from the following podcast pick one of the podcasts and briefly provide some thoughts on it in the context of the topic of leadership.

PODCAST

Support for this podcast and the following message comes from Wells Fargo, where they're proactively advancing their security to develop strong authentication technologies that go beyond the password to help protect your accounts. Learn more at wells fargo.com/together. This is Invisibilia. I'm Spiegel.

And I'm Lulu Miller. So let's begin in Moscow, Pushkin Square. Okay. I'm Ior Karagan. Russian guy. Russian guy. Ior Kagan was there. He was standing in front of a restaurant where he'd worked in the early nineties when he was just a teenager, a place he said that was so popular. His employer had to hire security to control the crowds.

Two of them would stay here, two of them would stay there, uh, at the entrance and at the exit. They were here all the time. Had to be there because this restaurant was the beginning of a very unexpected revolution in Russia. Now, you've probably heard of this. It's pretty famous and so is its logo. You can see on the building right behind you, uh, a shadow of Big M.

You see

the big M of McDonald's in America. It's so common. It feels as inevitable as sky, but the thing you need to know is that bringing the McDonald's M to Russia was the opposite of inevitable. After my first trip when I was asked, Can we open McDonald's in Russia? I said, No, it's impossible. Impossible says Michael Gling, one of the guys charged with opening that first McDonald's in Russia in the late eighties for three main reasons.

Number one, bureaucracy in Soviet Russia was so insane that getting even a single day's worth of yeast required. Massive paperwork. You had to application and then, and an order, and then the delivery papers and then the invoice. You had to fill out applications for yeast for everything you buy everything.

Number two, basic infrastructure in the Soviet Union was so bad that even if you wanted to do something small, like say call another country to arrange a shipment, you had to it sounds ridiculous, but you had to go to the post office and say, You know, I wanna call this is this number in Germany or that that number in United States.

They then said, Okay, you come back at, uh, 11 o'clock at night or two o'clock in the morning, whatever it was. But both of those problems peeled in comparison to the third major obstacle because as Russian guy, Igor Koff explained to create aviable McDonald's in Russia. McDonald's had to reach deep into the heart of Russians themselves and change their very souls in the homeland of dust dsky of Stravinsky, McDonald's had to convince its employees to be cheerful.

We were all serious. We were all serious about life because life is struggle. We were all building the happy future, uh, and uh, we were not allowed to be happy in the process. What do you think, Lulu? Do you think that you can teach cheerful? Mm. Welcome to the second season of Invisibilia Omie Spiegel. And I am Lulu Miller.

Invisibilia is a show about all of the invisible forces that shape human behavior, our emotions, our beliefs, our expectations, And our question today is, can you take an emotional norm? And transform it, right? Are these large, invisible, seemingly intractable things like the emotional temperament of an entire nation changeable.

We have got two stories of people who actually set out to try, but that is not all we have something else. We have a new. Co-host, we are expanding Invisibilia. We have invited the awesome and amazing Hannah Rosen to come work with a show. Yes, we have successfully stolen her from the world of high class print magazines and today you will hear her very first piece.

Hello Hannah Rosen. I was hoping you call me big age, . Big age. Well, Potter Past has big shadows. , Ill small woman. Should we stop doing Russian accent quickly? Yes. Okay. So lots to come stick with us.

So we're gonna circle back to the tale of bringing McDonald's to Russia. But first we have Hannah's inaugural story, which is about a very unusual oil rig. Before we start a quick warning, there are some very vivid descriptions of people getting injured coming up in the first few minutes, which might not be good for some listeners, especially children.

This is a story about an oil rig, unlike any oil rig that came before it. When it was built, it was the biggest, baddest rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A structure the size of a city block floating in 4,000 feet of water. It was set up to pump twice as many barrels of oil as traditional rigs at four times the speed.

Think oil racing through miles of pipe at the speed of a freight train. Dangers were everywhere, but none of this is what made this rig special. What made this rig special is that in order to handle all this potent new stuff and stay alive, they had to train the men on the rig to cry. Come on, flip, flip.

How's that bull for you? Flip. I'll work him this morning and they're not happy with me. This is one of the men from the rig, Tommy, Tommy l Shereen. I went to visit Tommy on his farm in Southern L. And when I saw him, he was covered in cow blood. He just spent the morning cutting horns off his cattle. See the horns?

Tommy started working rigs when he was 14, which means he'd spent many years in what? Up until the early nineties. People called the old oil fields, and I wanted to know what that was like. Like was it dangerous? Was it dangerous? Hell yeah. It was dangerous. Yes ma'am. It wasn't unusual. Tommy told me to see people die.

He'd personally known seven. The worst story he told me involved a guy who had just finished his shift and was about to go home. The man was standing in front of an enormous pipe that was wound into the ground, like a twisted rubber band and was held in place by a handle. And before the man left, he was fooling around with Tommy and he kicked the handle and he looked up at me, said Shereen, and I said, Hey, it's time to go.

He said, I know. He said, I'm tired of this and. Kicked the handle, the torque. When the pipe spun and caught his ankle, like that's his foot, his ankle went into that handle and in about three seconds it spun him around about 80 times, about three feet away from the spinning pipe was opposed. His head was hitting at post and his head was like a rotten tomato.

I'm watching this boy dying right there in front of me. When the body finally stopped, Tommy went over and held the man's head. He said it felt like jello and then came what in the old oil fields, counted as a morning period. 15 minutes. Well, he was lucky to get 15 minutes. I mean, that whole cost a lot of money.

We got to go to work.

Most oil people I spoke to had a story like this. I mean, yeah, for someone to get hurt on a rig and to, you know, get maybe killed on a rig. It was not very uncommon. This is Mark Gatlin, another oil field worker. Mark's best friend died on a helicopter that was taking him out to the rig. They never found the body, but the accident that haunts him most, It wasn't even a death.

There was a bug blower on the rig floor, like a big, big airplane blade, you know, find out there blowing. And, uh, the guy was up there throwing some chain around and, you know, somebody asked him a question. I think he went to point somewhere and it went p like that. The blade cut off his fingers. Mark remembers the man standing, looking at his bloody palm.

And, and I remember him saying, What am I gonna do? That's what he said. What am I gonna do now? And when I saw that no one made me sick, could you tell anyone? I, I feel sick now. Uh, back then, , all, all I did was just went on. You know, I, I let it sink in a little bit and then went on

rig culture back then. Not for sissies. There were unwritten rules of macho. Everyone understood and enforced, like, don't question authority. Tommy's boss was a guy with monster hands and a scar in his face from Ida Chin that nobody asked about. His actual name was Buck. He called them Flunkies is in flunkies, Get me my coffee.

And when they did, he would pour it out. If you make a mistake, hide it. If you don't know something, pretend that you do. And as Tommy would tell you, never appear weak if for some god forsaken reason, you feel an emotion rising, swallow hard. Anyone cry, Mom? We were a different breed of people out there. Uh, we did things that most of the rest of the world didn't want to.

That's Floyd Guidry, another rig worker. So you don't wanna show your vulnerability, vulnerability to anybody, to your friends, to your superiors, or you know, whatever I'm called upon to do, I'll do it. Helicopter went down. Your best buddy got killed 10 minutes ago, and I gotta get on. Well, yes sir, I'm ready to go in this manly code of conduct, it worked fine for years.

Wells got drilled, money got made, but then in the late nineties something big happened, oil companies decided to try drilling in deeper water. Nearly 4,000 feet deep. This might not sound like a big thing, but to the oil guys, it was like going from earth to Mars. So much of what they had to do was totally unfamiliar, really complex, and also potentially dangerous.

Instead of 20 people on the rig, there would have to be well over a hundred. They had to pump 200,000 barrels a day using technology that hadn't even been invented yet. So many moving parts, so many potential explosions. Real danger. Which brings me to the rig where the story unfolds. Rsa, the mag daddy, the biggest RSA was two football fields worth of metal in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

It costs Shell $1.5 billion to make. Tommy remembers walking onto the platform for the first time and struggling to take in the size of it. Huge columns that are massive and there's a big firewall, which is massive. Uh, you gotta remember, I'm a little country boy. I'm used to working on little platforms, and you go up there and these huge things just sticking up through the middle.

You're waiting, you're waiting for a UFO to come fly in.

Shell started building our sun in 1997. It wasn't the company's first foray into deep water drilling, but it was by far it's most ambitious. and there was a sense in the company that they were really not prepared to do something this complex and huge and dangerous. We spent many hours agonizing over how this was gonna work and we had to look at the organization and see if we could do something better and, and who knew what that was gonna open.

This is Rick Fox, the man at the heart of the story, who was put in charge of planning I RSA in 1997. Rick had started out in the old oil field at age 23 as a rough neck scraping painting and hauling sacks on rigs, but he'd risen through the ranks pretty quickly and by 1997 he was a star at Shell. Rick fit into Shell's culture perfectly.

In fact, even at home, Rick lived by RIG rules. Don't ask questions, never look weak. I would definitely not describe my dad as, uh, touchy-feely. This is Rick's son Roger, who told me that R code infiltrated even the smallest interactions between him and his father growing up. So I remember the first time I heard the word Phillip's head screwdriver, he was said, you know, uh, go get me a Phillip's head out of the shop,

And I didn't even think to, um, say, Hey dad, you know, I've never heard what, I don't know what you're talking about. So, uh, I went to the shop to look for something. I had no idea what it was and was felt stuck cuz you know, I didn't want to be, uh, vulnerable. There were much bigger things that Roger couldn't ask about.

For example, one day he and his family were vacationing in Lake Raven, Georgia. He was about 10 years old and a teenage girl showed up. My memory is that she's there, she's very pleasant. She seems kind, and I wanna know who she is. And, um, and, uh, you know, through one question and one answer, I learned who she was.

And, uh, that's how I got to, uh, know that it had a sister.

That first family was a part of Rick's life. He never talked about, he didn't talk about a lot of things, like how he never met his own father and how his mother struggled to raise him alone. He didn't like talking about how he was feeling, or how anyone was feeling. And so by the time Roger was a teenager, father and son were at each other's throats.

Regarded. We're fearful, we're so angry at each other because we don't see each other really. Even Rick, through his haze of repression could sense this. I had this nagging dissatisfaction that things could be different and better, and I didn't understand why I couldn't make that happen. So here's where Rick was in 1997 when shell put him in charge of rsa.

He was stressed at home, barely able to speak to his son, who was about to leave for college. He was stressed at work in charge of a giant, really complicated venture that he didn't know how to tackle. Things felt like they were spinning out of control. And then out of the blue, this crazy lady calls me and says, She wants to work with Shell.

