Wild Thinking

Tribes Have lots to Teach About Courage and the Value of Community.

Jo Owen spent seven years living with tribes in places like Mongolia and Papua New Guinea. In his new book, Tribal Business School: Lessons in Business Survival and Success from the Ultimate Survivors, Owen explains what executives can learn from the tribal leaders he met.

PROFIT: How did you come up with the idea for this book?

OWEN: I spent some time building a business in Japan, and I realized that the rules of survival and success are fundamentally different. Not better, not worse, but different. At other times, I visited various parts of the world and talked to people there. I found that how they live, how they survive, and how they succeed is also based on a different set of principles. The people who live in the last great wildernesses have none of the corporate life-support systems that both enable us and imprison us. They don't have HR, they don't have IT, they don't have computers, they don't have branding gurus. How do they survive without the things that we take for granted? And, incidentally, for them the price of failure isn't that they might miss a promotion or lose their job—they could lose their life.

PROFIT: In the book, you say that different tribes tend to value the same qualities in their leaders: courage, contribution, and responsibility. What can business leaders learn from these values?

OWEN: In Kenya, I was out walking with a tribal warrior and suddenly out of the bush came a hyena at full speed. Then, a very small child with a very small stick came running, chasing the hyena. Reflect on that: In that one moment, had that child shown courage? Absolutely. Had he made a contribution? You bet. Protecting the wealth, the livelihood of the tribe. Had he taken responsibility? Of course he had. He didn't run off and try and convene a special hyena subcommittee of the wildlife management committee. He took action. So courage, contribution, and responsibility don't exist as a phrase, they exist in action, in what people do.

PROFIT: What is the one lesson that you want executives to walk away with?

OWEN: Everyone needs to build his or her own success model, and you're not going to get that just by applying the latest fad. You're going to get it by finding what really works in your own unique circumstances. To do that, you need to be able to ask the smart questions. The tribal model encourages us to challenge our assumptions about what "effective" or "successful" or "excellent" look like.

PROFIT: Has your research changed your own thinking as a business leader?

OWEN: I hope it has. I've come up through the classic road warrior background, which tends to be very task focused and outcome focused. One thing that's come out of doing this research is perhaps a little more humility, realizing that there are more ways of contributing and achieving self-satisfaction than simply working for the biggest bonus. The second bit is perhaps a bit more humanity. What I've learned from the tribes is, if we can make the whole community succeed—if we can succeed with and through other people—that is actually highly rewarding.