Author: supermoxie

I wrote a recent post called A Cautionary Tale: Watch the Email, about a Dean in Florida who apparently lost his job — in part — because he sent out a very nasty email, which was then leaked to the press.  I talked about a great IT guy I know who has his email set-up to delay emails for a few minutes after hitting the send button — allowing him time to change his mind before it is sent.  His name is Tim Keely and he just sent me an email with a link that explains how to do this in Microsoft Outlook.  It isn’t exactly simple, but I am going to go through the steps anyway as, I confess, there are times when I wish I had taken time to cool-off after hitting the “send” button, and could take back my words. Here are the steps. Thanks Tim!

As they say, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. I do, however, agree with Jon Gordon's general premise in The No Complaining Rule (as I understand it…I have just read through the chapter titles and jacket, and glanced through the book).  On this point, my favorite maverick, Annette Kyle, led one of the most impressive organizational transformations I've ever heard of at a loading terminal in Bayport, Texas (This is described in the prior link, and in detail in The Knowing-Doing Gap and Weird Ideas That Work).   One of the actions that Annette took was to sew "no whining patches" on employees uniforms, on the theory that if something was wrong, people should try to fix it rather than complain about it, if that didn't work, they should come to management and they should try to fix it together.  When the problem was impossible to change, however,  then her view was that it was a constraint that they just needed to work around.  In such cases, constant complaining about something they couldn't change, Annette argued, was poison because it made people depressed and diverted energy away from problems that they could solve.  

Yet I do worry that this new book, and even Annette's patches, are the kind of thing that can backfire in the wrong hands, unwittingly stifling people from pointing out problems that need to be fixed.  The no complaining rule may create fear of being labeled as a complainer or whiner, even when a person has legitimate concerns.  People need to feel psychologically safe to speak-up, or you end-up with disasters like the Columbia and Challenger space shuttle accidents. See this post about "shooting the messenger," and I especially recommend following-up on Amy Edmondson's research if you are interested in this issues of speaking-up and psychological safety.

I’ve been doing some blogging lately at BusinessWeek Online about Toxic Bosses,
and will be doing so for the next few weeks with Ben Dattner and Annie McKee. There is also blogging by
various experts — along with lots of comments from readers — on other business at work issues including work-life balance, staying entrepreneurial, time
management, negotiating bureaucracy, and generational issues.  Blogging in concert with what is published in
a major magazine like BusinessWeek
isn’t new. In fact,  BusinessWeek has been the
leader among major business magazine in producing diverse and high quality online
content — light years ahead of Fortune, for example. BUT they really going to
extremes to produce their summer double issue on Business@Work, using a kind of modified Wisdom of
Crowds or “open source” approach.

Michelle Conlin,
the BusinessWeek editor I am working with,
puts it that this way: “We are reverse engineering the news-gathering process.
Rather than us going out to craft and gather the story, we are going to let
readers guide us through their questions and comments on our blogs online.
Coupled with posts from experts, we will use the material generated online to
create the print version. It's the opposite of how we normally do things.”

How about that? I have often accused people in the
publishing industry of a stunning lack of courage and creativity (The second
paragraph of Weird Ideas
That Work introduces an example of a publishing firm that wants to innovate, but doesn’t
have the will to do so. In essence, they wanted the money from creativity, but
didn’t want to take any risks). BusinessWeek
is taking a substantial risk with this approach, and I applaud their courage.  Check-out these blogs and make some comments — you may end-up in the pages of BusinessWeek
in a couple months!

P.S. Here is a press release about it.

This charming article in Esquire by Roy Blount Jr. argues that "We
don't need any more assholes. We need a son of a bitch."  I love his
arguments that there is a difference between people who are abrasive and
admirable versus people who are simply demeaning and narrow-minded
creeps . As I've written here before, The No Asshole Rule is not an argument for being a doormat or wimp, and I am a strong believer in the power of constructive conflict. Recall that one of the 15 things I believe is: 
Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong:
It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held. I also love the picture of the box that goes with the article too.  Check it out.

Dr. Bruce Kone of the University of Florida was involved in a controversy this Spring about (allegedly) inappropriate inactions involving the admission of a student.  There is a lot of finger-pointing going on in this story, but two facts are pretty clear.  First, as part of the controversy, then Dean Kone sent a rather nasty email to several Florida administrators, that led to a public apology on his part.  Second, Dr. Kone was removed as Dean of the Medical School shortly thereafter. 

It is unclear if Dr. Kone lost his job just because of the email, there were a lot of other things going on (he did seem to have overly close personal connections to the student he admitted and there are some hints from the news stories that he was breeding a climate of fear at the school). But I confess that, for me, this story had special resonance as I think I am most prone toward becoming temporary asshole on email, and have learned — the hard way — to keep censoring myself.  An IT guy I know showed me that he has his email set-up so that it takes a full five minutes for his email to go out after he hits "send." I think I will go in and set that up.  Also, another part of this story we should all remember — many, or perhaps most, of our employers have can go back and read the emails we send.  

Finally, alas, I don't find the nastiness here very surprising, as academia, and especially, medicine have well-deserved reputations for being prone to asshole poisoning, and here we have both worlds at work — although some doctors are fighting back admirably.