The No Asshole Rule at SuccessFactors

I wrote a post a few months back on The No Asshole Rule Reaches New Heights, which described how CE0 Lars Dalgaard enforced the rule at SuccessFactors, a global softwate companies with headquarters in San Mateo, California.  You may recall that he has employees sign contracts in which they
commit to not acting like assholes.  I’ve got an update:  The rule
seems to be working and is part of the company’s current success. Check out Succcesfactors list of five founding principles that Dalgaard spelled out when he started the company in 2001 — "No Assholes" is number 5.  Now that is my kind of CEO!  This story has lovely implications for entrepreneurship. I’ve had at least half-a-dozen entrepreneurs tell me that they used the no asshole rule as one of their founding principles, but all told me that — although they used the word "asshole" when talking about who they wanted to hire, fire, and so on — they used more polite language to describe it in written materials or just talked about it rather than writing it down. I applaud Mr. Dalgaard for his courage and plain talk. 

I also love how Dalgaard measures the company’s current success. I quote:

As of September 2006 we have made a dent into this goal by achieving:

Now that is a balanced scorecard!  And one that is short enough that it doesn’t suffer from the Otis Redding Problem

UPDATE ON OCTOBER 2nd: I pasted the above text in blue on Sunday October, 1 from the SuccessFactor site. So it said "Employing no assholes" just yesterday.  But it seems that someone at SuccessFactors has decided that the word "asshole" is a bit too much. As Stan points out in his comment below, it now says "jerks."  I bet Lars still calls them assholes, but someone with less courage has talked him into a bit of censoring.  My hunch — and this is a hunch based on no other information– is this is the kind of thing that people do when they start "prettying-up" a company to sell it or go public. I could be wrong, but let’s see what happens in the next few months — or days.   In any event, I still have to give them credit for straight talk for the first five years, even if they are losing a bit of courage now.