattan.
And had just flown into JFK that morning--
that afternoon, rather, and he had done--
he flies those huge airbuses.
And he'd just come in from Dubai.
And he was late.
And I said, well, why were you late?
And he said, well, because we had this issue just a couple
of hours out of Dubai.
You know, when you fly from Dubai to New York,
you go north.
You go up over Moscow on the Arctic Circle
and then you come down.
And when they were over Moscow, a woman in the back--
an Indian woman, who was traveling
with-- an elderly Indian woman traveling with her husband,
had had a stroke, and she started
vomiting and having seizures.
And they found a doctor and he'd gone back, and he had said,
she only has, at best, an hour to live.
We have to get her medical attention.
And he was at that point over Moscow.
And he had to make a series of decisions
about what to do in order to save this woman's life.
And his first thought was, I can't land in Moscow.
I mean here is a elderly couple.
They have no money.
They don't even speak English.
They're from some little tiny village in the Punjab.
If I plunk them down in Moscow, they're
going to get eaten alive.
He's like, we'll never see them again.
So he's like, I've got to find a first world country.
That's exactly the phase he used.
[LAUGHTER]
I have to find a first world destination for this couple.
And so he thinks, Helsinki.
That's where he's going to land the plane.
And his next problem is, he's heavy.
He's 60 tons overweight.
Think about it-- he just took off from Dubai.
Planes are not supposed to land when they have that much fuel.
A plane, you're supposed to use up all your fuel,
get to your destination, and then you land.
But he's got 60 tons of extra fuel.
And the plane's electronics are not
calibrated to land a plane that's that heavy.
So he has this decision to make.
What do I do?
Do I go over the Baltic Sea and dump my fuel?
Then he thinks, that'll take 40 minutes,
and besides, no one's very happy when you dump 60 tons of fuel
in the middle of the Baltic Sea.
[LAUGHTER]
So he thinks, OK, I'm going to land heavy.
Now landing having means that you have to turn off
your electronics, and, basically,
land the plane yourself as light as a feather,
and if you don't, it could structurally damage the plane.
And planes are $400, $500 million each.
They're not cheap things.
This is a huge Airbus.
So immediately he has to start dealing with this crisis.
And he has a window of 40 minutes
in which to figure it out.
So he has to get on the radio with his superiors in Dubai
and say, is it OK if I land heavy?
I'm going to risk your brand new $400 million dollar plane,
but I think I need to.
He's going to get on the phone with Helsinki, an airport
he's never landed at and that he doesn't even
know can handle his plane, and learn everything
he can about that airport and figure out as well-- he learns
when he's talking to them, typically
when you land at Helsinki, you come in over the water, not
over the city, because they don't
want planes coming in over the city for noise reasons.
But when you come in that way over the water, typically,
the wind is behind you.
Well, he's heavy.
He can't be landing with the wind behind him.
He needs to land into the wind.
So he has to not only get Helsinki to tell him
about their airport really fast, [AUDIO OUT]
to doing what you're not supposed to do,
which is coming in over Helsinki.
Next, he's got to talk to the doctor who's tending
to the woman in the back.
Exactly how much time do I need?
He's got to get an ambulance waiting
on the ground, ready to-- right where
he's going to land, come in immediately
and get that woman off the plane.
He's got to get his flight attendants
to communicate to the people in the back
that no, we're not going to crash.
No, this isn't horrible, but we have a woman who's very sick.
He's got to--
I could go on.
But if you think about all the things
he had to do in order to prepare for that landing, what that
meant was that for that 40 minutes,
he never stopped talking.
He talked the entire time.
And, in fact, what we're talking about when we talk about what
it means to be a good pilot-- because he is being a really
good pilot in that moment--
sure, he needs to be able to land heavy,
and that takes technical skills, but mostly
what we are asking of that pilot in that moment, in that crisis,
is that he be able to communicate,
he be able to get on the phone with his bosses back home
and talk them into letting him land the plane,
get on the phone with Helsinki and talk them into letting him
land into the wind, get on the phone with the ambulance guys
and get them all ready, get on the radio with the people
in the back and get them all calmed down, talk to them,
you know, on and on, and on, and on.
We think when we talk about what it
means to be a good pilot that we're
talking about technical skills and daring do and that laconic
voice and being able to fly a plane through two canyons
and roll the plane when-- but, in fact,
that has nothing to do with what it means to be a good pilot.
What it means to be a good pilot is
to be able to do what Ratwatte was doing right, which
is to able to talk to all kinds of different people in a very
open and honest and persuasive way
and talk your way out of this particular crisis.
So with that in mind, let's think about what was going
on in the cockpit of Avianca 052.
And I'm going to read for you now the transcript--
a little bit of the transcript from the flight recorder.
And this is when they're going into JFK
for their first abortive landing.
OK.
So Caviedes says-- remember, they're in heavy fog.
Caviedes says, the runway--
where is it?
I don't see it.
Comes in.
Can't see it, and then they realize
they're not going to be able to make it,
and they pull up and pull up the landing gear
and they start their go around.
