Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 23

That is the title of an interview that Leigh Buchanan did with me on Good Boss, Bad Boss, which just appeared in the October INC. I have know Leigh for some years, since she was at Harvard Business Review. She is a great writer and editor.  Check out this piece she did about two entrepreneurs who spent five years building "eco adventure lodge" called Tranquilo Bay in the rain forest in Panama.   Leigh also did one of the best, and probably the funniest, interview about The No Asshole Rule, which was called "The Bully Rule Book." 

The new interview similarly reflects Leigh's great skill at taking my disorganized babbling and making me sound coherent.  Here is a taste of the interview, two of the questions and answers:

Is it harder for bosses whose reports range from the highest- to the lowest-level employees?

It is harder. Because the people you oversee will have different motivations. With all due respect, this is where Jim Collins
is full of shit. I have a friend whose family bought a chain of movie
theaters. Maybe all that get-the-right-people-on-the-bus stuff applies
to the managers of those multiplexes. But a couple levels down, you're
dealing with teenagers who are going to be in the job for a year or
less. My friend said there are four things you want those people to do:
show up to work, look decent, not make out or get stoned while they're
on the job, and not steal. If you can find people like that, you have a
successful business.

Work may be the most important thing in your value system, but that
may not be true for those around you. Especially if you have all the
equity, and to the people around you, it is just a job.

Also, Leigh ended the interview with a pretty funny twist... I guess I was saying the s-word a lot during this intervew:

So can I count on you to write a blurb for my forthcoming book, High-Performance Teaming for Douche Bags?

Sure. I can do it now. "This is good shit."

You can read the rest here; it provides a pretty good summary of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss -- not just the lessons from nightmare bosses:

P.S. A couple of other media things have hit including this short interview in Newsweek, which apparently accompanies a gallery of CEOs Behaving Badly.  Also this nice review of Good Boss, Bad Boss just appeared in Risk Management.  These are also nice, but Leigh's interview is the most fun and goes into the most depth.

That is the title of an interview that Leigh Buchanan did with me on Good Boss, Bad Boss, which just appeared in the October INC. I have know Leigh for some years, since she was at Harvard Business Review. She is a great writer and editor.  Check out this piece she did about two entrepreneurs who spent five years building "eco adventure lodge" called Tranquilo Bay in the rain forest in Panama.   Leigh also did one of the best, and probably the funniest, interview about The No Asshole Rule, which was called "The Bully Rule Book." 

The new interview similarly reflects Leigh's great skill at taking my disorganized babbling and making me sound coherent.  Here is a taste of the interview, two of the questions and answers:

Is it harder for bosses whose reports range from the highest- to the lowest-level employees?

It is harder. Because the people you oversee will have different motivations. With all due respect, this is where Jim Collins
is full of shit. I have a friend whose family bought a chain of movie
theaters. Maybe all that get-the-right-people-on-the-bus stuff applies
to the managers of those multiplexes. But a couple levels down, you're
dealing with teenagers who are going to be in the job for a year or
less. My friend said there are four things you want those people to do:
show up to work, look decent, not make out or get stoned while they're
on the job, and not steal. If you can find people like that, you have a
successful business.

Work may be the most important thing in your value system, but that
may not be true for those around you. Especially if you have all the
equity, and to the people around you, it is just a job.

Also, Leigh ended the interview with a pretty funny twist... I guess I was saying the s-word a lot during this intervew:

So can I count on you to write a blurb for my forthcoming book, High-Performance Teaming for Douche Bags?

Sure. I can do it now. "This is good shit."

You can read the rest here; it provides a pretty good summary of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss -- not just the lessons from nightmare bosses:

P.S. A couple of other media things have hit including this short interview in Newsweek, which apparently accompanies a gallery of CEOs Behaving Badly.  Also this nice review of Good Boss, Bad Boss just appeared in Risk Management.  These are also nice, but Leigh's interview is the most fun and goes into the most depth.

