You’ve just completed the training period for your new job when you receive “The Offer.” You can quit your job, get paid for training time and even get a bonus roughly equal to your first month’s pay. All you have to do is agree to an exit interview and surrender eligibility to be rehired. What company offers to pay new employees
to quit?
One that has learned how to think like a “Freak,” according to authors Steven D. Levitt
and Stephen J. Dubner. In their book “Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain,” they set out to show how companies, organizations, governments and individuals can all benefit from learning to look at the familiar in new ways. The company in the example is Zappos, the online shoe store known for its outside-the-box thinking about how to run a business.
The company determined that a worker who would take the easy money would probably
end up costing Zappos more in the long run.
A recent survey showed that a bad hire could cost a company more than $25,000 in lost
productivity and lower morale. Historically, less than 1 percent of new hires at Zappos have accepted “The Offer.”
Following the success of their bestsellers “Freakonomics” and “Superfreakonomics,”
the authors started receiving questions from readers. These questions ranged from how
to pass on a family business to the search for happiness. The ideas of Freakonomics
seemed to offer a framework for problem solving of all kinds.
The authors’ response was straightforward: solving problems is hard work. Perhaps,
they determined, learning to “think like a Freak” might provide a way to help.
“The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively,
more rationally, that we think from a different angle, with a diff erent set of muscles, with
a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor; with neither blind
optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like — ahem — a Freak,” the authors state in
their opening remarks.
Levitt and Dubner advocate their thinking is based on an economic approach, relying on
data, rather than hunch or ideology. It relies on common sense and is simple. Yet few people use it, the authors note.
“A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.”
Supporting this, the authors suggest the three hardest words in the English language
are “I don’t know.” Acknowledging that it is all right to say these three little words could go a long way to change how we work with problems, allowing us to explore new solutions.
This simple technique of Freak thinking also means we may lie a lot less.
Why the need for this type of thinking? The authors conclude that it is because most
of us, when trying to fi gure out a problem or issue, choose the most obvious cause. In
today’s world, the problems are complex and not often obvious. Problems like crime,
poverty, disease and political dysfunction are complicated, requiring hard work to uncover
their root causes and not simply address their symptoms.
One of the elements of thinking like a Freak is to think small, not big. Among the
reasons:
• Small questions are often less asked.
• Big problems are usually a mass of smaller ones. Tackling a piece of the problem can often be more eff ective than tackling the big one.
• Change is hard. Affecting change on a small problem can be easier.
• Thinking big means being imprecise. Thinking small means you can often be surer of what you’re talking about.
Should you want to think like a Freak? Retraining your brain to consider problems in
diff erent ways can put you at odds in both social situations and the workplace. For example, try explaining to a family that the best way to kill a family business is to pass it on to the next generation.
Learning to think like a freak is still worth the effort, the authors conclude. Just be ready to be embarrassed by how much you don’t know. BL