One obvious way in which people around the world vary is in terms of language. In fact, there are some 7,000 distinct languages spoken on the planet today, though fewer than 100 have more than 10 million speakers. And many languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Obviously, being able to communicate is important to team success in achieving collective goals through coordinated efforts. So sharing a common language is crucial. Even if teams speak the same language as people who are not members of the team, like a company in America where everyone speaks English. Nevertheless, the team often develops recognizable ways of speaking. I've been impressed when working with individual corporations that I often at first can't follow the details of internal conversations. There may be acronyms with which I'm unfamiliar, like AOB, meaning at or better, on Wall Street Banks. Individuals, places, and operations may be referred to by unfamiliar terms. And certain phrases with otherwise obscure meaning might frequently pop up. An anthropologist studying the Motorola corporation back in the 1980s and 90s, heard people in meetings regularly utter the phrase, the dog will eat it. Motorola was, of course, a pioneer in the cell phone industry. It was a tech company and then largely run by technical people. The anthropologist wondered at the meaning of the phrase, but it eventually became clear to her what it meant. We technical people will come up with clever inventions, and no matter what it is, the people will buy it. Hence, the dog will eat it. Over time, however, Motorola began to lose market share. And so, like their competitors, they started paying more attention to what their customers actually wanted in the way of technology. At General Motors Company not many years ago, and maybe still today, executives were regularly saying that automobile makers ought to keep their brands inside their swim lanes, quote unquote. That was an expression they had borrowed from the dot com entrepreneurs of the 1990s. The jargon expressed the idea that GM's four major brands should be kept very distinct. The Chicago Cubs are a baseball team. If we think of the broader team as including their fans and supporters, it is evident that they have a recognizable way of speaking. For example, though the Cubs have not won a World Series in nearly a century, since 1908, they have die hard fans known as the bleacher bums. The Cubs are also known among fans as the North Siders because of the location of their playing field on the north side of Chicago. A particular player and later coach, Don Zimmerman, became known as the Gerbil, presumably because of his pronounced cheeks, which you can see perhaps in these photos, and so forth. You may not normally think of fans as part of the team in the case of sports, but in many ways they actually are. Recall our earlier definition of a team. We said it was a group of individuals who had to work together, or cooperate, to accomplish some collective task. The fans are arguably essential to the accomplishment of a team's success in sports. The viewership is, of course, ultimately what supports the team. Without fans, there would be no team. But their cheering also contributes to the drive players have out on the field to win. So it is natural in many ways that fans, together with players of specific teams, develop a distinctive habitus, including the words and phrases they know and use. But also other aspects of habitus like the clothes they wear. Sporting team logos, or the names of specific players or player numbers on their clothing, and so forth. We can regard the team habitus as contributing to the motivational basis for team success. Nor is the habitus even of many modern business corporations confined to the employees of the corporation. These days, numerous businesses have recognized the importance of their brands. So that brand loyalists, who are like a sports team's fans, contribute to the success of corporations. One of the obvious examples is Apple Computer, known today simply as Apple. It established a brand following that purchased their products but also promoted them, especially through the Mac versus PC ad wars. In the second unit of this course, you will learn more about the range of phenomena that go to make up the habitus of team culture. But before we get there, we'll need to talk more about the difference between what words mean within the team context and the habitus of a team as embodied dispositions. This is the subject of our next video, the difference between what we say and what we do.
