S6E3: “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together”

Transcript:

Jason Dressel  00:00

Today on The History Factory Podcast. Michael Morris, author of the book “Tribal.”

 

Jason Dressel  00:25

I’m Jason Dressel, and welcome to The History Factory Podcast, the podcast at the intersection of business and history. Our guest today, Michael Morris and his new book are a person and a project that I learned of last year when I was tipped off that the book had a chapter titled “Inside the History Factory.” And no, it was not a coincidence, and yes, it was inspired by our work at History Factory, and specifically our work with the NFL. Naturally, I checked out the book, and now Michael is here with us today to share more behind the project in “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.” Michael challenges the idea that culture, and quote, “tribalism is an obstacle to modern organizations and democracy.” 

 

Jason Dressel  01:10

As you’re about to hear the book argues that while popular commentary frames tribal instinct as hardwired sources of division and conflict, the research tells a different story. Humans evolved to cooperate, share knowledge and build large networks bound by shared culture. Professor Morris is a cultural psychologist at Columbia University in its Graduate School of Business and its psychology department. He also previously spent 10 years teaching at Stanford University, and outside of academia, Michael advises corporations, government agencies, NGOs and political campaigns about cultural related issues. So let’s jump right into my fascinating conversation with Professor Michael Morris.

 

Jason Dressel  01:57

Well, Michael Morris, welcome to The History Factory Podcast, and thanks so much for joining us. And congratulations on the book, “Tribal.” It’s, it’s a great read. And, of course, my, my particular favorite chapter was chapter six “Inside the History Factory.” So thank you for so thank you for that, that, that thought leadership, marketing. But first of all, welcome and and and congratulations on the book.

 

Michael Morris  02:23

Thanks so much for having me, and thanks for naming your company in such a witty way. I I originally had a more pointy headed academic title for that chapter, as I did for many chapters, and my editor read the content about your company and was like, there’s your title, right? That, you know, like, “Inside the History Factory,” that’s your title.

 

Jason Dressel  02:47

Well, it’s, it’s a name that always has been great cocktail party and an airplane travel fodder, and I’m glad that that continues to pay dividends. Well, Michael, let’s, let’s jump into it. You know, in the spirit of history, I’d love to just start with what’s the origin, kind of story of this, this project and this book. It’s incredibly layered, you know, it’s incredibly thoughtful. And I’d love to just hear, you know, kind of your perspective on, you know, how the, how the book came to be and why now?

 

Michael Morris  03:22

Sure, well, I’m glad you added the why now thing, because there’s really a two part answer to it–one that’s a really slow burning origin story, and one that’s more triggered by recent events. So the slow burning origin story is that I’m a research psychologist in the area that’s known as cultural psychology, and we can talk more about that later. I was somebody who, before I did my PhD, I did a degree in literature, but then I also did a degree in cognitive science, which was sort of modeling cognition in very formal ways, like doing a lot of artificial intelligence and that sort of thing. And then I was kind of torn between my humanities worldview and my sort of, you know, cognitive modeling worldview. And so I started reading about the history of psychology, and I realized there used to be this field called cultural psychology in Moscow in the 1920s, you know, Vygotsky and Nureyev and these people and Luria, and they, they got shut down by Stalin, you know, because their their descriptions of different ethnic groups in Russia were, were considered to be, you know, politically incorrect. 

 

Michael Morris  04:38

And I started looking around and around. The time that I was doing this, in the in the early ’90s, there were an increasing number of psychologists getting reinterested in culture, and in part, it was because this was the time when the four Tiger Economies and China was rising and Japan was preeminent. And so there was just this sense that culture was going to be something people needed to know about. So I studied that, and then I got recruited to teach in business schools, because business schools realized that, you know, they needed to prepare people for the global, the global economy. And so I’ve been teaching business people about culture and about leadership for, you know, 25-30 years now, and I find that for most business people, their first association of culture is, it’s an obstacle, you know. It’s an obstacle to change, or it’s, it’s why the it’s why the sales division doesn’t cooperate with the engineering division, etc. And I always thought of culture in a much more dynamic way, as something that you could, you could harness, you know, for unity, for motivation, even for change. And so I kind of wanted to write a playbook for, you know, making culture an opportunity, rather than an obstacle, the kinds of things I had been teaching. And then, as I started to do that over the last five years, I noticed that there was this, this kind of new discourse about tribalism. A lot of the political pundits, Tom Friedman, you know, those people were kind of talking as though humans had this hard wired hate for other groups and that this, you know, deeply buried, you know, evolutionary trait had somehow resurfaced and was destroying our democracy and, you know, ruining pluralistic corporations and creating, you know, problems for international cooperation. So I felt like that couldn’t be less true, and it couldn’t be less helpful, you know. It, it made for some riveting, you know, magazine articles and op eds, but it it’s not a very good basis for policy, and it’s not a very accurate, you know, read on what’s going on in these conflicts right now. We do have tribal instincts. 

