Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 17

My attempt to stave off email bankruptcy is not only going pretty well -- I am down to 135 emails to deal with -- I just found a gem from a couple months back that forgot to write about here.  A reader who asked to described as "Carolyn in Austin, Texas" wrote me nice note about The No Asshole Rule and especially emphasized that she liked my assertion in Chapter 1 that "The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. "

Carolyn suggested a second test that I just love.  In fact, let's call it Carolyn's Rule:

You can determine someone's character by how quickly they realize they've made a mistake and how readily they admit it.

Not bad, huh? It makes me think of one colleague I've know from nearly 30 years who has never admitted a mistake -- even in multiple cases where it is clear this person has made big mistakes, has damaged other people, and it would be best for all concerned.  Indeed, as I implied over at HBR, Carolyn's Rule is also a good test of a boss's skill.

As my last post suggests, I am working today to get my in-box in some semblance of order (I am under 200 emails to deal with in my in-box, down from 400 a few hours ago).  I just ran into an email I got about five weeks ago about a CEO who was a certified asshole.  As regular readers of this blog know, one of the studies I love is the  "Cookie Experiment" reported by Dacher Keltner and Deb Gruenfeld.  It showed that giving people a little power over others led them to eat more than their share of cookies, eat with their mouths open, and leave more crumbs. 

In this vein, here a reader's a story about the hissy fit her CEO had because one of his colleagues had eaten the last cookie.

The "Bad Christian" Attack.

This person professed to be an avowed Christian, and was on the board of directors of a major Christian publication.  At times he even resorted to holding prayer meetings in the board room.  One day he went to the executive kitchen to fetch a cookie, only to find out his favorite box of cookies was no longer to be found.  After relentless quizzing of the administrative staff one person indicated they had seen a particular person go into the kitchen.  This person, also an avowed Christian, but one who walked the talk, was singled out for persecution.  He was called into the board room and accused of being a "bad Christian" for eating the last cookie.  Up until that point the executive staff in the "front office" all had rights to use the executive kitchen at their discretion.  Following the cookie incident the executive kitchen was for the exclusive use of the CEO, COO, and vice presidents.

I find this both sad and funny.  If you have any stories about how bosses or other people in power exhibited selfish, pigish, or otherwise weird behavior around food, please share them us.

P.S. Yes, that is a Girl Scout Samoa.  If you are in Northern California, remember that booth sales for Girl Scouts Cookies start today.  See Marina's post.

A couple weeks back, I was listening to Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air interview one of the Twitter founders, Biz Stone.  He mentioned the concept of "email bankruptcy," that sometimes -- just as with having so many debts that you can't pay,  and declaring bankruptcy in hopes of moving forward with a clean slate --sometimes the best thing to do is to alert all the people in your electronic world that you are declaring email bankruptcy and are starting fresh, and to offere some kind of apoligy for getting so far behind.   Apparently this notion of email bankrputcy has been around for awhile (see here and here).  Author Sherry Trukle joked that a book she is working on would have taken half the time if she didn't have email and that she had some 2500 unanswered emails. 

The concept of email bankruptcy really hit home to me because my situation is similar to what Sherry Turkle describes. And it is no joke to me.   I am struggling to make progress on a new book with Huggy Rao on scaling (see this little story in HBR), but as of early last week I had about 3000 unanswered emails in my inbox.  Note that I feel great obligation to answer all of them, especially emails from readers.  But so many have been coming in that I fell way behind.  And things were even worse when it came to emails about things like administrative chores and expenses.  Well, I have spent much of the past week digging out (two cross-country plane flights with wifi helped a lot) and am down to 400 in my inbox.  But my plans to make serious progress on our book last week are shot and I am worried that the 100 to 200 or so emails a day I get will soon drive me back to the edge of bankruptcy.

I am trying certain strategies.  There are certain kinds of emails I have stopped answering, such as requests to advertise on my blog or people who don't me but are asking for some kind rather extreme favor (It just amazes me how often I get emails from people whom I have never met asking them to endorse their business in some way... last week a publicist sent a choice of three endorsements for her client's company -- note I never met or had heard of the client or company.  I eventually figured out the client was a twitter follower.).  I am also trying to use filters and blocking more aggressively. At the same time, however, I don't want to block-out or ignore all the people who write me about their sometimes heartwarming and sometimes horrible stories.   Clearly, there is a line to walk here. But I am feeling like the temptations of NOW are winning out too often over the more important if less vivid and exciting need to work on stuff that will be done LATER. 

I was thinking -- as I am leave from Stanford this year and have fewer administrative pressures than usual -- about occassionally taking a 72 hour vacation from my email.   Perhaps I will try that next week or the week after.  But I am not sure that will work (check out John Lilly's post on trying to disconnect).  I would love your suggestions here -- what works for you?  Has anyone declared email bankruptcy or taken vacations?  How do you draw the line between emails you ignore versus answer?  

Thanks!

P.S.  Even though it is Saturday morning, when I started this post perhaps 15 minutes ago, there were 398 emails in my inbox (whittled down from about 3000).  Now there are 407. 

