The Sacred and the Profane

I
have not been surprised that some people have reacted negatively to
the title of The No Asshole Rule. I wrote about a few of these complaints in Why
I Call Them Assholes and in “amusing
poetic vitriol,” about the wonderful nasty letter that a reader sent to the
San Francisco Chronicle. I also am not especially surprised that, in
response to Lisa Cullen’s Time Magazine
column
and blog
about the book (in which she sung the praises of assholes, and used the word in
uncensored form), that at least one person threatened to cancel his 25-year
subscription to Time (although other
people told him to “get over it.”). And I
wasn’t surprised — but was amused — when a woman recently wrote me that her boss asked her to take
the book home because the title might upset her co-workers (She implied that
his overt justification was the title, but the real reason probably was because he is a nasty boss.)

I was
a little more surprised to learn that Josh Quittner, the Editor of Business 2.0, predicted to my friend and
frequent co-author (a 2.0 columnist) Jeff Pfeffer last December that my dirty
title would “severely limit sales.”  I
just learned of this prediction in an “I told you so” e-mail that Jeff sent
Josh recently (Jeff has an excellent memory and is usually right, a dangerous
combination). Of course, we haven’t done
the alternative experiment — trying to sell the same book with a clean title
— but the dirty title does seem to be attracting people more people than it is
repelling.  It is on a number of best
seller lists: Friday’s Wall Street
Journal listed it as the #3 business Book and #14 non-fiction book, and as Guy Kawasaki
discussed on his blog, I wouldn’t accept offers from publishers who wanted the
book, but didn’t want the title, because I believed in it so strongly.

A
bigger surprise, however, is how many positive reactions I have received from
religious people, especially devout Christians, about the book. The first time this happened was in January,
when I got an e-mail from an editor at Chrismon, a magazine published by
the Lutheran Church in Germany (and mailed to 1.5 million Germans). He wanted to interview me for a story about
Der Arschloch-Faktor. I frankly thought, at first,
that either it was a joke, or he was going to write a negative story. But he explained
to me that, in his view, The No Asshole
Rule was really quite closely related to the Golden Rule, and that if you
looked closely at the teachings of Christ, the main points of the book were
quite consistent.  A positive story appeared in
the March issue. 

I have since received at least 20 emails from people who make a
similar point, including several from a woman who suggested that we work together
on a version of the book that contained footnotes to biblical sources
that supported the assertions and advice — and that contained a bible study guide to go
with the book. Finally, a few weeks back, Richard Beck wrote a post on his blog, Experimental Theology, called 1
Corinthians and the No Asshole Rule.  Beck started out by saying:

Two weeks ago it was my turn to
teach my adult bible class at church. We are going through 1 Corinthians and I
was up to teach the famous Chapter 13, "Love is patient, love is
kind…"

And I thought to myself,
"Richard, what are you possibly going to say in class that hasn’t been
said before about 1 Corinthians 13?"

Then it hit me. I started the class by doing a
book review and reading selections from Dr. Robert Sutton’s new book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and
Surviving One That Isn’t.

Beck
went to say argue that my two tests for determining if a person is an asshole
are in direct agreement with 1 Corinthians, and ended the post by saying:

So, we reflected on all this in my Sunday School class. And
after reflection on the No Asshole Rule, I read these famous words:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is
not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it
keeps no record of wrongs…

Basically, don’t be an asshole.

I
confess that I like his logic, but I don’t trust my reaction.  If anyone can help me sort this out, I would
appreciate it – talking dirty in a way that seems to please at least some
religious people is quite a shock!

P.S.
I also should confess that I stole this heading from an InformationWeek
article about the work done by
our d.school students to spread Firefox. They used this title because one team developed a website called Firefoxies.com, where models posted their
sometimes sexy pictures.  In contrast, the "sacred" website, Faithbrowser.com, is a tool for customizing your Firefox browser so that it has Christian graphics and
presents an ever changing set of quotes from the bible.