The Financial Times is a UK based business paper, but is also widely read in the U.S.  I wrote a piece for them awhile back on "Separating the Best CEOs from the Dolts" and they just came out with a positive, but classically "cheeky" English review by Peter Whitehead. My reaction is that "I wish I could write like that," but I think I was raised in the wrong country!  It is headlined "A timely guide to being a better manager" and here is how it ends:

Having made the case repeatedly that managers need to
consider others in everything they do, Sutton's perhaps counter-intuitive
conclusion is that they have to accept the role is all about themselves: their
own behaviour is infectious and will be copied; everything they do will be
watched and noted.

Is this good advice? The world's worst boss, David Brent
of The Office TV comedy series (renamed Michael Scott in the US series)
believes exactly that, with his constant "look at me" antics. But he is utterly
lacking in common sense and compassion. So perhaps the best advice would be
that anyone without these traits should please do everyone a favour and steer
clear of management. 

I confess that I sometimes react to reviews -- even positive ones -- by whining "the reviewer doesn't quite get it." Mr. Whitehead clearly did, which means he read the book carefully.

P.S. An interview with me about the book just came out at The Invisible Hand if you are interested.

I am writing this from Seat 8D on an Alaskan Airlines flight as I am giving an internal talk today at Amazon, which they call a "fishbowl."  It should be fun.  I also wanted people to know that I am giving three local talks in the bay area that are open to the public this week.  One is Thursday the 30th, which I am giving a Silicon Valley Commonwealth Club talk, but unfortunately, that is sold out.  I am also giving a talk at Xerox PARC that evening, which is free. Go here for details.  Finally, I am giving a talk at 12:50 on October 1 in a speaker's series at Stanford ran by some folks in the Computer Science Department that is also open to the public -- go here for details. I hope to see you at one of these talks. I have been having a lot of fun discussing these ideas with people who work in diverse jobs and industries.

I have no idea what is says, but looks cool.

Tucker Max has just published Asshole Finish First, as shown above, which reports more of Max's tales of drunkenness, sex, and general obnoxiousness.  It is a sequel to his bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which was made into a film that I did not see (but that got bad reviews).  When I first read Max's proud claim that he was a professional asshole, I did an, as I was -- and remain -- amazed that anyone would be proud to be an asshole because, as I have said here before, if you an asshole and you finish first, your are still an asshole, and therefore a loser in my book.  

The odd thing about writing that post a couple years back was the reaction that I got from Tucker Max and a guy who worked for him.  I describe it in the new chapter in the paperback version of the The No Asshole Rule:

The weirdest email exchange I had about bosses
was with Tucker Max and one of his subordinates.  Max is the author of the
bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.  His next book is called Assholes
Finish First.  Max's website says:

My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole.I get excessively drunk
at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the
consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than
is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.

When
I wrote on my blog that Max "appears to be a professional asshole," he wrote me
several friendly notes and explained that he really wasn't an asshole as I
define it. He further claimed "In five years, no more than ten, you are going
to do a profile of me and declare that I am a model boss, a CEO that all bosses
should base themselves on in some form or other." The boss theme also came up
when one his underlings wrote to say that Max has "been a mentor to me and I
don't think ever violated that trust by being an asshole."  So, even a guy
who has made a ton of money being what I would call a professional asshole
denies he is a certified asshole by the standards here -- and he has at least
one very loyal follower who admires Max because he has never acted like an
asshole boss!  

Pretty weird, huh?  Tucker, I am sorry, but I don't think I am ready yet to hold you up as a great human-being of any kind -- but I guess you have another seven years to prove me wrong!

It is mighty easy to focus on how much better the world's bosses could be, and on the plight of all the unhappy workers out there who work for lousy ones.

And it's not necessarily a bad thing to focus on that. We know that in organizations, "bad apples" do spoil bunches, and bad experiences leave deeper impressions than good ones. This is why, in Good Boss, Bad Boss,
I emphasize that the first order of business must be to get rid of or
reform any supervisors who take a toll on employee well-being, dignity,
commitment, and performance. Moreover, there is evidence that plenty of
bosses are failing, in these tough times, to make work a joy. A survey early this year
of a good representative sample of American workers found that only 45%
of them were satisfied with their jobs. That marked a record low in the
22 years the Conference Board has been asking. (Contrast it with 49% in
2008 and 61% in 1987.) Only 51% of them were satisfied with their
bosses (down from 55% in 2008 and 60% in 1987).