She wants to work with me. Would I be interested in talking to her? This crazy lady was a leadership coach who'd heard about Shell's new venture and wanted them as a client. Her name was Claire Nuer, and she was a teeny, tiny, 64 year old French woman who spoke very little English, wore be jewelled glasses, and had a frizz of blonde hair.

She wasn't your typical business person, but she ran a consulting group called Learning as Leadership. L a l as it's called, was Small at the time, and it was looking to expand its US operations by cold calling companies, trolling for clients. Claire asked Rick if she and her colleagues could fly down and meet with the I RSA team, and Rick said, Okay, we met for coffee in the French Quarter at the Cafe Demand about nine o'clock at night, or some craziness, you know, and there was this moment where things became really real.

Claire died in 1999, but we talked to one of her coworkers, Mark Andre, Olivia, who went down with her to meet Rick. Mark. Andre told us that at the beginning of the meeting, Rick was talking drill schedules and oil production. Calendars and hardware, but then Claire cut him. She said he really wasn't dealing with the real problem, his fear, you're not talking real and that's what you need.

What are the things that you, in particular Rick, what are the fears, anxiety, concerns you have about the challenges in front of you that you're not allowing yourself to be, uh, open with? Can we just like get the BS? Because it's scary what you're doing and uh, it's normal to be, it's normal to be scared and if you just don't tell people you're scared, you are not gonna create safety together.

This got rick's attention and she said, I want to help you. I can't help you.

So who was this little French lady? Claire. Claire, would you please tell us where and when you were born? Mano Claire Nuer. My name was Claire New France. I'm born in France, in Paris. I'm in the San in 1933. Uh, just the date, you know, Hitler came to. It's just Claire was seven when her mother sent her into hiding, and she was eight when her father was seized and taken to Auschwitz.

My name is Claire, but for most of her life, her son Noah, knew her, told us she didn't want to talk about it. In fact, she shut down any discussion of it. My mother, uh, didn't talk to us very much about the war before. She had a real switch in her life. She didn't want to face it, she didn't want to talk about it.

This switch that Noah's talking about, sick, Claire's daughter la told us that it happened when she was on a plane one day or in the plane, and she rubs her eyes and as she's rubbing her one eye, she realizes that the other eye that's open, her right eye, there's like this, it's fuzzy. She has a spot in her eye.

It turns out that it's a 12 millimeter melanoma and she's given three months to live.

The doctors recommended surgery. Most people would've listened, but not Claire. Instead, she took comfort in the human potential movement. Specifically est. EST was a new age therapy popular in the seventies, which was famous for these brutal day long encounter sessions where it's founder Wener. Earhart would stand on the stage and confront the audience members yelling at them.

Why do you have to look cool? Why do you have to come off as smart? Why do you have to keep it all together? What is it that looking good hides? One of the main principles of EST was that if you dug deep into your psychology, you could change the course of your life. That emotions were the key to everything, and so Claire experimented with trying to alter her.

Even trying to contain her cancer with her mind. Her son Noah, told us that every day she would visualize the cancer in her eye being wrapped up as if in a blanket so that it couldn't spread to the rest of her body, which he believes is exactly what the doctors found. Many years later, when she finally did have her eye removed, they removed her eye and they had it sent to different labs, and what they saw is that the cancer was, uh, surrounded by a bowl of nerve, which was basically what she had visualized.

Visualization is a cure for disease, is of course, totally unproven and possibly offensive to people who think a persistent mass of malignant tumors does not represent a failure of will or imagination. But even before she had any proof, Claire felt certain her visualization was helping her, and she tried it out on all kinds of things.

For example, she would bring LA down to the beach and together they would visualize clouds disappearing. And the cloud says Lara did disappear. But are you speaking like metaphorically or are you speaking like I am speaking? Literally. I am speaking, We're on the beach and there's a cloud and we're looking at it and we're, when we're visualizing it disappearing and it's disappearing.

That's what I'm talking about. And you were able to make clouds disappear. Yep.

There are lots of directions Claire could have gone with her newly discovered superpowers, meteorologist, most popular person in the city of Seattle. But instead, Claire and her husband started holding their own encounter sessions in their living room with friends and neighbors, which eventually turned into learning as leadership.

The group that cold called. L a l is famous for a particular kind of consulting. They take very straight business people and get them to strip off their corporate masks and look at what's really driving them, their anxieties, their deepest fears. Sometimes they talk about events in their own childhood or examine dysfunctional dynamics in their families.

Sometimes they might even bring a wife or a kid along with them. Claire would sit at ADA and pro people with questions that LA translated. I didn't really understand. Two months after meeting Claire at the cafe Damon, Rick began attending these sessions. What set up that he's, He was there, of course, to talk about challenges at work.

Let me, But he was also interested in addressing the other major problem he was facing. What, in what? His teenage son, Roger. So one day he convinced Roger to come along with him. Rick and Roger, are you there? Would you mind standing up? So tell me, Roger,

what in what your father does is most unbearable to you? Um,

that, uh, I, I may have to be worried. To be intense in a relaxed time. Roger has trouble getting the words out, but eventually he explains that his father is really demanding an intolerant of weakness, and that he's always just issuing instructions. It's hard to tell your father that, Yeah.

And, uh, his intentions are the best in the world, but it makes this atmosphere tense. So, So what do you think about that, Rick? So, um, yeah. Instructions. Instructions. Yeah. This, that would be, that would be me. That would be . Yeah. So, um, Roger, you know, I take this really seriously though. It's, um, it's, it's ruined a lot of our good times together.

