Work Matters

Author: supermoxie

  • A$$hole: How I Got Rich and Happy By Not Giving a Damn About Anyone

    Ahole_2
    A$$Hole is a new book  by Martin Kihn.  He was nominated for an Emmy for his work on MTV’s Pop-Up Video and wrote the most cynical, painfully accurate, and funny book I’ve ever seen on management consulting, House of Lies.  When I first heard about A$$hole, I was disgusted as I thought that it clashed with everything that I had tried to accomplish in The No Asshole Rule.  But after I read a pre-publication version of the book, I liked it so much that offered to write an endorsement.  Kihn tells his story about an experiment that he tried in his life, to go from a doormat to an asshole.  In doing so, although this is an autobiographical tale, he does a remarkably effective — and often very funny — job of providing step-by-step instructions for anyone who wants to be an effective asshole.  His lessons are reminiscent of Chapter Six of The No Asshole Rule and of the manifesto that I wrote for ChangeThis on The Upside of Assholes. But Martin dives into the problem much more deeply and the blend of his personal story and his skill as a comedy writer make the book a fun romp.  For me, the bad news about the book (although it is good news for aspiring assholes) is that he does such an effective job of showing how you too can be an effective workplace asshole.  The good news, however, is that he also shows the drawbacks and downsides of assholes for organizations, their clients, co-workers who are trapped with these creeps, and yes, for workplace assholes themselves too.

    I recommend it highly. The book comes out in April, but Amazon usually ships earlier than that.  Kihn has started a blog about the book too — which already has quite a bit of material and is just as funny as the book.

  • The Winner of the Biggest Failure Award During Stanford Entrepeneurship Week

    Last week was Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford.  There was a whirlwind of activities, from the premier of a film called Imagine It
    about last year’s Entrepreneurship week, to all sorts of great presentations, to the
    Stanford E Week Entrepreneurship Tournament.  This event was sponsored
    and organized by the amazing folks at the Stanford Technology Ventures
    Program    , notably Executive Director Tina Seelig and Academic Director
    Tom Byers. Plus long-time faculty member Tom Kosnik, who has won
    numerous teaching awards and is widely loved, was also heavily involved.  You can read all
    about what happened here.

    I wanted to draw special attention to my favorite prize given during the week — for the Biggest Failure in the Entrepreneurship Tournament.  This was called the Stanford Rubber Wishing Tree project.  Failing and learning from it is a hallmark of all creative efforts, especially settings that produce successful entrepreneurship.  As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

    I am proud of the organizers of this event for giving a Biggest Failure award and also proud of student Dorothea Koh and the members of her team for accepting the award in the right spirit. Here is the YouTube Video on the Stanford Rubber Wishing Tree. It is wonderful.  And check out Tom Kosnik’s wise comment.

  • The No Asshole Rule and Weird Ideas in Russia

    I got an email the other day from Selva at Callidus Publishing in Russia, which just published The No Asshole Rule and had published Weird Ideas That Work about a year ago. I attach the covers because they are so different from any that I’ve seen any other place in the world.  Weird Ideas That Work is especially funny, I find. 
    Russian_witw_cover

    Russian_tnar_cover

    In addition, they have translated and modified the English version of the ARSE to help promote the book The No Asshole Rule in Russia. Here is the Russian ARSE test.

     

  • Nominees for the Worst Boss of the Year

    Attorney
    Alan Rupe wrote an article over at Workforce Management on his “nominees for the
    Awfuls—my Bad Boss Behavior of the Year Award.”     He presents a pretty vile list. My vote goes
    to these creeps:

    Our next
    nominee is a group performance: Alarm One, a California alarm-sales company,
    and two supervisors. Most of the employees in the company’s Fresno office were
    18 to 25 years old. Plaintiff Janet Orlando was 52. The supervisors held a
    meeting every morning before the field supervisors and the sales team left for
    a day of selling alarm systems door-to-door. The meetings had a pep rally
    atmosphere with yelling, chanting and cheering. Motivational techniques used at
    the morning meetings included passing out bonuses, singing in front of the
    group, pies in the face, eating baby food, wearing diapers and spanking with
    Alarm One and its competitor’s yard signs. Employees were spanked for arriving
    late or for losing a sales competition.

        On
    January 14, 2004, Janet Orlando was spanked and sustained a cut and a bruise.
    She filled out an injury report and was taken to the doctor. Alarm One’s
    defense? Orlando was not injured; she never reported the injury; and she never
    sought medical care. The verdict was in Orlando’s favor, and the jury awarded
    her $500,000 in compensatory damages against the company and the two
    supervisors, plus $1 million in punitive damages. (An appeals court sent the
    case back to the trial court because of a judge’s erroneous jury instruction, but
    defense costs continue.)

  • Hole-ier Than Thou?

    B2bsutton2_3

    I was interviewed by Scott Clair of The Press-Democrat (a newspaper in Mobile, Alabama) a couple months back for a story in B2B, a brand new business magazine.  The inaugural issue was just published with a story called "Hole-ier that Thou" about The No Asshole Rule and the bold sidebar above.  As a life-long San Francisco Giants fan, I’ve tried to resist believing that Barry Bonds is a certified asshole, but alas, the evidence against him is just too strong. 

    Here is a pdf of the story: Download b2b-feb-sutton1.pdf

  • Almost 10,000 ACHE Completions: Clients From Hell Are Everywhere

    Emily over at Electric Pulp reports that almost 10,000 (9307) people completed the Asshole Client from Hell Exam at yourclientfromhell.com. I suspect that the ACHE is most likely to be completed by people
    who are unhappy with their clients, but still, I was shocked to
    see a mean score of 14.3 out of a possible 20 among these 9307 people.  A score of
    a 10 qualifies as a "certified asshole" on the exam; a 16 is a "flaming
    certified asshole."  So it seems that there are a lot of nasty clients out there.

