A
recent post on the BusinessWeek blog
IQ Matters, asks
“Why All The Focus On Jerks?” It is
a good question, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, as I am working
on a little essay on exactly that question. Before I get to this cool new
rudeness study, let’s consider one reason for the interest in jerks, bullies,
and all those terms used to describe these creeps and their workplaces.

Jena
McGregor, who wrote the post, points to a couple of new scholarly studies – one
of abusive supervisors and the other of rudeness —  in the October Academy of Management Journal as one indication of the rising
interest in jerks.  McGregor also mentions other signs of interest like SucceesFactors “no assholes
policy,” Jim Kilts discussion of “the no jerk rule” in his new book, as well as
the attention directed at The No Asshole
Rule.

I
would argue that academic studies aren’t just a sign of interest in the problem,
I would add that –- despite all the whining and hand wringing these days that
business research doesn’t matter much (see this report)
—  the interest in jerks, abusive
supervisors, bullying, mobbing, or as I call them, assholes, has risen in part because there is a growing – – and
increasingly more rigorous – body of academic research that shows how nasty
people and nasty behavior damages people and undermines organizational
performance. This research has been widely reported in the press, and leaders
of organizations –- including in corporations, government, non-profits, and
labor unions –- are being influenced by such research, and I would argue, ought
to be influenced by such research.

To this point, consider one of the new studies in
the October 2007 Academy of Management
Journal, which considers the question “Does Rudeness Really Matter?” Christine
Porath and Amir Erez
conducted a series of controlled experiments to examine the effects of rudeness
on how well people perform on routine and creative tasks, as well as how likely
they are to help others. Porath and Erez used different interventions to make
their experimental subjects feel as if they had been victims of rudeness –
having the experimenter berate them for being late, having a an apparent
stranger  berating students would
couldn’t the find the right room (“Can’t you read? … I am not a secretary here,
I am a busy professor”), and in the final experiment, just thinking of a time
when they were victims of rudeness.  In
other words, these are studies of two incidents where people were abused by temporary
assholes, and one incident where they were asked to dredge-up memories of a
past encounter with an asshole.

Experiments are sometimes questioned as they measure
seemingly trivial behaviors – in this case performance meant completing
anagrams and imaging different uses for a brick; helpfulness meant whether or
not participants helped the experimenter after he or she “accidentally” dropped
ten pencils or books.   The advantage of experiments, however, is that
they allow a level of control that is impossible in “real” settings – people
are randomly assigned to different conditions and everyone in the same
condition is subjected to pretty much the same thing.  As a result,  it is much easier to
untangle WHY people respond differently under different conditions. So, for
example, in addition to the effects on performance demonstrated across the
three different experiments, I was struck by the effects on helpfulness. In experiment 2 (where the rude professor
berated  the “lost” student, saying
“Can’t you read?”), a few minutes later when the experimenter (who apparently
had no connection to the rude professor) “accidentally” dropped a pile of
books, only 24% of the insulted students helped pick up the books, but 73% of
those who weren’t insulted volunteered to lend a hand.

As always, more research is needed. But I find this study compelling and,
certainly, it suggests that  little bits
of nastiness can have a big cumulative impact. And when you combine this study
with findings from a host of field studies by researchers including Bennett
Tepper, Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, Christine
Pearson, Loraleigh Keashly, and many others, you
can see that the human and business case against  assholes keeps growing. And despite all howls that business research
doesn’t matter much, this research keeps bolstering the message that breeding
and putting up with these creeps just plain costs too much. This message is seeping into business
culture throughout the world (Europe is well ahead of the U.S.), the list of
organizations that take this problem seriously is growing,
and the lawyers are starting to line-up to make sure that, when organizations
allow such abuse to persist, it will start costing them serious money.

Plus, putting the lost costs, lost productivity,  and lost creativity aside,  this emerging social movement means that when leaders
are suspected of running an asshole infested workplace, they run a risk of being
deluged with unpleasant questions from the press, job candidates, clients, shareholders
and so on that they would rather not have to answer.

Last
week, I wrote a post describing “Evidence-Based
Asshole Pricing” used by a U.K, consulting firm, where they had
conducted careful analysis of project costs and concluded that:

We’ve therefore abandoned the old pricing altogether and simply
have a list of difficult customers who get charged more.  Before the No
Asshole Rule become widely known, we were calling this Asshole Pricing.
It isn’t just a tax, a surcharge on the regular price; the entirety of the
price quoted is driven by Asshole considerations.