And the captain asks Klotz, the copilot,
to ask air traffic control for another traffic pattern.
And 10 seconds pass.
And Caviedes says, like almost to himself--
he just kind of mutters to himself, we don't have fuel.
And then 17 seconds pass.
Now, just to get a sense of this, right,
we've just come from hearing the story about a guy who had
a crisis that was this much as serious as the one
that's in Avianca 052, and he never stops talking for 40
minutes.
There's not a moment of silence in the cockpit
of Ratwatte's plane.
We've just had 10 seconds of silence
between the captain muttering about not enough fuel,
and now we have another 17 seconds--
and we're going to do-- let's do the 17 seconds
just to understand what this is like.
Ready?
The plane is-- the thing is on empty, right,
you've just botched your landing.
Nothing.
14, 15, 16, 17.
And then, Caviedes says, I don't know
what happened with the runway.
I didn't see it.
Now that's in the past, right, and they can't move on.
They're still kind of thinking about--
they're not even thinking about how to land the plane.
They're thinking about, oh my goodness, we
botched the runway, right.
And then Klotz says-- finally Klotz, the one who's
supposed to be doing the communicating
in this situation, says, I didn't see it.
And then air traffic control comes in
and tells them to make a left turn.
And Caviedes says to Klotz--
he says, tell them-- tell air traffic control,
we are in an emergency.
And then Klotz says, to air traffic control, that's
right to 180 on the heading and we'll try again.
We're running out of fuel.
Now, let's go back to the scene in the cockpit again, remember.
They had the fuel gauge on empty.
They've blown their shot at a landing.
They know that there is a whole long line
of planes in the sky above JFK waiting to land.
They're in crisis mode.
They're somewhere out over Long Island.
And the captain is desperate, and he says to Klotz, tell them
we are in an emergency.
He's panicking at this point, properly.
And what does Klotz say?
Klotz says, "That's right to 180 on the heading
and, uh, we'll try once again.
We're running out of fuel."
Now, first of all, that phrase "running out of fuel"
has no meaning in the world of aviation.
By definition, as you're coming into land,
you're running out of fuel.
All planes run out of fuel at the very end of their journey.
It doesn't mean anything.
If you hear that if you're an air traffic controller
it doesn't check any boxes or spark any special interest.
Now-- and also, think about the structure of that sentence.
He starts that critical sentence with
the routine acknowledgement of the instructions.
And then in the second half is where he puts his concern.
We're in crisis.
That's all wrong.
It would be as if you are in a restaurant
and you say to the waitress, I'll
have a refill on that coffee and I'm choking on a chicken bone.
[LAUGHTER]
What's she going to do?
She's going to look at you, like, oh, we're funny.
That's not the way we talk when we're trying to communicate
about our situation.
Even the "uh" that he puts between the two
halves of that sentence is really important.
It serves to undercut the seriousness
of what he's saying.
In fact, later during the inquest,
they bring they bring in the air traffic controllers who were
communicating with Avianca 052 that night.
And they all say the same thing, which
was, we had no idea they were in trouble.
It's like, one of them says, it sounded
like Klotz was totally nonchalant
when he was talking to us.
There was nothing in his tone of voice
or the structure of his sentences
to suggest that something was seriously amiss with the plane.
Now there's an actual term that linguists
use to describe what was going on, what Klotz was doing.
And it's called mitigation.
And mitigation is the word that we use to describe situations
where people undercut the seriousness of what they're
saying.
And all of us mitigate all the time.
If you want your boss-- if you're desperate for your boss
to read something you've written and get back to you,
you don't say to your boss, I need
you to read this now and get back to me.
You say, if you have time this weekend,
if you could look this, it would--
I mean it's not a big deal, but I would just--
I really-- that's mitigation.
[LAUGHTER]
And you do that for a reason.
If you said to your boss, I need you to read this now,
you wouldn't be employed much longer.
It's a very appropriate use of--
in that situation-- this kind of social tool for communicating.
Now, normally, that's fine.
But in the aviation world what people began to realize
was that--
they began to get obsessed with mitigation
because they realized that this was
a cause of a lot of problems in the cockpit.
The cockpit was a place where mitigation
wasn't an appropriate strategy.
Now let me give you an example.
So suppose that you and I are--
you're the pilot and I'm the copilot.
And we're flying along and we see that on the weather radar,
we see that 25 miles ahead, there's
a big ugly patch of thunderstorms.
And air traffic control has been telling us
over the course of the last 10 minutes
about the really choppy weather ahead.
But I notice that you--
you guys are the pilot--
that you're just flying straight into it.
You haven't made any attempt to kind of--
so I what I want to do is to communicate to you
the fact that we really should find a way of going
around the thunderstorms.
So how do I do it?
Now there are many different strategies
that I could use that differ in terms
of their level of mitigation.
So the first thing I would say to you, which is zero
mitigation would be a command.
I could say, something like, turn 30 degrees right.
It's a command.
Now that is wholly inappropriate for me to say that to you,
really hard for me to say that, because what I'm saying is,
I'm the boss, not you.