 

Michael Morris  07:09

You know, there’s been a lot of breakthroughs by evolutionists and archeologists, paleontologists and behavioral scientists about the human specific group instincts that enable us to live in in large groups with shared cultures. So we’ve learned a lot about this, but these are instincts for solidarity, not instincts for hostility. In fact, you know, one of the reasons why Homo sapiens, you know, lived and Neanderthals did not live, is that they were more inclined to do battle with neighboring clans than we were. We were more able to forge these large scale networks of cooperation, networks of exchange, known as tribes. And so it’s our it’s our capacity for cooperation, and you know, sharing knowledge and living in large groups that are bound together by shared knowledge that made us human. And so it’s, it’s rather unfair to assert that our tribal psychology is, is, you know, the is going to be our downfall. And it’s, it’s the, it’s an evolutionary curse, you know, it’s an evolutionary blessing, I would say. But it can cycle out of control, especially when you know society changes and conditions change. You know, you can get feedback loops where people are thinking in terms of cultural frames a little bit too much and but when you’re trying to fix the problems that come from that, it’s really important to have an accurate diagnosis, to understand the psychology that’s involved, and not to think that these conflicts, like the red, blue rift you know, in our politics right now, that they somehow come out of a need to hate, you know, a need to hate another group. You know, animosity does arise, but I would argue it’s a byproduct of more fundamental things that have happened over the last generation or so, where our group instincts have led us to be doing dysfunctional things in our politics. 

 

Michael Morris  09:13

So that was really long winded. That was the long answer. That was the two part answer that, you know, I wrote the book in part to make accessible my knowledge as a business school professor about culture, but I also wrote the book to kind of push back against this trope of toxic tribalism that I feel is is unhelpful and unconstructive.

 

Jason Dressel  09:37

Yeah, and I think to reinforce the title of the book is “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.” And I want to come back to that, maybe in a bit. But I think what you just shared, Michael, in the context of the title of the book really reinforces that, that you know time and time again, what the book really reinforces is that these sort of tribal instincts and how cultures are defined are not black and white, and that they are very malleable, and that they evolve, and we’ll talk about it, but I think you provide a lot of insight and context with how cultures change over time, and how they really adapt and modify what members of that tribe or culture are learning from from other tribes and cultures. And I suspect that that is at least, at least in part of what cultural psychology is. And as a person who had maybe heard the term in some abstract context, but never had the opportunity to just ask specifically, what is cultural psychology, and in the book, early on in the book, you kind of frame it as really a sort of emerging discipline, or an evolving discipline that’s really kind of taken hold. I just was wondering, for our listeners, if you can just kind of sort of articulate a little bit more around what is cultural psychology and how is it applied?

 

Michael Morris  11:15

It’s the overlap of psychology and anthropology. It’s using the methods of psychology, the sort of empirical and somewhat objective measures of experiments, big data, text processing, surveys, careful sampling and surveys to address some of the classic questions of anthropology. Anthropologists tended to use field work, you know, ethnographic methods, which are great in some ways, but they can easily lead to reinforcing the biases of the, of the ethnographer. Because you know, you’re, you’re, you’re not asking a standardized set of questions every place that you go. It’s a field that, you know, had started a few times, and notably, you know, in Russia of the 1920s with some really brilliant work, but then got shut down because, you know, from the left wing perspective that dominates academia explaining problems in terms of culture was regarded as a as a sort of blaming the victim move, and so that was one reason why, through the, you know, the ’50s and the ’60s, it wasn’t very popular to use culture as an explanation. But then I think in the ’90s, you know, as we started to see that, you know, unlike in the mid, in the middle of the 20th century, there was this idea of modernization theory and sociology that that all of the countries of the world were going to become alike once they had factories and formal education, you know. They were all going to converge on the same kind of individualistic culture. And it just became apparent, you know, in the in the ’90s, that that’s not what was happening. Instead, we had multiple modernities, you know. We had, you know, Japan as probably the preeminent economy of those times, operating in a much less individualistic fashion and a much more hierarchical fashion, right than what we see in the US and the UK. So cultural psychology had this kind of rebirth in the 1990s largely around these East West issues. But now there’s a lot of research on the cultural North versus the cultural South and cultural differences within Europe, and so it’s become a worldwide discipline now, you know, as people try to think about culture. And it’s, it’s somewhat come to intersect with the discipline within the organization’s field about organizational culture, you know, that was kind of a separate field, you know, somewhat inspired by anthropology, but with a more practical bent, and that has sort of come together with the cultural psychology from psychology departments in the last decades.

