Nice Guys Do Really Finish First

When Ratan Tata left the living world in Oct-24, the world was grieving. The legacy he left behind is that of being a nice leader. Nice, but not a pushover. Remember the early years when Tata took over and fought off stalwarts like Russi Mody (Tata Steel), Darbari Seth (Tata Chemicals), Ajit Kelkar (Indian Hotels) who ran their companies like personal fiefdoms under JRD Tata.

From my professional experiences, I see the difference in my motivation and performance when working with nice managers versus the unpredictable, hard-to-read ones. And, it feels important to revisit this , especially when mercurial leaders like Trump, Elon Musk or Bhavish Aggarwal increasingly dominate the narrative.

So, I go back to Prof Axelrod's mathematical proof that most of us may have studied in our college Game theory lessons. He is an American political scientist, professor at the University of Michigan best known for his work on the evolution of cooperation.

Prof Axelrod was dissatisfied that there was no definite answer to Prisoner's Dilemma, especially when most things in life is not "just one game." So he went about to study what it means when this game was played over and over again with players remembering what others did in previous rounds. And the big question here was: What kind of strategy would do the best (i.e. win) in the long run?

He reached out to about a dozen academics mostly who had actually worked with the prisoner’s dilemma, and said, “How would you play? Assuming that you’re going to have this indefinite future and the other player is pretty smart too, but you’re both selfish.”

And, of all the strategies submitted, the one that repeatedly came up top was called tit-for-tat. The simplest strategy. It cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other guy did on the previous move. It’s reciprocity. It’s saying, “I’m willing to cooperate if you are, and if you’re not, I’m going to defect.” And so, I’m just going to echo what you do and maybe that’ll get you to realize that you’re better off cooperating with me because then I’ll cooperate the next time. And then, we could both do pretty well.

In the end, what emerged from Prof Axelrod's prisoner's dilemma tournament was that it proved Why Being Nice, Forgiving, Provokable and Clear are the Best Strategies for Life. This is a lot like the ancient morality that you find in many cultures around the world.

Recommended watch: What Game Theory Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything