Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 20

I was Reading through notes I took about six months ago during a talk given by a CEO of a large company, who was fired by his board because his firm had serious performance problems -- and was taking great risks -- that he never learned about until it was too late, and the firm was in deep trouble.  I can't identify him, but as I have warned here, at HBR,and in Good Boss, Bad Boss, every boss risks living in a fool's paradise -- and the more power the boss wields over others, the greater the risk.

Here is his comment:

"You desperately need a candid adviser.  When you become CEO, you get a lot of bullshit.  You don't information so much as you get sales pitches.  You're alone in the ring."

This guy learned the hard way; I offer it so others can avoid the pain and obvious embarrassment he felt.  He looked like wounded animal during this talk, but I had to give him credit for being honest. 

The post I did yesterday about the All-Star Certified Asshole, Steve Raucci, reminded me of stuff I had written on the virtues of assholes, which is the focus of Chapter 6 of The No Asshole Rule.  I thought a bit of this material might be fun and perhaps instructive for those of you who went to leave a trail of victims in your wake, while using your nasty ways to get ahead in the local pecking order.  That is what Mr. Raucci did for decades;  although please keep in  mind that he will be at least 84 years old when he gets out of prison, if he lives that long.  Here is a list from Chapter 6 of NAR (which is Jeff Pfeffer's favorite chapter in the book, although it isn't mine):

Do You Want to Be an Effective Asshole?

Key Lessons

 1. Expressing anger, even nastiness, can be an effective method for grabbing and keeping power.  Climb to the top of the heap by elbowing your "colleagues" out of the way by expressing anger rather than sadness, or perfecting a "general's face" like George S. Patton.

2. Nastiness and intimidation are especially effective for vanquishing competitors.  Follow in the footsteps of baseball legend Ty Cobb, and succeed by snarling at, bullying, putting-down, threatening, and psyching-out your opponents. 

3. If you demean your people to motivate them, alternate it with (at least occasional) encouragement and praise.  Alternate the "carrot" and the "stick," the contrast between the two makes your wrath seem harsher and your occasional kindnesses seem even sweeter.

4. Create a "toxic tandem."  If you are nasty, team up with someone who can calm people down, clean-up your mess, and who will extract favors and extra work from people because they are so grateful to the "good cop."  If you are "too nice," you might "rent-a-jerk," perhaps a consultant, a manager from temporary staffing firm, or lawyer.

 5. Being all asshole, all the time, won't work. Effective assholes have the ability to release their venom at just the right moment, and turn it off when just enough destruction or humiliation has been inflicted on their victim.

A final reminder for readers who are dreaming of putting these principles to work.  Here is how I end Chapter 6:

'In closing, I want to make my personal beliefs crystal clear. Even if there were no performance advantages to barring, expelling, and reforming nasty and demeaning people, I'd still want organizations to enforce no asshole rules.  This book isn't simply meant to be an objective summary of theory and research about the ways that assholes undermine organizational effectiveness.  I wrote it because my life and the lives of the people I care about are too short and too precious to spend our days surrounded by jerks.        

And, despite my failures in this regard, I feel obligated to avoid inflicting my "inner jerk" on others.  I wonder why so many assholes completely miss the fact that all we have on this Earth is the days of our lives, and for many of us, huge portions of our lives are spent doing our jobs, interacting with other people.  Steve Jobs is famous for saying that the "journey is the reward," but for my tastes, as much as I admire his accomplishments, it appears that he has missed the point. We all die in the end, and despite whatever "rational" virtues assholes may enjoy, I prefer to avoid spending my days working with mean-spirited jerks and will continue to question why so many of us tolerate, justify, and glorify so much demeaning behavior from so many people.'

As regular readers of Work Matters know, since I published The No Asshole Rule in 2007 (or really, since I published a short essay on the rule  in Harvard Business Review in 2004) I have since been deluged with stories about certified assholes of every stripe. An astounding story about a candidate for the worst of the worst, the winner of this race to the bottom, perhaps the worst bosshole I have ever heard about, was played on This American Life a couple weeks ago.  It is called "Petty Tyrant,"and you can listen to it for free here. 

The story is about Steve Raucci, who was in charge of the the maintains department at the school system in Schenectady, New York.  It sounds like an innocent and valuable position, but the pattern of his behavior was just outrageous. He was a masterful bully, doing everything from forcing his employees to socialize with him, to making constant and open threats, to forcing them to campaign for members of the school board he supported (indeed, it appears that most of the members of the school board were beholden to him), to firing and demoting people who were disloyal, to relentless taunting that ranged from sliding burning papers in a bathroom stall were an employee sat to outrageous sexual harassment. 