But other evidence paints a less gloomy picture. For example, a recent poll [pdf]
by StrategyOne of over 500 American workers finds that over 80% of
employees feel respected by their supervisors and believe their
supervisors value their work. And I just heard from a Danish journalist
about an ongoing effort by staffing firm Randstad to index satisfaction and other work-related attitudes and behavior across 26 countries. While Japan, according to it,
has the lowest satisfaction, with only 41% of its workers calling
themselves either very satisfied or satisfied with their employer,
Denmark tops the charts at 83%. (Note that there is other research that
shows the Danes are the happiest people
in the world.) US workers, while not as satisfied as their near
neighbors the Canadians (78%) still came in at 70%. Worldwide, some 68%
of employees are satisfied with their employer. (I realize this does not
necessarily mean they are satisfied with their bosses. The old saw that people leave bosses, not companies, is supported by a lot of research.)

Even when it comes to one of my favorite sins to preach against — the presence of jerks in management ranks (it's why I've unfortunately been referred to as "the asshole guy"), evidence offers a bright side. The excellent 2010 Zogby/Workplace Bullying Institute study showed
that although 34.5% of respondents had experienced workplace bullying
at some point in their career, fewer than 9% were currently experiencing
it — a drop from the nearly 13% who reported being bullied in 2007.
Bosses were meting out much of that abuse but not all of it. Most
interesting to me is that half the sample (50%) reported they had never
been bullied or even seen others bullied in their workplaces.

Clearly, in light of all this research, you can see the glass as half
full or half empty. But I have done much of my writing in the
half-empty mode, critiquing bad bosses. In fact, I am even now drawing
up my list of the "Top 11 Clueless, Comedic, and Cruel Bosses" based on
the striking and sometimes disgusting examples that readers have
provided here.

I think it is important to focus on the good as well. As we've seen,
even the most pessimistic evidence suggests that most bosses are
managing to do a decent job. And some go much further than that.

So let's take a moment to thank all the great bosses of the world. I would start with one of my own, Jim Plummer, the Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering. (If you want to know why I am so devoted to Jim, see Chapter 3 of Good Boss, Bad Boss.)
Other bosses I've seen in action and singled out for praise have
included Bonny Simi of JetBlue, David Kelley of IDEO, AG Lafley of
P&G, Joel Podolny (now at Apple, but he was a great Associate Dean),
Brad Bird of Pixar, Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey, and Whitney Mortimer of
IDEO.

Who are your favorites? In the spirit of this "glass half full" post,
let's use the comments section here to compile a serious counterweight
to all the coverage of clueless and crappy managers. Reflect for a
minute on the best boss you've ever had, and then I would love to hear
the story.

P.S. This post first appeared last week at HBR.org under the title "The Not-So-Bad News About Bosses." I also want to give a big thank you to HBR's Julia Kirby for her splendid editing.  

My last post about Boss Poop and the dozens of examples that people posted about Clueless and Comical Bosses (I will post a top 11 list later this week) provide cautionary tales that every person who wields power over others ought to pay attention to -- because that clueless boss could be you.  As I have shown here and in Good Boss, Bad Boss, there is extensive and scary evidence that these stories reflect a tendency for people who oversee others, or who simply feel as if they have power, to ...

I have talked about author Jon Littman here before, as he has written a lot of books.  He co-authored gems including The Art of Innovation, Ten Faces of Innovation, and most recently "I Hate People." Jon has many talents, including writing in-depth stories about performance-enhancing drugs in sports on athletes including Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong.  His current adventure is Snowballnarrative.com where he works with entrepreneurs and corporations to help them with branding and...

When I was in New York last week, I had lunch with U.S. News & World Report writer Rick Newman -- Rick is also the co-author of Firefight: The Battle to Save the Pentagon.  We had a rambling conversation, with about half of it focusing more or less on Good Boss, Bad Boss, and the other half on a collection of diverse topics.  I warned Rick several times "I have already told you 5 of what I know," but he smiled and pushed on, and said he would show me what he wrote when it was all over.  I...