That
post provoked a email from a project manager at a different European
consulting firm, who told me a story about the damage done and costs created by working
with an asshole client. I have organized
the story into short “chapters” changed a few names to protect the innocent and
guilty, edited a couple sentences for clarity, but this is what he sent
to me, and in his own words (His words are in blue text):

The Job

We
are IT Consultants and recently implemented a rework of the information system
of a large European company.  We had heard that they were a tough client,
and knew it would be hard, not THAT hard. 

The Client’s Asshole Moves

We
got everything and more from our client that you depicted in The No
Asshole Rule, Consider some examples: 

• Clients routinely arriving 30 minutes late at workshops, yelling
  to get summarized everything that was said, and objecting to any decision that
  was made before they arrived.

• People putting down our work every day, arguing day after day
  that we were just unskilled, writing directly to our managers.

• Bad faith, lies, threats, physical threats, non-factual garbage
  in every meeting, report, email (that would be sent to anyone then).

• Assholes hiring assholes. 

• Internal conflicts within
  the client organization that we were trying to serve — between the operational pole, the marketing,
  the IT branch, and us in the middle; we constantly paid both financial and
  emotional costs because they were late or took contradictory decisions – and refused
  to admit that we ever to blame.

• They were constantly spying
  on their employees who are answering phone calls all day to check if they’re OK
  with their customers. We became convinced they were using these tools with us.

• Some people from the customer’s crew came to us ask for stupid
  things all day long, which slowed our work and distracted us –- and then led us
  to be blamed by other people in the client organization.

Effects on the Team

• More illnesses on our team than usual, or people asking to work
  at home rather than at the customer’s place, me included

• Our own managers in their comfortable offices were even
  bullshitted into believing we were bad at what we were doing, no matter how
  successful were our previous missions

• We began to become
  assholes ourselves, which didn’t improve the situation

It was like a huge asshole nest. After being insulted in the middle of an exec
meeting, one of us left and never came back. The core of the crew made up of
the three remaining ones was enriched by two project directors that were flying
too high, and a dozen of the developers. On top of us, the pressure went down,
still below us, the pressure went up, all the more as our development crew was
mostly made of rookies who had never thought IT would be sick like this and who
lost motivation really fast.

How the Consulting Team Helped Itself

Our experience, our professionalism and our charisma, all put
together, saved us and the project

• One of us was a pro of project management and emotional
  disengagement who would always highlight the customer’s errors and support his
  two teammates. He was the strongest at trapping the customer at its own game,
  always repeating to himself like a mantra "it’s not my company it’s not my
  money."

• I was the one able to
  laugh at anything, but I was always surprising these guys at being unmerciful.
  I was writing and recording anything, asking for dates, always asking to write
  and control every meeting minutes. I surely looked like the paranoid one but it
  saved us many times too. Small victories.

• · I was also the development team leader and was supporting and
  training the rookies. I was trying to make them report all the pressure on
  me/us so that they could still work efficiently instead of resigning overnight.
  

• · The third guy was the weaker in terms of professionalism but he
  was strong at finding the non-certified assholes, the few ones that were simply
  infected, and he could "turn them into something good" by repeatedly
  inviting them to have a coffee with us or setup some dinner, etc. And they
  would remain on our side then.

• · Like you wrote, we were one way or another giving a shelter to
  each other, regarding our own abilities, in order to workaround and circumvent
  the asshole nest.

 The Key Moment

There was one big issue still: we were working at
the same floor as all the assholes, including the CEO in a separate office, and
it was causing lots of "interferences" in our work on top of that
"sick daily atmosphere".

One day, one of the customer’s project managers really
pushed me in front of everyone, and I had to deal with him using a
"calculated anger". It was the perfect opportunity to take my
computer with me and move to the open-space upstairs which I had noticed was
almost empty, without fearing any retaliation. All my team mates followed me
the next day! We had managed to "say no", to "retreat" in a
proper way.

From that day we stopped being infected, being assholes ourselves, and the main
word became "NO" to anything they would ask/do/breathe that was not
part of our contract. It was like digging oneself out of a tomb, not the end of
the story, yet a great step.

Postscript

This
correspondent also sent a second mail giving me permission to use his story,
and adding two interesting facts about the experience:

 The asshole I mentioned who was always late and would
object with any decision taken in a meeting left the firm last Friday. The 3 of
us former-teammates bought a copy of your book and sent his gift wrapped!

