Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 19

I have had Matt May's new book, The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meanningful Change, sitting on my desk for a few weeks, and I finally picked-up. Wow. I read it from cover to cover this morning. It is sort of a business book, sort of a change book, and sort of a self-help book... it defies classification in some ways, but that is one of the things that makes it so great.  A quick and satisfying read that made me think of ways I might lead a calmer and more constructive life. 

Below is my review on Amazon; also check out this one at Fast Company:

I am one not a Zen or touchy-feely guy, so I began reading this book with considerable skepticism. But once I got past the first page or two, I was hooked, the story is great, it feels authentic and emotionally compelling, and as it unfolds it teaches you how to apply the Zen mindset and concepts to be more effective at what you do, more patient, to avoid pushing too hard, to keep pressing forward during tough times, and always, to chip away at small wins. It is nothing like a typical business book, and as a result, far more fun, satisfying, and useful then most other business books. It is a bit like Randy Komisar's The Monk and the Riddle, which is a great book that sold a lot, but it is even better and I think even more useful for most of us.

Polly LaBarre has been developing, sparking, and spreading ideas about innovative companies and people for about 15 years now, first as one of the most insightful (and downright fun) editors of Fast Company in its early days, then as a TV personality who did cool innovation stuff at CNN, co-author of Mavericks at Work, a great speaker at events of all kinds, and now at her latest adventure, the Management Innovation Exchange (or MIX) -- which she is  leading with Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and David Sims.  I love the MIX Manifesto:

Why Not?

What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.

I've known Polly at least 12 years, as I was involved a bit in the delightful madness of Fast Company conferences and other things in its crazy early years, and she wrote one of the best stories on Weird Ideas That Work. Polly is also, as many of you will recall, the person who I learned the phrase "Jargon Monoxide" from, which I still love. 

As part of the MIX adventure, Polly and I are doing a webinar on bosses on this Thursday, December 9th at 11AM Eastern.  The basic plan is that I will spend about 25 minutes or so presenting core ideas from Good Boss, Bad Boss.  Then Polly and I will spend 15 or 20 minutes have a more rollicking a no doubt less linear conversation about it, and then the last 15 minutes or so will be more general Q&A. Polly is fun and always imaginative; I hope you will join us -- and yes, it is free! Once again, you can sign-up here.

Below you can see an entire article (including a reviewer's comment) that may look fake, but is legitimate. It was published by Dennis Upper in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974, and is funny, true, and inspired -- and a great demonstration that "brevity is the soul of wit."   Academics, especially the editor's of our journals, have a well-deserved reputation for being humorless assholes (note I edited a couple academic journals and include myself in this swipe), so I give these editors a lot of credit.  A big thanks to Thomas Haymore for telling me about this masterpiece and to Professor Brad DeLong for publishing it on his blog a few days ago.

 

I just got an email from Scott Bolin, an MBA student at North Carolina State, who worked with his team of fellow MBA's,  James Wall, My Le, and Bikram Jit Singh, create a funny and well-crafted cartoon called Asshole Bosses and You.  It not only is quite funny, "Team  Synchronicity," as they call themselves, did a great job of summarizing the main ideas in The No Asshole Rule.   I love the creativity, and while it may not be my place, I would call it "A" work if their teacher, Professor Roger Mayer, asked for my advice!  I especially love the way the evil boss looks and sounds.

I just got an email from a writer who was checking to see if I had argued -- in a talk long ago -- that true innovations come from people who ignore customers.  As I told her, I don't recall saying exactly that, but as I argued in Chapters 12 and 13 in Weird Ideas That Work, there are many virtues of ignorance and naivete in the innovation process.  At IDEO and the d.school, we talk about "the mind of the child" (see Diego's great post on this at Metacool).  Also see this old article I wrote that draws on these chapters.