And I'm saying you're not a good pilot, which is a hard thing
to say to someone who is your superior in that notion.
So maybe I want to cut it down just a little bit.
So I could make what they call a crew obligation
statement, which--
I could say something like, I think
we need to deviate right around now.
Now that's softer.
"I think," and I use "we," and instead of saying 30 degrees,
I just say, deviate right around now.
A little more acceptable for me to put it that way.
But that might also be too much, so I
could take it down one more notch,
and I could use a suggestion.
I could say, let's go around the weather.
Right.
We're in this together.
Two-- you and me.
[LAUGHTER]
We're flying this plane.
Let's just go around.
That's a little softer.
But maybe even that's too hard.
So what if I could just do a simple question.
I could just say, which direction do you
want to deviate?
I'm assuming you're going to deviate sooner or later,
you just--
are you going to go right or left?
It's getting a little bit more subtle.
Now maybe even that's too strong.
Maybe I want to simply state a preference, like, you know,
if it was up to me, I'd go left.
It's even softer.
And softest of all would be the hints.
I could just say, boy, it looks mean up there, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Now there is a world of difference between turn
30 degrees right and boy, it looks mean up there ahead.
World of difference.
In one case, I command an action, a response from you.
And the last case, I give you something so soft
that it's easy for you to ignore it.
Well, this is what people in the aviation world--
why people in the aviation world became
obsessed with mitigation.
Because when they started to listen
to the transcripts of those black boxes,
what they began to understand is that in the minutes and hours
before plane crashes, what you saw was
lots and lots of mitigation.
That's what was going on in the cockpit that
was causing all of those errors was people
were too often relying on hints and too infrequently using
the kind of language that would compel action.
So, for example, there's a famous crash--
Air Florida crash in the 1980s in Washington.
And it was one of those wintry days and it was sleeting.
And all the planes-- you know how you get deiced,
well, the plane got deiced, but they
were taking off at rush hour.
So they'll have a line of like 15 planes in a row.
And this one was number 15.
So they've been deiced and they're creeping forward,
and the sleet comes down, and the ice
begins to reform on the wings.
So what happens is the copilot, who has flown in bad weather
quite a lot, wants to tell the pilot that this is not good,
we have to get deiced again.
So what does he say?
Well, he says-- he hints.
The first thing he says is, look how
the ice is just hanging on this back there, back there,
see that?
That's what he says.
It's a hint.
Total mitigation.
Just throwing it out there.
Look at that.
Ice.
He's hoping that the captain kind of fills in the blanks.
And it doesn't work.
And they're starting to creep forward.
They're no longer 15th for take off.
They're now ninth for takeoff.
And the ice is getting a little bit thicker.
So he tries again.
He says, see all those icicles on the back
there and everything?
Now he's like, icicles--
it's like he's trying to ramp it up a little bit,
but it's still just a hint.
It just see those icicles, I mean I don't--
just making conversation up there in the cockpit.
[LAUGHTER]
Nothing happens.
A couple more minutes passed.
Now they've crept up a little closer.
They're like fifth for takeoff.
And now the copilot is getting a little bit concerned.
So what does he say?
He says, boy, this is a losing battle here trying
to deice those things.
It gives you a false sense of security.
That's all that does.
Still a hint.
A little stronger though, like three sentences of hints,
but it still hints.
Nothing happens.
Pilot's ignoring him.
They've now crept up.
They're like number two for takeoff.
And he starting to get really, really worried.
So what does he do?
He upgrades.
He goes from a hint to a suggestion.
He actually suggests and actually says,
let's check those tops again since we've
been sitting here a while.
Now he's suggesting action.
Finally, the captain responds and says,
no, I think we get to go here in a minute.
Just wants to take off.
So they get up for first in line for landing and on the runway--
first in line for takeoff, and they take off
on the south runway at Washington Reagan.
And if you know this when ice forms on your wings,
it diminishes your lift--
the plane's ability to take off when it's really, really heavy
and take off.
So they take off and then plane can't make it.
It starts to go down like this, and the Potomac is right below.
They clip the 14th Street bridge and as they're going down,
the copilot turns to the captain,
and they have the first moment of honest conversation--
honest, open communication since the two of them
got into the cockpit.
And the copilot says, Larry, we're going down, Larry.
And the captain says, I know it.
And, boom, plane crashes.
Now fighting mitigation has become
one of the great crusades in the airline world.
In fact, when you look at why plane crashes have dropped
so dramatically over the last 20 years,
it is principally because of the success in retraining pilots
in how they talk--
how they talk to each other.
For example, this was never the case before, but now very
often, pilots are required to call each other
by their first names.
And the idea is if you're talking to someone-- you're not
calling someone Captain Smith, but rather calling him Jack,
you're more likely to communicate openly with him.
Sometimes some airlines have done away
with Captain and First Officer or pilot and copilot entirely.
And they just talk about the flying pilot
and the non-flying pilot.
Again, it's an attempt to foster some kind of openness
and communication.
They also give pilots scripts now.