I estimated that this project cost my company close to 1 million euros. I’m not
even talking about the shortfall of the customer itself. The project has not
yet reached the acceptance stage.

Our correspondent also added some wise reflection
about this 18 month experience, which I think provides useful guidance for
others who have survived, as he put it, "a huge asshole nest.”

You’re
right, they’re everywhere. Now -with the experience- I realized being only
negative would only make me tired -or worse, depressed, or even worse- with my
work. So I’m trying to get past this and "squeeze some good out of the
bad", no matter how subjective these phrases may be.

I think that blending
this vivid story about the financial and emotional costs generated by an
asshole client with the more detached and systematic analysis that I posted
earlier on asshole-based pricing provides quite a one-two punch; Together they make a strong case  for
charging nasty clients asshole taxes, doing asshole based pricing, and when possible
avoiding – or walking away – from projects dominated by such demeaning and
demanding creeps. Indeed, my
correspondent also suggested that his colleagues who worked on the project
continue to face pressure and criticism from the senior management at both his
firm and the client firm –- so another cost of working with assholes is that
they can damage your reputation and career no matter how much of yourself and your skills that you sacrifice for them.

I have written about assholes taxes now and then, most recently in Clients from Hell and Asshole Taxes. The lesson is that, although there are times when firing difficult and/or demeaning clients is best for both your mental health and your pocketbook, an intermediate approach is to charge assholes higher rates.  Extracting more money from nasty clients makes the exchange more equitable because they require more of your time and emotional energy than more reasonable clients AND it feels better to take the abuse if you can tell yourself "I am being paid a 50% premium to work with this jerk." (Sort of like the notion of combat pay).

On this point, a "specialised consultant" David C. just sent in an amazing comment — I think he is from the UK based on both his address and spelling — where he explains that his firm calculated the cost of different kinds of clients. They found that the primary driver of how much it costs them to serve a client is how difficult the client is to work with.

So David’s firm now uses what they call Asshole Pricing.

I reprint David’s entire comment below — fascinating.

I run a specialised consulting business.  There are various metrics that describe the complexity of each job. 

After accumulating accurate time sheets for a year or so, we set about analysing them.  We found that the relationship between the metrics and time actually taken to complete each assignment was weak: R2 < 0.2. 

What drives the cost to complete a job was the tractability of the original client.  If he accepts recommendations and works collaboratively to implement them, things go much quicker than if he bitches about the recommendations and obstructs the implementation.

We’ve therefore abandoned the old pricing altogether and simply have a list of difficult customers who get charged more.  Before the No Asshole Rule become widely known, we were calling this Asshole Pricing.  It isn’t just a tax, a surcharge on the regular price; the entirety of the price quoted is driven by Asshole considerations.

I wonder if anyone else out there has made such calculations, as David’s firm brings the concept of the "total cost of assholes" to an entirely new level.

BNET has a new series called Book Briefs, and I recently was filmed for a segment on The No Asshole Rule, which you can find here.  I’ve done a lot of interviews by now on the book, but this one was especially fun because they took a bunch of film, edited it pretty heavily, and inserted all sorts of crazy graphics.  A big advantage of this level of editing is that A LOT of the ideas in the book are packed into just a few minutes, especially ideas from the chapter about how to implement the rule.

The Portuguese edition of The No Asshole Rule just came out in Brazil. They call it Chega de Babaquice — I also understand that, given the strangeness of markets, that there will be a different Portuguese edition coming out in  Portugal.

Here is a link to the book — and if anyone out there could tell us what Chega de Babaquice translates to precisely English, I would appreciate it! As I recall, it means something like "no more silliness."  If so, it is quite toned down, apparently unlike the French version, Objectif Zéro-sale-con : Petit guide de survie face
aux connards, despotes, enflures, harceleurs, trous du cul et autres personnes
nuisibles qui sévissent au travail

A French journalist recently wrote me that "The
English tagline of your book is a sweet lullaby compared to the French one.
Your publisher not only bought into the glorification of slang but obviously ran
with it (listing all the synonyms of "asshole" in one concise,
explosive sentence). I had to laugh…”

I guess the French are less touchy about dirty talk.  In fact, my French editor suggested that I call the sequel "The Asshole Shits Again." I think she was joking, but I am not entirely sure!