Listen to the story if you want to hear the nuances, I can't do them justice here.  But this case is intriguing because, in many ways, Steve Raucci demonstrates the hallmarks of what might be called, for lack of a better term, an effective asshole.  He did a masterful job of "managing up" so that he had very powerful political allies in the administration and the school board, and was arguably the most powerful person in the school system.  He also did a pretty good job of running the department so that they did their job well.  And he used heavy handed tactics to force his employees to be loyal to him -- or else.   Yet, it still stuns me to discover how these power strategies provided cover so that he could get away with consistently outrageous behavior.  

Eventually, Mr. Raucci was sentenced to 23 years to life, "convicted on 18 of 22 counts against him for intimidating co-workers and perceived enemies with explosives at the school and union where he worked."  The picture above shows him at his sentencing hearing last May.  My only quarrel with the story on This American Life is that the term "petty tyrant" does not quite capture his evil nature.

I was exchanging emails the other day with Dave Ulrich, my co-author on Asian Leadership, and asked him what he was working on.  He answered that he was pretty interested in the link between CEO actions and stock price.  Dave's interest reminded me and delightful and imaginative 2004 study of such links by Frank Flynn (co-author of the narcissism study I discussed last week) and Barry Staw.  It is called Lend Me Your Wallets: The Effect of Charismatic Leadership on External Support for an Organization.  Flynn and Staw did two studies on charisma in this paper, which they defined as follows:

Such individuals exude confidence, dominance, a sense of purpose, and the ability to articulate a vision for followers
to grasp (House, 1977; Conger, 1991). Charismatic leaders are able to communicate this vision to their followers, and by the force of their own excitement and enthusiasm, induce their followers to support this vision (Yukl and Van Fleet, 1992). In this sense, charismatic leaders are said to have remarkable influence over subordinates who internalize the leader's vision of what can be achieved through collective effort (Bass, 1985).

The first was a field study, where they compared 46 firms led by CEOs who were identified identified as charismatic (a total of 44 CEOs.. it appears two were used twice) who led Fortune 500 firms between 1985 and 1994.  They found that, independently of objective financial information, firms led by charismatic CEOs enjoyed higher stock prices.  Moreover, this effect was magnified during difficult financial conditions -- during economic downturns, charismatic CEOs had an even stronger effect on stock price. (Perhaps when people are under duress, they especially gravitate to the hope and energy that such leaders exude).

This first study was used to set the stage for a second study using Steve Jobs. Note that although this study was published in 2004, the data collection was actually done years earlier (things move slow in academia), in late 1998, barely a year after Jobs had returned to Apple.  There was a lot of hype and hope about Jobs, but he was not seen as the magical CEO is he now.  This research was done  in the very early and most uncertain days of the turnaround. 

The set-up of the study was as follows (I am simplifying): 150 students were asked to imagine they had inherited $10,000 from a relative and were asked to alocate the money among three investment options: an indexed mutual fund, a money market certificate, or Apple stock.  All were shown objective fiancial information about Apple's recent performance (and the performance of money markets and mutual funds too). Half were given information suggesting that Apple's prospects for a turnaround were bright and half were given information that Apple's prospects for a turnaround were dim.  Then came the big manipulation: Half were shown a videotape of Jobs doing a 20 minute presentation at a trade show (I am pretty sure I loaned this to them for the experiment, Jobs talks about all the ways things are getting better and is his usual compelling self) and half did not see the video. 

The results were pretty interesting.  The subjects who saw the film rated Jobs as considerably more charismatic than those who did not. And those who saw the film were willing to invest more money in Apple than those who did not. This effect was driven primarily by people who were presented negative predictions about Apple's future. Those who did not see Jobs invested an average of $1329 but those who saw Jobs invested an average of $3327 (compared to a $400 bump for those who saw the film but were presented information suggesting that Apple's future was bright).