Rick told us that this encounter session completely transformed his relationship with Roger. That was all the proof he needed. If Claire had melt 18 years of family attention, she could doanything. She was what he needed on rsa. So just to review, Rick decided that the key to making his complicated and dangerous new oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico work was a frail, one-eyed French woman who did not speak English, thought she could move clouds with her mind and make grown men cry.

Obviously that's a plan that's gonna work.

Invisia will return in.

Invisibilia is supported by Squarespace. The simplest way to capture your passion with a beautiful website. If there's an idea or project that you're itching to show the world you should. With Squarespace's, simple tools and captivating templates, showcasing your hard work is the easy part. Start your free trial today.

Visit squarespace.com/invisibilia. Set your website apart. Support for Invisibilia also comes from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo understands that you work hard to get the most out of life. From starting a business to saving for retirement. There are a lot of things you wanna accomplish. Working together, Wells Fargo will take the time to understand what you're trying to achieve to help you reach your financial goals.

That way you can care for the people and things that matter most. Learn more at wells fargo.com/together. Wells Fargo. Together we'll go far.

Hey, everybody coming here to tell you about a new NPR podcast that I think is really great. It's from the Code Switch team. It's hosted by Gene Deby and Sharine, Marisol Mira. It's a new kind of conversation about race and identity and how race and identity crash into everything else in our lives. From music to food, to sports, all from a diverse group of journalists.

Sometimes they'll make you laugh. Sometimes they will make you think, Sometimes they'll make you uncomfortable, but it'll always be interesting in dynamic Find code. Switch now on the NPR one app or npr.org/podcasts. This is Invisibilia. I'm Spiegel. And I'm Lulu Miller. And I'm Hannah Rosen. And today we are looking at emotional norms and seeing if a person can get in there and change them.

And if so, How so let's go back to Hana story about an oil rig, which totally changed things up. Don't crash. So how do you convince a group of oil field workers to sit around and sharing circles and bear their souls turn right on Park Avenue? I couldn't totally imagine it either. So last fall, Lisa and I drove through Louisiana and Mississippi asking the guys how it happened.

This doesn't seem like the kind of place where there would be a Park Avenue. The first thing we learned, hyper-masculine oil guys are not really into sharing. We had no idea what this was for. We thought it was so silly. This is George Horn, a high school graduate who grew up hard as he put it on a tiny farm with only one toy.

That was eventually crushed by a tractor because I left it in the road. George told us that when all the sharing stuff was first introduced, he was completely hostile. Why do I need to share my personal life with these people? I don't know them. This has nothing to do with oilfield. What is this for? A lot of the guys felt this way, but they were asked to do it anyway for a year and a half.

As Ursa was being physically built, Rick put George and a hundred of the other oil workers into an open space at one Shell Square Shell's headquarters in New Orleans. He then invited L AAL and a few other groups to put them through a series of exercises designed to open them up. The men told us that about 30 to 40% of their time during those 18 months was spent on emotional exercises like this one.

You were asked to draw a picture if you could or didn't have to, of just, uh, of your family, you know, depict what your family is all about. And so the men would pick up a pencil or a colored marker with their big hands, and they would start drawing pictures of their wives or their daughters or their fathers pictures that were supposed to somehow capture how they felt.

The men were also asked to lay out a timeline of their life and then get up in front of the group and talk about it, and they begin to tell a story of their life. And some of them are. Some of them are not real happy. They told stories about alcoholic fathers, about how they were hungry as children and about their failed relationships.

As adults actually got up in front of the group and said these things out loud, it felt vulnerable. You know, you put your personal life out there for everybody to hear and everybody to see. You know, you don't wanna share every, every detail thing that's happened in your life, and some of the guys did.

And George says, once one guy did, the whole dynamic in the room began to shift, and maybe the next guy that, Well, I'm just gonna say that as just enough to get by. Well, he may say a little bit more than that.

All these exercises, they brought up emotions in the men that they hadn't anticipated and didn't even really want. Floyd Goodery says that even Tommy, bad boy, big laugh. Tommy was overcome when he told the group that his son, then a teenager with a rare disease was dying. Tommy in a group of people now.

This is all people of his, uh, working friends and everything. And, uh, Tommy actually broke down and cried. I mean, I was weeping like a baby, and there was nobody ever said anything about it. What do you mean? Well, nobody come to me and, you know, said, Oh, you big cri everything.

Here's George. Had you ever talked this way emotionally with men? No. That's just not a manly thing. And had the other men spoken like that? No. It was new for, for all of us. We're all in the same boat that is about Did you like speaking that way with other men? I did not, I can't say that anybody enjoyed it.

In fact, there were plenty of outright dissenters to the barrier sold thing. Allow me to introduce one of them, Billy Ray, who worked with Rick. You don't have to go and get soften up or whatever, you know, California to get the work done and work as steam. What I'm saying, you know, you don't have to break everybody down to, you know, to get the job done.

So that's, that's how some of us saw it. And so Billy Ray said no when Rick asked him to attend one of the Laal sessions, and Billy Ray said no. When Rick asked him to share his personal story. And when Rick asked Billy Ray to chronicle his feelings in a journal, Bill Ray in general, , do nothing like that.

No,

Rick didn't push. He knew he wasn't gonna convert everybody, but he took the men as far as he could. In fact, some of the men Ursula's team leaders, mostly, he pushed them into doing even deeper work with Claire. A thousands of dollars ahead. He had them put through a nine day l a l personal mastery course where they had them do things like stand face to face and ask each other direct questions.