 

Jason Dressel  14:13

That’s helpful. And how do you… how do you think about sort of the relationship between culture and history and heritage?

 

Michael Morris  14:25

Well, it’s a great question. In my book, I argue that, I try to lump together the many, many distinctions that academics make about the, you know, the adaptations in our psychology that enable us to live with cultures. I try to lump them together into three major waves of evolutionary change, and I call them the peer instinct, the hero instinct and the ancestor instinct. And the peer instinct is basically our conformist psychology. You know that we have this drive to mesh with the people that we see the most, the people that are around us. And the hero instinct is like our status seeking psychology. We want to find ways to contribute to our community and gain all of the standing and tribute that comes with it. And then the ancestor instinct is this backwards looking quality in human nature that we are, we are very interested in what prior generations did, you know. We hang on the stories of the elders. We when we find artifacts from the past, you know, we treat them as almost sacrosanct objects. And why did we evolve that way? 

 

Michael Morris  15:42

Well, all of these things we can see can be quite irrational, right? Conformity can be irrational, status seeking can be irrational, blind. Traditionalism can be irrational, but I argue that this kind of traditionalist notion or penchant in our in our psychology, it created tribal memory, you know. Before that evolved, and that seems to have evolved, you know, about 50,000 years ago, before that, you know, early human groups would invent something like stone point spears, and then they would have it for like, 10 generations. And then maybe there would be an epidemic or something, and all of the spear makers would die, and then nobody knew how to make them, and then they wouldn’t have them for 10 generations. And then some smart guy would reinvent it, you know, but they were, their creative energy went into reinventing the wheel. But once they became wired to compulsively hang on to the wisdom of the past, then you started to have this snowballing, what we call cumulative cultural evolution. You know, where you weren’t your creative energy could go into building on the wisdom of the past rather than reinventing it. 

 

Michael Morris  16:51

So. So for me, heritage and history, that that dimension of culture is, you know, related to the third instinct. And you know, the names that you that you might hear in in many fields are norms, are the words that we use for just like the shared practices in a group. And then ideals or standards or values are the things that we aspire to. And then traditions or institutions are the things that we we feel like have been in our community over time and when we, when we let them guide us. We feel a deep sense of connection with past generations, and we feel a kind of existential balm against the, you know, the shortness of life. We feel that we’re part of something enduring. So there’s all kinds of special emotions and motivations that are involved when we’re following a tradition or following an institution. And to me, that’s what that’s, you know, our obsession with history. And the reason why we rewrite history every generation is that, you know, we have this need to feel that what we’re doing connects with what past generations have done. And leaders can, you know, manipulate that in some ways. You know, skilled CEOs and skilled politicians, they may have a platform or a plan which is a departure from the status quo, but if they can frame it as a return to something prior, you know, then it’s not a scary change. Then it’s, then it’s something established, you know, something traditional, something that we should, something that we should feel, you know, almost compelled by identity to pursue.

 

Jason Dressel  18:45

Yeah, and I think you can answer this through the kind of broad lens of organizations, or perhaps, you know, given some of the case studies you talk about in the book that are more specific to corporations, which, of course, is the sort of the space that I’m generally operating in, you know, in the context of History Factory and the work we do with clients, I’m curious how you think about sort of that use of history and heritage as a as an asset. And one of the interesting kind of themes, I think, that came through was sort of different versions of organizations that, to your point, are authentically leaning into a true history and heritage in a more authentic way. But then there are other examples where it’s kind of manufactured, or maybe it’s completely manufactured, and they have essentially fabricated that kind of notion of history to accomplish exactly what you what you articulated.