This study is imperfect, as all studies are. But I find it fun, imaginative, and intriguing.  For starters, it shows both the dangers of charismatic leaders -- because they can distract people from the facts or at least color the ways those facts are construed (especially when fear and pessimism are in the air).  This research also shows how charismatic leaders have the potential to start a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.  And in the specific case of Jobs, it is intriguing to think about the astounding long-term success of Apple under his leadership the last 13 years or so, especially in light of Jim Collins dim view of charisma in both Built to Last and Good to Great.  I have complained about Collins' mediocre and over-hyped methodology before (see here and here) and the fact that he elected to ignore literally hundreds of past studies (including many studies on charisma and performance) and to simply rely on two very small samples to make sweeping claims.  As I have also said before, I find his books to be compelling in terms of the writing and despite this specific complaint about charisma, I generally agree with his claims and  could point to many other studies that support them.

What do you think?  Is Jobs' charisma an important part of the Apple turnaround?  And what are the virtues and dangers of charismatic leaders?

So much for my well-placed well sources.  You may call that  I wrote a post last week asking if it was true that GE blocks Work Matters. I got message from Mark Guthrie, who serves as Global Personnel Realtions Manager at GE.  Mark reports:

FYI:  I am a colleague of Max Brown ... last night over dinner he mentioned you were looking for confirmation regarding internal-to-GE access to your website / blog.  Max forwarded me your link and I was granted immediate access via the GE server. I used the "email me" tab to shoot you this note.  I hope this helps.

Mark, thanks for clearing this up, and Max, thanks for your help.

P.S. I try to check my facts when I post things on this blog, but this is a reminder not to believe everything I write here.  And it is a reminder to me that staying paranoid, and even gewtting more paranoid, about fact-checking is wise.

Last March, I joined Dave Ulrich in Singapore to lead an "executive roundtable" with the CEOs and heads of human resources from seven companies, which was convened by Singapore's Ministry of Manpower. The participants included executives from DBS (a bank),  Far East Organization (a real estate company), Procter & Gamble, MediCorp (Singapore's leading media company, they own everything from newspapers to TV stations), General Electric,  IDEO, and IBM.  We were also joined by three thought leaders: Debashis Chatterjee, Michael Jenkins, and Howard Thomas. 

We had two days of intense conversation about the challenges of leading large companies, with a particular focus on the challenges faced in Asia.  One reason that the conversation was so focused was that those of us at the gathering had committed to produce an edited book, which was to be published by September.  I was of the opinion that this was an impossible task, but Dave Ulrich (a masterful leader) had done it once before, and he assured me it was possible because of the great managerial skill of the folks at the Ministry of Manpower.  I was skeptical, and as regular readers of this blog will recall, I was also distracted because I had open heart surgery in April.  Indeed, I tried to resign from the project a couple times, but Dave, and the amazing Arina Koh and Serene Teh from the Ministry (to whom we dedicated the book) talked me off the ledge. 

To my amazement, not only did we finish this edited volume on time, I think it makes a nice contribution. It is called Asian Leadership: What Works and it is for sale at Amazon in the states.  It isn't destined to change the world, but it does have some nice cases and commentaries.  One of my favorite pieces is "Banking the Asian Way" by DBS CEO Piyush Gupta, which describes the determination of one DBS to meet with an important customer in the middle of a cyclone. I also was quite taken with the pieces by Stuart Dean of GE and Cordelia Chung of IBM on the extreme lengths that these two huge firms go through to develop and assess leaders -- and with how both showed that being a solo superstar doesn't cut it in either place.

The thought leaders also wrote some lovely pieces too; for example, Michael Jenkins' piece on the company vs. national culture was intriguing, especially because we had a lengthy conversation during the gathering where most executives argued that company culture was more important for success than national culture. I was also taken Debashis Chatterjee's piece on change, as he made a strong case that, especially in Asian settings, imagination and taking a long-term time perspective were ore important for success than doing careful analysis and choosing "the best" decision in many cases.

I could go on and on, as the book contains 30 short pieces organized around 8 themes:

1. Creating Customer-centric actions

2. Implementing Strategy

3. Getting Past the Past

4. Governing Through Decision-Making

5. Inspiring Collective Meaning

6. Capitalizing on Capability

7. Developing Careers

8. Generating Leaders

Even after doing this book, I am far from an expert on Asian leadership, but I did learn a bit more about this vexing topic from the process and it also helped me understand a bit more about what it takes to be a good boss in any culture. I also enjoyed working with Dave Ulrich a great deal, as we have complementary skills; he is much better at organizing ideas than I am and is skilled at dealing with my diverse and often disconnected thoughts.  Dave was also enormously supportive of my personal challenges during the production of the book, which I greatly appreciated.