Last year, I wrote about the first Bootcamp Bootleg here, a compilation of materials and methods assembled by the team that teaches our introductory course on design thinking at the Stanford d.school, which we call Bootcamp. As with last year's model, you can download the latest version free, courtesy of the d.school.  The team has outdone themselves this year, the content is just awesome -- fun to read, detailed, useful, and great pictures and drawings to guide and inspire anyone who is applying design thinking (from novices to veterans). 

I love the opening paragraph:

Check this out —
It's the d.school bootcamp bootleg.

This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold.

Then the fun begins.  Here is the crisp summary of the d.school philosophy:

Show don't tell.  Focus on human values. Craft clarity. Embrace experimentation. Be mindful of process. Bias toward action. Radical collaboration

Then it goes through the fives "modes" of the design process (By the way, note the term "mode" rather than "step" or stage"  is important here because we never mean to convey that this is a clean and linear process):

Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.

To me,while philosophy and process are important, the real stuff, the material here that really makes the Bootleg so valuable, are the dozens of methods it contains.  These have been tried and fine-tuned for the six or seven years the d.school has been around, and for decades before that at places including IDEO and the Stanford Product Design program.   In d.school speak, these methods help you DO TO THINK.  Here are a few samples, there are many more:

Assume a beginners mindset. Use a camera study. Interview for empathy. Extreme users. Team share and capture. Journey map. Empathy map. Fill-in-the blank character profile. Why-how laddering. Point-of-view want-ad. "How might we" questions. Stoke. Facilitate a brainstorm. Bodystorming. Impose constraints.

Try the Bootleg. You will like most of it -- and will probably get frustrated and fail along the way too. That's part of the process too.  Please let us know what did and did not work for you. Let us know you changed or, as we say "flexed," these methods so they would work for you.  And please let us know other methods you have used, and perhaps invented, to do design thinking

Once again, a big thanks to the team that developed the first cut at the Bootleg last year and the team that cranked0out this lovely revision.

I just started reading Guys new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. I will do a post about its content around the publication date, which is March 11 2011.  But I could not resist putting up the cover, as -- thanks to Guy's doggedness, good taste, and fantastic social network -- the result is one of the most beautiful business book covers I have ever seen.  It would have been aweseome even without that Woz quote, although that quote (especially given the source) is every business book author's dream!

One of the my favorite blogs on the planet is BPS Research,  where folks from the British Psychological Society summarize the latest psychological research -- and do so with delightful charm and accuracy.  I was just visiting (it is a great place to look around) and, as part of just one post, they offer "7 Ways to Be Good."

Check out these links to studies from peer-reviewed journals:

Learn healthier habits
Have an energy drink
Use your inner voice
Practise self control
Clench your muscles
Form if-then plans
Distract yourself

They are all wonderful, but I was especially amused by the experiment showing that students who (after an exam that presumably depleted their glucose levels) had a "high-glucose lemonade" were more likely to offer help to a classmate who was facing eviction and to offer larger donations to charity.  No, it wasn't just because the experimenter gave the students a gift...the students in the control condition (who were less generous) were given a low-glucose lemonade.  Sugar isn't all bad! 

The February edition of Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine has a an article on Good Boss, Bad Boss called Lead the Way. I was both delighted and a bit distrubed to see what a great job they did of capturing the central themes in the book with so few words, and few key pictures.  I wrote all those words and the simple page below captures so much it! Below is a somewhat blurry and small jpeg; click here to see the full pdf, which is more clear.

I was interviewed last week about bosses by the Wall Street Journal's Diana Middleton. Her story "Five Signs You're a Bad Boss" came out today.  The five signs are:

1. Most of your emails are one-word long

2. You rarely talk to your employees face-to-face

3. Your employees are out sick–a lot.

4. Your team's working overtime, but still missing deadlines.

5. You yell.

I was especially taken with point 4 in Diane's list, as it is a sign of bosses who lack both competence and consideration for their people:

New bosses are particularly prone to giving unmanageable deadlines to staffers, says Gini Graham Scott, author of "A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses."

A human resources executive at a New York firm who declined to be named because she's currently looking for a new position, says that she began working 15-hour days after her new boss came on board. Her boss' first order of business: Promising more aggressive deadlines to clients. "She would tell the client, 'We can have this for you in three days,' which was impossible," says this woman.

I have not thought about this one enough, but it really strikes me as diagnostic.  Yes, there are always emergencies that a boss cannot control, but when the boss does not have the skill to prevent such relentless hours from becoming a way of life or the backbone to protect his or people from such exploitation, it is a pretty good sign of a bad boss.

Clearly, this is not as complete or detailed list. Creating one would be impossible in such a short space.  I would also caution that yelling is complicated, and is sometimes a sign of an over-passionate boss that might otherwise be good.  And even the best bosses -- as with all human-beings -- may succeed despite these and other flaws.  Certainly, to pick some famous bosses who were sometimes given to yelling, Vince Lombardi and Steve Jobs certainly both were given to screaming now and then.  I am not defending their actions, but there are times that people with flaws are worth the trouble, especially if they are embedded in teams that can dampen their flaws.