 

Michael Morris  19:51

Goop is one of the examples that I like in this regard. You know, they, they sold these Jade eggs for, let’s just say, anatomical rejuvenation. And they had a they had a lot of medical claims, but they also had a lot of historical claims that ancient Chinese emperors, you know, gave them to their concubines, and the concubines kept the uh, you know, and they got in trouble, and had to, had to pay a fee, both for false medical claims and false historical claims, because there, there was, there is no tradition of, you know, Yoni eggs in in the Chinese, in Chinese history, you know. There is almost everything else. So they were inserting all sorts of things into every orifice that you could imagine, but they were not inserting Jade eggs into that particular orifice. So, but what’s really interesting, what’s really interesting, and it reminds me of a classic line in a Woody Allen movie, is that they had to stop advertising it that way, but customers still want the X. There’s still a lot of demand for these eggs, even after the big public thing about how it’s all false, and there’s a lot of other brands that, in a more facile way, just concoct a brand history. So the Goop cases is is not unprecedented. 

 

Michael Morris  21:22

One of the most famous advertising campaigns in all of history is the “Diamonds Are Forever” campaign by De Beers. And De Beers had a near monopoly on diamonds, and they discovered unprecedented reserves of diamonds. So they had a glut, and so they more or less invented the notion of diamond engagement rings, which had never been the norm, even even among royalty. But they found selected examples, and they promoted this idea that for mid-century Americans that you know, if you really had commitment in your intentions, that you would give your betrothed a diamond ring. And it convinced a generation, and that generation somehow forgot that their parents had not done this and their grandparents had not done this, you know. If anything in the past, sapphire rings were the engagement ring, but most people didn’t have engagement rings, you know, three generations ago or four generations ago. And there are lots of mundane examples of brand stories, brand back stories, that have been constructed out of whole cloth. But even after they’re revealed as fictions, the customers don’t seem to mind very much. 

 

Michael Morris  22:48

And an example is Hollister. It’s a company that essentially sells surf shorts and faded T shirts and prewashed jeans to wannabe surfers. You know, it’s a mall store based in Ohio, and they made up a story about their founder, Edgar Hollister, who was a James Bond-like figure, who, you know, renounced his aristocratic family and traveled around the world surfing while also solving crimes and meeting beautiful women, and then landed in California and opened a surf shop, which became Hollister. And it’s all completely false, but they made their sales people memorize the story, and customers liked hearing it, and they would include parts of it in their descriptions of products, and it it kind of tied together the product line. And when it was revealed to be false, well, customers didn’t really seem to care. And maybe it’s people who are not actual surfers, but who want a surfer look and are buying prewashed jeans. Maybe they don’t really care that the the history, in this case, is not authentic.

 

Jason Dressel  24:06

That’s interesting. I never heard that. And as the as the dad of a couple of teenagers, definitely have have some Hollister apparel readily available in the house, that’s really interesting. You know, the other thing about that, though, is what you’re also kind of getting at, is that not only the balance of sort of, you know, authenticity and versus inauthenticity, but also kind of that balance of respect for a heritage or culture versus maybe what’s considered sort of cultural appropriation, right? And, you know, when you look at the Hollister example, you know, I’m not I, I would actually assume that folks who do identify with the surfing culture would consider Hollister, you know, essentially, of, you know, appropriating, you know, their their culture. Obviously, that’s probably a less extreme or less harmful example, but when we were talking before, Michael about you know, as the world became more more global, there’s certainly a place for organizations being respectful and aware of other cultures, their history and their heritage. But there’s also then that kind of balance of making sure you’re not going so far that then it’s like cultural appropriation. So it seems like if you don’t get that balance right, you’re either accused of, you know, going too far down the path and essentially, you know, stealing their culture and making it your own. But if you completely dismiss it, then obviously you’re disrespectful. So I’m curious how what you think of that kind of balance, and maybe where organizations have kind of gotten that balance right, maybe where they’ve gotten it wrong.

 

Michael Morris  25:58

Well, I think that you know, organizations, corporations, they appropriate from many kinds of cultures. You know, so appropriating from the community of surfers probably irritates some hardcore surfers, or people running a mom and pop surf shop, you know, really dedicated to the lifestyle. But you know, we know Coca Cola appropriated from the sort of hippie, New Age movement. You know, we know many other, many other brands have appropriated from, you know, I think that Pepsi appropriated from the Occupy movement, you know, and that was, that was something that people didn’t like because they had Kendall Jenner, you know, walk up to a cop and hand him like a Pepsi, and people didn’t think that was appropriate. But I think where, and I, my students, have done some some empirical studies on this, of like, when is cultural borrowing construed as appropriation, inappropriate appropriation, and when is it regarded as respectful or honorific? Even, you know, yeah, and, and, I think the the key variables there are not surprising. It’s, it’s when you’re borrowing from a group that’s less powerful than yourself. When you’re misrepresenting their culture as opposed to getting it accurate. And when this activity takes away opportunities for economic opportunities for people from that group you know. So when it’s when it’s a fancy New York designer drawing on, you know, a design from an in indigenous Mexican community, okay? All, all of those things are wrong, right? Because they’re not getting the design, you know. They’re often taking a sacred design, you know, from the church, and then they’re making booty shorts or something, you know, that’s mis misrepresentation and and by by making, by turning this cultural esthetic into a cliche, there may be taking away opportunities for people from that culture. 

 

Michael Morris  28:15

We talked about how cultures are malleable, and that’s something that I very much believe in. And I think if you, if you believe that cultures are malleable and that traditions are malleable, you can understand the concern about cultural appropriation, when a powerful group takes your culture or some tradition from your culture, and then maybe starts propagating a simplified version of that. They can easily not only, not only take away opportunities, but they can even damage the tradition in your group, because there’s this idea of cultural hegemony, you know, powerful groups that control the media and control the international flow of images. They can affect how other cultures see themselves, you know. So it’s a problem that, you know, Western stereotypes of cultures then affect the self-perception of those other cultures, because the Western stereotypes become ubiquitous, and the children see them and everything. So there is, you know when, when we understand the malleability of traditions, and I know that’s a lot of you know what your what your firm works with. We can understand the concern. We can understand what’s at stake, right? And I think it’s not unlike you know why in the wine world, you know, like champ, the wine growers of Champagne do not allow producers from other regions to use that word, you know. So they make really good white sparkling wines in California, but they can’t label them champagne. And the idea here is that, you know, you protect the you protect the name, you protect the tradition, so that you don’t have people debasing the currency. And, you know, cheap, cheap sparkling wine driving out, you know, or cheap champagne, driving out the expensive champagne. So there’s, there’s, there’s good reason to be a little defensive and territorial about your cultural traditions.

 

Jason Dressel  30:35

Yeah, that’s a great example. And you know, the other sort of, sort of piece of that is, and obviously, a lot of the work that we do is rooted in helping organizations use their history and their heritage as a source of cultural strength, yeah, um, but that also, you know, used, you know, in the wrong way, can also be a source of weakness, where you know your history can also hold you back. So I was curious if you, sort of, you know, had examples from from the book or from your work, where both maybe instances where a culture or tribe kind of leaning into their history and heritage as a source of strength. But on the flip side, you know, where maybe it became a an obstacle, you know. And there are others, but certainly, one of the examples that came through really clear in the book was the was the South Korean football team, or the soccer team in the early 2000s.

 

Michael Morris  31:41

Yeah, well, that’s a, that’s a story about a coach, you know, and it’s, it’s a story that’s becoming relevant now that we move into another World Cup season, you know, where people remember these improbable runs that happen in the World Cup. But I think I like that example. I use it to open the book because he was this soccer coach, you know, who probably couldn’t articulate, you know, ideas about culture and tradition in the way that you could, or I could, but he, he kind of intuitively understood that his soccer players had many identities. You know, they had identities as Koreans. They had identities as, more specifically, South Koreans. They had identities as professional athletes, you know, and that some of these identities were really helpful at certain junctures for getting things done that he needed. So when he he needed them to commit to sacrifices, you know, they were in a room with the Korean flag, and they had passed out the red uniforms. And, you know, people were like, “We’ll do whatever it takes. We’ll work out three hours a day, you know, to gain this fitness advantage.” But then when he needed them to learn these new techniques, and specifically these techniques that came out of the Netherlands, he found that they, they weren’t, it wasn’t taking, you know, when he was holding the training camp in South Korea, where they were kind of embedded, you know, with Korean reporters and their Korean families and, you know, using the Korean language all the time. So he, he said, okay, the next, the next phase of the training camp is going to be in the United Arab Emirates. And, you know, the cover story was, well, this way the European trainers who are going to work with us can, can, can come to us more easily. But he was also, you know, rearchitecting the cultural cues that surrounded them on a daily basis. So sometimes making progress means intensifying the culture, you know, and gaining the strength and the motivation that comes from the culture being salient, and sometimes it means removing triggers of the culture you know, making a culture less part of the foreground, so that people become open to learning things that are, you know, maybe different from the main emphasis of of a particular culture. 

