Mozart and management: why companies fall for myths By Michael Skapinker
Do babies who are exposed to classical music grow up to be more intelligent? You are in good company if you believe that they do.
In 1998, the US state of Georgia began distributing free classical compact discs and tapes to new mothers. Florida required state-funded day-care centres to play classical music.
In 2000, the South China Morning Post reported a common variation on the babies-and-classics theme: that music education should begin before birth. "Babies who hear Così Fan Tutte or the Mass in C Minor during gestation are likely to come out of the womb smarter than their peers," the newspaper said.
These are extraordinary beliefs and statements, given that the research that inspired them was not about babies at all, and has, in any case, been widely questioned.
Where did the classical music and babies story come from? In 1993, the journal Nature published a study which showed that college students (not babies) who listened to a Mozart sonata for 10 minutes increased their performance on a subsequent spatial intelligence test. This became known as the "Mozart effect".
Subsequent studies produced mixed results. In 1999, an analysis of 16 such studies, published once again in Nature, concluded that the overall effect of playing music on spatial intelligence was negligible.
In a fascinating article entitled The Mozart Effect: Tracking the Evolution of a Scientific Legend, Adrian Bangerter and Chip Heath of Stanford University analysed both why people projected what had originally been a study of students on to infants, and why the story achieved such wide currency. (In surveys the researchers conducted in California and Arizona, 80 per cent of respondents had heard of the Mozart effect.)
Their conclusions, published in the December 2004 edition of the British Journal of Social Psychology, have far wider application: much of what they say explains, as we shall see, the frenzy with which companies adopt management fads - before those, too, are exposed as having less to them than everyone originally thought they had.
The Stanford researchers concluded that the reason so many people thought the Mozart research was about infants was that babies were the focus of so much anxiety. Parents worry desperately about young children and this seemed a way for them to assuage their concern. The anxiety is part of a "widespread, older belief that has been labelled 'infant determinism', the idea that a critical period early in development has irreversible consequences for the rest of a child's life", the Stanford writers said.
The researchers discovered that the worse a state's schooling system was - as measured by teacher salaries, spending per pupil and national test scores - the greater the interest in the Mozart effect.
They noted that media references to the Mozart effect had now tailed off. This was partly due to the subsequent scientific studies questioning the link between music and intelligence, but also because it had lost its novelty.
Reading about the rise and fall of the Mozart effect reminded me of several other frenzies, involving companies rather than children: re-engineering the company, the dash to go online and, now, locating the organisation's core competence and outsourcing the rest.
Re-engineering is particularly apposite because, like the Mozart effect, it began with a founding text. When Michael Hammer and James Champey's Re-engineering the Corporation was published in 1993, it caught US and western business at a low ebb, very scared of what appeared to be frighteningly efficient Japanese companies selling high-quality goods at low prices.
Western companies were desperate to cut costs - and re-engineering appeared to show them how. The Hammer and Champey book, they believed, told them to re-examine every business process as if they were setting it up from scratch. Did they really need all those people, for example? Companies slashed their workforces; middle managers, deemed worthless and superfluous, were dispatched with particular vigour.
In fact, Re-engineering the Corporation was not as simple-minded as that. It advocated looking at each encounter from the customers' point of view and designing processes to ensure they were best served. This might well have involved merging departments that were previously separate, but it required taking employees' abilities more, rather than less, seriously. The book advocated giving workers more authority and autonomy and even involving trade unions in the process.
All that was drowned out in the stampede to downsize. When it was over, companies were left to rue the experience and expertise they had lost. All the factors that lay behind the Mozart effect were there: anxiety, weakness and misinterpretation of the original writing.
The dotcom madness and outsourcing did not start with single texts, but they showed many of the same characteristics. With the rise of the internet, many established companies were panicked into believing they were about to be destroyed by a spotty youth operating from a garage.
The outsourcing craze has at its source the foreigners westerners fear in the way they once did the Japanese: the Indians and, especially, the Chinese.
Of course, there is an Indian and Chinese challenge - and opportunity. These are potentially huge markets that are just beginning to open up. In the same way, the internet was extremely important - it was just not very clear at the time why that was.
But there is more than one method to deal with any new situation. When everyone believes they have found the way to do it, there is a good chance that everyone is wrong.