Marlon Brando on Adversarial Competition

1989 Connie Chung Interview Reveals a Deming-Like Mindset

THE AIM for this brief post is to call your attention to a clip I came across on Reddit this morning of two rather famous people having a conversation about being “the greatest of all time”, a subtle expression of adversarial win/lose competition that is bred-in-the-bone here in North America as a virtue.

Here follows a brief transcript of the conversation between famed news anchor and journalist, Connie Chung, and famed actor, Marlon Brando:

CC: Don’t you realize you’re thought of as the greatest actor ever?

MB: [Looking at his dog] Tim’s the greatest actor ever. He pretends he loves me when he wants something to eat. Get out of here.

CC: No, it’s true.

MB: What’s the difference? See, that’s a part of the sickness in America, that you have to think in terms of who wins, who loses. Who’s good, who’s bad, who’s best, who’s worst. We always think in those terms, in the extreme terms. I don’t like to think that way. Everybody has their own value, in a different way, and I don’t like to think who was “the best at this”. I mean, what’s the point of it?

Chung, like many at the time who heard Dr. Deming speak in similar terms, seems puzzled. It’s so far outside the norms, even today, that it is foreign. Whaddaya mean it’s a sickness to frame things in terms of who wins and who loses?

Questioning the Water

Deming begins The New Economics by calling into question the fulcrum upon which our entire system of thought on management (and indeed much of life) rests: That it exists to sort good from bad, best from worst through the practical magic of win/lose competition:

We have grown up in a climate of competition between people, teams, departments, divisions, pupils, schools, universities. We have been taught by economists that competition will solve our problems. Actually, competition, we see now is destructive. It would be better if everyone would work together as a system, with the aim for everybody to win. What we need is cooperation and transformation to a new style of management.

3rd ed. (p. ix)

He elaborates on this in Chapter 1, How Are We Doing?

Differences there will always be between any two people, any two salesmen, etc. The question is, what do the differences mean? Maybe nothing. Some knowledge about variation (statistical theory) is required to answer these questions.

Ranking is a farce. Apparent performance is actually attributable mostly to the system that the individual works in, not to the individual himself…

Ranking creates competition between people, salesmen, teams, divisions. It demoralizes people.

Ibid. (p. 19)

In rebuffing Chung’s question on its merit, Brando speaks as though channelling Deming, who would probably agree with characterizing the need to rate and rank an illness— indeed, he thought of it as a “deadly disease”.

It’s Not a Private Club

A mentor described to me a while ago how seeing and thinking with a systems view is innate to everyone. It’s not some private club where those of us “in the know” check who passes muster to get behind the velvet rope - membership is open to all who seek it and choose to adjust their view ever so slightly. The Matrix will be immediately revealed.

Chung’s interview with Brando shows that we can develop biases in our thinking over time. What’s wrong with thinking who’s the best? Why not heap accolades on them? They should be held up as examples to aspire toward, right? What this thinking ignores is that Brando’s talents would have been nothing without people to write the scripts, direct the shoots, set the lighting, edit the films, act alongside him, distribute the films, project them, engage the audience. He knows this full well, which is why he has humility to understand why it’s not correct to reduce his worldview to binary conditions of best or worst: It’s an infinite continuum with nearly infinite inputs.

Reflection Questions

What do you make of Chung’s questions and Brando’s responses? Do you agree with his assessment of thinking in terms of winners and losers as a sickness? Why or why not?

Consider Dr. Deming’s thinking on cooperation instead of adversarial competition in the context of the interview. Are his positions fanciful and unrealistic or necessary and needed?