Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 28

I generally try to stay apolitical here.    I think that taking sides in elections and political issues when my focus is on management and organizational life can ignite ideological reactions that polarize people and make it hard from them to talk about the merits of management ideas and evidence.  In the case of the upcoming California election, I generally won't take sides here and in fact, for the Governor's race, I find both candidates so unattractive, that I really can't decide who to...

This is the entire contents of page 129 in the late Robert Townsend's masterpiece Up the Organization. I wrote a rave about this book awhile back, and I still find myself going back to it often.  Townsend was, among other things, CEO of Avis, and a complete character.

I was reminded of this page by a comment at HBR in response to my list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Carmilla, who is a personal assistant to a busy surgeon, wrote that her boss had only thanked her once in five months, and ...

This story was reported in the Wall Street Journal the other day. I guess Goldman is doing this because emails leak -- or in their case -- may surface during legal proceedings against them.  And all that dirty talk isn't helping their already rather soiled reputation.  But given how most people I know in their industry actually talk, there is a lot of hypocrisy here.  On the other hand, an interesting research project (given this is now an explicit norm at Goldman) would be to see if, as a re...

If you read Work Matters, or my books or articles, you know that I believe that one of hallmarks of constructive team dynamics are healthy and respectful arguments over ideas.  And I believe it is a hallmark of skilled bosses, especially when it comes to sparking creativity.  For example, I have written about the importance of having strong opinions that are weakly held and fast fights at the  d.school. I continue to dig into this issue in Good Boss, Bad Boss, which has a section in the...

I suppose that I should have known this was going on, but I just got an email titled "Sponsoring a blog post," which says:

My name is Samantha and I work for a management consulting
firm. We are currently in the process of growing our online presence and would
like to know if we would be able to sponsor your upcoming post. The sponsorship
is not a product review but rather a mention within the body or the byline of
the post. Do you think we would be able to work something out?

I was a...