Yesterday, a couple hundred of us gathered at the Stanford d.school to celebrate David Kelley's 60th birthday.  The outpouring of love and affection was something -- the guests included old friends he grew-up with, his family, Stanford colleagues (David is a professor and the main founder of the Stanford d.school), IDEO colleagues (David is co-founder of IDEO, was the first CEO, and the driving force behind the culture), dozens of former students, many of his friends from Silicon Valley businesses, and his friends from the car world (David loves old cars and has a pretty cool collection of old American cars and other cool things like a well-restored and "chopped" Mini and some classic Porsches).  The outpouring of affection was even stronger than it might have been because several years back David was diagnosed with cancer, and he seems to have beat it (his doctor was there, who David thanked for saving his life).

David is one of the inspiring and wise people I've ever met (I once tried to write a book about him and IDEO called The Attitude of Wisdom... I have written about wisdom in subsequent books, but I still regret not finishing that book.)  One key to David's success is that, before he starts talking to the person in front of him, he actually listens carefully and takes in their body language before offering a comment or opinion -- it is a rare talent, and one of many signs of his magnificent empathy. (Here is a recent Fast Company article that covers David and some of his latest accomplishments.)

I could tell a a hundred stories about David, and as part of celebrating his 60th, perhaps I will write out a few more.  But one that has been top of mind lately is his "Love and Money" drawing (he did the one above for Good Boss, Bad Boss, but it remains unchanged over the years).  One of the first times I talked to David in depth, at some point in the early 1990s, as I was asking him about his management philosophy, he drew-out the graphic above and explained that, to run a business, you need to make money, but you also need to retain the talents and motivation of great people.  Yes, he said there are times when love and money go together, but there are always stretches of time when a boss needs to ask people to do things they don't want to do and don't love to make the necessary money required to keep the doors open.  But the smart boss realizes that he or she damn well build up some love points in advance to burn when some unpleasant money tasks are required.  

This simple idea is strikingly similar to one of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss -- albeit one derived from research and theory on leaders rather than David's pencil.  As I argue in the book, the best bosses realize that one of the balancing acts that they walk is between pressing people to perform well for the collective good and treating them with respect, dignity, and injecting joy into their days at work.   This is why I came close to calling Good Boss, Bad Boss "Top Dog on a Tightrope" as the best bosses carry-off this daily balancing act in a masterful way. 

This is developed on Good Boss, Bad Boss in some detail.  Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1 that focuses on my conversation with David about love and money (the same one where he drew the above picture; the original is in my Stanford office):

David sees his job, or the job of any boss, as enabling people to experience dignity and joy as they travel through their work days (the love part, what I call humanity) AND to do work that keeps the lights on and provides them with fair pay, health care, and other necessities (the money part, what I call performance).  David says that, although sometimes you can accomplish both at once, there are always stretches when people must do things they don't love to bring in money.  David explains that great bosses work to strike a balance between love and money over time, for example, by making sure that a designer who has worked on a dull, frustrating, and lucrative project gets to choose an inspiring if less profitable project the next time.

Managers at IDEO don't accomplish this balancing act just through bigger moves like project assignments.  They do it in little ways too: When designers have been working like dogs and are tired, grumpy, and starting to bicker, managers find little ways to slow things down, have some fun, and promote civility and mutual respect.  This might happen by making sure that a designer who has been grinding away designing a medical device can get a refreshing break by going to a brainstorming session, for example, on how to improve the airport security experience, get doctors to wash their hands, or design new playing pieces for the Monopoly board game. Managers at IDEO also provide breaks by shooting darts from Nerf guns or launching rubber darts called Finger Blasters at their people – which often degenerate into a full-scale 15 minute battles.  Such adolescent antics won't work in every workplace.  But when the performance pressure starts heating-up and things are on the verge of turning ugly, skilled bosses everywhere find ways to give people a break, or tell a joke, or just make a warm gesture to place more weight on the "humanity" side of the scale.  As David put it, "foam darts aren't for everybody, but there is always some form of play in every culture that allows people to let off steam."

Happy Birthday David.  As the  Neil Young song about his old car goes,  "Long May You Run."

  

Thanks to Jason, I learned of some weird but unsurprising research that brings together the bad apple studies described in Good Boss, Bad Boss and work on emotional contagion in The No Asshole Rule.  A five-year study led by Mississippi State University Associate Professor Rhonda Vann found that cows that were "very aggressive, excitable, and out of control" not only got sick more often, weighed less, and wrecked farm equipment, these bad things "rub-off" on the rest of the herd.   Here is the story from Delta Farm Press, called "Calm Cattle More Valuable."  Of course, human groups are different from farm animals in many ways, but the parallel between this and Will Felps' research on bad apples, and related work on "bad is stronger than good"  is striking (See this HBR post).