A thoughtful creativity professor sent me this image, and added ‘e.e.cummings wrote a poem called“the song of olaf”…in which he provides wonderful advice for dealing with the assholes of the world: “…there is some shit i will not eat…”’ I think the poem and the picture go together well, although those birds at the bottom of heap need to find some way to fly away if they want to avoid spending their days eating the crap dropped from above — not unlike the predicament that some abused underlings are caught in, as in the above post and associated comments on the damage done.
Author: supermoxie
-
Perry Klebahn is the New CEO of Timbuk2
The new Stanford d.school, or as it is known officially, The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, has been lucky to attract enormously skilled people who devote their time to teaching, administration, and fund-raising for no pay, or for a tiny fraction of what they can make in other jobs. In the Clicks-n-Bricks class that we are doing this term, for example, my co-teachers are Michael Dearing who was an Executive Vice-President at eBay for years and Perry Klebahn — who invented the modern snowshoe, built Atlas Snowshoes to design, make, and market it, sold the company, and then went on to be COO of Patagonia. (In addition, the second half of the class has involved heavy contributions from the amazing Debra Dunn, who was at HP for many years and held at least two different Executive Vice-President positions. And we also have two other incredibly skilled and dedicated designers on the team,d.school fellow Alex Ko and Ph.D student Liz Gerber.)
Back to Perry. I’ve worked on three different d.school classes with Perry, and just last week, worked with him on an executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation that I co-direct with Huggy Rao. This program is a joint venture between the d.school and the Graduate School of Business (I will write about on another post — it was an inspiring and exhausting experience, especially for the d.school hands-on design experience that Perry co-led). These classes and programs are among the most exciting, chaotic, and intense teaching experiences I’ve ever been part of — the design teams work under intense time pressure, toward uncertain goals, produce prototype solutions rather than just talking about what to do, and feel pressed to do creative work — which is then judged in public by panels of experts who are polite and constructive, but call it as they see it.
No matter how wild things get, Perry is always rock-solid, never losing his cool (even as those around him do, including me), constantly praising people and pushing them ever harder, and displaying massive knowledge about the intersection between human needs and the sometimes harsh realities of business. And throughout, he says remarkably little, while modeling the right behavior.
In classic Perry fashion, although I saw him constantly last week, and asked how he was doing many times, he was focused on the executive program and never mentioned a bit of personal news (which was rumored, but not confirmed) — because as always, Perry focuses on what matters most. I eventually learned that on November 10th, a press release went out announcing that Perry is the new CEO of Timbuk2. This company originally gained fame for making bike messenger bags and selling them to a broader set of customers, and now makes a wider line of products including laptop cases, backpacks, and accessories. Plus Timbuk2 is set-up so you can build your own custom bag either online or in person at their store in San Francisco — check it out if you want to design your own bag or want to see a great case study of mass customization in action.
Perry is still committed to the d.school and will still teach classes, but no doubt we will be seeing less of him. The people at Timbuk2 are mighty lucky to have him, as are Timbuk2 customers. Perry is a great leader and doer. I am constantly inspired by his action orientation, his coolness when all seems to be falling apart, and his remarkable ability to see and develop the best in every person around him. I write and talk about what it takes to turn knowledge into action, but Perry lives it!
-
JerkFests
Adrian Savage over at Slow Leadership has a an insightful new post based on his reading of advanced copy of The No Asshole Rule. I first encountered Adrian as the author of a lovely new book (I will talk about it in more detail in the future) called Slow Leadership: Civilizing the Organization, which I endorsed with much enthusiasm after seeing a pre-publication version. As I wrote him after reading his book, we are both singing the same tune (albeit with different words, and in my case, somewhat more nasty words). Adrian’s comments on the book were not only kind, they were detailed and insightful, I especially like his point about "Jerkfests." I quote:
So there ought to be a name you could use to identify such foul
organizations—those rank, jerk-infested swamps where even the rats hold
their noses. How about “JerkFests”—places where assholes proliferate
and only another long-time, gold-plated, doctoral-level jerk could
enjoy him or herself and find a home? In a JerkFest, Hamburger Management
is normal and assholes rule. Perhaps there should be a symbol people
could apply to the door posts to warn anyone entering what will be
found inside; or major magazines could list the “100 Greatest JerkFests
of 2006" in the way that they list the 100 richest people or most
successful organizations. -
Press Conference in World of Warcraft
As I wrote in my earlier post about about Joi Ito, I am fascinated about the prospect of using online worlds as arenas to develop prototypes and do experiments to learn about "real" organizations. Increasingly, however, I realize that drawing a dividing line between real and virtual worlds can be a half-truth or even downright wrong. Check out Diego’s current post on the real press conference that Ross of Socialtext is holding "at" World of Warcraft.
-
Firefox Reality Check
As I’ve written about before, Diego Rodriguez and I taught a class at the Stanford d.school last spring on Creating Infectious Action. One of the student projects, perhaps the most successful, focused on spreading the use of Firefox, the open source web browser. I learned from that experience that, as an engineering professor who lives in Silicon Valley, I sometimes make assumptions things that people know about the web and technology that turn out to me dead wrong. The students in the class taught me that there are many experienced web users who don’t know what Firefox is, or in fact, that there different kinds of browsers. As a result, when I talk to audiences about the project, I now ask them "how many of you have heard of the Firefox web browser." And the answers surprise me. A few weeks ago, I asked this question to an audience in Des Moines Iowa composed of about 100 of the top senior executives of Principal Financial. I was giving a speech on evidence-based management. I was surprised when only about 5 people raised their hands. NOW before you get judgmental about ignorance of the web (an instinct I have, but have learned is dangerous), you should also know that this company has splendid financial performance as well as some of the most progressive HR practices I know, they were persistently friendly and very smart, and are on Fortune’s list of the best 100 places to work –and unlike many employers — the HR people are developing ever more progressive programs, like on site childcare. In my mind, any company that achieves these two "bottom lines" is doing something right.
Then about 10 days later I was giving an innovation talk in Frankfurt, Germany to the clients of Lupus alpha, an asset management firm. There were perhaps 300 people in the audience, and I asked them "how many of you have heard of the Firefox web browser?" I was amazed when over 75% of them raised their hands. I am not sure of the reasons for this, but the difference was striking, as I didn’t expect institutional investors to know so much about the web given my experience in Des Moines in the prior week — I am not sure of the reason for this awareness, but one of my students told me that Firefox has been in Germany a long time and is widely used.
The lesson, as we tell our students in the d.school, is to keep testing your assumptions. Indeed, in a related vein, I recently realized that many people in an audience of executives that I was teaching did not quite understand what it meant to do an experiment. If evidence-based management is going to spread, this is something people need to understand — I won’t go into the answer here, but if you want to see the answer, go to Wikipedia does a splendid job of defining and explaining experiments and check out the Campbell Collaboration for an impressive array of information on experiments and related methods.
P.S. I am sure that I biased the crowd with my connection to the d.school, but quite a few Germans told me that SAP founder Hasso Plattner (who donated 35 million to the school, and it is named after him) was the known as the most innovative German executive. And one German told me that he believed that Hasso and Arnold Schwarzenegger were two of the most admired people in the country.
-
TCDP: A Censored Version
We had some lively conversation a few weeks ago about why I call them assholes, and although most folks preferred the use of that mild obscenity to "less offensive language," there are still people who are uncomfortable with the word "asshole,"and even among people who don’t mind using the a-word, let’s fact it, there are times – when kids around, when you are around strangers, at formal occasions, or anytime when you are with people who don’t like dirty talk — that more polite language is in order. The word "jerk" or the phrase "demeaning creep" are decent (if less emotionally compelling) alternatives. And todayI had an interesting exchange with a guy who suggested the acronym TCDP: "A thoroughly contemptible, detestable person," which I think is a nice description of a certified asshole. Although I like the words better than the alphabet soup.
-
Randy Hodson’s Dignity at Work
One of the main ideas that
runs through The No Asshole Rule, and
in fact, much of the work that we do at Stanford’s Center for
Work, Technology and Organization, is the importance maintaining dignity in
the workplace. If you think about the kinds of people who are labeled as assholes,
they often earn the label by demeaning people in ways that strip them of their
dignity. I was reminded of this just the
other day in an email that a management consultant sent me about a nasty
client: “I spent the day with a person who routinely
puts me down, But he’s great at smooching butts of people higher than him. Really frustrating. Yesterday he bumped into me three times,
poked my chest twice with his finger, and made five jokes about me. What an
asshole.”If
you take a look at my list of things that assholes do, which is on Guy Kawasaki’s
blog posting, you will see that many of these put down moves are covered. And
you will also see ways that people can battle back against assholes who take away their dignity. Like the radio producer I talk
about in The No Asshole Rule who had
a boss that kept stealing her food: she exacted revenge by making some “treats”
out of Ex-Lax and leaving them out in her desk. As usual, her boss promptly ate without asking her permission. He was not pleased when
she told him the ingredients!If you want to read the
most comprehensive academic treatment of dignity that I know of, check out Randy Hodson’s 2001
book Dignity
at Work. He reviewed over 300 in-depth ethnographies – these are
academic ethnographies, usually entailing a year or more of intense observation
–and ultimately selected 108 cases from 86 published ethnographies for
intense quantitative and qualitative analysis. His compact definition is
fantastic, “Dignity is the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and
self-respect and to appreciate the respect of others.”Hodson presents insightful analysis of major
challenges to dignity at work and “the strategies through which dignity is
attained and defended.” He digs into causes
including mismanagement and abuse, overwork, challenges to autonomy (e.g., undermining
freedom and control at work), and “contradictions of employee involvement,”
where employees are blamed for organizational performance problems, are asked
to work harder and get more involved, but they don’t actually have any control.
Or when employees are asked to work harder to avoid layoffs, be when they do
work harder, layoffs happen because the organization has become more efficient.
Dignity at Work is written for academics, not managers, but it is
far more accessible than most academic books and still impressively rigorous in terms
of theory and evidence. If you are serious about digging into the struggle for workplace
dignity, want to understand why you as manager might be making if difficult for
your people to sustain their self-worth and self-respect, what others are doing
to you to take your dignity away, and why and how people can fight back, this splendid
and well-crafted book is well-worth reading.
interested in other examples of in-depth organizational ethnography, especially
from our Center from Work, Technology and Organization, check out Steve Barley
and Gideon Kunda’s masterpiece Gurus,
Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy,
the most complete and thoughtful book ever written on skilled contract labor. It
also includes lovely examples and analyses of the ways that “permanent”
employees undermine the status of these temporary employees and how contract workers fight
back to gain self-respect and control. -
The Guy Kawasaki Effect
The No Asshole Rule has been getting some nice advanced buzz, in large part, because of the nice things that a number of bloggers have said after reading advanced copies of the book. But I confess that, although I knew that Guy Kawasaki was an influential blogger (and, long before that, an influential management thinker, venture capitalist, and going back further, Apple evangelist), but I didn’t realize how influential he was until he posted a detailed — and quite funny — review of the book last week.
His review generated over 60,000 hits on his website the first day, over 900 diggs, and 60 comments on his website, it drove about 10,000 hits to my website and pushed the advanced Amazon sales for my book into the top 1000 for most of the week — which is pretty good for a book for doesn’t ship until February. And — as evidence that blogs, especially Guy’s blog — are affecting traditional media sources, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story on November 2 called "Expletive Deleted" by Daniel Rubin that has a picture of a donkey and starts out by saying: "This is by far the most excellent blog post I’ve come across today, but it needs some care in introduction. It has a language problem."
I loved the way that Daniel Rubin got around using the "A-word." I’d also like to thank Guy for the nice review.
-
Jack and Suzy Welch Want to Send the Jerks Packing
I was delighted to see that Jack and Suzy Welch’s new column in BusinessWeek, "Send the Jerks Packing," is singing my tune. In response to a reader’s question about what do about bad apples, they advise that such jerks "must go — publicly." And they go on to say:
Look, nothing hurts a
company more than when the bosses ignore, indulge, or otherwise
tolerate a jerk–or two or three–in the house. Such latitude
undermines organizational trust and morale, and without those, the
competitive linchpins of collaboration and speed are just plain harder.
Not to mention the fact that jerks take the fun out of work.Jack and Suzy take a bit different approach that I do, but I am glad to see that they are adding their support to the no asshole rule, albeit in more polite language
P.S. I worked with Suzy on a couple of articles when she was an editor, and then THE editor of the Harvard Business Review. She was creative, an amazingly fast writer, and fun to work with. And she came up with one my favorite titles, "The Smart Talk Trap," for an article that Jeff Pfeffer and I published in 1999.
-
David Maister’s List
David Maister was kind enough to write some nice words about The No Asshole Rule on his blog after reading an advance copy. As skilled bloggers do, he took the ideas the next step and added his own twists and extensions. I was especially struck by his thoughts about the situations that turn typically civilized people into temporary assholes. See his post for the complete set of comments, but it is worth repeating his initial list below. As I went through it, it certainly described the times when my inner jerk has reared its ugly head. Indeed, I think I am going to start using it as a personal checklist to help me decide when to go into hiding! To quote David:
So, under what circumstances have you found (past tense, of
corse) that you yourself ended up being the asshole?Here’s the beginnings of my list:
I have been the asshole when:
- I
got overexcited and overenthused on a topic (I lose my sense of proportion ,
just keep trying to make my point and don’t let people finish their sentences)
- I
got tired
- Three
things went wrong in a row. Two I can handle, but make it three and I lose it.
- I
was asked to do more than one thing at a time. I’m not a multitasker, and I get
shirty when people interrupt my concentration.
- I
got criticized too directly (I reacted badly)
- I felt like I’m not being treated with respect
- I
was trying too hard to ‘show off.’
- I