You know, if, if you had one thing you'd like me to change, what would that be? This is Mark Gatlin, or, uh, do I make you feel appreciated? What were the kind of answers one heard to do? I make you feel appreciated? Uh, I've heard people say, I don't even think you know who I am. Mark says he himself heard some pretty tough things.

I had people tell me I don't listen. I had some people tell me, You talk too much. I'd say, Tell me more. And how did you feel when they like what's the pro someone sometimes. Sometimes you feel absolutely like, This guys just don't understand me, . So then you stand in front of somebody else and they tell you the same thing and you say, Well, he don't understand me either, Right?

No, you don't understand yourself. Say,

I just want us all to pause for a minute and imagine doing what these men were asked to do. Let's say you had pick eight of your friends and you say, Hey, let's get in a room and tell each other what we really think about each other. Would you want to do that? So let me honestly answer this question.

Hell no. You don't want to know the truth. You don't want to know what's really going on. I'm gonna let Tommy handle this one. No, and let's be clear. It's not like the process is just a couple of hours of soul searching and then everyone knocks off for a beer. You start about six and you'll go to 11.

That's am 2:00 PM What? And then you do that for about nine or 10 days in a row. What do you, why? Like what are you doing ? Well, you listen to Claire, you do exercises, you listen to Claire, you do you noble goals, you listen to Claire, you, you know, you just, it was a very complex school.

Which brings us to the question that really animated our quest in the deep south. So what was the deal with foot massage? What was the deal with foot massage? Why was it that one day in the fall of 1998, a group of men who had spent their entire lives in the old oil fields were encouraged by one of Rick's consultants to pair off, remove their socks, take their neighbor's middle earth and toes into their hands and gently rub, you know, I think they were push, pushing the boundaries of trust in a way.

You know, how far do you go to. To relax with each other. Can you actually relax around another guy? You know, can you relax and be confident?

Most of the men managed it, but Mark told us there were moments where all this emotional work, it really pushed people too far. This is absolutely off. No names, no names. Uh, uh, a person completely forgot who he was. Mark told us that during one LA session he attended one of the I RSA managers had a really strange episode, I guess either through exhaustion or the con constant, uh, you know, diving into emotion kind of thing.

He, he absolutely forgot. He, he just kind of woke up and said, Where am.

The guy literally went blank. He forgot his own name. He turned to the person sitting next to him and asked what city he was in and what he was doing there. So they sent him home to a doctor. Mark told me that this man eventually recovered and became a great leader at Shell, so he wasn't permanently harmed.

But still, the story was really weird and it really stuck with me. Like, on the one hand, I loved hearing these guys open up and talk about how this whole thing changed them, but on the other hand, the story creeped me out to think about a workplace pushing you so far emotionally that you could completely lose yourself.

Is it really okay for a workplace to mess with the emotions of its workers like this? What does doing that get you? Anyway, these changes that they instituted resulted in an 84% decline in the company's accident rate. Um, and in that same period, the company's level of productivity, in terms of number of barrels and efficiency and reliability exceeded the industry's previous benchmark.

This is Harvard Business School, Professor Robin Elie. After Ursula was up and running, Robin and a fellow academic from Stanford named Deborah Myerson, heard about Rick's experiment and decided to study it, see if it was gonna work. They spent months documenting the rigs culture, watching the men talk, be vulnerable and open with each other.

And what Robin saw was that when the men became more open with each other, It wasn't just feelings that were being passed back and forth, but information, technical information that helps a platform run smoothly and safely. This was the kind of change that explains the 84% decline in accidents. Part of of safety in an environment like that is being able to, um, admit mistakes and being open to learning to say, I need help.

I can't lift this thing by myself. I'm not sure how to read this meter. That alone is about being vulnerable. Robin says there's actually a name for what they created. A learning culture and she wasn't the only one who noticed it. We learned through a lot of the exercises too. You know, ask for advice.

This is George, you know, Hey, I'm have, I'm going through a, a, some issues here. Have you ever, you got any experience with that? Can you, can you lead me in the right direction? What do I need to do? The way Robin sees it in the old way of doing things, men spent a lot of energy trying to preserve this hyper-masculine image of themselves.

They were supposed to be physically tough, technically infallible, and emotionally detached. And that closedness, it actually got in the way of staying safe in an environment with thousands of moving parts. I, I come from an environment where small things matter and. Lives are at stake. This is Rick again.

He agrees with Robin. Do you think that in hindsight, BP might have benefited from, you know, having this kind of work with all the people that were eventually involved in the horizon before it happened? I do. It's easy to visualize the physical structures that make or break the success of a big corporation.

The plants, the assembly lines, the drills, the inventory, but just as critical are the invisible emotional structures that run through the organization, like wires through a building, powering it. And here's a question, Is the moral of this story that in order to succeed in the 21st century, it's better to choose an emotional structure that's girly?

I mean, the norms these men learned, talking about their feelings, crying at work, eagerly admitting mistakes, These are behaviors that people associate with women, right? We asked the men this, starting with Rick, did you teach them more female norms of interacting with each other? I don't think so.

um, shocks me to, to, to, to even have that brought up. None of the men were buying it, so we called up Art Kliner, an author who studied corporations for the last 30 years. He says that the female norms thing comes up all the time in his world, but he also said that the men are right, the man, woman thing.

It's just not the right way to look at it. That's a shorthand for the way people regard this change. It's not like the men are becoming more. They're opening up and becoming more themselves. He did it. He did what? Bill? A new kind of person. This is Floyd Guidry talking about what he thinks Rick accomplished on rsa.

Maybe not a new physical man, but a new mental man. How he thinks about things and how he, uh, behaves and, uh, and so he's, that's, that's what he, maybe not knowing it, but at the end of the day, I think that's what he did. When you think about all the changes that happened to these men, it's amazing. So we asked Rick, do you think that the culture would've changed if it hadn't been for you?

Can one person change a culture? Claire did. Claire did. Oh yeah, I think she did. Claire, a tiny old French woman who believed she could move clouds with her mind. Which proves that life does not work like a game of pool where one thing pushes another at a predictable angle. The reality is life is an interplay between the visible, the concrete, and things that are invisible and intangible and sometimes don't even make sense.

But here's the thing, almost all the men we talked to said that the kind of man Rick turned them into, they liked better. Did you ever question whether the new was better? No. Here's George. I wonder if there are some things we left behind in the old way. Um, mm-hmm. . I'm glad they always gone because, you know, it wasn't any fun.

It was no fun whatsoever.

Rick knows that the way he and Claire made this change happen probably sounds a little far out, but he wouldn't have done it differently. So profound and long lasting was the impact Claire had on him and his whole family, particularly his son Roger, who went on to become a psychiatrist, a person who spends his life dealing with emotions.

I, I'm so grateful because my son did not have to wait till he was 40 something years old to have the experience of being able to question his own habits and his own way of thinking about things and reexamine those and see if they're working for him. My son's a beautiful human being and I can't get enough of being around him.

Like Rick George Horn sometimes looks at his son in amazement. Four years ago, George's stepmother died and he and his son were both p bearers at the funeral. He told us this story at his dining room table with his wife by his side, whispering, encouragement in his ear. I learned something about my son then that I, I didn't know before.

We were at the, had a little country church out here where we had the funeral and um, the speaking part was done and we all took turns. We want put our little, uh, flowers on our casket.

You can look do it

Anyway, he just teared up and cried like a baby and so did up. But afterwards, he said, you know, he said, It wouldn't have had to been my all Peggy, you know, that's a part to get me. He said, It can be a total stranger. I'd still cry for him. . I have empathy for those that I don't even know. So where did he learn that?

You know, instead of all this tough guys stuff that you're raised with in the south, did he learn that from me? I don't know. Excuse me.

So here's what you need to produce a drop of oil, a giant metal structure tethered to the bottom of the ocean by 16 tendons, each weighing a ton, a ballast system, and something called a Christmas tree. Trust me. A heliport for the helicopters to land on computers to make constant adjustments so nothing explodes.

A firefighting, an emergency rescue system in case something does explode and mail tears.

Invisia, we'll be back in.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Blue Apron. Who knows that incredible ingredients make incredible meals? Blue Apron works with a community of artisanal suppliers, family run farms, sustainable fisheries, and ethical ranchers to deliver perfectly portioned seasonal ingredients and easy to follow recipe cards right to your door.

Choose recipes based on your preferences with no weekly commitment. Get your first two Blue Apron meals free, plus free shipping by visiting blue apron.com/invisibilia.

Hey everybody. If you are an invisibility hardcore fan and wanna hear more about the story that you just heard, you are in luck. If you listen to the NPR one app, you can hear me, Elise Beagle, and me Hna Rosen. Talk more about the oil rig story that we just played for you. Find out what sparked Hannah's interest in the story in the first place.

Hear about the trip that Elise and I took to Louisiana to talk to the guys on the rig. That's all available exclusively on the NPR one app. If you're already listening on NPR one, just stick around. It'll play right after the episode. And if you don't have NPR one, you can download it for free in your app store.

Once you've got it downloaded, just search for the word Invisibilia in the app and are inside the episode. Extra will be right. This is Invisia. I'm Elise Siegel. And I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Hannah Rosen. And today we're looking at emotional norms and whether you can take these things which are so entrenched in a culture and change them.

And so now Elise is going to bring us the tale of opening the first McDonald's in Russia and the export of the American Smile. Smiles are a huge part of American culture. You get them with your morning coffee, you get them with your lunch, you get them from vague acquaintances and total strangers. You pass on the street.

In America, smiles are like air. They're all around us, which was really quite mystifying to Yuri Chico in. We were always a little bit afraid of American's. Smile. Yuri grew up in Moscow during the 1970s and eighties when the Soviet Union was still a communist country in many ways, cut off from the rest of the world.

So Yuri didn't know a ton about America, but he knew that Americans liked to smile since we were little, You know, in school we learned that American smile, that's not honest, that's not sincere smile. That's just for show. They would actually talk to you about the American smile and tell you how to interpret it.

Absolutely. Uh, there were like posters about those evil capitalists wearing top hats and uh, smiling in that evil way. And, uh, they would say, Yeah, Americans smile all the time, but he shouldn't.

See in Russia at the time, smiling had a very different meaning than it did in America. Smiling was seen as a very personal, intimate thing in Russia. Um, yeah, we don't smile at strangers and, uh, like when you see your family or when you see your friends, that is when you. Uh, you don't really smile to anybody outside of that.

Why? Um, it's, it's a long history. I mean, we have like a lot of proverbs, uh, that say like, uh, smra, if you smile without a reason. It's a sign of edc.