  Indeed, radical innovations do often come from people who don't know what has been or can't be done.  I once had a student who worked as an earlier employee at Invisalign (those clear braces that replace the ugly wire things), and he told me that none of the members of the original design team had any background in traditional braces or dentistry.  Indeed, at least one history of the company suggests the initial idea came from one of the founders, who had no background in dentistry at all:

The company was founded in 1997 by Mr. Zia Chishti and Ms. Kelsey Wirth, who -- as graduate students at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business -- realized the benefit of applying advanced 3-D computer imaging
graphics to the field of orthodontics. Like many breakthrough inventions, the idea for Invisalign® grew from happenstance.Mr. Chishti wore braces as an adult when working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, which was awkward and embarrassing. When his braces were removed he wore a clear plastic retainer. He noticed that when he neglected to wear the retainer for several days his teeth would shift back and upon reinsertion his teeth would shift back to their desired, straightened state. It was the observation that a clear plastic device was capable of moving his own teeth that led to Chishti's conceptualization of a process that became the Invisalign System. A background in computer science gave Chishti the insight that it was possible to design and manufacture an entire series of clear orthodontic devices similar to the retainer he wore, using 3- D computer graphics technology. He and Ms. Wirth started Align Technology in 1997 to realize this vision. And the rest – as they say – is history.

In this vein, Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:

During the early stages of a project, don't study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.


If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it.  Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.


Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you "know" the answer to or you can't resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.


Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved. 


Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.


If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,
If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don't assume they are right especially if they tell you    they are right. 

What do you think?  Do you have more ideas for harnessing innovation?  Do you know of other instructive cases?  When is ignorance dangerous and destructive?

I have been reading through "Ben's Blog," which is written by Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitiz (a firm that just raised 650 million, yikes!)  He wrote a great post awhile back on how the firm evaluates CEOs. Read the whole thing, it is inspired.  I especially love this part, because it is so true and explodes the myth of the all knowing and all powerful CEO:

Courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. In fact, at the time of the decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10% of the information typically present in the ensuing Harvard Business School case study (emphasis added by me).  As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO's most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

This point dovetails well with the quote at the top of Ben's Blog:

I will poke around more; he is a very thoughtful guy. Also, Ben's point reminds of something I heard Andy Grove say several years back along similar lines -- see this HBR post on how a good boss is confident, but not really sure.

Dan's lovely quote is from a story in this morning's New York Times.  It is about how Google has become so big that it has lost its start-up feel and some of its best employees are heading for more exciting places, especially Facebook.  As further evidence of Google's concern about a talent drain, Google gave every employee a 10% (or larger) raise this month.  I agree with the story's premise that Facebook is one of the hottest employers in Silicon Valley, partly because they do give technical folks very cool work (although so does Google) and partly because they are pre-IPO, so there is the lure of a big payday when they go public. 

The challenges of scaling an exciting small company into a big one are not easy (see this great post by venture capitalist on Taking The Mystery Out of Scaling a Company, which I will likely do a longer post on soon).  But I do think that Google has done a pretty good job here; size creates complexity that is unavoidable, but they've done a good job of staying pretty lean and not adding excessive rules and constraints compared to most rapidly growing companies.  But the process whereby people leave a once small company to start their own company or to join a smaller and more exciting one has always been part of the growth cycle in every company, especially in Silicon Valley.  Indeed, during the glory days of Hewlett-Packard, they fueled the growth of Silicon Valley with employees who left to start their own companies (including Steve Wozniak; his Apple PC to them, but they didn't want it).   Although the loss of specific employees was regretable, these same employees helped fuel an ecosystem of innovation that benefits HP to this day -- and the same is true of Google. 

I wonder, what other companies have impressed people for their ability to scale without sclerosis, and which companies are horror stories of red-tape, unnecessary rules, and petty politics, and bulky bureaucracies?

P.S. The large company that has done the most impressive job of scaling (although there are some unattractive features about them) is Wall-Mart.  Their lack of excessive complexity and action orientation is really something.

 
My Sunday New York Times piece on How Bad Apples Infect the Tree was printed with this graphic, which portrays the vile workplace that the star of the story, "Ruth," coped with successfully -- and then escaped.  I like it, as it conveys the way it feels to be in a workplace where assholes are everywhere.  Here are some key posts related to challenge of dealing with vile bosses and workplaces:

1. Check out my tips for dealing with asshole infected workplaces

2. If you want to help determine if you are a certified asshole or not (or someone you work with is or is not), take the ARSE, a 24-item self-exam.  About 250,000 people have completed it.

4. Here is my honor roll of places that have no asshole rules.

5. If you want to determine if you work for a great boss, or a "brasshole," complete the BRASS (Boss Reality Assessment System).

6. Here are two videos of me talking about The No Asshole Rule, the first is a 50Lessons interview and the other is a CNBC Story called The Jerk at Work.

7. Here are two videos about my new book Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The first is a CNN appearance and the other is a speech I gave that summer at an AlwaysOn conference at Stanford.

Please let Work Matters readers know of other resources that you find to be helpful.

 

 

One of the main themes in The No Asshole Rule is that, if you work with a bunch of mean-spirited creeps, it is difficult to avoid catching these "adult cooties."  There are at least two reasons this happens.  The first is that a pile of studies show that emotions and behavior patterns are remarkably contagious -- that without realizing it, we mimic the way that people around us act.  The second reason is self-preservation: If you work with a bunch of nasty creeps who put you down all the time, treat you as if you are invisible, bad-mouth you, and tease you in hostile ways, sometimes the only way to protect yourself (for better or worse) is to return fire.   These points are supported by academic research, especially on emotional contagion.
Yet it is always fascinating to see how this stuff plays out in the real world. I got an intriguing email the other day from a fellow (who had written me a second time) to report a big drop in his ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam) score after leaving an asshole-infested workplace and moving to a civilized one.  Here is his email, with names of companies and people removed:

Hi Bob, I sent you an email several years back (I believe around March 2008) when I left a horribly poisonous company after less than 3 months of employment.

Since then I have started with [an energy company].  Very different environment. It's not Shangri-la but it's definitely a more positive workplace.

When I was working for [the horribly poisonous company ] I had taken the ARSE exam and scored a 12 (after answering honestly). Today, I retook the test (answering honestly again) and scored a 2. I've sent the test to others in my work group and asked them to give me their test scores. The highest score was a 6.

I also find myself much more productive and spend most of my time working on how to achieve the group's goals instead of how to protect myself.

This story also reinforces a point I make over and over again on this blog and  other places that I write and speak: If you are in an asshole-infested work group or organization, the best thing you can do is to get out as fast as you can.  Yes, there are ways to limit the damage, fight back, and to make changes -- but they don't always work, and even when they do, you can suffer a lot of damage in the process.

Note, for readers who may not know, the ARSE, or Asshole Rating Self-Exam, is a 24 item self-test that you can take to determine if you are a certified asshole, a "borderline" case, or not an asshole at all.  Many people also complete with someone else in mind, such as a boss or co-worker.  At last count, it had been completed by just 250,000 people.

P.S. This is a revised version of a post that first appeared here early this year.  I thought it was a good time to reprint it as it is related to the "bad apple" story that was published in Sunday's New York Times.  In particular, this post reinforces  the importance of escaping from a vile workplace.

Since The No Asshole Rule was published in paperback a couple months back, the inflow of asshole stories into my inbox has been on the upswing.  I am getting at least three a day lately, and last week, I got tenin  one day.  I also expect an upswing next week, as I have a piece coming out in The New York Times business section this Sunday called "When Bad Apples Infect The Tree. "  I only share the most striking and instructive of such stories here; I got one Wednesday that certainly qualifies. The woman who wrote me works for a ghuy who clearly is a candidate for bosshole of the year. I am leaving out some parts of the email for length and also to protect her identity.  Consider this excerpt from a woman who finally took a job after searching for over a year:

I was kind of desperate and took this job even though my gut said, "not a good idea."  You should always follow your gut.  I have almost walked out several times.  He lies about my benefits and salary.  He stated one salary and then told me once I started that the salary he quoted included potential bonus.  Of course, there is not going to be any bonus. 

I don't get a lunch hour, and have to work at my desk or he calls me or texts me all the time.  In this year's time I took some time during lunch twice to go to doctor's appointments and he complained that I needed to not go so much as he was feeling taken advantage of.  Of course, his asking me to stop off at the grocery store and buy milk for him and his family and bring it to him (he was working at home) since it was on my way doesn't constitute being taken advantage of. 

Needless to say, he has been a nightmare.  He has even texted me in the middle of the night demanding a report be redone immediately, and I actually did it.  Complete and total asshole.  And he's an asshole in his personal life.  His son had a birthday party and they hired a clown.  Well, he wasn't happy with the clown so he and his wife sued the clown to get their money back.  Seriously, this guy make millions a year and he sues a clown??? 

She added "I've got to get away from asshole.  He's is like a vampire, sucks the joy out of life."  

No kidding. I hope she finds a better job with a better boss as soon as possible.  I was careful to advise her, however, to resist the temptation to storm out, to tell her boss to take this job and shove it, as it is a lot easier to find a new job when you already have one.