I was invited to be part of this cool online event and I am most impressed with the quality of the content and speakers.  It was originally scheduled to run just two days, but it has been  so successful that it has been extended until November 30th.  Check it out here: You need to register, but it is free.  There are about 30 short talks (6 to 20 minutes) from thought leaders including Robert Cialdini, Charlene Li, Tim Sanders, Jim Kouzes, Marshall Goldmith, Stan Slap, and on and on.  The diversity and quality are pretty impressive.  I hope you enjoy it.

P.S. I contributed my AlwaysOn keynote, which you can also see here.

This quote is from an email I got from the head of a "conflict resolution" office at a large organization. She was talking about The No Asshole Rule.  I wonder if the combination of the book and valium would be especially effective under some conditions!

A trio of researchers -- Jack Goncalo and Sharon Kim of Cornell University and Frank Flynn of Stanford -- have done a pair of experiments on narcissism and creativity (see the description here) that are fascinating and have some disturbing implications.  In both studies, they used a questionnaire called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (see the long version of it here and test yourself) to assess if people suffered -- or perhaps enjoyed -- this characteristic. 

In the first study, students were placed in pairs and asked to pitch an ideas to their partner for a movie concept. The results: "the ideas impressed the person evaluating the pitch roughly 50% more than did those from the least narcissistic pitchers."  BUT the interesting twist was when these same ideas were evaluated by two independent observers who only saw the ideas on paper, but did not see the pitches:  "Having only seen the movie pitches in written form, they found the narcissists' ideas to be about as creative as proposals from non-narcissists. The difference, the researchers say, was in the pitch itself: narcissists were more enthusiastic, witty, and charming—all traits, according to past research, that people associate with creativity."

In other words, the live pitches led people to make an attribution error, to confuse stereotypical features of creative people with creative ideas. (This explains, by the way, why creative people who come in bodies that can't pitch need someone on their team to sell their ideas: Steve Wozniak would not have succeeded without Steve Jobs' pizazz.)

The second study bugs me, and even though I don't like it, I am trying to resist rejecting it because it was done quite well.  "The researchers composed 4 person teams of various numbers of narcissists: asked them to draw up proposals to improve the performance of real businesses and other organizations. Teams made up of three or four narcissists came up with incremental proposals and failed to generate and discuss many ideas, but so did teams with no narcissists. The teams that generated the most ideas were half narcissist."  Senior author Jack Goncalo speculated that this finding may have occurred because: "narcissists can help get ideas on the table. If there are too many of them, however, there may be too many egos in the room, preventing anything from getting done."

As I said, I am not especially happy about the findings of this study, in part, because even if these findings do generalize to the real world, narcissists do so much damage that they still may not be worth the trouble.  On the other hand, this research is consistent with more applied and qualitative writings by Michael Maccoby (see this HBR article) that suggest narcissists are high magnitude people, with strong pros and cons.  Maccoby summarized this perspective brillantly:

Leaders such as Jack Welch or George Soros are examples of productive narcissists. They are gifted and creative strategists who see the big picture and find meaning in the risky proposition of changing the world and leaving behind a legacy. Indeed, one reason we look to productive narcissists in times of great transition is that they have the audacity to push through the massive transformations that society periodically undertakes. Productive narcissists are not only risk takers willing to get the job done but also charmers who can convert the masses with their rhetoric. The danger is that narcissism can turn unproductive when, lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers. They nurture grand schemes and harbor the illusion that only circumstances or enemies block their success. This tendency toward grandiosity and distrust is the Achilles' heel of narcissism. Because of it, even brilliant narcissists can come under suspicion for self–involvement, unpredictability and—in extreme cases—paranoia.

I'd love your reaction to this research and more generally to the notion that -- contrary to my biases -- that narcissists may at times may be worth the trouble!

A well-placed source informed me that this blog is blocked by GE, that you can't access it through their network.  If anyone can confirm this rumor, I would be curious to know why it is so.  This blog does contain swearwords (although, if reports are true, Jack Welch would not be shocked by such language), but for the most part I believe the ideas are constructive and I also don't recall saying anything nasty about GE.  Also, if this blog is blocked any other places, I would be curious to know that as well, as this is the first instance I have ever heard of it being blocked and their may be others.

Also, a message to whomever makes the decision at GE: If the rumor is true, please unblock my site!