 

Michael Morris  34:04

And you know, we’re, we’re all multicultural individuals, you know, we all, you know, we have the culture of our country, the culture of our religion, the culture of our school, the culture of our profession, the culture of our corporation. And so because of this, we all code switch, you know, we they can’t all drive at once, and the main way that we code switch is by responding to cues in our immediate situation. So when you know I one of the stories that I talk about in the book from your firm’s work is how you know you help the NFL get out of a really tough stretch, tough patch, or whatever you want to call it, where you know they were… they had everything going wrong. It was like a perfect storm, but you took advantage of the fact that their centennial was coming up, and that’s that’s an opportunity for many organizations to look back at their past and to draw parallels between the past and the present and and they did that with your help in very artful ways that that kind of changed, you know, change what was salient about the NFL. So I think that’s great. 

 

Michael Morris  35:16

You know, in in terms of your your question, are there companies who are obsessed with their past and it it’s a detriment? Well, I do think there’s this. We call it sometimes, the competency trap, you know, in organizational studies that you know, like Radio Shack was really good at selling radio parts and things like that. But, you know, there’s certainly a lot of opportunities to sell electronic appliances like that. There’s no reason why they should have gone out of business, but maybe they weren’t selling the right, you know, you know, there are other other companies that were more oriented towards laptops and mp3 players, etc., a company that, I think some companies that have done it well are like Levi’s. You know, they have their 501 jeans, and it’s this great Gold Rush story. But then they, every generation they find, either they find or the or the customers find a kind of new meaning of 501 jeans, you know. They they were, they were, what hippies would, you know, tie dye and, you know, and and modify. And now in Generation Z, there’s this big emphasis on sustainability. And Levi’s has been able to say, hey, we’re the original sustainable garment. You know, people have been turning these things into handbags and backpacks and other things for generations. 

 

Michael Morris  36:45

Harley Davidson is a is a great example of a company that kind of lost its way, because, you know, when the Japanese, when Honda came with its smaller, cheaper bikes that were more fuel efficient in the ’70s, you know, people were dropping their Harleys and picking up Hondas. And Harley tried to make bikes that were like Honda’s, but nobody wanted, you know, nobody wanted that kind of bike from Harley Davidson. You can’t out Honda Honda. And so, with the help of, with the help of a designer who was actually the grandson of Davidson, I think, you know, he came back into the company, and he was a Harley rider and a Harley collector. And he basically said, we got to return to the return to the past, you know. We should just start making these epic heavyweight bikes again, like that people remember from, you know, from James Dean movies, and, you know, Peter Fonda, Easy Rider, those kinds of movies. We start making these big bikes again, and it it’ll become a nostalgia trip for people, and we’ll gain back some of our market share. And around the same time, they they stopped traditional advertising and instead put their money into holding rallies for Harley riders. And at the rallies, they would have vintage bikes, they would have new bikes. People could look and compare. And people started showing up in Harley jackets and Harley patches. And then eventually the Harley tattoo, the Harley logo, tattooed on their arm, you know. And that’s when it became tribal. You know, you don’t have to worry about someone switching to Honda when they when they’ve tattooed Harley on their arm. So that’s a great example of a company that, you know, refound its refound its audience, refound its identity.

 

Jason Dressel  38:36

Yeah, well, and what you just tapped into there as any listener of this podcast and follower of a lot of our thought leadership content, you just tapped into, you know, three or four really powerful themes of creating community, creating nostalgia. There actually is a movement right now around this notion of companies essentially refounding, and it is that balance of reinvention, but doing it in a way that you know completely embraces change and evolution, but doing it in a way that really stays tethered to what your company stands for, right? And so you really just in a nice little little capsule there kind of articulated all of that. Michael, so much, thank you so much for for joining us. It was a really interesting conversation. Again, congratulations on the book. 

 

Michael Morris  39:24

Thanks so much. Thanks, Jason.

 

Jason Dressel  39:33

Thanks again to Professor Michael Morris. If you are interested in learning more or purchasing the book tribal, you can visit his website, michaelwmorris.com, or go to wherever you go to buy books. Thanks again to all of you for listening to The History Factory Podcast. Be well, stay safe, and we’ll be back soon with a new episode.