Do you feel like being around a kind of community of people that didn't smile, Like was it a downer? No. Cuz uh, that was pretty normal. I mean, um, when people smile all the time, it's kind of a bad character trait. Like not willing to express, uh, your true feelings kind of thing. We actually suspicious about that.

Or if a stranger smiles at me, that's when I would feel uncomfortable because, uh, is something wrong with me? Do I know this person? Why is he, she's smiling at me.

And so until he was 19, Yuri almost never smiled at strangers. And then came this. Today we are opening the first McDonald's in Moscow. On January 31st, 1990, McDonald's opened its first franchise in Moscow, a brightly lit, fully modern showboat in Pushkin Square. This was a huge deal. 30,000 people showed up opening day for a first taste, not only of hamburgers, but really of America.

McDonald's is a world famous now at the time, and even until today, McDonald's was a major force in the mass production of cheerfulness. After Disney, probably the major force smiles after all, are one of the main things that McDonald's claims to sell.

Smile so clearly McDonald's needed its Russian employees to smile, which was a problem in Russia, not just because of the thing that Yuri talked about before. Russians don't really like to smile at strangers. There was something else. At that time in Russia, the relationship between customers and service providers like cashiers or waiters, Was basically the opposite of the relationship set up in America.

Waitress were kind of above us. They were not serving us. We, we were kind of like bothering them. In Russia, the role of the customer was to please the waiter, not the other way around. To understand this, you need to remember that in the sixties, seventies and eighties, Russia was a state run economy plagued by severe shortages.

There were shortages of bread, of meat, toilet paper, and so anyone who had access to stuff, to goods or food had a tremendous amount of power. So would it make you nervous to go into a restaurant? Yeah, of course. We, we were nervous cuz in the Soviet Union, when you walked into a re. The first thing they would look at is your clothes.

And uh, then they would, you know, judge if they want you in this restaurant or if they just rather take break. In fact, it was extremely common to show up at a completely empty restaurant and be told by a lounging waiter with a board expression that unfortunately they simply didn't have space. They usually would just chase you away.

It would be empty and they would just tell you to leave. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

But say you did magically get into the restaurant. It wasn't like America. No one was killing themselves. To provide a prime dining experience, you have to wait for hour and a half, two hours before you get your meal. Can't really complain. So it wasn't like customer always, right? Rudeness was the norm.

Which brings us back to McDonald's. When Yu a first encountered the notice advertising positions at the Pushkin Square McDonald's, he knew it sounded interesting to him, but it's not like he expected to be introduced to a new way of thinking, different from anything he'd ever known. But I thought it would be, uh, more exciting.

Yeah, sure. So Yuri applied. He remembers going to the interview and sitting down across from a smiling American who shook his hand, then quickly got down to business. He asked me, Do you think you can be outgoing? And, uh, you could say things like, you know, have a nice day. And, uh, I thought, Well, you know, why not sure you, you thought I could give that a try

Pretty much, that'll all be nice to people. One week later, Yuri reported to work and was immediately put into training. He was given manuals, which explained the concept of McDonald's. And then the lights were turned off and the Russian newbies sat in the dark to watch training videos from Hamburger University, McDonald's training headquarters in Illinois.

Hi, good to see you. May I help you? Two Big Macs and a chocolate shake. It was an American video and it was just dubbed in Russian how you're supposed to smile, how you're supposed to greet. Glad you came in, hope to see you again real soon. You bet. And then the lights came back on and the trainers got down to work breaking down the elements of American cheerfulness into digestible component parts.

For example, when you meet someone, you must make direct eye contact, which seemed deeply strange to Yuri. So in Russia we, we used to, uh, Uh, if somebody looks at us, we just kinda look the other way unless we about to fight or something like that. So, but in America he says, uh, you know, when you make an eye contact, you smile.

They were then taught a series of phrases, phrases that hear before none of the employees had ever heard uttered by actual Russian service workers. Have a good day. Come back soon. How can I help you together in the training quarters above the store, they practiced this new language, ran through the words over and over.

Would you like anything else? Yuri remembers wondering about all this smiling stuff. I thought, Oh yeah, I must be tiring to dothis all day long. But Yuri says his real concern, and actually the concern of several of the Russians being trained was not the stress that cheerfulness would place on the McDonald's employees.

We were thinking about customers as well, and we were thinking, Are they gonna be happy with such treatment? Uh, you know, like, are they gonna feel like really uncomfortable about it?

But once the training was finished and Yuri got a chance to put into practice what he'd learned with customers, actually they were really happy. In fact, Yuri noticed that the niceness, it seemed to change customer behavior as well. A lot of Russian people walking into that McDonald's, they also acted differently.

They were friendlier. Even though when you look at pictures from those times, you don't see too many smiles on their faces. However, the way they would address me would be a lot friendlier. So do you think they were coming for the food or do you think they were coming for the different emotional culture?

I think emotional culture. Uh, people, some people liked food. Some people, uh, are kind of like, eh, food is okay, but you know, it's really a great place to just hang out. In the context of America, McDonald's is often seen as a place of soulist depersonalization in terms of food, in terms of human interaction.

But in Russia, in 1990, Yuri says its meaning was completely different. It was an island of light and humanity. Everywhere else you go, it was just gloomy and, you know, dark didn't, uh, do it. And, uh, there were. Trouble stress. And you come to McDonald's and it's all, you know, everybody's always happy and, uh, you see smiles, you can't make any mistakes and uh, you can stay there for as long as you want.

Nobody's gonna kick you out. And so it was just a great place to hang out. People really felt, uh, they could just relax and be themselves.