You know how in Brown and places like that,
they give freshmen boys all those instructions about how
to make out with a girl?
Do you know about this?
I'm sure you do.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, like, can I place my hand here?
Yes or no.
Can I move my hand six inches lower?
Is that a yes?
Will you sign here?
That kind of stuff.
They do that with captains.
They give you scripts.
And if you're a copilot and you're having trouble
communicating with your captain, you take out the script
and then you just read off the things.
And it's surprisingly effective in creating
more open conversation in times where the social context makes
open communication difficult. This
has actually been one of the great success stories
in the world of aviation.
OK.
So let's go back to Avianca and let's
think about what was going on in that cockpit in terms
of mitigation.
So they've just blown the first landing,
and they're circling around over Long Island,
and Klotz is on the phone with air traffic control,
and he's trying to figure out when they can land again--
the critical question.
And Caviedes turns to him and he says, what did he say,
meaning what did air traffic control just tell you?
And Klotz says, I already advised him that we are going
to attempt again, because now we can't--
and then he just--
his voice trails off.
And it's four seconds of silence.
And then Caviedes says, advise him we are in an emergency.
The second time he's said that.
Four more seconds pass.
Captain tries again.
He says, did you tell him?
And Klotz says, yes, sir, I already advised him.
And then Klotz starts talking to air traffic control.
He's going over really routine details.
And he says to air traffic control,
1-5-0 maintaining 2000, Avianca 052 heavy.
And the captain starts to freak out.
And he says, advise him we don't have fuel.
So Klotz gets back on the radio with air traffic control.
And he says, climb and maintain 3,000
and, uh, we're running out of fuel, sir.
There it is again.
Does not mention the word emergency.
Now emergency, if you're an air traffic
controller, that is the word you are trained to listen for.
The minute someone says emergency, you act.
Does Klotz use it?
No.
He just says, we're running out of fuel, which by the way,
every single plane in the air that night over JFK
was also doing.
And when does he say that phrase running out of fuel?
Once again, in the second half of the sentence preceded
by the mitigating uh.
He's mitigating.
Now a minute passes.
A minute.
And air traffic control says, "And Avianca 052 [INAUDIBLE]..
I'm going to bring you about 15 miles northeast
and then turn you back into the approach.
Is that OK with you and your fuel?"
And Klotz says, "I guess so.
Thank you very much."
I guess so.
Thank you very much.
They're about to crash.
Now what's going on here?
Why is he this way?
Well, one key fact is they're at Kennedy.
And one thing you have to know about Kennedy
is that air traffic control at Kennedy
is famous throughout the aviation world.
These are possibly the finest air traffic controllers
in the world.
They have run one of the busiest airports in the world
with an extraordinary safety record over the last 50 years.
They are also the most obnoxious air traffic controllers
in the world.
They are famous.
They are bullies.
They won't put up with anything.
Pilots have all kinds of great stories,
and if you ask them to tell you JFK stories,
they'll just-- an endless number will come out.
And one I heard was, you know, JFK is so crazy,
it's so large that once you land,
it's really easy to get lost.
So there was a pilot once, and he gets lost.
And he's trying to find his way to the terminal.
And so he's like, he's just bothering the air traffic
controller so much for directions. ,
And, finally, she turns to him, and she says on the radio--
and of course, you know, all the pilots are listening in.
So the air traffic control turns to him and she says, shut up.
Stay there.
Don't move.
I'll get back in touch with you when I'm ready.
And then there's silence.
And then the pilot says, ma'am, was
I'm married to you in an earlier life?
[LAUGHTER]
So here we have--
[LAUGHTER]
So these guys are-- this is what they're like.
They're total bullies.
They push you around, and the only way
to get what you want, if you're trying to land at Kennedy,
is to push back.
You've got to play their game.
And they will only respect you if you're
willing to stand up to them and say, look, this is my issue.
I need it to be resolved right now.
And then they'll respond.
And that's what Klotz can't do.
He's intimidated.
That's what's going on here.
I guess so.
Thank you very much.
And that's what's so puzzling about this,
because we can understand intimidation and mitigation
when what you're trying to do is avoid a thunderstorm 25
miles ahead.
You're going to survive the thunderstorm.
We can even kind of understand it
when we're in that plane on the ground at Washington National,
because it is possible-- it's a judgment call about whether you
want to get deiced.
It's not a sure thing the plane's not going to make it.
And he was just kind of worried, and one guy
had a risk threshold that was a little bit higher
than the other.
It is really hard to understand mitigation
when you're in a plane and your fuel gauge is on empty
and you know you're going to crash unless you do something
now.
So that's the puzzle.
Why is Klotz that way under this most dire of circumstances?
So the answer, I think--
or one of the answers--
one useful way of thinking about this
is to use the work of this really
fascinating Dutch psychologist named Geert Hofstede.
And he is a guy who works for IBM in the 60s, when
IBM was this sort of colossus, multinational all
over the globe.
And what Hofstede does is he goes around the world,
and he gives people in every one of the IBM offices
a very detailed psychological questionnaire,
because he's trying to answer the question of how should we
behave as a company differently in different cultures.
