I am still sometimes surprised by how strong the emotional reactions are to The No Asshole Rule; the sad, funny, and scary emails keep coming in from around the world (a really awful tale came in this morning from a former victim in the Australian Department of Defense). I am especially struck by the reactions I have been getting from members of the media –who are usually pretty tight-lipped. The interviews that I’ve done in the past — for my other prior three books and for other things, like the the Stanford d.school — are often engaging, but rarely contain what feel like "Dr. Phil moments," where the person interviewing me reverses roles and starts telling me his or her stories about dealing with assholes in the workplace — and sometimes ask for my advice.
Something like this seems to happen in about 50% of the interviews I’ve done lately, even among the most experienced journalists. Experienced journalists have heard a lot of stuff, so I listen and learn.
Just last week, I got a great tip during an interview (I will not name the source to protect the innocent and guilty). We were talking about the problem of asshole poisoning being a contagious disease that you catch from and give to other people, and how sometimes the worst episodes happen during escalating email wars and phone calls, where anger is tossed back and forth between the warring parties. The journalist I was talking to had a great suggestion about how to break such a cycle when you are on a nasty phone call: HANG UP WHILE YOU ARE SPEAKING. And do it without warning.
Think about it. If you hang up while the other person is speaking, it is an insult that fuels the flames. If you hang up while you are speaking, there is a break in the action, and confusion… perhaps the line just went dead? And in any case interrupting yourself is just not as hostile an act as interrupting someone else. I guess it is a little sneaky, but it strikes me as an interesting and at times wise tactic that is the lesser of other evils — like screaming an insult, pausing, waiting for the other person to answer back, and then slamming the phone down as they respond (or pressing the "end call" button).
The other sign that journalists are emotionally drawn to the problem of assholes is that several have told me that they became interested in doing a story because they work for — or have worked for — an asshole in the business. I had an experience about two weeks ago where a journalist for Europe interviewed me (and seemed oddly tense during the interview, I was worried that I was offending him in some way). After the interview was done, he wrote me an email about the asshole boss he worked for and asked for advice about what to do. I am not a professional therapist and warned him that he likely needed more skilled help. But I did make my usual top suggestion: If you are stuck with an asshole or a bunch of them, the best thing to do is to get out as fast as you can.
P.S. The other funny twist is that media people keep asking for a second copy of the book because their copy has been been stolen. This seems to be a San Francisco phenomenon in particular: It happened when Jessica Guynn was doing her San Francisco Chronicle story and I just got a note from Moira Gunn of Tech Nation (who wrote to tell me that our interview runs tonight on her syndicated PBS show), reporting that someone at her radio station KQED had stolen her book. (It looks like you can find the interview with Moira on The No Asshole Rule and download a podcast of it here.)
I take all this theivery this as a good sign! It all reminds me of the old hippie bible Steal this Book by Abbie Hoffman.
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