The 2014 film “Whiplash” elicited a lot of strong reactions. Richard Brody called it “a grotesque and ludicrous caricature” of jazz, but broader aversion to the flick is usually due to other reasons. (For what it’s worth, I was a pretty mediocre second-string drummer in the high school jazz band, and my knuckles never came close to bleeding. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough). More commonly, audiences can’t stand seeing the conservatory conductor, played by J.K. Simmons, berate and humiliate his student. The underlying sentiment—passion being squashed by a rigid, abusive mentor practicing an antiquated form of adversarial instruction—proved highly relatable for people in all sorts of disciplines.
One person that explicitly stated he’ll never watch “Whiplash” is Ryan Neil, who took on one of the most intense apprenticeships on earth. Neil went to Japan to study the art of bonsai cultivation and styling under the tutelage of Masahiko Kimura, dubbed “the magician of bonsai.” There, he worked twelve-plus hours every day while being subjected to the unsparing criticism of his teacher. From rote tasks like watering twelve hundred trees thrice daily to the more delicate duties of wiring rare specimens’ branches into place, any misstep was conspicuously noted.
At one point, the master bonsai artist looked at a piece of Neil’s work and said, “I’ve never even seen anyone do something this terrible. I would have to try to do something this terrible. Why are you so stupid?”
Of course, this leadership style has been around for centuries—and, for better or worse, has yielded some strong results.
Take Carl Zeiss, for instance, whose brand (and real) name adorns high-quality lenses on cameras, eyeglasses, microscopes, binoculars, and more. If you’d gone to work for Zeiss at his original workshop in Jena, Germany around 1865, you’d have been expected to meet his standards of manufacturing precision or pay the price. It’s said that at the conclusion of each day, Zeiss personally destroyed lackluster microscopes with the workshop anvil. Also, according to the company's Wikipedia entry, the hours were long (11 and 3/4 hours per shift), new recruits were interviewed extensively over a glass of wine at the Zeiss estate (?), the employee healthcare policy was ahead of its time, and morale was high. Who’s to say what was really going on there.
In any case, today there are studies to prove that being nice and offering constructive criticism is better for everyone in the long run than yelling or pulverizing works in progress. In three separate experiments, psychologist R.A. Baron found that destructive criticism left students “less likely to handle disagreements through collaboration or compromise” and led them to set lower long-term goals while reporting lower self-efficacy.
So what do we tell the Zeisses and Kimuras of the world? Changing your ways doesn’t happen overnight, after all. Yet with heightened operational efficiency on the line, stern bosses might just have to be more pleasant or get left in the dust. What I’m really asking here is this: Will they, too, turn to AI in lieu of empathy training seminars?
ChatGPT, the new publicly-available chatbot by research lab OpenAI, is getting all sorts of attention for its ability to spin up convincing pieces of text in seconds. From taglines to funny poems, courteous emails, and college sophomore-level book reports, this thing is pretty impressive. It can’t do everything, but by editing prompts carefully you can get some convincing copy out of it (or at least a useful starting point when your brain is in a fog).
These days, most feedback is doled out virtually. But that doesn’t mean striking the right tone is easy; in fact, tools like Slack can make it even harder. As Emma Goldberg recently described in the New York Times, despite the proliferation of emojis in corporate communications, it’s still pretty easy to tell when someone is less than pleased. And for ultra-old-school bosses, all that informality might make things even harder.
So let’s see what ChatGPT can really do.
The jury’s still out on if robotic assessments like this could really inspire someone to improve; plus, I don’t really want a chatbot telling me what to do. For now, maybe it serves as a different litmus test altogether: If a machine can outdo you in thoughtfulness, perhaps you’d better re-think that critique.