Work Matters

No Asshole Rule Round-up: The Flying Arse, CNN, BusinessWeek, The War for Talent, National Football League, The Huffington Post, an Intriguing But Inaccurate Story, and Porcupines with Hearts of Gold

Written by

supermoxie

in

Things
have been busy lately, but rewarding, as many of the doctoral students I work
with at Stanford are wrapping-up their dissertations, I’ve been talking to lots
of diverse organizations lately on different topics (from two law firms and one manufacturing
company on the no asshole rule to a pharmaceutical company on innovation), and
I am about to do a workshop in Abu Dhabi with Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn
on innovation, which should be fascinating (and a lot of fun). Before we take off, I thought I would do a
quick round-up of what has been happening, especially around the no asshole
rule:

  1. I know, I’ve been talking about the Flying ARSE –- the self-test to see if you are driving otherArse_2
    airline passengers crazy — for months now.  But it is pretty much done and we should go live in about a week. Meanwhile, the original ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam) is getting close to 85,000 completions.
  2. I was interviewed on CNN’s In the Money  for 6 or 7 minutes today (May 5th) at about 1:30 PM EST on The No Asshole Rule and it will run again on Sunday, May 6th at about 3:30 EST. The interviewers Ali Velshi and Christine Romans were really fun, and they had a lot of fun showing a censored version of the cover and telling the viewers the book was about jerks, but if they wanted to find the book, to search with a letter that starts with  an “A.” I will try to find a video link.
  1. The No Asshole Rule debuted on the BusinessWeek business bestseller list in the May 7th issue, at number #2, just behind Suze Orman’s book. I was delighted to join Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, which has been on the list for three months.
  1. I’ve had a lot of reaction to my post on the Harvard Business blog and here on “The War for Talent is Back,” where I argue among other things, that great people are overrated and great systems are under-rated. I have also since had a very interesting set of conversations with high-technology executives who argue that the no asshole rule is of special interest to their companies, because they are trying to compete for talent with Google, where the “don’t be evil” policy means, as I say in the book (and talked about in detail with a group at Google recently), that “it isn’t efficient to be an asshole at Google.”  So –- although I don’t like the motivation –- it seems that at least some executives are starting believe that having the rule is imperative, as otherwise, they can’t competing with Google for people.
  1. I was invited by Stanford Business School Professor George Foster to talk about The No Asshole Rule at a “custom” executive program that he runs for executives from the National Football League this coming June. Check out the story about the program. Now that sounds fun!
  1. The Huffington Post, one of the leading political blogs, is going to launch a group business blog in a few weeks. I will do an occasional post there as well. Stay tuned for details.
  1. A publication called Style Weekly in Richmond, Virginia  published an interesting article on their (apparently) intimidating and demeaning mayor Doug Wilder called Methodical Tyrants. I don’t know if the facts about the mayor are inaccurate, but I was struck by the inaccuracies in fact and
    emphasis in the article about The No Asshole Rule.  It says I am a Harvard Professor (wrong, I am from Stanford) and also seems to imply that the book is an argument against tough managers and executives. It is an argument against demeaning managers, not against toughness, as I make
         clear in Chapter 1. I guess it is nice that people are writing about the book without reading it, but I think that accuracy is important!
  1. Finally, look for some coming posts where I dig further into the “caution” in the book that it is
    important to be slow about labeling people as assholes.  After all, some people that have gruff exteriors, but once you get to know them, they are great people, which I sometimes call “Porcupines with Hearts of Gold.”  I received a couple of fantastic emails about people who fit this description, and was giving a talk to a group of engineers a few weeks back, and one audience member had a wonderful line, “Those are the kind of guys with a bad user interface and a great operating system.” Now that is a nerd line !

 I
will provide a trip report about our trip to Abu Dhabi and other updates
(especially about the last point) in future posts.

 

Comments

2 responses to “No Asshole Rule Round-up: The Flying Arse, CNN, BusinessWeek, The War for Talent, National Football League, The Huffington Post, an Intriguing But Inaccurate Story, and Porcupines with Hearts of Gold”

  1. JMG3Y Avatar
    JMG3Y

    IMO a huge problem with superstars (and anyone else with highly credentialed special expertise, such as is common in academia, Nobel laureates and so on) is that they almost automatically assume that their expertise extends well into other disciplines. They perceive their boundaries as being considerably farther away from their true expertise than do many of those working in the same environment, whether business, government or academia.
    For example, academics with renown expertise in a scientific discipline rarely call in organization experts for assistance in solving departmental or college problems or call in education experts for consultation in solving curricular or pedagogical problems. But investment by discipline members in learning the fundamentals of that other discipline is often regarded as nonproductive and is discouraged. Or the superstars strongly signal to the experts in those other disciplines that they are of lower value, that such expertise is more easily acquired than theirs.
    When the inevitable conflict arises with those who are knowledgeable in those “out of bounds” areas, the non-expert “experts” often react very poorly to being brought up short, not having much experience with being on the other side of the knowledge fence. Many of these superstars’ behavior then degrades to the A* hole level.

    Reply
  2. Gretchen Rubin Avatar
    Gretchen Rubin

    Fascinating that Google has now changed the “asshole” atmosphere generally by deciding not to put up with that behavior. The fact is that in many situations, change is much more likely to come about if people feel that money will follow. I’ve been thinking about this issue with happiness — there are so many good reasons to try to help employees be happy at work, but pointing to factors such as avoiding absenteeism and burn-out, and encouraging creativity and helpfulness, is more persuasive than pointing out that people are, well, HAPPIER being happy than being unhappy. I write about this often on my blog, the Happiness Project, http://www.happiness-project.com
    I loooved MADE TO STICK. Fascinating, useful, and also hilarious. I loved the account of the “Don’t Mess With Texas” anti-littering campaign.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts