Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 27

Paul Reist, Mehrdad Azim, Patrick Keating and Daphne Chang teamed-up to produce a new Good Boss,Bad Boss interview for the Stanford Graduate School of Business site.  I was most impressed with their commitment to quality, and it was fun to do because Paul asked great questions and Mehrdad did some cool video stuff where he filmed it outside and used a low camera angle.  This video and my recent AlwaysOn keynote provide a pretty good summary of the main ideas in the book.

Good Boss, Bad Boss is officially appearing on September 7th, but it is already beginning to appear in stores and I notice that Amazon is already selling it and will start mailing out copies next week.  In thinking about the process of writing the book, and more broadly, about the the set of books that I believe every boss should read, I came up with a list of my favorites.  I tried to limit it to a dozen, but couldn't bring myself to delete any of these, so here is my list of 16:

The central idea in Good Boss, Bad Boss, the one that runs throughout the book and that links many things together, is the notion that the best bosses are in tune with what it feels like to work for them and deeply aware of the impact of their words and deeds on others.  And the worst bosses are out of touch and turn inward, focus on their own needs, and are oblivious to the needs of others.  As I have written in several places, including this post at Harvard Business Review and in the

My last posts here and at Harvard Business Review were about the unintended dangers of the distinction between leadership and management.  I argued that leadership is too often over-glorified and management is too often under-appreciated, which results in management being treated as a second class activity.  The discussion these posts provoked, a total of about 30 comments in total, yielded great examples and details.  I especially liked Rick's statement that "there is
an ebb and flow in...

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a longstanding ambivalence about the distinction between leadership and management  I blogged about it today over at HBR.org, under the title ""True leaders are also managers." Here is a taste and then I will talk about what motivated me to think more about why this difference is both valid and dangerous:

The brilliant and charming Warren Bennis has likely done more to popularize this distinction than anyone else. He wrote in Learning to...

One of my favorite CEO's of all time is A.G. Lafley,
who recently stepped down after running Procter & Gamble for a
decade. There are many things I admire about A.G. His modesty and
ability to listen — and I mean really listen, not just pretend —
impressed me when I first met him in 2000, and when I spoke with again
last year I found him unchanged, even after all the praise he has
received.

But perhaps the thing I admire most about A.G. is that, in contrast
to so many other CEOs...

Given all those lawyers and the confidentiality agreements that have been signed, we will likely never know exactly what happened between Hurd and that very attractive actress, Jessica Jodie Fisher. But from both what had been said, and not said, it seems that Mark Hurd's demise can be explained by an old Yiddish expression that, roughly translated, means "When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground."

I don't know the Yiddish words, but it sure seems apt here.

P.S. There is...

Last week, I gave a keynote speech on Good Boss, Bad Boss at the AlwaysOn Conference at Stanford.  The folks at AlwaysOn videotaped the speech (and use a nice technology where you can follow the Powerpoints as well). You can find a short story by Andrew Bellay and a link to the video and Powerpoint slides here.  It was one of those speeches that was interesting because the audience seemed to start-out a bit disengaged but as time went on, I could feel them get into it.  (Alas, I have had the ...

This was the entire content of an email that I just got from a well-informed Silicon Valley insider.   As most of you know by now, the HP Board canned Mark Hurd today because of his allegedly unsavory actions surrounding a sexual harassment claim.  The contrast between this story and my nostalgic post yesterday about the good old days at Hewlett=Packard could not be more striking.

But the events that prompted the above line are a bit more specific.  I had recently sent a draft of a blog...

My last post made me nostalgic for the old HP. Those of us who are faculty members in the Stanford School of Engineering have a special place in our hearts for the company that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started.  They were students here and started the company with $500 borrowed from Fred Terman, who was dean of the school for many years.  They also donated very generously to the school; a building is named after Bill, another after Dave, and a third after Fred Terman -- all built with...