Do we run IBM the same way in Cape Town
as we do in Copenhagen?
That's what he's trying to figure out.
And so he's dispatched by the company
to go and try and get a read on what it means to belong
to a particular local culture.
And he organizes this enormous database
and comes up with a set of what are called
Hofstede's dimensions, which are now
famous in the world of cross-cultural psychology.
They are ways of understanding the ways in which the cultures
of the world differ.
So he comes up with a series of dimensions-- continuum--
that he says are the easiest way to categorize differences
among cultures.
So one of them, for example, is individualism, collectivism.
And he says, all of the countries of the world
exist somewhere along this continuum.
So for example, the most collectivistic culture
in the world according to Hofstede is Guatemala.
The most individualistic culture in the world
according to Hofstede is the United States,
which makes sense.
Why are we the only industrialized nation
in the world not to have national health insurance?
Because we are individual.
One of the definitions of individualism is to what extent
do you feel responsible for the welfare of someone
other than yourself?
That's the definition.
And we feel less responsible for the welfare
of people other than ourselves than any other country
in the world.
It makes sense, that fits with our--
Another one of his dimensions is uncertainty avoidance,
which is how tolerant is a culture of ambiguity.
You know, when things go hairy, and there's a big crisis,
are you willing to be flexible or do you adhere to the rules--
to the kind of principles that you laid down beforehand?
And what he finds once again is that there's
wide differences among cultures along that dimension.
So the countries of the world who
are the least tolerant of ambiguity,
who are the most willing, most keen
on sticking to the rules regardless of circumstance
are Greece, Portugal, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Belgium.
The five countries of the world at the other end
of the spectrum-- the most tolerant of ambiguity--
are Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Singapore, and then
the last will come as no surprise to me
since my family is from there--
Jamaica.
Now it's really important to understand that Hofstede is not
making a value judgment here.
He's not saying it's better to be here
on the continuum than there.
He's just saying, look, this is just one
of the ways in which cultures differ,
and it's a way for us to understand
when we're dealing with that culture what
their frame of reference is.
And he's saying that, look, that these things are also
pretty specific-- that cultures have dramatic differences
along these lines.
So when we look at that list of five,
you can see that Belgium is one of the least
tolerant of ambiguity and Denmark
is one of the most tolerant of ambiguity.
Well, Belgium and Denmark are two northern European countries
that are pretty close together that eat roughly the same food
that have architecture that's kind of the same
that have been Democratic for an awful long time
that you would think as a stranger going in,
it must be pretty similar in culture along these culture
dimensions.
And Hofstede is saying, no, they're
actually profoundly different.
That on this dimension, Denmark has more in common
with Jamaica, and Belgium has more in common with Guatemala.
That's really an interesting-- a fascinating insight.
Now of all of Hofstede's dimensions,
though, the most interesting and crucial for our purposes
is something he calls power distance.
And power distance is a measure of a country's orientation
towards hierarchy.
And he measures power distance by asking
questions like, how likely in your culture
is it for a subordinate to express agreement
with a superior?
How much do you guys in your culture respect this?
How much do you venerate somebody or hold someone up
because they are older or have more experience
or are of higher social standing?
How common is it-- how important is
it for people in positions of power
to downplay or accentuate the difference in their status
and the status of everybody else?
And he says, look, there's huge differences.
So, for example, he says in low power distance countries,
you see political leaders very consciously
trying to hide their power.
So he says, if you go to Austria, for example--
very low power distance country--
you can see-- he would say, I would go to Austria
and I would see the prime minister of Austria
taking a streetcar to work.
That's what you do in a low power distance culture.
He said also, I would-- he said, he would go to--
he was once on holiday in Spain and he saw the prime minister
of the Netherlands in one of those vacation trailer parks.
It's like, that's-- the Netherlands is one
of the lowest power distance countries in the world.
That's what you do if you're the prime minister
of the Netherlands.
You try to act like as normal a person as you possibly can.
And he says, compare this to--
France is a very, very high power distance culture.
He says, what are the odds you would ever
see the president of France in a trailer park in Spain?
[LAUGHTER]
Zero.
It's not going to happen.
And that's a profound difference between two countries
that, by the way, are right next door to each other.
So now when people in the aviation world
hear about power distance, their eyes grow wide,
because they say, you know what, that's exactly what we've
been talking about.
We are concerned with nothing more than the issue
of the likelihood of a subordinate expressing
disagreement with a superior.
So they suddenly realize, ah, this completely
helps us to understand--
how both to understand and to combat plane crashes.
This concept, they realize, says that in a culture
that has a high power distance--
in a culture that respects hierarchy,
the task of combating mitigation will be a lot harder.
And, similarly, in fact, they say, look,
it should be possible, in fact, to understand
the likelihood of a culture's having a plane crash just
by looking at the level of that culture's power distance.
And, in fact, there's a very famous paper
done in the 1980s, where they simply
list all of the countries of the world
according to their plane crashes per capita,
and they list all of the countries of the world
according to the power distance of their pilots,
and they discovered that the two lists are basically the same.