That's right, folks. Capitalism, it's the best. Oh wait. Outsourced child labor, exploitation of the poor, or the pro commercialization of every element of life, no matter how inappropriate Twitter, Well, Twitter, Sorry. Let's continue with this story. And did working in that emotional culture, did it alienate you from your own culture?

Sure, sure. As the months wore on, Yuri began to change and he felt more and more frustrated by his fellow Russians, I could see that you could be happy without putting that much effort into it. You know, it, it's really, it. It doesn't take that much. You just smile. Uh, people actually react to that In a positive way.

Yuri became a convert, a believer in the power of this particular American emotional norm to transform and elevate, and Yuri isn't the only one. During my reporting for this story, I stumbled across something called the smiling. It's this survey compiled by an international confederation of mystery shoppers, the people hired by companies to secretly check how products are displayed, and yes, how much employees smile.

And if you look at the 2015 Smiling Report, America originator, an international Snider bearer of good cheer in a corporate context comes in at 13 Russia. 15. In other words, in the 25 years since McDonald's opened its doors, customer service in Russia has radically changed. And not just Russia, American service culture has been exported to many different countries, which raises this question, what exactly are we exporting?

You might see those signs on fast food Marquis, that say hiring smiling faces. , Right, So it's explicitly part of the job requirements. This is Alicia Grandy, an organizational psychologist at Penn State University. Grandy studies what's known in her business as emotional labor, the emotions companies demand from employees, and how those emotions affect both customer satisfaction and the health of the worker.

And Grandi says, if you look at the research on forced cheer, you can see some benefits. Smiling is contagious. It does spread, as Yuri said, from employee to customer. But she points out there isn't any real evidence that these changes in behavior translate into actual gains in the bottom line. More money.

On the other hand, she says there is clear evidence that forced smiling. Has a dark side. It's associated with health problems, with, uh, mistakes making performance based errors. Um, the strongest link, I would say is between, um, the display requirements and exhaustion, job burnout. The problem Grandi says is that the emotional norm of cheer is now the default, and everyone, including customers just expects it.

Customers are aware that there's a service with a SMILE requirement, so it sets up a dynamic where customers are free to act however they want to. The employee and the employee has to grin and take it. And so over, over time, that creates a feeling of dissonance. Um, that feeling where your internal state is different than your external, um, expressions or requirements.

And that feeling of like, Wow, this is, this is incongruent with how I really feel inside. You're having to hold that for extended periods of time that takes a toll on the body. And so people drink. Or learn to ignore their true feelings, they might have to lose touch with their internal signal, how they truly feel.

Now, obviously there are plenty of people who genuinely enjoy interacting with customers and are not at all oppressed by their work. But talking to Grandy made me think about this trope that we have. The customer is always right. It suddenly struck me as kind of messed up that, um, communication tells the customer you have more power and more capability of getting what you want.

Um, and thus you can treat this employee how you want to. So emotional labor jobs tend to predict the experience of more mistreatment from customers. Our guess is that it's due to this. The customer knows they're always right, they can get away with it.

There are many wonderful things about American culture, including this part of American culture. But when the smile went sailing across the ocean to take root in places like Pushkin Square, it carried with it some negative aspects that were not so easy to see. Negative aspects that even people like Yuri couldn't appreciate until much, much later.

Two years after Yuri got his job at McDonald's, he and his family decided to leave Russia and move to America. In March of 1992, they flew to Boston and at first year he says, It really did feel like a dream come true. Everybody smiles, everybody's happy. Uh, that's incredible. But what Yu began to see was that actually that thing that he had learned in his Russian school all those years ago, there was an element of truth to.

Smiles here did feel more shallow to him than they were in Russia. I was at the bus stop and, uh, a person approached me and we were talking and we were talking about a lot of like, person, oh, the personal stuff. You know what, what's cool do you go, what do you do? You know, when did you come to the United States?

Blah, blah, blah. And then as soon as that bus showed up, he just totally just left me. He just went and sat somewhere far away from me and I was like, Wait a second. We were just friends. We were to, and, and now we don't know each other. That's really strange. And I still remember that feeling. I was like, Oh, I, I thought you were my friend.

That's really strange.

So that's our show for today, you guys. Any closing thoughts? Russian Dance Party. I.

Invisibilia is me, Lu Spiegel, and me Hannah Rosen, and me Lu Miller. Our senior editor is Ann Gooden. Our executive producer is Jeff Rogers. Invisibilia is produced by Yosha and Abby Wendel with help from Leon Simons. Linda Nia Kdi. Megan Kane, Mickey Caper. Maria PAs Gutierrez Matilde pr, Andy Hether, Brent Bachman, and our Vice President of Programming aa Grundman.

Special thanks to Rachel Brown and Maya Duke, Ma Sova, and especially to Yakoff Ray Jo, this amazing man who helped me find McDonald's employees. Thank you. Also, we'd like to take a moment to remember a special fan from season. Max Snyder who passed away last fall. To learn more about the invisible things we talked about in this week's episode, follow us on Facebook or sign up to receive our newsletter, or visit us at npr.org/invisibilia.

Just so you know, the way we're rolling with this three hosts thing is that you're gonna hear two of us at a time, which means that you won't hear from Hannah next episode. So to tide you over for our moment of Non Zen, we give you Hannah racking the mic like a radio pro. Hell no. Hell no. Hell no, No, no.

Hell no. Join us next week for more Invi. Hell yes.