    The ACHE was launched last week on Guy’s blog and here — see Guy’s post for some pretty interesting comments.  I thought the most useful was from a fellow who described a "three strikes" process used by well-managed professional services firms:

    "Yes, everyone has a bad day now and then so a typical policy is "three
    strikes and you’re out". The first results in a note in the client
    files unless it was really over the line. The second is reviewed for
    action by a principal, likely resulting in some form of query about
    what went wrong or what we could do better. The third strike triggers a
    regret letter thanking the offender for previous business with an offer
    to send the appropriate files to the provider of the aHole’s choice. And word gets around via the grapevine between established firms. One result is that new service providers hanging out their shingle tend to have a higher proportion of these "euthanized"     Aholes crossing their thresholds.
    A word to the wise – if that day was your bad day, when you realize
    that you stepped over the line a sincere apology to the staff member is
    worth its weight in gold."

    This comment is chock full of good ideas and obervations, both the practice and the associated attitude could be applied in many settings, from retail stores to airlines to law firms.  I especially like his word to the wise: All of us are capable of acting like assholes under the wrong conditions, and when we blow it, a quick and  sincere apology is often the best solution.

    Emily also reports that the spread of the ACHE seems to have sparked renewed interest in the ARSE (Asshole Rating Self-Exam), as there are now over 140,000 completions (142,927), which means that about 8,000 people  completed the ARSE in first week or so that the ACHE was out.

    Again, if you have any stories about clients from hell or, better yet, tips about how to deal with them, please send in a comment or email me.

  • Performance Evaluations: Do They Do More Harm Than Good?

    A young head of HR at a small firm I know just had his first experience with managing and implementing the employee performance evaluation process.  He is a very smart guy and carefully implemented the process in a way that was consistent with "best practices" suggested by leading HR professionals.  I guess things did not come out as well as he hoped.  He wrote me yesterday: "I’m getting very close to finishing up our performance reviews for 07.  I’m
    having some questions as to how helpful the process is for companies.  …. I am wondering if the process does more harm
    than good." 

    I forwarded this email to My co-author Jeff Pfeffer and he reminded me that there is a lot of theory and evidence out there suggesting that many companies might be better off not doing performance evaluations at all, as this young head of HR seems to be learning. Although there is so much faith in the importance of doing performance evaluations, most companies implement them badly enough that (applying the "first do no harm" standard to management), and doing them well is expensive enough and time consuming enough, that having no process, or an extremely simple and quick one (e.g., one company I know used to have employees pick three peers or subordinates, and those three alone decided the size of the raise and bonus within a preset range). 

    Then there is another, more extreme argument, that the performance evaluation process is fundamentally flawed.  That doing it well is like doing blood-letting well — it is a bad practice that does more harm than good in all or nearly all cases.  This is the position taken by the famous quality guru W. Edwards Deming — he was vehemently opposed to using them at all.  As Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote on page 193 of The Knowing-Doing Gap:

    Deming emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed
    internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and
    breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing
    good work. He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as
    poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high
    quality. Deming maintained that when people get unfair negative evaluations, it
    can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent,
    dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after
    receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior."     

    I would be curious to hear from people out there who have a lot of experience giving or getting performance evaluations.  Do they do so much damage that the best performance evaluation might be none at all?   

    To make an extreme and probably over cynical argument: Do organization just do them because they have always done them, because there is excessive and irrational faith in them, and perhaps because a whole bunch of vendors, consultants, and HR professionals benefit financially (in fact, you could argue that because so many things go wrong with evaluations, that the amount of work they generate is nearly endless).

  • Alltop: Guy Kawasaki’s New Adventure

    Check it out.  Alltop is a clean, spare, and remarkably user-friendly compilation of top stories in 12 different categories, from autos, to egos, to mac, to sports, to politics, and a lot more.  After spending about 30 minutes clicking around, I found it much more efficient and fun than looking for news on Google or Yahoo or any other place that I know. Just click, for example,on the Green Alltop section, and in seconds, you can see what happening everyplace from Treehugger, to The Green Skeptic, to the The New York Times. I am no expert on interface design, but there is some user experience magic here. It kind of felt like I was speed-reading the web.

  • The Steve Sleeve for Your MacBook Air: Timbuk2 Does It Again

    Timbuk2macbookairsleeve_open_3

    I don’t even have a MacBook Air and I want this Steve Sleeve thing. Check out the description here.

    Timbuk2macbookairsleeve_front_2

       

  • A Very Nice Story

    A professor sent me this lovely email yesterday:

    Hello,

    I recently read your
    book “The No Asshole Rule” and it literally changed my life.  The short story is
    that the few jerks in my workplace were pretty much sucking the life out of me. 
    I felt so validated when I read your book.  Further, I realized that these
    tenured faculty were not going anywhere, and I couldn’t change them.  So your
    book prompted me into action.  I started a job search and have found a new job
    in a much more collegial environment with a huge pay raise. 

    I’m sure your book
    has had this kind of direct impact on the lives of many others.  How I wish my
    life’s work could have such a positive effect on other’s
    lives!

    Thank you for sharing
    the message.

    I think it is just a wonderful story. It made my day.  I still get many emails each week about The No Asshole Rule. This one just might be my favorite ever. I love it because it has such a happy ending and it shows that, for people who are trapped in asshole infested place, moving to a better place is often the best option if it is at all possible — as I emphasize on my tip list.

    I would also like to thank this professor for taking the time to send me such a nice note. When I asked her if I could post it (with just her name removed), her reply was: "Yes, please feel free to share it in any way that you
    want.   If it can help even one person, I would feel gratified."