That this is the most powerful way
to understand the likelihood of a particular airline having
a crash.
So which countries have the lowest power
distance and the lowest plane crashes per capita?
Well, the countries that you would expect.
We already talked about Austria, the United States,
very low power distance, Australia, classic low power
distance.
Israel, right?
It's one of the most low power distance places on earth.
Can you imagine an Israeli subordinate having difficulty
expressing disagreement with his superior?
[LAUGHTER]
In fact, parenthetically, someone
was telling me that one of the big problems with Israeli army
patrols on the West Bank, where they're
going in very stealthily at night
is that the leader of the patrol just
can't get the people who are supposed to be his subordinates
to shut up, because they're constantly like,
no, no, let's not go that way.
No, no, no.
Anyway.
So that's--
And what are the countries--
what is one of the countries that
has one of the highest levels of power distance in the world?
Columbia.
In fact, the Kennedy crash is not the first time
that Avianca, the national airline of Columbia,
has had this particular kind of accident.
In fact, after that crash they have a kind of investigation.
And they go over the fact that they
had had four crashes in quick succession
in that period, all of which took exactly the same form.
These were crashes where the plane was in perfect working
order, where the pilots weren't sick or whatever, where there
wasn't some massive mistake from air traffic control, where
there wasn't some massive technological failure,
but still the planes crashed.
Why?
Because there was a social breakdown between the pilot
and the copilot.
In fact, there was a crash in Madrid,
and I'll just quote you the two lines
from the event from the conclusion of the crash--
from the report on the crash.
And it was this case of the copilot
saw something and tried to bring it
to the attention of the pilot and failed.
And the report said, the copilot was right, but they died--
the plane crashed-- because when the copilot asked questions,
his implied suggestions were very weak.
The captain's reply was to ignore him totally.
This was a kind of endemic problem at Avianca.
The problem that night, in other words, in that cockpit
was not merely one of Klotz's inability
to communicate effectively with Caviedes.
It was a problem about Avianca's problem
of the inability of copilots to communicate with pilots.
And even more than that, it was a symptom
of a culture's inability to allow subordinates to openly
question their superiors.
This plane crash cannot be understood just individually.
It has to be understood as part of a much
larger cultural context.
Now it is very easy, I think, to find
this kind of talk offensive.
We don't like to talk about cultures
having traits like this.
We find that kind of language and that line of argument
to be problematic and with good reason,
because so often I think that kind of cultural stereotyping
is used to harm.
But one of the arguments I make in this book--
I hope persuasively-- is that there
are times and occasions where we have to talk about cultures
in that way, because cultures play such an important role
in how we behave and how we think
and how we go about doing our jobs.
And if we want to make people better
at those kinds of things, we have
to be willing and honest enough to confront
our cultural legacies, and say, this
is an area where my culture does not do a good job
and this is an area where my culture does do a good job.
Unless we're willing to have that kind of conversation,
I think that we leave all kinds of problems on the table.
So back to Klotz.
You have to understand where he's from.
You have to understand if you want
to understand what happened to that plane
that night that he comes from a culture that is deeply
hierarchical, where it is very difficult for a subordinate
to speak openly to a superior.
Where leaders are supposed to lead.
And what's going on that night in the plane?
His leader isn't leading.
Caviedes-- the man who is supposed
to be in charge of this plane-- is exhausted.
He can barely listen or hear any-- yes,
everything has to be repeated to him.
He's at the end of his tether.
He's been rowing this boat around the sky
for an hour and a half.
So Klotz is all by himself.
And then he's dealing with the Kennedy controllers.
And what are they like?
They are these totally low power distance, obnoxious,
bullying New Yorkers.
And he's trying to tell them that he's in trouble,
but he's using his own cultural language.
The kind of language that says when you try and say
that kind of thing, you mitigate.
But who are these controllers?
They come from a completely different cultural context,
and when they hear someone mitigate,
they don't think that person is being appropriately
deferential to authority.
They think that person doesn't have a problem.
So there's this incredible moment
in the transcript where the kind of cultural disconnect
between Klotz and the air traffic controllers
gets so stark that it's almost painful to read.
It's the last exchange between Avianca and air traffic
control.
And it's just-- the crash is minutes away.
And Klotz has just said, I guess so.
Thank you very much, in response to the controller's question
about their fuel state.
And Caviedes turns the Klotz, and he says, what did he say,
meaning what did the controller just tell you.
Now understand again, they are--
this is at the very, very end of the flight,
and they are in this foggy, windy night,
and they're somewhere out over Long Island,
and the fuel gauge is at empty.
And one of the flight attendants, who-- actually,
we know this story because she survived,
one of the few survivors-- comes into the cockpit at that moment
to ask what's going on.
And she asked the flight engineer,
and he just goes like this.
They know that it's kind of over.
And then there's Klotz, and he's absolutely at wits' end,
because he has been trying, using his own cultural language
to communicate the seriousness of the plane's state
to air traffic control, and he realizes
he has completely failed.
He's completely failed.
And the only way that he can make sense of that--
the only way he can make sense of his failure
is to assume that he has somehow offended air traffic control.
So Caviedes says to him, what did he say, what did the air
traffic controller say?
And Klotz in this little small voice, he says,
the guy is angry.
And then the flight engineer says,
flame out on engine number four.
And then Caviedes says, where's the runway?
Because he thinks maybe he can bring a plane in to land,
but he can't because they're miles and miles away.
And then the flight transcript after that there's two minutes
of nothing but static and the last thing you hear is air
traffic control comes on and says, Avianca 052,
do you have enough fuel to make the runway?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I think we have time for a few questions.
Unless I've spooked you all.
[LAUGHTER]
Is the-- oh, there's the mic.
Right?
This is back to Outliers, just a question about that.
I was just curious in the book where you talk about the 10,000
hours of needing practice.
And I know you don't call yourself an outlier,
but I think all of us would say you are extremely successful,
and I was just wondering, what are some
of the cultural background that you would say contributed
to your success?
Or how would you answer that?
This is-- for those who haven't read
the book there's a section in the book where
I talk about what it takes to be good at something,
and how there's something-- psychologists have sort of come
up with this idea that in an incredibly
large number of cases, it seems like in order to master
a complex task, you need to practice
for about 10,000 hours, which is four hours a day for 10 years.
So the question was do I have such a 10,000 hour
period in my life?
It's actually besides that.
Oh, outside of that.
Outside of that.
Oh, dear.
I'm not very good at answering autobiographical questions,
but did I have a cultural-- well, I mean,
I grew up in a house where--
I realized, I guess, that in retrospect my parents
are borderline workaholics.
But that seemed like a really good thing.
So maybe growing up in an atmosphere that venerated work
in that way was important.
Thank you very much.
So one of the examples you use in your book of people
who practiced well was my favorite rock
band, the Beatles, and I'm just curious--
I understand how their practice in Hamburg
increased their technical skills,
but it strikes me their long term success was more
from their ability to innovate in a sustained way.
And I was wondering, do you think
that came from practice or something else?
Yes, so this is a reference along the same lines.
I talk about the Beatles and how before they come to America,
they had this extraordinary sojourn in Hamburg, Germany,
where they're the house band in a strip club
and they play eight-hour sets, seven days a week
for months at a stretch.
And that's really where they get their 10,000 hours in.
And so the question was to what extent can we
credit that apprenticeship for their ability to innovate?
I think you can credit it a lot.
You know, what innovation is--
innovation comes when you have mastered a particular field
well enough to be able to understand
all of its possibilities.
It's very difficult to innovate when
you don't know what to innovate or when
you don't know what's wrong with the existing paradigm.
And they are, as rock bands go, a profoundly well-educated rock
band because of their--
I mean they had played together 1,200 times
by the time they come to America.
You know, you would be hard pressed
to find a band today at that age that has played together
half that many times.
Played together live.
Performed live 1,200 times by the time they're
in their very early 20s.
That's astonishing.
And I think that it's much easier to see--
to understand how to innovate when you've
got that kind of background.
[INAUDIBLE]
I recently discovered and started devouring the podcasts
on the TED website, and you know, immediately,
when you see it, you want to become part of the event.
But what I slowly started to realize
is that it's probably easier to get invited
to speak than it is to get a ticket in the audience,
especially with a 10-year waiting list,
you know, on the premise of your book,
I could spend 10,000 hours and perfect a skill
and then get invited.
So I was just curious if you had any tips
on how to convince the members of TED
to invite you to the talk?
[LAUGHTER]
No.
I haven't even been invited back since I did that,
so I'm in the same predicament as you are.
So if I hear anything from them, I'll be sure to pass it along.
[LAUGHTER]
I really enjoy your books and I hope you keep writing them.
My question is about women, or actually the lack of them
in the first half of Outliers.
When you profile both individuals and groups
of people who have had success, they're
all male examples, which is not surprising
because of those who have had access
to success in our society, et cetera,
and the notable exception is Marita
at Kipp Academy, who's a student and whose
success may be before her.
So when you talk about the ideal year for a male who
wants to earn a fortune in America to be born being 1835,
do you think that the age of the woman is before us?
And is that here in our decade?
Is it ahead of us?
What do you think about female success?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean you're absolutely right.
There is an absence of women in the first half of this book.
And it would have been dishonest to put them in.
And my whole argument in the book
is that success is a function of opportunities
that are granted by society.
And we have, as you point out, over the last--
going back as long as there's been human history,
hugely disproportionately granted those opportunities
to men.
And, I think, one of the ways we gloss over that fact is by when
we tell stories about success pretending there's as many
women out there as men, and there aren't.
Because we just haven't--
you know, success is not a simple function
of people's ability.
It's a function of ability plus these--
but do I think that will change?
I certainly hope so, and I certainly
hope if I were to write another version of this book in 40
years--
God forbid-- you would tell a very different story.
But I mean, you know, when I was--
it's so interesting, you know, I tell
the story of Jewish lawyers in New York,
for example, their rise.
Well, you can't find any-- in that cohort,
there are no women.
It's sort of amazing.
Like there was this group beautifully poised
to take on a profession for reasons that I explain,
and yet all of those opportunities
were granted to 50% of the group's population.
I mean, it's just sort of like--
what it is is a kind of reminder of how tragically
we have underutilized the talents of our population.
Yeah, even Bill Gates' school is an all boys school.
I looked that up.
I was curious about it.
So it's the same thing.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yup.
Hello.
So I haven't read your most recent book, yet,
so you might have already answered this question.
But there's a theorist named Robert Trivers who writes
a lot about self-deception.
I think he actually cited the same story about the guys
with the deicing on their wings.
And his idea is that we can deceive ourselves
into believing that everything's OK when it's not.
So I was wondering if you think that concept works
with your cultural ideas about how
people can deceive themselves into taking off then crashing.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, so in this--
to apply that to this-- what I'm talking about,
maybe part of what's happening in a high power distance
culture is part of the deception is that the hierarchy will
take care of you.
That the hierarchy knows more-- like the person higher up
the chain knows more than you.
And so you don't have to assert yourself in that way.
Whereas the assumption the low power distance cultures
is that being higher on the ladder
is actually a more random fact than a fact
that speaks to a meaningful difference
in ability or judgment.
So there's that element of--
perhaps there's an additional element of self-deceit
in high power distance worlds.
That being said, you know, it is important to point out
that a high power distance is not always a bad thing.
Like a lot of that chapter of my book
is concerned with Korea, which is a very, very, very
high power distance culture, which
has had all kinds of consequences
for Korean aviation.
They've really struggled with this issue in the air.
But in all kinds of other areas of Korean life,
the high power distance notion has been enormously useful.
I mean a country does not go from being
in ruins at the end of the Korean War to being one
of the most powerful economic forces in the world
in the space of half a century unless it
has cultural ideas that support this enormous organization
and effort and an order.
So I hesitate to kind of describe hierarchy
in entirely negative terms.
I think it can be a wonderful thing, just not in a cockpit.
Thanks.
It seems that a lot of what you're talking about here
are things that are out of people's control--
the role that luck plays in success, the culture
we come from, and what we've been raised with,
where we're at.
Given that the other factor--
the amount of practice we have to work on our abilities--
is something that we can choose to engage with,
are there any prescriptions-- is there
anything we can choose to do to deal with the culture
that we come from and how it interacts with other cultures?
So this is a good question.
And to my annoyance, some reviewers of my book
have accused me of being a cultural determinist.
In fact, I'm the opposite.
So the culture that we come from is
only deterministic of our behavior
if we choose to ignore it.
If you never address-- so the chapter that I was talking
about it not in my talk--
the plane crash chapter.
It's really about Korean Air, and how Korean Air
goes from being an airline that almost gets
pushed out of business because it has so many plane
crashes to being one of what is now
today one of the premier airlines in the world.
And they transformed themselves over the last 10 years
precisely because they say--
they decide at long last to confront their cultural legacy
and deal with it.
And what they discover is if they are honest and open about
the fact that in this particular instance-- the cockpit--
acting like you're a "Korean" is not a good idea,
then you can change it.
And they do.
They take that airline from-- literally,
it was this close to not existing anymore,
and it is now an absolutely world class airline.
And what they showed-- and I continue
this theme in the second half of the book--
is once we can talk about and confront culture,
we can change culture.
We're not prisoners of it.
We're only prisoners of it if we pretend it doesn't exist.
And this is my great objection to the way
we deal with so-called "cultural stereotypes" in this society.
That we have decided that it is always better
to ignore them in the interest of avoiding those few cases
where they are misused.
And that's a shame, because--
for example, I have another chapter
in the book, which talks about math--
learning math-- and points out that Asian schoolchildren
vastly outperform their Western counterparts at math.
So the question-- now flip the question,
if they can learn from us about flying planes,
can we learn from them about doing math?
And the answer is yes, we can.
And, in fact, our culture--
Western culture is sorely deficient
when it comes to giving kids the emotional equipment
necessary to achieve at high school calculus.
We do a terrible job of it, and they
do a really good job of it.
And we can-- does that mean that we are prisoners of that notion
here in the West?
No.
And, in fact, I talk about how there are schools--
the Kipp schools, which many of you
will be familiar with, these charter school movement--
Kipp Academy is essentially just an attempt
to set up an Asian school in the middle of the inner city.
That's what is.
It's like, can we get disadvantaged Hispanic and
African-American kids to behave like Korean schoolchildren
when they do the math?
And the answer is, yes you can.
It's not that hard.
You just have to be determined about it and honest about it
and say, we haven't prepared these kids culturally properly
for what they're doing.
So what I would like to do is I think
that we should look upon cultural legacies
as a big smorgasbord, and we should just say, look,
you know these people do this well,
and these people do this well, and let's just
have a one-- let's assume that everyone has something to teach
us and that way we can get around
the trap of assuming that there is a kind of hierarchy
of cultures.
Or-- anyway, so.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]